Лесли Чартерис - The Saint

The second blast came quickly, accompanied by additional gunfire from the courtyard. The room shuddered with heat, chaos, and confusion.

Templar ran for the stairs, grabbing Ilya’s walking stick in the process. With the ground floor and mezzanine afire, there was no where to go but up. Templar took the stairs four at a time with Ilya directly behind him.

The third rocket blast rippled the staircase as if it were an amusement park ride, and the two men gripped the banisters, battling for balance.

At the top of the stairs Templar leaped to the scaffold as another shock wave shook the mansion. He stumbled, sprawled headlong, and the walking stick flew from this grip. Plaster showered down around him. Dust and debris were everywhere.

Ilya, armed and triumphant, mounted the scaffold and edged closer.

The two men locked eyes.

“Maybe I’m better at math than you,” mocked Ilya. “I shot three men in Red Square, not four.”

“I admit you’re a master of division,” offered Templar, his right hand searching under the plaster. His fingers found the tapered form of Ilya’s walking stick.

“You will give me the disk and I will shoot you,” stated Ilya flatly as he raised the weapon. “Or, if you prefer, I will shoot you and take the disk. Either way you are a failure and a fool.”

“Fool?” Templar hoped Ilya would move even closer. His hopes were not disappointed.

“You allowed yourself to be influenced by a woman. I, myself, have never allowed a woman to influence me.”

“I bet that broke her heart,” said Simon Templar, and he swung the stick with astonishing force into Ilya’s right wrist. The Russian screamed in pain, and the gun spat flame as it plummeted to the inferno below.

“You were right,” said Templar. “There was one bullet left.”

Another missile rocked the mansion’s foundation. Templar stood and steadied himself, brandishing the walking stick as if it were a sword.

Ilya’s eyes widened in shocked realization — the gun was gone, Simon had the disk, flames were rapidly mounting, and missiles were blasting the mansion to rubble.

Templar thrust the stick repeatedly at Ilya, forcing him backward. “Tell me again about being a fool and a failure.”

“Bastard!” yelled Ilya. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Templar stopped. That was a good question. He hadn’t know the answer for decades. But now, in this precise moment, he knew exactly who he was.

“My name is Templar, Simon Templar,” he recited, saying it with the same exuberant self-assurance as he had to little Agnes those many years ago, “crusading Saint and hero of a thousand adventures.”

“Spare me,” groaned Ilya, and blindsided Templar with a roundhouse kick. The walking stick dropped from Templar’s grip as he flailed backward over the scaffold. He clutched desperately at the struts, his strong fingers clamping like iron. He hung there, helpless, suspended over searing flames and suffocating smoke.

Ilya realized only moments remained before Templar could no longer hold on. When he fell, the cold fusion disk would be lost forever. He leaned over, quickly lifted the disk from Templar’s pocket, and placed it in his own. Ilya grabbed the walking stick and began a frantic climb upward toward the domed ceiling, where a row of windows offered his only chance of escape.

He was starting to scale the scaffolding when Templar, summoning astonishing strength born of pure will, somersaulted back onto the platform.

Ilya whirled at Templar’s unexpected reappearance, and what he saw unnerved him more than the renewed whine of incoming ordinance or the increased heat of rising flames.

He had left his adversary dangling above a pit of fiery death, but now Simon Templar stood before him radiating confidence and victory.

“I’m not done with you yet, Sonny Boy!” Templar shouted over the roar of flame and scream of firepower.

Ilya threw a wild look at him, and saw Templar holding aloft what appeared to be computer disk.

“I won’t be suckered!” yelled Ilya. “I saw you...”

“The hand is quicker than the eye, my friend,” said Templar proudly. “It’s the first thing you learn in my line of work.”

Ilya stopped cold, searching Templar’s masklike face for any clue to the truth.

“That’s a blank disk from Botvin’s lab,” stated Ilya, and he hoped he was right.

“Or is yours...?”

The Russian paused only a moment to consider the possibilities. He was going out the window with his disk, right one or not. Reaching the top, Ilya crawled to a bracing strut that led to one of the windows. As deft as he was daft, he gingerly stepped along the plank leading to freedom.

He was halfway to his goal when incoming firepower hit the roof. The shattering explosion demolished Ilya’s escape hatch and blasted him back through the air.

In a move both desperate and inventive, Ilya saved himself from plummeting into the flames by hooking the crook of his walking stick onto the lower ring of the massive chandelier suspended from the mansion’s dome.

He hung there, helpless and terrified, while flames swept over the scaffold.

Templar felt the structure on which he stood ominously shift. Having only moments before the entire tower collapsed upon him, his options for action were decidedly limited.

He leaped off the crashing scaffold, clamped his grip around Ilya’s ankles, and swayed over the inferno like a spider dangling from a thread.

Ilya screamed, Simon held tight, and the rope supporting the chandelier strained and stretched.

“No! Let go!” Ilya tried to kick, but his legs were locked in Simon’s grip.

The wildly rocking chandelier shed a blizzard of crystal as Templar literally climbed up the screaming Russian. Templar planted his heel firmly on Ilya’s head as he reached the chandelier itself.

The rope, never meant to support the additional weight of two men, began to slip. The chandelier lurched and dropped sickeningly, swaying even more precariously as Ilya shimmied up onto it, also.

The pair balanced on opposite sides, suspended over the pit of hell.

The roar of flames was loud on every side. The stifling heat drenched their brows with sweat; acrid smoke stung their nostrils and burned their lungs.

“Damn you,” rasped Ilya. “Cold fusion will die with me!”

“Not exactly,” insisted Templar as he again held up the disk. “I told you I had the real one, and I still do.”

Infuriated, confused, and frustrated, Ilya snatched the disk from Templar’s hand. It crumbled under his grip — it was nothing more than Templar’s card of the Kremlin ground-plan.

In the instant of distraction Templar grabbed between Ilya’s knees for the walking stick still hooked on the steel ring.

Ilya swore and his heart pounded madly in his chest.

Templar thrust the point at him, the needle-sharp tip less than an inch from the assassin’s neck.

“You got it backward. Templar!” yelled Ilya. “You’re the thief... a very good one, okay? But you don’t kill people, not even people like me.”

“You’re the exception that proves the rule,” said Templar coldly. “People like you are greatly improved by death.”

With awesome dexterity, speed, and nerve, Ilya grabbed the stick’s shaft and twisted it from Templar’s hand.

“ I’m the killer here!” yelled Ilya victoriously as he jabbed the point repeatedly at the Saint, “ I’m the killer.”

His triumphant grin faded when he realized what Templar had done — in the instant Ilya regained the stick, Templar plucked the cold fusion disk from the wily Russian’s breast pocket.

In Templar’s left hand was the disk, in his right hand was a little penknife.