practitioners in his chosen field, this one looked almost alert. Hawke plastered a drunken smile on his face, dropped his right shoulder, and walked loosely toward the man, concealing the narrow blade along the inside of his right forearm.
“Beggin’ yer pardon, Cap’n,” Hawke said slurrily to the big fellow, laying his left hand easily on his shoulder. “This wouldn’t be the HMS Victory, now would it? Nelson’s barky? Seems I’ve lost me bloody ship.”
The guard sneered, showing his unfortunate teeth, and reached inside his slicker for a weapon.
Hawke instantly inserted the long thin blade precisely five millimeters below the man’s sternum and upward into the thoracic cavity on his left side, found the heart, and ruined it. One small gasp and his eyes went vacant.
Before the first man knew he was dead Hawke had turned and performed an identical procedure on the second, smaller guard. He caught the newly deceased by the collar of his orange waterproof and let him fall silently to the concrete, the dead man’s arms sliding out of the sour-smelling garment as he did so.
In a trice, Hawke shouldered himself into the slicker and raised the hood so that his face was in shadow. As he did, he stifled the wave of self-disgust that usually accompanied such vicious and unexpected violence. He actually hated killing, though it was duty. He took pride in doing it well. It was scant consolation.
Tendrils of fog snaked into the harbor from the sea and wrapped around the old steamer’s stacks as Alex Hawke ascended the slippery gangplank. The Star, save the loading activity amidships, was quiet. Having gained the deck, he paused and looked up at the dimly lit bridge. Shadowy figures moved behind the grimy yellow glass of the pilothouse. Two men at least, maybe three. He would start his search for Harry Brock there. He looked at his watch. He was two minutes in, right on schedule.
To his left, a steep corrugated stairwell leading up, more of a ladder than a staircase. He raced up it, and another like it, and arrived on the starboard-side bridge wing. He paused and listened, feeling the faint shudder and thump of the engines beneath his feet. Inside the pilothouse, he could hear muffled voices and laughter. The door was slightly ajar. He shot out his left leg and slammed it inward, stepping inside the hot and stinking bridge with the Walther extended at the end of his right arm. The look on the faces of the two Chinamen told him his information from Brick was indeed hard fact. They were hiding something. And surprised.
“Evening, gents,” Hawke said, kicking the steel door closed behind him. “Lovely night for it, what?”
“Huh?” said a squat man in grimy coveralls who now moved in front of the fellow in a sheepskin coat who was levering noodles from a box to his hungry mouth. The boxlike man advanced toward Hawke, protecting his captain.
“Bad idea,” Hawke said. Somehow, the gun was now in his left hand and a long blood-stained dagger had appeared in his right. The man kept coming and retreated only when Hawke flicked the blade before his eyes. He had little interest in killing these men, at least until he learned the location and condition of their prisoner. Then he would dispatch them without mercy.
“I’m looking for a reluctant passenger of yours, Captain,” he said to a leather-jacketed man wearing an ancient captain’s cap cocked rakishly over his bushy black brows. “Chap who was shanghaied in Morocco yesterday. Where might I find him?”
The Chinese captain stopped eating his noodles, and, placing the container and chopsticks carefully on a stool, stared at him. Hawke saw something in his eyes and instinctively dove for the floor as rounds from the captain’s silenced automatic pistol stitched a pattern in the bulkhead inches above his head. Hawke rolled left and fired the Walther, putting one slug in the captain’s thigh and sending him crashing back against the wheel.
There was little time to celebrate. Five fingers that felt like steel bolts sank into the ganglia at the back of his neck. He relaxed, then sucked down a lungful of air at a new sensation: the cold press of steel at his temple. The pressure increased and he dropped his own gun.
“I Tsing Ping,” an oddly musical voice whispered in his ear, “you dead.”
“This is all a bit more complicated than I was led to believe,” Hawke said, twisting his body carefully and smiling up at the man. His eyes were like a pair of small coals. Tsing Ping racked the slide on his gun.
“Easy, old fellow,” Hawke said calmly, getting one foot under him. “Easy does it, right? I’m going to get to my feet now and—” He never finished the sentence.
There was a sudden screech of metal and then a terrific jolt as the ship’s entire superstructure shuddered under the violent impact of something slamming against it, just below the pilothouse. Hawke, trying to scramble to his feet, was slammed hard against the bulkhead. The impact was sufficient to send Tsing Ping and everyone on the bridge flying across the wheelhouse and tumbling to the floor. He heard shouts from the pier below and then shots rang out, bursts of automatic fire.
Hawke crabbed his way across the chaos of the wheelhouse, managing to recover his Walther from under a sheath of loose documents and navigation charts and broken glass. Then he was up and out onto the bridge wing. Standing at the rail he saw that one of the two dockside cranes, the one directly abeam, was now coming under intense fire from crewmen standing on the starboard rail. Then he saw why. Some madman was at the controls of the crane. The cab had revolved away and now was spinning toward the Star’s hull again, the cable taut, and the crazed operator was about to smash the heavily laden pallet against the ship for the second time.
Hawke could see by its trajectory that, this time, the violent impact was targeted at the pilothouse itself. With maybe three seconds to spare, Hawke turned and simply dropped through the stairway opening, hitting the deck hard, and raced aft.
He didn’t look back at the violent sound of metal on metal and shattering glass as the crane whipped around and smashed its pay-load directly into the four angled windows of the Star’s bridge. Agonized screams were heard as bodies were smashed in the twisted metal.
He reached the stern rail. On shore, he could hear the keening high-low sirens and see flashing blue lights approaching the harbor from every direction. Les flics to the rescue. Everyone aboard the old tub appeared to have run forward to see what was going on. He looked at his watch. The Zodiac rendezvous was in six minutes. In the pitted bulkhead behind him, a rusted door hung open, steps leading down. Brock had to be down there somewhere. Guarded? Absolutely. It seemed he was expected after all.
How the hell had he imagined this was going to be simple?
He had one thought as he raced down the steep metal steps.
He’d gone soft. Lazy. Cocky.
Chapter Seven
Paris, 1970
ALL WAS BLACK INSIDE DES INVALIDES. THE GREAT COMPLEX of buildings housed a veterans’ hospital and the army museum. And, in the center, a great church, the Church of the Dome, where the emperor was buried. The skeleton named Joe Bones had forced Luca’s father to use one of his keys to open a security door at the rear of the Musee de L’Armee.
They entered the museum at the end of a long dark allee where no lights shone. But now the snow had stopped and a bright white moon had emerged from the clouds. Pale light flowed through the tall windows and Luca could hear the powdery silence outside.
“Move yer ass, Joey,” Benny said to his gunman. “History awaits us.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Joe Bones said, and shoved the gun in Luca’s father’s back, nudging him forward. The two mute goons brought up the rear.
Everywhere Luca looked, in shadowy display cases, were relics of the vanished Grande Armee. Uniforms, muskets, cannon, and swords. Cavalry mounted on horses. The stuff of Luca’s dreams. The stuff of La Gloire. In other words, his bright and shining future, if he survived this night. His heart quickened.
Their footsteps were a hollow echo on the vast marble floors as they made their way past the endless rooms of the museum, moving relentlessly toward the great Dome. Luca willed himself to show no emotion whatsoever. It would do no good in any case to let these monkeys see anything.
His father was walking ahead of them all, his head down, like a condemned man approaching the gallows. The dog Pozzo trotted happily alongside his owner. Joe Bones held his gun extended at the end of his arm, trained on the back of his father’s head. Luca had never seen the old man look so forlorn and defeated. Except now,
