was moving to stop them.
Through the South Room they angled a hard right into a coin gallery. “Go through that door!” Amit said.
Up ahead, Jules saw exactly the one he meant. It was a fire exit. She
threw herself at the door and activated the shrill alarm. The door flew open hard enough to knock over an employee who’d been out back smoking. Facedown on the pavement, the poor man shouted his protest, but she wasn’t stopping to make any apologies.
Now they were along the rear drive reserved for employees and deliveries. The Land Rover sat only twenty meters away. With key chain in hand, Amit had remotely opened it the moment he was outside.
Jules was already in the passenger seat and pulling her door closed as Amit was fumbling with the driver’s- side door latch.
“Come on! Hurry!” he heard her yelling on the other side of the glass.
Yanking the door back, Amit hopped in.
Back at the exit door, the befuddled smoker was back on his feet, assessing the ragged tear in his pants, just over the right knee. Amit couldn’t hear the swearing, but the guy looked awfully pissed off and was throwing his hands into the air. It would only be another second before his mood would surely worsen, Amit thought, jamming the key into the ignition.
By the time Amit looked back up, the smoker had been knocked facedown onto the ground again, his left leg blocking the door that was once more being forced open from the inside. There was a split second where Amit considered reaching for the pistol stashed in the center console. He’d left a round chambered, safety off. But as he made to get it, Jules screamed.
“Go! ”
Cranking hard on the gearshift, Amit stepped down on the accelerator just as the arm-casted assassin muscled his way around the door and used the smoker’s back like a doormat. In his good hand, he was clutching a replacement for the Jericho pistol taken from him last night. And now he was positioning himself for a clean shot.
The Land Rover’s tires screeched as he ducked and pulled the wheel hard to the left. The gunshot was loud, the report of breaking glass just as harsh. The would-be assassin’s left-handed aim wasn’t so great. He’d only managed to take out the driver’s-side rear passenger window. Amit peeked up over the dash just in time to cut a hard right that avoided a thick gatepost at the lot’s exit. A successful maneuver, yet the Rover’s rear tire caught the curb that stuck out beneath it, bouncing the truck into the air. Amit and Jules catapulted up from their seats, both smacking their heads on the roof.
But it was a fortunate thing, because the second shot that had cracked an instant earlier on a direct line for Amit’s skull instead blew out the spare tire bolted to the truck’s lift gate.
“Holy shit!” Jules yelled, cradling her pounding head in her hands.
Amit sped around the building. Then he confused Jules by bringing the truck to a sudden halt. He hit the switch that rolled down his window, then flipped open the console and pulled out the pistol.
“What the ’ell are you doing?” The French accent was really thick now. “Trust me.” He gave it about ten seconds. “Get down and stay down.” “Amit, I don’t think—”
“Do it!”
She did.
Then he eased down on the accelerator again and cornered stealthily onto the front circular drive.
His timing was good. The gunman was already outside working his car remote like a lobster with the two mobile fingers of his cast hand. Before the guy could figure out what was happening, Amit stomped on the accelerator and steered straight for him. Clutching the Jericho, Amit stuck his arm out the window, aimed, and squeezed off a shot that spat through the silencer. Unlike the assassin, Amit was a seasoned lefty.
The shot was close but missed. It did, however, force the guy to duck for cover behind his Fiat coupe.
That gave Amit just enough time to slow the Land Rover and maneuver for another shot. But this time, it wasn’t the assassin he was going for. It was the front tire of the Fiat. He took aim and held the trigger down, forcing the pistol into semiautomatic mode. A slight circular sweep emptied three successive rounds into the Fiat’s front wheel well and tire rim. A fourth tore apart the tire with a loud pop.
The assassin tried to come up over the hood for a shot, but Amit fired again to force him back down.
Satisfied, Amit ducked low and gunned the engine. One more shot came, but it merely shattered the driver’s side mirror. Amit made a wild right onto Sultan Suleiman Street, which ran parallel to the Old City’s northern wall. Not wanting to attract attention from the IDF guards stationed outside the Damascus Gate up ahead, he immediately slowed.
“You are one crazy bastard,” she said.
“Best defense is a good offense,” he reminded her.
31
******
Vat ic a n Ci t y
It was nearing one o’clock when Charlotte heard a knock at the door. “Just a sec,” she called out from the bathroom.
She checked her mascara and lipstick in the mirror one last time, hoping
she hadn’t overdone it. “Sexed up” was not the look she was going for with a pair of priests. Just a little something to put some color back in her cheeks and jazz up her swollen eyes. With the amount of crying she’d done up until now, she might as well have poured acid over her eyelids.
But she had to remind herself that the last time she’d stared into a mirror inside a guest room at the Vatican’s Domus Sanctae Marthae, her eyes showed a different kind of pain that no makeup could conceal. And she’d relied on chemo pills to suppress it, not Revlon.
Charlotte was glad she’d accepted Father Martin’s offer to have her pantsuit dry-cleaned by housekeeping. As
