lifeboats on their davits. A number of ship’s officers were checking them in case this turned out to be a catastrophic fire rather than a false alarm. They hadn’t heard the gunfire.
Running in the opposite direction, Mercer and Anika made their way toward a flight of stairs leading to one of the vessel’s many outdoor cafes. Mercer took the H amp;K from Anika and refitted the silencer. Two quick shots destroyed the lock on the sliding glass doors and they were back in the ship.
The hallway beyond the cafe’s entrance was deserted. Moving carefully because they were exposed, they passed a number of shops and another bar that overlooked an outdoor pool. Across the smooth water they could see a towering funnel lit with floodlights. Neither saw the two figures crossing the pool area en route to an entry door until the door was heaved open.
The figures, dressed in black and carrying MP-5s with probing laser sights, swept the corridor to their right and turned to look behind them. Mercer and Anika stood just ten yards away. He pushed her down and dove across the hallway as the laser cut the air above him. Mercer rolled onto his knee and fired, a tongue of flame shooting from the Model 12. The fusillade caught the security personnel across the chests, tossing one back onto the patio and standing the other against a wall, his body jerking like a puppet.
“You said you weren’t going to kill anyone!” Anika shrieked.
“They were Rath’s men,” Mercer shouted above her screams. “They were carrying German machine pistols, not the Italian ones the Swiss Guards have.”
She edged closer and recognized the corpse in the hall from the Geo-Research station in Greenland. She couldn’t believe the speed of Mercer’s reaction.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Mercer added and led her away.
He pulled another fire alarm as they entered a long corridor lined with cabins. As before, a few passengers were in the hallway but not many because rumors of a terrorist attack were already spreading. Mercer glanced at his watch, assuming that the twenty-minute time line had passed. He was stunned to find less than half that had elapsed. Like all combat, time had telescoped into a weird distortion where seconds took hours and hours could vanish in a blink.
They reached the double doors at the end of the hall just as Swiss Guards poured onto the companionway. Mercer fired a snap burst from his submachine gun, praying he didn’t hit anyone. Pounding the doors against their stops, Mercer pushed Anika ahead of him, taking up a defensive crouch when he found cover behind a large planter overflowing like a jungle. A few seconds later, a pair of Swiss Guards came racing after them. He used the H amp;K pistol he’d taken from Hoffmann and placed rounds in each of the Guards’ thighs, far enough from the femoral artery so they wouldn’t bleed out.
“Let’s go.” He’d bought a few more seconds.
They burst into an empty ballroom. The ornate chamber echoed as they ran toward the glowing EXIT signs on the opposite wall. At the far side, Anika collapsed onto a sofa, her chest heaving to get enough air into her body. Mercer too was winded, but they couldn’t rest here.
“You’re doing great,” he panted. “Just a little while longer.”
They checked the antechamber beyond the ballroom and began walking more normally, their weapons hidden from the two Muslim clerics arguing in Arabic despite the wailing fire alarms.
They moved through several more passages, firing indiscriminately at walls and ceilings, spreading fear wherever they went. At one point Mercer found a stack of the ship’s newspaper awaiting delivery to the cabins. He stuffed handfuls of them into a ventilation grate and set them on fire. Considering the size of the vessel, it would take many minutes for the smoke to be detected, but he hoped by then it would have diffused all over the ship. More confusion. More panic. They dodged in and out of two more firefights with roaming Guards, each time escaping to a lower deck and blending with frightened passengers until they were safe.
By now Mercer was thoroughly lost, but he guessed that all passages on the each half of the catamaran eventually led to one of the atriums. As they walked down a hall, keeping watch for pursuing Guards, Mercer spotted a sign indicating the atrium was just ahead. He broke into a jog, with Anika beside him. She’d emptied all her clips but continued to carry the silenced H amp;K.
They entered the atrium one level below the dining room where Mercer had met the televangelist and his wife. The cavernous space was deserted. Hunched to minimize his size, he led Anika to one of the bridges to get to the center of the ship so they could then lose themselves in the starboard hull, an area they hadn’t been to yet.
A piece of the bridge’s brass railing exploded the same time Mercer heard the whip crack of a pistol shot. He pushed Anika to the carpet and covered her with his body. It felt like the shot had come from across the mall-like atrium and one level up. He chanced a look and saw a dozen Swiss Guards lining the upper railings. Some of them were headed to the escalators. The Guards would reach the ends of Mercer’s bridge long before he and Anika could escape.
“Drop your gun,” Mercer whispered to her, visually checking distances in the opposite direction of the group of Guards.
“Why?”
“I’m saving your life,” Mercer said. “Do it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“You don’t want to know.” Mercer’s grim tone sounded like a final good-bye.
As soon as Anika laid the pistol on the floor, he grabbed her by her collar and hauled her to her feet. Making sure the Model 12 was on safe, he put her in a hammerlock and jammed the weapon into the side of her head. Her scream was no act.
“One step closer and I kill her.” Mercer’s shouted warning stopped the approaching men dead. He kept twisting in place so no one could get an accurate shot. Because Anika was so short, using her as a shield was a lot harder than he’d envisioned. “All of you drop your guns and back up.”
A few guards pulled their aim high, but none of them relinquished their grips. The men coming down the escalator took up firing stances. Had any of them had laser sights like Rath’s troops, they would have taken a shot. Still, Mercer’s weaving form danced in and out of the crosshairs of eight different shooters.
“Let her go,” a Guard officer shouted in rough English. “We will not fire.”
“Drop your weapons.” While Mercer wanted them to think he was unstable, the anxiety straining his voice was very real. This situation went far beyond anything he’d ever experienced. One twitchy finger and he and Anika would be shredded. “I’ll kill her, I swear to God.”
“You don’t want to do this,” the Guard captain called down in a soothing voice. “We can talk about it.”
“No!” Mercer shrieked, allowing his voice to become hysterical. He wanted the Swiss edgy and nervous. It would throw off their aim. “Lorna Farquar’s dog bit me, and I will hold this woman until she apologizes.”
The absurdity of Mercer’s demand had the desired effect. For a fraction of a second the Guards’ concentration wavered. He whispered, “See you later,” in Anika’s ear, pushed her to the floor once again, and threw himself backward, blindly vaulting over the railing behind him.
The rush of the free fall left his heart in his throat and the sound of Anika’s cry fading like a distant whistle. Mercer wouldn’t know if his leap had been accurate until he hit. He could only see the waterfall looming over him if he tipped his head back. The falls seemed to have come to a standstill as he plummeted at the same speed as the water. The drop was twenty feet and took more than a second — more than enough time for the quicker of the Guards to react. Automatic weapons opened up like chainsaws. Spray from rounds hitting the falls landed on Mercer and then he himself landed. Flat on his back. In the pool at the base of the falls.
He went deep and slapped against the concrete bottom of the four-foot-deep faux lagoon. The water crashed back over him, swirling with bubbles from the air forced from his lungs. He lay at the bottom of the pool, his entire body aching until he opened his eyes and saw streaks of silver slashing the water. The Guards were firing down at him.
With no breath to hold, Mercer swam under the falls and emerged in a hollowed space that housed the pumps needed to create the aquatic effect. Beyond was an access hatch so workers didn’t have to wade through the pool to service the machinery. Soaked and struggling to refill his lungs, Mercer kicked open the hatch and
