"Certainly." Sinclair smiled. "But you won't be the recipient. Miss Blackstock will." She called out a single harsh command in Czech. Three guards suddenly appeared, two carrying automatic rifles, one carrying shackles and chains.
"Your chariot has arrived, Colonel," said Kate Sinclair. "Time to load you onto the bus."
The windowless old prison bus took the road from the old Pr?ibram airport at Dlouha Lhota north through the old forests of the foothill country in central Bohemia. The bus was like something out of an old chain-gang movie: driver and guard segregated from the prisoners by a chain-link grating with apertures just big enough to poke the barrel of a shotgun through.
The prisoner entrance was through a heavily secured door in the rear of the bus with its own little caged enclosure for a second guard, who was also armed with a short-barreled riot gun and controlled the master lock that opened the threaded shackles and chains that secured the prisoners.
The prisoners themselves occupied long benches that were bolted to the floor on either side of the bus. The benches in turn were divided into narrow cubicles by sheets of gray steel etched with the handcuffed graffiti of a thousand previous occupants. It was, in effect, a jail on wheels, walls made of armor plate, the windshield made of bulletproof double-thickness glass and the heavy tires puncture proof.
Tonight there were seven people from the black-site bunker on the bus: Peggy, Holliday and five rumpled-looking young men with black cotton bags tied securely over their heads, babbling blindly together in Farsi, their voices strained with panic.
Holliday was shackled directly across from Peggy on the bus in the forward section.
"Are you sure about this Pankrac place?" Peggy asked.
"There's no reason for Sinclair to have lied."
"But what's the point?" Peggy asked. "Why doesn't she just get rid of us?"
Holliday shrugged. "She will, as soon as she gets the information she wants."
Peggy shuffled her feet, pulling slightly on the shiny steel shackles threaded through eyebolts along the length of the bus. Her movements pulled on the chain around one of the hooded men's ankles and his head jerked in her direction.
"Ann ru sar et, kiram tu kunet cos eh lash jende!"
"Torke char, arabe kassif!" Peggy yelled down the bus. The man who'd cursed at her turned his hooded head around and the other four laughed at her quick and unexpected comeback to the man's insult.
They could hear the ringing of a railway-crossing bell and the bus slowed to a stop. After several long minutes the guard and the driver began talking. Holliday leaned forward on the hard metal seat and peeked around the edge of the metal divider. He could vaguely make out the flashing red lights of the railroad crossing and the lowered red-and-white-striped barriers.
"What's up?" Peggy asked from the other side of the bus.
"Some glitch at a railway crossing," answered Holliday. "The lights are flashing and the barriers are down but there's no train."
"What are they arguing about?" Peggy asked.
"Whose responsibility getting off the bus and checking it out is, at least as far as I can tell," replied Holliday.
"Who's winning?" Peggy laughed,
"The driver, I think," said Holliday.
Sighing melodramatically the guard got up from his seat and the driver pushed a button on his control panel. The hydraulic double doors hissed open and the guard went down the three steps to the outside.
The high, explosive round came through the open door, vaporized the guard and kept going until it detonated against the far side of the driver's compartment, sending a long spray of blood, debris and yellowish bony shrapnel the length of the bus.
"Oh, crap," whispered Peggy, ducking back into her narrow little cubicle.
Holliday knew what she meant. Someone was trying to break the hooded men-probably Afghani Talibans or Al-Qaeda-out of custody, and to their rescuers he and Peggy would be useless baggage, and infidel baggage at that. Holliday pulled hard at the chains of his shackles but nothing budged. A second explosion rocked the bus on its heavy wheels. Holliday risked a peek. Someone had blasted open the rear prisoners' doors. The rear guard, protected in his cage, poked the barrel of his riot gun out through the grate and fired blindly. There was a brief moment of silence and then Holliday heard the familiar rasp and ping of a hand grenade pin being pulled. There was a faint knocking sound and then a flat, crumpling explosion. The chains shackling him to the floor went slack.
There was a final, smaller explosion from the front of the bus and then absolute silence. In a single, surrealistic moment Holliday could actually hear the sound of crickets outside in the forest. He stayed well back in his little metal enclosure and silently motioned Peggy to do the same thing.
The strange silence went on for a long minute, and then there was a harsh whispering voice: "Yellah! Yellah!" Someone speaking Arabic.
The hooded prisoners began to chatter, some of them laughing, and Holliday felt a slackness in the chains threaded through the I-bolt at his feet. There was more chatter and then silence. Only a few seconds passed and then there was the stuttering hammer of an automatic weapon.
"What's happening?" Peggy whispered.
"I don't think our Farsi friends got the reception they were hoping for," said Holliday.
There was another period of silence and then the sound of booted footsteps coming in their direction. Three men appeared, all carrying folding stock Czech Skorpion submachine guns and all dressed identically in black, wearing Kevlar body armor and black balaclavas covering their faces. One of them appeared to be a woman.
One of the men stopped in front of Holliday's little enclosure. He slung his light machine gun over his shoulder, then took a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters off his belt, silently snipped the shackles at Holliday's feet and threaded the chain through his handcuffs. He took the bolt cutters and slid them back onto his belt, then reached into the side pocket of his combat trousers and took out a small key. He unlocked the handcuffs and took a step back.
"You're free, Colonel Holliday."
Holliday looked at him strangely. There was something in the rasping voice that seemed familiar.
"Don't recognize me, Colonel?"
The man reached up and pulled off the knitted balaclava that covered his head. He smiled down at his old adversary and quoted from the New Testament: "And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And Lazarus walked."
The man standing over him laughed, the scar on his throat as thick as a curled red worm. "I was in bandages for months."
It was Antonin Pesek, the Czech assassin he'd shot and killed in Venice more than a year before.
27
The Penzion Akat was a tobacco-colored, stucco-fronted hotel that overlooked the railway tracks and the streetcar terminal at the Smichov metro station in western Prague. The building was without any architectural distinction whatsoever-one step above a flophouse where a noisy night's sleep could be had for a few crowns, and where the cracked china rattled on the tables in the cafeteria-like dining room every time a streetcar rumbled by. It was totally anonymous, a place for traveling salesmen and tourists without much money.
"He's dead?" Holliday asked, coming out of the hotel room's coffin-sized bathroom.
"Double tap: one to the heart; one to the head. Very professional," said Pat Philpot, munching on a chicken leg from the KFC down the road. Peggy was sprawled in an overstuffed armchair on the opposite side of the room and Antonin Pesek, their savior on the road to Pankrac Prison, stood beside the grimy window, watching the street below.
"But why kill him? He didn't know anything. He was a local photographer who didn't know what he had."
"Jefferson knew you, Doc. That's what got him killed. Originally you were meant to be a fall guy. Now you and Ms. Blackstock are flies in the Sinclairs' ointment."