Reiser’s suggestion to scramble the brain was too much work. Paralyzed, the koob would bleed out in just a few minutes. Unconsciousness would come within thirty seconds.
So far, so good. And yet something about this whole thing was bothering Jack Bowie. What did Savage relics have to do with anything? And other than Reiser there wasn’t much Team Nilo. Which had kind of been a hallmark of everything he’d been asked to do so far. The audition hit. The chase. All of it had dangled Team Nilo. And now… here he was stealing stuff. For what reason? Why? What did Nilo, whoever he really was, stand to gain?
And then Jack Bowie reminded himself that none of this was his business. He’d been hired to do what he did. Rarely and seldom was the full picture given.
But one day, someone had once told him, you find yourself in a blind alley you never saw coming. And there’s no way out.
How, Jack had asked. How do you avoid ending up there?
That’s the problem, that other older, wiser hitter had said. You never see it coming because you’ve been going up blind allies all along. There’s a certain amount of blind trust doing what we do. And sometimes that gets used against you. And by the time you realize it… well… it’s too late.
Then what?
Nothing. Nothing you can do. You just face it like some lamb led to the slaughter.
Remind me not to be a sacrificial lamb, Bowie had quipped in the darkness between the two men. I’d rather charge.
Even bulls get sacrificed, Jack. Even bulls.
Number Five died in a small library of ancient scrolls illuminated in soft light. The koob was actually sleeping and all Bowie had to do was nick the rather prominent vein visible as the airsac deflated with each slumbering breath. Time did the rest.
Bowie was already onto Number Four when he ran into Three, who was supposed to be with Two. Not there.
He and Three practically walked up on each other. Bowie, blade in his off hand, Nine at the ready, turned and fired fast, pulling the trigger and walking hits up along the body of the jerking Kublaren guard.
The series of puffs was audible. They sounded loud. Some trick in the silent cavern of a room that featured ancient art magnified the sounds. The puffs became the sudden loud hisses of feral cats as Bowie shot the guard dead several times.
He heard the other guard, Two, coming into the room where the killing was taking place. The koob gurgling curses and trying to unlimber its new Black Leaf rifle to engage the killer with.
Five shots, Jack Bowie told himself as he pivoted away from the prone koob whom he wasn’t quite sure was dead when he took aim and fired at this new threat.
Two was just getting his automatic rifle off his shoulder when Bowie hit him in the upper chest, nowhere near the pump and pipes, and watched the guard twist away to get out from under the glare of the barrel spitting death in his face. The koob smacked into a wall, rebounded, and came up standing still for just a second to gather his bearings. Bowie had challenged himself to wait to fire his last shot, and the wait was rewarded because the sight picture for a kill shot in the brain stem was now as good as it was ever going to get.
He pulled the trigger and blew the koob’s brains all over a picture of some sunset.
He clipped the knife back to his belt, slapped in a new magazine, and chambered another round, listening all the while.
Had the last guard alive in the place heard anything?
Would the alarm suddenly sound? A high-tech thing in this modern monument to the ancient past.
Nothing.
Now there was just one left and Number One was the hardest one to get to and hit. Prior scans had indicated that the Kublaren guard watch leader stayed within a blastproof security station near the main door. That station was accessible by one door. The approach to the station from the rest of the building was monitored at all times, both visually and with broad knee-level sensor beams that swept the entire main entrance hall.
Bowie moved to a small gallery filled with onyx statuary that looked out upon the main gallery. From the shadows there he could see the security station, designed to look like some kind of information booth sitting dead center in the massive hall. The front doors to the museum, monitored and locked by high tech sophisticated security systems installed by Team Nilo, stood guard against the outside. Those were the final objective. Open them and his work was done.
And that tickled Jack Bowie’s brain just a bit. He found it impossible to believe Team Nilo couldn’t hack their own installed equipment. Didn’t put some kind of back door the near–Stone Age Kublarens couldn’t find. That just didn’t add up.
Not your problem right now, Jack. So far they’ve dealt straight-ish. Keep charging and maybe… just maybe you see the other side of this.
Even bulls get sacrificed, Jack.
But first there were two things to do.
Kill the guard.
And secure the artifacts down below.
Bowie got down onto his belly and began to low crawl across the meticulously polished floor of the main entrance. The smartsuit adapted to the viscosity of the surface it was being used against, shifted its molecular structure somehow and suddenly the small rubberized squeak it had been making went silent. And, amazingly, Bowie was moving faster.
The sensor laser was invisible so there was no telling where it was, even with the enhanced optics his HUD contacts provided. But if Jack kept down and just under its calculated depth, he could make it the whole way to the security station. Visual was the only problem. If the guard looked up, he was had. So he crawled with the Nine
