Their eyes locked for an instant, and Juba and Shake recognized each other.
“You!” screamed Juba, who was already disappearing around the outer door. He put his back against the concrete wall, reached around and emptied his clip at Kyle.
“Goddamn!” shouted Swanson, off balance and ignoring the bullets as he also started to shoot, although the angles were wrong and his target was out of view.
Bullets whanged against marble and stone, and chips of rock ricocheted in the tight confines of the rear stairwell. Each man knew his opponent’s capabilities, so there would be no more headlong charges, for any rash move would be suicide.
Juba dashed through a small gate and disappeared around a corner.
Swanson heard him leaving but edged down the stairs, wary of deception and places that danger might be hiding. He had to suppress his reflex to go after Juba and bring him down. The mission was still unaccomplished. Those papers on the main floor had to be examined, and he had to be gone himself before the cops came. He holstered his weapon with a curse: a golden opportunity missed.
Kyle hurried back into the main room, where papers were strewn wildly across the furniture, the sign of someone who had left in a hurry. They were bound to contain the secrets, and Kyle was about to call for Sybelle and Freedman to come around with the SUV when his peripheral vision caught the blinking of a tiny red light on the wall. He stopped.
The detonator had only two minutes left and was steadily counting down. Any attempt to disarm it would take longer than that, and Kyle knew that Juba had probably rigged it to a booby-trap alternate igniter to protect the explosive sequence.
He ran. The door at the bottom of the stairs seemed a mile away as he rushed toward it, counting seconds as he went. Minute-thirty. In the distance, he heard the dipping whine of sirens that meant the French cops were coming. He jumped over the body of Saladin, went out of the gate, crossed the street, and crawled back into the manhole. A minute. The stinking sewer system was his friend now, for the blast could not reach him belowground, and it would be a while before the police discovered the open manhole cover. Every step he took got him farther from the blast zone. Forty. Thirty.
At fifteen seconds, he found a small side room where workmen could store their tools and used his Glock to shoot the lock. The door wobbled, and he hauled on the heavy wooden panel with all of his strength, pulling it open far enough so he could burrow inside and kneel, opening his mouth so the blast would not rupture his ears. He hoped the cops had not arrived.
It went off with an earthshaking roar in a repeated series of explosions as Juba’s booby traps blew up in deadly sequence, one after another, and the big house crumbled and shattered. The blast wave knocked down the old walls of the courtyard, clawed at the nearby brick buildings, and ruptured the neat lines of parked vehicles. The shock wave came pounding down the sewer openings and raced along the main trunk line, tearing down everything in its path, pushing aside debris, causing a small tsunami in the sewer water itself, and slamming the door to the room in which Kyle was crouched. He was knocked to his side and bounced hard against some large equipment.
When it was done, he lay there for a minute, dazed and catching his breath in the darkness. Then he struggled to his feet and opened the door to see a thick cloud of dirt and dust hanging in the tunnel like a curtain. Slapping his handkerchief to his mouth, Kyle was about to leave the little room when he noticed the object he had been thrown against was really the steel rungs of a ladder built into the side of the concrete, leading upward. He climbed and found another door, an entrance to the service tunnel.
Then he walked away, and each stride convinced him that he was uninjured. By the time Swanson arrived at the Fort d’Aubervilliers station, he was walking normally. He would catch the Line 7 train for the five-minute trip north to the next stop at La Courneuve/8 Mai 1945. Nearby, Sybelle and the Lizard would be cruising in a car out in front of the sprawling and popular Air Museum tourist attraction.
THEY TOOK HIM AT the station when the train rushed up to the platform in a howl of screeching brakes, pushing a blast of air ahead of it. The crowd moved almost as one toward the doors, jostling for position while trying to avoid being touched.
Two needles of a Taser X26 penetrated Swanson’s jacket and shirt from the rear, and multiple pulses of electricity totaling thousands of volts hit him with volcanic pain and rendered his motor systems useless. Kyle toppled toward the dirty station floor, aware of a man kneeling beside him, on the left, calling out in English, “Hey, this guy’s had a heart attack!”
As the subway doors closed and the train moved out, two ambulance attendants trotted down the stairs. Kyle was placed on their rolling stretcher, where he was again hit with the Taser to keep him immobile while one of the attendants jammed a needle in his arm.
Commuters parted to let the stretcher bearers exit, carrying some man lashed to the gurney to the ambulance waiting up on the street.
17
JUBA WAS CERTAIN THAT no one was following him because the explosion would have turned all eyes toward the disaster. He hoped Kyle Swanson was buried in that smoking debris. Swanson was supposed to be dead, but there had been no mistaking that angular face that had absolutely no fear on it when they were trading shots in the stairwell. Maybe Shake really was dead now, a thought that made Juba smile.
Juba used his time well before the flight to America. An executive hotel near the airport rented rooms by the hour for businessmen in transit, and Juba used a Dutch passport to get a room and clean up. Downstairs, he got a close shave, then had a stylist trim his hair to a neatness that would be welcome in a company boardroom. He had her put in a little lighter color, joking that he wanted to look younger because of the competition for a new vice presidential opening at his finance firm. A clothing store furnished new slacks, shirts, underwear, socks, and a blue sport coat with gold buttons. What he did not wear fit snugly into his large briefcase. Unfortunately, he would not be able to take his weapon, but there were plenty of guns waiting on the other end of the flight. As a final move, he bought a disposable cell phone with plenty of prepaid minutes.
Carrying only the briefcase and the computer bag, he passed through security without a problem and took his seat in the first-class compartment of the British Airways flight to Washington. A hostess brought a glass of chilled water for him while the rest of the plane loaded, and once the plane was moving, gathering speed, and lifting as the wheels left the tarmac, Juba let himself relax. There was no danger now, so he stretched his seat back and ordered himself to catch some sleep. The quiet, steady hum of the engines helped him relax. He dreamed of Scotland.
A special ops team of American Marines had been pitted in a war exercise against a similar team of Royal Marines, and Color Sergeant Osmand was in his element. He had racked up a couple of mock “kills” and then decided to take the game to a higher level.
For a full day he and a spotter tracked the American Blue Team, then slithered through their sentries and lookouts and set up an invisible hide on a low ridge that overlooked the enemy headquarters and a road the Americans would have to use the following morning. He hoped a general would turn up in his sights. The two of them spent several hours erasing all traces of their passage and improving their hide, then shared a tin of cold meat and drank some water as the night closed around them like a starlit glove.
It was raining, but that meant nothing on a mission in Scotland, where it was always either raining or about to rain. Juba was on watch during the early morning hours while his spotter caught a nap, and it was not only wet but cold, too, and absolutely silent. A fire to warm his hands, of course, was out of the question.
Instead, he remained still, the thistles and weeds sprouting from the slits of his ghillie suit turning him into just another bush on the rugged Scottish landscape. Dawn would come in two hours, and the American Marines would begin moving around. Color Sergeant Osmand intended to slaughter as many as he could and possibly even capture their headquarters, which would give him bragging rights forever over the vaunted United States Marine Corps.
