Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(95)

One of the two remaining bodyguards shoved Bayad out of the van’s path, covering his employer with his body as the van slammed into his partner’s rising gun hand, wedging it and the man’s face deep inside the front grill. The passenger door opened away from Heather as she found her view blocked by terrified patrons. As she rounded the rear of the van, she heard a double tap and saw the bleeding bodyguard roll off the wide-eyed Bayad. Seeing the assassin’s trigger finger tighten, she fired again, striking the man’s gun hand as the weapon discharged into the paving stones beside Bayad’s head.

And then she was on him, her kick buckling the assassin’s right knee as she pistol-whipped him across the side of his head. As the big man hit the pavement, the squall of the van’s tires sent Heather diving to her right, shoulder-rolling into a shooter’s crouch in time to see the white van skid into a racing turn, its back doors slamming open as it accelerated away across the piazza. Taking a forty-five-degree angle away from her, it prevented her from getting a clear shot at the driver. Heather put four rounds into the right tires and another four into the white side panel, but if she hit the driver, she couldn’t tell. Skidding around the corner, the van disappeared down Via Casato di Sotto.

Heather ejected the magazine, slapped in a fresh one, and leaned down to check the unconscious assassin. His pulse and the blood matting the hair on the right side of his head told her he wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon. Kicking his pistol away, she did a rapid pat-down, pulled the man’s ankle knife from its sheath, and turned her back on him.

Bayad had scrambled back against one of the tables, pushing the chairs aside until he was half under it, his breath coming in short, hyperventilating gasps. As Heather knelt beside him, the wail of sirens echoed through the streets. Holstering her weapon, she knelt beside the Saudi.

“Mr. al’Fahd. Are you injured?”

“What?”

“Look at me. Are you injured?”

As his eyes focused on her face, a wave of relief washed his features. “No. I don’t think so. Just bruises, Allah be praised.”

Four police cars raced into the piazza, spilling heavily armed blue-and-gray-clad polizia onto the asphalt thirty meters to either side of her. Seeing Heather kneeling beside the seated Bayad, in the midst of so many dead bodies, they advanced with submachine guns leveled.

A loudspeaker blared in Italian. “On your stomach, arms and legs spread. Now!”

Heather flopped facedown, spread-eagled.

Bayad hesitated. “But I...”

The message blared again in heavily accented English.

“Down on your stomach! Arms and legs spread! Do it now!”

Bayad complied.

Immediately Heather felt a knee in her back as a steel handcuff crunched tight around her right hand, then her left, as they were drawn together behind her back. In seconds she was disarmed and thrust in the back of one police car, while Bayad disappeared into another.

Leaning back in her seat, Heather looked out the window as the car sped through the narrow streets.

Memorizing the scenery as she passed it by, she nodded. Siena really was a very lovely city.





Mark wriggled into a crawl space barely wide enough to squeeze his body through, deep into the MINGSTER’s belly. Officially it was called the Matter to Energy Conversion Facility, but nobody besides Dr. Stephenson called it that. It, along with its other end in the ATLAS cavern, was the biggest jumble of electrical wiring and cables on earth, and that didn’t even take into account the cooling required for the superconducting cables. Because of the need for demon speed in construction and the need to minimize the amount of cable through which all that power had to be pushed, everything was placed as close together as possible. It was the thing that made for these tight crawls.

Unfortunately the project’s lead engineer, Gerhardt Werner, had stuck him on the wrong end of the construction. Mark didn’t want to be buried in the MINGSTER. He needed to be working with the crew in the ATLAS cavern. There was a way to get transferred to the other team, but it took time, and that was something he didn’t have much of.

Mark needed to get his team ahead of schedule and make it obvious that he was the reason. The ATLAS crew was already behind; he just had to widen that gap. So Mark worked double shifts. He would have liked to work triple, but working around the clock without sleep would have attracted the wrong kind of attention. Between the double shifts and the speed and quality of his work, he had become the engine propelling the project forward.

In normal times, the union would have tried to put a thumb on him to slow down and quit making others look bad, but these weren’t normal times. So they left the muscular Swede with the Viking beard and long blond mane to himself and his work. That was fine with Mark. He wasn’t here to make friends and drink beer.

As he finished wiring the current section, his favorite music mix thundered in his mind. Mark worked at the one thing he could directly control, confident in the knowledge that by the end of today’s second shift, his crew would be farther ahead of the ATLAS team. Picturing the project leaders, sitting in their meetings, staring at their Gantt charts, he smiled. Soon now, the picture of what he was accomplishing would leap off the page at them. Then his boss would have no choice but to move him to where he should have been all along.





Dr. Peter Trotsky stared as his postdoctoral assistant turned her back on him and headed toward the stairs that would take her up, out of the ATLAS cavern. Dr. Nika Ivanovich was driving him crazy. Perhaps she already had.