“You’ll know,” he said with a smile. “Ready, Lena?”
“I’ve been ready since you told me about the water tank.”
“Then let’s go!”
By the time they reached the tank, the Snake King had got into the chopper and was powering up the engine. He lifted the aircraft off the roof and rotated it in the air. Decker watched the wind throwing it around and guessed old Danvers had planned to be far away by the time the winds had reached this velocity.
Tarántula called out to him but he turned away and flew in the opposite direction. The wounded Mexican gangster broke cover and ran after him, reaching out with his bloody arms as he desperately tried to grab hold of one of the skids.
“He’s crazy!” Riley yelled.
Charlie and Cade fired on the chopper, missing by inches. “They’re both crazy!”
Tarántula grabbed the skid just as the chopper flew over the edge of the skyscraper. Riley fired and hit him in the back, forcing him to release his grip on the skid and fall screaming from the chopper. A few meters beneath the aircraft the wind caught hold of him and clawed him away at high speed. Decker watched in horror as the wind tipped the chopper on its side and sliced Tarántula in two with its rotors. Both halves of the gangster tumbled away in the swirling maelstrom as the Snake King struggled to right the chopper.
It was no good. The power of the wind was too much for the aircraft. It lost all stability and turned upside down before losing lift and tumbling down the side of the skyscraper. Decker and the others ran to the rail and leaned over the edge just in time to see the storm catch hold of the chopper one more time and throw it into the skyscraper on the other side of the street. It exploded in a ball of fire and dropped like a stone to the street below, streaking a long line of burning oil and flames and smoke in its wake.
“My God!” Diana said a prayer in whispered Portuguese.
Charlie and Cade shared a high five while Riley released his empty mag and replaced it with a new one, holstering the weapon. Selena turned away from the burning wreckage plummeting through the stormy air and shook her head.
Decker holstered his gun and turned to the Cuban professor. “Get that damned thing turned off, Diaz!”
“On my way!”
Decker was searching the roof for something. “And where the hell is my hat?”
EPILOGUE
The following day’s dawn broke hot and humid. A thunderstorm was gathering power just off to the west and by the time the crew met for breakfast, all dressed in shorts and t-shirts, it had already started to rain over the city. Their hotel’s breakfast room was situated on the east side of the building with an impressive, panoramic view of Midtown Manhattan and despite the bad weather, people were still walking along the street, shopping, working, some even jogging.
No one in the Avalon crew had the energy for any of that today. Not even Riley. Instead, they shuffled around the self-service buffet tables and piled their plates full of food. Atticus and Charlie and Cade stuck with plain, black coffee and toast with grape jelly. Diana, Acosta and Diaz chose mostly fruit and some healthy cereal with skim milk. Selena was happy with a single cup of tea with a dash of milk and some brioche with Chantilly cream. Riley and Decker had opted for a chunky omelet with green onions and Swiss cheese, washed down with hot black coffee.
As they shuffled back over to their table by the window and took their seats, Atticus was the first to speak.
“Bloody good breakfast, here. I do like this purple jam.”
Cade laughed. “We call it grape jelly. Purple jam. Pure gold dust, man.”
Selena rolled her eyes.
“What?” Atticus asked his daughter.
“All you ever think about is your stomach, Dad.”
“And what else is there think about?”
“That we almost died yesterday!”
“Almost, Lena,” he said cheerily. “That is the operative word. Almost. Ooh, real butter!”
She looked to Decker for sympathy and maybe found a little lurking at the back of his eyes.
“Atticus is right,” Decker said. “We might have almost died, but we didn’t. We survived and Nathaniel Danvers and his gang are all dead, including the men holding Cristina Diaz down in Havana.”
“And thank you all for that,” Diaz said. “You saved my family from endless suffering and pain.”
“It’s over now,” Selena said. “Like Mitch says, Danvers is gone.”
“And Danvers was quite insane,” Salvador Diaz said. “Not only did he think he was doing Huracan’s bidding, he also believed he was seeing the future when he looked into the capstone.”
“Wasn’t he?” Selena asked.
Diaz laughed. “Not at all. The capstone is made from a very mysterious metal I have never encountered before. Danvers told me he called it divinium, mostly because of his insane god complex, I should think.”
A gentle laugh rippled around the breakfast table.
Diaz continued. “I had plenty of chance to study this new metal when he was forcing me to operate the device, and what I found was intriguing. As is now obvious, the metal was an unimaginably powerful conductor, unlike any other I have studied. More than that, it grew intensely hot when in use and gave off fumes. This is a well-known phenomenon we’ve known about for a long time, and it induces in anyone too close to it something called metal fume fever. I recognized it at once so I kept my distance, but Danvers had no idea what was really happening. This caused him to have vivid hallucinogens based on his innermost fears.”
“So he wasn’t seeing the future at all?” Diana asked.
“I really don’t think so,” he
