“What’s happened?” Dr. Almanzar asked in a breathless voice, crowding up behind him.
“I’m afraid your assistant has been killed,” Gabriel told her. “Someone shot him in the head.”
It was a brutal way to break the news, but he wanted Dr. Almanzar to appreciate what they were up against. There were killers loose in the museum, and while Gabriel knew that he was their real target—either that or they were after the second flag—he also knew they wouldn’t shrink from gunning down anyone who got in their way.
Dr. Almanzar had blanched at the news of Carlos’s murder. “What are we going to do?”
“There’s no other way out of this room?”
Mutely, she shook her head.
“Do you have any sort of security system here?”
“Not really,” Dr. Almanzar said. “The collections all have historical value, of course, but none of them are worth enough to tempt thieves. At least, not that we knew of.”
“So if I broke some of these display cases, it wouldn’t set off an alarm?”
“No. Only the front door. If someone broke the glass there, then an alarm would sound and the police would be alerted.”
A grim smile tugged at Gabriel’s mouth. “Good enough,” he said.
He knew they didn’t have much time. The men who had killed Carlos might be coming down the hallway even now. He was carrying the Colt in a shoulder holster tonight and reached under his coat to draw it. He didn’t want to get involved in another shootout if he could avoid it, not with Dr. Almanzar there, but it wasn’t always possible to avoid such things. Switching the gun to his left hand, he lifted a stone axe from a pair of hooks on the wall with his right.
“What are you doing?” the doctor said. “You can’t—”
“Get behind something solid,” Gabriel said.
He saw Dr. Almanzar gape at him for a second, then abruptly decide to follow his advice. She scrambled behind a big open cabinet full of what looked like maps.
Gabriel hefted the axe in his hand, judging its weight and balance. He could put a round from the Colt through the museum’s front door, but a bullet hole might not be enough to trigger the alarm. And anyway, he didn’t know how many adversaries he was facing—he might need all the bullets he had just to deal with them.
He took a deep breath and then stepped through the doorway, raising the axe behind his head as he did so. His arm flashed forward and sent the axe spinning through the air, over the desk, and into the glass of the door. The glass shattered, splintering outward, and instantly an alarm began to blare.
As he’d thrown the axe, Gabriel had seen three figures clad in black creeping along the walls of the corridor toward the room he was in. Even before his arm descended and the alarm went off, the silenced pistols the men held came up and began to spit death at him. He leaped back through the doorway, narrowly missed by a couple of shots as he did so. The sounds of ricochets echoed from the walls of the corridor.
As he landed, he rolled behind a display case and came to a stop on his stomach. Thrusting the Colt’s barrel around the end of the case, he fired as one of the assassins tried to rush into the room. The man cried out as the bullet drove him backward. One of his companions grabbed him and dragged him out of the doorway.
Now the fact that there was only one way in or out of this room played in Gabriel’s favor. If the other two men rushed him, he would be able to cut them down as they came through the door. They had to know that as well, and they would be worrying about the alarm, too. They had no way of knowing how soon the police might arrive.
A hand holding a gun poked around the doorjamb. The gun erupted several times as the man emptied it, but he was just flinging lead blindly around the room. The shots shattered some displays but didn’t come close to him or Dr. Almanzar.
Then the hand vanished and he heard the swift rataplan of running footsteps as the men fled.
Dr. Almanzar heard it, too. “Are…are they gone?” she asked.
“Stay where you are,” Gabriel said. “It could be a trick.”
He didn’t want to wait too long, though, because he didn’t want to have to deal with the police, either. Any bureaucracy was bad enough; the Mexican legal system was worse than most. He could easily wind up being held in jail for days, maybe even longer.
After a couple of minutes he got up and risked a look in the hallway. It was deserted. Gabriel held out a hand to Dr. Almanzar and said, “Come on.”
She emerged from behind the cabinet, hesitated a second, then took his hand. “Where are we going?”
“That’s up to you, as long as it’s away from here.”
“But the police—”
“—will be very upset that we left before they got here, I know. But I’ll live with the guilt.” He held one elbow out to her. “You say you’re expected at an event?”
Chapter 8
For a moment Gabriel thought that Dr. Almanzar was going to argue with him, maybe even fight to get away.
Then she said, “This interest in General Fargo’s flag is not just a matter of academic research, is it?”
Gabriel shook his head. “No.”
“Then perhaps we should take it with us,” she said as she slipped her hand out of his, went to the display case, and unlocked it with a small key she took from a pocket in her dress.
Gabriel grinned as Dr. Almanzar took the flag from the case and folded it carefully. “I can put it under my jacket,” he suggested.
“Can I return to my office for my bag?” she asked as he stowed away the flag, nestling it next to the other flag, which he’d tucked into the waistband of his pants at the small of his back before heading to the museum. Good thing they made flags of thin fabric back then, he thought. It was getting a bit tight as it was.
“Okay,” he said. “But make it quick.” The alarm was still going off and it was only a matter of time before someone showed up.
They hurried out of the Special Collections room, Gabriel going first just in case one of the black-clad assassins had remained behind and was waiting in ambush for them. No shots came their way, though, as they headed toward Dr. Almanzar’s office.
“There’s a back door we can use,” she said once she had collected her purse.
“Excellent,” Gabriel said. He’d noticed how the doctor avoided looking at Carlos’s corpse as they passed the security station, but other than that she seemed to be holding up well, considering.
She led the way to a rear door and pushed it open. It was very dark back here in the shadow of the trees of Chapultepec Park, but Dr. Almanzar seemed to know her way around. A couple of vehicles were parked in the small lot she led him to, and she headed straight for one of them, a jeep with enclosed sides.
“Looks like something you’d use for field work,” Gabriel commented as Dr. Almanzar unlocked the jeep’s doors.
“It is. Get in.”
“You’re driving?”
She patted the jeep’s hood and smiled. “This is my niño. No offense, Señor Hunt, but if there’s a chance anyone is going to be coming after us, I’d rather be at the wheel.”
Gabriel nodded and swung into the passenger seat. “Let’s go.” If this turned out to be an attempt to doublecross him, he would deal with that problem then.
Dr. Almanzar knew all the roads through the park and sent the jeep twisting and turning along them, emerging a few minutes later at Paseo de la Reforma, the wide, busy boulevard that cut through the northern section of the park. As the doctor turned west on the boulevard, Gabriel heard whooping sirens and looked back to see flashing red and blue lights through the trees.
The police had arrived at the museum. They would find the shattered door, Carlos’s body, and the damage in the Special Collections room.