The Pharaoh's Secret

19

Kurt and Joe were making up ground on the two assassins, but the men had a large lead and they reached the fort and vanished.

Kurt rushed on, heading up the ramp. Joe was right behind him.

Kurt went from a sprint to a jog. The glare from the orange lights and the shadows where those lights were blocked made it difficult to see. He swung wide, not interested in being jumped by someone hiding in a dark nook or alley.

Even from this angle, the fort was an imposing structure. Built on a spit of land that stuck out into Valletta Harbor, it was shaped like a multilayered wedding cake, but the walls of each new level canted at a different angle so that an attacking ship would be unable to find a spot to safely fire from.

Kurt slowed down. The wall of the fort was on his right, the waters of the harbor on his left. He passed a locked gate and then came to a stairwell that cut into the wall like a narrow canyon. A similar gate was in place, but a quick look told Kurt the men had turned in there.

“They broke the lock,” he said, pushing the gate open.

After a glance upward, Kurt began to climb. He stuck close to the wall but was ambushed at the top as a limping man jumped out at him with a sword in his hand.

Kurt managed to dive away from the blade, hitting the ground, rolling and popping up just as Joe appeared. The man with the sword stepped back, his gaze pivoting to Joe, and the crowbar he held, to Kurt and then back again.

Kurt noticed a suit of armor displayed as part of the fort’s illustrious history. A gauntlet lay on the ground. The sword had been ripped from it.

The man pointed the sword from one of them to the other. Kurt recognized him.

“You must be Hagen,” Kurt said. “The cowardly doctor who fled a dying island.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Hagen grunted.

“We know you have an antidote for what happened to the people of Lampedusa. If you tell us, it might just keep you from the gas chamber.”

“Shut up,” Hagen shouted. He feinted toward Kurt and then swung at Joe, whipping the sword through a long arc.

The old blade whistled as it cut through the night, but Joe stepped back with the reflexes of a mongoose and deflected the killing blow with a swift jerk of the crowbar. Sparks lit out into the dark accompanied by the metal clang of the weapons coming together.

“This whole situation has turned positively medieval,” Joe said.

Hagen lunged forward again. He swung at Joe several times, trying to drive him back to the stairs, perhaps hoping he would fall, but each attack was deflected until after a last swing Joe knocked the tip of Hagen’s sword off and then kicked him in the chest all in one swift move. Hagen fell back and readied himself for another round.

“You’re pretty handy with that thing,” Kurt said.

“I’ve seen all the Star Wars movies multiple times,” Joe replied proudly.

“So you’ve got this one under control?”

“Absolutely,” Joe said. “Go get his partner. By the time you get back, I’ll have this guy gift-wrapped and placed in your stocking.”

As Kurt took off, Joe faced his enemy directly. After sizing him up, he switched from holding the crowbar like a sword to wielding it with a two-handed grip like a battle staff.

Hagen swiped at Joe once more, but Joe blocked him with one end of the crowbar and jabbed at him with the other, hitting him in the face and giving him a bloody nose.

“You know how you doctors like to say, ‘This won’t hurt a bit’?” Joe asked. “I don’t think that applies in this case. It’s probably going to be quite painful.”

Hagen stepped forward and began to swing wildly. He fought with desperation, shouting and even spitting at Joe.

Joe was all balance and poise. He moved with the quickness of a trained fighter. His footwork smooth and precise. Each lunge or hack from the sword was easily dealt with, each swing blocked or avoided.

He counterattacked with ease, feinting with one end of the crowbar and then swinging with the other. “Not only have I seen all the Star Wars movies,” he warned, “I’m a big fan of Errol Flynn.”

“Who’s Errol Flynn?” Hagen said.

“You’re kidding me.”

Hagen did not reply and Joe moved into attack mode. He jabbed at the doctor and forced him back with one end of the crowbar and then swung the other end around and down. A sickening crack came from Hagen’s shoulder and the doctor let out a painful cry.

“I’m pretty sure that was your humorous bone,” Joe said, “though I’m betting it wasn’t very funny.”

Hagen grunted. “It was my clavicle, you idiot.” He was tilted over now like a bird with a broken wing.

“Okay, let me try again,” Joe said, raising the crowbar for another strike.

“Stop,” he said, throwing the sword to the ground. “I give up. Just stop hitting me.”

Hagen dropped to his knees, grasping his broken collarbone and wincing in agony, but as Joe stepped forward, the doctor played one last trick. He pulled a syringe from his pocket and tried to plunge it into Joe’s leg. Joe saw it just in time and blocked it downward, where it went into Hagen’s own thigh.

Whatever was in the needle, it worked almost instantly. Hagen’s eyes rolled up and he fell sideways onto his injured shoulder without the slightest bit of protest.

“Great,” Joe said. “Now I have to carry you.”

Joe bent down beside him and felt for a pulse. Thankfully, he found one. He pulled the syringe out and broke off the needle before slipping it into his pocket. He thought it might be wise to find out what had been inside.

As Joe figured out what to do with the unconscious doctor, Kurt moved with deliberate caution in search of the second fugitive. He figured the man was either out of ammunition or had lost his weapon because he hadn’t fired any more shots, but that didn’t mean another ambush wasn’t in the works.

As he moved forward, he heard the sound of footsteps on loose gravel from another stairwell. Kurt pressed himself against the wall and peered around the corner. The stairway was curved back in on itself in a spiral as it went up to the next level of the battlements. It wasn’t a long ascent, but the stone wall made it impossible to see more than a few steps at a time.

Kurt held perfectly still, listening. For several seconds, there was no sound at all. Then, suddenly, the muted echo of someone running and clearing the last few steps.

Kurt ducked onto the stairwell and charged upward. Thirty tight curving steps, carved for men in the eighteen hundreds who had shorter strides and smaller frames. It was a tight fit, but Kurt moved quickly and came out the top in time to see a man running across the flat space of the gunnery deck.

He was headed for the far side, where a row of ancient cannon pointed their muzzles toward the sea. Kurt sprinted after him, hopping over a short wall and cutting across the courtyard at an angle. He was closing in when his quarry scrambled over the ramparts at the far end and dropped eight feet to the deck below.

Kurt reached the wall, palmed it as he went over and dropped to the next level as well. Flexing his legs to absorb the impact, he stayed upright, but the assassin was already forty feet away and leaping over the next wall.

Kurt followed and discovered that this drop was closer to ten feet. “Figures I end up chasing the guy who’s half mountain goat.”

Kurt eyed the drop to a sloping ramp. He jumped, hit the stone ramp and continued the chase.

The target was out ahead, still running, heading for yet another wall. This one was at the very front of the fort, where it jutted out into the harbor. So far, they’d gone up to the top and come down two levels of the wedding cake. Kurt figured this was the end of the line. They were on the lower tier of the fort now and the drop on the other side of the wall was seventy, perhaps eighty feet, with nothing at the bottom but rocks.

The man seemed to realize this, hitting the brakes before he got to the wall and looking back at Kurt. After a slight hesitation, he took off again, raced for the wall at a dead run and launched himself off of its precipice. It was a suicide leap if ever he’d seen one.

Kurt reached the edge and looked over, expecting to find a hopelessly smashed body lying on the rocks below. Instead, he saw a narrow rectangular cut carved into the stone like a canal. Not only was the man who’d jumped alive, he was swimming like an Olympic champion out toward a waiting motorboat.

There was nothing he could do but watch in grudging admiration as the swimmer was hauled aboard the boat, which sped off and disappeared into the night.

“What happened?” a voice shouted from one level above him.

Kurt looked back to see Joe holding Dr. Hagen up by the scruff of the neck.

“He got away,” Kurt said. “Have to hand it to him, he earned it.”

“At least we have this one,” Joe replied.

As Joe spoke, a sharp crack rang out and the prisoner sagged to his knees and then fell sideways. Both Kurt and Joe dove for cover, but no additional shots came forth.

From his spot behind the ramparts of the wall, Kurt looked around. Both he and Joe were smart enough to stay down, shouting to each other from behind the safety of the stone walls.

“Joe,” Kurt called out. “Tell me you’re all right.”

“I’m okay,” Joe called back, sounding glum. “But our prisoner is dead.”

Kurt could have guessed. “Damn,” he muttered. “All this for nothing.”

“Any idea where the shot came from?”

Considering Joe’s position on the upper level and the way the sound echoed off the walls, the shot had to have come from somewhere across the water. “The other side of the harbor,” Kurt guessed.

He risked a glance in that direction. The speedboat was gone, but that was no platform to shoot from anyway. On the far shore were other structures, including the fortifications and flat gunnery plaza of another fort.

“That’s at least a thousand feet,” Joe said.

“In the dark, with a slight wind,” Kurt said. “Heck of a shot.”

“Especially on the first try,” Joe added. “Without correcting.”

It wasn’t morbidity that led them to talk this way. They were trying to determine the nature of their enemy. “And they took out their own guy instead of us,” Kurt added.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Joe asked. “That these guys are professionals?”

“Heavy hitters,” Kurt said. “Hagen was just a dupe.”

By now, police units were racing down the road to the fort. Flashing red and blue lights on a powerboat cruising toward them from the inner harbor showed the police were out there as well. Too late, Kurt thought. The culprits were dead or gone.

Keeping his head down in case the sniper was still in place, he pulled the note Kensington had been trying to write from his pocket. It was covered in blood, but part of it was readable. It seemed to be a name. Sophie C.…

It rang no bells. But, then, nothing seemed to make sense at the moment. He hid the note, waited for the police to arrive and wondered when their luck was going to turn.

Across the river, on ruins every bit as old and auspicious as those of Fort Saint Angelo, another figure was convinced that his luck had done just that. He stood, gazing at the aftermath of his shot.

He’d sighted the enemy, adjusted for the wind and fought off a sudden blurring of his vison, forcing a double image back into one and pulling the trigger. The vision problems went along with the slowly healing blisters and sores on his face.

Number four wore those scars with pride. He’d survived the death march back to the checkpoint and he’d been given a second chance to serve Osiris. With a single shot, he’d proven his worth.

He disassembled a long-barreled sniper’s rifle, perused the electronic photo of the killing shot he’d taken and wondered briefly if he should have killed the Americans instead. But there was only time for one clean shot and Hagen had to be silenced. He’d made the right choice. He’d kill the Americans next time.

With the rifle stowed, he carefully wrapped a scarf around his damaged face, making sure to conceal a length of gauze soaked in antibiotic healing ointment that covered the back of his neck. Then he stepped away and vanished into the night.