The Gilded Seal (30 page)
cally, Djoulou jerked the wheel, sending the car swerving
across the carriageway and sweeping both motorcyclists into
the central reservation.
“
Bravo, Capitaine
!” Milo grunted his approval as the bikes
disappeared behind them in a jagged cartwheel of metal,
sparks and fl ailing limbs.
A few moments later they swept inside the tunnel, the
rumble of the engines and the hum of the tires echoing
around them, a growling bass note overlaid by the rhythmic
rise and fall of the siren’s harsh treble in the distance.
“Get closer,” Milo ordered as the tunnel’s orange lights
flashed hypnotically past, “The exit’s not far.”
“The traffi c’s slowing,” Eva pointed out. “They must have
landed.”
The roof of the tunnel suddenly glowed red as if a fire had
been lit at the far end, the glow advancing in a steady ripple
toward them as the cars ahead applied their brakes, like a
field of corn bending under a sudden gust of wind.
“Get past them,” Milo instructed.
Djoulou obediently carved across on to the hard shoulder,
fizzing past the slowing cars. Ahead they could see the semi-
circular outline of the tunnel exit and, silhouetted against it,
the helicop ter parked across the opening, its rotors still shred-
ding the air.
They arrived just as the convoy came to a halt. Milo opened
fire, catching both lead motorcyclists before they knew what
had hit them. Eva meanwhile took out the driver of the fi rst
police van with a well- aimed burst that had him dancing in
his seat as if he’d been electrocuted.
Milo rolled out of the door and took up a position behind
the hood of a small Renault. The woman inside screamed at
the sight of his gun and, rather pointlessly, wound up her
window.
“Get down,” Milo shouted. It wasn’t that he minded hitting
civilians. He just didn’t want them getting in the way. Eva
and Djoulou threw themselves next to him.
A van pulled up alongside them and disgorged the rest of
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
2 1 7
Milo’s men. The five remaining policemen jumped down and
fired toward them as they too ran for shelter.
“Spread out and move in,” Milo ordered. “Drive them to-
ward the he li cop ter.”
C H A P T E R F O R T Y- E I G H T
22nd April— 5:37 p.m.
The tunnel’s access hatch was no more than five feet away,
but with the sound of spent cartridges pinging off the
tarmac around Tom and tiles shattering overhead, it seemed
like fifty. So much for Archie engineering a temporary stop
at a secluded point where he would be able to slip unobtru-
sively into the trees. Anyway, fi ve yards or fifty, all he knew
was that he needed to get as far away from this van as he
could before Milo cracked it open. Assuming it was Milo, of
course. But then, who else could it be?
With a deep breath, he crawled out from under the van and
scrambled over to the hatch. Yanking it open, he rolled inside
and pulled it shut behind him with relief. He found himself in
a central service corridor that ran between the two main tun-
nels. It was dimly lit by an intermittent series of sodium lights
that stretched into the distance, their orange glow revealing a
damp floor and calcified concrete walls.
Rather than turn right toward the nearest exit, however,
Tom set off toward the door at the far end of the tunnel, the
narrow walls amplifying the sound of his breathing, his feet
splashing through long stretches of standing water. He wanted
to get as far away from Milo and his men as he could.
A few minutes later there was a muffled boom, the ground
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
2 1 9
shuddering underfoot. He guessed that they must have blown
open the back of the van. For a fleeting moment he allowed
himself to picture Milo’s reaction on opening the case and
seeing the little gift he’d left him. It would almost have been
worth the risk of staying behind to see that.
The tunnel ended at a solid metal door fitted with a bolt
encased in glass that was, according to the sign above it, only
to be broken in an emergency. As far as Tom was concerned,
this qualified on several counts. He shattered the glass with
his elbow and then threw back the bolt, the door swinging
open. But before he could step outside, a shot rang out and a
bullet buried itself in the wall just a few feet to his left.
He immediately guessed that someone must have seen
him escape into the tunnel and followed him. Judging from
their rangy stride, they were tall and clearly prepared to shoot
fi rst and forget the questions altogether. Right now, that was
all Tom needed or wanted to know.
He dived outside, slamming the door behind him. To his
left the traffic had already backed up for nearly a mile behind
the carnage at the far end of the tunnel, but to his right it was
still flowing smoothly. Tom vaulted the crash barrier and
carefully picked his moment to sprint across to the far side of
the road, cars and trucks marking his stuttering progress
across the lanes by angrily sounding their horns as they fl ew
past.
Behind him the door crashed open and his pursuer tum-
bled out. The gunman took aim, but thankfully the traffi c
seemed to be moving too fast to give him a clear shot. Curs-
ing, he holstered his weapon and set off toward Tom, negoti-
ating one lane, then a second.
Tom waited until the man was almost halfway across the
road before calling out to him. The gunman looked up, mo-
mentarily confused, perhaps worried that Tom might also be
armed. It was only a slight hesitation but it was enough for a
small car to appear out of the tunnel’s darkness and plow into
him with a futile squeal of its brakes.
Tom turned away so that he didn’t have to watch the man
be catapulted through the air only to have his back broken
when he landed under the wheels of another car.
C H A P T E R F O R T Y- N I N E
22nd April— 5:37 p.m.
Djoulou turned to his expectant men and gave them a
series of punched hand signals. With a nod, they split
into pairs and then fanned out in a wide semi-circle. Using the
civilian cars as shelter, they moved forward in a classic cover-
and- shoot formation, firing in accurate short, controlled bursts.
Several people screamed. Most huddled, terrified, in the foot-
wells of their cars as the bullets pinged and fi zzed around
them, the tunnel echoing with the sharp crack of gunfi re, the
shriek of broken glass and the crash of shredded metal.
The police fired back and for a few minutes it even seemed
that they had gained the initiative. One of Milo’s men was
caught in the neck and sent spinning to the ground, blood
arcing through the air. Another writhed, screaming, his knee-
cap shattered, until a comrade hauled him to safety.
But outnumbered and outgunned, it was only a question of
when, not if, the police would admit defeat. Eventually, with
three of their colleagues dead and surrounded on all sides, the
two survivors threw down their weapons and lay flat on their
stomachs. Milo’s men rose slowly out of the smoking wreck-
age and in seconds the two men had been frisked and cuffed,
face down.
“Status?” Milo barked, holstering his weapon.
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
2 2 1
“One dead, two injured,” Djoulou replied.
“Three injured,” Eva corrected him, her arm limp, blood
dripping from her fi ngers.
“You okay?” Milo eyed her with concern.
“Fine.” She nodded, seeming more annoyed with herself
than anything. “It’s a fl esh wound.”
“Schmidt’s gone after someone he saw escaping down the
service tunnel,” Djoulou informed them.
“Get him back here,” Milo insisted impatiently. “Whoever
it is, we don’t need them.”
Milo stepped over one of the dead policemen toward the
front of the armored car. The driver and his colleague were
still sitting in the front cabin, their faces clenched with fear
behind the bullet-chipped and debris- strewn glass.
“Open the door,” Milo ordered.
They shook their heads—small, nervous, barely notice-
able movements.
“Open it up, or we’ll execute them,” Milo insisted, his tone
ice cold.
Eva stood over one of the surviving policemen and cocked
her gun. The two guards glanced at each other and then
shrugged helplessly.
“Eva,” Milo called.
She emptied two shots into the back of the policeman’s
skull, his face disintegrating onto the road.
“Open the door,” Milo blazed as Eva hauled the remaining
policeman to his feet. She pressed her gun to his temple, the
muzzle branding his skin with a faint fizz of burning fl esh
that made him yell out.
“We can’t,” a voice, distorted by a loudspeaker, rang out.
“We’ve tripped the safe mode. It can only be opened by a
supervisor back at the depot.”
“We’ll see about that,” Milo breathed through clenched
teeth. “Djoulou?”
With a nod, Djoulou stepped around to the rear of the truck
and placed several small charges against the hinges and lock
area. Then he ran back and handed the detonator to Milo,
who had taken cover with Eva and the rest of the men behind
a small truck.
2 2 2 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
Milo pressed the switch. There was a massive fl ash and
then a deafening boom as the armored car lurched into the
air. A burning hot wind washed over them, followed by a
thick curtain of smoke that slowly cleared to leave the cloying
smell of hot metal and melted rubber.
“You think it’s all right?” Eva asked anxiously as she fol-
lowed Milo to the rear of the van. Both rear doors were hang-
ing off their hinges.
“These cabinets are bomb-proof,” Milo reassured her as
he stepped up into the van and forced the first locker open,
eventually finding the metal box he was looking for in the
third one he tried. “Here we go.”
He kicked what remained of the guard who had been in-
side the van out of the way and then laid the box down on the
fl oor.
“They cycle the code between dates that have something
to do with da Vinci or the painting,” he explained with a
smile. “This week, it’s 1519—the year he died.”
He keyed in the numbers and the lock clicked open.
“The police backup is on its way. We need to be out of
here in sixty seconds,” Djoulou warned them.
“Don’t rush me,” Milo retorted. “I’ve waited too long for
this.”
“What’s that?” Eva pointed with a frown.
“That’s . . . that’s not possible,” Milo half whispered, his
eyes widening as he saw the small hole that had been cut in
the van’s floor. He suddenly realized that he was too late.
He threw the lid back. The container was empty. Empty
apart from a small black cat.
“Kirk!” he screamed, grabbing the stuffed toy. In the in-
termittent fl ash of the blue lights on top of the bullet- riddled
police van, it almost seemed to be winking at him.
RUE DE CHARENTON, 12TH ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS
22nd April— 10:55 p.m.
Who wants another drink?”
Archie had a wild, exultant look on his face that
Tom hadn’t seen since he’d pulled a straight on the river card
at a poker game a few years before.
“Fill her up,” Dumas ordered, thrusting his glass under the
whiskey bottle. Holding it there until it overflowed, he then
downed half of it as Archie cheered him on. Tom smiled—he
could see it was going to be a long night.
“Tom, mate?” Archie turned to face him expectantly. “You
in?”
“All the way.” Tom held his chipped mug out, Archie and
Dumas having laid claim to the only two glasses in the
house.
“Cheers.” Archie clinked the bottle against the mug and
then stood up unsteadily on a chair. “Here’s to us,” he slurred,
his gestures increasingly expansive and uncoordinated. “Here’s
to Tom and a job bloody well done. One of his best. Perhaps
the best ever.”
“Here’s to Rafael.” Tom raised his mug, but his heart
wasn’t in it. It wasn’t that he wasn’t pleased with how things
had gone. It was just that this was all for nothing unless they
2 2 4 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
got Eva back. Because he’d made a promise. Because he
hadn’t forgotten that she knew something about his father;
something he was determined to hear. “Here’s to Eva.”
“Look. We’re famous!” Dumas tugged on Archie’s leg and
pointed at the television.
The program had been interrupted by a news fl ash. Even
though the volume was turned down, the headlines across the
bottom of the screen told the grim statistics of the day—
twelve dead, twenty injured, twin explosions at the Louvre, a
gun- battle with police in a tunnel outside Paris, the assailants
still at large.
“Turn it up,” Tom said.
The newsreader handed over to a reporter at the scene.
