shrieked in pain, the flash drive in her other hand dropping to the ground, but Nina was already striking again, and again, fists crunched tight like blocks of stone. Blood smeared her knuckles as Sophia staggered.
Nina pulled back her arm, winding up for a final punch, swinging—
Sophia caught it.
‘
Nina struck first. One of Chase’s moves: crude, savage - but effective. Sophia’s nose broke with a snap of cartilage as Nina headbutted her, spraying both women with blood.
She tried to pull free, but Sophia still had a solid grip on her arm despite the pain. Gasping, Nina raked her fingernails at the other woman’s eyes.
Sophia jerked her head back - and kicked Nina hard in the stomach. Choking, Nina stumbled, the wound in her leg searing with resurgent pain. Sophia tried again to break her arm, but the kick had thrown her off balance, forcing her to let go to avoid falling.
But Nina was already past the point of no return. She fell heavily beside di Bonaventura. For a moment their eyes met, the Cardinal’s gaze full of pain and regret, before an almost infinitesimal relaxation of the tiny muscles around his eyes marked the moment when life became death. Di Bonaventura was about to find out if his beliefs were true.
Clutching her aching stomach, Nina got to her knees and looked up.
The gun was pointing at her head.
Sophia’s enraged face was behind it, rivulets of blood running from her nose. Her finger tightened on the trigger—
A terrifying roar made both women whirl.
Chase had staggered upright, one hand clutched to his bloodied chest. He launched himself at Sophia, tackling her as she fired again and slamming her back against the railings.
They toppled over them, and were gone.
Sophia’s piercing shriek of terror vanished beneath the waterfall’s rumble as she fell. Chase made no sound as he plunged into the darkness with her.
Nina stared at the railings in stunned disbelief before running to the spot and looking down. The waterfall was a silver streak in the moonlight, the lake at its base a pool of pure black speckled with froth. Of Chase and Sophia there was no sign.
‘Eddie!’ She couldn’t accept that he was gone, leaning out to look beneath the platform. He
But he wasn’t. There was nobody there.
She had lost him.
Nina stumbled away from the railing with a moan of despair, tripping and landing by the bag. She didn’t feel the pain of the fall, a far greater agony overpowering it.
Chase was dead.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No, no,
A mechanical noise: a gun’s hammer being cocked. Ribbsley had recovered, had found his gun, was pointing it at her with his bloodied face twisted by rage—
A hole exploded in his chest as a high-velocity bullet blew right through him in a bloody shower. The force of the impact sent the professor rolling over several times before coming to a stop, leaving a ragged red trail like a child’s hand painting.
Some fearful instinct made Nina grab the bag and clutch it to herself as she scrambled back against the railings. There was nobody in sight. Who had fired the shot?
And was she the next target?
She looked in panic across the valley. The distant lights of the village glowed below, but she couldn’t see any sign of the sniper . . .
A dazzling blue-white light pinned her from above. A helicopter - but she couldn’t hear any rotor noise, or see anything except the blinding spotlight as it approached.
‘Dr Wilde,’ said a man’s voice, American-accented but unfamiliar. It didn’t seem to be coming from the helicopter, but from all around her - or inside her head. ‘Do not move, remain still. I repeat, do not move, or you will be killed.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she whispered, frozen with fear. Some remaining rational part of her mind dredged an explanation from her memory: a few years earlier, an advertiser had experimented with a hypersonic loudspeaker in New York, only people standing in a small area able to hear the commercials it played while others just feet away heard nothing. She had even gone to experience it for herself. This was something similar, the helicopter’s occupants not wanting to rouse the entire valley.
But who were they?
The light came closer. Nina could now feel the downdraught from the rotors, but still couldn’t hear any noise until it was almost upon her, when a low-frequency thrum filled the air. The light flicked off as the helicopter swept overhead and moved to land behind the cars, cutting off her escape route.
Not that she was planning to move. A strange numbness rolled through her body, as if something within her had switched off to escape the pain. She watched the helicopter almost with disinterest, noting that it was a very strange-looking aircraft, unlike any chopper she had seen before: a flat matt black with a sharply pointed, seemingly windowless nose and an odd rotor assembly within a ring that rose above the fuselage like a halo. Some kind of stealth prototype? Whatever. She didn’t care.
A hatch opened in the helicopter’s featureless side, several men in all-black combat gear jumping out and rapidly securing the area. Two more men, faces hidden behind black masks and night-vision goggles, advanced on her, silenced compact rifles flicking between her and the two bodies nearby. Once it was clear that neither Ribbsley nor di Bonaventura would be moving again, they came to a stop ten feet from Nina and fixed their guns on her, laser spots dancing over her chest.
Another man emerged from the helicopter. No mask, no camouflage; she saw he was wearing a suit and tie as he passed one of the lamps illuminating the platform, the light catching his face.
A face she knew well.
Victor Dalton. The President of the United States.
He stopped between the two men in black. ‘Dr Wilde, hello again. You probably won’t believe me, but I’m glad to see you.’
‘Go to hell,’ Nina growled.
‘No, really - I’ve been watching what was going on down here. I didn’t think you’d be the last person standing, but it’s worked out fairly well.’ He walked to the railing near where Chase and Sophia had fallen and picked up a small white object - Sophia’s flash drive. ‘I even heard Sophia say this was the only copy.’ He looked back at the helicopter. ‘It’s a hell of a machine, by the way. One of DARPA’s latest toys. Full array of surveillance gear, almost totally invisible to radar, and ninety per cent quieter than a normal chopper. Lucky for me it was in Germany for NATO evaluation, or my trip would have attracted a lot more attention - officially, I’m on vacation at my estate in Virginia. I wanted to keep this whole thing quiet.’ He took a step towards her. ‘Personal.’
Nina crawled away. ‘Stay back! What do you want?’
‘This, for one,’ he said, holding up the memory stick. ‘For another, what you’ve got in that case there. May I see it?’ She didn’t respond immediately; one of the soldiers flashed his laser sight over her face. ‘Don’t expect me to ask twice, Dr Wilde. For anything.’
Reluctantly, she opened it and took out a large plastic ziplock bag - inside which, still wrapped in the remains of its ancient shroud, was the skull. ‘Open it,’ ordered Dalton. ‘Let me see.’
‘Why do you want it?’ she demanded as she unfastened the seal and began to peel away the cloth.
Dalton didn’t answer at first, watching as she carefully removed the shroud. The skeletal face was revealed beneath. She turned it towards the President. To her surprise, he appeared visibly discomfited. ‘So, it’s true,’ he
