Suddenly another Uzi stuttered harshly, spitting bullets down the road. Pieces of asphalt and shredded grass and dirt exploded all around the black-clad woman. She fell forward and lay still.
Nedel swore silently. Bazhenov had panicked.
Suddenly he saw the Russian poke his head out above the bushes, trying to get a clearer shot. The demolitions expert brought his submachine gun up, aiming intently at the motionless figure curled up beside the road.
And then another weapon fired, this one from farther down the hill.
Hit in the face, Bazhenov screamed shrilly once and then fell sideways, sprawling out from the bushes to lie in a heap. A second burst tore him apart.
Instantly, the black-clad gunman who had killed him leaped to his feet and raced toward the fallen woman. He dropped to her side, apparently fumbling for a medical kit in one of the many pouches on his assault vest.
Nedel nodded slightly to himself. That was a worthwhile target. Slowly, with great care, he rose up from behind his little pile of rocks. He stared down the short barrel of his Uzi, breathing shallowly, waiting until the sights settled on the kneeling man and hung there. His finger tightened on the trigger…
Lying prone about one hundred meters away, Smith fired. The MP5 chattered loudly, punching back against his shoulder. Three spent cartridges flew away into the grass. Hit twice, once in the neck and once in the shoulder, Brandt’s gunman slumped forward. Black in the pale light, blood pulsed across the rocks briefly and then stopped flowing.
Grim-faced, Jon sprang up and sprinted forward to where Kirov knelt beside Fiona Devin.
She was already sitting up when he got there. “I’m okay,” she insisted, pale and plainly a bit shaken, but smiling with relief nonetheless. “They missed me.”
“You say they missed?” Kirov growled. He reached out and touched a long tear through the dark cloth covering her upper left arm. A thin trickle of blood welled up from a bullet graze there. “So what is this?”
“That?” Fiona said, grinning back at him. “That’s nothing but a scratch.”
“You were lucky,” Smith told her bluntly. His heart was still pounding. Like Kirov, he had been sure that she was dead or badly wounded.
She nodded calmly. “Indeed I was, Colonel.” She looked down ruefully at the radio clipped to her equipment vest. It had been smashed, either by a bullet or by a rock when she dove for cover. She stripped off the now-useless headset. “But it looks as though I’ll have to rely on you two to make any calls for me.”
Abruptly, bright white light flared through the night behind them, throwing their shadows ahead up the slope. They whirled around, in time to see a huge fireball rising in the west. Shards of twisted steel and shattered concrete spun away from the center of the explosion, soaring hundreds of meters into the night sky before tumbling back to earth. The sound of the blast reached them in that same moment, a rumbling, thunderous freight-train roar that died slowly, leaving only a stunned silence in its wake.
“There went Renke’s lab,” Smith said bitterly, staring at the pillar of flame still rising from the ECPR compound. “Along with most of the evidence we needed.”
Kirov nodded somberly. “All the more reason to capture Malkovic and Brandt, then.” He shrugged. “But at least we no longer have to worry so much about being stopped by the police.”
“No kidding,” Jon agreed absently, still looking at the fires consuming the shattered ruins of Renke’s weapons lab. “Every municipal police and Carabinieri squad in Orvieto will be swarming over that compound in ten minutes or less.” He leaned down and helped Fiona back to her feet. “We’d better not waste the opportunity.”
Together, the three Covert-One agents turned and sprinted east along the road, running flat-out now toward the top of the plateau.
Pushing carefully through a tangle of vines, Randi Russell saw the sudden glare light up the slope around her, casting its stark illumination across a landscape of tall grass, leafless fruit trees, waist-high rail fences, and eroded terraces covered in brush. She dropped flat, waiting until the flash faded and the hillside returned to darkness.
In the sudden silence following the explosion, she heard a quick murmur of startled voices from ahead and off to her left. Cautiously, she rose and moved forward again, heading in that direction. The voices fell silent abruptly.
Randi came to a rail fence and crouched lower. In the faint moonlight, the terrain ahead looked far more open. It was difficult, however, to make out details. There was a succession of what appeared to be grassy mounds with gray stones set in the top, but the areas between these mounds were bathed in impenetrable shadow. It was time to get a better look at what lay ahead of her, she decided. She raised her image-intensifier binoculars. Set to amplify even the smallest amount of ambient light, whether from the stars or the moon, they turned night into effective day.
Immediately, the landscape leaped into clearer focus.
She was looking at what appeared to be a rectangular grid of streets. Small houses built of large blocks of quarried tufa, a form of pitted gray limestone, lined these narrow, stepped roads cut into the hillside. Some of their roofs were conical, others were flat, but almost all of them were covered in grass and hard-packed earth. Low, dark, trapezoidal openings gaped in the center of each building. Letters in some archaic script were carved on the large stones set above the empty doorways. Beyond the buildings she could see a path with railings leading up shallow steps to an empty parking lot.
This was the old Etruscan city of the dead, Randi realized, remembering the quick research she had done on her flight down from Germany the day before. Some of the tombs here were nearly three thousand years old. Excavated beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the vases, drinking cups, weapons, and armor found inside were now on display in a museum next to Orvieto’s cathedral.
She frowned. Renke and his bodyguard must be hiding somewhere in the necropolis, probably with the intention of slipping away back down the hill when all the shooting died down. Not a bad plan, Randi thought coldly. Anyone trying to hunt for them up and down those narrow streets would be exposed, a sitting duck for anyone shooting from cover inside one of the tombs.
She stuffed the binoculars back into one of her equipment pouches and slid under the bottom rail of the fence, moving slowly to make sure she did not snag any of her gear. Then she wriggled toward the tombs through the long grass, gliding quietly from one patch of shadow to another.
Periodically, Randi stopped moving to listen, trying to ferret out the slightest sound that could tell her where her enemies were lurking. But she heard nothing, only the sound of police and fire and ambulance sirens speeding toward the explosion-ravaged ECPR compound.
At last she made it to the position she had been aiming for, a small stand of scrub trees growing out of the slope above the necropolis. From here, she could look down into most of the streets, especially the lanes that ran back toward the Orvieto road.
Again, Randi dug out her binoculars. Methodically, she swept them across the ancient cemetery, focusing first on the entrances of tombs that she thought offered the best vantage points. Unless she missed her guess, Renke and his bodyguard would have picked a hiding place that would let them spot anyone entering the tomb complex from the road or the parking lot.
Her binoculars slid slowly past a tomb opening about halfway up the central street, paused, and then came back. Was that paler shape inside the darkness just a chunk of fallen stone or a trick of the moonlight?
Randi held her breath, waiting patiently. The shape moved slightly, taking on form and definition. She was looking at the head and shoulders of a man, a clean-shaven man who was crouched just inside the low opening, peering down the street toward the entrance to the necropolis. He shifted position again and now she saw the weapon in his hands.
She held still. Was Renke inside the tomb with this man? Or had the weapons scientist chosen another lair?
The bodyguard looked back behind him for a moment, a
pparently listening to something being whispered to him, nodded, and then turned back to his post.
Randi smiled thinly. Wulf Renke was there, crouching patiently in the darkness, waiting for his chance to slip away and disappear again, as he had so many times before. That was the answer she had been hoping for. She put her binoculars away and crawled down the slope, staying low and angling away from the street where Renke and the other man were concealed.
She dropped quietly into the little lane that marked the northern boundary of the necropolis and crossed it quickly, slipping into the shelter of one of the small square mounded tombs. Then she slid her Beretta back into the holster on her hip, snapped the flap shut, and used both hands to haul herself up onto the grass-covered roof of the burial chamber.
From there, Randi made her way from rooftop to rooftop, jumping lightly across the narrow gaps between buildings until she reached the flat-roofed tomb just north of Renke’s hiding place. She drew the 9mm pistol, crawled to the corner, and looked down over the edge.
There, just a few meters away, lay the low open door where she had seen the scientist’s lookout. She took aim with the Beretta, waiting while her eyes adjusted. Gradually, the blackness took on different shapes and shades, again revealing the head and shoulders of the sentry crouching there with his submachine gun. Her finger tightened on the trigger and then eased off slightly. She decided to give this guy the chance to be smart.
“Drop the weapon!” Randi called softly.
Taken completely by surprise, the guard reacted instinctively. His head jerked up and he spun desperately, bringing his Uzi up to fire.
She shot him in the head.
Before the Beretta’s sharp, ringing report stopped echoing back from the stone walls around her, she was in motion. She rolled off the roof, landed in a crouch on the street, and brought her pistol back up, aiming straight at the opening to the crypt.
There was no noise. No sign of movement from inside.
“Wulf Renke!” Randi said quietly in perfect German, pitching her voice just loud enough to be heard inside the tomb. “It’s over. You’ve got nowhere left to run. Come out now, with your hands up, and you’ll live. Otherwise, I will kill you.”
For a moment, she thought he would stay silent, refusing to talk. But then the scientist replied. “So those are my two choices?” he said calmly. “I either meekly surrender to you and face prison? Or else I die at your hands?”
“Correct.”
Renke snorted. “You are wrong,” he said bleakly. “You forget, there is always a third option. And that is the path I choose.”
Suddenly Randi heard a faint crunch from inside the tomb, followed by a startled gasp and then a long, drawn-out sigh that ended in absolute silence. “Oh, hell,” she murmured, already moving toward the entrance.
She was too late.
Wulf Renke sat slumped over on one of the stone benches used by the Etruscans for their dead. His eyes stared back at her, rigid and unblinking. Foam had dripped out of his slack mouth and into his neat, white beard. The fragments of a broken glass ampule lay on the ground at his feet, next to an insulated carrying case. The air inside the burial chamber smelled faintly of almonds.
The fugitive biological weapons scientist had committed suicide, probably with cyanide, Randi thought grimly. She bent down and entered the tomb. When a quick search of Renke’s pockets produced nothing of value, she took the case and backed out again, into the narrow moonlit street.
Inside the container, she found a row of glass vials packed in dry ice. And when she read the labels on each vial, her eyes widened in absolute astonishment and horror. At a guess, Randi decided that she was looking at lethal disease variants keyed to the precise genetic makeup of Viktor Dudarev, his senior ministers, and many of Russia’s highest-ranking military commanders. Quickly, she slammed the lid back down, grabbed the case, and then raced away through the cramped streets of the city of the dead.
Chapter Fifty
Smith slid quietly through the shadows thrown by a row of tall pine trees. He came out on the edge of a small public park dominated by the foundations of an Etruscan temple—not much more than a few stone steps, a raised, grass-covered platform, and the circular bases of what must have once been towering columns. The main road up had turned sharply as it climbed and entered Orvieto and now he was facing south.
He dropped to one knee, signaling Kirov and Fiona to come ahead. They ghosted through the trees and joined him.
The bulk of the medieval city loomed on their right, a maze of little, twisting streets and low, irregularly shaped stone houses that were mostly between eight and nine hundred years old. Arches crossed the streets in many places, linking the ancient houses, and turning the narrow lanes into alternating pools of wan silver moonlight and Stygian darkness.
The eastern end of the plateau fell away on their left, plunging steeply toward the lights of Orvieto Scalo, the lower town. A wide terrace ran along this edge, all the way to the tall, round, open-topped bastions and massive outer stone walls of the Fortezza dell’Albornoz, a papal fortress built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
“Which way would Brandt and Malkovic go?” Jon murmured. “West into the old city?”
“Not into the old city,” Fiona said flatly. “That’s a dead end for them. The only real way out from there leads straight back toward the Center compound, and that road will be swarming with Italian police and emergency crews.”
“Ahead,” Kirov said firmly. He pointed to a small sign with an arrow, pointing the way south along a tree-lined avenue to the Piazza Cahen and the Stazione Funicalore—the station for the funicular railway connecting Orvieto with the lower town. “Their only realistic hope of escape is to beg, buy, or steal another car, and the only place to do that safely is down below, near the main train station. That funicular railway is probably closed for the night, but there must be other roads or tracks down from this side of the city.”
Smith nodded tightly. “Sounds reasonable.” He stood up. “Okay, I’ll take the left flank. Oleg, you take the right.”
“And I’ll tag along like a good little girl, safe in the middle,” Fiona said, smiling slightly to take the sting out of her words.
Spread apart in a skirmish line, the three of them crossed the little park, skirting the raised platform of the ruined temple, and kept moving south, sticking close to the left edge of the wide road leading into the open square called the Piazza Cahen.
“But where is Professor Renke?” Konstantin Malkovic forced out between panting gasps, still clutching his briefcase to his heaving chest. He was sitting propped up with his back against the locked doors of the funicular station. Sweat matted his thick mane of white hair and ran in rivulets down his terrified face.
“Either dead or a prisoner,” Brandt snapped. “He should have kept up with us.”
Coldly furious with himself and with his panic-stricken employer, Brandt contemplated his options. They were increasingly limited. With Renke gone and the HYDRA lab destroyed, his usefulness to the Russians would last only so long as the Americans were kept in the dark about the invasion plans for Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics. The gray-eyed man glanced sidelong at Malkovic’s briefcase. It contained information that must not be allowed to fall into American hands. And the financier himself was rapidly becoming a liability.
At this point, Brandt suspected, the only way he could win back his own life from the hard men in the Kremlin would be to eliminate Malkovic for them and then hand over the briefcase and all of its contents. He raised his Walther pistol, then stopped himself. Not here, he decided. The square was too open and the sound of a shot would echo across the city. No, he would kill the older man later, Brandt thought grimly, when they were safely away from this damned medieval maze. Once they were high up in the Apennines, it would be a simple matter to hide a bullet-riddled body where it might never be found.
Bending down, he roughly yanked Malkovic back to his feet. “Come on!”
he snarled. “There’s another road down, just around the corner of that fortress.”
Trembling both with fear and fatigue, the older man obeyed.
In that instant, one of his two remaining men crouched lower, hissing, “Herr Brandt! The Americans! They’re here!” He raised his submachine gun, using the Uzi’s short black barrel to point toward the entrance to the Piazza.
Startled, Brandt spun round with his pistol ready. In the dim light, he could just make out three black-clad figures entering the square. They were less than a hundred meters away. “Kill them!” he snapped.
Smith saw a sudden flurry of movement near the funicular railway station, a small, modern building, on the eastern edge of the square. There were four men there. Two were in cover behind a row of terracotta planters, with their weapons out. Brandt, taller and blond-haired, crouched behind them. The fourth man, Konstantin Malkovic, was turning to flee, scuttling wildly away from the station. He disappeared into the darkness, heading for the tall arched gateway leading into the papal fortress.
“Down!” Jon roared, trying to warn Kirov and Fiona. He dove for the pavement. “Get down!”
And then Brandt’s gunmen started shooting, firing on full automatic.
Bullets ripped through the air all around Smith, cracking past low over his head. Others ricocheted off the paving, spinning wildly away in every direction. Chunks of concrete and torn strips of asphalt spattered across the square.
He rolled away, frantically trying to throw off their aim.
A few meters away, Fiona Devin cried out suddenly and went down. She lay curled up, with her teeth tightly clenched, clutching at her right thigh. Blood welled up between her locked fingers. Grim-faced with worry, Kirov hurled himself toward her, ignoring the 9mm rounds screaming around him.
The two Uzis fell silent. Both gunmen had expended their full twenty-round magazines in just a couple of seconds. Each man crouched low, desperately slapping in a fresh clip.