"Don't call him a kid," said Laika. "He's no kid."
"Okay, the asshole could be useful."
"That's more like it. What are you thinking, send him out?"
Joseph nodded. "With gun blazing."
"The thought had occurred to me, too. Maybe he'd get lucky and take out one or two before they got him. Fewer for us to deal with. Maybe improve our chances."
It was damned heartless, and the thought of doing it to somebody she had once thought she loved made Laika half sick. But James had planned to kill them, all of them. He had that sin against his soul, and also the sin of discovering them in action. To any of their superiors in the Company, that alone would have condemned him.
"You want me to handle it?" said Joseph, as if sensing her unease.
She shook her head. "I'll take care of—"
But her words were interrupted by another blast of gunfire from the hallway. This time she stepped past Joseph far enough to thrust the barrel of her Jati-Matic around the corner and open up on whoever was foolhardy enough to try and advance on them. The firing stopped.
"James!" Laika called, and the man appeared, looking, fittingly enough, as though he were about to get killed. "We're going to have to go out," she told him.
"Into that?" he said. "Are you crazy?"
"We'll run out of bullets eventually. We're low now. We stay here, we're dead. So here's the deal. We give you back your pistol, and we go out together, firing away. They're down at that end of the hall. We shoot straight down, we'll hit them. But the part you're not going to like is that you're going first."
James's mouth fell open. "No way!"
"Now look, you bastard, this is the way it is. You came in here to kill us, you think we're going to turn our backs on you? This way, at least you've got a chance. You don't go along with this . . ." She put the muzzle of her Jati-Matic against his forehead. ". . . I kill you right now." She clicked the lever to single fire. "One shot, because I can't waste the ammo. Be a man. Make the call."
James had pressed his eyes shut when the cold metal kissed his flesh. Now he opened them. "All right, all right . . . I'll do it."
Laika pulled her gun away and set it back to automatic fire. Then she took out the .38 Tony had taken from James and handed it back to him barrel first. "Don't touch that trigger yet. Turn around and get in front of me . . . that's right. Right by the corner of the wall. They can't hit you there. Now, just keep holding it by the barrel. You grab the grip, you're dead. You turn around, you're dead."
"What . . . what do I do?"
His voice sounded so frightened that she almost felt sorry for him. But almost was the key word. "We wait until they shoot again, try to come down the hall. But this time we don't shoot back. They'll think we're out of bullets, and then their own firing will slacken. It may not stop, but it'll slow. Then I'll say go, and we go. Go out shooting. Advance two or three feet, fire your six straight down the hall, and then drop to the floor."
"Why . . . why can't I drop first?"
"Time. Surprise is all we've got. They'll be too surprised to react immediately. You'll have time to get your shots off, and so will we. Now. When the firing starts, take the gun by the grip and cock it, but don't turn around or I'll kill you. You got it?"
He didn't say anything, but she saw his head nod. When she glanced at Joseph, she saw that he was looking at her with a mixture of respect and something else, something that may have been a touch of revulsion. She didn't care; her job now was to get him and herself out alive, and she'd let a dozen James Winstons die to do that.
Two minutes later, the firing started again, sending bits of the wall flying into the air in tiny clouds of plaster. James winced, but didn't move otherwise, and Laika tensed, ready for what was to come. Neither she nor Joseph returned fire, and in a few more seconds their attackers' fire slowed to the point where they could hear stealthy footsteps advancing down the corridor toward them.
"Now!" she said softly, and prodded James in the back.
He ran out at an angle, flattened himself against the opposite wall, and fired his pistol down the corridor with his right hand. Laika remained where she was, behind the shelter of the protecting wall, her hand on Joseph's shoulder in case he had not seen through her subterfuge.
He had, and watched with her as James, only four of his six shots fired, went down in an assault of lead that bit into his legs and side and head with titanic force, tearing away bits of flesh and droplets of blood that dappled their faces as they saw him die.
He was a dead man who could not fall down. The impact of the continuing hail of bullets pushed him back against the wall and held him there until the firing stopped. Then he slid slowly down the wall, his blind eyes open, leaving a trail of red on the bullet-pocked surface.
"You lied to that man," Joseph said softly, wiping the sprayed blood from his face.
"I'm CIA. I lie for a living."
He didn't speak for a moment. "Think we ought to toss a couple shots down there," he finally said, "let them know there's more than one of us, and we're not dead?"
"Maybe we ought to let them know something," she said. Then she called out: "Hey! We're still here, and we still have enough ammo to stand you off for a long time. If you came for us, then that's how it'll go. If you came for what we came for, you're too late, and so were we."
There was no reply. She looked at Joseph, and he looked at her and shrugged, as if to say, "What could it hurt?"
"Whoever he or she or . . . it is, they took it down on an elevator. We can't go down. They locked it. So it's gone, you understand? If it's what you wanted, then we both lose."
She waited, but still only silence came from down the hall.
"Do you hear me?" she called. "Talk to me, where are we here?"
Still, there was no answer.
"Shit," she muttered, and let herself slide down the wall until she was sitting on the floor. She looked at James, dead, but in much the same position, and wiped her forehead with her sleeve. "Okay," she said, loud enough for the unknown quantities at the end of the corridor to hear. "That's how we'll play, then. We'll be here."
"Just fire if you want us," Joseph added softly, and Laika had to smile in spite of herself. "Miserable situation," he said.
"I've come through worse. Tony could come back, help us out."
"Firing his way through half a dozen well-armed men."
"Well, if anyone could do it, I'd put my money on Tony." She thought for a minute. "Or maybe they'll get bored and leave."
"There is that," Joseph said, and Laika was glad to hear a small but sincere chuckle from him. "I feel like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
"Shall we yell 'Shit' and jump down the elevator shaft?" she asked, the last word breaking apart into a giggle. She hoped Joseph didn't think she was cracking up, but she had resorted to humor before to get her through life-threatening situations. It was one of the glories of the human animal, she thought.
"Why not, Sundance?" Joseph answered. "We've already done the 'Who are those guys?' bit."
They sat for a long time, waiting for the next round of shooting to start. Laika walked back to the elevator and looked down the shaft. She thought she saw a small square of light at the bottom, but couldn't be sure. "I think Tony got out," she told Joseph when she rejoined him. "Looks like the escape door of the car's open."
"Maybe he'll come back, then, if he didn't get killed by whoever was running." Joseph shrugged. "He knows who's here. He might be able to come up behind them. And I don't think Tony would feel any hesitation about shooting them in the back."
They sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, waiting for something to happen. Laika looked at James's body, from which the blood was still running, puddling all around him as he sat dead on the floor.
To her surprise, she didn't feel a thing. Even though the dead man had shared her bed and lodged for a time in her heart, she felt nothing, not even regret that he had been stupid enough to follow them to his certain
death—if not at the hands of their attackers, then at their own.
"The bastard is dead now," she said softly.
Joseph looked up. "What?"
"When I was a kid, I read James Bond novels," she said. "I guess that was what first got me interested in espionage. And at the end of one of them, I forget which, Bond discovers that this woman who was his lover was a double agent. And I don't remember whether he kills her or not, but I think the villain does it, and in the last line of the book, he's telling one of his colleagues that she was a double, and he says that, only he calls her the bitch. And it was just so goddamned ice cold. I always wondered what Bond was thinking. Was he just lying to himself?" She looked away from the corpse. "He used to call me a bitch. I didn't like that. I didn't like it any better than when James Bond called the dead girl that."
"Casino Royale," Joseph said. "Good book, shitty movie."
"Did you read them all, too?" Laika said.
"All the Flemings."
"Which were better, books or movies?"
"First three Connerys were better than the books, Mizh Moneypenny."
"Worst Bond?"
"Lazenby."
She shook her head. "Moore."
"At least Moore could act."
"He couldn't act Bond. And they gave him all those dopey special effects. And that Jaws guy."
"Wasn't Moore's fault. You like Dalton?"
"Liked Brosnan better."
"Just another pretty face." Laika nodded. "Best villain?"
"Goldfinger."
"Nope," Joseph said. "Has to be Rosa Klebb."
"Rosa Who?"
"Lotte Lenya in the movie."
"The knife-tipped shoes," Laika said. "I always hoped I'd be issued a pair of those."
"And speaking of villains, how long has it been since that bunch last fired at us?"
"About twelve minutes." She looked up, startled. "They're coming."
Joseph listened, and heard it, too . . . Soft footsteps coming slowly down the corridor. "Take them here, or. . . ." He jerked his head back toward the cul-de-sac by the elevator, where they could get on either side of the wall where it widened. Here, at the turn of the corridor, there was only room for one to make a stand.
Laika nodded and they slipped quietly back to the elevator. Laika took the right, Joseph the left, and they waited, their weapons pointing toward the turn, where their enemy would appear from the right.
Chapter 49
Then they both heard a voice. "Laika? Joseph?"
"Tony?" Laika said, raising the muzzle of her weapon toward the ceiling as Tony Luciano appeared from around the corner. "Jesus!" she said, overjoyed to see him and not the half dozen shooters she had expected. She met him halfway down the corridor and slapped him genially on the arm, and then, unable to restrain herself, gave him a hug. Joseph grabbed his hand and pumped it.
"Ow, man, easy!" Tony said. He held up his hand to reveal a red and oozing spot where the cable had torn it. "I don't know why you're so glad to see me, anyway," Tony said. "I lost them."
"Yeah," said Joseph, "but you lost the gunmen, too. That's who we were expecting when you poked your head around the corner."
"What the hell happened here?" said Tony, looking at James's corpse. "No, maybe I shouldn't ask. There's another dead one at the end of the hall."
"Did you see our attackers on your way up?" Laika asked.
"Not a sign of them."
"They must've gone right after we talked to them. We should've tried that earlier," Joseph said, nodding at James's corpse. "He might still be alive." Then he looked at Laika's grim face. "Or not," he added softly. "So how did you make out? You said you lost them?"
Tony nodded glumly. "Stole a car and followed them, but they got away. Escaped in a boat down the East River. Not one damn piece of evidence in the van. Cops are all over the streets looking for the car I stole, so I just drove it down into the garage and came up the stairs again."
"Well," said Laika, "whoever was here is gone, and so are our attackers, so let's take some time to look around and find out what we can."
When they walked back into the corridor, they saw the body at the end of it. The man had been hit twice in the chest, and had probably died quickly. "Looks like James was a straight shooter at the end," Joseph said, kneeling next to the body.
"Search it," Laika ordered. "I'll take the office we came through. Tony, you check the rest of this suite—see what's around the corners and in the other rooms."
Before she went into the office, however, Laika more closely examined the boxlike cell in which she assumed the prisoner had been held. She ran a fingernail along the flat black surface of the wall and ascertained what she had first thought, that it was an unbroken plane of lead. The room must have weighed a ton. She examined the strips along the frame of the door. Although they might have been made of a hard rubber beneath, they were coated with lead as well. She searched for an air vent of some kind, but there was none. The room was a box, and when the door was closed, that box would be sealed airtight.
Next she went into the office. The magazines on the coffee table were the latest editions of Time, National Geographic, and Entertainment Weekly. The Bible was a King James version with no markings or name on it. The Greeley book looked as if it had been heavily read. Its spine was broken in a dozen places and the pages were dogeared in a dozen more.
She picked up the Walkman and opened it. A Natalie Cole cassette was inside. The tape box was nowhere to be seen. A box of coffee filters and a large can of Maxwell House coffee sat next to the coffee machine, whose red "on" button was still glowing.
The desk was empty. There was nothing in any of the drawers, not even the detritus of paper clips or broken pencil points or bits of torn paper. With the alarm system as further evidence, it seemed as though these people, whoever they were, expected to be raided, and had a contingency plan for just that occasion.
Laika turned as Tony came back into the room. "You know that panel we saw at the end of the big hall?" he said. "It covers the windows—it's set a few feet back from them so that from the outside the place just looks dark and empty. This whole thing isn't any too sophisticated, but it worked."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean they got away."
"Anything else in the other offices?"
"Not much. There's a cot in one close by, looks as though it's been used recently, but otherwise, not a thing in any of them. No filing cabinets, desks, chairs, nada. And no trace evidence to speak of."
Joseph came in from the hallway where the dead men lay. He was wiping blood off his hands with a handkerchief. There was a small book tucked under his arm. "Find anything?" asked Laika.
"Yes. There's a list of some sort, and what appears to be a coded message. They were both folded up in this." He took the book from under his arm and held it out spine first. It was slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes and bound in brown leatherette. Laika could read "Holy Bible" on the spine.
"Funny how these things keep cropping up," Joseph said. "There wasn't a bit of personal ID on the body—no wallet, keys, nothing. Even the labels had been cut from his clothing. It's almost like these people expected to get killed."
"How old was he?" Laika asked.
"Twenty-two, twenty-three. A suicide squad for Christ? I took a set of prints we can run."
"All right, then. We've stayed here long enough." Laika turned to go.
"So," said Tony, "we gonna let the police find out who he is? And the other one, too?"
She shook her head. "I think I know what'll happen after we leave. The police will never see the inside of this place—it would raise too many questions. The two bodies will disappear, and so will the lead cell. I don't think anyone will ever see that dead soldier . . . or James Winston again."
"I ought to remove his ID," said Tony. Laika nodded in agreement and Tony disappeared into the next room for several minutes, while Laika looked at the papers Joseph handed her.
The lis
t had been made on four pieces of yellow legal paper and was now tattered, as if from having been carried about unprotected for a long time. The Latin words Locus hominus aeterni were written at the top, and there were six columns across the page. On the left of each column was a list of four-digit numbers. On the right was the name of a location. It began:
1204 Rome
1208 Venice
1217 Bologna
1223 Paris
It continued in this way for all four sheets, front and back. The last entry was "1996 NYC." She was just about to ask Joseph what he thought it meant when Tony returned.
"We can go," he said. "I've got all his ID."
"What about dental records?" Joseph asked. "And fingerprints. Is he on file anywhere?"
Tony looked at him darkly. "I said I got all his ID."
That was enough for Laika. She didn't want to think about what Tony had done, and she didn't want to guess what besides a wallet he might be carrying out in his pockets. "Then let's go," she said, and led the way out, down the stairs to the cellar garage and up the ramp.
Tony locked the garage door behind them, leaving the stolen Pinto in the darkness. He reattached the padlock to the iron gate as well, and they saw no one observing or following them as they walked through the streets to their car several blocks away.
As Tony drove them uptown, dawn was just beginning to brighten the strips of sky visible around the tops of the buildings. In the passing light from street lamps and signs, Laika continued to look at the list, holding it up for Joseph, who leaned over the backseat.
"It's headed Locus hominus aetemi," Laika said for Tony's benefit. "Then a list of dates and places. Europe first of all, and then, from the 1700s onward, all over the world."
"Ending here in 1996," Joseph said. "A couple years ago."
"What's the location for 1919?" Tony asked.
Laika found the date. "That's also New York City," she said.
"Want to bet that it was St. Stephen's Church?" said Tony.
"The implication?"
"That this is a list of the places where the prisoner was held over the years . . . hell, over the centuries."
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