Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [95]
A harsh voice cut him off. “What’s going on here? Who is this man?”
They turned to find a brutish-looking German with a crew cut standing in the doorway, frowning at Jack.
Jack held out a hand, about to introduce himself, but the guy ignored him. “Did anyone sweep them?”
“Relax, Reinhardt,” Alain said.
“Relax? That’s how errors are made.” The man came into the room now, looking like an angry bulldog. “How many times do I have to tell you, we sweep everyone. No exceptions.” He scooped a security wand from a nearby table then gestured to Jack and Sara. “Against the wall.”
Sara gave Jack a look that said, What can you do? But considering the number of people they’d lost over the last two years, Jack couldn’t blame the guy. He moved to the wall, placed his palms against it, and spread his legs.
Reinhardt flicked a switch on the wand and started with Jack’s shoes, slowly moving up the inside of each leg, the torso, the neck and shoulders, then up each arm.
When he waved it over Jack’s right wrist—over his Hamilton Gilbert—the wand began to beep. Loudly.
The entire room went quiet, heads turning in reaction to the sound. Without missing a beat, Reinhardt produced a gun and pressed it against Jack’s head.
“The watch,” he demanded. “Take it off.”
Sara just stood there looking stunned and Jack was flabbergasted.
With horror, he thought:
Swain. While I was out, he had my watch. Has he been tracking us all this time?
“Take it off!” the bulldog roared.
But before Jack could comply a radio squawked nearby. Brendan Lapworth’s frantic voice came over the airwaves—
“Shut her down! We’re under attack!”
As one, all eyes shifted to the computer screen showing the infrared security cameras as a team of black-suited commandos spilled from a van then crashed through the chain-link gate—
—and shot Ethan and Brendan down in cold blood.
27
Chaos.
That was the only word to describe it.
The room erupted in shouts and scrambling bodies. Alain quickly moved from computer to computer to shut them down, as people hurried toward windows and doors. Reinhardt’s expression was pure fury. He slammed Jack across the back of the head with his gun, then stepped back and was about to pull the trigger when Sara shouted.
“No!”
She smashed into their leader, knocking him against the white board. He went down with a crash and she grabbed Jack’s arm, pulling him toward the doorway.
“Run!”
Jack’s head was throbbing as they flew through the hallway, shouts echoing around them. The commandos were inside the building and storming up the stairs, firing indiscriminately at any movement they saw.
A bullet gouged plaster above Jack’s head and Sara steered him through a doorway into another apartment, pulling him into the bathroom.
She pointed toward the ceiling. “Up there. Open it!”
Gunfire echoed in the hall as Jack jumped onto the toilet, unlatched a square hatch above it—an air vent—and threw it open. The space was just big enough for him to fit through.
“Go!” she said.
Jack hoisted himself up and through to a slanted slate rooftop. He turned and reached back inside and Sara got onto the toilet and grabbed hold of his hands. He pulled her up, paused just long enough to drop his beloved watch through the opening, then quickly closed the hatch.
Down in the street, several more vans and French police cars screeched to a stop in front of the building, uniformed officers piling out, weapons at the ready. Whatever lie they had been told—undoubtedly by MI6—they had swallowed it whole.
The rooftops of Paris were like no place else on earth. For as far as Jack could see in the moonlight there were no flat surfaces, just a maze of slants and protrusions, gullies and pipes and television antennas—visual disorder but beautiful, as if the city had been designed by a mad genius.
Sara got to her feet and started across the slanted roof, gesturing for Jack to follow. But that was easier said than done. She seemed to have a path mapped out, grabbing onto landmarks along the way—a pipe here, a chimney there, the occasional satellite dish—and Jack