bluff him, but certainly not if you're along.'
I nodded. What Tal said made sense. Still, Lippitt was right on Tal's heels as they went through the basement door. I waited ten seconds, then pushed the door open a few inches and peered down the corridor. The hallway looked the same as the one on the third floor-except that there was a guard standing in front of a door fifty feet down the hall in these, the 'living quarters' indicated on the schematics.
Tal walked quickly, with an air of absolute assurance, even when the guard raised his rifle and challenged him. Lippitt was walking a few feet behind Tal, using the taller man's body to shield the automatic in his hand.
Tal spoke rapidly to the guard, in fluent Russian. I felt a little chill up my spine. I could understand Lippitt's sudden nervousness. The discussion quickly degenerated into an argument, with Tal maintaining, from what I could gather from his hand gestures, that the Fosters would have to be taken out of the room because of the fire. The guard was apparently insisting that Tal and Lippitt produce some kind of credentials. Tal made a show of going through his pockets while Lippitt ended the discussion by hitting the guard over the head with the butt of his gun.
Lippitt immediately went to his knees in front of the door and began to pick the lock. I pushed through the door and ran down the hall, arriving just as Lippitt finished his work and opened the door.
The Fosters were standing in the middle of the room. Mike Foster had his arms wrapped tightly around his wife. Both were still in their nightclothes. 'Mongo!' Foster shouted when he saw me. 'Jesus Christ!
Something in Foster's voice caused his wife to push his arms away from her shoulders. She turned slowly to look at us. Elizabeth Foster was a beautiful woman, even without makeup and numbed by sleep. But now her thin lips were compressed by terror, her violet eyes muddy with shock. She gasped when she saw Lippitt.
'Hello, Mrs. Foster,' Lippitt said softly.
Foster's mouth opened and closed without making a sound. He kept staring at me, as if he couldn't believe I was there. I knew how he felt.
'Let's go,' Lippitt said.
It was Tal who led the way out. 'This way,' he said, turning to his right and motioning for us to follow.
Lippitt abruptly stopped in the doorway, blocking our way. I watched the gun in his hand swing up and point at Tal. 'Hold it,' Lippitt said. 'That's not the way out. We go out the way we came in. That's the plan!'
Tal's eyes flashed angrily. 'We can't make it that way, Lippitt. They'll be waiting for us! You tripped an alarm when you opened the door.'
'How the hell do you know that?'
'Look at the doorjamb!'
Lippitt and I looked in the direction where Tal pointed; there was a thin, almost invisible wire running the length of the jamb.
Lippitt hesitated. 'The way you want to go leads right up to the lobby; there'll be a lot of firepower there.'
'There'll be more at the other exits,' Tal replied. 'It's our only chance; the
Lippitt's gun was still firmly pointed at Tal's chest. 'You know too goddamned much about this place to suit me,' Lippitt said tensely.
Foster turned to me. 'Who do we follow, Mongo?'
'Tal,' I said quickly, without really knowing why.
Ignoring Lippitt's gun, Foster brushed past me and pushed the agent to one side. Gripping his wife's hand firmly, he started after Tal, who was already walking toward the open stairway at the far end of the corridor. Lippitt and I exchanged glances.
'You'd better have guessed right, Frederickson,' Lippitt said ominously. His gun started to swing around, stopped just short of my forehead.
There didn't seem to be much sense in stopping to argue the point, so I ducked under the gun and started after Tal and the Fosters. Lippitt's footsteps came up quickly from behind me as a contingent of guards suddenly appeared on the stairs just above us. Tal grabbed the Fosters and pulled them to the floor while Lippitt squeezed three quick shots over our heads. The three men fell dead, each with a bullet hole placed precisely in the middle of his forehead.
As Elizabeth Foster started to scream and tremble, her husband scooped her up in his arms and ran up the stairs after Tal. Lippitt followed, and after grabbing a pistol from one of the dead guards, I brought up the rear. I almost bumped into Lippitt as I rounded a curve in the stairs. Tal, Lippitt, and the Fosters were crouched down, backs against the wall, while someone poured shots down the stairwell.
'Two of them,' Lippitt barked. 'Machine pistols. They've spotted us!'
I was still filled with the giddy, drunken feeling I'd been carrying with me since I'd left Kaznakov's charred, crackling corpse up on the third floor. I lunged up the stairs, leaped, twisted in the air, and pulled the trigger on my own gun. I fired blindly, both hands on the weapon. It must have been a red-letter day on my astrological chart, because I knew even before I landed hard on my back that I'd hit both of them. Tal suddenly appeared beside me. He finished the job with a gun he took from one of the guards, then motioned for the others to follow him. I saw that he was holding his left side.
'You all right?' I asked. Tal nodded. 'Go!' I shouted as Foster paused beside me. 'Get your wife out of here!'
It was Lippitt who stopped and yanked me to my feet. 'Are you hit?'
'No,' I gasped, sobbing for breath. 'Just knocked the wind out of myself.' With Lippitt dragging me by the sleeve, I struggled up the steps and through the pneumatic door above into a mass of milling, shouting bodies.
The wail of police and fire sirens was very loud now, almost drowning out everything else. The main entrance was perhaps sixty feet away, separated from us by a throng of Russians and firemen. The air was thick with smoke that was billowing down the elevator shafts and stairways.
Someone shouted in Russian, and two burly men who had been standing around as if awaiting orders craned their necks, saw us and drew their guns, started in our direction.
Tal and Lippitt stepped forward, and I joined them as Foster pushed through and a semicircle was formed around his wife. Foster had no gun, but he had his fists; he jabbed and feinted in the air as we inched forward.
I was staring up the barrel of a Russian gun as a red-faced fireman with an American flag sewn on his sleeve and a fire ax in his hands suddenly squeezed into the semicircle between Lippitt and me.
'Man, I don't know what you people are up to,' the fireman said in a thick Brooklyn accent, 'but anybody who's trying to get away from the Russkys has my help.'
More firemen joined the circle, and our group began to move forward. The Russians, unwilling to shoot down New York firemen, backed away. In a few seconds we were at the main entrance. A human corridor of firemen's bodies was formed, and Elizabeth Foster went through it, followed by her husband, Tal, Lippitt, and me.
We were out of the consulate.
19
The street was filled with smoke, sparks, and heat. Flames had eaten through the outer walls of the second and third floors; their light cast a small circle of artificial dawn that vied with the real thing. We'd made a journey of thousands of miles merely by stepping through a doorway; it was a journey of the mind and spirit. The New York street was our homeland.
Lippitt cleared a path through the police lines with his credentials, and we walked quickly to the car. Tal slipped behind the wheel and Lippitt got in on the passenger's side next to him. I sat in the back with the Fosters. A fire chief cleared the way, and Tal pulled away from the curb, navigated the obstacle course of vehicles, then turned uptown. The mad energy that had been fueling me had evaporated. I felt weak and nauseated, and I was trembling slightly. I hurt all over; my entire body felt like a bruise, which it was.
At the U.N., Tal drove through a series of linked underground garages and security gates, then parked. Finally
