that Devlin knew would lead into the old building’s ancient cellar. Devlin dashed over to her and spoke rapidly in French. “They’ll be here in a less than a minute. They’re going to find me. They are not going to find you, but that’s okay. Trust me, they won’t have time to think about it. Now blow the lock on this door, get in and get out.”
He took a quick look at the area map; her instincts, as usual, were impeccable. “There’s a garden in the back, which connects through to the buildings on the other side of the street. You can crawl out the cellar window, sprint across. The fence on the other side shouldn’t be a problem and then you’re out on the utca and away. Now ditch the wig and get out of here.”
“What about you?” There was no worry in her eyes, just professional curiosity. That was part of their deal.
“I have to wait for Duke Mantee.” He sensed, rather than saw, her look of incomprehension. “An old friend,” he explained. “Now get out of here. Seriously.”
She hesitated, for just an unprofessional instant—
“Arnaud’s, just like we planned. Bienville Street.”
“Order for me,” she smiled. And then she was gone.
Devlin slipped back into the car. “Duke Mantee” had his instructions. It was all going to happen very fast, it was all going to happen all at once, and it had better damn well work.
They were almost upon him now. He could hear voices, speaking in different languages. There was no point in listening to what they were saying. It would be over soon, one way or another. But, even though he’d never met him, he trusted “Duke Mantee” more than he trusted anybody else, except her.
He strained his ears above the voices, listening for the Duke.
The men came closer to the Prius, weapons drawn. They wouldn’t be expecting to see him sitting there, big as life, which is what he was counting on. All those crazy spy books and their Rube Goldberg plotting devices—he’d trade them all for the element of surprise. Naked was always the best disguise.
They’d have suppressors, of course, and a silencer was something he lacked, but if the Duke was punctual, he wasn’t going to need one. It was like trying to unwrap candy in a movie theater: never make a series of little noises when you can make one big noise and get it over with.
There—now he heard it. The thwack of a helicopter, approaching rapidly.
The men heard it, too. They stopped for a moment and looked up at the sky. Budapest was not Los Angeles, and the sound of a helicopter in the middle of the night was not a normal occurrence. They were amazed when the chopper roared over the buildings, dipped down, and hovered just over their heads.
Now—
Devlin opened fire with the shotgun, bringing down two of the men with one blast as the other two scattered and returned fire. He could hear the pock marks as the bullets slammed into the Prius, but he was already out of the car, rolling, the shotgun abandoned now in favor of the HK and one of the Armalites. He got off two quick rounds, heard one of the assailants groan. And then an extraordinary thing happened.
A lifeline descended from the chopper. But no ordinary lifeline. Instead, it was more like a grappling hook, rocketing down a winch and heading straight for—
The trash can. It latched on and began winching the thing up.
Devlin shot the fourth man with the HK and sprinted away, in the opposite direction from Maryam. Op sec came before everything else, and he had planned the operation with multiple outcomes in mind.
One of the four was still alive as Devlin passed him, but there was no time for mercy. He shot him as he ran, heading straight for the other SUV at the end of the street, the two-man team. He could see they were out of the car now, firing at the helicopter. Devlin said a quick prayer that none of the rounds would clip Farid, but he kept running, staying on the sidewalk, in the gloom of the old 19th-century blocks of flats.
Now one of the men spotted him, redirecting his fire. Bullets gouged out chunks of the buildings. Devlin somersaulted twice and came up shooting. He dropped his man with two shots, even though it should have only taken one, and dashed for the SUV. He had time for a quick glance back, and saw that the trash can had disappeared into the chopper’s interior, and the big bird was already whirling away.
He was in the driver’s seat of the Benz before the last man standing knew he was there. Devlin popped the clutch and squealed into first gear as a bullet clanked off the rear window. Bulletproof. Good—he didn’t need to be driving around Budapest in the middle of the night with a rear window punched out. The man was still pursuing him, firing. Devlin caught a glimpse of his face in the side mirror—it was the Hungarian he had seen with Farid up on Castle Hill.
One more thing to do.
Abruptly, he slammed the big car in reverse. Before the man could react, Devlin ran him over. He never knew his name, never would know what crime, if any, the man had committed. But he had been trained to understand that it didn’t matter, and it didn’t. The back alleys of central Europe were littered with the bodies of nameless ops, who had vanished unknown and unmourned. That was his tough luck. Operational security was everything.
CHAPTER TWO
In the air
Emanuel Skorzeny did his best to relax into the leather seats of his private airplane. For the past nine months, he had been a veritable fugitive, airborne, fleeing the wrath of the U.S. government. Until last year, that had not been a thing worth fearing, not for a long time, not since Americans had landed on Normandy Beach, bridged Remagen, and came close enough to Berlin to let the Soviets and Zhukov hurry up and take the prize. So much for the bromide that violence never solved anything. It certainly sorted Hitler and the National Socialists out.
More—not since the Americans had cleared the Pacific islands from Tarawa and Iwo Jima to Okinawa, firebombed Tokyo, and dropped the Big One on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oddly enough, that was the end of Japanese militarism, finis to the Empire, the rude termination of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Thank God the Americans didn’t fight like that anymore.
Still, here he was, a prisoner of his own wealth and ambition. Airborne in his private 707, outfitted and retrofitted to his exact specifications, a home away from home, a flying living room if indeed he would ever have stooped to anything so vulgar as a living room. Free to fly the world, but never land, a contemporary Flying Dutchman, a Wandering Jew, the desolate hero of Schubert’s Winterreise—the living embodiment of a hundred European tragic heroes, but without the heroic deeds that had accompanied their ineluctable fates.
That devil, Devlin, had done this to him. The boy he had failed to kill when he had the chance, a latter-day Hercules, who had turned the tables on the snakes sent to throttle him in his cradle. And now, after all these years of waiting and plotting and planning, Devlin had defeated him again, defeated him and his most potent operative, Milverton, killed him with his bare hands in his own house, as Hercules had strangled the serpents. Broken his back, stopped his plot, razed his house, and nearly killed Skorzeny himself. He had underestimated his enemy. It was not a mistake he would make again. The next time they confronted each other would be the last time.
“Is there anything else, M. Skorzeny?” asked Emanuelle Derrida. Since the unfortunate demise of M. Pilier, Mlle. Derrida had taken his place as his most trusted assistant. She was younger than Pilier, and certainly prettier. She was also unmarried and seemed
