Veil

Chapter 4

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Veil completed a third set of bench presses and eased the weights down onto the holding rack above his head. He pushed back his long, sweat-soaked blond hair, sat up, and studied himself in the wall mirror as he waited for his pulse to normalize and the satisfying ache in his muscles to ease. His pale blue, gold-flecked eyes narrowed as he appraised what he saw. There were scars, of course, including a puckered mound the size of a baby's fist on his right side where a lance of twisted metal had skewered him and collapsed a lung, but his body was solid; the muscles in his stomach, chest, arms, and legs clearly articulated.

Satisfied with his workout, Veil rose and walked to the showers, passing through a cloud of musky-smelling mist that was leaking from the half-open door of the steam room. He shuddered under an ice-cold needle spray for a few seconds, then padded down a narrow, tiled corridor leading to the pool.

He knifed cleanly into the still, blue water and swam the twenty-five-meter length of the pool under water, pulling rhythmically with his arms and using a powerful scissors kick. As he reached the shallow end he had the abrupt, alarming sensation that someone was stuffing a flannel rag down his throat. He surfaced and began to cough violently.

Finally the racking spasm passed. Puzzled, Veil took a series of deep breaths as he rubbed his sore chest and swallowed repeatedly. Feeling no lingering ill effects, he pushed off the wall and lazily backstroked toward the deep end. Without warning he began to cough again, and he barely managed to keep from swallowing water. There was a bitter medicinal taste at the back of his throat, and he felt as if he had been gassed.

The steam room, Veil thought.

He heard the familiar sound of soft, distant chimes in his head, and knew he was in terrible danger.

He twisted around in the water in time to see a golden shape angling up toward him from the bottom of the pool. He had heard no sound—no closing doors in the locker room, no smack of feet on tile, no splash as the man had entered the water.

Veil rolled to his left and jackknifed beneath the surface. A hand grabbed for his ankle, missed, caught hold of his left wrist, and yanked. Fighting against dizziness and a swelling pressure behind his eyes, he relaxed and allowed himself to be pulled toward the bottom of the pool. The fingers on his wrist were very strong, powerful enough to snap bone. He knew that he had to control his gag reflex, for he would drown if he coughed. That was what the man wanted; he had been gassed just enough to make him an easy target.

Veil reached across his body and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the man's wrist. He pivoted a quarter turn, brought his knees up to his chest, and kicked under the man's extended arm into his rib cage. Despite the fact that Veil's strength was rapidly failing, the blow landed with enough force to break the wristlock and drive the man away. There was a gurgle of surprise, accompanied by a burst of bubbles that shimmered with a pink glow in his drug-clouded field of vision.

Veil swept his arms up over his head, driving himself down hard to a squatting position on the bottom. He immediately pushed off, extending his arms over his head and angling toward the side of the pool. He broke the surface just inches from the edge, slapped his palms on the deck, and pulled. His momentum carried him cleanly out of the water. He swayed with dizziness, coughing and gasping for breath, but managed to stay on his feet.

He had to get into the locker room, had to get to his gym bag.

There was an explosion of water four feet to his right as the yellow-haired, deeply tanned man burst out of the water like a missile launched from a submarine. The golden man landed light as a cat on the deck, then immediately dropped on his hands and executed a gymnast's leg sweep in an attempt to cut Veil's legs out from under him.

Veil hopped over the scythe of the man's legs, then dove toward the center of the pool. He entered the water at a sharp angle and, wincing at the sick pain in his head, immediately reversed his direction, crabbing down and back. The golden man landed in the water and shot past overhead. Veil turned, pulled to the surface, and again hopped up on the deck. He grabbed a long-poled skimming net from a rack on the wall, spun around, and crouched, ready to jab with the pole's blunt end. His muscles felt rubbery.

The golden man was treading water easily in the center of the pool, long yellow hair floating around his shoulders. There was surprise and respect in the dark brown eyes that studied Veil. "Don't resist," he said in a flat voice. "It won't do you any good. I won't hurt you if you don't force me to. You won't feel anything."

American, Veil thought. Home-grown talent. He judged him to be in his mid-twenties. It was all Veil could do to draw a breath, and the golden man wasn't even breathing hard. "My dentist used to say things like that," Veil replied in a voice that sounded like it came from an echo chamber inside his head. "I think I'll decline your offer and just wait here until somebody shows up."

"The doors are locked. Nobody's coming in, and you're not walking out."

"Talk is cheap, my young friend. What else do you have to show me besides your vocabulary?"

"I heard you used to be quite the martial artist, Kendry. Well, you're not anywhere near top stuff now. You're past it. Even without that shit in you, you'd be no match for me. Accept my offer."

"If you think you're so goddam good, why don't you wait for me on the other side of the pool? As soon as I stop seeing two of you, I'll see if I can't make you work up a sweat."

"Don't take me for a fool, Kendry. I was just stating a fact, not issuing a challenge. This is just business."

"You're Madison's man, right? How is that fat, sadistic bastard?"

The golden man did not answer.

"Why the hell pick this place to come after me?" Veil continued. "What was wrong with New York?"

The golden man's response this time was a faint smile as, head up and eyes fixed on the end of the skimming net pole, he began to glide slowly toward Veil.

He waited until the man was a few feet closer, then hurled the pole at his head. The golden man casually knocked the pole away with the side of a thickly callused hand. Veil launched himself into the air. He soared over the golden man's head, landed flat on his stomach and chest in a racing dive, and sprinted toward the opposite side.

Now he was exactly where the assassin wanted him, Veil thought, in the water. But swimming across the pool was the most direct route to the locker room, and that was where he had to go. The time he had already gained seemed to be working to his advantage, for he no longer had the urge to gag and cough. The drug was passing out of his system. He felt better but nowhere near well enough to turn and fight. He needed still more time.

Feigning only slightly more exhaustion than he actually felt, Veil slowed as he approached the side and listened carefully to the sound of the golden man thrashing through the water after him. He gripped the edge, made a motion as if he were going to haul himself out of the water, then flipped over on his back, cocked his right leg, and kicked out at the golden man's face. The assassin managed to partially block the kick, but a popping sound and a rush of blood told Veil that, at the least, the man's nose was broken.

The assassin grabbed for Veil's ankle, but Veil was already out of the water and staggering into the locker room.

More than a minute passed. Then the golden man appeared, naked and silent as a shadow, at the far end of a row of lockers. Blood still flowed freely from his nose and mouth, but he gave no indication that he was in pain. He stared for a few moments at Veil, who was sitting on a long wooden bench, gagging and coughing as he slumped over a blue canvas gym bag.

"You should have done as I asked," the golden man said, lisping slightly as his tongue passed over the space where his front teeth had been. "You hurt me, and now I'm going to hurt you before I kill you. In the end it will still look as though you drowned."

Suddenly Veil straightened. There was a flash of movement as his hand came out of the bag and he hurled a set of heavy ankle weights at the assassin's head. Displaying incredible reflexes, depth perception, and nerve, the golden man calmly reached out and plucked the leather-and-lead missile from the air. The golden man smiled with contempt, then shrugged and started to toss the weights to one side. In that instant of wasted motion and flickering concentration, Veil threw the bench. The golden man was able to sidestep the flying bench, but by then Veil was in on him.