She glanced at her small, bejeweled wristwatch, retrieved the phone,
and made one more call.
Winded, his starved muscles screaming for oxygen, Ben Hartman paused at
the escalators to the arcade, knowing he had to make a split-second
decision, I. untergeschoss shop ville read the blue overhead sign. The
down escalator was crowded with shoppers laden with bags and strollers;
he’d have to use the up escalator, which had relatively few riders. Ben
charged down it, elbowing aside a young couple who were holding hands
and blocking his path. He saw the startled looks his actions had
provoked, looks that mingled dismay and derision.
Now he raced through the underground arcade’s central atrium, his feet
scudding along the black rubberized floor, and he allowed himself a
glimmer of hope before he realized the error he’d made. From all
around him arose screams, frenzied shouting. Cavanaugh had followed
him here,
into this enclosed, contained space. In the mirrored facade of a
jewelry store, he caught a glimpse of muzzle fire, a burst of
yellow-white. Instantly, a bullet tore through the burnished mahogany
panels of a travel bookstore, exposing the cheap fiberboard beneath.
Everywhere was pandemonium. An old man in a baggy suit a few feet away
clutched his throat and toppled like a bowling pin, blood drenching his
shirt front.
Ben dove behind the information station, an oblong concrete-and glass
structure perhaps five feet wide, on which was mounted a list of
stores, elegant white lettering on black, a shoppers’ guide in three
languages. A hollow explosion of glass told him that the information
box had been hit. Half a second later, there was a sharp crack, and a
piece of concrete fell heavily from the structure, landing near his
feet.
Inches away!
Another man, tall and stout in a camel-hair topcoat and a jaunty gray
cap, staggered a few feet past him before collapsing to the floor,
dead. He’d been shot in the chest.
Amid the chaos, Ben found it impossible to distinguish Cavanaugh’s
footsteps, but, gauging his position from the reflected muzzle flash,
he knew no more than a minute remained before he would be overtaken.
Remaining in position behind the concrete island, he stood, to his full
six feet, and peered around wildly, looking for new refuge.
Meanwhile, the screams crescendoed. Ahead, the arcade was crowded with
people, shrieking, crying out hysterically, crouching and cowering,
many of them trying to hide their heads beneath folded arms.
Twenty feet away there were escalators marked 2 untergeschoss. If he
could close the distance without being shot, he could get to the level
below. His luck might change there. It couldn’t get any worse, he
thought–then he changed his mind as he saw a widening pool of blood
flowing from the man in the camel-hair coat a few feet away. Dammit,
he had to think! There was no way he could close the distance in time.
Unless… He reached for the dead man’s arm and dragged him over.
Seconds remained. He yanked off the dead man’s tawny coat and grabbed
the gray cap, conscious of baleful eyes upon him from shoppers cowering
near the Western Union. This was no time for delicacy. Now he
shrugged into the roomy overcoat, pulled the cap down hard on his head.
If he was to remain alive, he would have to resist the urge to dart
toward the second-level escalators like a jackrabbit: he had gone
hunting enough to
know that anything that moved too abruptly was likely to be shot by an
itchy-fingered gunman. Instead, he clambered slowly to his feet,
hunched, staggering, weaving like an old man who had lost blood. He
was now visible and supremely vulnerable: the ruse had to last just
long enough to get him to the escalator. Maybe ten seconds. So long
as Cavanaugh thought he was a wounded bystander, he wouldn’t waste
another bullet on him.
Ben’s heart was hammering in his chest, his every instinct screaming at
him to break into a sprint. Not yet. Hunched over, shoulders rounded,
he staggered on with an unsteady gait, his strides as long as he could
make them without exciting suspicion. Five seconds. Four seconds.
Three seconds.
At the escalator, which had emptied out, abandoned by the terrified
pedestrians, the man in the bloodied camel-hair overcoat seemed to
crumple face forward, before the movement of the stairs took him out of
view.
Now.”
Inaction had been as strenuous as exertion, and, every nerve in his
body twitching, Ben had broken his fall with his hands. As quietly as
he could, he raced down the remaining stairs.
He heard a bellow of frustration from upstairs: Cavanaugh would now be
after him. Every second had to count.
Ben put on another burst of speed, but the second below-ground level of
the arcade was a virtual maze. There was no straight route of egress
to the other side of the Bahnhofplatz, just a succession of byways, the
wider walkways punctuated with kiosks of wood and glass that sold
cellular phones, cigars, watches, posters. To a dilatory shopper, they
were islands of interest–to him, an obstacle course.
Still, they reduced the number of sight lines. They lessened the
chance of the long-distance kill. And so they bought him time. Perhaps
enough time for Ben to secure the one thing he had on his mind: a
shield.
He ran past a blur of boutiques: Foto Video Ganz, Restseller
Buchhandlung, Presensende Stickler, Microspot. Kinderboutique, with
its window crammed with furry stuffed animals, the display framed by
green-and-gold-painted wood with an incised ivy pattern. There was the
chrome and plastic of a Swisscom outlet… All of them festively plying
their goods and services, all utterly worthless to him. Then, straight
ahead, to his right, next to a Credit Suisse/Volksbank branch office,
he
spotted a luggage store. He looked through the window, heaped high
with soft-sided leather suitcases–no good. The item he was after was
inside: a large, brushed-steel briefcase. No doubt the gleaming steel
cladding was as much cosmetic as functional, but it would serve. It
would have to. As Ben darted in the store, grabbed the article, and
ran out, he noticed that the proprietor, pale and sweating, was
jabbering hysterically in Schweitzerdeutsch on the telephone. No one
bothered to run after Ben; word of the insanity had already spread.
Ben had gained a shield; he had also lost precious time. Even as he
sprang out of the luggage store, he saw its display window transformed
into an oddly beautiful spiderweb in the instant before it
disintegrated into shards. Cavanaugh was close, so close Ben didn’t
dare look around to try to locate his position. Instead, Ben charged
forward into a crowd of shoppers emerging from Franscati, a large
department store at one end of the cruciform plaza. Holding up the
briefcase, Ben lunged forward, tripping on someone’s leg, regaining his
footing with difficulty, losing a few precious moments.
An explosion inches from his head: the sound of a lead bullet slamming
into the steel briefcase. It jolted in his hands, partly from the
impact of the bullet, partly from his own muscular reflex, and Ben
noticed a bulge on the steel casing facing him, as if it had been stuck
by a small hammer. The bullet had penetrated the first layer, had
almost penetrated the second. His shield had saved his life, but only
just.
Everything around him had gone blurry, but he knew he was entering the
teeming Halle Landesmuseum. He also knew that carnage was still
trailing him.
Throngs of people were screaming–huddled, cringing, running–as the
horror, the gunfire, the bloodshed came closer.
Ben plunged into the frenzied crowd, was swallowed up by it. For a
moment the gunfire seemed to have stopped. He tossed the briefcase to
the floor: it had served its purpose, and its gleaming metal would now
make him too easy to pick out of the crowd.
Was it over? Was Cavanaugh out of ammunition? Reloading?
Jostled one way, then another, Ben scanned the labyrinthine arcade for
an exit, an Ausgang, through which he could disappear unseen. Maybe
I’ve lost him, Ben thought. Yet he didn’t dare look back again. No
going back. Only forward.
Along the walkway that led to the Franscati department store, he
spotteda fake-rustic sign of dark wood and gilt lettering in shrift:
katz keller-bierhalle. It hung above an alcove, an entrance to a
deserted restaurant. geschlossen, a smaller sign read. Closed.
He raced toward it, his movement camouflaged by a frenzied rush of
people in that general direction. Through a faux-medieval archway
beneath the sign, he ran into a spacious, empty dining room. Cast-iron
chains from the ceiling supported enormous wooden chandeliers; medieval
halberds and engravings of medieval nobility adorned the walls. The
motif continued with the heavy round tables, which were crudely carved
in keeping with someone’s fantasy of a fifteenth-century arsenal.
On the right side of the room was a long bar, and Ben ducked behind it,
gasping loudly for breath, as desperately as he tried to remain silent.