The American’s eyes were locked on him and intense with hate and purpose. The old man had used his legs to sweep Grouse off his feet, and now he had taken surprisingly strong hold of the Steyr’s nylon sling, and he pulled it hard, and Grouse found himself pinned on his back on the cold tile floor. His finger had slipped out of the trigger guard of the weapon as his hand tried to break his fall, and as he scrambled on the tile, trying to free the sling from around his throat, he fought with the American for the grip of his gun.
The old man was fighting for it just as hard. He was alive and healthy and amazingly strong. The sling was around Grouse’s neck, and the white man had it wrapped tightly around his wrist; every time Grouse tried to wrest control of the machine pistol, the sling was pulled to the side, yanking him off balance as he tried to sit up and take it.
Grouse looked to the stairwell, he tried to shout out for help, but the old man pulled the sling even tighter, partially cutting off his windpipe and turning the shout into just a warbling gurgle.
One more vicious yank to the left by the American and Grouse fell all the way onto his back and lost his grip on the gun. His hands reached out desperately for the weapon.
Grouse felt himself weakening as he flailed and kicked.
The American had control now.
John Clark could not get his right hand inside the trigger of the gun because of his injury and limited mobility, but he had the sling perfectly positioned on the Chinese man’s windpipe, so he cinched it tighter and tighter, strangling him to death.
When it was all over, some forty-five seconds after his feigned heart attack gave him the opening to fight back, he lay on his back panting next to the dead man for a few seconds.
But he knew he had no time to spare, so he sat up and went to work.
He felt quickly through the man’s pockets and retrieved his SIG.45-caliber pistol and a mobile phone, and he pulled the headset off the man. He did not speak Mandarin, but he put the headset on, making certain the mute button was depressed so that his voice could not be heard.
Melanie just looked at him from across the floor. “He’s dead?” she asked, still not catching up to what she had just witnessed.
“Yes.”
She nodded. “You tricked him? You faked a heart attack?”
He nodded.
“I needed him closer. Sorry,” Clark said as he hung the Steyr’s sling over his neck.
“We have to call the police,” she said.
“No time,” said Clark. He looked the girl over quickly. Ryan had told Clark that Melanie had compromised him, apparently on the orders of a man she thought was an FBI agent. John was not sure who the young woman was working for or what her motivations were, but it seemed evident that this dead Chinese man on the floor was from the squad of assassins that had tried to kill her on the Rock Creek Parkway just hours earlier.
She was clearly not a confederate of theirs.
Clark had no idea how many more foreign killers there were in the building, nor how well armed and well trained they were, but if they were the group who took out the five CIA men in Georgetown, Clark was damn sure they were tier-one gunmen.
Clark did not trust Melanie Kraft, but he decided Melanie Kraft was the very least of his problems.
He held up his SIG pistol. “Do you know how to use this?”
She nodded slowly while she looked at it.
He handed it to her and she took it, then adopted a two-handed combat grip, holding the weapon at the low, ready in front of her at the waist.
“Listen carefully,” Clark instructed. “I need you to stay behind me. Far behind, but don’t lose sight of me.”
“Okay,” she said. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going upstairs.”
John Clark kicked off his shoes and entered the darkened stairwell. As he did so, he heard a door opening just one floor above.
SEVENTY
Crane had ordered Snipe to go downstairs to retrieve the woman, and then he had his three other men, Quail, Stint, and Gull, wait with the prisoners in the conference room while he brought IT director Gavin Biery over to a node in the server room. The American had told them he would start up and then log in to the system, allowing the Chinese men administrator-level access to do whatever they wanted.
Twice Crane hit the big man in the back of the head for deliberately stalling, both times knocking him from his chair. A third time, when he saw hesitation on the part of the American, he told him he would go into the conference room and begin shooting prisoners.
Gavin reluctantly logged in.
John Clark stood over the limp body of a young, muscular Chinese man. The sixty-five-year-old American had heard the man descending the stairs, then hidden under the first-floor landing, waiting for him to come down. As he passed, Clark cracked him from behind with a vicious downward thrust of the butt of the Steyr TMP. The man fell forward onto the concrete, and three more heavy blows to the head knocked him out cold.
Melanie came out of her hiding place below the stairs, and she pulled off the man’s belt, then used it to tie his hands behind his back. She pulled his jacket down to his elbows to make it even harder for him to get free. She took his machine pistol, but she did not know how to use it, so she just slung it around her neck and followed John upstairs with the pistol in her hand.
John slowly opened the door to the second floor and looked down a hallway, past a row of elevators, past the dead body of a security guard John recognized as an old friend named Joe Fischer, and toward the open door to the IT conference room at the end of the hall. As he did so he heard a transmission in Chinese in his borrowed headset. Of course he could not understand the words, but he had put the device on his head so he could get a heads-up when it became apparent to this crew of killers that members of their unit were not checking in.
And that time was now. The transmission came a second time, and then a third; each repetition was more alert- and alarmed-sounding than the one before. Clark quickly began walking up the hall with the TMP out in front of him in his left hand, his eye looking through the small glass sight.
He’d passed the elevators and was only fifteen feet from the entrance to the conference room when a man quickly stepped out, his gun rising but not yet fully raised. He saw John, tried vainly to yank his weapon up to a firing position, but Clark shot the man five times with a burst of automatic fire.
Now Clark was running; he entered the conference room as fast as he could, with no idea what he would find when he got there.
Before his eyes could take in the complete scene, an Asian man in black clothing fired a burst of bullets at him; John moved quickly to the side, lined up his gun on the threat, and saw that the man stood in front of a row of Hendley employees, all seated and tied. Clark did not hesitate — he fired a single round from the machine pistol, his left trigger finger pressed off another single round, and the man fell back onto Campus Analyst Tony Wills.
There was one more threat in the room. He had been facing in the other direction when John came through the door, but now he was facing the old American with the Steyr. As he aimed to fire, Melanie Kraft came through the door, a pistol clutched in both hands in a firing grip, and she lined up her sights on the man. She fired a single round that missed high, but the Chinese assassin spun his machine pistol away from Clark and toward the girl, giving John the half-second he needed to refocus on this threat and drop the man dead with a long blast to the upper torso.
As soon as the Chinese operator dropped to the floor, Gerry Hendley said, “There’s one more. He’s got Biery in the server room.”
Clark left Melanie with the eight Campus employees, and he rushed out of the conference room heading up a
