he'd have to come through Jack. Let him try!
Jack refused to let Vollard take the initiative and make the next move. He made it first, starting along the catwalk toward the tower where Vollard lurked. Winds buffeted him, slamming into him with body-blow force.
Shots sounded, Vollard firing at Jack.
The storm was impartial, taking no sides. The same winds that sought to tear Jack loose from the catwalk also slammed Vollard, knocking off his aim, making it impossible for him to draw an accurate bead on Jack.
His bullets went wild. The closest he came was a round that spanged the steel safety railing of the catwalk; metal sang and shivered, generating an impact that Jack could feel up to the elbow of the arm whose hand clutched that rail. It didn't do his sore hand any good, either.
He kept on coming, closing in, holding his fire, waiting for a clean firing line for a killing shot.
Perhaps Vollard had emptied his clip; he stopped shooting and dodged around the platform that skirted the tower, disappearing around the curve. The platform was an apron that made a 360-degree ring around the tower; Vollard had vanished on the far side, the one facing riverward.
Jack stepped onto the platform, crouched almost double, gun arm stuck out in front of him, free hand clutching the rail. No tanks or other obstructions stood between him and the terrific force of northbound winds.
He decided on a quick change-up, abandoning the safety rail at the outer edge of the platform and darting inward, flattening himself against the curving metal wall of the tower. Hugging it to keep from being windblown across the platform.
He reversed position, so that not his front but his back was now flattened against the tower. Sidestepping, he edged around the tower toward the windward side.
As he rounded the curve that put him in the direct path of the storm, the wind became an ally, pushing him back against the tower and helping to hold him in place. He inched farther along, looking up.
On the windward side, a vertical metal-rung ladder was bolted to the side of the tower, rising straight up for sixty or seventy feet before accessing an upper platform level.
Vollard clung midway up, his free arm hooked through a rung to hold him in place, gun hand pointed downward at the platform below. He'd expected his pursuer to come along the outer rim of the platform, where the safety rail provided some protection against being blown away. Instead, Jack had come along the inner rim, back flattened to the curving tower wall.
A flash of motion glimpsed in the corner of his eye alerted Vollard that the showdown had come.
He and Jack opened fire, Jack's first shot coming perhaps a split-second before Vollard's, both squeezing off a rapid-fire burst of rounds.
Vollard, caught unaware by his foe's unexpected change of position, missed his target, his rounds sailing clear of Jack and hammering the floor of the platform beyond him.
Jack fired straight up along the ladder, pumping slugs into Vollard hanging fifty feet above him. Emptying his clip into the other.
Vollard's hold broke; he pitched forward, falling free.
A streaming, screaming blast of wind caught him in midair, swiping him to the side. The wind screamed. Vollard was silent, no sound escaping him as he took the big dive.
His trajectory caused him to hit the catwalk rail, thudding against it with an impact that Jack felt through the soles of his shoes right up to his knees.
Vollard bounced off, cartwheeling into space and dropping another twenty-five feet before slamming into the ground below. With a thud that was clearly audible to Jack, even above the winds.
Jack reloaded before starting down. It was a matter of routine. Vollard was done. The steel safety rail he'd struck on the way down was bowed and crumpled.
Jack climbed down to solid ground, fighting wind and rain to cross to Vollard, who lay in a heap near where a T-shaped pipeline rose out of a concrete platform.
Crouching down beside the body, Jack turned him faceup. His bullets had tagged Vollard in a leg, the belly, and on his left side under his arm, drilling him through the chest. Vollard's open eyes lay unblinking as rain pelted his face.
A CTU agent came up beside Jack. He put his mouth close to Jack's ear and spoke loudly to be heard over the storm. He said, 'Which one is that?'
Jack's thoughts were not of Vollard, but of those who'd been lost along the way, men like Pete Malo, Hathaway, Topham, and Beauclerk; real patriots who'd risked all and sacrificed all, not for personal gain, for money, but for that most intangible thing of all: an ideal, a dream of freedom and a hope that the nation might perhaps, at its best, embody that ideal.
Thinking that Jack hadn't heard him, the agent said, 'Who was he?'
Jack said, 'Who was he? Nobody, just a hired gun.
'Now retired,' he added.
24. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 A.M. AND 5 A.M. CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME
Hurricane Everette never did make landfall at New Orleans or even the Gulf Coast. At the last moment, it changed course, veering on a path that ultimately sent it crashing full-force into Cuba.
Epilogue
CTU arranged for Havana and Caracas to learn enough select details of the Paz/Beltran affair to cause a serious breach in the alliance between their two countries.
Society pages bannered the forthcoming nuptials of Susan Keehan. The bridegroom: Gene Jasper, a security expert who was leaving EXECPROTEK for a seat on the board of several Keehan-owned corporations.
Floyd Dooley and Buck Buttrick became nationally famous as 'Hero Cops Who Thwarted a Terror Plot.' Their ghostwritten autobiography spent several months on the best-seller list and was optioned by a Hollywood studio to become a major motion picture, which was never made. Dooley went on to run for the post of Louisiana Parish sheriff; narrowly defeated, he went on to become a front man, spokesperson, and greeter for New Orleans's newest and most lavish gambling casino. His partner, Buck Buttrick, became the host of a popular fishing show on an outdoors-oriented cable TV network.
A week or so after Hurricane Everette, a body washed up on the shores of the Mississippi River. It was identified as that of Arno Puce, Corsican gunman and member of Vollard's mercenary force. Among the contents of his pockets was found a medallion bearing the likeness of Saint Barbara. It quietly became the property of a young assistant at the parish morgue, who palmed it when nobody was looking and took it home. He figured it might be some kind of good luck piece.
In Saudi Arabia, the Rub' al-Khali, the Empty Quarter, is a bleak wasteland so forbidding, so unremittingly hostile to human life, that even the most hardened, desert-dwelling Bedouin tribes give it a wide berth on their wanderings.
Not long after the failed assassination attempt on Minister Fedallah, an air-conditioned Cadillac car was driven deep into the Quarter, as far as it would go before its gas tank registered empty. It stood inert in the middle of a sun-blasted flat, several hundred miles from the nearest human habitation.
Its occupants were two members of Fedallah's Special Section and Prince Tariq.
The pair of escorts treated Tariq with the impersonal politeness of the executioners that they were.
Presently, the vault of white-hot sky was broken by a flyspeck, a blur of motion that resolved itself into a helicopter that closed on the site where the Cadillac stood.
It touched down long enough to pick up the two Special Section men before lifting off, leaving Tariq marooned in the middle of a desert hell without so much as a drop of water.
