"This really doesn't seem like the appropriate time or place to discuss it, Garth. However, suffice it to say that if you hadn't always been such a pisshead when it came to the martial arts, calling just about anything you heard a ninja bullshit story, I might have told you about muzukashi jotai kara deru-the art of getting out of knotty situations. Think Houdini. Get it? Too late for you now. I'm thinking of leaving you behind."
"My hero," Harper whispered, and then giggled softly.
"We don't know how many of them there are, or where they are. We have to assume most of them are watching the perimeter of the castle and grounds waiting for John Sinclair to show up. We need to find a fast and simple way to get out of here. If we can get away from here, we may be in a position to intercept your man, or at least show some kind of signal that we've escaped. Any ideas?"
"We must get down to the lower level," Jan whispered. "There's a labyrinth to the west, and if we can get to-"
Suddenly, all of the lights came on, momentarily blinding me. I closed my eyes, fighting back the panic that welled in me. I was very close to slipping the last knot in the ropes that bound my wrists, and there had to be a considerable length of loose rope beneath my chair and behind me. If Al or one of his men saw the rope, they would know what was happening. We'd all be checked. Veil and I would be rebound, probably this time with thin wire, and there was no way we were going to get out of that ever, much less before dawn. I brought my legs together as far as I could, hoping to partially block any sight lines to the floor under my chair. Then I began frantically picking up the loose rope with my fingers, pushing the coils under my buttocks.
I slowly opened my eyes. Al and three Black Flame soldiers I hadn't seen before were standing at the opposite end of the huge library. Al was staring at us intently. I stared back, trying to look nonchalant, desperately hoping that no loose rope was visible on the floor around Veil or me, and that what I was feeling didn't show on my face. It was a very bad time for our captors to come and check on us. I glanced at Veil, who was blinking and yawning, as if he had just been aroused from sleep. There was no rope on the floor beneath Veil or behind his chair.
Apparently satisfied that we were where we were supposed to be, Al raised the walkie-talkie he was carrying to his mouth, pressed the Send button on the side, and spoke rapidly in Japanese. When he released the button, he was answered by static. He repeated the action, with the same result. If I'd had to hazard a guess as to what it all meant, I'd have ventured the opinion that our youthful leader had lost communication with one or more of his men. He was, for sure, not looking as bouncy as he had earlier in the evening. He cursed in English, then threw the walkie-talkie against one of the bookcases lining the wall to his left. He signaled to his men, who fanned out. Two of the men pointed their weapons at the entrances to the library, while the third nervously aimed his up at the balcony ringing the second level.
"Oh, my God," Jan said with a sharp intake of breath. "He's here! Chant's already here!"
That might be true, and all well and good, but the problem was that we were already, still, there too. And Al was showing disturbing signs of being more than a bit perturbed at the whole situation. If John Sinclair had indeed somehow managed to penetrate the ring of Black Flame soldiers and had entered the castle in order to rescue us, the fact of the matter was that his timing was as bad as Al's. The rope I had spent hours untying from my wrists was a painful lump under my buttocks and in the small of my back. I wondered if the Japanese had an expression concerning frying pans and fire.
As his men continued to slowly circle, sweeping the area around and above them with their automatic weapons, Al abruptly strode the rest of the way across the library, stopped in front of Harper and Jan. He reached into the back pocket of his black linen slacks, removed what appeared to be an ornately carved, rectangular box of enameled wood. He gripped both ends of the box, pulled. There was a soft, ominous clicking sound; the box separated to become the handles of two shiny, triangular-shaped knives. He raised his hands, placing the tip of one blade an inch or so from Harper's left eye, the other an equally small distance from Jan's right eye.
"Sinclair!" Al shouted, his voice echoing in the huge library. "I hope you can hear me, because if you can't, each of these women is going to lose an eye for nothing! We'll talk! Show yourself!"
The odds for the six of us surviving this business, which had seemed fairly good only a minute or two before, were now rapidly diminishing; the chances that one dwarf, however well motivated, could overwhelm one man with two knives and three men with automatic weapons were nonexistent. Any move whatsoever on my part now would be the ultimate fool's play and would undoubtedly obliterate any lingering chances we might have for survival. As horrible as it was, having an eyeball punctured by the tip of a knife was preferable to dying. And he was going to take their eyes, any moment now. Even if I hadn't felt it in my bones, Al had already provided not only ample proof that he was not a man to bluff, but clear evidence that he enjoyed such things. However, without question, the only thing to do was to sit tight, let him stick the eyes, and then hope the men would leave for a while so that Veil and I could continue going about our business of engineering our escape.
On the other hand.
Al might be wrong about Sinclair being in the castle. Whether or not Sinclair was in our midst, Al wasn't going to stop with taking an eye from Harper and Jan if the man didn't show up. If there was no response after the initial mutilations, he would take the other eyes, then the ears, and then other parts of their bodies. There was no telling when or where he would stop. And even if Sinclair did show himself and give up, Al had made it clear that we were all going to die anyway. Black Flame had been one step ahead of everybody in this game, and still was.
I now felt the desperation Garth had been feeling all along, and I now had what he had been so desperately hoping for-one clear shot at Al. It was a moment that might never present itself again in our lifetimes, and it was mine. I took it.
As I untied the last knot and slipped the last loop from my wrists, and prepared to drop the rope from my hands, I quickly but carefully examined my options, my angles of attack. There weren't many of either. I had been sitting motionless for hours, with my blood circulation restricted, and my legs were bound to feel rubbery when I abruptly stood up. I might even experience a dizzy spell. Under normal circumstances, I would have had no trouble getting up the speed and momentum I would need to leap to his head, which I needed to do in order to strike a killing blow; but I didn't think I had the necessary spring in my legs now for such a move, and I would only have one chance at him.
Another consideration was the fact that my attack would have to snap his head and torso backward, or the tips of the knives he held in his hands would still puncture the women's eyeballs. That effectively narrowed my options for point of attack down to one, but that was fine with me; it was my preferred option. I must have picked up a case of bad attitude from Al, for I was no longer content to simply kill the young leader of Black Flame. I wanted him to have something-or not have something-to remember me by for the rest of his abominable life, long after I was dead.
I dropped the rope to the floor and sprang to my feet. As I'd expected, my legs were stiff, my knees weak; but the massive amounts of adrenaline pumping through my system galvanized my nerves and muscles, and I shot forward, lowering my head and aiming at Al's exposed back. The three gunmen started, but could not fire at me for fear of hitting their leader. One man shouted a warning, but it was too late. I had already centered my chi, imagining all the power in my body focused into a fine point at my forehead. I lunged the last step, hunched my shoulders, drove as hard as I could. The center of my forehead connected solidly with the small of Al's back, directly on his spine. The crunching sound of his spine breaking traveled down through my skull, the bone acting as a kind of amplifier, and I knew that all of Al's nasty doings in the future would be done from a wheelchair. He shrieked in surprise, pain, and anger as his
upper body snapped backward. As he crumpled to the floor, I rolled over him and lay flat on the floor, using his body as a shield between me and the gunmen.
Then things got a bit hectic. It felt like I was adrift in a blurred universe of sound, sight, and cascading emotion, with everything seeming to happen at once. As I reached to recover the daggers Al had been holding, I heard the sound of wood cracking, breaking. That, I knew, would be Veil focusing his own chi; harnessing the enormous power in his hard, finely conditioned body, he stood up, leaving the chair into which he had been tied in shards on the floor.
But not even Veil could dodge bullets. I doubted that his breaking free was going to do either of us much good, but it did afford me an odd sense of relief, of having company out on the thin, far edge of existence in what I assumed were the final seconds of my life. At least I would die as a free man on my feet, as it were, even if I did happen to be crawling on my belly at the moment.
I took the daggers from the unconscious Al's hands, then raised my head slightly and peered over his chest to see what was going on. Everything seemed a chaotic blend of movement, with Veil diving through the air, executing a shoulder roll, then scrambling for the feet of the closest Black Flame soldier even as all three men swung their guns in his direction. Suddenly, there was more movement on the balcony overhead, off to my right. A headless corpse, naked except for a green plaid flannel shirt, came sailing down through the air. The bloody corpse hit one of the gunmen square in the chest, knocking him backward and off his feet. An instant later a deadly steel star, a shuriken, came whistling through the air and planted itself in the center of the second gunman's forehead, splitting his skull and killing him instantly. The man on the floor was dispatched in the same manner. The third soldier did manage to get off a burst of fire, but he was distracted, and his bullets passed over Veil's body as Veil rolled once more, came up in the man's face, and wrapped his hands around the man's throat.
Things were definitely looking up.
I sprang to my feet, went to my right, and began cutting through the ropes that bound Garth, Insolers, Harper, and Jan. When Harper and Jan tried to stand, they both fell. Garth and Insolers supported Jan, while I gripped Harper's hand and pulled her to her feet. She lunged for, fell on, the sofa. She rummaged around the overstuffed pillows on the sofa until she found her purse, opened it, took out the small wooden box inside, and shoved it down the front of her blouse.
"This way!" Jan cried, tugging at both Garth and Insolers as she staggered forward toward the door leading to the pantry.
Veil and I started to go to retrieve the dead men's automatic weapons, abruptly halted, turned, and sprinted after the others as two more gunmen came running through the door at the far end of the library. We darted through the pantry door where the others had gone a split second before twin bursts of gunfire sent a hail of bullets chewing into the wood of the door frame. We found ourselves in a long, narrow pantry with a high ceiling. Garth was standing at the other end, holding a door open and frantically urging us on. We ducked through the doorway, with Garth following, slamming the door shut and bolting it behind us. We clambered down a circular staircase to a narrow stone corridor. Insolers and an anxious-looking Harper and Jan were waiting for us. The corridor was like an echo chamber, and the sound of running footsteps was all around us-but the men seemed to be running in a number of different directions, and there was no sound of splintering wood at the head of the stairs down which we had come.
Twenty yards down the corridor there were three more doors, one on the left and two on the right. We followed Jan through the door on the left, skipped and hopped down yet another steel stairwell into a large wine cellar. A door at the opposite end of the cellar opened into yet another stone corridor, and our footsteps echoed eerily as we ran down it after Jan. I presumed we were heading for what Jan had described as a labyrinth, but to me the complex system of stairwells and stone corridors was a hopeless maze and I wondered how many years it had taken the woman to find her way around this massive complex she modestly called home.
A man suddenly lunged out from the dark shadows of a deeply recessed doorway to my left, grabbed Harper with one hand, and started to raise the machine pistol he carried in the other. Jan was in the line of fire between Veil and Garth, and they couldn't get around her before he fired. I tensed, ready to leap at the man, but Harper reacted first. She jerked free from his grasp, reached down the front of her blouse, and took out the wooden box. As Insolers knocked the gun away, Harper opened the lid of the box, then slapped it against the man's face, just below his left eye. The man screamed, clawed for a few moments at the spot on his face where he had been bitten, then stiffened and crumpled to the stone floor. Veil stepped around Jan and picked up the machine pistol, and I grabbed Harper's arm, helping her to step over the corpse of the Black Flame soldier.
"We're almost there," Jan gasped, pausing just before a sharp bend in the corridor. "The door at the end opens into the labyrinth. I know the way through. It will take us to an apple orchard on a hill overlooking the castle. Chant will know where to find us. Come on."
Jan turned and went around the bend, disappearing from sight for a moment, and then we heard a startled cry. The rest of us hurried around the bend, then came to an abrupt halt, with Veil, Garth, and Insolers quickly moving to screen the women, when we saw what Jan had seen.
The door at the end of the corridor was open, and moonlight silhouetted the black shape of the tall man who filled the door frame. The man's hands were empty, hanging at his sides.
"Shoot the fucker," Garth murmured.
Veil shook his head, then handed the machine pistol to my brother. 'The sound of gunfire through that open door could give away our position. It doesn't look like he has a gun, which means I can take him out without making much noise. You people stay here."
"I'm coming with you," I said, and fell into step beside Veil as he started forward.
The man's features began to emerge from the moon shadows as we grew nearer, and I felt a little shudder as I recognized him. Carlo was bare-chested, which was understandable since he had wrapped his shirt around the corpse of one of the two Black Flame soldiers unlucky enough to have been ordered by Al to carry him out of the library and chop his head off. It seemed Carlo was anything but a run-of-the-mill assassin, with hidden resources neither Black Flame nor we had imagined; like Veil, he knew more than a little about focusing strength. In the second or two before they died, the men who had carried Carlo from the library must have been quite surprised when the chair they were holding abruptly disintegrated, and powerful hands gripped their throats.
The man who had been my chauffeur obviously knew a few other tricks as well. The features were still those of the man who had introduced himself to me as Carlo, but the bad leg was now straight, as was the spine. I stopped, grabbed Veil's arm just as he was about to leap at the man-a move I suspected might not be such a great idea, even for Veil. Suddenly, I knew who this man really was, even before he turned slightly to reveal the large mark, a combination of scar tissue and black tattoo ink, that ran up the left side of his back.
"John Sinclair, I presume," I said to the still figure.
"I want to thank you for what you did back there in the library, Mongo," the man replied in a deep, resonant voice that might have been Carlo's, except that it had lost all trace of any Italian accent. "You too, Kendry. Things were getting a bit out of hand."
"Chant!" Jan shouted with joy when she heard the man's voice, and rushed past Veil and me into his outstretched arms. "Oh, Chant!"
The man and woman held each other tightly, swaying back and forth slightly. They kissed, and then Sinclair gently pushed her away and turned to the rest of us. "We'll talk later. There's no time now. I just wanted to make sure you were all safe. Jan will lead you through the labyrinth to a safe place, and I'll join you there when I'm finished with the rest of that overgrown delinquent's men. I have to move quickly now, before it gets light."
J
udging from his tone of voice and casual manner, he might have been talking about going to the corner grocery store for a quart of milk.
"I'm sorry, Sinclair," Insolers said in a low voice. "I came to help, but I … I didn't mean for things to happen the way they did. It's my fault those men found your home."
"Don't worry about it, Insolers," John Sinclair replied easily. "I'd have chosen a different battleground, but this was inevitable. They've been getting closer every year. It's why I chose to make my stand now, to try to draw them to Switzerland. It will work out. They're spread all over the castle and the grounds hunting for me." He paused, then added in a tone that chilled me, "I won't be long."
I stepped closer to Sinclair, looked up at him, said, "I want to go with you. I owe them too."
He shook his head. "Thank you, but no. It's better that I work alone."
"I assume you killed the two who carried you out, but you don't know how many are left."
"Eleven, not counting the pain-in-the-ass kid you put down. It's almost a tenth of their entire membership."
"Let me come with you."
"This isn't your kind of play, Mongo. They will never give up, and so they must be killed, one by one. There can be no hesitation. I think it's safe to say you've never killed a man in cold blood, but that is precisely what is required now. There is no middle way."
"Your blood may be cold right now, Sinclair, but mine definitely isn't. I know how they've tortured people to death, and they've shot down men, women, and children in front of my eyes." I paused, held up the twin daggers I had taken from Al. "I won't hesitate. At least let me come along to hold your coat."
"And me," Veil said, stepping up beside me. "My blood's as cold as yours. I may not be as good as you, but I'd like to think I'm damn close-better than any member of Black Flame. I have no doubt that you can kill every one of the fuckers, but I'm not so sure you, alone, can find them all in the hour or so you have before the sun comes up. When it gets light, things are going to get tougher. You can use the help. I've done this kind of thing before-in Laos and Cambodia."
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