Raiders

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Moving toward the security office things got real in a hurry. The two security guards who had headed back to the entrance now lay dead on the floor in the corridor; blood and brain matter splattered over the polished white tiles.

Ella raised her hand to her mouth to stop herself being sick and turned away; Mason knew at once that they were in grave danger and had to act fast. The murders had been professional and quick. He was certain the killers had mufflers on their guns so they didn’t attract the attention of any of the other guards in the museum. What made it particularly vile was that these guards were all unarmed.

The clock was ticking. Mason knew time was running out. The wounds on the dead guards were fresh, and it was clear they had been killed within the last few seconds. “Where are they, Milo?”

“In the room you guys were just in. They’re looking at the sarcophagus right now and they don’t look very happy to be honest.”

“Neither do the two dead guards in the corridor,” Ella said.

“I saw them die on the monitor,” Milo said. “These guys are quick, everyone. They moved like they were on fast-forward or something.”

Milo kept one eye on the Hidden Hand as he guided his friends away from the enemy and toward the security office. Safely inside, they gathered around the CCTV monitors and watched the Bride and her Ravens sweeping through the empty museum in pursuit of them. “They’re hunting the codex,” Mason said. “Look at how they move and communicate with one another.”

“You weren’t screwing around when you told us about these guys, Ezra,” Zara said.

Caleb let out a deep, knowing sigh. “He never screws around, believe me.”

“True story,” Ezra said.

Mason watched the CCTV covering the Egyptian department closely for a few seconds and then he saw the Bride up close for the first time. She was standing in front of the sarcophagus. Flanked on either side by two powerful looking men dressed in black, her beauty was almost bewitching.

But she was the enemy.

“Is that her?” Zara asked.

Ezra nodded. “That’s her.”

“What about the guys in leather trench coats?”

“They’re her Ravens. Utterly loyal to their Bride. It’s an order of loyalty right out of the ancient world and not something most modern minds could understand. They will happily sacrifice themselves if it means she survives. She would do the same for her Lion and so on up the line.”

“Like some kind of crazy suicide cult?” Milo said.

“No,” Ezra said firmly. “Nothing like that at all; as I said, their loyalty to the Hidden Hand is a kind of commitment that just doesn’t exist in today’s world. It’s not suicide. They are warriors in a global order that goes back further than any other we know. To betray that order is worse than suicide.”

Eva leaned into the screen. “Now they’re working out that the codex isn’t where it’s supposed to be.”

They watched the shadowy figures discuss the situation. The woman in particular looked highly agitated. After a few seconds they turned and made their way out of the Egyptian Department.

Ella felt a shiver go up her spine. “Now they’re hunting us. They know we have the codex.”

“We have to get out of here,” Milo said nervously. “We’ve been up against some rotten scumbags in our time but these guys are from another dimension.”

“Agreed,” Mason said. “Dr Hamilton — what’s the fastest way out of the museum from our present location?”

Still drowsy from passing out, she took a few seconds to think. “At the end of the corridor outside this room there’s a lift which will take us back down to the ground floor. From there it’s only a short walk to the Great Court. We’ll come out on Great Russell Street.”

“You stay here, Dr Hamilton,” Mason said calmly. “They want us, not you. We’ll draw them away.” He looked at his team and felt a sudden burst of pride in them. “Let’s get on with it, and keep that codex safe because right now we’re ahead of them.”

Kiya felt the anger flood her body alongside a rush of adrenalin. She had gotten to the British Museum minutes too late and now the enemy had the codex in their hands. The Lion would not be happy but maybe if she could retrieve it fast enough he would never have to know about her error.

As she slipped through the shadows of the museum she swore she would not only hold the codex in her hand, but execute whoever had tried to take it from her.

“How do we find them?” Dariush said. His breathing was hard as they pounded through the darkened corridors.

“We go back to the main entrance,” Kiya said. “They will call for back-up and that is where it will go. That’s where our enemy will head next.”

“There will be many armed officers,” Tekin said. “We must ready ourselves to fight them.”

“I am always ready to fight,” Kiya said without emotion. “And you should be too.”

She and the two Ravens entered the Great Hall and then she saw them. As Tekin had mentioned, there were several armed policemen holding Heckler & Koch submachine guns. With the terror threat so high in London their incredible reaction time was no surprise. They must have been here within minutes of their colleagues being shot.

Kiya stopped in her tracks and the two Ravens immediately halted either side of her. She heard someone cry out: “There they are!”

Fearing they had been seen by the anti-terror police, they darted back into the shadows only to see their enemy appear in the Great Court. They were walking in a group now and the American woman was holding a copper tube in her hand.

“There it is!” she whispered.

“What’s our next move?” Tekin asked.

“Take out the law, then we kill our new enemy and we have the codex.”

They stepped out from the shadows and opened fire without warning on the anti-terror police officers. Their M6 carbines spat fire and wrath across the Great Hall and mowed down four of the six police officers before they knew what had happened. The two survivors dived for the cover of an information board as they desperately radioed in the attack.

Mason and the other Raiders sprinted for one of the enormous circular help desks and skidded to a halt behind the relative safety of a large central island covered in tour guidebooks.

Zara checked her weapon was loaded and gave Mason an anxious look. “Holy shit, they’re already on us, Jed!

Milo was almost speechless. “Fucking hell, did you see what they did to those coppers?”

“It’s not over yet,” Mason said. “The ugly one’s got an HK compact grenade launcher — check it out.”

Milo peered over the desk and watched as Dariush opened fire on the two remaining police officers with the grenade launcher. He fired three of the grenades in rapid succession and they blasted the information board and both the counter-terror officers to pieces.

“Looks like we’re next!” Ella said. “They’re heading this way.”

Unprepared for such a heavy gunfight, both sides had emptied their mags within minutes of the exchange and now the battle would get more personal. Kiya was first into the fray, leaping without fear over the help desk and grabbing hold of Virgil. With one devastating downward elbow strike he was out cold, but what unsettled Mason the most was how fast she had assessed Virgil as the weakest link. A heartbeat later she spun around and struck Milo in the head with the heel of her boot, knocking him out cold beside Virgil.

As Milo and Virgil slumped to the floor, the Bride pulled away and took stock of the new situation as it was unfolding around her. The two Ravens were now engaged in a furious battle with Zara. Mason thought that two on one didn’t seem fair — to the Ravens — and now Zara was a whirlwind of kicks and punches as she worked some of her aggression out on the two men.

Mason moved forward and approached the Bride. She looked at him with a simmering hatred in her eyes; eyes that were almost mesmerizing in their beauty — a devastating beauty that would lure him to his death if he didn’t back off and snap out of it. He moved in for the kill, but then she ordered Tekin to attack Caleb.

Tekin spun around to increase the momentum of his kick. He was a big man to start with, and now his boot smashed into Caleb’s thigh and almost broke it. The Arizonan recoiled in pain, desperate not to show it to his enemy, and mustered every fiber of strength in his body to deliver a counter-strike. The Raven took the blow to his jaw with little sign of distress and then effortlessly swept Caleb’s striking hand away before aiming a high-speed tiger punch at his throat.

Caleb saw it coming and ducked to the side, narrowly avoiding a crushed windpipe and an agonizingly slow death as he suffocated on the floor, but as he went down he struck his head on the side of the desk and passed out.

Now, Mason stepped up and fired a volley of hefty jabs at the Occulta Manu Raven. He threw punch after punch at the man but he blocked them all with ease before lunging forward and piling the back of his hand into Mason’s face, knocking him on the back foot.

“Shit, Jed,” Ella said. “Are you all right?”

Mason spat a wad of blood on the tiled floor. “Feeling just fine, Ellz, thanks for asking.”

Ezra jumped in, landing a solid punch on the Raven’s temple, but the OM man easily repelled him with a backwards sweep of his arm, bowling him over onto the floor.

“Even Zara’s getting her arse kicked!” Ella cried out.

Mason glanced to his right to see Zara struggling with Kiya. The Bride had now pinned his old friend to the help desk by her throat and was smashing a series of punches just below her ribcage. The former cop and Buddhist bhikkhuni usually used hand-to-hand combat to work out and sharpen her skills, but not today. Right now she was working harder than ever just to stay alive.

“Ella!” Mason yelled. “Get Eva and the codex out of here, for fuck’s sake!”

Ella nodded and grabbed hold of Eva Starling. “We’re out of here.”

“No,” Kiya said, turning from a barely conscious Zara and facing her and Eva. “You are not.”

Before either of them responded, Kiya attacked them both, easily knocking Ella to the floor with a windpipe-bruising side-slap. As the Englishwoman gasped for air like a landed fish, the Hidden Hand Bride moved behind Eva like lightning and quickly placed her in a choke hold. Deftly taking the codex from the American’s pocket and slipping it in her own, she spoke in a language no one understood. Dariush and Tekin withdrew from the fight and joined her.

Mason watched her and the Ravens walk slowly backward away from the desk.

Kiya’s eyes narrowed. “You follow us and I will kill her.”

Mason heaved his breath back into his body and surveyed the carnage scattered all around him: Virgil, Milo, Zara and Caleb out cold, Ella half-dead and gasping for breath on the floor, and he could barely move. Ezra was only just crawling to his knees. To think all of this destruction was done by just three of these people didn’t fill him with confidence about having to fight any more of them.

Zara came to, slid off the desk and winced in pain as she rubbed her throat. “Did I try and swallow a motorbike or what?”

“You got choked by Kiya.”

“What happened?” Virgil said groggily.

“Otoshi empi uchi,” Zara said.

“What the hell?”

“Downward elbow strike delivered to the middle of your face is what happened,” Zara said, checking the young man’s eyes. “Follow my finger.”

Virgil did as he was told and Zara was satisfied he was okay. Her LAPD training had included first-aid, and she’d had plenty of opportunity to use it on the streets during her time on the force. “You’re going to be fine,” she said, getting to her feet. “Still ugly, but fine.”

“Thanks, Zara.”

But Zara had already turned to see the enemy. “Over there — they still have the codex and they’re getting away!”

Kiya and the surviving Ravens gave no indication of what they were thinking as they dragged Eva toward the fire exit. Tekin was holding her now, and Kiya was in the lead.

“Freeze!” Zara yelled, and raised her freshly reloaded weapon.

Neither the Bride nor the Ravens paid any attention, and the only response was when Tekin spun around and fired his M6 at her while his free arm was still gripping Eva around her neck.

“Dammit,” Zara said. “No clear shot with Eva in the way.”

Ahead of him, the woman, the one Ezra had called Kiya, was clutching the codex in her hand as she booted open the emergency exit’s panic bar and vanished in the night air. Seconds later Tekin and Dariush made the same escape, releasing Eva at the last second before fleeing into the night.