The Lucifer Code (26 page)

‘What about the Joy Scroll?’

Olympia frowned. ‘That’s a bit more problematic, but I promise it will depend on your abilities more than our decision.’

Before Lourds could ask her how that was problematic, the frosted-glass door pane shattered and fell into the room. The redhead from the airport stood on the other side of the door with a pistol her hand.

CHAPTER

16

Istanbul University

Beyazit Square

Istanbul, Turkey

19 March 2010

‘G
et up.’ The redhead waved her pistol at Lourds.

Calmly, Lourds stood and blocked Olympia from Cleena’s field of fire. The move wasn’t out of bravery as much as it was feeling responsible for endangering Olympia.
Obviously she’s still intent on collecting her bounty
, Lourds thought sourly
.

As clearly and calmly as he could, hoping his voice didn’t crack and she wouldn’t shoot him, he said, ‘Olympia, phone the police. Tell them what’s going on.’

‘Thomas, who is this woman?’ Olympia demanded.

Lourds couldn’t believe it. A woman had shown up in the office with a
weapon
, and Olympia wanted to know who she was in a tone that suggested jealousy.

‘This is the woman who kidnapped me from the airport. Call the police.’

Cleena glanced down the hallway. ‘We don’t have time for the police. They’re coming.’

‘Who?’ Lourds asked automatically. ‘The police?’

‘Not the police. If I knew who these people were, I’d have given you names. They’re big, scary guys. And they have guns.’

‘Everybody you know seems to have guns,’ Lourds said.

‘Don’t blame
me
. They’re after
you
. I could have ducked out and not risked my neck. And you want to blame me for this?’

‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

An exasperated look filled Cleena’s face. ‘You’re kidding, right? You’re here to speak at the university. It’s been in all the papers. Especially after the scene at the airport. All Istanbul, those who care, know you’re here.’

Without warning, she cursed and ducked into the room just as bullets shattered the doorframe. Lourds stepped back and nearly fell on top of the desk. Olympia’s frightened scream echoed in his ears and galvanized him into action. He reached down for his backpack and slung it on. Cleena ducked back round the door and fired several quick shots, then came inside and took cover.

She glared at Lourds. ‘At gunpoint, do you always have to ask so many questions?’

Lourds glared back. ‘I’m not up on all the protocol for getting abducted.’

‘I’m not abducting you. I’m protecting you.’

‘By bringing these men here?’ Olympia still had the phone pressed against her ear.

‘I didn’t bring those men here.’ Cleena sounded really put out.

‘I’d have seen someone following us,’ Olympia insisted.

‘You haven’t seen me for the last few days,’ the woman snapped. ‘You’ve been busy tearing up the sheets at the hotel. I’ve been expecting footage on YouTube. Now let’s get moving. They want the professor. I don’t think they care if either one of us are alive.’

‘I’m on the line to the police.’ Olympia spoke rapidly in Turkish.

Another fusillade of bullets slammed into the open door and tore gouges in the wood.

‘The police won’t get here fast enough.’ Cleena changed magazines in her pistol and released the slide. ‘By the time they get here, you’ll either be in the custody of those men—or you’ll be dead. It’s a cellphone. Take it with you. You can talk to the police on the way. Just try to keep up and dodge the bullets.’

She grabbed Lourds by the elbow, but he resisted. He trusted her not to shoot him. She
had
, in a way, saved his life down in the catacombs. And she hadn’t shot him. Yet. She cursed again and tried to push him into motion.

‘Cleena MacKenna,’ a man’s voice boomed.

Lourds immediately recognized the accent as American, probably by way of Philadelphia. He looked at Cleena as she returned to the door.

‘Cleena? That’s your name?’ Lourds asked.

‘So not the time for introductions,’ she growled.

‘Cleena MacKenna,’ the man called again, ‘you don’t have to die today. You can just walk away from this. We’re just here for the professor. Back away and you can go.’

Cleena looked at Lourds. ‘Do you believe him?’

Lourds started to answer, but wasn’t sure what he was going to say.

‘I don’t believe him,’ Cleena went on. She looked around. ‘There’s a back door to this room?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lourds replied.

Cleena shot a scathing glance at Olympia. ‘You could have mentioned there’s a back door to this office.’

Olympia crossed her arms and looked defiant. ‘The police are on their way. I have them on speaker phone.’

‘I don’t think the speaker-phone function is going to stop those guys.’

Olympia raised her voice and said for the benefit of the men outside, ‘I have called the police. They are on their way.’

Cleena ignored her and raced to the back of the room. ‘Where’s the door?’ she asked. A second later, she swivelled her head to the left and looked at the bookshelf covering one of the walls. ‘Shelving and books cover that wall.’

Lourds realized she was talking to someone else, not him. Then he saw the glint of metal in her ear.

‘Okay, okay. I’ll look.’ Cleena raked a shelf clear of books. The heavy volumes toppled to the floor, along with a snow globe containing a statue of the Greek god, Poseidon.

‘Hey!’ Olympia protested. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

Abruptly, out in the hallway the fire alarm rang, strident and harsh. Lourds guessed that someone, a student or a professor, had set it off. That had been good. At least all the students would get clear of the situation.

‘Ma’am,’ a man’s voice called from the phone in Turkish, ‘is something wrong? Is everything all right?’

Undeterred, Cleena moved on to the second shelf and began clearing those as well. In the shadowy recesses, the door was hard to see, but Lourds spotted the straight lines. Impulsively, he went to help the woman, wading over and through the books.

‘Thomas?’ Olympia called.

‘Ma’am?’ the Istanbul policeman enquired loudly. ‘Please stay on the line.’

‘There’s a door back here.’ Lourds pulled at the higher shelving.

‘Olympia, you don’t think those men are really here after me, do you? I don’t make enemies like this. They have to be after the book I got down in the catacombs. And if they find out you know something about it, they’re not going to stop at just questioning me.’

Cleena swung round with a shelf and nearly caught Lourds in the face with it. She locked eyes with Olympia. ‘Get over here!’

‘Don’t tell me—’

Out in the hallway, something metallic struck the floor and skidded to a stop near the door. Lourds took in the spherical shape, then redoubled his efforts to get to the door.

‘They’ve got a grenade!’

‘It opens inwards!’ Cleena yelled.

Understanding, Lourds reached for the doorknob but found it lacking. Someone had taken it off. As he turned to Cleena, she shoved him aside with her free hand and fired the pistol three times at the locking mechanism. The bullets cored through the cheap metal and splintered the wood. Before the echoes of the shots died away, Olympia had joined them and the grenade blew up.

The tremendous noise deafened Lourds and vibrated through his body. He expected shrapnel to rip through him, but it didn’t. Bright lights and gas followed the explosion.
Flash-bang
, he realized. He’d read about those in the novels he consumed during long plane flights and dead time at sites. Those grenades were used to confuse and disorient people.

Cleena grabbed his arm and shoved him towards the door, which still hadn’t opened. Lourds saw her mouth moving but heard nothing. Knowing what she wanted, he set his shoulder to the door and threw his weight against it. The door shivered and sprang open, revealing that it had been covered over by Sheetrock on the other side. Evidently some alterations had been done to increase office space.

The other room was thankfully empty. Lourds didn’t want anyone else in danger or joining their little group. His attempt to open the door ripped it from its hinges and it smashed into someone’s painstaking model reproduction of the Ottoman Siege of Constantinople in 1453. Ships and warriors went flying, followed by the blue waters of the Golden Horn and the fabricated brown coastline.

Olympia followed, almost running over Lourds in her haste. She held the cellphone to her ear, but if anyone was on the other end she apparently couldn’t hear any better than Lourds.

He looked round the room, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do next. They were still on the third floor, too high to risk jumping and breaking a leg.

Olympia grabbed his arm and, when he turned to face her, spoke to him anxiously. He read her lips, missing it the first time because she was speaking her native tongue, not English.

‘Where do we go?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied enunciating carefully. ‘Up? Down?’

He used his hands in case she couldn’t read his lips. His mouth, eyes and nose all stung from the gas contained in the flash-bang. Tears blurred his vision as he swept his gaze round the room. Two sharp cracks pierced his deafness and he recognized the sounds as gunshots. Anxiously, he peered back into the opening, wondering if Cleena had made it out of Olympia’s office alive.

She barrelled through and hit him full on. Lourds wrapped his arms round her and they fell to the floor on his back. Cleena glared at him as if he were a bumbling moron, which—Lourds reflected irritably—was unfair. He’d been concerned about her. She forced herself up and partially kneed him in the crotch while doing so. Lourds was certain he’d cried out and was glad no one had been able to hear him. Then his thoughts focused on survival again.

Smoke rolled into the room from the grenade. It got harder to breathe. He didn’t know how they were going to get out of the office. They were still in a death trap.

Eckart stood his ground in the hallway with his pistol up. His left hand was wrapped tightly round his right so the semi-automatic pistol’s recoil would respond perfectly and not jam. He peered through the smoke, expecting Lourds and the two women to emerge at any second. The flash-bang held pepper gas as well as the pyrotechnics.

No one came out.

‘Humboldt,’ Eckart called over the com. Three of his men had set up behind him. Three others held the stairs at the other end of the hall. There was no way their target could escape. ‘Set up outside that office.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The man ran forward without hesitation. He wore a mask against the effects of the pepper gas. He waited a moment, then peered round the door.

Two shots rang out in quick succession. Humboldt jerked, then stumbled back. He turned round and clutched at his face, but blood already poured from one of the shattered lenses of his mask.

Eckart cursed. For a home-grown terrorist, the woman was good.

Humboldt staggered twice more, then turned boneless and dropped to the ground. His head rebounded from the floor and Eckart knew the man was dead.

‘Are you sure there’s no other way out of the office?’ Eckart demanded.

‘No, sir,’ Mayfield replied over the com. ‘Two elevators. The stairs at each end of the building. That covers everything.’

Eckart tried to put himself inside the office and work out what he would do if he was trapped in there.
You wouldn’t have been trapped in there
, he told himself.

‘What about the windows?’

‘The grenade blew the glass out of the one in the office, sir, but the people inside haven’t left.’

‘Can you see inside?’

‘No, sir. The smoke’s too thick.’

‘Keep watch.’ Eckart kept his eyes on the door. ‘How much time has elapsed since the first shots?’

‘Two minutes thirty-seven seconds, sir. We’re coming up on the threshold for this mission.’

Eckart knew they couldn’t stay much longer. The local police would arrive shortly, and the college security armed-response teams had to be en route as well. If they didn’t leave soon, things were going to get messier. He willed himself to be patient. Whatever threat Lourds presented against the United States was about to end. Eckart fully intended to take the professor into custody.

Or kill him.

‘Sevki?’ Cleena cupped a hand over her ear and struggled to hear him at the other end of the earwig connection. ‘I can’t hear. A grenade deafened me.’

‘… other wall—elevator shaft—emergency.’ Sevki sounded as though he was breaking up as he shouted, and she could still barely hear him. But she understood what he was talking about. They’d managed something like this before.

Approaching the wall on the other side of the office, Cleena bent down and took her knife out of her boot. When she reached the wall, she fisted the hilt and drove the broad blade into the Sheetrock. The material gave way easily. Two strokes made an X. She stepped back and drove her boot through it. Big pieces of the material dropped to the floor but others vanished in the space beyond. In seconds, she’d stripped the Sheetrock away to reveal the 2 x 4 studs beneath. She used the knife again to score the wall on the other side. When she kicked this time, her foot went through it.

‘… you see—it there?’ Sevki asked. ‘Cleena—you—now?’

Cleena shoved Sheetrock out of the way and peered into the empty space. Darkness filled the area on the other side of the broken wall, but the light that filtered in around her exposed a greasy network of cables.

‘I’ve found the elevator shaft,’ she said.

She checked the wall studs again and hoped Lourds could squeeze through. If anything, it would be the professor’s big head that got him stuck. She almost smiled at that, but the thought of the men waiting out in the hallway with guns took the fun out of that possibility. The elevator sat at the first floor. When the fire alarm had been set off, the cages had all automatically gone to the ground floor.