Hanging the Devil, page 29
Their quarry stepped through the front doors as if the museum was open to the public. Pasha marveled at the deserted streets but knew this had become the rule and not the exception for nonresidential neighborhoods. The city barely had enough cops to watch the neighborhoods where the politicians lived.
Pasha glanced at the ray gun in his brother’s arms as they walked.
“You sure you want to use that thing?”
“What are you worried about?” Ely raised the Bastard Blaster heroically over his head.
Pasha pointed at the weapon. “That’s what I’m worried about.”
“Relax, brother,” said Ely. “What could possibly go wrong?”
64
Maria tried counting all the things that could possibly go wrong and gave up after she reached a dozen. She may have quit Interpol but couldn’t stop thinking like a detective.
There were too many variables in this case—and far too many players—to control the outcome. Maria was trained to plan for every contingency, cut off every escape, and follow every lead to its logical conclusion. Work the angles, set a trap, and execute.
That was a case, but this was a circus.
Maria liked the circus, but she was starting to feel like a trapeze artist without a net. She glanced around the security room, double-checking each monitor to make sure none of the cameras were recording.
That’s when she noticed the figures moving rapidly across the screens.
Two men coming in through the front door, one holding a bulbous rifle. Another man rode the escalator on the far side of the museum.
Maria spotted a fourth man crossing the main floor, heading toward the staircase. He must have entered through the exit door located near the security room she was in now. If he took the stairs, that would put him close to the special acquisitions gallery on the second floor.
Maria glanced at the monitor covering the gallery and froze.
Grace was spinning at the end of a rope. Cape and Sally were in the hallway near the entrance. And inside the gallery, moving toward the girl, was a white cloud of smoke.
Maria was still a cop at heart.
She ran to the end of the control panel, grabbed the phone, and dialed 9-1-1. She didn’t bother to wait for the dispatcher. She left the receiver on the desk and the phone off the hook. Then she thumbed the safety off her gun and opened the door.
65
Ely and Pasha opened the museum door in time to see Fang reach the top of the escalator.
Fang stepped onto the second floor landing, turned toward the galleries, and glanced over the railing as he walked. He spotted Ely and Pasha coming through the main entrance.
Fang and Pasha made eye contact.
Pasha cursed under his breath.
“I told you we should have counted to ten before we followed him.”
“Too late now, brother.” Ely squinted at a button on the grip of his rifle.
Fang drew a handgun from behind his back and took aim over the balcony.
“What are you waiting for?” Pasha smacked his brother on the back. “Blast that bastard!”
Ely lowered the rifle, grabbed Pasha by the sleeve and yanked him sideways, pulling him diagonally across the lobby to a corner behind the escalator. They were out of Fang’s line of sight but could hear him muttering in Chinese as he tried to decide whether to continue to the galleries or descend the escalator and start shooting.
“We’re sitting ducks,” said Pasha. “Why didn’t you blast him?”
“It’s charging,” said Ely.
“Charging?”
“It takes a lot of power, Pasha.” Ely checked to see if the green light was illuminated. “Why didn’t you draw your pistol?”
Pasha looked at his shoes. “I left it in the car.”
“What?”
“I got distracted, okay?” Pasha kicked at an imaginary rock. “The people in the park—”
“—where is it?”
“Underneath my seat,” said Pasha. “Where’s yours?”
Ely cradled the rifle like a newborn. “I have this baby.”
Pasha scowled. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll kill you.”
“If this doesn’t work, we’re both dead.” Ely craned his neck to peer at the balcony without exposing his body. “He hasn’t come down…do we follow?”
“No way, he’s got the high ground.” Pasha pointed across the lobby toward the back of the museum. “Stay close to the wall, there’s a staircase in back.”
They left the main entrance and escalator behind and were passing the gift shop before they noticed a man standing directly ahead of them. He was about twenty yards away, his back to them, facing a woman who was pointing a gun at him.
The man’s right hand was raised as if he’d been frozen mid-throw.
Ely and Pasha stopped in their tracks as the woman caught sight of them. Without changing her aim, she jutted her chin in their direction.
“Quien son ustedes?” she asked. “Who the hell are you two?”
Pasha leaned closer to Ely. “I think we should answer her—”
“—she’s very attractive,” said Ely, “and stylishly dressed—”
“—and she has a gun.” Pasha raised his voice. “I’m Pasha, this is Ely.”
“Hi, Pasha and Ely, I’m Maria.” The woman tilted her head but the gun never wavered. She held her shooting stance like a cop. “What brings you to the museum?”
“We work for Maksim Valenko.”
If raised eyebrows were any indication, the woman recognized Valenko’s name.
It also got the attention of the man striking the Statue of Liberty pose. His raised arm didn’t move but he twisted his head like an owl and looked over his shoulder.
Ely elbowed his brother and hissed under his breath. “That’s the Asian guy from the escalator.”
“How’d he get here so fast?” asked Pasha. “He’s not even out of breath.”
“He looks very fit,” said Ely, “maybe he has a good cardio regimen.”
“No way,” said Pasha. “We were walking pretty fast, and he’d have to come downstairs.”
“Maybe he’s a clone.”
“There aren’t any clones, tupoy,” said Pasha. “Maybe he’s a twin.”
“Same thing.”
“Wait,” said Pasha. “What’s that in his hand?”
The man was holding a black disk.
From Ely’s vantage, the man’s thumb was plainly visible, sliding back and forth over a red button on the side of the disk. The woman named Maria couldn’t see the button, which meant she didn’t notice when the roving thumb pressed down, the skin under the nail turning pale from the pressure.
When the red light started to flash, Ely was the first to react.
“Pasha, move.”
The man with the hockey puck pivoted on his left heel and threw sidearm directly at the Russians. Pasha scurried to the left while Ely lunged to the right.
Maria fired. The shot went wide and ricocheted off the marble floor.
The echo bounced between the stone walls like a racquetball. Ely wondered fleetingly if Maria was a cop, and if she’d been reluctant to shoot a man in the back. Maybe she aimed for his leg and missed. Either way, she missed.
Ely scrambled on his hands and knees into the gift shop.
The hockey puck slid down the middle of the floor. The red light blinked faster.
Pasha crouched against the wall on the left. Ely slid under a table filled with calendars. When the disk reached the spot where they’d been standing—the midpoint between them—it exploded. The acoustics of the lobby turned the blast into a concussive wave of pure pressure.
Glass shattered on either side of Ely, bouncing like raindrops off the marble floor. Pasha tried to stand but staggered against the wall and pressed his hands to his ears. Maria fell to one knee. She swayed but held the gun steady in her right hand while the other hand cupped her left ear.
Maria tried to get a bead on the bomber, but he started running the moment he made the throw and disappeared up the broad staircase before she could take a second shot.
A second explosion reverberated from somewhere far away. It sounded like thunder. Ely wondered if it was raining outside, then worried he might have a concussion.
Maria lowered her gun, spared a last glance at the Russians, then stood shakily and followed up the stairs. She disappeared from sight, her footsteps echoing off the marble walls, but Ely could barely hear them over the ringing in his ears.
66
Cape didn’t hear any footsteps because the echoes of the gunshot and the boom from the explosion were still reverberating around the museum.
The ragged sound of his own breathing didn’t help. His broken ribs had turned into saws.
He started to turn away from the gallery toward the stairway when Sally’s hand closed around his arm like a vise. Her expression was a warning to keep his mouth shut.
Sally was one step ahead, at the threshold to the special exhibitions galley. Cape moved sideways at an oblique angle to glance over Sally’s shoulder into the room, expecting to see a theft-in-progress.
He didn’t expect to see Grace hanging upside down.
She was twenty feet away, ten feet off the ground near the east wall, spinning slowly. Between the door and Grace was a low table on which a variety of teapots were displayed, each carved into the shape of an animal from the Chinese zodiac. Four feet beyond that was a pedestal five feet high supporting a stone carving of a rhinoceros.
As she rotated away from the wall, Grace caught sight of Sally and frantically waved her arms to slow her rotation, but that didn’t seem to work. Sally raised a finger to her lips before they lost eye contact. Grace nodded and remained silent as she rotated clockwise.
Sally took a step back from the door and pressed her lips against Cape’s ear, careful to keep the curved blade of the naginata at arm’s length.
“There’s someone in the gallery.”
Cape’s whisper was barely audible. “Someone who isn’t upside down?”
Sally nodded and extended the index and middle fingers of her free hand, inverting them to represent a human figure. She pantomimed a makeshift plan, interrupting her own narrative periodically to point at herself or Cape. It took less than a minute, but by the time she finished, they could hear the faint echoes of footsteps on marble stairs.
“We don’t have much time,” said Cape.
Sally’s expression was grim. “Neither does Grace.”
67
Grace’s expression was grim, but she looked happy because her frown, like the rest of her, was upside down.
Cape could only imagine his own expression as he clenched his jaw against the serrated agony of his ribs. Once he charted a clear path across the gallery floor, he plowed forward as fast as possible, acutely aware that he was racing Sally. His legs fought a losing battle with gravity.
Gravity needed a win, because Sally was kicking its ass.
Cape ran diagonally toward Grace while Sally took two loping strides to the left, bouncing on her toes like a high-jumper approaching the bar. She held the long sword parallel to the floor as she sprang onto the low table, landing on her right foot in a narrow space between two teapots. Without losing momentum or touching the table with her other leg, Sally leapt onto the small pedestal, somehow finding purchase for her foot without wrecking the rhinoceros.
Then Sally debunked Newtonian physics altogether.
Cape was keeping pace when she launched herself off the pedestal. Her body flattened as her leg snapped back, the long sword extended like a spear as she vaulted higher. At the apex she bent at the waist, rolled into a forward somersault, and swung the naginata sideways.
The blade was a silver whisper that sent a chill down Cape’s spine. He marveled Sally hadn’t severed the girl’s foot at the ankle. Sally landed on both feet, bounced like she had springs in her heels, and kept running deeper into the gallery.
Cape fell to his knees like a supplicant directly beneath the plummeting girl.
Grace tried to do a sit-up in midair, instinct telling her to protect her head, but she was still inverted when Cape caught her. He fell backward to dissipate the momentum, his legs bending at angles that made his knees want to look for another job.
His skull banged against the marble floor as Grace’s head bounced off his broken ribs like a toddler on a trampoline. Cape saw stars as he craned his neck sideways to get a closer look at his catch. Grace’s smile was right-side-up despite the fear in her eyes.
She rolled off his chest and one of her knees caught Cape across the bridge of his nose.
“I’m s—”
“—don’t worry, it was already broken.” Cape rolled onto his side to get his knees under him and stand, but the added weight against his ribs sent him coughing and wheezing like an asthmatic at an anthrax party.
By the time he got it under control, Grace was patting him on the back.
“Did you swallow something bad?” she asked.
“Only my pride,” said Cape, gasping.
“Thanks for catching me.”
“Thanks for dropping in.”
Grace spun around, looking for Sally. “We have to leave, there’s—”
“—someone else here.”
Cape stood on wobbly legs and rested a hand on Grace’s shoulder. He nudged her sideways and put himself between her and the gallery entrance.
Grace had been looking in the other direction, trying to see past the exhibits to spot Sally, but now she glanced at Cape. She followed his gaze and realized why he had shifted their positions, and why his other hand was drifting slowly toward the gun on his belt.
A man was standing at the entrance watching them. He had malice in his eyes and hockey pucks in his hands.
“That’s Fang.” Cape raised his voice so the man could hear. “Or Feng, it’s hard to tell.”
“You should be dead,” said the man.
“I get that a lot,” said Cape. “Feng?”
The man nodded.
“What does he want?” asked Grace in a whisper.
“Me, dead,” Cape said under his breath. “Aren’t you paying attention?” Then, more loudly, “I’m glad it’s you and not your brother.”
“Why?” Feng moved his arms fractionally and shifted his weight to his rear foot.
“I kind of like your brother,” said Cape. “And you killed my car.”
Feng’s right arm swung away from his side but stopped moving when he saw the gun. Cape cocked the hammer on the revolver. The metallic click was unexpectedly loud in the cavernous space.
If this encounter had occurred the day before, Cape might have appealed to Feng’s sense of reason by saying how reluctant he was to shoot someone, or by mentioning how unsympathetic Feng would seem if he threw a bomb across a room full of priceless antiques at a girl less than half his age. But a lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
Cape’s car was dead. His ribs were broken. An eleven-year-old got hung upside down like a duck in a restaurant window. Cape sighted down the barrel and increased pressure on the trigger.
With his eyes on Feng, he spoke quietly to Grace. “Get ready to ru—”
A boom followed by a crash made Feng flinch before Cape could fire.
Cape felt Grace tugging frantically at his shirt. He eased his finger off the trigger but kept the hammer back and the Ruger raised as he traced the sound of the crash to a fallen column and shattered vase.
Standing among the shards of porcelain stood Sally. Her right arm was holding the cavalry sword like a javelin. Her left arm was bleeding. She backed toward them, feet sliding noiselessly across the marble floor.
Ahead and to the right of Sally, something moved behind a row of life-sized statues of mythological deities and demons. It was difficult to discern a definite shape as the shadows shifted between the statues. Cape had a vague sense of flowing robes and white mist.
Then he saw the ghost.
Cape felt cold fingers run across his scalp. He wasn’t superstitious but couldn’t deny the pale poltergeist brought a chill to the room. A primal reaction to seeing a figure from folklore manifest in the real world.
Sally pivoted slowly so her right foot was behind her and her left closer to the ghost. She angled the sword so it pointed toward the floor at a thirty-degree angle. The ghost’s right arm shot forward, the cuff of his robe billowing and flaring from the motion.
A flash of silver flew past his open palm as a long ribbon emerged from his open sleeve. The triangular blade at the end of the ribbon flew at Sally’s face like an angry arrow. Sally leaned back as if she was doing the limbo as the blade flew over her head.
The ghost spun his wrist to make the ribbon snap like a whip, which made the blade spin like a medieval flail. Sally twisted her hips and swung the naginata across her body.
Her blade caught the ribbon but didn’t cut through.
Before the ghost could react, Sally spun her sword, yanking him closer. The ghost staggered, smiling as he regained his footing. He looped the ribbon around his wrist and tightened his grip. It was a tug-of-war to determine who would be left standing once the blades were freed.
A test of balance had begun.
Cape sensed movement on his left and realized too late he’d been distracted by the battle. Watching the wrong bad guy. He turned in time to see Feng whip his arm in a sidearm throw.
Even if Cape shot Feng, it was too late. The black disk with the flashing red light slid across the floor as if the marble was a sheet of ice.
Cape wondered how many seconds they had left before they died.
68
Maria wondered how many seconds she was running behind the mad bomber as she reached the landing halfway up the stairs. She also wondered how many bombs he had left.
He had turned right at the top of the stairs and disappeared without looking back. Maria worried he might throw another bomb down the stairs, but either he figured his lead was sufficient or he was saving his explosives for something else.
Pasha glanced at the ray gun in his brother’s arms as they walked.
“You sure you want to use that thing?”
“What are you worried about?” Ely raised the Bastard Blaster heroically over his head.
Pasha pointed at the weapon. “That’s what I’m worried about.”
“Relax, brother,” said Ely. “What could possibly go wrong?”
64
Maria tried counting all the things that could possibly go wrong and gave up after she reached a dozen. She may have quit Interpol but couldn’t stop thinking like a detective.
There were too many variables in this case—and far too many players—to control the outcome. Maria was trained to plan for every contingency, cut off every escape, and follow every lead to its logical conclusion. Work the angles, set a trap, and execute.
That was a case, but this was a circus.
Maria liked the circus, but she was starting to feel like a trapeze artist without a net. She glanced around the security room, double-checking each monitor to make sure none of the cameras were recording.
That’s when she noticed the figures moving rapidly across the screens.
Two men coming in through the front door, one holding a bulbous rifle. Another man rode the escalator on the far side of the museum.
Maria spotted a fourth man crossing the main floor, heading toward the staircase. He must have entered through the exit door located near the security room she was in now. If he took the stairs, that would put him close to the special acquisitions gallery on the second floor.
Maria glanced at the monitor covering the gallery and froze.
Grace was spinning at the end of a rope. Cape and Sally were in the hallway near the entrance. And inside the gallery, moving toward the girl, was a white cloud of smoke.
Maria was still a cop at heart.
She ran to the end of the control panel, grabbed the phone, and dialed 9-1-1. She didn’t bother to wait for the dispatcher. She left the receiver on the desk and the phone off the hook. Then she thumbed the safety off her gun and opened the door.
65
Ely and Pasha opened the museum door in time to see Fang reach the top of the escalator.
Fang stepped onto the second floor landing, turned toward the galleries, and glanced over the railing as he walked. He spotted Ely and Pasha coming through the main entrance.
Fang and Pasha made eye contact.
Pasha cursed under his breath.
“I told you we should have counted to ten before we followed him.”
“Too late now, brother.” Ely squinted at a button on the grip of his rifle.
Fang drew a handgun from behind his back and took aim over the balcony.
“What are you waiting for?” Pasha smacked his brother on the back. “Blast that bastard!”
Ely lowered the rifle, grabbed Pasha by the sleeve and yanked him sideways, pulling him diagonally across the lobby to a corner behind the escalator. They were out of Fang’s line of sight but could hear him muttering in Chinese as he tried to decide whether to continue to the galleries or descend the escalator and start shooting.
“We’re sitting ducks,” said Pasha. “Why didn’t you blast him?”
“It’s charging,” said Ely.
“Charging?”
“It takes a lot of power, Pasha.” Ely checked to see if the green light was illuminated. “Why didn’t you draw your pistol?”
Pasha looked at his shoes. “I left it in the car.”
“What?”
“I got distracted, okay?” Pasha kicked at an imaginary rock. “The people in the park—”
“—where is it?”
“Underneath my seat,” said Pasha. “Where’s yours?”
Ely cradled the rifle like a newborn. “I have this baby.”
Pasha scowled. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll kill you.”
“If this doesn’t work, we’re both dead.” Ely craned his neck to peer at the balcony without exposing his body. “He hasn’t come down…do we follow?”
“No way, he’s got the high ground.” Pasha pointed across the lobby toward the back of the museum. “Stay close to the wall, there’s a staircase in back.”
They left the main entrance and escalator behind and were passing the gift shop before they noticed a man standing directly ahead of them. He was about twenty yards away, his back to them, facing a woman who was pointing a gun at him.
The man’s right hand was raised as if he’d been frozen mid-throw.
Ely and Pasha stopped in their tracks as the woman caught sight of them. Without changing her aim, she jutted her chin in their direction.
“Quien son ustedes?” she asked. “Who the hell are you two?”
Pasha leaned closer to Ely. “I think we should answer her—”
“—she’s very attractive,” said Ely, “and stylishly dressed—”
“—and she has a gun.” Pasha raised his voice. “I’m Pasha, this is Ely.”
“Hi, Pasha and Ely, I’m Maria.” The woman tilted her head but the gun never wavered. She held her shooting stance like a cop. “What brings you to the museum?”
“We work for Maksim Valenko.”
If raised eyebrows were any indication, the woman recognized Valenko’s name.
It also got the attention of the man striking the Statue of Liberty pose. His raised arm didn’t move but he twisted his head like an owl and looked over his shoulder.
Ely elbowed his brother and hissed under his breath. “That’s the Asian guy from the escalator.”
“How’d he get here so fast?” asked Pasha. “He’s not even out of breath.”
“He looks very fit,” said Ely, “maybe he has a good cardio regimen.”
“No way,” said Pasha. “We were walking pretty fast, and he’d have to come downstairs.”
“Maybe he’s a clone.”
“There aren’t any clones, tupoy,” said Pasha. “Maybe he’s a twin.”
“Same thing.”
“Wait,” said Pasha. “What’s that in his hand?”
The man was holding a black disk.
From Ely’s vantage, the man’s thumb was plainly visible, sliding back and forth over a red button on the side of the disk. The woman named Maria couldn’t see the button, which meant she didn’t notice when the roving thumb pressed down, the skin under the nail turning pale from the pressure.
When the red light started to flash, Ely was the first to react.
“Pasha, move.”
The man with the hockey puck pivoted on his left heel and threw sidearm directly at the Russians. Pasha scurried to the left while Ely lunged to the right.
Maria fired. The shot went wide and ricocheted off the marble floor.
The echo bounced between the stone walls like a racquetball. Ely wondered fleetingly if Maria was a cop, and if she’d been reluctant to shoot a man in the back. Maybe she aimed for his leg and missed. Either way, she missed.
Ely scrambled on his hands and knees into the gift shop.
The hockey puck slid down the middle of the floor. The red light blinked faster.
Pasha crouched against the wall on the left. Ely slid under a table filled with calendars. When the disk reached the spot where they’d been standing—the midpoint between them—it exploded. The acoustics of the lobby turned the blast into a concussive wave of pure pressure.
Glass shattered on either side of Ely, bouncing like raindrops off the marble floor. Pasha tried to stand but staggered against the wall and pressed his hands to his ears. Maria fell to one knee. She swayed but held the gun steady in her right hand while the other hand cupped her left ear.
Maria tried to get a bead on the bomber, but he started running the moment he made the throw and disappeared up the broad staircase before she could take a second shot.
A second explosion reverberated from somewhere far away. It sounded like thunder. Ely wondered if it was raining outside, then worried he might have a concussion.
Maria lowered her gun, spared a last glance at the Russians, then stood shakily and followed up the stairs. She disappeared from sight, her footsteps echoing off the marble walls, but Ely could barely hear them over the ringing in his ears.
66
Cape didn’t hear any footsteps because the echoes of the gunshot and the boom from the explosion were still reverberating around the museum.
The ragged sound of his own breathing didn’t help. His broken ribs had turned into saws.
He started to turn away from the gallery toward the stairway when Sally’s hand closed around his arm like a vise. Her expression was a warning to keep his mouth shut.
Sally was one step ahead, at the threshold to the special exhibitions galley. Cape moved sideways at an oblique angle to glance over Sally’s shoulder into the room, expecting to see a theft-in-progress.
He didn’t expect to see Grace hanging upside down.
She was twenty feet away, ten feet off the ground near the east wall, spinning slowly. Between the door and Grace was a low table on which a variety of teapots were displayed, each carved into the shape of an animal from the Chinese zodiac. Four feet beyond that was a pedestal five feet high supporting a stone carving of a rhinoceros.
As she rotated away from the wall, Grace caught sight of Sally and frantically waved her arms to slow her rotation, but that didn’t seem to work. Sally raised a finger to her lips before they lost eye contact. Grace nodded and remained silent as she rotated clockwise.
Sally took a step back from the door and pressed her lips against Cape’s ear, careful to keep the curved blade of the naginata at arm’s length.
“There’s someone in the gallery.”
Cape’s whisper was barely audible. “Someone who isn’t upside down?”
Sally nodded and extended the index and middle fingers of her free hand, inverting them to represent a human figure. She pantomimed a makeshift plan, interrupting her own narrative periodically to point at herself or Cape. It took less than a minute, but by the time she finished, they could hear the faint echoes of footsteps on marble stairs.
“We don’t have much time,” said Cape.
Sally’s expression was grim. “Neither does Grace.”
67
Grace’s expression was grim, but she looked happy because her frown, like the rest of her, was upside down.
Cape could only imagine his own expression as he clenched his jaw against the serrated agony of his ribs. Once he charted a clear path across the gallery floor, he plowed forward as fast as possible, acutely aware that he was racing Sally. His legs fought a losing battle with gravity.
Gravity needed a win, because Sally was kicking its ass.
Cape ran diagonally toward Grace while Sally took two loping strides to the left, bouncing on her toes like a high-jumper approaching the bar. She held the long sword parallel to the floor as she sprang onto the low table, landing on her right foot in a narrow space between two teapots. Without losing momentum or touching the table with her other leg, Sally leapt onto the small pedestal, somehow finding purchase for her foot without wrecking the rhinoceros.
Then Sally debunked Newtonian physics altogether.
Cape was keeping pace when she launched herself off the pedestal. Her body flattened as her leg snapped back, the long sword extended like a spear as she vaulted higher. At the apex she bent at the waist, rolled into a forward somersault, and swung the naginata sideways.
The blade was a silver whisper that sent a chill down Cape’s spine. He marveled Sally hadn’t severed the girl’s foot at the ankle. Sally landed on both feet, bounced like she had springs in her heels, and kept running deeper into the gallery.
Cape fell to his knees like a supplicant directly beneath the plummeting girl.
Grace tried to do a sit-up in midair, instinct telling her to protect her head, but she was still inverted when Cape caught her. He fell backward to dissipate the momentum, his legs bending at angles that made his knees want to look for another job.
His skull banged against the marble floor as Grace’s head bounced off his broken ribs like a toddler on a trampoline. Cape saw stars as he craned his neck sideways to get a closer look at his catch. Grace’s smile was right-side-up despite the fear in her eyes.
She rolled off his chest and one of her knees caught Cape across the bridge of his nose.
“I’m s—”
“—don’t worry, it was already broken.” Cape rolled onto his side to get his knees under him and stand, but the added weight against his ribs sent him coughing and wheezing like an asthmatic at an anthrax party.
By the time he got it under control, Grace was patting him on the back.
“Did you swallow something bad?” she asked.
“Only my pride,” said Cape, gasping.
“Thanks for catching me.”
“Thanks for dropping in.”
Grace spun around, looking for Sally. “We have to leave, there’s—”
“—someone else here.”
Cape stood on wobbly legs and rested a hand on Grace’s shoulder. He nudged her sideways and put himself between her and the gallery entrance.
Grace had been looking in the other direction, trying to see past the exhibits to spot Sally, but now she glanced at Cape. She followed his gaze and realized why he had shifted their positions, and why his other hand was drifting slowly toward the gun on his belt.
A man was standing at the entrance watching them. He had malice in his eyes and hockey pucks in his hands.
“That’s Fang.” Cape raised his voice so the man could hear. “Or Feng, it’s hard to tell.”
“You should be dead,” said the man.
“I get that a lot,” said Cape. “Feng?”
The man nodded.
“What does he want?” asked Grace in a whisper.
“Me, dead,” Cape said under his breath. “Aren’t you paying attention?” Then, more loudly, “I’m glad it’s you and not your brother.”
“Why?” Feng moved his arms fractionally and shifted his weight to his rear foot.
“I kind of like your brother,” said Cape. “And you killed my car.”
Feng’s right arm swung away from his side but stopped moving when he saw the gun. Cape cocked the hammer on the revolver. The metallic click was unexpectedly loud in the cavernous space.
If this encounter had occurred the day before, Cape might have appealed to Feng’s sense of reason by saying how reluctant he was to shoot someone, or by mentioning how unsympathetic Feng would seem if he threw a bomb across a room full of priceless antiques at a girl less than half his age. But a lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
Cape’s car was dead. His ribs were broken. An eleven-year-old got hung upside down like a duck in a restaurant window. Cape sighted down the barrel and increased pressure on the trigger.
With his eyes on Feng, he spoke quietly to Grace. “Get ready to ru—”
A boom followed by a crash made Feng flinch before Cape could fire.
Cape felt Grace tugging frantically at his shirt. He eased his finger off the trigger but kept the hammer back and the Ruger raised as he traced the sound of the crash to a fallen column and shattered vase.
Standing among the shards of porcelain stood Sally. Her right arm was holding the cavalry sword like a javelin. Her left arm was bleeding. She backed toward them, feet sliding noiselessly across the marble floor.
Ahead and to the right of Sally, something moved behind a row of life-sized statues of mythological deities and demons. It was difficult to discern a definite shape as the shadows shifted between the statues. Cape had a vague sense of flowing robes and white mist.
Then he saw the ghost.
Cape felt cold fingers run across his scalp. He wasn’t superstitious but couldn’t deny the pale poltergeist brought a chill to the room. A primal reaction to seeing a figure from folklore manifest in the real world.
Sally pivoted slowly so her right foot was behind her and her left closer to the ghost. She angled the sword so it pointed toward the floor at a thirty-degree angle. The ghost’s right arm shot forward, the cuff of his robe billowing and flaring from the motion.
A flash of silver flew past his open palm as a long ribbon emerged from his open sleeve. The triangular blade at the end of the ribbon flew at Sally’s face like an angry arrow. Sally leaned back as if she was doing the limbo as the blade flew over her head.
The ghost spun his wrist to make the ribbon snap like a whip, which made the blade spin like a medieval flail. Sally twisted her hips and swung the naginata across her body.
Her blade caught the ribbon but didn’t cut through.
Before the ghost could react, Sally spun her sword, yanking him closer. The ghost staggered, smiling as he regained his footing. He looped the ribbon around his wrist and tightened his grip. It was a tug-of-war to determine who would be left standing once the blades were freed.
A test of balance had begun.
Cape sensed movement on his left and realized too late he’d been distracted by the battle. Watching the wrong bad guy. He turned in time to see Feng whip his arm in a sidearm throw.
Even if Cape shot Feng, it was too late. The black disk with the flashing red light slid across the floor as if the marble was a sheet of ice.
Cape wondered how many seconds they had left before they died.
68
Maria wondered how many seconds she was running behind the mad bomber as she reached the landing halfway up the stairs. She also wondered how many bombs he had left.
He had turned right at the top of the stairs and disappeared without looking back. Maria worried he might throw another bomb down the stairs, but either he figured his lead was sufficient or he was saving his explosives for something else.
