Jeremy Robinson - Blackout

There was no time to savor the victory. King twisted around to find the second commando looming above him. Clad in black from head to toe, the man was almost invisible against the backdrop of night, but King had no difficulty making out the glinting steel of the knife in the man’s right hand as it slashed down toward him. He shrank away, pressing himself into the bilge space, but there was nowhere to go.

The knife slashed again but even as he felt its tip snag the fabric of his dinner jacket, King brought his own right arm up and caught the man’s forearm in the crook of his elbow. The commando reflexively tried to pull away, but King trapped his foe’s forearm with the heel of his left hand and then with a savage scissor-action, broke the man’s wrist. The commando howled in pain; the knife fell from his fingers and clattered into the bilge space. King, still on his back, did not release his hold on the injured limb, but drew his knees up, planted his feet squarely in his opponent’s chest, and used his legs to launch the man out into the river.

In the moment that followed, King wanted nothing more than to simply lay still and savor a few seconds where no one wanted to kill him, but he knew that, despite this initial victory, his real objective was slipping further away with every tick of the clock.

He rolled over and struggled to get to his hands and knees. The cramped bilge space at the rear of the boat conspired with the undulations of the craft as if bumped across wakes and ripples in the river’s surface to make it a ridiculously complicated task. He finally managed to grasp the control lever on the outboard and hauled himself into a sitting position.

The inflatable boat was moving at an almost perpendicular angle away from the floating casino. He could make out the city skyline in every direction, but everything in the foreground was shrouded in darkness. As his eyes adjusted to the low light, he could make out the ripples left by the wake of another craft. It was moving away in the same general direction he was now traveling, and he followed the ripples to their source: two more Zodiacs, barely more than shadows, a few hundred yards away, just passing under one of the many bridges that spanned the river and connected the city proper with Ile Saint-Louis. He adjusted the tiller to bring his boat into line behind them and opened the throttle wide. The bow of the craft came up as the burst of speed sent it rocketing forward, almost skimming across the surface of the Seine.

He could tell he was closing the gap on the retreating boats. If their operators were the professionals he guessed them to be, they would sacrifice speed for stealth. Unfortunately, that meant they would notice his approach, and if they didn’t already know that he had commandeered one of their boats and reduced their fighting force by two, they would at the very least be alerted to the fact that something was wrong.

He took stock of his tactical situation. The Glock he had taken from Brown was gone. There was no sign of the pistol in the bilge space, and he could only assume that it had gone into the river during the struggle with the commandos. His foes had likewise taken their guns with them into the Seine. The only weapon available to him was the knife that the second man had dropped. King retrieved the blade and gave it a cursory examination.

In the darkness, it was difficult to distinguish any manufacturing marks, but his fingertips probed the knurled metal of the cylindrical hilt-heavier than expected, making for a poorly balanced weapon-and the odd shape of the finger guard, which sported a metallic stud that reminded King of a gun’s magazine release button. It was, he realized, a ballistic knife. Depressing the stud would trigger a blast of pressurized gas inside the hilt and simultaneously release a mechanism holding the blade in place, subsequently launching the blade like a crossbow bolt.

When he recognized the weapon, any remaining doubts about the identity of the commando team were swept away. The ballistic knife was the signature weapon of the voyska spetsialnogo naznacheniya, the elite special forces of Russia’s military intelligence directorate, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye.

If there was a Russian equivalent of Chess Team, it was the GRU Spetsnaz.

King knew the outcome of his first battle with the Russian commandos had been more a matter of luck than anything else, and as Brown had pointed out, luck was fickle.

He backed off the throttle a little, somewhat reducing the noise and fury of his progress across the watercourse. The longer he succeeded in not attracting the attention of the occupants of the other boats, the better his chances of surviving the next encounter. For that reason, he also pulled the lapels of his dinner jacket together, covering up the white shirt beneath, and sank down low, trying to hide as much of his face from view as he could.

He risked a quick glance over the bow. The nearest Zodiac was now only about a hundred yards away, the other at least fifty yards beyond that. If they were operating as he expected, Brown would be in the closer boat, with the lead craft acting as a vanguard to make sure that the landing zone was secure. That would work to his advantage; he would only need to subdue Brown’s immediate captors, and with a little luck, the men in the front boat would never even know that their comrades were in trouble.

There was that word again. Luck.

Fiona ignored the big man’s dire pronouncement. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, her fists on her hips in a defiant pose.

The man she knew as Hercules and Alexander Diotrophes-the man now calling himself Carutius-ignored her and turned his gaze to the woman that had guided Fiona and Sara into the exhibit hall. “Dr. Preston, I need you to take them out of here immediately.”

The woman blinked at him and for a moment, seemingly on the verge of complying, but then Sara stepped forward. “Just a damn minute. Fiona asked you a question, and I think we all deserve an answer. I’ve heard a lot about you… Frankly, I think a lot of it is bullshit, but one thing I do know is that you’re a magnet for trouble.”

A gleam that might have been humor flickered in the man’s eyes. “And here you are, Sara. Interesting.”

“Are you following us?” Fiona asked.

“Not everything in the world revolves around you, my dear. The fact of the matter is that your presence here is a complication, and one that I wish to immediately resolve. Thus…” He glanced at Dr. Preston again. “My insistence that you leave immediately.”

“The pictures are singing to me,” Fiona blurted. “When I look at them…at the artwork here…it’s like I can hear voices.”

Alexander’s brow creased as he pondered this, and Fiona realized that maybe the big man didn’t have all the answers after all. Then his visage hardened again. “This changes nothing. You need to leave. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t even be in Paris, but there’s nothing to be done about that. Dr. Preston-Julia-please do as I asked. Escort them to the front gate and put them in a taxi. Get them out of here.”

Julia shook her head, overcoming her paralysis. “I don’t think so. This is all too much. First you close the exhibit and give me some cock-and-bull story about radiometric dating. Now these two show up and this girl says…what? That she can hear the paintings singing to her? And you don’t even bat an eye? What the hell is going on here?”

Alexander drew a deep breath, clearly struggling to control his anger. If he wanted, the big man could probably have scooped them all up under one mighty arm and bodily carried them out the door, but Fiona resolved that she wouldn’t be leaving any other way. It seemed that Sara and Julia were of the same mind, and Alexander evidently realized this. He faced Julia. “This young woman possesses a remarkable gift. She is quite possibly the last person alive with knowledge-albeit incomplete-of what might be the original language.”