NINE

Nina stared at the monitor, shocked. Whomever the other man was, he was serious about wanting Kari dead. And from what she had already seen of Hajjar, his greed would soon force him to cave in and accept the blood money.

And there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Unless…

“Two guards at the lower gate,” said Castille as he and Chase ran up the rocky slope.

“I see ’em,” Chase replied. “They’ll take a couple of minutes to get up here. Sod ’em for now. What about the top?”

“They must be inside the gate. What’s our best tactic? Something subtle?”

Chase raised his Uzi. “Subtle suits me.”

Hajjar was torn, looking between the other people in the room-even Kari-as if hoping for guidance. “Fifteen million?” he said at last. “Why? Why is it so important to you that she dies?”

“Twenty million!” shouted Qobras. “Twenty million dollars to kill her, now! Don’t ask questions, just-”

The screen went dark.

As did the entire room-the lights, Hajjar’s computer, everything. The only illumination came from the narrow stained-glass windows.

Hajjar and his guards were caught unawares, held in bewildered surprise.

Kari moved-

Nina had spotted the large red switches at the bottom of the control panels when she switched off the electric fence. She didn’t need fluency in Farsi or an electrician’s training to work out what they did.

She pushed them all. Everything went black.

Switching on the flashlight, she hurried from the room. Somebody was certain to investigate. As she ran down the darkened corridor, she pulled her belt around to bring the holster within easy reach.

The main gate was a huge archway running through the thick southern wall. Chase used his steel mirror to peek around the corner.

“Two guys in a little gatehouse at the far end, left,” he told Castille, “about fifteen feet. Doesn’t look like they’re on the ball.”

Castille brought up his rifle. “Still subtle?”

Chase nodded, watching the gatehouse in the mirror. “Let’s-”

The lights in the gatehouse went out, as did the CCTV monitors. The guards reacted with confusion.

“Oh bollocks!” Chase hissed. “She’s turned off the rest of the power!” The voices of the guards echoed down the passage, one of them using a walkie-talkie.

Castille made a face. “Subtle is out, then.”

“Fight to the end?”

“Fight to the end.”

A nod, then both men charged into the gateway, guns roaring as they blasted the gatehouse and its occupants apart.

Kari whipped around with the effortless grace of a ballerina, pivoting on one foot as she dropped to a crouch. At the same time, her other leg lanced out and scythed into her guard’s ankles from behind. He fell backwards, his head cracking against the hard marble.

She leapt up, pulling her knees high to curl herself into a ball, and bringing her cuffed wrists beneath her tucked feet.

Her heels hit the floor with a clack as she raised her hands in front of her. Somewhere outside, she heard the rattle of automatic weapons.

Chase.

In the low light, she saw Hajjar still sitting behind his desk, facing the dead plasma screen. The other guard fumbled with his MP-5.

The man at her feet had a gun, but it was still in its holster. The door was too far away.

Which left-

She vaulted onto Hajjar’s desk and slid across the gleaming surface on her butt just as he turned his chair around. Her feet smashed into the Iranian’s face, driving him back into the padded leather as she continued her slide right over the desk to land in his lap. The swivel chair spun around with the impact, its high back blocking both Kari and Hajjar from the guard’s view for a moment.

And in that moment, Kari wrenched the revolver from Hajjar’s hand.

A single shot was all she needed to hit the guard square in the forehead. He collapsed instantly, dead.

The other guard was recovering, pulling out his gun as he twisted to face her.

Kari kicked again, using Hajjar as a human springboard to launch herself into the air. The chair and its occupant toppled over with a crash. She performed a perfect somersault as a bullet cracked against the wall behind her.

She was still upside down in midair as she pulled the trigger. The bullet exploded in the guard’s chest, blood spurting out as she flopped back to the floor.

Kari landed on both feet beside the desk, coat swirling like a cape. She gave the body of her former guard a cold look. “You were right about the martial arts.”

She heard a noise behind her and whirled. Hajjar had crawled from his overturned chair, flattening himself against the wall beneath the plasma screen. As he raised his hook hand to the carved skirting along the base of the wall, a twisted smile of triumph on his bloodied lips, the floor beneath him dropped away and pitched him into darkness. Before Kari could react, the trapdoor snapped back into place, only the tiniest seam in the marble giving away that it had even been there at all.

She hurried to the spot and pushed at the skirting, but although a piece of it moved under her touch, nothing happened. The trapdoor had some kind of lock or timing mechanism to prevent people pursuing its user.

The artifact!

Kari frantically searched the desk for the orichalcum piece.

It wasn’t there!

She must have swept it along with her when she slid over the desk, dropping it right into Hajjar’s lap. And now he had used the shah’s secret escape route to make his getaway with it!

Spitting a Norwegian curse, Kari dropped the revolver into a pocket, picked up the dead bodyguard’s MP-5 and hurried from the room.

The spiraling chute deposited Hajjar in a small room two floors below. Like the rest of the fortress the room was dark, but once his disorientation cleared, that presented him with no problems. He had prepared the room carefully with everything he might need should he have to use his emergency exit.

Not, he thought as his hand felt for the battery-powered lantern he knew was there, that he had ever actually expected to do so. Especially to escape from someone who just a few seconds earlier had been his prisoner! Qobras was right-Kari Frost was indeed more dangerous than she seemed.

He found the lantern and switched it on. The contents of the room were exactly as he’d left them. Hurriedly slinging a satchel over one shoulder, he dropped the orichalcum bar into it before choosing a weapon.

Hajjar’s disability limited him to relatively small and light guns, but that didn’t mean he was limited in terms of firepower. The gun he selected was an Ingram M11, scarcely bigger than an ordinary pistol but able to spew bullets at the frightening rate of sixteen hundred rounds per minute. This particular gun had a special modification ordered personally by its owner: the magazine, protruding from the bottom of the handgrip, ended in a drum, more than doubling its capacity. With only one hand, reloading was a task Hajjar preferred to delay.

There was one other weapon he chose. He unscrewed the steel hook from the metal cup covering the stump of his right wrist… and replaced it with a vicious, eight-inch serrated blade.

His pilot had standing orders in case of an emergency-get to the helipad and start the chopper. Hajjar had many enemies, and was under no illusions that the fortress was impregnable. Running from the danger and letting his men handle it was his preferred option.