Dark Chant In A Crimson Key

elbowing their way toward the main desk. 'In fact, I'm glad to see you. I have to go back to the Cornucopia offices.'

The big, crippled Italian nodded eagerly. 'I have the car parked in back. You wait outside. I won't be a minute.'

As Carlo hobbled off toward a rear exit, I pushed through the glass revolving doors at the entrance, picked my way through more men, women, and children who were standing by their luggage as they waited for the crush inside to ease, and took up a position at the curb behind the last bus in line. Suddenly, a hand roughly gripped my shoulder and yanked me around, nearly pulling me off my feet. I found myself staring up into the craggy, unshaven face of a man, probably American, who looked to be in his early thirties. He also looked as if he hadn't slept in days, and he smelled terrible. There was a look of desperation, even terror, in his wide, bloodshot eyes.

'What have you done?!' he screamed at me, his foul-smelling spittle flying in my face. 'Why didn't you meet us like you said you would! Furie, Henry, and Jacques are dead! Why weren't-?!'

The terrified man with the haunted eyes stopped in midsentence as he suddenly looked up at something behind me in the driveway. His mouth dropped open and he gagged, as if he wanted to scream but couldn't. The expression on his face had climbed a notch or two above terror; this was a man looking at his own death-and maybe mine. It seemed a good time to part company. Without wasting time to turn to see what had attracted his attention, I dropped to the sidewalk and rolled to my left a split second before a swarm of bullets from a sputtering automatic weapon ripped through the space where my head had been and into the chest of the American I had left behind. The deadly steel spray also cut into the flesh of the men, women, and children from the tour group who had been standing nearby, and my own howl of disbelief and horror mingled with their screams. I stopped rolling, looked back in the direction from which death had so suddenly appeared.

A gray Peugeot was stopped in the center of the driveway, and a man wearing a black hood and wielding an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol was standing, legs slightly apart, by the open door on the passenger's side.

'Nooo!' I screamed as the man swung the machine pistol in my direction, knowing that a single squeeze of the trigger would mean the extinguishing of even more lives in the crowd of hysterical, terrified people milling around on the sidewalk to my sides and behind me, still in the line of fire.

I rolled again as the gunman fired, howled again with horror, rage, and dismay as the spray of bullets ricocheted off the area of concrete sidewalk where I had been and into more of the screaming people around me.

Horror upon horror; the cost of my trying to stay alive was the rising death toll of the people around me- including, I had to assume, at least one infant I had seen being carried in its mother's arms.

I kept rolling until there was a bus between the gunman and me, then sprang to my feet and darted into the narrow space between that bus and the one parked in front of it. The space might well turn out to be a death trap, but I felt I had no choice but to stay there; the logical thing to do was to keep moving in and around the buses until I could make a break for the lobby of the hotel, but that would only make me an elusive target moving against a backdrop of dozens of not-so-elusive targets, and I could not bear the thought of any more innocent people being killed or maimed because of me, simply because they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I inched forward in my narrow, open-ended steel coffin and peered out from between the buses. The gunman immediately saw me, brought the machine pistol around, and pulled the trigger. I dropped to the ground as bullets smacked against the buses, some penetrating the steel skin, others ricocheting back and forth above my head. When the firing stopped, I looked up; the gunman had ejected an empty clip and was reaching into the baggy pocket of his jacket for another.

The odds were heavily against my being able to get to the man before he inserted the second clip, but that was the only acceptable option I had. I got to my feet and was about to sprint forward when I heard the screech of tires off to my left. An instant later my huge, black limousine with a grim-faced Carlo at the wheel came careening around a corner of the service driveway leading to the back of the hotel. The car hit a speed bump, sailed into the air, landed in a shower of sparks as its frame scraped the concrete. It kept gathering speed as it approached. The assassin's driver must have seen the oncoming juggernaut in his rearview mirror, for the Peugeot suddenly shot forward and veered sharply to the left, bouncing up over a curb and chewing up sod as it sped across the hotel's spacious lawn toward the street beyond, abandoning the gunman.

The assassin realized his peril a moment too late. He had just finished inserting the fresh clip into his machine pistol and was preparing to resume firing when his driver had sped away. Confused, he started to wheel around, and managed to squeeze off one brief burst of fire that went harmlessly into the air just before the limousine hit him. There was a sound like a ripe melon bursting, and then the gunman, minus his gun, shoes, and jacket, was thrown through the air a hundred feet or more, landing down the driveway with a dull thump, shattered limbs pointing in all directions at odd angles.

Feeling both numb and cold, with the screams of the dead, dying, and terrified echoing in my ears, I slowly walked forward to examine the corpse of the man who had been willing to kill so many others in his effort to kill me.

The articles of clothing not left behind in the driveway had been shredded by the forces of impact and scraping on the concrete. The man appeared to be Japanese, or perhaps Korean. On his bare back, clearly visible even among the framing carnage of bloody flesh and splintered bone, was what appeared to be a large tattoo that had been applied not only with needles and ink but perhaps with a branding iron as well. The combination of tattooed skin and scar tissue formed a grisly picture of tongues of jet-black flame erupting over his back and across his shoulders.

And then Carlo was beside me. He laid one huge hand on my shoulder, as if he sensed that I needed some steadying. 'Signor, are you all right? I heard the gunfire while I was bringing the car around. I saw what was happening, and … I did not know what else to do but what I did.'

'You saved my life, and probably the lives of a lot of others,' I said in a hoarse stranger's voice as I looked up into the soulful black eyes of the Italian. 'I owe you.'

I glanced once more at the assassin's corpse with its burn-tattoo of black flame, then turned around and started back toward the sidewalk to see if there was anything I could do to help the gunman's real victims. The air was filled with a cacophony of wails, both mechanical and human. There was a blur of movement all around me, but off to my right I glimpsed Pierre Moliere and the policeman who had been with him urgently directing the driver of the first ambulance that had arrived toward the bodies that were strewn on the sidewalk near the spot where I had been standing when the gunman had first opened fire on me. I headed toward the two men, suddenly feeling oddly distanced from the horror that was all around me, although I was filled with a bitter sorrow for the people who had died this day simply because they had been standing too close to me. But beneath the sorrow was a deep, white- hot core of abiding rage I knew would now govern my every action, consume every waking moment, and which would not be extinguished until I found a way to do what I now knew had to be done.

Chapter Six

Veil, it's Mongo.'

'Mongo! Jesus, I've been trying to reach you for the past three hours. That massacre at your hotel is all over the news here. What the hell's going on over there? Are you all right?'

'No, I'm not all right,' I replied, looking down at the front of my shirt and slacks still spattered and smeared with blood. I had lost track of time. First there had been my feeble efforts to help the victims, and then the hours spent in a police station being grilled as Pierre Moliere had looked on, anger and suspicion in his eyes. I was certain Moliere and the police were convinced, as Insolers had at first been convinced, that I was concealing important information about my role in events, and I had been surprised when they'd finally let me go. But they still had my passport, and I had acquired a not-so-subtle tail comprised of two plainclothes policemen in a pale blue Volvo. 'The bullets that killed those people were meant for me.'

'Get out of there now, Mongo,' Veil said tightly. 'When you hang up, go straight to the airport and-' 'The police took my passport.'

There was a short pause, then, 'I'll be there as soon as I can, Mongo. I'll bring you false identity papers.'