alarmed as four more men filed into the room through a narrow arched doorway.
Smith watched carefully. These newcomers were hard-faced men dressed in dark clothing, with bulging satchels slung over their shoulders. Two carried drawn pistols. A third held a shotgun cradled in his arms. The fourth man, much taller than the others and evidently the leader, snapped an order to his men. They split up immediately — each moving purposefully toward a different part of the room. The big auburn-haired giant glanced briefly toward the row of windows and then turned away. With a sinister fluid grace he drew a pistol out of his shoulder holster.
Jon felt his eyes widen in stunned disbelief. A shiver of superstitious dread ran down his spine. He had seen that same face and those same startling green eyes before — just six days ago. They belonged to the terrorist leader who had nearly killed him in personal combat outside the Teller Institute. This was impossible, he thought desperately. Absolutely impossible. How could a man wholly consumed by nanophages rise from the grave?
Chapter Forty-Two
Nones turned away from the windows toward Willem Linden. Slowly, he brought his pistol on-target. He flipped the safety off with one huge thumb.
The white-haired Dutchman stared at the weapon aimed straight at his forehead. He turned pale. “What are you doing?” he stammered.
“This is your severance package. Your services are no longer required,” Nones told him drily. “But Lazarus thanks you for your efforts on his behalf. Farewell, Herr Linden.”
The third of the Horatii waited just long enough to watch the horrified understanding enter the other man's eyes. Then Nones pulled the trigger twice — firing two rounds into Linden's head at point-blank range. Blood, shards of bone, and bits of brain flew out the back of the Dutchman's shattered skull and spattered against the wall. The dead man fell away and crumpled to the floor in a heap.
In that same moment, a shotgun blast echoed from the darkened corner of the room — followed immediately by a second and then a third blast. Nones glanced in that direction. One of his three men had just finished slaughtering the four surveillance team members who had been sleeping. Trapped in their cots, they were easy prey. Fired at a range of less than ten feet, three twelve-gauge rounds filled with buckshot tore them into pitiful shreds of torn flesh and broken bone.
The big man heard a sudden choked-off cry of fear off to his left. He swiveled that way fast, seeing the youngest member of Linden's team, the Portuguese signals expert named Vitor Abrantes, staggering to his feet. Abrantes yanked frantically at his headset, but he was still tethered to the satellite transmitter by a twisted length of audio cable.
Nones fired twice more while moving. The first 9mm round hit the young man high up in the chest. The second tore into his left shoulder and spun him around in a complete circle. White-faced with shock, Abrantes toppled backward against the transmitter. Moaning, he slid to the floor and sat clutching his smashed shoulder.
Frowning at his own sloppiness, Nones took a step closer to the wounded man, raising his pistol again. This time he would aim with more care and precision. He sighted along the barrel. His finger tightened on the trigger, starting to squeeze it…
But then the window beside him exploded inward — flying apart in a tinkling cloud of sharp-edged glass shards.
Still hanging in his rappelling harness just outside the room, Jon Smith saw the wave of cold-blooded butchery begin inside. These bastards were killing their own people, he realized abruptly — clearing away loose ends, evidence, and potential witnesses. Witnesses and evidence he urgently needed. Gripped by a wave of white- hot fury, he reacted instantly, tugging his SIG-Sauer pistol out of the holster on his hip. He aimed at the glass.
Three rapid shots fired from top to bottom blew open the window, spraying broken glass and bullets through an arc inside the room. Before the last shards stopped falling, he shoved the pistol back into its holster and yanked one of his two flash/bang grenades out of a leg pouch strapped to his left thigh. His gloved right thumb pulled the ring. The grenade's safety spoon flipped up.
Smith lobbed the black cylinder in through the shattered window and shoved off hard from the wall with his boots, moving directly away from the opening. He reached the end of his pendulum arc, pushed away again even harder, and began swinging back toward the window, flying even faster now.
And then the grenade went off — detonating in a rapid-fire burst of blinding flashes and earsplitting explosions intended to stun and disorient anyone caught within its burst radius. A dense cloud of smoke rolled outward, swirling madly in air roiled by the continuing staccato series of bangs.
Jon came soaring through the window feetfirst. He landed heavily on the floor, folded up, and then rolled prone. Small pieces of glass crunched beneath him. He pulled his SIG-Sauer out again, already searching for targets through the haze and smoke.
Smith looked first for the big green-eyed man. There were smeared streaks of blood on the hardwood floor where he had been standing when the window exploded in on him, but nothing else. The auburn-haired giant must have dived for cover when the flash/bang grenade went off. The blood trail he had left behind disappeared out through the arched doorway.
Stumbling footsteps sounded nearby, on the other side of a heavy table.
Smith reared up and saw one of the other gunmen come reeling out of the rapidly thinning smoke cloud. Though dazed by the grenade's nerve-shattering burst of noise and dazzling light, the gunman still held his pistol in a two-handed shooting grip. Blinking rapidly to clear his eyes, he caught sight of Jon's head poking above the table and swung around, trying to draw a bead on him.
Smith shot him twice, hitting him once in the heart and once in the neck.
The gunman folded over and fell forward, plainly dead before he hit the floor.
Jon dropped back behind the table and rolled frantically the other way, rapidly hitting the release on his rappelling harness to detach the climbing rope still trailing in through the window. While he was still hooked to it, the rope would hamper his movements. It would also act as a giant arrow pointing straight at him wherever he went. At last, he managed to tug the length of rope clear and crawled away across the scarred floor, staying low.
One down. Counting the big man, that left three to go, he thought grimly. Where exactly had the other enemy gunmen been when his grenade came sailing through the window? More important, where were they now?
He wriggled around the corner of a table and saw the white-haired man sprawled in front of him. Smith grimaced at the sight of the ugly mess seeping out from under the dead man's shattered skull. That bullet-riddled brain had held information they needed.
He crawled past the corpse, heading toward the darker corner of the room he had seen being used as makeshift sleeping quarters.
From somewhere behind him, a pistol barked three times in rapid succession. One round ripped low over his head. Another tore jagged splinters off the solid oak table leg next to his face. The third 9mm round slammed into his back and then tumbled away, deflected by his Kevlar body armor. It was like being kicked by a mule between the shoulder blades.
Gasping through a searing wave of white-hot pain, trying to suck air into lungs that felt as though they had been hammered flat, Smith threw himself onto his side. Two more shots tore into the floor, right where he had been lying a second before — gouging out huge chunks of wood before they ricocheted away. He curled around, frantically seeking a glimpse of the gunman firing at him.
There!
A shape wavered in his pain-filled vision. One of the gunmen knelt behind a table just about twenty feet away, coolly taking aim. Jon shot back wildly with the SIG-Sauer, squeezing the trigger as rapidly as he could. The pistol bucked upward in his hands. Rounds crashed through the table and hammered into the computer equipment piled on top of it. A hail of wood splinters, sparks, and broken pieces of plastic and metal went flying away through
