Outside in the Great Court, guests were screaming and pushing for the exit. Splashes and pools of blood on the golden stone, stray shoes and bags, glass and broken bottles everywhere. As he edged forward, in his immediate sight line alone, three dead bodies were splayed on the stone floor and one spreadeagled on the central steps. Two security guards and an elderly man on the floor, and a young woman on the steps. Blood pooled and trickled step by step down from the girl. He sensed Paulie emerge from somewhere behind him and make a dash for the information desk, which was shut up for the evening. Watching, he saw Paulie disappear behind the counter before emerging with a young man he realized was Jarrod. His arm around the injured receptionist, half carrying him, Paulie headed for the exit.
Whatever information Paulie had about the leak to the Chinese would have to wait. The noise of gunfire grew louder – there was more than one shooter – and North made a dash across the courtyard. Was Esme out already? Was she trying to get out? As he reached cover behind a column, two huge heavies passed. Each had one hand tucked under Chin’s elbow as they propelled him out of the doorway, his feet barely touching the floor. But there was no sign of Esme. The last time he’d seen her, she was heading away from Chin, and God knows where Tobias had gone once he got clear of Paulie. Were they together? Perhaps they were already outside among the screaming, hysterical guests? But somehow North didn’t think so.
He struggled to remember the layout of the museum as an old man with wild-dandelion hair and a drooping walrus moustache, carrying a Heckler & Koch MP5, fired a series of deliberate three-round bursts into the pushing and shoving crowds at the exit. Half a dozen more people dropped to the ground, and the old man lowered the gun and watched the panicking, shrieking guests in their dinner jackets and fancy frocks fight to get through the doors. He was ex-military, North knew it – something about the control, the way he stood, the detachment as he fired then waited. He wasn’t crazed or in any kind of bloodlust. He wanted people out of the building. Shooting a few of the stragglers made everyone else move that much faster. And there was something about his face, with its bushy moustache, that was familiar. Was he someone North knew? The old man moved towards the door and loosed off several more long bursts of gunfire, brass casings flying, the rounds shattering the glass in the frame, and the screaming went up a gear. He clanked as he walked. Standing on the broken bodies of the fallen, the MP5 swinging from him, he reached out to bring the doors together, then unwound the chains from around his waist before looping them through the handles and padlocking them. He moved to the next set of doors to do the same thing. He was on a clock – the attackers didn’t want anyone else leaving and they certainly weren’t going to make it easy for anyone else to get in. Step by step, North backed away.
The sound of automatic weapon fire from elsewhere in the museum bounced off the walls as glass from an upstairs window exploded out into the courtyard, fragments raining down on to the stone. North put his fingers to his head and batted off the powder and glass splinters, his fingertips coming away bloody. If anyone looked down from the broken window, he was in plain sight and they’d have a clear shot. He was going to have to move again. But which way to go?
Advice to civilians in the event of active shooters revolved around three words: run, hide, fight. Those who ran for the exits were either out or dead; those who hid would be lucky or unlucky. Would they find a room near an elevator with reinforced walls? Did they know to lock and barricade the doors? To stay low? He himself preferred the third step – fight. And he added a fourth: kill. Run, hide, fight, kill. It had an altogether better rhythm. And what was the point of fighting if it wasn’t to a standstill?
North needed a weapon. The spaces were too open and clear to catch the murderous old man by surprise. He kept low and to the wall around the foyer and back through the doorway of the Enlightenment Gallery, on through another gallery, to a display case he half-remembered from previous visits.
The claymore was more than three feet long, with a wooden handle. According to the sign it was around five hundred years old, but he figured he didn’t need the iron sword to be razor sharp. The force alone would be enough to decapitate anyone coming at him at close quarters. The only problem – it was behind glass.
Across the room was a chair where the security guard normally sat. It was vacant. North took a second to consider the security guards. They’d have been the first in the line of fire. Holding the moulded chair by its two front legs, North swivelled round, bringing the chair as far back as he could manage before smashing it full force into the glass. The reverberations shot up his arms, making his broken ribs sing and his teeth ache. The security glass was unmarked. Not a crack or a dent. Cursing, North checked the back of the case. Could he heave it to the ground? Screws held the powder-coated steel plates of the display case to the floor and to the wall. He wasn’t getting the sword. Moreover, he realized, in his haste to find a weapon he had trapped himself in a room with only one way in and out. He pressed himself against the wall as somewhere far too close a radio receiver crackled into life. ‘Einstein, gallery 2 clear. Gallery 2a clear.’ The white hair, the walrus moustache. The shooter wasn’t an old man that North recognized. It was a man wearing the latex mask of a genius.
North’s heart beat hard in his chest. When Albert Einstein stepped through the doorway, he would have a direct sight line. North held his breath.