Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector (54 page)

Again, Randi dug out her binoculars. Methodically, she swept them across the ancient cemetery, focusing first on the entrances of tombs that she thought offered the best vantage points. Unless she missed her guess, Renke and his bodyguard would have picked a hiding place that would let them spot anyone entering the tomb complex from the road or the parking lot.

Her binoculars slid slowly past a tomb opening about halfway up the central street, paused, and then came back. Was that paler shape inside the darkness just a chunk of fallen stone or a trick of the moonlight?

Randi held her breath, waiting patiently. The shape moved slightly, taking on form and definition. She was looking at the head and shoulders of a man, a clean-shaven man who was crouched just inside the low opening, peering down the street toward the entrance to the necropolis. He shifted position again and now she saw the weapon in his hands.

She held still. Was Renke inside the tomb with this man? Or had the weapons scientist chosen another lair?

The bodyguard looked back behind him for a moment, apparently listening to something being whispered to him, nodded, and then turned back to his post.

Randi smiled thinly. Wulf Renke was there, crouching patiently in the darkness, waiting for his chance to slip away and disappear again, as he had so many times before. That was the answer she had been hoping for. She put her binoculars away and crawled down the slope, staying low and angling away from the street where Renke and the other man were concealed.

She dropped quietly into the little lane that marked the northern boundary of the necropolis and crossed it quickly, slipping into the shelter of one of the

small square mounded tombs. Then she slid her Beretta back into the holster on her hip, snapped the flap shut, and used both hands to haul herself up onto the grass-covered roof of the burial chamber.

From there, Randi made her way from rooftop to rooftop, jumping lightly across the narrow gaps between buildings until she reached the flat-roofed tomb just north of Renke’s hiding place. She drew the 9mm pistol, crawled to the corner, and looked down over the edge.

There, just a few meters away, lay the low open door where she had seen the scientist’s lookout. She took aim with the Beretta, waiting while her eyes adjusted. Gradually, the blackness took on different shapes and shades, again revealing the head and shoulders of the sentry crouching there with his submachine gun. Her finger tightened on the trigger and then eased off slightly.

She decided to give this guy the chance to be smart.

“Drop the weapon!” Randi called softly.

Taken completely by surprise, the guard reacted instinctively. His head jerked up and he spun desperately, bringing his Uzi up to fire.

She shot him in the head.

Before the Beretta’s sharp, ringing report stopped echoing back from the stone walls around her, she was in motion. She rolled off the roof, landed in a crouch on the street, and brought her pistol back up, aiming straight at the opening to the crypt.

There was no noise. No sign of movement from inside.

“Wulf Renke!” Randi said quietly in perfect German, pitching her voice just loud enough to be heard inside the tomb. “It’s over. You’ve got nowhere left to run. Come out now, with your hands up, and you’ll live. Otherwise, I will kill you.”

For a moment, she thought he would stay silent, refusing to talk. But then the scientist replied. “So those are my two choices?” he said calmly. “I either meekly surrender to you and face prison? Or else I die at your hands?”

“Correct.”

Renke snorted. “You are wrong,” he said bleakly. “You forget, there is always a third option. And that is the path I choose.”

Suddenly Randi heard a faint crunch from inside the tomb, followed by a startled gasp and then a long, drawn-out sigh that ended in absolute silence.

“Oh, hell,” she murmured, already moving toward the entrance.

She was too late.

Wulf Renke sat slumped over on one of the stone benches used by the Etruscans for their dead. His eyes stared back at her, rigid and unblinking. Foam had dripped out of his slack mouth and into his neat, white beard. The fragments of a broken glass ampule lay on the ground at his feet, next to an insulated carrying case. The air inside the burial chamber smelled faintly of almonds.

The fugitive biological weapons scientist had committed suicide, probably with cvanide, Randi thought grimly. She bent down and entered the tomb.

When a quick search of Renke’s pockets produced nothing of value, she took the case and backed out again, into the narrow moonlit street.

Inside the container, she found a row of glass vials packed in dry ice. And when she read the labels on each vial, her eyes widened in absolute astonishment and horror. At a guess, Randi decided that she was looking at lethal disease variants keyed to the precise genetic makeup of Viktor Dudarev, his senior ministers, and many of Russia’s highest-ranking military commanders.

Quickly, she slammed the lid back down, grabbed the case, and then raced away through the cramped streets of the city of the dead.

Smith slid quietly through the shadows thrown by a row of tall pine trees. He came out on the edge of a small public park dominated by the foundations of an Etruscan temple—not much more than a few stone steps, a raised, grass-covered platform, and the circular bases of what must have once been towering columns. The main road up had turned sharply as it climbed and entered Orvieto and now he was facing south.

He dropped to one knee, signaling Kirov and Fiona to come ahead. They ghosted through the trees and joined him.

The bulk of the medieval city loomed on their right, a maze of little, twisting streets and low, irregularly shaped stone houses that were mostly between eight and nine hundred years old. Arches crossed the streets in many places, linking the ancient houses, and turning the narrow lanes into alternating pools of wan silver moonlight and Stygian darkness.

The eastern end of the plateau fell away on their left, plunging steeply toward the lights of Orvieto Scalo, the lower town. A wide terrace ran along this edge, all the way to the tall, round, open-topped bastions and massive outer stone walls of the Fortezza dell’Albornoz, a papal fortress built in the four-teenth and fifteenth centuries.

“Which way would Brandt and Malkovic go?” Jon murmured. “West into the old city?”

“Not into the old city,” Fiona said flatly. “That’s a dead end for them. The only real way out from there leads straight back toward the Center compound, and that road will be swarming with Italian police and emergency crews.”

“Ahead,” Kirov said firmly. He pointed to a small sign with an arrow, pointing the wav south along a tree-lined avenue to the Piazza Cahen and the Stazione Funicalore—the station for the funicular railway connecting Orvieto with the lower town. “Their only realistic hope of escape is to beg, buy, or steal another car, and the only place to do that safely is down below, near the main train station. That funicular railway is probably closed for the night, but there must be other roads or tracks down from this side of the city.”

Smith nodded tightly. “Sounds reasonable.” He stood up. “Okay, I’ll take the left flank. Oleg, you take the right.”

“And I’ll tag along like a good little girl, safe in the middle,” Fiona said, smiling slightly to take the sting out of her words.

Spread apart in a skirmish line, the three of them crossed the little park, skirting the raised platform of the ruined temple, and kept moving south, sticking close to the left edge of the wide road leading into the open square called the Piazza Cahen.

“But where is Professor Renke?” Konstantin Malkovic forced out between panting gasps, still clutching his briefcase to his heaving chest. He was sitting

propped up with his back against the locked doors of the funicular station.

Sweat matted his thick mane of white hair and ran in rivulets down his terrified face.

“Either dead or a prisoner,” Brandt snapped. “He should have kept up with us.”

Coldly furious with himself and with his panic-stricken employer, Brandt contemplated his options. They were increasingly limited. With Renke gone and the HYDRA lab destroyed, his usefulness to the Russians would last only so long as the Americans were kept in the dark about the invasion plans for Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics. The gray-eyed man glanced sidelong at Malkovic’s briefcase. It contained information that must not be allowed to fall into American hands. And the financier himself was rapidly becoming a liability.

At this point, Brandt suspected, the only way he could win back his own life from the hard men in the Kremlin would be to eliminate Malkovic for them and then hand over the briefcase and all of its contents. He raised his Walther pistol, then stopped himself. Not here, he decided. The square was too open and the sound of a shot would echo across the city. No, he would kill the older man later, Brandt thought grimly, when they were safely away from this damned medieval maze. Once they were high up in the Apennines, it would be a simple matter to hide a bullet-riddled body where it might never be found.

Bending down, he roughly yanked Malkovic back to his feet. “Come on!”

he snarled. “There’s another road down, just around the corner of that fortress.”

Trembling both with fear and fatigue, the older man obeyed.

In that instant, one of his two remaining men crouched lower, hissing, “Herr Brandt! The Americans! They’re here!” He raised his submachine gun, using the Uzi’s short black barrel to point toward the entrance to the Piazza.

Startled, Brandt spun round with his pistol ready. In the dim light, he could just make out three black-clad figures entering the square. The}’ were less than a hundred meters away. “Kill them!” he snapped.

Smith saw a sudden flurry of movement near the funicular railway station, a small, modern building, on the eastern edge of the square. There were four men there. Two were in cover behind a row of terracotta planters, with their weapons out. Brandt, taller and blond-haired, crouched behind them. The fourth man, Konstantin Malkovic, was turning to flee, scuttling wildly away from the station. He disappeared into the darkness, heading for the tall arched gateway leading into the papal fortress.

“Down!” Jon roared, trying to warn Kirov and Fiona. He dove for the pavement. “Get down!”

And then Brandt’s gunmen started shooting, firing on full automatic.

Bullets ripped through the air all around Smith, cracking past low over his head. Others ricocheted off the paving, spinning wildly away in every direction. Chunks of concrete and torn strips of asphalt spattered across the square.

He rolled away, frantically trying to throw off their aim.

A few meters away, Fiona Devin cried out suddenly and went down. She lay curled up, with her teeth tightly clenched, clutching at her right thigh.

Blood welled up between her locked fingers. Grim-faced with worry, Kirov hurled himself toward her, ignoring the 9mm rounds screaming around him.

The two Uzis fell silent. Both gunmen had expended their full twenty-round magazines in just a couple of seconds. Each man crouched low, desperately slapping in a fresh clip.

Smith stopped rolling. Either they started fighting back or they were dead.

His eyes narrowed and he took rapid aim at the row of planter boxes. He pulled the trigger, firing as quickly as he could while swinging the barrel from one end of the little train station to the other. The MP5 stuttered loudly, punching rounds toward Brandt and his men. Hit by one of his bursts, a terracotta planter exploded, sending pieces of shattered pottery, dirt, and bits of shredded bark and leaves swirling through the air.

The gunman crouching behind that planter toppled backward and lay still. His Uzi clattered to the pavement.

One down, Smith thought grimly. He shifted his aim again, swiveling toward Brandt’s second gunman. Brandt himself was next to his subordinate, down on one knee with his semiautomatic pistol out.

The three men opened fire at the same time.

Again, bullets hammered the paving and the air around Jon. One round tore a line of fire across the top of his right shoulder. Another near miss ripped

through his assault vest, sending a torn equipment pouch tumbling away across the Piazza. Bits of broken plastic and glass littered the ground in its wake, all that was left of a handheld laser surveillance kit. A ricochet punched off the pavement and slammed into his left side, hitting with enough force to crack one of his ribs.

Deliberately, Smith fought down his fear-laced instincts to duck or to dive away from the incoming fire. Instead, his finger tightened again and again on the trigger. The MP5’s barrel jumped and bucked against his grip. Jon clenched his jaw against the searing pain from his cracked rib, and kept shooting, forcing the submachine gun back onto his targets.

Multiple 9mm rounds smacked into the funicular station, shattering glass, punching through the locked doors, and gouging huge craters in the brown basalt walls. The rest of the planter boxes blew apart. Brandt and his gunman crumpled and fell, one heaped on top of the other.

The cocking handle slammed forward as Smith fired the last of the thirty rounds in his magazine. Reacting swiftly, he snatched out the old clip, tugged a new magazine out of his ammunition pouch, and slid it into the MP5. Then he yanked back on the handle, chambering a new bullet.

He scanned the front of the station, finger on the trigger, looking closely for any sign of movement from the three bodies littering the torn pavement.

Nothing stirred. There was only a sudden strange silence —the total absence of noise after the staccato, clattering roar of so much gunfire.

“Jon!” Kirov called to him. The Russian was crouching over Fiona Devin, working frantically to staunch the bleeding from the wound in her thigh. “I need your help,” he said bleakly.

Smith rolled back to his feet, staggering slightly as a new wave of pain from his cracked rib ripped through him, and then hurried over to the wounded woman. Fiona was still conscious. But she was pale and shivering, starting to go into shock.