“Who are they?” he asked Kate between rounds.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
One of the men tried to come up the stairs. Duckworth kept the “eye hole” promise he’d made to Nick and put one through the man’s left eye. When the man went down, another appeared from behind him. He sprayed bullets wildly, one of them hitting Duckworth under his arm.
Kate took aim and fired, killing the second intruder.
“Get out of here!” Duckworth said. “Through that door! I’ll hold them!”
Kate pushed Nick ahead through the other secret door. It led to another staircase, this one caked with dust and cobwebs, obviously not used for years. They followed the two sets of footprints down to a door that had already been pushed open. They emerged in the alley behind the pub. Another man fired on them immediately. Kate took dead aim and put one into his chest.
“Which way did they go?” Kate asked Nick.
Nick saw one set of dusty footprints leading in one direction, another set in the opposite direction. “Both ways!”
Kate grabbed the gun that the man in the alley had just dropped. She got her first good look at the man, saw nothing more remarkable than his raw, stubbled face, his thick sweater and heavy boots, like a dockworker would wear. There was a tattoo on his neck, a hint of something red barely peeking out from under his collar, but Kate had no time to examine it. “Here,” she said to Nick, handing him the gun. “You go that way.”
It was one of Nick’s oldest rules to never touch a gun if he didn’t have to, but today was a great day to make an exception. He gripped it in firing position, finger off the trigger, and headed left down the alley as Kate went in the opposite direction.
As Kate drew nearer to the alley’s opening to the street, she saw one of the men who’d been in the upper room, now splashing through the filthy puddles just ahead of her. It wasn’t Quentin Fox, but rather the third man, the one with the tweed jacket and the bow tie. He ran out onto the street, but before Kate could reach the same opening, it was blocked by the largest man she had ever seen in her life. And he had a gun.
She dove behind a garbage bin as the huge man fired on her. She fired back and caught him high in the right shoulder. The man barely flinched. He kept firing, until he finally ran out of bullets.
The big man came toward her, as if Kate being armed meant nothing to him, but then someone called to him from the street. He turned and left the alley. When Kate caught up, she saw him getting into a black van. He had left a thin trail of blood from where she’d hit him in the shoulder.
She turned and looked back down the alley, but saw no sign of either Fox, father or son.
* * *
Nick emerged from the alley and spotted his father running across Whitechapel Road. He gave chase, dodging oncoming cars, catching sight of him again as he entered a park. He lost him, almost gave up, until he finally saw him running toward a pedestrian bridge.
Nick’s lungs were burning as he reached the bridge. He stood at the apex, which gave him a good view of the rest of the park. He saw nothing but trees, the darkness broken only by a few more streetlamps and a dozen people walking calmly. Nobody running.
“Where did you go, Dad?” he asked out loud.
Nick leaned over the edge of the pedestrian bridge, taking long breaths of the cold evening air. On the street directly below him, opening the door to a taxi, was his father. He was holding the metal cylinder containing the map.
Quentin Fox sensed the presence above him, looked up, and saw Nick staring down at him. The two men were frozen like this for several seconds. Nick still had the gun in his hand. He could have pointed it at his father, ordered him to stop. He could have shot the gun into the air. He could have put a bullet into the taxi’s hood, scaring the driver out of his vehicle and drawing the attention of everyone around him, including the police.
He didn’t do any of those things.
He kept staring into his father’s eyes until the driver honked his horn. Quentin nodded to Nick, got into the back with his treasure map, and then the taxi drove away.
CHAPTER FOUR
Nick answered the call on his cell phone. He didn’t recognize the number, but he immediately knew his father’s voice.
“We have to stop meeting this way, Nick.”
“Where are you?” Nick asked.
“I’m on the run,” his father said, “apparently being hunted by my own son.”
Nick was standing on the sidewalk outside the pub, watching the stretchers roll by, each one carrying a black body bag.
“Interpol says you’re working for some seriously bad people,” Nick said.
“I don’t care what they think,” Quentin said. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re in a lot of trouble. I can help you.”
A moment of silence passed.
“What happened to Duckie?” Quentin asked. “And the professor?”
“The captain is in surgery. He’ll be fine. The professor got away. So are you going to tell me where you are, or not? And who were those people shooting at us? A hit squad from some government? Or just another group of competing psychos?”
“I don’t have time to explain,” Quentin said. “But don’t listen to what Interpol is telling you. You know me too well to believe any of that.”
“Tell me where you are,” Nick said.
“Good-bye, son.”
The call ended. Nick stood there under the streetlamp, staring at his phone, until an idea came to him and suddenly he wasn’t so tired anymore.
* * *
On the other side of the building, Kate was on her own call.
“I told you to watch your partner,” Special Agent in Charge Carl Jessup said. “I told you to make good decisions. Your career is dangling by a thread, Agent O’Hare.”
Kate nodded in silent acknowledgment. She wondered how she had ended up in this London back alley, in the middle of the night. A dozen of the Crown’s finest officers were combing through both floors of the pub. The three dead intruders were not yet identified. Former SAS captain Richard Duckworth was in surgery to repair a partially collapsed lung. The professor was probably still out there, running.
“I thought returning fire was a good decision, sir,” Kate said.
“What were you doing there, anyway?”
“Following Nick. Just like you instructed.”
From there, Kate knew it would only get worse. Like an immediate one-way ticket home worse. Nick tricked me, she thought. He lied to me and the SAS major. And then, in the moment of truth, he went off to find his own father. He didn’t trust me to help him.
“This supposed pub, what is it really?” Kate asked, a game effort to change the subject. Two hidden staircases and a secret second-story room? Quentin Fox, a professor, and an ex-military man who just happens to have a loaded gun?
“I haven’t heard anything yet,” Jessup said, “but it’s obviously something because everybody at the CIA is doing a great job of playing dumb. I’ll keep digging, but right now I need both of you back here in Rome. After I debrief you, I’m going to personally put you on a plane to Los Angeles, and sit right between you. Kiss your two days good-bye.”