The Blood Lance (26 page)

Ethan saw Malloy trying to drag Dale out. 'I'll get him, T. K.,' Ethan whispered. 'You cover the building.'

He moved forward and swept Dale up over his shoulders, almost collapsing under the weight of the body and the hot pain in his shoulder. Kate and Malloy continued firing at the building, with Kate backing toward the kerb. Josh was waiting - his SUV now taking fire.

Kate emptied her gun and dived into the backseat. Several more shots hit the vehicle as Ethan rolled Dale's corpse into the backseat and climbed in after him. Malloy emptied his clip and plunged headfirst through the open passenger window in the front. Ethan shouted, 'Go!' but Josh was already burning rubber.

Josh made a hard right turn at the end of the block and came round a second turn to the front of the building. He slowed in perplexity when he did not see Dale's Land Rover. Breaking the lull, a burst of fire hit the windshield. Josh turned a one-eighty, fish-tailing into a parked vehicle as he finished, but he got them out of the kill zone. Kate called directions from the backseat as they roared down the street and soon they skidded into the BP station. For the moment, no one was following and the streets were quiet. That gave them time to move to the Toyota, Malloy and Ethan fitting Perry's corpse into the boot. This time Malloy drove. He pulled out of the lot slowly, not a worry in the world, just as the first police car screamed out of a side street opposite them and went roaring by.

'Call Jim,' Malloy told Sutter, as he tapped the speed dial of his own phone.

It was early evening in the U.S., and Jane let her phone ring several times before she got to it. When she picked up, she said, 'Yes.' She knew it was Malloy. He was pretty sure from her tone she expected good news.

'Dale's been killed,' Malloy told her.

'How?' Jane asked. Her voice was calm, her manner cool.

Malloy could imagine someone was with her, that she could not talk freely, but she was always like that. The rougher the game, the colder she got.

'Somebody got in close and used a knife.
^'
He looked at Sutter who wasn't getting an answer. 'We've also got an MIA - one of the FBI agents on the case.'

'Which one?' she asked.

'Special Agent James Randal.'

'I'll let his people know about it. Can you give me the last-seen location?'

Malloy gave the address of the building and told her Randal had been driving Dale's Land Rover. Ethan recited the license number on the Land Rover from the backseat and Malloy repeated it, wondering as he did how Ethan could remember something like that at a time like this.

'I'll handle it,' Jane said.

'I got Dale's body off site. I'll leave him at his safe house under
Das Sternenlicht.'

'Where is the second agent, T. K.?'

Malloy glanced at Josh Sutter, who looked stricken and lost. 'He's with me.'

'We need to get him out of the country tonight.'

'I've got my hands full with another problem.'

'Can you tell me about it?'

'Not really.'

'I can send two teams in: one to clean up Dale's operation, the other to get Agent Sutter down to Ramstein. How about you? Are you going to be okay?'

'I'm okay.' Sore, he thought, maybe even wounded, but she didn't need to know that. Not at the moment at least.

'I want you to go after Chernoff, T. K. She's the priority now. With federal agents killed in pursuit, Mr Farrell just lost any sympathy with the media he might have had. Are we clear on that?'

'We
took
a woman out. It might have been Chernoff, but if
not, trust me, Chernoff is mine.'

Once Malloy had clicked off, Josh Sutter asked him, 'What are the chances Jim is still alive?' He was still trying Randal's cell phone every couple of blocks and staring out the window as if he thought he might discover his partner somewhere at the side of the road. When Malloy didn't answer him, Sutter said, 'You think he's dead?'

This really wasn't a question and Malloy let it hang before he said, 'I think you had better be prepared for the worst.'

Josh Sutter started punching out another number. 'I need to call my supervisor.'

'It's being handled,' Malloy told him. When that didn't stop him, Malloy took his wrist. 'You don't need to do anything right now, Josh. Everything is being handled.'

'What about Jim? He's
missing,
T. K.! We can't just assume he's dead!'

'The Hamburg cops are going to be all over this. They've got the crime scene by now and they've got the license plate of the Land Rover.'

'I need to call Hans!'

'Call him. . .' Malloy said,'. . .and you'll do twenty-to-life as an accessory to murder.'

Murder
stopped him. 'What are you talking about?'

From the back seat Ethan said, 'If you kill someone while you're committing a felony in the States, don't they charge you with murder in the first?' When Sutter didn't respond, Ethan told him, 'It's the same over here. Only thing is over here they don't have the death penalty.'

'Hans is not your friend, Josh,' Malloy told him. 'Not anymore.'

'No, T. K.
You're
not my friend.'

'Right now,' Ethan told him, 'like it or not, you've got three friends in this country - the people in this car. Everybody else is after your ass.'

Altstadt, Hamburg.

'How bad is it?' Carlisle asked. Jim Randal was bound and gagged in the next room, conscious but groggy. Helena Chernoff had already changed clothes and was strapping on armour.

'No one in the apartment building is responding,' she said. 'The other three got out before the police showed up.'

'So we can get Ohlendorf?'

Chernoff gave Jim Randal a speculative look. 'That shouldn't be a problem. All we have to do is persuade Agent Randal to make a phone call.'

St. Pauli District, Hamburg.

'Better tell Josh about Ohlendorf.' Kate said as Ethan slipped out of the car and unlocked the parking slot at the back door of
Das Sternenlicht.

'I was just going to do that,' Malloy answered. He looked at Josh who had gone quiet since realising he had no friends. 'The guy who gave us our information is inside.'

'You still trust him?' Sutter asked. This might have been a joke, but nobody was laughing.

'Never did,' Malloy answered and pulled the car forward. 'When you get inside, I want you to go to the back room. Don't let him hear you say anything. We're going to have to let him go later and I don't want him to have any information the police can use to find us.'

Malloy went in first to make sure no one from the bar came back through the storage room and found them. Ethan and Josh Sutter brought Dale's corpse out of the boot of the Toyota and got him to the cellar. Kate brought the canvas bags.

Malloy led all three of them into the bedroom. When they had settled Dale Perry's corpse against the far wall, Sutter said, 'We can't just leave him here like this.'

'A team will come in before dawn. They'll take care of it.' By that Malloy meant they would drop the body someplace and leave it for others to find. Sutter looked at the sterile setting of the bedroom. 'Is this where he lived?'

'No. This is one of his safe houses. He had a wife and kids, a house. . . a real life.' He felt a moment of sorrow taking him and pushed it away.

Kate stripped away her jacket and guns. 'Have you got some kind of medical kit?'

'In the bathroom.'

'Then let's go. I want to have a look at your back.'

'Take care of Ethan,' he said. 'I have to clean up the computer before I do anything else.' After they had left, he told Josh Sutter, 'You might as well get comfortable, Josh. We've got a three-to-four hour wait for your ride home.' He looked at his watch. 'The good news is you should be on a plane bound for New York sometime in the next eight hours.'

'I'm not leaving until I know what happened to my partner.'

'Josh, you don't have a choice. If the police find you, you are looking at multiple charges of murder and one count of kidnap.'

Sutter's face washed pale with fear, but even then he was thinking about Randal. 'So you're saying if the police find Jim alive. . . ?'

'Either way, it's not good, but at least if the cops find him he'll be alive and we can start dealing with the Germans. Maybe get a reduced sentence.'

'What the hell did you get us into T. K.?'

Malloy looked down at Dale, feeling his stomach churning. 'I don't know, Josh. I really don't have any idea.'

Malloy turned on the computer. He had all the relevant files on Chernoff at his hotel room in the Neustadt, but thought he might as well try to search for leads on the Knights of the Lance before cleaning the thing. He tried
knights, lance
, and
paladins.
When that failed to turn up anything, he searched for Ohlendorf and found a nest of files, including known associates. He downloaded the material to a two gig memory stick, which he pocketed. He then activated the self-destruct software. The prompt asked for his code. He typed in JANE and the files started disappearing. Whilst the programme ran, he checked the drawers and turned up a bound stack of DVDs, all agency material. There was also another memory stick with two gigs of memory, though he could not read it now. He took these to the kitchen and began breaking them. When the files were clean on the computer, he lifted the hard drive out and went to the kitchen and broke it apart. Then he dumped the hard drive, the broken DVDs, and the extra memory stick into a glass bowl and poured liquid drain cleaner over them - just to be sure nothing survived.

When he tapped on the bathroom door Kate called for him to come in. Ethan was naked to the waist and sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Kate was beside him, straddling the edge of the tub and stitching his wound with a needle and surgical thread.

'How bad?' Malloy asked.

'There's buckshot all through his upper arm. I did what I could to clean the wounds, but he's going to need a doctor to dig them out. This,' she nodded toward the flap of skin, 'needs to be taken care of now.'

Malloy nosed around in the medicine box. 'What did you use to kill the pain?'

Kate took her eyes from her bloody needlework and met Malloy's. 'Guts.'

Malloy looked at Ethan. 'Hurt?'

Ethan's stony ghost-white face gave no expression, but he had enough breath to answer. 'Little bit.'

Kate finished sewing the wound and rummaged about in the medicine kit for bandages. Afterwards she turned to Malloy, 'Your turn, T. K. Strip.'

Without a needle running into him Ethan finally worked up something like a smile. 'Remember when a beautiful woman telling you to strip was a good thing?'

Malloy pulled off the armour and then his shirt. He was

hurting - a deep hollow ache, like his body had just been slammed into a wall a few times. 'Drop your pants, too,' Kate told him. 'Aren't you even going to buy me dinner?' he asked. 'Oh, man!' Ethan said as Malloy turned delicately away from Kate. 'What happened to your chest?'

Malloy glanced down at his chest as he dropped his pants. 'I got those in Lebanon - my first tour of duty.'

'Looks like it should have been your last.'

Malloy grinned. 'The people who found me told me later they didn't give me a chance in hell of making it.'

Kate started poking Malloy's kidneys and he winced, his eyes tearing uncontrollably. From the feel of it he thought she might be using her needle.

'You've been bruised pretty badly here, but I can't tell if there's any internal damage. You need to watch for blood. Kidneys are not something you want to mess with.'

'How bad are the buckshot wounds?'

'It's a bloody mess, but I'll clean it up and bandage the area. What do you like, salt or alcohol?'

'How about Demerol?'

'Alcohol it is.'

Cleaning the wounds hurt more than getting shot, but it wasn't a needle and thread, so Malloy took it without too much whimpering.

'Do you think my wife is going to figure out what happened?' he asked.

'I don't know,' Ethan answered. 'How stupid is she?' Josh Sutter knocked at the bathroom door and then opened it. His face was pale. He held out his cell phone for Malloy to take. 'There's a woman on my phone. She says she'll only talk to you.'

Malloy looked at Kate and then at Ethan. Finally he took the phone and said in German, 'Who is this?'

'I'm willing to make a trade,' the woman said in German.
'Are you?'

He recognised the voice from the video clips he had seen the night before. 'What are we trading, Helena?'

'One FBI agent for one Hamburg attorney.'

'I'm going to need proof—'