The Lucifer Code (27 page)

She pulled her head back out and addressed Lourds and Olympia. ‘Elevator shaft. We can use it to get downstairs.’ This time she could hear herself a little.

Lourds nodded, then picked up a leg from the broken table that had held the miniature war pieces. He swung it experimentally, then went to work on the Sheetrock still barring the door.

Cleena had to admit that once the professor decided on a course of action, not much deterred him. When he was satisfied, he reached into his backpack and took out a mini-flashlight. The fact that he seemed to be prepared for everything except being kidnapped irked Cleena. But it was probably more because she hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight herself.

‘The elevator cage is downstairs,’ he said. ‘We can’t get through.’

‘We go to the second floor,’ Cleena said. ‘Then to the stairs.’

‘They’ve got to have men outside,’ Lourds told her.

Cleena nodded. ‘They do. We’ll have to get round them.’

‘No,’ Olympia said. ‘We go downstairs. To the basement. There are tunnels that connect this building to other buildings on the campus.’

‘Sevki?’ Cleena asked.

‘It’s true,’ Sevki said. He sounded tinny and far away. ‘There’s an infrastructure throughout the college. The maintenance people use the tunnels to move large pieces of equipment and check on the utilities.’

‘All right.’ Cleena gestured to Olympia. ‘You know the way.’

Olympia peered through the hole, then back at Cleena. ‘You expect me to jump?’

‘I’ll go first,’ Lourds volunteered. He took off his backpack and handed it to Olympia. ‘That way I can help you down.’ He shone the flashlight round, then put it in his mouth and eased down into the shaft. Tension wound Cleena almost to the breaking point. Images of the scar-faced man and others like him kept bouncing through her mind. The effects of the pepper gas had made her eyes and nose run and she knew she couldn’t rely on her damaged hearing to hear anyone approaching.

When he was below, thankfully without breaking his neck, Lourds talked Olympia into descending, guiding her feet with his hands. Cleena followed at her heels in case they decided to bolt and attempt to get away from her.

‘Sir, we’re about to enter the red zone on our time line,’ Mayfield stated calmly.

‘I know. Everyone outside be prepared to exfiltrate instantly. There should be confusion enough on the campus to cover some of our retreat.’ Eckart didn’t like giving those orders. It was too near admitting failure, and he wasn’t prepared to do that yet. ‘Let me know when the police are on site.’

‘Affirmative.’

Too much time had elapsed for Lourds and the women to emerge from the office. If they hadn’t come out by now, they’d either been overcome by the gas—or they’d found another way out.

He took a fresh grip on his pistol and stepped forward in a combat crouch. He wore Kevlar under his shirt, but his head was unprotected. He reached the door, took a breath to steady himself, then ripped away his gas mask to clear his vision. The gas stung his eyes, but he’d been exposed to it on close-quarter battlefields numerous times. Whipping around the doorframe, he dropped to his knees with the pistol gripped in both hands before him.

No one was inside the room. It took him a moment to spot the hole in the wall through all the lingering gas. He slipped his gas mask up from his neck and back over his face.

‘They’re not inside,’ Eckart growled. He coughed as vestiges of the gas raked through his lungs.

‘There’s no other way out.’

‘They found one. It looks like a door.’

‘It
was
a door. Evidently it had been sealed off some time in the past.’

‘Where does it lead?’

‘To the adjoining office. If you’ve got that office door covered, then you’re covering the office next door as well.’

Eckart looked down the hall and saw the office was next to the elevator.

‘They can’t get out of there,’ Mayfield said.

‘They couldn’t get out of the last room they were in.’ Eckart swung back to the doorway and fired a half-dozen rounds into the hole in the wall.

There was no response.

A bad feeling ripped through Eckart’s stomach as he gazed back at the elevator next to the other office. The woman was a street rat. She was clever and dangerous.

‘Open the elevator doors,’ Eckart ordered. ‘Check the shaft.’ As his men ran to do that, he ducked into the office and crossed over to the hole in the wall. The door lay inside the room, torn from its hinges. He cursed as he scanned the room over his pistol sights and saw no one.

Then he spotted the hole in the opposite wall.

‘They’re in the elevator shaft. Check the cameras on the second floor.’

Mayfield took a moment to reply. ‘Negative. They haven’t exited either set of elevator doors.’

‘All right.’ Eckart stepped across ships and soldiers and paused at the second hole. ‘They’re still inside the shaft. Kill the two women but I want our target alive.’

He took a mini-Maglite from his trouser pocket, flicked it on, then crossed his wrists so the flashlight beam and the pistol pointed in the same direction. He leaned into the hole and spotted movement below.

‘Let’s go.’ Olympia spoke in Turkish and yanked at Lourds’ arm.

Lourds looked up at the hole. The air inside the shaft seemed to burn his lungs and nasal membranes even more. The logical side of his brain that wasn’t hunkered down in fear realized that the gas was heavy enough to hug the ground and now it was settling into the elevator shaft.

‘Come on, Thomas. Let’s go before she gets down here.’ Olympia pulled at the elevator doors in front of her. Standing on the elevator cage, the second floor exit was almost at her chin. ‘Help me.’

‘We’re not leaving her,’ Lourds said as he joined Olympia.

‘What?’

‘We’re not leaving her.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

Lourds hooked his fingers into the seam between the door and yanked. The doors gapped open a few inches, then slid back into place.

‘We’re not leaving her,’ Lourds repeated. ‘She’s part of this. We need to know what she knows.’

‘As if she’s going to tell you.’

‘You don’t know where the Joy Scroll is, do you?’

Olympia hesitated. ‘No.’

‘I thought so. Otherwise you wouldn’t have needed the book.’

‘We have a copy of the book. We couldn’t translate it. That was why—that
is
why we need you.’

That stopped Lourds in his tracks. ‘Qayin didn’t have the only copy?’

‘No.’

‘How many copies are there?’

‘We don’t know. There can’t have been many.’

Lourds tried the door again. ‘I would hope not. And we’re not going to leave her. She has a gun.’

‘Do you think she’s going to shoot us?’

‘No, but she’s been doing fantastically well shooting the people chasing us.’

Cleena dropped into the elevator shaft and looked at them.

‘Too late,’ Olympia grumbled in Turkish.

‘Did I miss the lovers’ quarrel?’ Cleena asked.

Lourds ignored her and bent his attention and strength to prising the doors open. This time when the doors opened he kept pushing till he reached the breakover point. The doors slid back into the wall on either side. He turned and hooked his hands together in front of him.

‘Okay, Olympia, up you go.’

Olympia placed his backpack on the elevator cage beside him, then stepped into Lourds’ hands and he boosted her up over the second-floor edge. He handed his backpack to her and turned to face Cleena, who was shorter than Olympia.

‘I don’t think your girlfriend much cares for me,’ Cleena said.

‘She’s not my girlfriend.’ Lourds didn’t know why he felt the need to clarify that, especially in the heat of a pitched gunbattle. He thought it was more a reflex than anything. ‘We’re just good friends.’

‘
Very
good friends.’ Cleena ignored his clasped hands and lithely jumped to the second floor under her own power, then rolled to her feet.

Lourds leaped up after her. As he managed the final frantic scramble, darkness filled the elevator shaft and he knew someone had stepped into the hole in the wall on the third floor. He renewed his efforts to get clear. Olympia grabbed his arms and yanked. Cleena dropped to one knee and fired up into the shaft.

A brief flurry of bullets ricocheted off the elevator cage then stopped.

‘Let’s go.’ Cleena swapped magazines in her pistol and stood. ‘They know where we are now. We’re going to have company.’ She looked at Olympia. ‘Maybe you could lead the way.’

Shooting her a scathing glance, Olympia quickly took the lead and headed toward the stairs just ahead of them. Lourds grabbed his backpack and slid it over one shoulder.

‘You’d be faster if you left that,’ Cleena advised him.

‘That’s not going to happen,’ Lourds assured her.

He fell into a jog on Olympia’s heels. Gunfire blasted in the elevator shaft again.

Eckart touched the burning area on his neck. His fingertips came away wet with crimson. He cursed the woman and hoped he got the chance to kill her up close and personal. Home-grown terrorists were always the worst, and she was beginning to seriously tick him off.

Echoes of full-auto fire filled the room and boomed out of the elevator shaft.

‘Do you have the elevator shaft?’ he asked.

‘Affirmative, sir, but they’re gone.’

‘Gone?’ During the brief encounter, Eckart’s eyes hadn’t adjusted well enough to pierce the fog of white gas in the elevator chamber. He peered again, and this time he spotted the open doors on the second-floor landing. He cursed as his mind raced.

‘Do you have them on the cameras?’ he demanded.

Mayfield answered at once. ‘Yes, sir. Second floor. Headed for the stairs.’

‘Do we have anyone there?’ Eckhart jumped down into the elevator shaft. His boots thudded against the cage but he kept his feet.

Two of his men dropped in after him. Together, they headed into the hallway.

‘Negative,’ Mayfield said. ‘They’d closed on the office with you.’

The second floor was empty. The door at the end of the hall was shut. Eckart increased his pace.

Lourds followed Olympia and was in turn followed by Cleena. The sound of the shots fired above echoed around them. He wanted to talk, a thousand questions zipped through his mind, but his breath was ragged from the pepper gas and from exertion. His feet pounded against the concrete steps. They passed the first-floor landing and headed down to the basement. Footsteps struck the steps behind them.

‘Hurry,’ Cleena urged; Lourds didn’t know how she found the breath to speak.

Olympia never broke stride as she reached the basement and shoved through the door and turned right immediately. Security lights burned weakly in the darkness. Olympia fumbled in her pocket, then produced a key ring. She halted at a large steel security door and tried keys.

‘Don’t you know which key it is?’ Cleena stood nearby with the pistol clenched in her hands as she faced the door they’d just run through.

Olympia ignored her and concentrated on the keys. Lourds knew the history department would have needed to move exhibits or research materials through the tunnels beneath the university because it would have been much simpler than doing it in the open and possible even on inclement days.

The locking mechanism clicked and Olympia pulled the door open. She reached for a light switch and turned it on. A row of low-wattage bulbs flared to yellow incandescence down the length of the tunnel.

‘Let’s go.’ Cleena ushered them inside as the basement door flew open. She held her fire and Lourds knew she didn’t want to mark their positions. His confidence in her abilities grew. She was a remarkable young woman.

Lourds entered the tunnel after Olympia.

‘Which way does the tunnel go?’ Cleena asked as she closed the door behind them. She took a moment to lock it.

‘A short distance ahead,’ Olympia said, ‘it splits in three directions. All of them lead to different buildings.’

‘That’s a strong door,’ Cleena said. ‘It should slow them.’

Olympia nodded. ‘We’ll reach the intersection before they can open it.’

‘Unless they brought a rocket launcher,’ Cleena said.

That, Lourds thought sourly, was entirely possible given past history.

Eckart glared at the security door in front of them. Two of his men worked on the locking mechanism, but it was going slowly.

‘Where did they go?’ he asked.

‘Service tunnel infrastructure beneath the university,’ Mayfield answered. ‘I found a map. The tunnel they’re in branches off into three hallways a short distance from that point.’

‘Are there cameras in the tunnels?’

‘No. I’m blind there.’

A one-in-three chance didn’t sound appealing to Eckart. Not with the local police and the university security people closing in.

‘All right,’ Eckart growled. ‘Pack it up and let’s hit the wind.’ Without a word, his men pulled their gear together and fell in behind him. ‘We need a route out of here.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And we’ve left dead behind.’ That was something Eckart wouldn’t have done when he’d been back in uniform. Now there was no helping it.

‘I’ll take care of it, sir.’

Eckart called off the names of the three men Cleena had killed. Within minutes, Mayfield would have plugged fake IDs into Interpol’s intelligence centre. He’d also activate the false identification they had at the Pentagon. Eckart and his team operated off the books, but Vice-President Webster made certain they had access to all the resources they needed.

Professor Lourds may have been lucky in this first encounter, but Eckart intended to write a much different ending the next time.

CHAPTER

17

Galata Tower

North of the Golden Horn

Istanbul, Turkey

19 March 2010

‘Y
ou’d better be worth all this trouble.’

Lourds looked up from his notebook at Cleena. ‘As far as I’m concerned, you started all this.’

They were sitting in the café near the top of the Galata Tower. Several European and Asian tourists occupied the tables near the windows overlooking the Golden Horn and other historic parts of the city. Lourds couldn’t help but think about the microcosm of East and West meeting inside the café being a reflection of what went on in the city on the other side of the three-foot thick walls. And those meetings had been going on for generations. Some things never changed. Well, didn’t change much, actually. The Galata Tower had also been known as the Christea Turris by the Genoese, which translated into the Tower of Christ. The Byzantines had named it Megalos Pyrgos, the Great Tower, because the cone-shaped stone capping had been—and remained—one of the most recognizable landmarks in the city.