Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow

The floor-to-ceiling windows of the boardroom took the brunt of the gunfire and spontaneously cracked into a million spiderwebs.

Mother grappled with her attacker on top of the boardroom table. He was a big guy, strong. He unsheathed a knife just as Mother did too and the two blades clashed.

Then, suddenly, as they fought, Mother caught sight of two shapes in the doorway.

Men.

But not IG-88 men.

Rather, two burly Israelis in suits, with Uzis slung over their shoulders and bloodstains on their shirts.

Mossad security men.

The two Israelis saw the fight taking place on the long boardroom table.

'Bounty hunters!' one of them spat.

'Come on!' the other yelled, looking back down the hallway. 'They're coming!'

The first man sneered at Mother and her attacker—then he quickly pulled a high-powered RDX grenade from his pocket, popped the cap and threw it into the boardroom. Then he and his partner dashed off.

Still fending off her attacker's blows with her knife, Mother saw the grenade fly into the room in a kind of detached slow motion. It bounced on the floor, disappearing underneath the gigantic

I

table. Mother heard the unmistakable sound of it clunking against one of the table's tree-trunk-sized legs. And then it detonated.

The blast was monstrous.

Despite its solidity, the corridor-end of the massive table just disintegrated, shattering instantly into a thousand splinters.

As for the rest of the table—still a good 25 feet long—something very different happened.

The concussive force of the grenade lifted the elongated table clear off the floor and—like a railroad car being shunted forward on its tracks—sent it sliding at considerable speed down the length of the boardroom, toward the bullet-cracked windows at the western end of the room.

Mother saw it coming an instant before it happened.

The table exploded through the cracked glass windows, blasting through them like a battering ram, and shot out into the sky, forty

storeys up.

Then with a sickening lurch, the table tipped downwards, and Mother suddenly found herself sliding—fast, down the length of the table, rain pounding against her face—toward four hundred feet of empty sky.

It looked totally bizarre: the elongated boardroom table jutting out from the top floor of the tower.

The table tilted sharply—passing through 45 degrees, then steeper—with the two tiny figures of Mother and the IG-88 commando sliding down its length.

Then—completely without warning—the falling table jolted to a

halt.

Its uppermost edge had hit the ceiling of the 40th floor and wedged against it, while two of its thick legs had locked against the floor right on the precipice—causing the whole table to stop suddenly, suspended at a vertiginous angle 40 storeys above the ground!

Mother slid fast, before at the very last moment she jammed her knife deep into the surface of the table—and using the knife's brass fingerholes as a handgrip, swung to a halt, hanging from the embedded knife, her feet dangling off the lower edge of the almost-vertical table.

Her attacker wasn't as quick-thinking.

In an attempt to get a handhold, he'd dropped his knife as they'd fallen. As it turned out, he hadn't been able to find a handhold, but luckily for him he'd been above Mother as the table had burst out through the window. As such, he'd fallen into her, his feet slamming into her embedded knife.

He now hung above her, one foot crushing her knife-hand, smiling.

Gripping the edges of the table with his hands, he started kicking her fingers, hard.

Mother clenched her teeth, held on grimly despite his blows, the brass fingerholes of her knife deflecting some of them.

And then she heard the noise.

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump . . .

The sound of helicopter rotors.

She glanced around and saw a Lynx chopper hovering right beside her like a giant flying hornet.

'Oh, fuck . . .' she moaned.

The IG-88 man above her waved to the chopper pilot, directing him to go down, below them.

The pilot complied and the chopper swung below Mother, its speed-blurred rotor blades forming a hazy white circle beneath her dangling feet.

Then the bounty hunter above her resumed his kicking, only harder.

Crack!

She heard one of her fingers break.

'You motherfucker]' she yelled.

He kicked again.

The rotor blades roared like a buzzsaw ten feet below Mother's boots.

Her attacker raised his foot for one last blow. He brought it

down hard—

—just as Mother did a most unexpected thing.

She withdrew the knife from the table, causing both of them to slide quickly downward, off the table's lower edge, toward the blurring blades of the helicopter!

Her attacker couldn't believe it.

Without the knife to lean on, he rocketed downward, sliding off the lower edge of the boardroom table!

They slid off the bottom end of the table together—but unlike her attacker, Mother had been prepared. As she went off the edge, she stabbed her knife into the underside of the table, and swung in underneath it, her fall halted.

The IG-88 man shot right past her, off the edge of the table and

out into space . . .

. . . and the world went slow as Mother watched his horrified face—eyes wide, mouth open—falling, falling, dropping away

from her.

Then he hit the rotor blades— splat-choo! —and his entire human shape just disappeared, spontaneously erupting into a star-shaped

burst of blood.

A wash of red liquid splattered the windscreen of the chopper and the Lynx peeled away from the building.

Mother didn't even have time to sigh with relief.

For just then, as she hung from the downward-pointing boardroom table, pelted by the London rain, the whole table shifted slightly.

A sudden jolt.

Downward.

Mother snapped to look up: saw that the legs pinioning the table

to the 40th floor were buckling. The table was going to fall. 'Oh, damn it all to fucking hell!' she yelled to the sky. 'I am not

going to die!'

She gauged her position.

She was at the corner of the building—the south-west corner— on the western side.

Just around the corner, slightly below her, she could see one of the glass elevators, stopped on the 38th floor on the southern face of the building.

'Okay,' she said to herself. 'Stay calm. What would the Scarecrow do?'

Maghook, she thought.

She drew her Maghook, aimed it up at the interior ceiling of the 40th floor, and fired.

Nothing happened.

The Maghook didn't fire.

Its trigger just clicked and its barrel emitted a weak fizzing noise. It was out of gas propellant.

'Oh, come on!' Mother yelled. 'That never happens to the Scarecrow!'

Then suddenly the table lurched again, dropped another two feet.

Mother started unspooling the Maghook manually—with her teeth—muttering as she did so. 'Not fair. Not fair. Not fucking fair . . .'

The table teetered on the edge of the 40th floor, its legs groaning under the weight, about to snap—

Mother felt she had enough rope and with her free hand, hurled the Maghook's grappling hook up at the 40th floor.

It landed on the edge of the shattered windowsill, its claws catching . . .

. . . just as the table tipped wholly out of the window . . .

. . . and Mother let go of her knife, swung away from the falling boardroom table . . .

. . . and the table fell through the rainy sky, all twenty-five feet of it dropping down the side of the building . . .

. . . while Mother swung on her rope, swooping around the corner of the building, before she slammed into the glass wall of