One minute dragged by, two, then three-it seemed far longer than that. Time seemed to flow like a stream of molasses. He looked up and saw the beam of a red laser sweep across the windshield of the Duesenberg and move on. He was betting his assailants were beginning to wonder if he might have slipped out of the hangar and escaped the trap. There was no way of knowing when Admiral Sandecker, backed by a team of federal marshals, would arrive on the scene. But Pitt was prepared to wait all night if need be while he laid there waiting for a sound or shadow that betrayed movement.
A plan began to form in his mind. He normally made a habit of removing the batteries from all his collector cars because of the danger of creating a fire from an electrical short. But since he planned on driving the Duesenberg when he returned from Orion Lake, Pitt had arranged for the chief mechanic of NUMA's fleet of vehicles, who was entrusted to enter the hangar, to charge a battery and install it in the car. It now struck him that if the opportunity presented itself, he could use the headlights of the Duesenberg to illuminate the floor of the warehouse.
Prudently keeping his eyes locked on the laser beams that swept around the hangar like tiny guard-tower lights from an old prison movie, he silently rolled over the backrest and slipped into a horizontal position on the front seat. Taking a calculated gamble, he aimed the spotlight on the outer cowling beside the steering wheel upward until the lens faced in the general direction of the balcony on the outside of his apartment. Then he raised the shotgun over the upper frame of the windshield and
switched on the light.
The bright beam shot aloft and pinpointed a figure in a black ninja suit with a hood covering the head and face crouched at the balcony railing and clutching a tactical machine pistol. The assassin's hand instinctively flew up to shield his eyes from the unexpected blinding glare. Pitt barely had time to adjust his aim before firing off two shots and blinking out the light, throwing the hangar into darkness again. The twin blast from the shotgun sounded like the firing of a cannon inside the metal-walled hangar. A surge of satisfaction swept through him as he heard the thud of a body against the concrete floor. Reckoning the second assassin would be expecting him to hide by throwing himself under the car, he stretched out horizontal on the wide running board and waited for a hail of gunfire.
It never came.
The second killer failed to react because he was searching for Pitt inside an antique Pullman coach parked at one side of the hangar on a pair of rails. The car had once been part of the crack express train called the Manhattan Limited that ran between New York and Quebec, Canada, between 1912 and 1914. Pitt had acquired the old coach after finding it in a cave. The killer barely perceived the brief flash of light through a glass window of the Pullman before hearing the explosive roar of the shotgun. By the time he rushed to the rear platform, the hangar had been plunged back into blackness. He was too late to hear the impact on the floor of his accomplice's body or know what target to fire at. He crouched behind a massive Daimler convertible and panned his night-vision goggles around and beneath the maze of parked cars. As he peered through the binocular eyepiece connected to a single objective lens that was attached to his head with straps, giving him the look of a robotic Cyclops, the pitch-black interior of the hangar appeared bathed in a green light that distinguished surrounding objects. Twenty feet ahead of him he spotted the body of his accomplice crumpled on the cold, hard floor, a pool of blood spreading around the head. Any confusion as to why their prey had willingly and knowingly walked into the trap evaporated. He now realized Pitt had somehow armed himself with a weapon. They were warned that their target was a dangerous man, and yet they had still badly underestimated him.
It was essential for Pitt to make a move while he had an advantage, and move as quickly as possible before the remaining killer pinpointed his location. Pitt made no attempt at stealth. Speed was what counted. He scrambled around the front end of the cars toward the entrance door, keeping low and using the wheels and tires to shield his movement from the view of a night scope probing the floor beneath. He reached the door, threw it open and fell back behind a car as bullets sped through the opening into the night outside. Then Pitt crawled along the wall of the hangar until he could huddle against the wheel of a 1939 540-K Mercedes-Benz sedan.
The move was foolhardy and reckless, but he only paid a small price. Pitt could feel blood streaming from his left forearm where the flesh had been nicked by a bullet. Had the remaining assassin been given five long seconds to divine Pitt's intention, he would have never rushed headlong toward the door in the certain belief that his quarry had tried to escape from the hangar.
Pitt heard the soft drumming of supple rubber soles against concrete. Then a figure dressed from the top of the head to his feet in black became outlined in the doorway by the dim light outside on the electrical pole. All's fair in love and war, Pitt thought, as he pulled the trigger and cut down the killer with a shotgun blast through the back below the right shoulder.
The arms flew upward and outward, his tactical machine pistol clattering to the walkway in front of the hangar. The killer stood there a moment, tore off his night-vision goggles and slowly turned. He stared disbelievingly into Pitt's face as the hunted approached the hunter and saw the muzzle of vicious-looking shotgun aimed at his chest. The shocked realization of his deadly blunder, the awareness that his death was only seconds away, seemed more to anger than frighten him. The bitter, stunned expression in his now visible eyes gave Pitt a chill. It was not the look of a man afraid to die, it was the desperate look of a man who had failed his mission. He staggered toward Pitt in a hopeless gesture of tenacity, the lips that were faintly visible through the open slit in his black hood hideous in a blood-flecked snarl.
Pitt did not send another burst from the shotgun into the assassin's body. Nor did he use his gun as a club. He stepped forward and lashed out with one foot, kicking the man's legs out from under him and sending him crashing heavily to the ground.
Picking up the killer's weapon, Pitt did not immediately recognize it as Chinese-manufactured, but he was impressed with its advanced innovations: a plastic frame with integral electro-optics, a fifty-round magazine in line with the bore, and cased, telescoped cartridges with the ballistics of a rifle shell. It was a handgun for the twenty-first century.
He stepped back inside the hangar and switched on the lights again. Despite the harrowing ordeal, Pitt felt strangely unaffected. He walked the aisle separating the cars until he stood below the balcony of his apartment. Then he stared down at the second killer's body. The partner of the man he dropped in the doorway was as dead as a rat in a sprung trap. One of Pitt's shots had missed, but the other had taken off the top of the killer's head. Not a sight to remember at the dinner table.
Wearily, Pitt climbed a circular metal staircase and entered his apartment. There was no sense in calling 911. He expected federal marshals to come bounding up the road any minute. Methodically, he rinsed a glass with water, shook it partially dry and inverted it in a bowl of salt. Then he added crushed ice, a sliced lime, and two shots from a bottle of Don Julio silver tequila. Relaxing in a leather sofa, he savored the drink like a thirst-stricken bedouin who staggered onto an oasis.
Five minutes and a second tequila later, Admiral Sandecker arrived with a team of marshals. Pitt came down to the hangar floor and met them, drink in hand. "Good evening, Admiral, always good to see you."
Sandecker grunted something appropriate and then nodded at the body beneath the apartment. "You really must learn to pick up after yourself." The voice was caustic, but there was no mistaking the concern in his eyes.
Pitt smiled and shrugged. "The world needs murderers like it needs cancer."
Sandecker noticed the streak of blood on Pitt's arm. "You took a hit."
"Nothing a Band-Aid won't fix."
"Let's have the story," demanded Sandecker, all preliminaries over. "Where did they come from?"
"I haven't a clue. They were waiting for me."
"A miracle they didn't kill you."
"They didn't plan on me coming to the party prepared after I saw that my security system had been tampered with."
Sandecker looked at Pitt cautiously. "You might have waited until I arrived with the marshals."
Pitt motioned through the door toward the road and barren land outside the hangar. "If I made a run for it, they'd have cut me down before I got fifty yards. Better to go on the offensive. I felt my only chance was to do something quickly and catch them off balance."
Sandecker stared at Pitt shrewdly. He knew his special projects director would never attempt anything without a solid reason. His eyes took in the bullet-riddled doorway. "I hope you know a good handyman."
At that moment a man wearing casual clothes and a windbreaker over a ballistic armor vest with a Smith & Wesson model 442 .38 revolver in a shoulder holster approached. In one hand he held a hooded mask worn by the killer whom Pitt had dropped in the doorway. "Won't be easy to ID them. They were probably imported for the hit."
Sandecker made the introduction. "Dirk, this is Mr. Peter Harper, executive associate commissioner of field operations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service."
Harper shook Pitt's hand. "A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Pitt. It seems you had an unexpected homecoming."