style="font-size:15px;"> “The way Krauzer tells it, a small army.”
“Right.”
“Krauzer had a run-in with a biker earlier in the day,” Dyson spoke up from the back.
Sabre glanced into the mirror on the back of the sun visor in front of him. Dyson was one of the young guys, a Marine veteran of Afghanistan.
“The guys hunting Krauzer are bikers?”
“I don’t know. I caught the story on the internet. Krauzer didn’t call, so I didn’t follow up. He usually only has us out when he’s got a new release.”
“And this is over an elf-witch crystal.” Sabre shook his head.
“Krauzer also mentioned something about Merovingian kings,” Meszoly said, “but that got garbled up in gunfire, so maybe I’m wrong about that.”
The mention of the Merovingians sent a jolt of electricity through Sabre. All of the old stories his father had told him came pouring out of his memory, the stories that had been handed down for generations.
Bottling his excitement with the professionalism he’d learned over the years, Sabre looked at the GPS screen again and the red line to USC that had gotten drastically shorter. “How far out are we?”
“Two minutes.”
“Other teams are en route?”
“Two other cars. Eight more guys. If we pull any more, we’ll be leaning out other ops. Want me to do that?”
“No. Twelve of us are a small army.” Sabre reached to the back of the vehicle and Dyson slid an M4A1 into his hands.
How could Krauzer have gotten involved in the Merovingian legends?
“Give me an update.” Ligier de Cerceau skidded to a stop at the doorway to the stairwell his quarry had entered. One of his men lay across the doorway threshold, holding the door partially open. Bullet holes showed in the glass viewing section and shards lay scattered in the hallway, telling him at once the bullets had come from within.
“We don’t have access to the security cameras, Colonel,” Gerard Malouel said. He’d remained with the vehicle out in the parking lot so he could monitor the insertion and capture. “I’ve got two helicopters in the air.”
As he leaned against the wall near the stairwell doorway, de Cerceau heard the drumbeat of one of the helicopters’ rotors overhead.
“They’re searching the building, lighting it up with spotlights,” Gerard went on. “One of them is switching over to thermographic systems. We should know more in another minute or two.”
“Have the police been alerted?” De Cerceau hadn’t detected any alarms that had been set off inside the building, but there could be a silent warning system.
“Affirmative. They’re en route.”
De Cerceau cursed, knowing they were running out of time. “If we’re not done here soon, we’ll need to slow them down.”
“We’re already preparing for that. This is going to get messy.” Gerard’s tone remained neutral, but he was unhappy. He wouldn’t have mentioned the potential problem if he hadn’t been disconcerted.
De Cerceau gazed down at the dead man in the doorway. “It’s already gotten messy. We’ve got four dead and one wounded. Almost half the team down.” Because of one lone woman. That was something he couldn’t believe. The first man might have been careless in approaching the people they were after, and perhaps even the second man. But there was no way this many would have been lost through carelessness. Reading the combat situations they’d been engaged in, de Cerceau knew that someone with Krauzer was used to military operations. He cursed.
“Yes, sir.”
Two men closed on de Cerceau’s position, stepped into position against the wall and waited for his orders. The remaining three gunmen held the other end of the building and were advancing up the stairwell there.
Holding the machine pistol tight against his shoulder and aiming it up the stairs, de Cerceau stepped across the dead man and into the stairwell. The enclosed space trapped the stench of death and cordite. He held his position and listened.
Farther up the stairwell, footsteps and quiet voices echoed for just a moment. Then a closing door shut them away. De Cerceau headed up the stairs with the machine pistol leading the way. The dead man behind him had been caught unaware. De Cerceau didn’t intend for that to happen to him. He took the stairs two at a time, his forefinger resting on his weapon’s trigger.
* * *
AS SOON AS he stepped through the stairwell doorway, Krauzer took off down the hallway to the left. The lights came on just behind him as the automatic systems cut in, making him look as if he was leading the charge against the darkness.
Annja kept pace with Orta. “What rooms are this way?” She slid a fresh magazine into the machine pistol.
“Classrooms.” Orta sounded out of breath. He was in good shape, but adrenaline had to be wreaking havoc on him. “Alcoves for the graduate assistants. A research archive. The graduate dean’s office.”
“The research archive sounds big enough to hide in.” She matched Orta stride for stride as they followed Krauzer down the hallway. Glancing at the windows, she realized that the lights reflected from the large windows along the hallway made seeing outside difficult.
Still, she was able to spot the helicopter’s red running lights as it dropped to hover just outside the building. Shoving a leg out, Annja tripped Orta and grabbed his shirtsleeve, pulling him to the ground hard and falling on top of him. As they skidded along the marble tiles, a burst of heavy machine-gun fire chewed through the windows in a ragged line.
Annja threw her arm over her head to protect herself. The helicopter’s whirling rotor noise suddenly rose to a deafening roar inside the hallway.
“Stay down,” she told Orta as she slithered along the hallway through the spray of broken glass. Once she was past the line of destruction, she rose to her knees, pointed the machine pistol at the helicopter’s nose and pulled the trigger.
Bullets tore through the window, blowing shards outside the building. The light made it impossible for her to see where the rounds struck the helicopter, but she thought she saw a jagged line stitched along the pilot’s door.
The helicopter fell away, dodging to put distance between itself and the building. The machine gunner in the cargo area fired, trying to vector in on Annja’s position, but the helicopter’s sudden movement jerked the gunman’s aim off and tracers stabbed into the night.
Shaking the broken glass from her clothes as best as she could, Annja rose to a crouched position and returned to Orta’s side. “Let’s go.”
He pushed himself up on trembling arms and looked at her.
“The archives,” Annja reminded him. “Let’s go there.”
Numbly,
