Scarecrow (35 page)

‘The Scarecrow will stop you,' Gant said defiantly.

‘Yes. Yes. The Scarecrow,' Killian said. ‘Our mutual friend. He is a special one, isn't he? Did you know that the Council was so concerned about his presence on the list that they went to the trouble of arranging a sham mission to Siberia just to trap him? Needless to say, it didn't work.'

‘No shit.'

‘But if he is still alive,' Killian said, ‘then, yes, it is something of a problem.'

Killian locked eyes with Gant . . .

. . . and she felt her spine turn completely to ice. There was something in his glare that she had never seen before, something truly terrifying.

Aloysius Knight saw it, too, and he immediately became concerned. This was happening too fast. He shifted in his stance, strained against his manacles.

‘Now,' Killian said, ‘in any standard story, a villain like me would seek to draw out the troublesome Schofield by holding his beloved Lieutenant Gant hostage. I believe this was exactly Demon Larkham's thinking earlier today.'

‘Yes,' Gant said warily. ‘It was.'

‘But it didn't work, did it?' Killian said.

‘No.'

‘Which is why, Lieutenant Gant, I must do something
more
to flush Shane Schofield out. Something that will make
finding me
far more important to him than disrupting the Council's plan. Mister Noonan.'

At that moment Rat Face—Noonan—grasped the release lever on the guillotine and Gant swallowed in horror.

Then she looked over at Knight, locking eyes with him.

‘Knight,' she said. ‘When you get out of here, tell Schofield something for me. Tell him I would have said yes.'

Then, without pause or patience, Rat Face pulled the lever and the guillotine's terrible blade dropped from its perch and rushed down its guide-rails toward Gant's exposed neck.

Chunk.

 

Libby Gant's headless body dropped to the ground at the base of the guillotine.

A hideous waterfall of blood gushed out from its open neck, spilling across the stone stage before flowing off it into the seawater at the platform's edge.

The blood in the water quickly attracted the sharks. Two pointed grey shadows appeared at the edge of the guillotine's stage, searching for the source of the blood.

‘Jesus,
no
!' Aloysius Knight yelled, straining at his chains, staring at the gruesome sight in total apoplectic shock.

It had happened so fast.

So quickly.

Without any hesitation.

Libby Gant was dead.

Despite the pain of the light hitting them, Knight's eyes were wide, his face white. ‘Oh God, no . . .' he gasped again.

He snapped to glare up at Jonathan Killian—but Killian's face was a mask. His cool hard stare had not changed at all.

And then suddenly one of the men in the pit was coming towards Knight.

It was Drake, the ExSol mercenary, carrying one of Knight's Remington shotguns and wearing his utility vest. The other man, Rat Face, was leaving the pit via a steel door over by the guillotine.

‘What about this one?' Drake asked Killian.

Killian waved a hand. ‘No guillotines for the Black Knight. No games that might permit him to escape. Shoot him in the head and then feed him to the sharks.'

‘Yes, sir,' Drake said.

The giant mercenary strode across a narrow stone bridge between the guillotine's stage and Knight's wall-platform, each step kicking up a shallow splash.

As Drake approached him, the squinting Knight assessed his options.

There weren't many.

He could barely see.

His hands were manacled.

Drake was coming closer.

Thinking furiously, Knight bit his lip so hard that he drew blood. He spat the gob of bloody saliva away in disgust.

Drake halted about six feet from him, out of range from anything Knight could do—like strangle him with his legs, or kick him in the crotch.

Drake raised Knight's silver Remington, aimed it at Knight's head. ‘Heard you were better than this, Knight.'

At which point, Knight nodded down at Drake's feet and said, ‘I am.'

Drake frowned.

And looked down—to see one of the tiger sharks in the water
right next to his boots
, drawn to the edge of the platform by Knight's blood-laced saliva.

Just as Knight had hoped.

‘Ah—' Drake took an involuntary step back from the big ten-foot shark at his feet . . .

. . . and walked into the strike zone of a far more dangerous predator.

What Knight did next, he did very
very
fast.

First, he whip-snapped his body upwards, lashing out with his legs, and grabbed Drake hard around the ribs from behind. Knight squeezed and there came a hideous
snap-snap-snap
, the sound of Drake's ribs breaking.

Drake roared with pain.

Then Knight yanked the mercenary closer so that he could reach something hanging from the utility vest—
his
utility vest—that Drake was wearing.

Knight pulled a mountaineering piton from the vest and one-handed, jammed the piton into his left-hand manacle and pressed its release.

With a powerful spring-loaded
thwack
, the piton expanded in an instant—

—and the old iron manacle around Knight's wrist cracked open and suddenly his left hand was free.

Up on the viewing balcony, Cedric Wexley saw what was happening and immediately whipped up his gun, but Knight was holding Drake in the way with his legs.

And he wasn't finished with Drake either.

He used his now-free left hand to grab a second item from the vest: the miniature blowtorch.

Knight yanked the blowtorch from its pouch and immediately pulled the trigger, firing it at point-blank range
into Drake's back
.

The mini-blowtorch burst to life, emitting a superheated blue flame.

Drake roared.

The spike-like blue flame lanced right through his body, emerging from the other side—the front side—like the blade of a luminescent sword.

Drake's face, shocked and dying, fell back against Knight's chest.

‘You got off lightly,' Knight growled, applying more power, blasting the insides of Drake's body to nothing.

Then the body went limp, and fell, and as it did so, Knight unclasped his utility vest from it, at the same time using his piton to break open his other manacle.

As Drake fell, however, Knight became exposed to Cedric Wexley up in the viewing balcony, who started firing.

But now Knight was completely free.

He dived behind Drake's corpse, let bullet after bullet hit it before, without warning, he rolled Drake's body into the blood-stained water, right in front of the nearest tiger shark, and then, to everyone's surprise . . .

. . . 
leapt into the water after it himself!

The shark lunged at Drake's corpse, bit into it with an almighty crunch, started tearing it to shreds. The second shark came over quickly and joined in the frenzy.

A churning bloody foam spilled out across the pool. Waves sloshed every which way.

After a few minutes, however, the frenzy died down and the water was calm once more.

But there was no sign of Knight.

Indeed, Aloysius Knight never surfaced again inside the deadly pool.

 

He did surface, however,
outside
the Forteresse de Valois, amid the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

Exactly six minutes after he'd dived underneath the sharks feeding on Drake's body, he breached the surface of the ocean, still holding his Pony Bottle to his lips.

The mini-scuba bottle had only just had enough air in it to get him through the long underwater passage that connected the Shark Pit to the open sea.

Knight didn't bob in the water for long. A homing transponder on his vest took care of that.

In a matter of minutes, the hawk-shaped shadow of his Sukhoi S-37 swung into place above him, blasting the water around him with its thrusters.

Then a harness fell out of the plane's bomb bay and slapped into the water beside him, and within moments, Aloysius Knight was sitting inside the
Black Raven
, back with Mother and Rufus.

‘You all right, Boss?' Rufus said, throwing him a new pair of yellow-lensed glasses.

Knight caught them as he slumped to the floor of the
Raven
's rear holding cell, put them on. He didn't answer Rufus's question. Just nodded. He was still shell-shocked by the horrific execution he had just witnessed in the Shark Pit.

Mother said, ‘What about the Scarecrow? And my little Chickadee?'

Knight looked up at her sharply.

Behind his yellow glasses, his eyes were the picture of horror. He gazed at Mother, wondering what to say.

Then abruptly he stood. ‘Rufus. Do you have a fix on Schofield? Those MicroDots I put on his Palm Pilot should have rubbed off on his hand.'

‘I've got him, Boss. And he's still moving. Looks like someone took him to that French carrier off the coast.'

Knight turned to Mother, took a deep, deep breath. ‘Schofield's alive, but'—he swallowed—‘there could be a problem with the girl.'

‘Oh dear God, no . . .' Mother said.

‘I can't talk about it now,' Knight said. ‘We have to rescue Schofield.'

 

THE FRENCH AIRCRAFT CARRIER RICHELIEU , ATLANTIC OCEAN, OFF THE FRENCH COAST

Shane Schofield was thrown into a small steel-walled room adjoining the below-decks hangar. The door slammed shut behind him.

There was nothing in the room but a table and a chair.

On the table sat Lefevre's CincLock-VII disarming unit. Next to the unit, with a little red pilot light burning brightly on its top, was:

A phosphorus grenade.

High in the corner of the room, hidden behind a dark glass plate, Schofield heard a camera whirring.

‘
Captain Schofield,
' the DGSE agent's voice came over some speakers. ‘
A simple test. The phosphorus grenade you see before you is connected by shortwave radio to the CincLock unit on the table. The only way to disarm the grenade is through the CincLock unit. For the purposes of this exercise, the final disarm code is 123. The grenade will go off in one minute. Your time starts . . . now.
'

‘Holy shit,' Schofield said, sitting down quickly.

He examined the CincLock unit up close.

White and red circles filled the main screen—red on the left, white on the right.

Bing
.

A message appeared on the lower screen:

 

FIRST PROTOCOL (PROXIMITY): SATISFIED.

INITIATE SECOND PROTOCOL.

Immediately, the white circles on the main screen began to flash—each one blinking for a brief instant, one at a time, in a slow random sequence.

The screen squealed in protest.

 

SECOND PROTOCOL (RESPONSE PATTERN): FAILED DISARM ATTEMPT RECORDED.

THREE FAILED DISARM ATTEMPTS WILL RESULT IN DEFAULT DETONATION.

SECOND PROTOCOL (RESPONSE PATTERN): RE-ACTIVATED.

‘What?' Schofield said to the screen.

‘
Fifty seconds, Captain
,' Lefevre's voice said. ‘
You have to touch the illuminated circles in the prescribed order
.'

‘Oh. Right.'

The white circles began to flash again, one after the other.

And now Schofield began pressing them—just after they flashed.

‘
Forty seconds
 . . .'

The white circles' sequence became faster. Schofield's hands began to move faster with them, touching the circles on the screen.

Then, abruptly, one of the red circles on the
left
side of the display illuminated.

Schofield wasn't ready for it. But hit it anyway, and got it in time. The white circles resumed their sequence, now blinking very quickly. Schofield's fingers increased their pace, too.