The Prometheus Deception (58 page)

However large the Alpha squad detachment, it would not be numerous enough to search the immense Palace of Westminster, which contained, in seven acres, the two houses of Parliament—twelve hundred rooms, more than a hundred staircases, over three kilometers of passages. There would undoubtedly be others in plainclothes searching for them who would be no less lethal: field operatives in the employ of the Prometheus Group. They could be anywhere. Bryson's mind was a whirl of memorized maps and plans; he needed to simplify, to find the order in the chaos. If he and Elena were to survive, he'd have to trust his instincts, and the training that shaped them. It was all they had.

Their pursuers would, he was sure, examine all possible means of egress, of escape, from Rupert Vere's office; that would determine the avenues of their search. Calculations would be made, search routes decided, based upon a fixed set of variables. The window was one obvious way out, but that was high above the ground, and no evidence would be found of any ropes or climbing apparatus. Vere's personal secretary, who guarded the entrance to the office suite, would assert that no one had run past here, though it was possible that she had been absent, away from her desk, for some period of time, in which case that route could not be ruled out.

That left one more avenue that had to be searched by their pursuers, and it would not take the killers long to realize that the plywood panel at the back of the closet was loose, though propped back into place. This meant that several killers from the Alpha squad or Prometheus were likely to be already finding their way through the crawlspace. Bryson and Elena's only hope was that the searchers might be confounded by the maze of hidden passages.

But a few seconds after they emerged from the steel air duct, Bryson could hear footsteps whose proximity seemed to indicate that they were coming from within the crawlspace, and not from outside. There was a certain echoing tonality, accompanied by a wooden creak.
Yes
. Bryson was now sure of it. Someone was following them through the concealed passage.

He felt Elena grab his shoulder, put her mouth to his ear, and whisper, “Listen!”

He nodded:
I hear
.

His mind raced. He had Dawson's Browning, with whatever ammunition was loaded in the chamber and magazine, and he had several implements in the briefcase that would be less effective in hand-to-hand combat. But the dismal fact was, there would be no hand-to-hand, close-range struggle. If they were spotted, guns would be fired, whether silenced or not.

Bryson stopped suddenly at another crack of light that seeped through the mortise work, and he peered through. He was looking into a fluorescent-lit utility room, its floors covered with old green linoleum. Looking more closely, he could make out shelving on one end stacked with what appeared to be cleaning supplies. Though the room was lit, it also appeared to be empty. He felt along the walls of the crawlspace until he found the detachable plywood panel that likely covered an egress into a closet that gave onto the utility room. With a small Phillips-head screwdriver he took from his briefcase, he unscrewed the panel and then pulled it loose. The wood squeaked and groaned as it came off. Indirect light shone through the opening; they could make out the outlines of the small closet, illuminated by a narrow slit of light that came in where the closet door met the linoleum floor.

Quietly, they squatted down and squeezed through the low, small opening. Bryson went first into the cluttered closet, and Elena followed. There was a sudden, jarring sound: Elena had knocked against a bucket, sending the wooden handle of a mop or broom clattering against the wall. They froze. Bryson held a hand in the air, signifying a command to halt. They listened, waited. Bryson's heart thundered.

After an endless minute, Bryson was satisfied that the noise had not attracted attention, and they resumed. Slowly, carefully, he opened the closet door. The utility room was indeed empty, though the lights were on; it was likely that someone had been here only recently, a cleaning person, who would therefore be returning at any time.

They raced silently across the room to the door that had to lead to a hallway. It was open a crack. Bryson pushed it open just enough to get his head through; he looked to either side down the dim hall. He saw no one. He whispered to Elena, “Stay here until I signal that it's safe to come out.”

Bryson passed a vending machine and an old brown bucket in which stood a wet-mop, and then a figure appeared. He stopped short, reached for the Browning, which he had jammed into his waistband.

But it was only an old lady, a slow-moving cleaning woman pushing a metal cart. Relieved, Bryson continued down the hall toward her, mentally preparing a response in case he was asked questions. He was a civil servant, as his clothing—though dust-covered—indicated. Yet he was mindful that the old woman could become a resource as well, and they could afford to bypass no resources.

“Excuse me,” Bryson said as he approached, dusting off his shoulders with a flick of his hand.

“Lost, are you?” the cleaning woman said. “Can I help you, dearie?” She had a kindly, wrinkled face, her white hair thin and wispy. She seemed old to be doing such manual labor, and she moved with such apparent physical exhaustion that she stirred Bryson's sympathy. Yet her eyes regarded him shrewdly.

Lost?
But wasn't it a natural question: dressed as he was, Bryson appeared to be out of place in this service corridor. Had the word been circulated so quickly that one—or more—fugitives were roaming the building? He thought rapidly.

“I'm with Scotland Yard,” Bryson replied in a flawless English lower-middle-class accent. “Some security breaches in the area. Maybe you've heard…?”

“Aye,” the old lady said wearily. “I don't ask questions. Be more than my job's worf, it would.” She wheeled the cart down the hall toward them and parked it against the wall. “Lot of rumors flying around.” She mopped her careworn brow with an old faded-red kerchief as she waddled up to him. “But you mind answerin' me just one question?”

Guardedly, Bryson said, “What's that?”

The ancient cleaning lady gave a perplexed look as she sidled up to Bryson and continued in a low, confiding voice, “What the hell are you doing
still alive?
” She whipped out a large blue-steel gun from the folds of her smock, pointed it at Bryson, and squeezed the trigger. Lightning-fast, Bryson swung his Kevlar-lined briefcase upward in a sharp arc, crashing it
hard
into her forearm. The gun clattered to the floor, skidding across the linoleum down the hall, away from him.

With a shrill scream, the harridan crouched and then sprang forward, her face contorted, her hands extended like claws, like deadly instruments. She slammed into him, knocking him to the floor just as he was reaching for the concealed gun. The wound in his side ached.
She's a goddamned old lady!
Bryson thought, then realizing—as she clawed at his eyes—that she was no old lady, she was far younger, far stronger, something more akin to a wild beast than a woman. She jabbed one thumb directly into his eye socket, the pain immense, blinding him, while she slammed her knee into his crotch, connecting at once with his genitals. Bryson roared with agony and determination, summoning his considerable strength, and slammed her to the floor. His right eye was bloodied, but he could still see through it, and what he saw made an eel of fear wriggle in his belly. She had pulled out a flashing blade, a long, thin stiletto. It gleamed wetly, as if coated with a viscous fluid. He knew at once that the blade must be coated with the alkaloid toxiferene, which made it an extremely dangerous weapon. The slightest nick or scrape would lead to immediate paralysis and a suffocating death.

Bryson could smell the blade and its acrid poison as it whisked millimeters from his face: he had jerked his head back just in time to save his life. Now the crazed woman reared up and lunged, and again Bryson's evasive action was only just sufficient; a button from his shirt was sliced off and went flying into the air. He went at her with both hands, with all of his strength, unable to risk reaching for the gun. The stiletto flashed in a blur near Bryson's face, but now Bryson lashed out with his left arm, like a cobra, directly
toward
the blade—a counterintuitive move, because it meant rising up and greeting the instrument of death, or the appendage that held it, rather than retreating from it—and as he seized the wrist of the hand holding the stiletto, the harridan was clearly taken by surprise.

But only for an instant. Bryson's strength would normally be far superior, but he was no longer in peak physical condition, nowhere close to it. He was, he was now realizing, badly weakened by the gunshot wound in Shenzhen; he had not given himself time to recover. And she had a mastery of moves he had never seen before. As her arm struggled against Bryson's grip, the long blade trembling, her left foot, clad in a steel-toed leather shoe, swung around, striking him again in the genitals. He groaned as he felt the pain radiating coldly through his testicles; he felt sick to his stomach. He shoved her again, slamming her back to the floor and knocking her white wig off her head, revealing close-cropped black hair and the lines of a latex face mask.

They were locked in struggle. She screamed again, her eyes wild. She was powerful and extraordinarily coordinated, and she lashed back and forth like a rabid beast. She tried to kick at him again, using her other foot, but Bryson had anticipated the move and rolled onto her, locking her legs in place, using his greater body mass, still holding her wrist, the stiletto blade still pointed at him. He had to move carefully around it, keeping all skin, all appendages clear of its lethal point. She was bucking violently, but he concentrated his strength, his energy, on angling her wrist back at her, directing the slickly gleaming stiletto toward her neck. Her arm shook with all the muscular resistance she could summon, but it was not enough: Bryson commanded more brute strength. Inch by inch, he pushed the tremulous blade back toward the soft exposed skin of the rabid woman's neck. Her eyes, hooded with latex skin folds, widened in terror as the blade gently creased her skin.

The effect was immediate. Her lips spread into a contorted rictus, spittle coming from her mouth, and she suddenly went limp against the floor and began to thrash wildly, her mouth opening again and again like a fish out of water, in soundless gasps. Then, as the deadening paralysis spread through her body, all respiration ceased; only a few muscles continued to twitch spasmodically.

Bryson pulled the blade from the dead woman's slackened grip, located the leather scabbard in the folds of her smock, and replaced the stiletto inside, then slid the scabbard into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He gasped for breath, touched the sticky blood that covered his right eye. He heard a cry: Elena rushed forward from the utility room, placing her hands on either side of his face, her panicked eyes searching his face. “Oh, God, my darling!” she whispered. “I think your eye looks worse than it actually is. Was that a poison of some sort?”

“Toxiferene.”

“She could have killed you, so easily!”

“She was strong, and very, very good.”

“Alpha, do you think?”

“Almost certainly Prometheus. Alpha units are marines or navy SEALs. She was some sort of an exotic, probably hired from Bulgaria or the old East Germany—one of the defunct Eastern-bloc services.”

“I hated staying back there, doing nothing!”

“You would have just gotten hurt, and she might have used you against me. No, I'm glad you did.”

“Oh, Nicholas, I'm
useless
. I know
nothing
about combat, about fighting!
Draga mea,
we have to get out of here. They want to kill you and me both!”

Bryson nodded, gulped. “I think we should separate—”

“No!”

“Elena, by now they know there are two of us, a man and a woman. Their surveillance is too good, too complete. The foreign secretary of England has been assassinated, and all forces are going to be on alert, not just Prometheus and Alpha.”

“There must be a thousand people in this building. Surely there's safety in numbers.”

“Crowds are better for killers than their targets, especially when the killers know what the marks look like. These are people who will
not
be deterred by normal considerations of prudence.”

“I can't! I'm sorry—on my own I can't fight, you know that! I can help you in many ways, but … please!”

Bryson nodded; she was terrified, and he couldn't send her off on her own in such a state. “All right. But we're going to have to take back hallways wherever we can find them, service corridors, that sort of thing. The crawlspaces and air ducts are no longer safe—they're probably crawling with agents by now. Somehow we have to get to the east side of the building if our escape plan's going to have any chance of succeeding.”

Standing to one side of the utility room window so that he could not be seen from outside, Bryson saw at once that it was worse than he'd imagined. He counted six men in fatigues—members of the Alpha squad. Two of them were patrolling the state officer's courtyard; two others were checking building exits, and two were walking along the roof, surveying the area with binoculars.

He turned back to Elena. “Well, that's just modified the plan. We're going to have to go out to the hallway and look for a freight elevator.”

“To the ground floor?”

He shook his head. “That's going to be crawling with police—and others. First or second floor, and then we'll look for an alternative way out.” He walked quickly to the door and listened for a few seconds. He heard nothing; no one had come by even during his struggle with the crone. Obviously this was a little-used area. But the fact was, the Prometheus decoy had been circulating here, obviously expecting one or both of them to come by. That told him two things: that this was probably near a convergence point, where various routes came together and led to an exit from the building; and that there would be others not too far away. The sooner they were out of this section, the better.