The Man of Bronze (2 page)

Survivor guilt is cruel. There’s no reason to blame yourself for a death that’s not your fault . . . yet deep in your soul dwells a sense of obligation when the bullet meant for you hits somebody else. You’ve incurred a debt you can never repay.

“It’s not like the movies,” Reuben murmured. “When a car explodes. It’s not a dramatic burst of fire with stuntmen jumping up off trampolines to simulate the force of the blast.”

“I know.”

He glanced at me angrily . . . but something in my face must have told him I
did
know what it was to endure an explosion. To feel the wall of heat slam into you: burning your eyes dry, popping your eardrums, pounding your body like a thousand simultaneous punches, knocking you off your feet and throwing you backward with a fire-driven force so far beyond mere human strength that the humiliation is almost as excruciating as the moment of impact.

Then for a time, there’s nothing. Even if you’re conscious, you can’t see, hear, or feel. Your senses are numb for a tiny grace period as your brain seeks to deal with what’s happened. Suddenly everything floods into awareness: light if your eyes haven’t been burned out of their sockets, sound if there’s anything left of your eardrums, and a lot—a
lot
—of pain.

“I blacked out for a while,” Reuben said. “I don’t know how long. When I woke, I felt burned head to toe . . . lying in a heap against the wall, maps littered around me, some of them smoldering . . . and the older guy from the rent-a-car agency was bending over me. I thought he was trying to help—giving me first aid. Then I saw he had a butcher’s knife the size of a machete. He was assessing my wrist, trying to decide the best way to cut off my hand.”

Reuben held up his arm, the one with the attaché case. It didn’t surprise me that the rental car man had intended to perform an impromptu amputation—I had no doubt the attaché case was the target of the whole explosive exercise. Such cases were built strong enough to keep their contents safe from fiery jolts. I assumed the original plan had been to blow up Reuben in the Diablo, then hack the case off Reuben’s corpse. Why would the rental car man have been carrying a knife if he hadn’t expected to use it?

The only surprise was the man’s hesitation before doing the deed. He must have had hours or days to prepare for the amputation—plenty of time to get past any squeamishness. So why the pause? Unless the man had always pictured slicing into skin charred to a crisp and was discomfited by the sight of Reuben’s relatively unburned flesh.

But I pushed such questions aside. Looking at Reuben’s arm, I saw it was very much intact. “I take it you convinced the gentleman not to carve you up?”

“Forcefully so.” Reuben gave a slight smile. “He thought I was still unconscious. Never saw the punch coming. I got him a good one in the nose, which dizzied him enough for me to knock the knife from his hand. Then I clubbed him a few times with the attaché case. That was that.”

“But he wasn’t alone?”

Reuben stared at me. “How did you know?”

I pointed to the dressings on his front and back. “Aren’t those bullet wounds? So you faced more than a meat cleaver and an exploding car.”

“Oh. Right.” He looked down at the bandages as if he’d forgotten about them. That was a bad sign—if his burns were so serious, he didn’t remember getting shot . . .

After a moment, Reuben said, “The fellow with the knife
did
have a friend. Waiting in a parked car. That must have been the getaway plan: the man in the office would grab my attaché case, then he’d be picked up by the chap in the car. They’d race off before the police arrived. Lucky for me, the driver had parked a long distance away. I suppose he wanted to stay out of the blast radius. So he was far enough off that when he shot at me, he missed. Mostly. Dr. Jacek said the bullet went in and out without hitting anything significant.”

Reuben pressed his hand against his side. In the quiet of the waiting room, I heard blood squish under the gauze.

“What kind of gun did the man have?” I asked.

“I don’t know. A handgun. Average size.”

I grimaced. Average size? What did that mean? When this was all over, I’d have to teach Reuben a few things about firearms. “Did the gun have a silencer?” I asked.

Reuben shook his head. “I doubt if the man came expecting to shoot. He thought I’d be killed in the explosion. The gun was just insurance if something went wrong.”

I shrugged. Reuben was probably right. “So this second man shot at you?”

“As I was clambering over debris to get out of the office. There wasn’t much left of the front of the building. I was lucky the whole place didn’t collapse on my head.”

“That probably wasn’t luck,” I said. “If they wanted to kill you but save the attaché case, they’d use as little explosive as possible. They’d also make sure the Diablo only had a few drops of petrol, to reduce the chance of fire. No more damage than necessary.”

“Easy for you to say,” Reuben muttered. “It looked like chaos to me. Things blasted in all directions . . . then this guy started shooting.”

“What did you do?”

“I dropped to the ground, gasping. Nearly skewered myself on broken glass. Isn’t that strange? I’d just been shot, but what stands out in my mind is being afraid of a bit of glass.”

“Sharp glass can be lethal,” I said. “Besides, the brain does odd things when you receive a major injury. Sometimes it fixates on trivialities as a way of blocking out pain.”

Reuben gave me a look. “You know all about major injuries, don’t you? But I’m learning, too. After a second, I barely felt the bullet. My mind was racing, trying to think how to escape.” He shrugged. “Then I caught a break. You know how some rent-a-car offices have a board where they hang the car keys? The explosion knocked things around so much, the key board had landed in the parking lot—only a few steps from me. Even better, some of the keys stayed on their hooks. So I grabbed all the keys I could and started trying to find a car that matched.”

“The man with the gun had stopped shooting?”

Reuben nodded. “There were dozens of parked cars between him and me. I kept low, out of the line of fire. After a while, I heard the getaway car’s engine rev. I thought,
Maybe the gunman has decided to run.
But no such luck. He started coming my way.”

“A determined fellow.” Also a fellow who was strangely unafraid of the police. These people had blown up a car near an international airport . . . a misdeed that would draw
massive
attention from concerned officials. Not just the Polish authorities; Interpol would get involved, as would MI6, the CIA, Russia’s FCIS, and a dozen other organizations that got nervous whenever “explosion” and “airport” appeared in the same sentence. It explained why Ok
cie had been on high alert when I arrived—Warsaw was now a global hot spot. Either the men who attacked Reuben didn’t realize they’d kicked over a hornet’s nest, or they believed they were safe from international manhunts.

“The keys I’d found,” Reuben continued, “had tags giving the license plates of the corresponding cars. The first matching car I came across had been too close to the blast—it’d flipped completely over on its roof. But the second car was still okay. I crawled inside and got it started just as the man who’d shot at me drove up.”

“Whereupon he shot at you again?”

Reuben nodded. “He hit the driver-side window, but I’d kept my head down. All I got was nuggets of glass down the back of my neck. Then I floored the accelerator and took off.”

“With the villain in hot pursuit.”

“My first car chase,” Reuben said. “I’d tell you every detail, but I don’t remember a thing.” He gave a rueful smile. “Okay, I remember being terrified, with occasional moments of blind panic. But how I got away—it’s just a blur.”

“I understand,” I told him. “You drove at high speeds taking ridiculous risks until you found you’d lost your pursuer.”

“That sums it up,” Reuben said. “For five minutes, I zigged and zagged like a maniac. Then all of a sudden, there was no one behind me. No one on the streets at all. So I pulled to the curb and passed out.” He closed his eyes, as if the memory embarrassed him. “When I woke, I felt so woozy . . . I was supposed to drive to my employer’s place, but it’s three or four hours out of town. I’d never make it unless I got patched up first.”

“So you discarded your vehicle and came here?”

Reuben hesitated.

“Oh no,” I said. “Reuben, please tell me you got rid of the car you were driving. The one that was seen by the man who shot you. Please tell me you left it miles away.”

“Um. Well . . .”

I glanced out the bell tower window. The streets of Stare Miasto are closed to automobile traffic, but the clinic was on the edge of the district. I could see a car park immediately across the way . . . and at this hour of night, there were only a few vehicles in the lot. It was hard to tell in the dark, but one of the cars might have been missing its driver-side window.

“Reuben,” I said, “the people who are after you will surely ask,
Where would a gunshot man go when he needs medical attention?
This clinic will immediately come to mind; they’ll surely check it out. If you were so careless as to leave your vehicle across the street, like a beacon saying,
He’s here, he’s here . . .
”

Reuben flinched and turned toward the door. “We’d better go.”

Beneath the bell tower, four identical black Ford Explorers slid to a stop in the slushy street. “Too late,” I said. “We now have a situation.”

2

WARSAW: THE CLINIC’S UPPER FLOOR

I turned from the window. “Tell me this, Reuben. Whatever you have in that attaché case . . . please say it’s not just money. If the people in those cars are thieves wanting cash, let them take it. We can unlock that handcuff—”

Reuben interrupted, “I don’t have a key. Either to the handcuff or the case.”

I stared at him. “You don’t have keys? You got that case through customs and airport security without even opening it?”

“My employers arranged it. They have clout with the authorities.”

“Apparently so.” I would have pressed for more details, but didn’t have time. “Look, I can probably pick the handcuff’s lock . . . and I will if that’ll save lives. We’ll toss the case down to the bad guys. No point anyone else getting hurt over money.”

“This isn’t about money,” Reuben said. “It’s about fighting goons like the ones outside. If I manage to make my delivery, criminals all over the world will be in serious trouble.”

“You’ve got evidence against them? Or secrets about criminal operations?” Before Reuben could answer, I waved him to silence. “Never mind. It’s too late to explain.”

Down in the street, dark figures were climbing from the Explorers: four from each of the four SUVs, making sixteen thugs in all. They wore the sort of black-on-black ski-mask-and-Kevlar outfits that have become mandatory for hoodlums with no fashion sense. Where
do
they buy those clothes? From some charity shop that gets hand-me-downs from Hollywood B movies? Just once, I’d like to face gunmen decked out in tuxedos. Or cashmere.

“One last question,” I said to Reuben. “If that attaché case is a delivery, where’s it supposed to go?”

He hesitated . . . but he realized if he wanted my help, he had to trust me. “St. Bernward’s Monastery,” he said, “a long way northeast of here, near the Lithuanian border. It’s hard to find—a lot of rough back roads—but if you drive me, I’ll show you the way.”

I raised my eyebrows, wondering how monks might fit into the increasingly convoluted picture . . . but I knew from experience that monasteries could contain a great deal more than prayers. “St. Bernward’s it is,” I said. “I’ll get you there, Reuben. Now follow me, do exactly what I tell you, and otherwise keep out of the way.”

If I’d been on my own, I would have gone upward. One floor up was the old church belfry, raftered with bells and open to the night. I could get outside from there and carefully climb down the bell tower’s wall. Once I reached solid ground, I’d vanish into the medieval complexities of Stare Miasto and eventually make my way to St. Bernward’s.

But Reuben’s presence ruled out such an easy escape. He was a scholar, not an athlete—even on his best day, he couldn’t descend a brick wall covered with December ice. His wounds just made things worse. So I had no choice but to escort him out by more conventional means: down through the actual clinic, where unfriendly men who thought that watch caps were fashionable headgear would try to “fill us with lead.”

Then again, I’ve always liked a challenge.

The waiting room where we started was two floors above street level. A single flight of steps led down one floor to an area that held half a dozen rooms for overnight and long-term patients. The next floor down—the ground floor—held treatment facilities, including an operating room and a general examination ward. I knew there was also a small laboratory, run by a gifted medical technician who was so clinically phobic of other human beings, she was unemployable by any traditional hospital. At Jacek’s, she fit right in. The staff here were all unfit for normal jobs, whether through mental imbalance, outstanding arrest warrants, or sheer inability to meet minimal standards of social behavior. These were underground people . . . and sadly for them, their untouchable status meant they couldn’t call the police when trouble crashed through their thick steel door.

When the crash came, it wasn’t loud. All I heard was a muffled thud—probably shaped demolition charges blasting out the lock that kept the door shut. Gunfire came immediately thereafter: gunfire from the attackers and return gunfire from the doorman’s MP5 A5. But in a straight-up firefight, sixteen against one, the doorman didn’t have a chance.

It was over in five seconds. Silence returned as the echoes of shooting faded.

The doorman was undoubtedly dead. Probably the receptionist too—hit in the cross fire or deliberately shot by thugs who didn’t know she was unarmed. I could only hope a few of the attackers got killed or wounded in the process. Much as I like a demanding fight, it’s nice to have help whittling down the odds.

Reuben and I hadn’t just stood slack-jawed listening to the firefight below us. The two of us hurried down the bell tower steps, with me practically carrying Reuben so he wouldn’t stumble. We made it to the floor below without major mishap, at which point I abandoned the stairway. Reuben and I were still a story above the street, but it would be suicide to continue down to ground level by the stairs. The assault teams would surely position a few shooters to pick off anyone coming out of the stairwell. That route was out of the question . . . at least until I’d reduced the opposition to a manageable number.

We left the stairs and dashed into the corridor. (I dashed; Reuben managed a wobbly shuffle.) As I’ve mentioned, this level of the clinic housed patients: three windowless rooms on either side, their doorways staggered so that no two were directly opposite each other. (Privacy is important in Dr. J.’s line of work.)

The first room we passed contained an ice-pale young woman with a plasma drip in her arm and prominent bite marks on her throat. Friday nights in Warsaw always produce a few of those. The next two rooms were empty, but the one after that held a man with his leg in plaster, suspended by one of those traction slings one sees in Three Stooges films but nowhere else. The man must have heard the shooting because he asked in Russian, “What’s going on?”

“The clinic is being invaded,” I told him in the same language.

“By police? Or the Sicilians?”

“Whoever they are, they aren’t after you.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh. Er.”

The man raised a valid point. Reuben might not be the only one in the clinic targeted by gun-toting thugs. This chap with the broken leg, for example—he had the look and aroma of the Russian Mafia, in which case he’d probably committed violence against rival gangsters during squabbles to control Warsaw’s underbelly. The Russian man’s victims might well seek revenge, especially if they knew their enemy lay helpless in a hospital bed.

But I didn’t think Warsaw’s local villains would invade Dr. Jacek’s. Gangsters needed this clinic; they depended on its services. The premises were therefore regarded as neutral ground, not to be used as a war zone. A single crook might still barge in with mayhem on his mind—criminals are famous for poor impulse control—but a massed assault by sixteen attackers sounded more like out of towners who didn’t care if Dr. Jacek remained in business after they were gone.

The rental-car bombers had shown the same attitude—no concern if their actions filled Warsaw with law enforcement agents. My gut instincts told me the bombers and assault teams both had the same target: whatever Reuben carried in his attaché case.

“No time to chat,” I told the Russian. “If I were you, I’d pretend to be unconscious. Maybe the shooters will leave you alone.” Also, if he was pretending to be unconscious, he’d be less likely to tell the attack squad where Reuben and I had gone . . . but I didn’t mention that, for fear of putting ideas into his head.

I dragged Reuben farther down the hall, past another empty room and to the doorway of one where a motionless figure lay wrapped in gauze. No way to tell if the patient was male or female; the only distinguishing feature was a breathing tube protruding from his or her mouth. The tube connected to respirator equipment, complete with a tank of oxygen . . . and there were two additional oxygen tanks for when the first tank ran out. The room also held a waist-high cart loaded with bandaging materials, plus a spray can of disinfectant and a good-sized bottle of rubbing alcohol. I could even see a pair of sharp scissors for cutting lengths of dressing.

“Lovely,” I said.

“What?” Reuben asked.

“You’re about to get a lesson in wise financial management. We start with a small nest egg.” I picked up the scissors. “Then with careful planning and prudent use of our original investment, we make our assets grow.” I tossed him some gauze off the cart. “Wrap your head in that, if you please . . . and be quick about it.”

Downstairs there were shouts and screams but no further gunfire. Good. I’d worried the assault teams might just kill every person in the clinic . . . but it sounded as if the invaders were merely rounding up captives. They’d gather the prisoners in some suitable location—perhaps the OR, the largest room in the clinic—then some thugs would stand guard while the rest fanned out in search of Reuben. I was glad they’d decided to secure the ground floor before dealing with the rest of the building; the longer they spent down there, the more time I had to prepare.

At last I heard feet coming up the stairs: two men making no attempt at silence or caution. They’d probably interrogated their prisoners enough to know that no one in the building had weapons except the doorman. The invaders also knew that their target, Reuben, was no great threat—he was wounded and not much of a fighter in the first place. If I was lucky, however, the hooligans weren’t aware of my own presence. I’d only been seen by the doorman and the receptionist, both of whom had likely been killed in the initial firefight. No one else knew I was here, so no one could give me away, even if threatened at gunpoint.

When the intruders first laid eyes on me, I wanted them to see me as just another patient. To encourage that impression I fixed a wad of gauze across the lower half of my face. Not only did that make me look wounded, it reduced the chance I might be recognized if these thugs had seen my picture in the papers. For clothing, I wrapped myself in a sheet from one of the unused beds. I still wore my normal clothes underneath, but Reuben assured me the sheet hid my ready-for-action outfit. It also hid the scissors, which I’d secured to my thigh with adhesive tape.

Reuben was concealed in sheets, too. Once he’d wrapped his head with medical dressing—only his eyes exposed—I’d ordered him into the empty bed in the second last room from the stairs. The attaché case locked to his wrist made a visible lump under the covers if he lay flat, but if he bent his knees, he could slide the case under his legs where it was reasonably unnoticeable beneath the bed linen. “Good enough,” I told him. “Now stay put until I call you.”

Twenty seconds later, two ski-masked men emerged from the stairwell. I’d positioned myself nearby, swaying rhythmically with what I hoped was a dazed expression and muttering plaintively in Polish, “I just took a little, I just took a little, I just took a little . . .”

“You!” one of the gunmen said in English. “Stand still.”

I pretended I hadn’t heard. “I just took a little, I just took a
little
.” Out of the corner of my eye, though, I sized up the men: bulky street beef carrying—what a surprise!—Uzi mini-pistols. Honestly, I have nothing against Uzis, but there
are
other SMGs in the world. When I see someone carrying an Uzi, I think,
Do you truly know anything about guns, or did you just shop by brand name?
Even homicidal thugs can be fashion victims.

“Don’t move!” the other gunman shouted at me. This one spoke Polish . . . not that it mattered, because I kept up my chant of, “I just took a little, I just took a little . . .”

“What’s she saying?” the first gunman asked in English.

The second gunman didn’t bother translating. “She’s high on something,” he said. “This place handles lots of junkies.” He looked at me with disdain. “Trash.”

“Maybe we should shoot her,” the first man suggested. “Give her a quick death instead of a slow one.”

Uh-oh,
I thought,
best to discourage such thinking.
I lifted my head and looked at the first man, the one who didn’t speak Polish. In stilted English, I said, “Hey, mister, you tourist? You like party, yes?”

My voice was still distant and dreamy, as if I spoke from reflex: a drugged-up gutter girl reciting her spiel, barely understanding what she said. The men, however, understood clearly . . . and the second one laughed to the first, “Hey, she likes you.”

“She can’t even focus on me,” the first said. But he could certainly focus on
me
. He eyed the sheet I’d clutched around my body . . . probably wondering if I was naked beneath.

“You like party,” I said, staggering up to him. “You like party, I like party, very nice.”

Just before I stumbled into him, I opened the sheet. Then I was tight against him, wrapping the sheet around both of us. With no hesitation—as if he were such a popular chap, women threw themselves at him every day—the man sent his hands a-roaming. When he felt my clothes under his fingers, he must have realized I wasn’t as naked as expected . . . but that didn’t slow him down. His breath was hot against my neck. Too bad his ski mask left his mouth uncovered.

“Some guys have all the luck,” the other man said, turning away. “I’ll check these rooms while you’re ‘busy.’”

“Hey,” said the man next to me. That’s all he ever got out. I’d grabbed the scissors taped to my thigh and had rammed their tips upward at just the right angle, past the man’s ribs and into his heart. Kevlar is fine for stopping bullets, but does nothing to protect against blade weapons. I’d been ready to jam my mouth against the man’s lips to silence him if he cried out . . . but he just loosed a sigh and became deadweight, held up by the scissors in his chest as if he were on a clothes hook.

Good. I didn’t mind killing the man—he was a killer himself, having helped shoot the doorman—but I preferred not to be kissing him as I perforated his aorta.

I killed a man once while kissing him. It’s an experience I’d rather not repeat.

If the other man noticed what I’d done, all he saw were movements hidden under the sheet. He’d assume I was up to something far different from what had actually happened. Besides, he was already heading down the hall to search for Reuben.