The doc suddenly let out a nasally laugh. “You didn’t really believe I’d let you two leave here, did you? I made these darts especially for you. I needed more test subjects.…”
Son of a bitch!
In one smooth move, I rolled onto my chest, brought my knees up under me, and leaped up, grabbing the dart gun with my left hand while my right punched the little weasel in the gut.
At the same time, Top relieved Halverson of his weapon once again.
With the tables suitably turned, I shoved Goldman toward the Minotaur. “You owe him a cure,” I said. “Maybe he’ll let you live if you promise to get back to work.”
“There really is no cure,” he said, shaking.
“Maybe he needs more motivation,” the Minotaur said. He reached a hand out to me and understanding dawned as I passed him the dart gun.
Goldman immediately figured out what the Minotaur intended to do as well. He bolted. Into the maze.
There was enough time for the man-bull to shoot the doctor in the back, but he didn’t. Instead, he snarled at Halverson, “I heard what you did. You caused all this. This is your fault.”
“No,” Halverson said. “No.”
The mutant bull grabbed him by the neck, but then let him go. He shoved him into the maze.
Halverson turned back. “Please,” he said. The Minotaur pointed the gun at him and he ran.
This time, the Minotaur pulled the trigger. Halverson cried out in pain and terror. He turned back toward us, but the man-bull waved his hand and the wall slid closed. The Minotaur had torn off the lanyard that Halverson had been wearing with his personnel badge.
“I wanted the doctor to be chased through his own maze by one of his own creations,” the Minotaur said, “just not by me. I’m never going back in there.”
“I can’t make any promises,” I said, “but I’ll do whatever I can to find someone capable of creating a cure for you.”
“No,” he said. “If more scientists study me, they might try to duplicate Goldman’s experiments. This has to end here.”
I looked sadly at him. “What do you have in mind?”
“I used to work here,” the Minotaur said. “I confided in Goldman that I had a gambling debt and he offered to pay it off for me if I let him test a new type of supersoldier steroid on me. I know how to lock the place down, hard.” He slid open a panel under the scanner, revealing a number pad and an ominous red button. He tapped in a long sequence of numbers, then pressed the button. “I’ve triggered the biohazard emergency protocols.”
I knew what that meant. A different kind of sliding steel wall would drop in front of the elevator and thermite charges would seal it permanently in place. No one that knew about this place would ever give the order to dig us out.
A courteous female voice emanated from speakers somewhere down the hall. She informed us that the fail-safe had been initiated. “Countdown is commencing. One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight…”
“You better run,” the Minotaur said.
“… ninety-five, ninety-four…”
We ran as though the hounds of hell were chasing us. And after everything the Goldman brothers had thrown at us, I doubt giant demon dogs would have even surprised me.
But there were no surprises. We made it out in time. I just hope to God Mama Goldman didn’t have triplets.
Nicholas Steven is the new action-adventure pen name of a bestselling ghostwriter. If you ask him his real name, he’ll give you the old “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” line, and he’ll say it just ominously enough that you won’t ask again. He’ll then give you a charming smile that’s at odds with the unnerving hold his steely eyes have on you, and he’ll strongly suggest you take note of his alias so you don’t miss any of his future publications, which he promises will be killer reads.
TARGET ACQUIRED
BY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN AND TIM LEBBON
Miranda had always thought one of the beauties of Venice was its anonymity. A city of magic and elegance, so unmistakably Italian — so iconic — it was nevertheless a place where one could vanish completely. In the crush of tourists in St. Mark’s Square, disappearing was simple, but it was only a tiny bit more difficult in the city’s less traveled alleys. Tourists were everywhere, clothing and faces and styles from all around the world. Almost from birth, Venetians learned not to see them, to let all of those unfamiliar faces blur together until they became, for all intents and purposes, invisible.
Invisibility made a killer’s job much simpler.
She carried a large coffee in a travel cup from a busy café, both part of her masquerade and a caffeine junkie’s necessity. This mission would have been so much simpler a few weeks earlier, in the middle of Carnival season, when meandering the bridges and alleys of Venice wearing an actual mask would not have seemed at all out of place. But mid-March worked just as well for Miranda, really. She had spent a lifetime mastering the art of the true masquerade, disguising herself without any mask at all. Changing her walk and her bearing, her body language and demeanor, her hair and her style, her tone and her language.
In a beige wool coat, gray leggings, and high black boots, with a burgundy-and-white-checked scarf that set off nicely against her dark features, she bore the look of just another British tourist. The badly folded map in her left hand completed the picture, and she made sure to pause to glance at it now and again for a sense of verisimilitude. The day’s high temperature would barely reach forty-five Fahrenheit, so the stylish hooded coat would seem sensible and not at all out of place, and it would hide a variety of weapons.
Weapons she did not expect to need.
The cobblestones beneath her feet were damp from rain, but as she emerged from an alley onto the Fondamenta Orseolo, a narrow walkway that ran beside a canal, she saw the way the water lapped up onto the steps at a gondola station, and she knew that some months it was not rain that dampened those cobblestones. The sea was rising and the city was sinking, both slowly, both surely. In time, the whole city would be underwater, washing away the evidence of a great civilization, and centuries of crimes. The city flooded so regularly now that in many buildings the ground floor had been filled with concrete, surrendered to the future. The last time Miranda had visited Venice she had hidden two corpses in one of those ground floors, the night before the concrete had been poured.
Venice hid a multitude of sins.
But none of those sins were as black as Joe Ledger’s.
From behind thousand-dollar Dita Cascais sunglasses, she caught sight of him crossing Ponte della Piavola fifty feet ahead. Precisely where she’d expected him to be. Miranda had measured her pace, timed every pause, so that the two of them would be in this very position. For eight days she had arrived before dawn to take up her position behind the construction fence of an eleventh-century church whose renovation had been abandoned for more than a year. A forgotten place, nearly as invisible as the face of a tourist. From behind the fence, she had watched the façade of the neglected apartment building where Ledger had been laying his head, emerging after he emerged, every morning a different persona for her, a different masquerade.
Miranda had followed him, timed his walk from the apartment building to the crumbling, abandoned villa where he’d been convening daily with members of a European antiterror task force. Each day she appeared to be meandering instead of stalking. Morning after morning she had scanned the architecture and the canals for ambush points. Nothing had satisfied her.
Last night, she had run out of patience. The desire to see Joe Ledger dead outweighed all else.