Gisela cried out also. A purse dangled from her left wrist, but it was toward the side pocket of her coat instead that her free hand dived.
First things first. The shorter attendant and his companion, who stood up on the driver’s side-step and looked over the van’s cab, were both reaching for hardware. Kelly threw himself sideways, toward the line of yews fringing the thirty-foot walkway to the parking lot. His hundred and eighty pounds meat-axed the dancer ahead of him, out of the line of fire.
It occurred to him as the first shot banged from the cab of the van that he might be getting a personal demonstration of how Mohammed Ayyubi had died: in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Ricochets have a soul-freezing sound that rightly suggests the flattened bullet may rip a hole through you from any direction. This round cracked twice from the concrete, wall and overhang, before thrumming viciously into the night. Ten yards is spitting distance on a lighted pistol range, but shock and darkness made the gunman at the van as great a threat to the world at large as he was to his target.
As they crashed through the prickly branches of the shrubs, Kelly expected to hit the ground on top of the woman he was trying to save. He had not considered the fact that she was his superior as an athlete. She twisted in the air, using Kelly’s own weight as a fulcrum, and hit the hard ground beyond him on braced fingers and toes. The weight of the gun in her right side pocket twisted the tail of the coat around behind her.
“Kelly – ” the radio voice in back of him called. There was a snap as the American scrambled to his feet. The sound was not a gunshot like the volley blasting from around the van; it could have been the release of a bowstring.
“Your car!” Kelly cried to the woman beside him. Glass shattered from the building, and the man shooting from in front of the van splayed like an electrocuted squirrel as he fell backward.
Crouching, Kelly aware that the woman’s light-colored coat made as good an aiming point as his own dark suit was a bad one, the couple broke for the asphalt lot at an angle which thankfully spread them further from the second attendant, who continued to shoot over the cab of the van. The three figures stood like sandbagged dummies, unaffected by the bullets. One round vanished in a violet flash that lighted the wall of the hotel instead of ricocheting away.
“This one!” Gisela shouted, motioning with her right arm toward a car parked at the edge of the asphalt. It was a Mercedes coupe with the slight rounding of lines that marked it as ten or fifteen years old rather than brand new. The mercury-vapor lamp was reflected as a rich blue pool from the bodywork of metallic silver, a German hallmark which Japanese automakers attempted to match with less success than they showed in matters of pure mechanics.
There was a second snap! and the remaining attendant catapulted from the van. Gisela, instead of dodging around the front bumper of the coupe, vaulted the hood which her dangling coattail struck with a clang. Kelly flattened himself on the ground, reaching up for the passenger-side door as he twisted his head back to see what weapons were being aimed. He had not attempted to clear the revolver attached to his waistband. All it was going to do under present circumstances was tie up his hand and make a target of him.
A better target.
Two of the figures, the men if they were men, ran toward him while the third’s radio shouted, “Thomas Kelly, for your planet’s sake – ”
The long burst of submachinegun fire from a parked Audi sedan drowned the cough-brap! of the six-cylinder Mercedes engine catching.
Kelly expected the coupe’s door to be locked. It was not. He threw it open and tossed himself into the passenger seat of the low car, wishing he were half as agile as the woman he was accompanying. The nearer of the two figures running toward the car toppled limply. The second froze and remained standing in a violet blaze as two or three automatic weapons ripped at it.