Zurich, Switzerland
Avery knew better than to raise her head. Not that she could have even if she really wanted to. The concussion had knocked the wind out of her, and her arms and legs felt like they were made of Jell-O. There were bright streaks across her vision, like the burned-in after-image of a flash camera, and her ears were ringing.
She recognized these symptoms as the effects of a stun grenade—commonly called a “flash-bang.” Considered “less-lethal,” the grenades created a blinding flash and a deafening eruption of sound, designed to disorient hostile targets while causing only minimal blast damage. Counter-terrorist operatives and SWAT teams used them when initiating raids.
It wasn’t the kind of hardware she would have expected from “paranoid Internet conspiracy theorists,” as Loew had called the Immortal’s adherents.
As the haze receded, she realized the follow-on assault by the invading force had already begun. Bullets zipped through the air above her, slamming into the gallery walls. The reports were coming from all sides, which told her that Greg and Kasey were returning fire. That was small comfort. She was caught in the crossfire.
She blinked furiously to clear away the retinal fireworks and found herself face to face with... a face. It wasn’t Loew or the man who had come bearing news of the impending attack. In fact, it wasn’t a person at all, but rather a sculpted metal simulacrum.
The Brazen Head.
There was not a doubt in her mind that the brass artifact was what the attackers were really after. On an impulse, she reached out for it, taking it with both hands and pulling it close to her chest. It was a little heavier than she expected—about twenty-five pounds if she had to guess.
The display column lay on its side nearby, evidently knocked over by the concussive blast. Loew lay nearby, unmoving, unconscious maybe. Hans, the German-speaking security expert, was crawling toward him. Further away, Kasey and Greg were hunkered down behind another fallen column, trading fire with the attackers who were shooting from the cover of the gallery entrance. The air was filled with smoke and flying bits of debris, obscuring her view of the assailants, but judging by the rate and intensity of the incoming fire, there were several of them, and they had some serious firepower.
Guess we’re not getting out that way, she thought, and just as quickly realized what she had to do.
Kasey and Greg wouldn’t be able to hold them off forever. It was a miracle they hadn’t already been overrun, but eventually they would run out of ammunition, and then it would be over. The bad guys would take the Brazen Head and probably kill them all.
She couldn’t let that happen.
Just beyond Loew and Hans was the door through which the latter had arrived. She didn’t know where that door led, but assumed the safe room, which was probably some kind of secure panic room, must be somewhere beyond. If she could reach it, barricade herself inside, wait for the police to arrive...
She shook her head. Even if she could find the panic room and figure out how to bolt the door, it would do her friends no good. No, she needed a better answer.
She needed to draw the enemy away.
Before she completely knew what she was going to do, she started moving, crawling toward the exit. From the corner of her eye, she could see Hans trying to drag Loew behind cover. Suddenly, he jerked as if touching a live wire, and then collapsed.
“Stay down!” Greg’s shout was barely audible over the din.
She ignored the admonition. Instead of flattening herself to reduce her profile, she turned, making sure that the Brazen Head was visible to the gunmen at the far end of the gallery. Hopefully, they wouldn’t shoot her and risk damaging the prize. Then, she leaped up and bolted for the exit.
“Avery, no!”
The cry trailed her into a long dimly lit hallway, adorned with red carpeting and plain wooden doors, all of which were closed. At the far end of the hall, mounted to the wall near the ceiling, was an illuminated green and white sign which depicted a running man and an arrow pointing right. It was the standard ISO emergency exit indicator, used in Switzerland and most countries of the world, and she knew there would be several more, one at each junction, to show the quickest escape route. Clutching the Brazen Head to her abdomen, she ran down the hall and made the turn, and started looking for the next sign. She found it on a red door at the end of the next hall, and this time, the pictograph of the running man was descending a staircase, and the arrow beside it was pointing down.
When she reached the door, she threw a glance over her shoulder to see if Greg and Kasey were following. They were not, but the shooting had stopped. That meant one of two things. Either the bad guys had seen her duck out and broken contact, exiting out the front in order to intercept her, or Greg and Kasey were dead, and the killers would be coming down the hall any second.
She hoped it was the former, and then thought about what that would actually mean and started down the stairs. Energized by adrenaline, she bounded down three steps at a time, with the surefootedness of a mountain goat. The descent was a blur, and it was only when she ran out of steps that she realized she had reached ground level.
There were two doors before her, but only one of them was marked with the exit sign. She hit it without slowing, throwing her hip forward into the panic bar. The latch disengaged and the door started to swing out, but then hit something solid and stopped. So did Avery, but only for an instant. Even as she rebounded back, the door opened, seemingly of its own volition, revealing a tall figure clad head-to-toe in black.
And holding a gun.
His face was mostly hidden behind a black balaclava, but she could see his eyes because they were staring right at her.
Then his gaze dropped to the Brazen Head, and his eyes went wide in recognition.
Avery reacted without thinking. She sprang forward and swung the brass artifact at the man’s head. She heard a crunch and a gonging sound as it connected, and the man staggered back, dazed. Avery kept going, shouldering past the man and bursting out into the open.
She found herself in a narrow alley—too narrow to accommodate vehicles. Aside from the man she’d just clobbered, the space was deserted. She looked left then right, then decided to go right because the distance to the cross street was shorter. She resisted the urge to look back, to see if the gunman she had brained was back up and closing on her, and instead brought her gaze forward and poured on a burst of speed until she rounded the corner.
The street, which was barely wider than the alley, lined with four- and five-story buildings that loomed above like the walls of a canyon, seemed to go on forever. The brick pavement was crowded with pedestrians browsing the shops and idling at the outdoor cafes, and more than a few heads swung toward her as she sprinted past. She took comfort in the fact that, even with a disembodied brass head tucked under her arm, she was a lot less conspicuous than the man chasing her.
After the first hundred yards or so, she realized that not only did she not know where she was going, but she had no idea where she actually was. She had glanced at a map of the city during her initial research, but trying to reconcile that with her current surroundings was impossible. The street seemed to go on forever, undulating back and forth like a snake. She knew the river was only a few blocks to the west, but she had no idea which direction that was.
Abruptly, the serpentine urban canyon opened up into a plaza with streets that branched off in several directions. Directly in front of her was the corner of a large stone building with Romanesque-style arched windows. The structure was positioned at a forty-five-degree angle so that she could see two sides of it; to the right, it joined with another older looking building with an impressive looking tower...no, two towers of equal height, rising twice as high as the rest of the building and topped with matching blue and white pennants. A third tower—a red spire—rose up from the opposite side of the sprawling edifice to her left.
She knew this building. The Grossmunster, a Twelfth Century monastery church commissioned, it was said, by Charlemagne himself. The towers of the Grossmunster were the Zurich equivalent of the Transamerica pyramid in San Francisco, or Big Ben and the Tower of London.
She darted across the plaza, past a lonely tree that looked like something from a Lord of the Rings movie—of course, that could be said for much of Zurich—and ran for the double wooden doors, situated just below the north tower.
As was often the case with medieval architecture, the interior of the church was smaller than its notoriety would have suggested. By comparison to the cathedrals of Paris, the nave was as austere as a cave. Most of the decorative art had been removed by Protestant reformers in the Sixteenth Century, but there were a few touches of color, mostly from stained glass panels above the choir, glowing like coals in the late afternoon sun. Avery ran down the aisle, past identical rows of simple wooden pews, and headed for the passage behind the choir, which she hoped would take her to the old cloisters.
There were, she knew, a lot of places to hide in an old church.
There were also a lot of places to get lost.
Instead of a passage to the back rooms of the old church, she found herself on a descending stairway. Hopeful nonetheless, she decided to press on. The stairs led to an underground chapel, likewise sparsely decorated, though one wall still retained a few faded frescos. She located another passage and kept going.
Beyond the chapel lay a sprawling crypt, with row after row of pillars supporting arches that, she knew, bore the full weight of the massive stone edifice above. Several rows of folding wooden chairs had been set up to either side of the center aisle, and at the far end of the crypt, as if presiding over a royal court, sat the emperor himself—Charlemagne—larger than life, carved from stone, but with a golden crown on his oversized head, and a massive broadsword of wrought metal resting on his lap. To the right of the statue was another staircase, but as she approached it, she heard urgent voices and the sound of running footsteps and froze in her tracks.
Crap!
She spun around, looking for a place to hide, but aside from the chairs and pillars, there wasn’t much.
The steps were getting louder. She was out of time.
Frantic, she dropped to all fours and crawled between the wooden chairs. When she reached the midpoint, she stopped, pressed herself flat, held her breath. Her heart was pounding in her chest, the roar of blood almost deafening, but she could hear the sound of feet treading on stone, and voices. The lined-up wooden chair legs formed a screen that obscured her view of the rest of the crypt, but she could see something moving down the aisle, or rather, someone.
Please don’t look here. Please don’t...
A shoe came into view right in front of her, just a few yards away, and then another, and then both stopped together, toes pointed right at her.
She gripped the Brazen Head between her palms. It had saved her before, working as both shield and weapon, but that had been luck as much as anything.
Still, she had to try.
She let out her breath and took another, mentally rehearsing how she would jump up and swing the brass artifact like a club....
The shoes moved, shifting position, and then abruptly vanished as the person wearing them dropped to all fours and stared directly at her.
She jolted in alarm, but then gave a squeal of relief when she saw the face of Greg Johns peering at her. Her joy was somewhat diminished by the urgency of his expression.
“Avery, come on. We need to get moving.”
She scrambled to her feet and saw Kasey Kim just a few steps behind Greg. Her face was streaked with dust, and her expression was as grave as Greg’s.
“You guys are okay?” Avery asked.
“Depends on your definition,” Kasey replied. She pointed at the Brazen Head. “You got it? Good. Cover it up. We need to move.”
Avery stared back dully. “Cover it? With what?”
Greg stripped off his sport coat and tossed it to her. “Do what you can with that. But come on.”
The significance of the thrice-repeated message finally sank in. The danger wasn’t past. Avery wrapped the jacket around the head and moved out from the line of chairs. “What happened? Are those guys still out there?”
Greg shook his head. “We took care of them.” Then he turned and made his way toward the stairs.
The vague language sent a chill down Avery’s spine. She decided she didn’t need to know the particulars. “What about Max?”
“He was alive when we left. I think he was just stunned from the flash-bang. I’ll make some inquiries once we get to the safe house.”
“Safe house? Shouldn’t we go to the police?”
Kasey spat a harsh laugh. “That’s the last thing we want to do. We’re supposed to be flying under the radar, Avery.”
“Oh.” She felt her face flushing in embarrassment. She was a researcher, not James Bond. What had she been thinking, running off on her own like that? What would she have done if the bad guys had found her first? “How did you guys find me?”
“Tracking app on your phone. Didn’t work so well once you came in here though.” Kasey answered. She took Avery’s arm and led her after Greg. “I sent you a text.”
“I put my phone on silent.”
“That was probably a good idea.” She paused at the foot of the stairs and regarded Avery thoughtfully. “That was quick thinking back there. But in the future, you might want to stick a little closer to us.”
“Definitely.”
LeMans halted at the junction where Munstergasse and Zwingliplatz met behind Grossmunster church in a hydra-like snarl of alleys and passages. He scanned the main streets, looking for anything that might hint at the presence of his escaping quarry. Three people sprinting down the crowded streets would have made an impression, but he seemed to be the only one drawing stares now. He had removed his balaclava, and his weapon and tactical gear were hidden under a windbreaker, but he was still a conspicuous figure in his full black attire.
He stood there, unmoving, letting the adrenaline drain away as he considered what to do next. They were gone. He had lost them. Lost the Brazen Head, too.
This was a setback but not a defeat. The Americans would resurface eventually, at a train station or an airport, and then he would have them.
But that wasn’t his most immediate concern.
He turned toward the river, and then headed north up the Limmatquai at a jog. He heard the wails of police sirens growing louder with each passing second, and quickened his step, reaching the Council of Rome headquarters building just a few seconds ahead of them.
He charged up the stairs, making his way to the debris-strewn lobby. The sulfur odor of burnt gunpowder reached his nostrils even before he made it through the gallery doors, but when he stepped through, a different, but all too familiar smell hit him.
The smell of death.
Two of his men lay unmoving in the doorway.
LeMans knelt, checked the nearest man for a pulse. Nothing. Both were dead.
Damn it.
Two more figures lay at the far end of the room—Loew and his head of security. They weren’t moving either, but he had to be sure. No loose ends. He rose and started toward them.
“Halt. Bewegen sich nicht.”
The shout startled him, but he complied, holding his hands out to either side as he turned slowly to find a pair of uniformed officers from the Kantonspolizei Zürich. They had their weapons drawn and aimed directly at him.
LeMans fought back a surge of anger. Usually, when someone pointed a gun at him, it was the last thing they ever did, but there was a better way to handle this. “I am going to take out my credentials,” he said, speaking in German. “I am Oberstleutnant LeMans from Reconnaissance Detachment 10, working with counter-terror service.”
When neither man responded, he lowered his hands and then did as he said he would, taking out the wallet with his identification. “This is my investigation,” he continued. “Put those guns away. You’re working for me now.”