She pawed for the gun she had pocketed in order to climb with both hands.
He pulled the trigger twice.
“Bring bullets next time, asshole.”
Van Pelt got over the shock of firing an empty pistol instantly. “You think you can stop me with that?” He lunged at her.
“Kneecapping’ll do it,” Kincaid said, trying to steady the little gun in hands that were wet again with blood from her wrists and firing twice at his knee. She heard him cry out, but he slung his empty weapon underarm in her face. It caromed off her skull as she ducked, slicing her scalp. Before she could fire again he had bolted around the next corner and was pounding the next stairs.
She knew she had hit him, but not in the knee or he wouldn’t be running like that. She slipped on something wet and fell hard. Righting herself on the steps, she felt the wet she had slipped on. Sticky blood—his this time. He wouldn’t get far.
The stairs and ladders stopped with no warning. She looked up, saw the glowing sky, saw the moving silhouette of Van Pelt climbing hand over hand up an improvised ladder of triangular cutouts in the girders. There was a sudden lull in the wind that whistled through the steel, and she could hear his laboring breath. But he was climbing fast, undaunted by whatever wound she had dealt him, and she saw no clear shot through the steel.
Pocketing the gun again, she felt for hand- and toeholds in the openings between the ties and struts that formed the panel he was climbing and started up after him. Something stung her eyes. His blood was dripping down on her, she thought at first. But no, her own blood was trickling from her scalp. She tried to brush it away with her sleeve and kept climbing, her breath coming short from exertion.
She heard voices. Numerous voices. Was she hallucinating? It sounded like people calling to each other. Not cops, not pursuit, but people having fun. Maybe she washallucinating. Her head hurt and she was sure as hell breathing hard, slipping into oxygen deficit, climbing hand over hand, foot over foot, like Spider-Man, minus the spidey juice that made him stronger than humans. Chill! Stay with this!
She concentrated on the endless task of lifting leaden arms and legs in a steady rhythm while trying to stay alert for another ambush. She had to remember to look up. High above her, Van Pelt appeared to be emerging from water. He had reached the top. He was climbing out of the steel into the air. She heard the voices, again—frightened now, shouts, a cry of pain, and then the pounding of Van Pelt running again.
She reached the top. She swung herself up off the girder onto a narrow windswept catwalk. The slope of the arch curved down behind her. People yelled. She turned and looked up and saw the arch still curving higher into the sky. The people were between her and the summit—a crowd of eight in identical jumpsuits. They wore radio headsets and were tethered to a cable beside the catwalk. Bridge climbers, she realized.
The Sydney Bridge Climb was advertised on the plane and in the airport. Groups of tourists were escorted to the top of the bridge to enjoy the stunning view and have their pictures taken above the beautiful city. Two of them were slumped unconscious on the catwalk, laid out by Van Pelt. He had broken past them and was racing toward the top.
A girl saw Kincaid and screamed.
“There’s another one!”
Kincaid ran straight at them, pointed to the side she was going to pass, and ordered in a shout louder than the wind, “ Disperse!”
The tourists shrank from the sight of a determined woman with blood streaming down her face. She blasted past them.
She saw Van Pelt fifty feet ahead, running like the wind.
The bastard was home free, running fast and easy, untroubled by his wound, and again taking advantage of being so much faster than she. A second climbing party suddenly materialized ahead of him, between him and the crest. The leader was shouting into a walkie-talkie. Without hesitating, Van Pelt jumped from the catwalk to the girders that traversed the bridge and ran, balancing himself hundreds of feet over the roadway and train tracks, racing across them to the opposite arch.
Kincaid followed. Her heart soared. She had better balance. She could run faster on the girders. In fact, the faster she ran the better her balance—as long as she didn’t miss a step and plunge a foot through a hole in the steel. He was picking his way more slowly, tiring, limping, stiffening up like a man afraid of falling. She was only twenty feet behind when the SR mercenary reached the far arch and scrambled onto its catwalk. His way was clear. There was nothing between him and the summit and when he crested it and started down he would go even faster. Kincaid reached the catwalk, scrambled over the rail, and ran after him.
A lone figure appeared at the top of the arch.
Kincaid blinked, gasping for breath, half-blinded by her own blood, thoroughly confused. The tourists’ voices had been weirdly hallucinatory. What she thought she saw now was even stranger. Hunched over a mobile phone, peering myopically through wire reading glasses at the yellow glow of a Google Map, the lone figure looked like a bridge climber who had somehow gotten lost, untethered from his group at the top of the bridge 450 feet above Sydney Harbour. He looked up from his phone at the sound of their pounding feet and removed his reading glasses as if to take a better look at the enormous Van Pelt charging the narrow catwalk straight at him. He slipped his glasses into his pocket, put his phone in another, and stood up straight.
“Janson!” The sight of his innocent specs and the span of his shoulders sent an invigorating blast of adrenaline through her arms and legs. No way she would let Paul Janson beat her to the catch. Kincaid summoned her last reserves for a final burst of speed to tackle Van Pelt’s ankles.
Van Pelt thrust his right shoulder forward like a battering ram. A loud yell stormed from his lips, a feral howl of destruction. He hurled his left hand in a pile driver blow with all his running weight behind it.
Paul Janson slid inside the arc of the mercenary’s fist, and Kincaid knew she had lost the race. But she had to admit that the traditional prizefighter punch that her partner chose from his close-combat arsenal was a thing of awesome beauty. With a synchronized explosion of footwork, hip pivot, and body momentum, the hand that had pocketed his mobile phone closed into a fist and flew with precisely directed energy. Quick as flame, smooth as oil, it traveled the shortest possible distance to strike the running man’s jaw with the audible crunch of a meat cleaver and lifted him over the guardrail and into thin air.
The SR mercenary fell with a scream of astonishment.
Plunging toward the water far below, wheeling through the beams of light that decorated the arch and illuminated the highways on the deck, buffeted by the wind and drifting like a kite, Hadrian Van Pelt took a full seven seconds to fall 450 feet.
Doubled over, Kincaid gasped, “I almost had him.”
* * *
PAUL JANSON LAUGHED, giddy with relief to have her back safe. “What in hell did you think you would do with him when you caught him? He outweighed you by a hundred pounds.”
“His gun was empty— Sweet Jesus, look at that son of a bitch!”
As Van Pelt’s falling body dropped through the last band of light, they saw him twist around and turn a somersault in the air. With his arms held high and his feet pointed down, he knifed cleanly into the black water.
Janson grabbed his phone, switched off the Google Map, and touched Redial.
“… Me again. A man just jumped off the Harbour Bridge, dead center. He cut the water clean with his feet, so he could have survived.… Tall, blond hair, broad shoulders, right arm in a bandage. Confirmation would be appreciated.”