As the first man from the Miami Grande bar came through the door, a Browning High Power in both hands like some cop on American television, she fired a double tap just in case the first chamber had been left empty, an old trick some police and security people who still clung
55
to revolvers used in case their gun was taken away and turned against them.
But both chambers were charged and his body slammed back through the doorway. Where was the American, Rourke?
Natalia Tiemerovna wheeled away from the doorway back into the bar, glancing at her watch. Seven minutes before Vladmir would send in his people with the submachineguns. Perhaps the gunfire would have alerted him that it wasn’t necessary? But that didn’t stop the kinds of men he used. Tell them to kill and they smiled. “Sometimes, to advance the cause, Natalia darling, men like these can be useful” he had told her more than once.
There was another doorway and the .357 Magnum with four shots remaining still in her right hand, she opened the door, a narrow, bare yellow-bulb-lit corridor beyond. Her purse in her left hand, her fingertips hitching up her dress so she could move quickly, Natalia ran the length of the corridor, eyes flickering side-to-side toward the doorways she passed. Performers dressing rooms perhaps. She could smell makeup.
At the far end of the corridor was a door, she opened it and stepped back quickly, in case the American was waiting in the alley beyond.
There was no gunfire and she stepped quickly through the shaft of yellow light and onto a small landing, flattening herself against the wall just beyond the door. She might be ruining her dress.
She saw no one in the alley, then heard gunfire from the end of the alley. Pistol caliber automatic weapons. The heavier thudding of a .45 automatic.
Natalia started down the steps to the alley floor. She saw a flash of white moving toward her. The American in his white dinner jacket?
Natalia stepped back into the shadows.
Two of the thugs her husband hired were chasing after
56
him. The American threw himself down behind a rank of trash cans as the alley wall exploded under submachinegun-fire impact. He rolled from cover and fired, a tongue of orange flame licking into the night, then another and another, one of the submachinegunners down.
The second man charged toward him and the American, Rourke, was on his feet, the submachinegunner firing, Rourke firing, the second man going down.
Rourke started running, coming toward her now, going for the fence that blocked her end of the alley.
Natalia put her purse under her left arm, raising the Python in both hands, tracking him as he ran until the range would make a miss impossible.
He was coming into the cone of the alley light.
He looked toward the doorway.
Natalia saw his face.
She lowered the revolver.
“Thanks!” He ran past her, to the fence, vaulting over it as if it were only eight inches tall rather than eight feet. He was gone.
“Thanks” he had said, this John Rourke . . . Natalia sat up, the hospital gown soaked with sweat. She brought her hands to her eyes, felt the tears streaming down her cheeks.
“John!” Her own voice sounded to her like a muffled scream.
The first time she had seen John Rourke, her life had forever changed. The questions that had remained unspoken inside her about Vladmir and what he told her was right and good to do had become more nagging.
She had always thought that stories of love at first sight were only for naive girls. And then she had learned that she was one.
Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna closed her eyes, wanting to see John’s face again in her self-imposed darkness.
57
But she could only see Vladmir’s face, the look of horror in his eyes, the horror of recognizing the moment of his own death as her arms had arced John’s massive knife toward his throat and steel first touched flesh and blood sprayed on her hands and face.
Natalia opened her eyes, realizing she was gasping for breath. She could still see Vladmir’s face.
58
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hans Weil’s eyes scanned the ground as they had with each step he had taken for hours and, at last, beneath the shelter of a scrub pine, where the drifting snow had not reached, he saw a partial footprint, the portion of the sole impression matching perfectly to the design of Eden Project issue boots. “Horst! Here!” Weil shouted, dropping to his knees to examine more carefully the boot’s print in the snow.
“Hans?”
“Here!” Was it the man, Kurinami, or the black woman, Halversen? Japanese were smaller statured than western men and the footsize would be correspondingly smaller, he knew. He couldn’t tell to which of the two they hunted the footprint belonged.
“What is this?”
“Horst —look here. A footprint. Dodd was right. They travel toward the Herr Doctor Rourke’s Retreat.”
“You had better call Dodd on the radio, I think,” Horst nodded gravely, pulling away his snow mask and tugging his goggles down to where they hung loosely around his neck.
“Yes.” Weil took the radio from the carrier on his vest. He telescoped the flexible antenna and pointed it southward, depressing the push to talk button under his gloved thumb. “Arrow Three to Archer. Arrow Three calling Archer. Come in, Archer.” He waited. There was only static. “This is Arrow Three calling Archer. Do you
59
read me? Over.”
Horst started to speak, then the radio crackled and he heard Dodd’s voice. “Arrow Three, this is Archer. Reading you loud and clear. Over.”
“Archer. Have located sign of prey near designated area. All is confirmed. Over.”
“Arrow Three. Say again. Over.”
“Archer. Have located some sign of prey. Indicates destination is designated area. All is confirmed as per your briefing. Over.”
“Arrow Three. Contact Arrow One, Arrow Two and Arrow Four. The word is Pearl. I say again, Pearl. Understood? Over.”
“The word is Pearl. Understood. Arrow Three Over.”
“Archer Out”
“Arrow Three Out.” And Weil switched frequencies, setting to the common frequency shared with Arrow One, Two and Four. He studied his watch. In ten minutes it would be time for the regular call up.
“So we go to this Retreat, then?”
“Yes. And we wait for Kurinami and Halversen. They have to come out sometime.”
Horst laughed. “The Herr Doctor and his family — they stayed inside for five hundred years.”
Weil saw nothing funny in it at all and he was very cold , . .
Annie Rourke finished drying her hair and started brushing it. In the old movies on videotape that her father kept at The Retreat, she would sometimes see women with such impossibly short haircuts. It would have to be easier to wash and care for, of course, but still, she thought —”What do you think about Michael and this deal with the Second City?” Paul called from the bathroom. She still liked watching him shave and as she
60
looked into the vanity mirror, she could just see his image in the bathroom mirror, half his face still white and foamy with lather.
“I don’t know. It scares me. Those people are crazy, from what I hear. I’d like to say they’d listen to reason, but-”
“No vibes on it?”
She laughed. “No vibes.” Her “psychic abilities,” if that was what they were properly called, were telling her nothing—yet. But she had never really considered that pre-cognition was something which really worked at all. She had her “flashes” while the event was actually transpiring, not before. If she ever started to see the future, she wondered if she would be able to handle it without losing her sanity. Just the thought of it made her shiver as she ran the brush through her waist length brown hair. Her father had always told her it was “honey blond” and that there were threads of gold in her hair, but to her it had always just been brown. Natalia’s hair —that was a different story, so dark a brown that it was almost a true black, such a lustrous —
“You sure you wanna go back to Georgia with us?”
“Akiro and Elaine are my friends, too. Mom’11 be all right here. And Maria’s staying when Michael leaves. Once Natalia’s out of the hospital, they can all keep each other company. We shouldn’t be long anyway. I’m sure Commander Dodd is just a screw up and doesn’t have any insidious purposes or anything like that don’t you think, Paul?”
“I don’t know what to think” he said, coming out the bathroom. He wasn’t wearing anything but the bathrobe she had made for him. And his almost black, thinning hair was still wet from the shower and the wetness made his head look shiny where there wasn’t any hair. She thought it looked sexy but never mentioned it because he was self-conscious about his thinning hair