Douglas Preston - Gideon’s Sword

There was a sudden pounding on the forward door of the warehouse; it was still locked, the alarm blaring. To follow the killer out his own exit hole would be suicide; Gideon needed to find another way. He looked wildly around but the only possible escape route lay above, through some louvered vents in the ceiling. Quickly he sprinted across the warehouse to a metal support and began shimmying up it.

“Open up!” yelled the cops. There was more pounding, followed by the crash of a battering ram.

Higher he climbed, using bolts as rungs; he reached a metal collar beam and crawled across it to a gusset, reached up again, grabbed a truss web member, and worked his way up it until he was at the level of the louvered vents.

The battering ram smashed into the metal door again, and again, and Gideon offered a silent prayer of thanks for the fine workmanship.

“Roland! You in there? Open up!”

Crawling up the sloping angle-iron truss on his hands and knees, Gideon gripped the iron, crouched again, and launched himself across the narrow gap, grasping the open louver, his feet swinging free.

A moment later, as the metal door caved in with a great crash, he hoisted himself up, crawled out the louver onto the sloping roof, and lay flat, breathing hard. Would they think of looking up here? They certainly would: as soon as they discovered the decapitated guard, the police warehouse was going to look like Grand Central Terminal.

Sliding down the pitch of the roof, he reached the drip edge along the back and peered over. Good — all the activity was still concentrated at the front. He could hear shouting and expostulations of horror and fury as the police found the guard’s decapitated body.

What a balls-up.

Gideon grasped the drip edge, swung over, dropped to the ground, and headed to his previous opening. Then he reconsidered. The killer seemed to know an awful lot about his movements; he might be waiting there in ambush. Instead, Gideon sprinted to another part of the fence, climbed it, and as quickly as he could cut a crude gap through the concertina wire.

“Hey! You!”

Damn. He forced his way through the wire, feeling it slice his clothes and skin, and half climbed, half tumbled down the far side, landing in some bushes.

“Over here!” the cop yelled. “Suspect in flight! This way!”

Boom , the cop fired at him as he darted across the overgrown lot at the rear of the warehouse, dodging between abandoned containers, burned-out cars, and dumped refrigerators. He sprinted toward the railroad tracks running alongside the river; leaping over them and pushing through a sagging fence, he reached the embankment of riprap at the river’s edge. An onshore wind brought with it the sulfurous stench of the Harlem River. Hopping and skipping from rock to rock, he dove in.

He swam underwater as far as he could, surfaced to gulp air, swam some more, and then—​with as little disturbance as possible—​returned to the surface. Jettisoning the heavy weight of the bolt cutters, he let himself drift downstream, floating without treading water, keeping his head as low in the water as possible. He could hear shouts from the shore and an unintelligible screed over an electronic megaphone. A feeble spotlight swung out over the water, but he was already out of reach; nevertheless, he turned his head to show only his black hair. There was quite a lot of flotsam bobbing downstream along with him, and for once he was grateful for the slovenly habits of New Yorkers. He wondered if he’d need to get a battery of shots after this little immersion, then realized it didn’t matter—​he was a dead man anyway.

He drifted along, letting the river take him downstream toward the fantastical arched and lighted form of the RFK Bridge. Slowly, the sluggish current moved him toward the Manhattan side of the river. Now he was thoroughly out of sight of the cops. Kicking his way over to the riverbank, he crawled up on a riprap boulder and began squeezing the water out of his clothes. He’d lost the Python somewhere in the river; good riddance to it. He would have had to toss it anyway, since shells and rounds had been left back in the warehouse; besides, it was too heavy a gun for his purposes.

He reached into his pocket and extracted the ziplock bag. It was still sealed, the cell phone inside safe and dry.

Balancing on the rocks, he made his way up the embankment, through yet another busted up chain-link fence, and found himself in a huge salt storage yard for the road department, mounds of white rising up around him like snowy mountains in some alien landscape painted by Nicholas Roerich.

The thought of Roerich triggered a rather interesting memory.

He would never get a cab this far uptown at four o’clock in the morning, especially in his sopping condition. He had a long walk back to the hotel, where he’d have to sneak his shit out and find another place to go to ground. And then it would be time to renew his old acquaintance with Tom O’Brien at Columbia.

He wondered what good old Tom would make of all this.

Gideon Crew walked east on 49th Street, still slightly damp from his misadventure of the previous night. It was eight o’clock in the morning and the sidewalks were in the full flow of the morning’s rush hour, commuters pouring out of the surrounding apartment buildings and heading for taxis or public transportation. Gideon was not normally given to paranoid thinking, but ever since he’d sneaked out of the hotel he’d had the uncanny feeling he was being followed. Nothing he could put his finger on — just a feeling. No doubt it had something to do with lingering worries from the previous evening’s shootout. The one thing he couldn’t do was allow whoever it was—​if there was indeed someone—​to follow him to Tom O’Brien’s place up at Columbia University. Tom O’Brien was to be his secret weapon in this and nobody— nobody —​could know.

He slowed his pace until most of the pedestrians—​swift-​walking New Yorkers, all—​were flowing past him. Then he casually paused to look at himself in a window while turning his attention behind. It was as he thought: an Asian man in a tracksuit, face half-​hidden by a baseball cap, was a hundred yards back, also slowing down, apparently keeping pace.

Gideon swore under his breath. While it might still be in his imagination, he could take no chances. Even if it wasn’t that particular fellow, with all these crowds it could be anyone. He had to assume he was being followed and act accordingly.

He crossed Broadway and entered the subway station, going to the downtown platform. The station was packed, and it was impossible to know if the man in the tracksuit had followed him down. But it didn’t matter — there was one surefire way to lose the son of a bitch. Gideon had done it before. It was fun and dangerous and foolproof. He felt his heart quicken in anticipation.

He waited until he heard a faint rumble from the uptown tracks across the way. As he leaned out, he could see the headlights of a local coming up the tunnel, closing in fast on the platform.

Waiting for just the right moment, and making sure no other trains were coming, he leapt down onto the tracks. There was a gratifying chorus of screams, shouts, and loud admonishments from the waiting crowd. Ignoring them, he hopped over the third rail, crossed the uptown local tracks just ahead of the arriving train, and scrambled onto the platform. More screaming, shouts, hollering— people are so excitable, he thought. But the platform was unbelievably crowded, no one could move, and as the local pulled in he forced his way inside, mingling with the crush of commuters and instantly rendering himself anonymous.

As the train pulled out he saw, through the grimy window, across the rails, the Asian man in a tracksuit still standing on the downtown platform, staring in his direction.