She released the catch on her holster and tucked the sweatshirt over her belt so that she had access to the gun. She opened the door to the sounds of a skirmish. A man in black and a tall, athletic woman in a zipped hoodie were engaged in a bout of what looked like some sort of martial art.
The woman turned as Lara entered the room, and it put her at a disadvantage. The Immortal performed a swinging kick to the back of the woman’s head, and she dropped to the floor, unconscious.
Lara didn’t hesitate. She pulled the gun and fired. A second kick from the Immortal connected with the weapon, sending the shot high over his head, into the ceiling, and a hard shower of plaster dust rained down on them. Lara brought her arm hard round in a backhanded sweep as the Immortal recovered from the kick. The weight of the gun added to the impact as her fist connected with his jaw, and his head swung, making him stagger off balance.
Lara followed the swing with a left-handed jab to the Immortal’s exposed chest, and the man was winded. She put her hands together and swung in a double-handed blow, but her fists did not connect. Only the barrel of the gun made contact with the Immortal’s face. His hands came up to his broken nose, and he reeled backwards.
Lara could have shot the Immortal. She knew she only had the bullets in the gun’s magazine. She didn’t know how many. She holstered the pistol and booted the Immortal hard in the knee, bringing him down in a lopsided fall. He tried to tackle her, but the blows to his head and face had taken their toll. Lara didn’t know what damage the girl had done to the Immortal, but she could see there was very little fight left in him.
As his arms reached out to grab at her, Lara swung her right fist hard. The Immortal sprawled to the floor, unconscious.
Lara heard a light moan from the girl on the floor. She didn’t move, but she was obviously coming round. Lara looked at her, and saw the pack of cable ties sticking out of her back pocket. She pulled them out, and quickly cuffed the girl’s hands and feet with them. She did the same to the Immortal, and pocketed the rest of the ties.
Then, she bent over, her hands on her knees, and breathed hard. The fight had lasted less than a minute, but it was hard physical work. Lara felt good. She felt strong. She felt good adrenaline work its magic in her body. She was calm. Two more deep breaths, and her heart rate was normalising after the physical exertion of tackling the Immortal.
Her only regret was that it wasn’t Hydarnes.
Chapter 31
Lara heard screaming from the quad, and ran back down the stairs to see what was happening. A dozen or more students were pouring out of the doorway in the adjacent wall, next to the Watergate. They’d been driven out. Something was happening there. Filled with confidence, and desperate to find Hydarnes, Lara sprinted across the lawn.
She heard the bang of hard rounds hitting stone, and thought, for one adrenaline pumping moment, that she’d been targeted. She made the door and looked back as she heard a bullet hitting flesh. She saw a figure in dark clothes fall among the fleeing students. Another Immortal was down. One fewer for her to worry about. She couldn’t see whether it was Hydarnes or not.
Lara hesitated for a split second, wondering whether to go back to check the body. She didn’t.
A man almost flew down the staircase in front of her. He came within a hair’s breadth of colliding with her. She turned as he passed. He turned, too, but she was already taking the stairs two at a time. At the fourth step, she spun and jumped. She landed hard with two feet in his chest, crashing him through the doorway and onto the wide path surrounding the lawn.
Lara’s own landing was clumsy, and she yelped with the pain in her ribs.
“Stop!” shouted Greg.
She wouldn’t stop for him or for anything. She didn’t trust him, and she didn’t trust Kennard Montez. Greg rocked forward, lifting his head and shoulders off the ground. Kneeling, Lara firmly held her left fist in her right and swung her body hard so that her right elbow impacted with the side of his face. The force was so fierce and so unexpected that Greg’s upper body twisted, and he landed on his shoulder. His neck snapped back, and his head bounced off the hard flagstones. He was out cold.
Lara pulled a cable tie from her pocket and bound his wrists. But Greg was strong and fit, and the blow hadn’t been hard enough. He came around fast, faster than Lara saw as, still kneeling, she dropped her head and breathed.
Greg shook his head once to clear his vision and then swung his arms, aiming his bound hands at Lara’s bowed head.
The first gunshot killed Greg before his hands could connect with Lara’s head. The second would have killed Lara, but the gunman didn’t get the chance to pull the trigger again. Lara didn’t know where that second shot had come from, but a split second after Greg was shot, the body of his killer fell facedown only a few yards away from him.
Lara was up and ducking for the doorway before she had checked the bodies or looked for the second gunman. She took the stairs two at a time. She didn’t even know which of the Immortals had killed Greg. Two of the Immortals had died in the Fellows’ Quad in a matter of a minute, and she couldn’t rule either of them out as Hydarnes.
Right now, all she wanted to do was get away.
Up wasn’t the answer.
When Lara reached the first floor, Trinity and the Immortals were engaged in ferocious hand-to-hand fighting that seemed to extend across the whole floor. She turned and ran back down the staircase, drawing her borrowed gun as she got back to ground level and the exterior door where she had attacked Greg.
Lara realised that she had been running blindly. She had been following the action. She needed to think. She needed to think about how Ares worked. Hydarnes had the ram statuette. How would he get it to Ares?
She knew the buildings. If Ares were here, where would he be? He was a man of authority. He was interested in status, in show. The whole college was about status. The whole place was steeped in history.
The chapel? she wondered. The Hall?
Lara stopped in the doorway, her back hard against the wall. She took a breath and concentrated.
“Where do men of power go in an Oxford college?” she asked.
The weapon still in her hand, Lara looked out of the doorway to her left at the last door adjacent to the back wall of the Hall. She looked up at the windows above it. The glass in them looked black in the daylight. It gave her no clues.
Lara thought about the moments she had spent hiding under the minstrels’ gallery in the Hall. She remembered Kennard Montez standing in the gallery above talking to Teo and April. She had been so close. Trinity had been so close.
Lara looked across the quad. The last of the stragglers were still leaving. She glanced up at the windows and the roofline as the last of the students left, via Fitzjames Arch. She could see the barrel of a gun at a window to her right pointing into Fitzjames Arch. She should be able to keep out of the shooter’s sight line. Someone was scaling a wall a few yards behind the shooter, but was in no position to aim a gun at her. Most of the action was happening inside the buildings.
Lara decided to go before all the students disappeared. She also decided to holster her gun. Holding it, she looked like one of Trinity. Without it, as long as she wasn’t recognised, she was just another student running for cover.
Lara made a dash for it, sprinting diagonally across the lawn. She heard shots, hard bangs and the soft spits of silenced rounds. She felt a hard smack to her backside and heard a high-pitched ping just as she reached the doorway she was aiming for. She thought that she’d been shot, but when she flexed her leg she felt nothing.
As she entered the doorway onto yet another staircase, Lara finally heard sirens. It felt as if she’d been under threat for a very long time. She knew it could only have been minutes. She knew that the call would have gone out to the emergency services at the first sign of danger.
People had died, but now she felt
real urgency. Lara’s body responded with a hit of adrenaline that drove her up the stairs, along corridors, and through rooms to her goal. Her only focus was Ares. Nothing would stop her getting to him before the authorities did. Nothing would stop her getting to him before he escaped.
Chapter 32
“Miss Croft,” said a familiar voice. Lara stopped in her tracks. She turned to face Ares, sitting in a green leather armchair, reading a newspaper. He folded it. Then, he leaned forward in his chair and tossed the newspaper onto a table that stood in the middle of the room, between them. The table was neatly arranged with the day’s newspapers, and at its centre stood the gold statuette of the ram.
She said nothing. Her head was full of too many things.
She had expected to find Ares in the Senior Common Room. That room was austere. The walls were lined with wood panelling, hung with old portraits. Tables stood on an ancient rug, surrounded by upright chairs with their green leather seats. It was a simple, masculine, formal room given over to the Fellows of the college.
Lara shook her head, trying to dislodge the sound of the sirens. She was standing in the smaller, prettier Upper Bursary. It did not suit Ares’s character, and yet, somehow it made sense. He was a guest, after all. He would expect the honour, the etiquette.
“You seem surprised to see me, Miss Croft,” said Ares, “and yet, I was expecting you.”
“You’ve got what you came for,” said Lara. “Why should you expect me?”
“Because you want it so very much,” said Ares gesturing with one beautifully manicured hand at the statue made from the gold collected in Menelaou’s fleece.
“To own such an object,” said Ares, “to have the privilege of choosing who sees it, who touches it, who has the honour of harnessing its power, that is the point. To see your desire for it, and to deny you the pleasure of its touch, of its wonders, that is everything.”
“And you believe in its mythical powers?” asked Lara.
“Do I believe in its power to confer kingship?” asked Ares. He laughed. “I am a very powerful man, Miss Croft, more powerful than any monarch.”
“The most powerful men still die alone,” said Lara.
“And yet here I sit, alive and thriving,” said Ares. “You would not believe the forces that a powerful man might employ to live forever. A girl, on the other hand, might easily meet her untimely death, especially in such a dangerous situation.”
“So you lured me here to gloat, and to kill me?” asked Lara.
“On the contrary,” said Ares. “You brought me here, Miss Croft. You have been invaluable in my search for the Golden Fleece. Why else would I allow you to escape my Paris office so easily? Of course, my ownership of the statue is natural justice for you destroying Yamatai.”
“There’s a connection?” asked Lara.
“Let us just agree that as a door closes in one place, somewhere else a window opens,” said Ares. “Himiko’s powers are lost to me, buried deep in that pathetic girl, your friend, inaccessible, useless. The Golden Fleece, however, is more than adequate compensation.”
Ares reached into his jacket and pulled something out. He held it in the palm of his extended hand for Lara to see. It was a small, old Derringer with a beautiful wooden stock.
“This is the gun that killed Abraham Lincoln,” said Ares. “You’ll be in good company when I shoot you with it.”
“The bullets won’t match any of the others found at the scene when they investigate what happened today,” said Lara.
Ares laughed again.
“What will that matter when you’re dead?” he asked.
“You’re wrong,” said Lara, suddenly remembering something. “That isn’t John Wilkes Booth’s gun. His gun is in the Ford’s Theatre Museum. It was authenticated by the FBI. I read about it.”
“If I know anything,” said Ares, “and I’ve been on Earth for long enough to have accumulated a great deal of knowledge. I know guns. I also know artifacts.”
“The FBI got it wrong?” asked Lara.
“The FBI authenticated the weapon in the Ford’s Theatre Museum using photographs taken in the 1930s,” said Ares.
“John Wilkes Booth’s gun wasn’t stolen until the 1960s,” said Lara.
“Are you sure about that?” asked Ares. His lip curled into a smile. “Are you absolutely sure, Miss Croft? Because I’m certain that I’m holding the weapon that killed Abraham Lincoln. I know that I am holding the gun that John Wilkes Booth used to shoot the President of the United States in 1865. The American Civil War made my company a very great deal of money, Miss Croft. You might say that it helped to put us on the world map.”
Images flashed through Lara’s memory, pictures of Ares shaking hands with men, standing or sitting beside them, surrounded by crates and boxes filled with firearms.
Ares turned the gun in his hand until he was pointing it at Lara, his finger on the trigger.
The sirens had stopped. The police had arrived. In a few moments, the college would be filled with armed officers. This would all be over soon. Lara heard a shouted command from somewhere outside, and then running. She turned in the direction of the sounds.
Lara was standing between two doors. The one she had entered by was fully open. Standing sideways with his back against it, invisible to the room, looking right at her as she turned towards the sounds, was Kennard Montez. He was holding a Glock 17 in a low, two-handed grip.
Lara looked back at Ares.
Her only hope was that Kennard would shoot Ares before he shot her, and that she would be fast enough to escape before he aimed his weapon a second time. Her adrenaline was already pumping. She hoped it didn’t show. She hoped that Ares couldn’t smell it on her. If he could, he’d assume that she was afraid of him. She put the hateful thought out of her mind.
“I’m a good shot, Miss Croft, but the body mass is always a safer bet than the head,” said Ares. “A double tap is very popular these days, but, of course, this is a single-shot weapon. So, the head, Miss Croft, or the heart? I suspect you’re ruled by—”
Kennard Montez’s first shot from the doorway as he raised his gun hit Ares in the body mass.
Lara didn’t see any of it.
The adrenaline in her system made her senses acute, and she trusted her intuition to know exactly when to grab the ram statuette and run for the opposite door. She yanked the door closed behind her and kept running.
The ram in her left hand, Lara pulled the gun from its holster with her right and then jammed the statuette into the holster and fastened it. She heard more shots as she ran the length of the building. Suddenly, she was in the minstrels’ gallery above the Hall. She kept moving.
Lara had Menelaou’s fleece in her back pocket in the Queen Mary tin. She had the ram statuette jammed in a gun holster, and she was carrying a weapon. Lara stopped at the top of the stairs to look out over Front Quad. It was teeming with police. She took a deep breath, tucked the gun in her waistband, and ascended the stairs.
If I can just get out of Merton without getting caught… by anyone, she thought.
Chapter 33
Kennard Montez was tackled by an Immortal as he fired at Ares. The bullet seared into Ares’s left shoulder. Kennard flew into the room a split second later, an Immortal on his back.
Ares stood. He did not gasp or wince. He took a large silk square from his pocket, folded it, and unbuttoned his shirt. He pressed the wadded cloth against the wound, and bound it in place with the tie that he had removed from around his collar.
Kennard and the Immortal battled furiously, first on the floor and then across the width of the room. They upended chairs and turned over tables in their urgency to do each other bodily harm.
Ares buttoned his shirt and shrugged his jacket back into place. Then, he walked deliberately across the room, sidestepping the furniture and the brawling men, and ex
ited in the same direction that Lara had left.
Kennard was backed against a window, the Immortal’s fists flying into his gut. Trying to avoid going down on his knees, Kennard reached out for something to steady himself. His right hand found the cord that was holding back the curtain, and he gripped it and pulled.
With renewed purpose, Kennard threw a hard left uppercut, connecting with the Immortal’s jaw. Then, he swung the cord around the Immortal’s neck. He caught the cord’s other end deftly in his left hand and pulled on both ends.
The Immortal tried to swing another punch, but the hard yank on his neck and punching into air compromised his balance. Kennard turned the Immortal. He twisted the ends of the cord around his hands and pushed his knee into the Immortal’s back as the man went down on his knees.
The Immortal began to claw at his neck, but it was useless. The pressure on his throat was too much, and he was quickly gasping for breath. Kennard kept tightening his grip as the Immortal’s strength began to fail him, and eventually he was unconscious.
Kennard Montez had no more time to waste. It would take several more seconds for the Immortal to die of strangulation, so he let go of the cord. The Immortal slumped to the floor. Kennard reached down, gripping the man’s head between his hands, and in one swift move, he broke his neck.
Then, Kennard retrieved his gun and went after Ares.
Lara crossed the roof of the stair turret and climbed the steep slope of the Hall roof, grateful for the rubber tread of her sturdy boots. She crouched at the top and looked out across the college. Someone was walking the ridgeline of the roof that adjoined the Hall, to her left, using it like a tightrope. It was a woman dressed all in black. She had to be an Immortal.