“I don’t think-”
“
She turned. Eye contact immediately. His gaze again ran smack into hers simultaneously. She saw him reach for something under his jacket. He was about fifty feet behind her.
“Get moving!” Rizzo repeated. “Get away from him!” barked Rizzo’s voice on the phone.
She had never felt slower in her life. Her ankle wouldn’t obey. She cursed the boots and wished she’d had sneakers. She bumped into a couple that was kissing and the contact nearly knocked her over. Kaspar was gaining.
“I can’t move fast! My ankle!”
“Get past the musicians!”
“I can’t. He’ll catch me first.” The words in her phone barked at her. “Move! Move!” they demanded. “You’ll be safe!”
“Why don’t you shoot him?” she demanded. “Just shoot him!”
“We can’t! Not yet!”
“He’s going to kill me!”
“Keep moving!” Rizzo barked. “Now! Move!”
It was the endgame and she knew it. She zigzagged through the crowd. She had never felt slower in her life. She heard excited voices and she heard the assassin steps behind her. And she heard the music, which got louder and louder as she lurched toward it. How was she going to get out of here? She eyed the
Kaspar must have drawn his gun because she heard a woman yell and scream. Then there was chaos behind her.
She broke into a final attempt at a run. She edged past people and Kaspar was on the run behind her.
Then her earphone thundered again. “Get down! He’s got a gun!”
She tried to move, but her ankle turned again. She fell and went down hard. She knew she was a goner. She got up and stumbled past the musicians, fell hard again. The musicians stopped playing.
She got past them. The accordion player reached into his pocket. So did the violin player. She saw from the corner of her eye. She tried to stand.
Then she saw what the trap was, what this was all about. Like Anatoli in London, Kaspar had stepped into his own hell on earth.
The violin player raised a black pistol at the same time. The accordion player pulled one out also. Kaspar raised his own weapon and the Metro platform was a flurry of bullets.
The violinist aimed right at Kaspar’s gut and put two shots into him. The assassin staggered for a moment, and his eyes went wide in pain and in the realization that death was at hand. He flailed and fired two shots wildly. Kaspar staggered, his hand snapped back, and he fired his own gun upward instead of downward.
There was a flurry on the Metro platform and bullets rang in every direction.
Alex felt something wallop her hard in the midpoint of the chest, just above the breast bone, at the center where her stone medallion hung.
She saw the accordion player reach forward and put a bullet into Kaspar’s head. Then a second. But she barely saw that, because she felt something wet and sticky on her chest. Blood. She had been hit by a bullet in the midpoint of the chest. The feeling first was numbness, then the pain radiated, as did the shock.
“Oh, God. Oh, God,” was all she could say.
Alex had a bullet wound in the center of her chest. She was bleeding.
Unreal. But she knew how quickly it could be fatal.
She clutched the area. She lay on the ground in shock, wondering how everything since January had led to this time, this place. The pain was spreading now and so was the blood. From the corner of her eye, she could see Kaspar lying on the ground, his skull torn open by a team of assassins.
One of them stayed over her and cradled her head.
“I’m dying,” she said. “I’m dying.” The pain was radiating out from a center point in her chest. Shivers turned to convulsions. She put an unsteady hand to the area where she had been hit. She felt warm wetness, the blood, and the broken pieces of the stone pendant from Barranco Lajoya.
It was surreal. The accordion player-gunman ripped off the sleeve of his shirt and pressed it to her chest. She drifted. Consciousness departed, then returned halfway.
Then there were the sounds of police over her. Her eyes flickered and she didn’t know how much time had passed. She only knew that the musician had disappeared.
Strange faces, noisy men and women in Parisian police uniforms, hovered over her. They barked orders and tried to help. She could no longer understand the language. They worked on her with bandages, tubes, and breathing devices. She felt herself tumbling deeper into shock. Or into something or some place she didn’t understand.
Then everything went from white to black then back to white again, and she was thinking, “If this is dying, it’s easier than I ever thought. Much easier…”
A cloudy painless whiteness enveloped her.
Two minutes later, her heart stopped.
EIGHTY-TWO
The heavyset woman came down the stairs of her apartment building in a hurry. She carried one large suitcase and struggled with it. Three flights down the back stairs and she was sweating beneath her tan raincoat. But she had been sweating since before she had finished backing.
Short notice, long trip. But a big payoff. It would all be worth it. She was going to get a new passport, a new identity. And a free trip out of the country. She would get more money in cash in the next few hours than she would by keeping her lousy government job for another twenty years. So it hadn’t been much of a decision when she had made it several years ago.
Still she was nervous. She had heard horror stories about people who got involved in this type of thing. But there was no turning back now.
It was nearly midnight.
She stepped out from the front door of her middle class building in Alexandria, Virginia. A few parking spaces down, in front of a hydrant, a car engine started up. The car slid forward a few parking spots and gently came to a halt.
She recognized two of the men in the front seat. The front window rolled down.
Handsome men. Smiling faces. The faces of her homeland.
“Hello, Olga,” the man in the shotgun seat said.
She answered in Ukrainian. “Do you have the money? Do you have my passport?” she demanded.
The man opened an envelope that sat on his lap. There were some huge bricks of money and some banking information where the rest could be found. He handed her a Brazilian passport.
“See if you like your picture,” the man answered. “But I wouldn’t advise you to stay too much longer. FBI. They’re probably on their way.”
The mere mention of American police was enough to make her heart jump. She had known of other CIA employees who had sold out over the years. Most of them went to federal prisons and didn’t emerge until they were very old or until some other more patriotic prisoner stuck a shiv in their backs.
Olga glanced at the passport. Her picture. A new name. She was now Helen Tamshenko and she was a resident of Sao Paolo.
Good enough. She reached for the back door and slid into the car. She slumped low. No one would spot her as a passenger.
The driver pulled away from the curb. An oncoming pair of headlights swept the street. Then a second. Two big unmarked Buicks, traveling fast.
“Just in time,” the driver said softly. “That’s the FBI now.”
