Ice Cold Kill (37 page)

Asher said,
“Scusi, signore,”
lifted one of the matching SIGs, and shot him through the heart.

Tourists began to scream and back away, ramming into one another, falling, creating a scrum at the entrance to the cathedral. Someone knocked over an iron array of votive candles.

Asher turned three hundred and sixty degrees, letting everyone see his twin handguns. The brazen act drove scores of people deeper into the church and away from the entrance, as he had planned.

Asher hefted his messenger bag, which was so heavy that it had banged against his hip during his mad dash for safety. He pulled open the flap and studied the red iron canister with its pressure gauge and valve.

What had Chatoulah called it? Pegasus-B?

Why not? As good a name as any.

He began striding straight down the left-hand aisle of the long axis of the cruciate complex, making sure people trapped inside could see his twin guns.

*   *   *

Tourists flocked back out of the main entrance, colliding with people who had been outside seeking sanctuary from the still-roiling firefight at the other end of the plaza.

Two-tone police sirens echoed from every direction.
Carabinieri
and
Polizia Locale di Commune
would have been on the combatants already, but the cops were busy not getting trampled.

A large woman in Euro Disney sweats looked at Daria and shrieked a long, sustained, slasher-film sort of shriek. Daria glanced down and realized her shirt was pink with blood and globby bits. Getting arrested or shot by the Italian police wouldn’t be helpful. She grabbed the shirtfront in both fists, Clark Kent–style, and yanked. Buttons flew. She shrugged it to the ground. Her white tank top was only mildly bloody but drenched in sweat.

She hefted the .357 magnum Python, heavier and more awkward than her reliable Glock. She waved it, shouting in Italian, “Move! Get out of the way! Go!”

Daria regularly ran five to ten miles in her workout regimen. Dashing across the hard stone plaza left her gasping, lungs spent. Her hair was matted to her skull. She wiped salty sweat away from her eyes and looked at her palm: it was pink with blood.

Her window of opportunity was closing. Quickly.

*   *   *

Back across the plaza, Eli Schullman saw Asher bolt toward the gothic cathedral. He knew what lay within the cathedral. He knew the Tunnel Rat of Rafah had one more trick up his sleeve.

Asher’s gambit was winnable but time-consuming. And time was, maybe, the one thing Schullman had left to give his old friend.

His own auto was empty, if he’d counted his shots right. And of course, he had. He made his decision in less than a second. He grinned.

It had been a good run, he thought. Better than most.

He picked an American who was just entering the fray. The tall man wore a Kevlar vest and carried a Ruger MP-9 machine pistol. Schullman bellowed, charging him.

The newcomer—flanked by a woman with a matching vest and machine pistol—targeted the sound of his bellow. The man raised his weapon and spat three slugs into Eli Schullman’s gut.

The big man staggered but didn’t fall. He held an arm across his wounds and raised an empty pistol, aiming it true.

The female agent with the Ruger fired and hit him twice, in his shoulder and chest.

Schullman plowed into the man, knocking him over. He swung his now-empty pistol like a club and the woman in the Kevlar vest staggered and fell. She hit another CIA agent moving toward Schullman, and both tumbled to the ground.

Schullman drew his combat knife. He glanced toward the cathedral. His smile blooming as he hacked up blood.

Eli Schullman heard the gunfire from the others, but he never really felt the impact.

*   *   *

Daria vaulted over two wounded guards outside the cathedral. The crowds had dispersed. She ducked inside.

Chaos reigned. Crying civilians huddled in corners. A police officer lay on his back, a chest wound oozing blood. Daria knelt, snapped open his hip holster and drew his sidearm. She put the spade knife back in her boot, and now had a revolver in each fist.

Dizziness and nausea swept through her. Adrenaline was battling the virus for all its worth and the virus was winning. Daria shook sweat from her eyelashes and stood, moving stiffly in the direction of the loudest screams and shouting. She found several people attempting to hide amid the wooden pews. Others had climbed over hip-high safety glass into displays of saints and cubicles dedicated to effigies and catafalques.

Daria got to the intersection, where the longest part of the great church met with two shorter naves, creating the crosslike structure. Directly ahead was the Duomo’s Chapel of the Masses. Daria glanced first to her right, both guns extended, and heard the telltale clack of a gun being cocked behind her.

“Chatoulah?”

Both of her hands shook and lightning bolts of pain coursed through her elbows and knees. She had trouble drawing a decent breath.

“Guns.” He spoke softly from behind her.

Daria went to one knee, set both guns down amid the ornate, nutmeg-and-black floral marble. She stood again, turning, arms out a little from her torso.

Several of the faithful who watched put their hands together or knelt or made the sign of the cross. Collectively, they prayed.

Asher aimed a SIG at her sweat-drenched T, the other hand gripping a matching automatic. To his right, a bright red canister with a pressure gauge and valve lay on an ancient and illuminated Bible, which itself stood on an ornate wooden choir stand. Asher’s shoulder bag sat at his feet.

The trapped tourists had stopped screaming. Daria’s voice echoed amid the towering marble support columns. “Still sorry you shot me that night?”

“God, yes! A day never passes that I don’t regret that.”

“You’ll have to again.”

Diffused light from stained-glass windows lent a rose-and-gold glow to the room. Their voices echoed off the high ceilings, which looked like the hulls of massive, inverted ships. Close to two hundred and fifty trapped tourists grew quiet. The children’s choir hadn’t had time to leave their risers. The pigeons hunkered down.

Asher stared into her eyes. “Get free of this. Let the Americans get you to an intensive care unit. The flu is survivable if treated quickly.”

Daria felt her knee twitch. She worked up a wry smile and a small shake of her head.

He said, “I have a way out. You need one, too.”

“The CIA is on our doorstop.”

Asher shook his head in annoyance. “Every contingency is accounted for, Chatoulah. Workers have been excavating an ancient baptistery. They’re using tunnels. I’m good with tunnels. You know that. I can be blocks away while the CIA and the Italians are dealing with the panic in here.”

“So you can reunite with the Club Sennacherib?”

For the first time, Asher smiled a true smile. Light glinted off his wire-rimmed glasses. The barrel of his SIG didn’t deviate a single millimeter from Daria’s heart.

“The Group has been reconstituted. Our original mission—the mission for which we were conceived and born and raised—is needed today, now more than ever. Israel needs us to do the things it cannot and must not do to survive. We—”

“Hey. Hi.”

An American in a jacket of supple chocolate leather edged through the crowd, empty hands up by his shoulders. “Sorry for interrupting. You’re Asher Sahar, aren’t you? Hi, Asher. I’m John Broom.” The American turned and gave her a little wave. “Hi, Daria.”

Daria blinked in befuddlement at the perfect stranger.

Yet another stranger—this one, a strapping, blond man with an incongruous grin—stepped free of the trapped crowd, put a meaty hand on John Broom’s shoulder, and plowed his other fist into John’s gut.

John folded like a paper kite. He landed on his hands and knees, face going red, hacking great, wet coughs, eyes squeezed shut.

Daria recognized the bigger man from the hellish firefight in the French factory.

Asher said, “Hallo, Will.”

The blond American nodded. “Hey, buddy.”

Asher bobbed the barrel of his gun toward John. “Friend of yours, Chatoulah?”

The smaller man gasped on his all fours. “I’m … CIA…”

Will Halliday drew his hand-gun and placed the barrel against the base of John’s neck. He patted him down, turned to Asher, and shook his head.

“Hallo, Mr.… Bloom, was it? You’re interfering.”

“Broom.” John rose up to his feet, hands on knees. “Yeah, I do that. Look, the guy who hit me sounds American, so I’m gonna go with Will Halliday of the Secret Service.”

The scene was getting away from Daria, who recognized neither American.

“I’m an analyst. I wrote the briefings on Daria Gibron.” John held his gut gingerly. “I know Agent Halliday here killed some of his fellow agents in Colorado and stole the Pegasus-B virus, which you tested at a factory in France. You’re hoping to use it to stir up a war.”

Daria didn’t interrupt. The stranger was buying her the time to catch her breath. All she needed was some breath to catch.

John stood as straight as he could. “Thing is, your plan only works if nobody knows you’re behind it all. And by now, everyone in the CIA knows. Everyone in French intelligence knows. Everyone in Italian intelligence knows. Everyone who’s ever been to a Starbucks knows. My mom, in Queens? She’s calling Aunt Edna right now, so she knows. No fall guy means no war.”

Daria spat a pink glob of blood on the floral floor. “The virus. It targets Jews. Does everyone know that?”

John pivoted slowly in her direction, hand on his gut. He blinked, his brain trying to wrap itself around the concept. Theo James had suggested that a targeted virus was possible. But the idea …

John reached for a gold chain around his neck, yanked a Star of David pennant out of his shirt and flashed it to both Daria and Asher Sahar. Daria could practically see gears churn in the man’s brain. “The Filipino Army broke open one of the canisters but nobody got sick.”

“Surprisingly few Jews in the Filipino military,” Asher deadpanned. “Make me a promise, Mr. Broom, and you’re free to go. Get Daria to an American medical facility, fast. Have her treated for a hemorrhagic fever. Will you do that, Mr. Broom?”

John hesitated.

“Well, sir?”

John inwardly chanted,
Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
“Are you going to release the gas in here?”

“After the two of you leave. And myself, of course. Will?”

Halliday reached out and Asher handed him the red canister. Halliday already had proven himself immune to Pegasus-B.

On a second-story walkway of rose-colored wood and fleur-de-lis filigree, three pigeons took wing, cooing in annoyance, and swooped over the tableau below. Will Halliday flinched, nerves raw. Asher and Daria kept their eyes on the canister in the American’s massive hand.

Daria’s heart raced. She took a stiff step to her left, knee twitching.

John held his aching gut. An image of the going-away Costco cake flashed through his mind.
So Long Suckers!
“I’m not sure I can do what you ask, Mr. Sahar. I can’t let you release the gas. I’m really, really sorry.”

Halliday said, “You’re sure as shit gonna be.”

Daria collapsed to her knees, palms to the floor, long, limp strands of sweat-wet hair obscuring her face.

“Take her out of here!” Asher’s voice rose as high as it could, taking on a reedy, strained quality, and John heard real emotion behind it. “If we have to carry her, I’ll help. We have to move now, Mr. Broom!”

Asher aimed his gun at him.

“Please, Mr. Broom.”

Daria got one boot under her. She looked up through a sheet of hair like a confessional’s curtain. Her voice rose. “Take … the shot!”

*   *   *

From the rosewood walkway above, Khalid Belhadj heard Daria’s command. He raised his Desert Eagle and fired once.

The velocity of the .50-caliber shell was so great that it sliced cleanly through Will Halliday. The bullet was too massive to break up and so fast that his muscle, bone, and skin put up as much resistance as a Japanese paper lantern. The exit wound was only marginally larger than the entrance wound.

But the water that makes up so much of the human body fared less well. The hydrostatic shock of the impact made Halliday bolt backward, chest concave, arms and neck snapping forward, his whole body shoved backward three inches. It looked like a modern jazz dance move.

The baptistry floor took the impact of the .50 caliber bullet. Well-trod for centuries by sinners, saints, and supplicants alike, it erupted as if hit by a small mortar round. The hostages reacted with panic to the gunman’s strange, almost acrobatic spasm and the eruption that appeared to come from
beneath
the floor. Screaming, they stampeded toward the exit and the other naves.

The impact snapped Halliday’s arms up and out. The red canister flew.

The size of an American football, it arced through the air, end over end. The dull red paint reflected the stained glass light of the cathedral.

Asher Sahar reacted first. He let both guns fall to the floor and charged forward, arms extended, his eyes on the canister.

Daria pushed up on her one good leg, flashing forward, slamming into Asher from behind. She palmed the spade-blade from her boot, flicked it open with her thumb, and shoved it into Asher’s back with all her waning strength. It slid in less than an inch.

Asher caught the canister and cradled it to his chest with both hands.

Daria leaped onto his back, her weight and trajectory adding to his forward momentum. She rode him down, her body weight driving the serrated knife through Asher’s spine.

The blade snapped off its hinge.

Daria lay atop Asher, and Asher atop the canister. She turned bloodshot eyes away to see Will Halliday fall amid the mini mushroom cloud of floor debris, on his back, arms wide, his handgun clattering away.

She saw a dim flurry of shoes and trouser legs. The crazy CIA analyst who seemed to know her knelt and gingerly slid the red canister out from beneath their pileup.