Boyd Morrison - The Midas Code

In half a minute, they’d crossed the lawn and reached the stables. Tyler motioned for her to stay behind him. With the pistol in front of him, he opened the stable door and swept the room. Clear. No stable hands visible. Except for the chuffing of horses and the clopping of hooves pawing at the hay in the stalls, the stable was silent.

There wasn’t a single vehicle in sight.

“We’re out of luck,” Tyler said. “I thought they might have a pickup or something in here. Without a car, we’re stuck.”

“What are you talking about?” Stacy said, pointing at the stalls. “These are even better than cars.”

Tyler blanched when he realized what Stacy was suggesting. She wanted him to ride a horse.

A fter a few more profuse apologies, Lumley went back to his office, leaving Grant on his own. As he walked through the hall of Greek statues and vases, Grant texted Tyler to tell him that someone had picked up the scent of the codex and warn his friend to be careful. Tyler replied immediately.

Too late. We got probs of r own. Meet at Heathrow.

That didn’t sound good, but at the moment Grant had to deal with his own situation. No doubt he could take the man tailing him in a fight, but an altercation might get the police involved, which would complicate things. If he had to, Grant would test his skills with Krav Maga, a style of fighting perfected by Israeli commandos, but he remembered an old joke about the merits of martial arts. When an elderly man was told that karate was the oldest form of self-defense, the man replied, “It ain’t older than running.”

Running wasn’t something Grant did often, because speed wasn’t his strength. Strength was his strength. He looped the backpack around both shoulders, leaving his arms free, and he looked at his map of the museum. He was one room over from the gallery with the Elgin Marbles. There were only two exits. He could either go back and exit through the Great Court, or he could keep going forward, which would lead him through the gift shop.

He didn’t like backtracking. Forward. Once he was outside, he would head back to the Underground and lose his shadow in the maze of passageways.

The man stayed thirty feet behind him. Grant checked out his follower in the reflection of the glass cases.

With acne-scarred cheeks and bushy black eyebrows, the guy wasn’t going to win an award in a Brad Pitt look-alike contest. But what he lacked in looks he more than made up for with his size. At least four inches taller than Grant, he had the bulk of a grizzly. The only place the guy would be inconspicuous was coming out of an NFL locker room.

He carried himself as though no one would ever dare give him trouble, which meant that he likely got by on intimidation and brute force rather than any skill, so Grant wasn’t too worried even if the guy confronted him. He just had to make sure he lost the man before reinforcements could arrive.

After the next archway, Grant turned left and picked up his pace, walking through two galleries and past the gift shop to the front entrance. Outside, it was a clear path through the courtyard to the entrance gate. From there it was just three blocks to the tube station.

At the gate, Grant realized that he wouldn’t get that far. As he walked through the gate, two men got out of a BMW and penned him in. Both looked like uglier relatives of the big man following him. One of them had a thin, perfectly shaped mustache that must have taken an hour to trim, and the other had a widow’s peak sharp enough to be classified as a weapon.

Grant turned and saw that the guy behind him had made up ground and was now only ten feet away.

The man with the mustache called the big guy Sal and said something in Italian.

“Si,” Sal said. “Mr. Westfield, you come with us.”

Grant took a look at the three of them, who now had him surrounded. “What if I don’t feel like it?”

Sal held his coat open to show a holstered pistol, warning Grant that he wouldn’t get twenty feet without becoming a bull’s-eye.

“You know, those are illegal in London,” Grant said. “You could get in big trouble if the bobbies caught you with that.”

“ You are in trouble.”

“Gia Cavano sent you, didn’t she?”

Sal’s eyes flickered at the mention of her name. “Get in the car.”

“You really want to cause a stink out here?”

Sal narrowed his gaze in confusion. He probably didn’t know what Grant meant. “Get in the car.”

The three of them moved closer.

Grant remained still, his muscles tensed. “So you want me to get in the car?”

“Now.”

They were within five feet of him.

“I’m going to have to say, screw you,” Grant said.

That got exactly the response he was hoping for. Sal nodded to the other two, who reached for Grant’s arms.

Whoever they were, they were street brawlers, not trained in hand-to-hand combat as he was. If they had been, they wouldn’t have left themselves so open to attack.

Grant swung his arm around and smashed mustache man in the back of the neck with brutal force. Before the guy with the widow’s peak could react, Grant threw his elbow back and slammed it into the side of his head. Both men went down in a heap.

During the time it took for Grant to put the two men out of action, Sal drew his pistol, but he’d made the mistake of standing too close. Grant chopped his wrist, sending the gun to the sidewalk. Then he smashed his knee into Sal’s groin. Simple, but effective. Sal fell to his knees and toppled over, cradling his crotch and screaming in pain.

Like most real fights Grant had been in, this one had lasted less than five seconds. Shaking his head at how easy it had been to disable the three men, Grant reached into their jackets and removed their guns. He ejected the magazines and removed the slides from each of the pistols before dumping them on the ground. There was no reason to make it easy for them to give chase, so he ran around to the driver’s side of the still-running car, shrugged off the backpack, and got in. He’d drive the BMW three blocks to the Underground station and dump it there.

Putting the car in gear, Grant smiled at the men still lying on the ground. Through the open window, he called out, “Piece of advice, Sal. Next time, bring more men.”

Then he stepped on the gas and left Sal still on his knees, shouting curses at him. Grant didn’t know what he said, but the Italian sure made it sound classy.

I’ m not getting on one of those death traps,” Tyler said.

He kept watch at the stable door while Stacy hurried to cinch up the straps on the saddle of a second horse. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught him nervously changing his grip on the pistol and realized that he was more scared than she was. She had marveled at how he had calmly disarmed a massive explosive, faced down Orr, and dispatched a gunman without breaking a sweat. Now she was the one trying to quiet his nerves.

“Come on, you big baby,” she said. “It’s just a horse. How else are we going to get away?” Cavano and her men would discover their hiding place any minute.

“You go. I’ll try for the car.”

“Don’t be stupid. You’ll get yourself killed. Don’t tell me you’ve never ridden.”

“I have. About twenty-five years ago. That’s why I’d rather take my chances with Cavano.” He wouldn’t look at Stacy.

They’d already gone over their options, and there weren’t any. The cars at the front of the house would be impossible to reach without getting captured. Calling the police wouldn’t help. At best, Cavano would say they assaulted her bodyguard and destroyed her property. Tyler and Stacy would be hauled off to jail, endangering any chance of meeting Orr in Naples on Sunday.