Coke was on his way down to the lobby. He paused, midway on the stairs, and asked, “Are they coming here?”
“Not yet, the bloody fools,” the intelligence officer said. “Either they’re not that organized, or they don’t realize that we’re keeping an eye on things.”
Barbour watched his console as he spoke. The main screen showed Johann Vierziger surrounded by L’Escorials and fireflies on a brothel bed, but graphic and numerical sidebars reduced the main image by sixty percent.
Barbour’s shouted warning drew Georg Hathaway’s head from the family apartment. Coke heard the door open beneath him.
“Hathaway!” he said, leaning over the balustrade to make eye contact. “Is anybody in the building but us, you, and Evie?”
“No sir,” Hathaway said, staring at Margulies by the door. The security officer was pulling her armor on one-handed while she held the shoulder weapon with the other and looked out the peephole in the front door. “No sir, there’s only you two gentlemen and the lady, that’s all who are present in our establishment.”
The innkeeper’s voice singsonged, as if he were chanting to himself in private. He was so frightened that his hands were still rather than washing themselves.
Evie Hathaway appeared behind her husband. She laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Sten’s on the way back,” Barbour noted. “He’s picking up Niko on the way.”
“Via, they shouldn’t risk it!” Margulies muttered from the doorway.
“They’ll be all right,” Barbour said. Tension clipped his tones, but his enunciation remained perfect. On the main screen, a pair of gunmen clubbed Vierziger unconscious. “Pepe guessed Johann sprang the ambiance for Larrinaga. There’s no evidence it’s occurred to him to come after the rest of us yet.”
Coke walked down the stairs and turned to face the Hathaways. “Georg, Evie,” he said. “If you can handle it, we’ll go up to the hide on your roof now. If you can’t, we’ll head for the woods. Either way, tell Pepe or whoever comes looking that an Astra messenger came for us twenty minutes ago. We left with him. All right?”
“Sten and Niko’re back,” Margulies called. The whine of a jitney’s motor came through the peephole and, faintly, through the building’s thick walls. “They’re going around to the lock-up.”
“Go upstairs, then,” Evie Hathaway said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Go!”
“Master Hathaway?” Coke said.
Georg finally met the Frisian commander’s eyes. He patted his wife’s hand on his shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “You are our guests. We will do what we can for you, despite, despite …”
Hathaway’s face settled into unexpectedly firm lines. “Your friend helped Pedro, returned Suzette to him and got him away from here. You’ll want to do what you can for your friend. We’ll hide you until you can.”
“There’s about forty men leaving L’Escorial HQ,” Margulies warned from the peephole. “A couple armored cars are coming up from the garage, too.”
“Sten and Niko have gone up the ladder to the back,” Barbour said.
“Shut it down, Bob,” Coke ordered, putting a hand for emphasis on the intelligence officer’s arm. “Everybody up to the—”
He heard the trapdoor open. “Stay where you are!” he bawled to Moden and Daun, who’d climbed the rope ladder from the locked parking area behind Hathaway House. “We’re on our way!”
Barbour blanked the console. His hesitation at abandoning his equipment was obvious in the longing glance he threw over his shoulder when Coke tugged him way .
“They’re crossing the street!” Margulies warned. She hadn’t moved from her position.
“Come on!” Coke shouted. He gave Barbour a push toward the stairs and skipped up after him, charging his sub-machine gun as he moved. The security lieutenant backed from the door, covering the rear.
“Twenty minutes ago!” Coke called from the top of the stairs.
The Hathaways couldn’t hold out against torture—nobody could if the stress was properly applied, though Coke doubted any non-Frisian on Cantilucca was competent at that either. Whether or not the Hathaways would blurt something when L’Escorial gunmen knocked them around, as would inevitably happen, was an open ques—
“We will stand it!” Evie Hathaway called. “For your sake, and for Cantilucca!”
“Blow the fucking door down!” shouted a gaunt, one-eyed L’Escorial gunman at the front of Hathaway House. Georg Hathaway was already pulling the door open as quickly as its mass would allow.
The five Frisians waited silently beneath piled lumber and the barrels on the roof. Enough of the twilight leaked through cracks in their concealment that they could see one another as their eyes adapted.
So long as the console in the lobby operated as a base unit, the commo helmets could access sounds and images from any of the sensors Daun had placed—including those in the hotel. There were no peepholes to look out through directly.
Six gunmen bulled into the lobby, deliberately slamming the innkeeper against the wall. Evie Hathaway stood at the doorway to the family apartment, glaring at the L’Escorials.
Ramon Luria entered behind his men. He looked at Evie, then Georg. “Where are the Frisians?” he asked.
“They’re gone—” Georg began.
Ramon nodded. Two of the gunmen grabbed Hathaway by the wrists.
“—twenty minutes ago when—” Georg said, his voice climbing a note with every syllable.
Ramon punched the innkeeper in the belly with all the strength of his pudgy body. Georg’s breath whooped out; his face lost color.
“The Astras sent for them!” Evie cried. “They went to the Astras with nothing but their guns!”
Ramon turned from the husband and slapped the wife. It was a full-armed blow which Evie could have dodged had she wished to. Instead she accepted the whack, knowing that there was no escape but death from whatever Luria chose to do.
Three scarlet armored cars were in the street, their armament pointed at Hathaway House. Several score gunmen milled around the vehicles. If the tribarrels and rocket launcher ever opened up, shrapnel and fragments of the facade would kill more of the L’Escorials than the Frisians could in the first few seconds.
Evie’s head rocked back. She put a hand to her cheek, then snatched it away as a sign of weakness.
“Go on,” she said. “Go on! The Astras came for them twenty minutes ago. Hitting me won’t change that!”
Ramon panted from his exertion. “Search the place,” he ordered his men generally. “Search it all!”
Four men of the group who’d entered with him scattered. Three went upstairs while the last entered the kitchen with his sub-machine gun outstretched like a cattle prod.
More L’Escorials stamped through the outer doorway, multiplying the number of searchers without adding organization to the process. One gunman began opening the console’s access panels, though only a child or a midget could have fit into the enclosed volume.
“Hey, there’s a ladder up to the roof!” a man called from the top of the stairwell.
The Frisians faced the barrels that formed the side of their concealment nearest the trapdoor. Each of them but the intelligence officer held a weapon ready.
Barbour started to pick up the sub-machine gun on the floor beside him; Coke laid a hand on his and shook his head. Barbour nodded understanding and let the weapon lie. The chance that the intelligence officer would do something noisily wrong was greater than any help his unskilled shooting would provide if the situation blew up.
Sten Moden carried three shoulder weapons, two slung and the last in his hand where it looked like a pistol by comparison to his size. There wasn’t room in the narrow hide for the rocket launcher he favored, and the big missiles would be useless in a point-blank shootout anyway.
Three L’Escorials came out onto the roof clumsily. Each of them climbed with one hand and waved his weapon through the trapdoor ahead of himself. The first man out shouted in alarm as the next prodded him in the back with a fléchette gun.
“They been up here,” a L’Escorial noted. “Hey, look at this!”
He’d found the panoramic camera Daun glued to the coping of the facade weeks before. It was a relatively large unit, about the size of a clenched fist, and Niko hadn’t tried to conceal it. The camera provided a view of the entire streetscape—distorted at the edges, but correctable into normal images by the console’s processing power.
“It’s a bomb!” cried the man with the fléchette gun. Why he thought so was beyond imagining, especially since the next thing he did was put the muzzle of his weapon against the camera and fire.
If it had been an explosive device, it would have detonated and killed all three L’Escorials. Instead, the gun’s enormous muzzle blast blew the camera across the street in tiny fragments. The osmium fléchette left a split and a crater in the facade of L’Escorial headquarters.
“What’s that?” a gunman in the street screamed. Another man emptied an automatic shotgun upward, scarring the reinforced concrete of Hathaway House. Dust and sparks flew past the coping.
“You bloody fool!” a L’Escorial snarled—correctly—at the man with the fléchette gun.
“Hey!” called a man through the trapdoor. “You dickheads up there? Come on back, we’re moving!”
Two of the L’Escorials moved quickly to the trapdoor. The third demanded, “What do you mean, we’re moving?”
“I mean we’re going to take out the Astras once and for all!” cried the man below. “Pepe just gave the order!”