I left my eyes open. It was a calculated risk since it was going to be hard not to blink, but I wanted to be fully aware of my surroundings. And right now I could see that Dr. Goldman had joined Halverson. Like his twin brother, he wore thick glasses and had the nervous habit of running his tongue along his lips.
“You don’t need to point that gun at me,” the Minotaur said, struggling to control his anger. “I just want what was promised to me: the cure.”
The doctor sighed, actually looking apologetic. “Do you remember Nurse Joy?” he asked. I couldn’t move my gaze off Goldman, but I assume the Minotaur nodded an affirmation, because the evil scientist continued. “I turned Nurse Joy into a Minotaur as well. I did it so I could test the cure on her. I figured if it didn’t work, you would at least have some companionship in the maze.” He shook his head with fatherly sorrow. “Unfortunately, not only did the cure not work, it killed her.”
“You lied to me!” the Minotaur screamed. Goldman might as well have waved a red flag at him. But the beast didn’t move. Halverson’s weapon kept him in check.
The head of base security took a nervous step backward nonetheless. That was enough of a distraction for Top to make his move. He had the man disarmed before he even realized what had happened.
Goldman blindsided us by whipping out his own gun and pointing it at Bunny. “Don’t move,” he said to Top.
I didn’t recognize the gun, but I could tell it shot sedative darts.
“I’m a trained soldier, you’re a mad scientist,” Top said, steel in his voice. “I could shoot your man, then you, faster than you could get off a single shot with that tranq gun.”
“Tranquilizer? No. The dart in here will pump a special cocktail into your friend. Then the maze will have two Minotaurs. Remember, there is no cure.”
Top cursed and returned the Glock to Halverson.
The only upside to the confrontation was that no one was paying any attention to me. I inched along the floor, getting closer to Goldman.
The doc suddenly let out a nasally laugh. “You didn’t really believe I’d let you two leave here, did you? I made these darts especially for you. I needed more test subjects.…”
Son of a bitch!
In one smooth move, I rolled onto my chest, brought my knees up under me, and leaped up, grabbing the dart gun with my left hand while my right punched the little weasel in the gut.
At the same time, Top relieved Halverson of his weapon once again.
With the tables suitably turned, I shoved Goldman toward the Minotaur. “You owe him a cure,” I said. “Maybe he’ll let you live if you promise to get back to work.”
“There really is no cure,” he said, shaking.
“Maybe he needs more motivation,” the Minotaur said. He reached a hand out to me and understanding dawned as I passed him the dart gun.
Goldman immediately figured out what the Minotaur intended to do as well. He bolted. Into the maze.
There was enough time for the man-bull to shoot the doctor in the back, but he didn’t. Instead, he snarled at Halverson, “I heard what you did. You caused all this. This is your fault.”
“No,” Halverson said. “No.”
The mutant bull grabbed him by the neck, but then let him go. He shoved him into the maze.
Halverson turned back. “Please,” he said. The Minotaur pointed the gun at him and he ran.
This time, the Minotaur pulled the trigger. Halverson cried out in pain and terror. He turned back toward us, but the man-bull waved his hand and the wall slid closed. The Minotaur had torn off the lanyard that Halverson had been wearing with his personnel badge.
“I wanted the doctor to be chased through his own maze by one of his own creations,” the Minotaur said, “just not by me. I’m never going back in there.”
“I can’t make any promises,” I said, “but I’ll do whatever I can to find someone capable of creating a cure for you.”
“No,” he said. “If more scientists study me, they might try to duplicate Goldman’s experiments. This has to end here.”
I looked sadly at him. “What do you have in mind?”
“I used to work here,” the Minotaur said. “I confided in Goldman that I had a gambling debt and he offered to pay it off for me if I let him test a new type of supersoldier steroid on me. I know how to lock the place down, hard.” He slid open a panel under the scanner, revealing a number pad and an ominous red button. He tapped in a long sequence of numbers, then pressed the button. “I’ve triggered the biohazard emergency protocols.”
I knew what that meant. A different kind of sliding steel wall would drop in front of the elevator and thermite charges would seal it permanently in place. No one that knew about this place would ever give the order to dig us out.
A courteous female voice emanated from speakers somewhere down the hall. She informed us that the fail-safe had been initiated. “Countdown is commencing. One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight…”
“You better run,” the Minotaur said.
“… ninety-five, ninety-four…”
We ran as though the hounds of hell were chasing us. And after everything the Goldman brothers had thrown at us, I doubt giant demon dogs would have even surprised me.
But there were no surprises. We made it out in time. I just hope to God Mama Goldman didn’t have triplets.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Steven is the new action-adventure pen name of a bestselling ghostwriter. If you ask him his real name, he’ll give you the old “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” line, and he’ll say it just ominously enough that you won’t ask again. He’ll then give you a charming smile that’s at odds with the unnerving hold his steely eyes have on you, and he’ll strongly suggest you take note of his alias so you don’t miss any of his future publications, which he promises will be killer reads.
TARGET ACQUIRED
BY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN AND TIM LEBBON
Miranda had always thought one of the beauties of Venice was its anonymity. A city of magic and elegance, so unmistakably Italian—so iconic—it was nevertheless a place where one could vanish completely. In the crush of tourists in St. Mark’s Square, disappearing was simple, but it was only a tiny bit more difficult in the city’s less traveled alleys. Tourists were everywhere, clothing and faces and styles from all around the world. Almost from birth, Venetians learned not to see them, to let all of those unfamiliar faces blur together until they became, for all intents and purposes, invisible.
Invisibility made a killer’s job much simpler.
She carried a large coffee in a travel cup from a busy café, both part of her masquerade and a caffeine junkie’s necessity. This mission would have been so much simpler a few weeks earlier, in the middle of Carnival season, when meandering the bridges and alleys of Venice wearing an actual mask would not have seemed at all out of place. But mid-March worked just as well for Miranda, really. She had spent a lifetime mastering the art of the true masquerade, disguising herself without any mask at all. Changing her walk and her bearing, her body language and demeanor, her hair and her style, her tone and her language.
In a beige wool coat, gray leggings, and high black boots, with a burgundy-and-white-checked scarf that set off nicely against her dark features, she bore the look of just another British tourist. The badly folded map in her left hand completed the picture, and she made sure to pause to glance at it now and again for a sense of verisimilitude. The day’s high temperature would barely reach forty-five Fahrenheit, so the stylish hooded coat would seem sensible and not at all out of place, and it would hide a variety of weapons.
Weapons she did not expect to need.
The cobblestones beneath her feet were damp from rain, but as she emerged from an alley onto the Fondamenta Orseolo, a narrow walkway that ran beside a canal, she saw the way the water lapped up onto the steps at a gondola station, and she knew that some months it was not rain that dampened those cobblestones. The sea was rising and the
city was sinking, both slowly, both surely. In time, the whole city would be underwater, washing away the evidence of a great civilization, and centuries of crimes. The city flooded so regularly now that in many buildings the ground floor had been filled with concrete, surrendered to the future. The last time Miranda had visited Venice she had hidden two corpses in one of those ground floors, the night before the concrete had been poured.
Venice hid a multitude of sins.
But none of those sins were as black as Joe Ledger’s.
From behind thousand-dollar Dita Cascais sunglasses, she caught sight of him crossing Ponte della Piavola fifty feet ahead. Precisely where she’d expected him to be. Miranda had measured her pace, timed every pause, so that the two of them would be in this very position. For eight days she had arrived before dawn to take up her position behind the construction fence of an eleventh-century church whose renovation had been abandoned for more than a year. A forgotten place, nearly as invisible as the face of a tourist. From behind the fence, she had watched the façade of the neglected apartment building where Ledger had been laying his head, emerging after he emerged, every morning a different persona for her, a different masquerade.
Miranda had followed him, timed his walk from the apartment building to the crumbling, abandoned villa where he’d been convening daily with members of a European antiterror task force. Each day she appeared to be meandering instead of stalking. Morning after morning she had scanned the architecture and the canals for ambush points. Nothing had satisfied her.
Last night, she had run out of patience. The desire to see Joe Ledger dead outweighed all else.
Now she reached the bridge and paused to sip her coffee and consult her map, glancing both directions along the canal. A gondolier called happily to another passing by, then disappeared beneath the bridge. A young couple—American by the look of them—ate pastries and drank coffee in the gondola, gazing around with wide eyes at the dying beauty of the place. Miranda had been on a gondola tour once, but so many of the narrow canals stank of piss that her stomach churned at the idea of eating or drinking anything as a gondolier poled his narrow vessel around those tight dank corners.
But she didn’t care about the gondola. She counted seconds, let a dozen people pass over the bridge before her, and then continued on. For several seconds she lost sight of Ledger, something not easy to do with a man as large and formidable as he appeared to be, but then she saw the back of his head, spotted the freshly clipped hair that he’d had buzzed three afternoons before, and she felt reassured.
Seven minutes and two bridges later, she paused in front of the immaculately clean plate-glass window of a shop that sold marionettes. Saints and Pinocchios and Carnival puppets were on display, including a Bauta and a jester who seemed to be sparring. Someone had rearranged the display in the three days since she’d stopped in the same spot to study them.
When she turned and glanced down at her map, eyes flicking back up to track Ledger, she saw him entering the dilapidated villa. Once the place had no doubt been full of light and color and music and art. Now the stonework had begun to crack and crumble and crude graffiti had been painted onto the foundation, just at the waterline. Another forgotten piece of the great history of the city. Time and neglect would swallow it before the sea ever could.
Miranda had no idea what the task force might be working on, or why they were meeting in secret here in Venice. She had identified agents of Interpol, Italian military, and OSCE operatives. The grouping suggested an imminent terrorist attack in Venice, or at least the suspicion of one, but it was Joe Ledger’s presence she did not understand. Most of the world remained unaware that the U.S. government had added yet another covert agency, the Department of Military Sciences, to handle the continually evolving dangers created by scientific advancement. More than likely, the Americans had insinuated themselves into a European operation both uninvited and unwelcome.
She wondered what the rest of the task force might say if they knew they had a traitor among them. A murderer. A terrorist. A man who would take whatever he learned of their activities, twist it, and use it against them. Who would kill hundreds of innocents, soak the cobblestones of Venice with their blood, just to make a point.
As he had done with the Royal London Hospital, orchestrating the explosion that had killed hundreds of people. Including Tess.
Just the thought of her name sent a fresh wave of pain rippling through Miranda. No one on the street would see it. Not while she was in the midst of a hunt, not while she needed to keep up the masquerade. But one reel of their years together kept playing over and over in Miranda’s head, the joyful grin and the laughing gleam in Tess’s eyes as she tucked a lock of red hair behind an ear and stared at the engagement ring on her finger. They’d climbed all the way to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral and stood in the Whispering Gallery, just inside the dome. If you whispered from one side of the dome, anyone standing directly opposite on the far side could hear every word with perfect, almost sensual clarity.
She’d asked Tess to marry her.
Later they’d walked among the roses in Queen Mary’s Gardens in Regent’s Park and Tess had kept shaking her head and stifling a laugh behind her hand. Then had come that joyful grin and the tuck of hair behind her ear, and those nine words—the words that played on a continuous loop in the back of Miranda’s mind.
“I can’t believe I’m going to be your wife,” Tess had said.
But she never would be.
* * *
The next morning she followed Ledger along a similar route, though not identical. Close to the old villa once again, she veered off and entered a run-down hotel. This was the day. After much thought, Miranda had decided to take him out in the open.
Her main intention here was Ledger’s death, but she was equally concerned with her own escape. Ledger had been the main triggerman for the London hospital bombing, but Miranda knew there must have been others involved whom she’d need to mop up. She’d discover their names, track them down, and kill them, and every time it would be Tess’s smile urging her on.
She’d only briefly considered trying to glean these names from Ledger. One look at him had convinced her that this would be a bad idea. The man was a killer, just like her, though more brutal and indiscriminate. He was calm and detached and, for a big man, almost as invisible as she was among the crowds, and just as alert to danger. That was what made this such a challenge. Although she was confident of her skills, she also prided herself on her sense of self-preservation.
She had no intention of getting close enough to Ledger to ask him any questions. Two shots to the chest, one to the head, less than a second between the first and last shot. That would be her justice. She’d snipe him when he went for lunch, put him down, and make her escape in the panic and chaos. That was what made the hotel rooftop a perfect location for the ambush.
She’d checked into a second-floor room under a false name the day before, and passing reception now, she offered the old hotelier a small nod and smile. He barely acknowledged her. Only when she was out of sight around the first landing on the narrow staircase did she increase her speed, passing the second floor without a pause. On the third floor she moved swiftly along a hallway smelling of cleaning products and the ingrained must of ages, pausing outside a locked wooden door that bore no number or spy hole. The sign read STAFF ONLY in Italian. She had already been inside.
She picked the lock and entered again, cautious as ever.
Tess grinned at her from inside. A shadow, a memory, the two combined to flash her a fleeting, startling image of the dead woman she loved. It happened from time to time, and on every occasion Miranda found herself momentarily thrown. She was a woman in complete control—always aware of her surroundings, conscious of who was around her, cognizant of escape routes and angles of fire. She’d spent most of her adult life never sitting with her back to open doorways, yet the doors that these memories of Tess crept through were in shadowy places she did not k
now. Her own mind surprised her. It made her feel less in control, yet she welcomed these interludes. It was as if Tess were still with her, just for those few brief, beautiful moments.
She’d discovered from the coroner’s report that Tess had been one of thirty people crushed to death when a ward ceiling came down. A nurse, she’d most likely been trying to save her patients.
“Not now,” she whispered, breathing deeply. Shadows and sunlight formed more mundane shapes, and Miranda headed past the window and toward the small wooden staircase, heading up.
The rooftop was unchanged from yesterday. Two telltales she’d left across the access door remained in place, as did the heavy canvas bag she’d hidden hooked into an air-conditioning exhaust duct. The AC in the hotel probably hadn’t worked in years, and the duct was spattered with pigeon shit and caked dust.
Ensuring she was out of sight behind the low-rooftop greenhouse, Miranda opened the bag and went about constructing the rifle.
“You’re so good with your hands,” she remembered Tess saying. That had been one evening in Paris, when Miranda had to fix a broken balcony door in their hotel room. Tess’s playful smile had made Miranda weak, and she’d felt a momentary pang of guilt—her hands had slit throats, punched, and killed, as well as bestowing intimacies.
Tess had never known. Miranda was pleased, because her fiancée had been a good person and would never have understood.
Assembling the weapon without conscious thought, Miranda spent those few seconds drifting back to the explosion’s aftermath. She had become a machine focused on information, accessing countless police, MI5 and Anti-Terrorist Squad transmissions. She’d even hacked into a series of electronic COBRA meeting minutes, gleaning as much information as she could about the perpetrators as quickly as possible.
Grief had driven her on. Revenge had burned bright, fueling her, feeding her. Never once had she allowed herself time to pause and breathe. To do that would be to crumple. Perhaps when this was done she would allow herself that brief loss of control.