"You can't stop me," the thief answered in a low voice.
"I'll have to try and that could lead to pain for both of us." The man advanced into the room, his white hair looking like blue ice in the ambient glow of outside light. "Put the Staff down and you can walk right out of here."
The thief drew out the telescoping stepladder, now merely a sturdy aluminum rod with the perfect heft to serve as a truncheon and struck a fighting stance. The silver-haired man continued to approach undaunted, but underlying the almost lackadaisical stride was a subtle shift of his center mass — he was gathering strength in his abdomen, coiling himself like a serpent about to strike.
The thief's eyes narrowed defensively; the man's posture was that of one trained in the Oriental fighting arts. This accurate assessment brought with it a faint glimmer of recognition. Their paths had crossed before, but the memory was strangely clouded.
The thief slashed diagonally with the rod directly across the path of the newcomer, who deftly retreated a step, but the first strike was merely a setup for the follow through. The thief darted forward, redirecting the club's energy into a sweeping curve that circled into a vicious two-handed overhead strike. The man seemed frozen in place, awaiting the attack like a sacrifice on the altar, but in the instant that the blow fell, he vanished. The bludgeon sliced the air and slammed into the floor with such force that it was jolted from the hands of its stunned wielder. A storm of rapid punches buffeted the dark-clad intruder, culminating in a sweeping claw-hand attack. The silver-haired man's fingers curled around the thief's mask, ripping it loose to expose the latter's true face.
There was an explosion of golden hair and in the midst of it, the face of an angel; the thief was a woman. The man gripped her shoulders and spun her around so that they were face to face. "You!" he rasped, genuinely surprised for the first time. "I might have known."
The woman shared no such sense of amazement. She used her foe's distraction to good advantage; she rammed a knee into the man's groin and twisted free of his hold. The man doubled over in pain, but recovered his composure with unnatural swiftness to dash after the fleeing villain.
She fled the laboratory and got as far as the exit from the office before he caught her. He snared her bulky backpack with one outstretched hand, deflecting her off her escape route by only a few degrees, enough to send her crashing into the wall a few steps to the left of the door. She rebounded and tried to correct her course, but her opponent was now steadfastly planted in front of the closed door.
"There's no way out," he declared. "My offer stands."
The blonde woman retreated a step, testing to see if the man would attack again — he did not — then glanced about to see if his statement was true. Indeed, the lone door appeared to be the only means of egress. The woman, however, had the means to alter that situation.
The man sucked in a breath as his eyes lit on the object she held up. It had been more than twenty years since he'd seen one — a wooden stick with what looked like a tin food can attached to one end. They had called them "Potato Mashers" back in the War, not only because of the physical resemblance to its namesake, but also because anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the blast radius would get squashed like an Idaho spud. The woman gripped the igniter cord in one hand and brandished the German made Model 24 Stielhandgranate—hand grenade — threateningly.
"Use that in here and you'll kill us both," the man warned. "There's no profit in that."
The woman's only answer was a smile that, in a different setting, would have been weapon enough against any man and then she pulled the cord. Although there was no outward change, the friction igniter inside the steel can sparked the fuse alight, commencing an inexorable countdown. Mirth trilled from the woman's shapely lips as if she believed the grenade to be nothing more than a New Year's Eve party favor.
"You have about three seconds to get out of my way," she said, still laughing.
A nerve twitched in the silver-haired man's cheek, but he did not relent. "No."
The woman's expression did not change; she had not anticipated any other answer. Abruptly, she spun on her heel and hurled the explosive device toward the window, diving for cover behind the desk in the same motion. Her foe moved almost as quickly, turning and throwing open the door, but he was too slow by a fraction of a second. The grenade detonated almost exactly at the same moment it made contact with the plate glass window.
Had the miniature bomb been equipped with a fragmentation sleeve, there would have been no surviving the blast at such close proximity; shrapnel would have sliced both of them to ribbons. Even without that augmentation, the high-explosive charge turned the air itself into a weapon, pushing outward in a sphere of force that crushed everything it touched. The window shattered and erupted out into the night, where thousands of glass splinters no larger than snowflakes were snatched away by the hurricane. The rush of wind mitigated some of the concussive force of the grenade, but the difference was marginal; the shockwave slammed into the wooden desk, blasting it back into the woman and throwing both in the opposite direction. The man in the doorway, though further away from the center of the explosion, had nothing to serve as a buffer; the force of the detonation slapped him across the threshold like an automobile windshield impacting a flying insect. He flew across the hallway and crashed into the far wall.
The explosive climax was followed by a brief lull as both combatants struggled to regain their feet. Perhaps because she was following a carefully devised script, the woman recovered more quickly, emerging from the broken remnants of the desk to stride purposefully toward the gaping wound in the side of the building. She slowed her pace as she neared the precipice. A few shards of glass remained fixed in place, giving the square window the look of a monstrous mouthful of teeth. Completing the illusion, the constant rush of air across the opening was like a dragon drawing breath; the wind sucked at the woman's straw-colored hair, whipping it into a frenzy around her face as she approached. She pulled her locks together in a loose ponytail held together only by a thumb and forefinger and gazed back at her foe. The man locked his gaze with hers, perhaps sensing in that moment what she was about to do and he broke into a mad dash to stop her.
She mouthed something—"au revoir" perhaps — but her whisper was caught away in the tempest as she leaped out into the night. And because he knew the import of what had been taken… because he knew what was at stake… Father Nathan Hobbs did not hesitate to follow.
CHAPTER 4 — AGENT PROVOCATEUR
Time lost all proportion, as though Father Chronos was mired in molasses. Dodge felt an ominous shudder as the cab scraped over the precipice and began to tilt toward the frothy river surface hundreds of feet below.
As his center of gravity changed involuntarily, the interior of the passenger compartment seemed like a funhouse tunnel, where ordinary sights no longer held the correct orientation. He tried the door handle, but couldn’t seem to figure out the correct direction to twist it to release the latch. He abandoned the effort and directed his energy instead toward the window on the opposite side. He rolled onto his back and thrust both feet at the glass, shattering it with his first attempt.
In the precious seconds lost while he fumbled for a means of egress, the weight of the engine block pulled the car almost vertical. The chassis squealed against the concrete edge and then the taxi lurched as the wheels caught for a moment on the lip. Dodge used that moment to orient himself and sprang through the narrow window frame.