Shadow Knight's Mate (34 page)

It didn't take long. Within five seconds the NSA's character took a wrong step, the floor dropped out from under him, and he fell to his death on a bed of spikes. The character reappeared, having lost that round. This time he opened a door, just trying to
get out, and a swinging blade cut off his head.

In his own mind, Jack could hear the NSA screaming in outrage.
What's happening?
Jack typed on the screen,
I told you you could alter your home court.
And he closed his game on his opponent's protests.

That was as much as he could do. Jack felt helpless. He looked around and wondered where he was. Arden had left him here. Where had she gone? Jack went outside and began walking toward the heart of Salzburg. He didn't want to get too close. Security would grow tighter with every hundred yards he traveled now. But he hoped to find Rachel. He sensed she was here.

The night seemed darker than it should be, the streets less crowded. He heard a strange murmur that he couldn't quite shape into words. Maybe the European wind spoke a different language. Jack had the feeling of being surrounded by an invisible crowd. In fact, there were very few people on the streets, which seemed odd.

Down at the corner a policeman in a light blue uniform watched Jack steadily, to the exclusion of all else on the street. Jack's instinct was to walk straight toward the man, until he remembered he might actually be wanted for the incident in Nice. So he turned instead and crossed the street, as if toward a restaurant that looked like the only open business on the block.

The street felt old under his feet, worn down smooth. The buildings were old too, but strong and stylish, stones with modest curlicues of architecture. As much time as he had spent abroad, Jack was American to his bones, and Salzburg made him feel strange. He expected to be stopped and asked for his “papers” at any moment. The citizens who passed averted their eyes, and if there were two of them they muttered just below the level of Jack's hearing. A good place to start a case of paranoia if you didn't already have one.

He didn't want to go into that café. Its door looked like a mouth, a trap from which he would not emerge. He could break right instead, dart down the street. The policeman would blow his whistle and a dozen more might appear. Just as he thought he'd try it anyway, a woman in a trench coat came around that corner
to his right and just stood there. She was slender and young and Jack might have been able to take her, but then again maybe not, as he watched the efficient movements of her hands as she lit a cigarette. Also a slight droop in a pocket that ruined the drape of her overcoat.

He went into the restaurant. There would be a back way out. Maybe he could call Arden.

Jack stopped just inside the doorway, took a quick scan of the tables, started to move through them, then his mind did a quick rewind and he stopped dead again. He thought he'd recognized the portion of a man's cheek he'd glimpsed beneath a hat. But mentally Jack shook his head. Couldn't be. And even if it was, he needed to steer away.

But then the man he'd thought he recognized was smiling and waving him over. Jack stood there thinking hard, wanting to get away, but then saw that the man was about to stand up and call his name, so Jack hurried over and sat down. He stuck out his hand and said as quietly as possible, but with surprise in his voice, “Professor Trimble? What are you doing here?”

“Jack! Well met. Didn't expect you here. Why didn't someone tell me? We could have joined forces. Good show you came, actually. See those men in the corner? I've been surveilling them. Now it looks as if I was waiting to meet a friend instead of following them in here. I think they might have been starting to get suspicious.”

In nearly every other situation, Don Trimble would have been one of the least suspicious people on earth. He had been an Economics professor at Yale when Jack went there, and also a Circle member. Jack had taken one class from him, been impressed by the man's brilliance but barely able to stay awake til the end of the semester. But Trimble was deep inside the leadership of the Circle, much deeper than Jack, in both recruitment and long-term planning.

No one would ever have used him for a field agent, though. He was tall and thin and somewhat clumsy, his hands and feet like the unruly children of distracted parents. With his height and his baldness he stood out in a crowd; his long nose seemed to tremble
when he was excited. At least he was wearing a hat now, and a trench coat. Secret Agent Man.

“Who are they?” Jack asked. He made some sort of gesture at the waiter, which perhaps didn't translate well. Moments later a beer appeared at his elbow, in an elaborate stein.

“Not sure,” Trimble murmured, staring straight at the small group at the corner table. “Two of them are affiliated with Al-Quaeda, but one is French and two others Asian. An odd grouping, and at least three of them affiliated with terrorist organizations. I've been following them for two days.”

If that were so, the men must have spotted the professor a day and nine-tenths ago. Now they saw Jack, too. Jack turned his back on them. “What do you think they're up to?” he muttered.

“Pretty plain. That summit begins tomorrow. It's our one chance to lure the President out of this ridiculous turtle-posture he's put us in. To get him to re-engage with the world. Groups like Al-Quaeda would do anything to stop that. When he comes they plan to kill him, pure and simple.” Professor Trimble looked feverish for a moment. He had never been this animated as a teacher. “It is absolutely imperative that we head off any such terrorist plot
and
that the President comes here. If he doesn't, we've lost. The mission with which we've been entrusted for generations is a failure. If he comes and gets killed we've lost too. We've got to take out whatever all the terrorists on earth are planning, and we have less than twenty-four hours.”

Jack said, “Absolutely,” without much enthusiasm, then looked around again. “Any other leads here?”

Trimble calmed down and straightened his coat. His forehead creased. “Just in the last few hours I've noticed a young woman flitting about. Very young. Light brown hair, blue eyes, a quick step, a little reminiscent smile on her face once in a while. She's been in and out of the area too fast for me to—”

“That would be Arden,” Jack said. He couldn't help smiling himself at the “reminiscent smile” in Professor Trimble's description. “Arden Spindler.”

“Ah. Knew she looked familiar. She's up to something,
though. I'm not sure she's absolutely to be trusted. Have you ever done anything with her?”

For a moment the question left Jack at a loss. Then he managed, “As a matter of fact, we're working together right now.”

“Oh. Well, then you'll know what she's up to. I saw her earlier, going into a building down the street. Odd sort of place. I called to her, but she didn't hear me. Anyway, I've had to concentrate on these fellows.”

“Have you seen Rachel here, Professor? Rachel Greene?”

“Rachel? Oh yes, the Israeli girl. Your friend back in school, wasn't she, Jack? No, haven't heard a thing about her. Is she supposed to be here?” Trimble looked away from him as he spoke.

“I thought so, but maybe she's coming later.” Jack slumped a little more in his chair. He looked all around the restaurant. Six occupied tables, out of a possible dozen. The bartender was cleaning a glass with a bar rag—the same glass he'd been cleaning since Jack had walked in. The restaurant patrons were couples or groups, but mostly men. None of them looked overtly at Jack.

“I need to ask you something,” Jack said softly to Don Trimble, which caused the professor to look at him intently. “But I need more urgently to find the men's room. Know where it is?”

Trimble gestured a direction with his head, a gesture broad enough for everyone in the restaurant to see, as Jack had hoped. “Down that little hallway, I think.”

“Thanks. Be right back.”

Jack stood up, moving like a man with a rather urgent mission, not meeting any eyes. He entered the short hallway, momentarily out of sight of everyone. Two doors at the end of the hall had symbols on them, broad enough to understand. Jack instead took the first door he came to on the right. It was locked, but not very sturdily. A few moments' manipulation got him through it. Jack went inside, found himself in a dark, empty office, and opened the door a crack to look back out into the corridor he'd just left. In only a few seconds three men came into the hallway. They all walked resolutely toward the doors at the far end. Two of them went into the men's room and one into the women's.

Jack closed the office door and looked around. Heavy curtains hung behind the desk. Jack went and pulled them open and found a window, to his relief. He raised it shakily, trying to be quiet, and slipped out. He stood for a moment in the alley and closed the window behind him. He glanced down the alley that would lead to the back of the restaurant, but that was the direction the men who had gone into the restrooms would be going. So Jack turned and ran, fast, the other direction, toward the street from which he'd come, hoping that anyone who'd been watching him would have shifted to have a view of the restaurant.

They hadn't. When he was within twenty yards of the street that young woman stepped around the corner and stood waiting for him, hands in her trenchcoat pockets. She didn't smile or otherwise acknowledge that he was coming.

Jack skidded to a halt. Trench coat woman wouldn't be alone. He turned, saw a fire escape back that way, and headed toward it. Just as he reached the bottom, though, he looked up and saw the man on the roof at the top of the fire escape. These people knew his habits.

A bullet pinged off the metal next to him. Jack ran the only direction he could, across the alley, where another window beckoned. Covering his head with his arms, Jack dived through it.

Forces scrambled into motion. The woman disappeared, heading around to find another entrance to the building. At the other end of the building, half a dozen more men headed into it from that direction. They would have the first floor blanketed in seconds, then close in.

In a large room a few blocks away, Bruno Benjamin sat in an overstuffed chair and smiled at one of the screens in front of him. “This is so much fun,” he said aloud to no one. “What kind of idiot gets any satisfaction out of a video game?” He turned a knob and spoke into a small microphone. “He'll re-emerge from the same window. Be ready.”

On the screen, after a beat of four or five seconds, Jack's head came out of the window he'd dived through. He looked both ways
down the alley, which seemed quiet now. Slowly, trying not to make a sound, Jack climbed back out and dropped down into the alley.

“Jack, old friend, you are so predictable,” Bruno said, and sat back and folded his hands over his stomach and enjoyed himself, watching the screen.

Jack felt safe for the moment. But which way? They were down there to the left, down to the right, they might have left people in place while they searched the building at his back. He would have to bluff or be faster than a bullet…

Wait a minute. What about going back into the restaurant the same way he'd come out? Find another way out on the other side of the building. No one would ever suspect him of going back to his starting place.

Acting on the thought as soon as he had it, Jack started quickly across the alley, on tiptoes. He tripped on something and fell to the left, which saved his life, as a bullet went through the space where he'd just been standing.

Uh. Jack heard the shot, heard the bullet slam off the pavement, but didn't know where it had come from. He looked both ways down the alley, saw no one. Then he remembered, just in time, the other direction. He jumped to the side just as another bullet filled the space he'd just vacated.

This time Jack looked up. The guy at the top of the fire escape had stayed in position. His handgun at the end of his arm, he fired again.

Jack ran the only direction he could, to right under the fire escape. It cut off the guy's angle. But Jack had nowhere to go. The window into the restaurant office was six feet away, a gap that would kill him, because the shooter above was focused on it. Nor could Jack stay safely where he was. The trembling of the metal ladder beside him told him the shooter was descending.

As Jack hesitated, his situation only got worse. The gunman above him paused long enough to fire into the window through which Jack had dived across the alley. The bullet was loud,
ricocheting and echoing within the building. It would alert the people inside. The man fired three more times, just to make as much noise as possible. Then Jack heard the clatter as the automatic weapon's clip fell to pavement beside him.

That meant he had a second to act. Jack leaped out, headed toward the nearest window. But as he did, he heard the distinct click from above of the weapon being reloaded. Jack was still a few seconds away from that window, which he had so carefully closed. He knew he wouldn't make it.

Well, maybe it was time to take a bullet. See if he could survive that. If he couldn't, all this would be someone else's problem. He had already done all he could.

The problem was, he
didn't
think anyone else could handle the world's situation.

Before he leaped he glanced upward again, to see exactly where his assailant was. The man was coming down the fire escape rapidly, holding his gun pointed skyward. Then Jack looked past him, and was amazed. There was another head up there on the roof, looking over.

Jack leaned outward to get a better look, stepping out of the shelter of the fire escape. That made the gunman pause in his descent and lean outward too, to get a better aim. Jack seemed so distracted that the shooter took his time, aiming downward carefully. Just as he pulled the trigger the concrete block fell on his head. The concrete block Arden had just dropped from the roof above.