Unprepared for such a heavy gunfight, both sides had emptied their mags within minutes of the exchange and now the battle would get more personal. Kiya was first into the fray, leaping without fear over the help desk and grabbing hold of Virgil. With one devastating downward elbow strike he was out cold, but what unsettled Mason the most was how fast she had assessed Virgil as the weakest link. A heartbeat later she spun around and struck Milo in the head with the heel of her boot, knocking him out cold beside Virgil.
As Milo and Virgil slumped to the floor, the Bride pulled away and took stock of the new situation as it was unfolding around her. The two Ravens were now engaged in a furious battle with Zara. Mason thought that two on one didn’t seem fair — to the Ravens — and now Zara was a whirlwind of kicks and punches as she worked some of her aggression out on the two men.
Mason moved forward and approached the Bride. She looked at him with a simmering hatred in her eyes; eyes that were almost mesmerizing in their beauty — a devastating beauty that would lure him to his death if he didn’t back off and snap out of it. He moved in for the kill, but then she ordered Tekin to attack Caleb.
Tekin spun around to increase the momentum of his kick. He was a big man to start with, and now his boot smashed into Caleb’s thigh and almost broke it. The Arizonan recoiled in pain, desperate not to show it to his enemy, and mustered every fiber of strength in his body to deliver a counter-strike. The Raven took the blow to his jaw with little sign of distress and then effortlessly swept Caleb’s striking hand away before aiming a high-speed tiger punch at his throat.
Caleb saw it coming and ducked to the side, narrowly avoiding a crushed windpipe and an agonizingly slow death as he suffocated on the floor, but as he went down he struck his head on the side of the desk and passed out.
Now, Mason stepped up and fired a volley of hefty jabs at the Occulta Manu Raven. He threw punch after punch at the man but he blocked them all with ease before lunging forward and piling the back of his hand into Mason’s face, knocking him on the back foot.
“Shit, Jed,” Ella said. “Are you all right?”
Mason spat a wad of blood on the tiled floor. “Feeling just fine, Ellz, thanks for asking.”
Ezra jumped in, landing a solid punch on the Raven’s temple, but the OM man easily repelled him with a backwards sweep of his arm, bowling him over onto the floor.
“Even Zara’s getting her arse kicked!” Ella cried out.
Mason glanced to his right to see Zara struggling with Kiya. The Bride had now pinned his old friend to the help desk by her throat and was smashing a series of punches just below her ribcage. The former cop and Buddhist bhikkhuni usually used hand-to-hand combat to work out and sharpen her skills, but not today. Right now she was working harder than ever just to stay alive.
“Ella!” Mason yelled. “Get Eva and the codex out of here, for fuck’s sake!”
Ella nodded and grabbed hold of Eva Starling. “We’re out of here.”
“No,” Kiya said, turning from a barely conscious Zara and facing her and Eva. “You are not.”
Before either of them responded, Kiya attacked them both, easily knocking Ella to the floor with a windpipe-bruising side-slap. As the Englishwoman gasped for air like a landed fish, the Hidden Hand Bride moved behind Eva like lightning and quickly placed her in a choke hold. Deftly taking the codex from the American’s pocket and slipping it in her own, she spoke in a language no one understood. Dariush and Tekin withdrew from the fight and joined her.
Mason watched her and the Ravens walk slowly backward away from the desk.
Kiya’s eyes narrowed. “You follow us and I will kill her.”
Mason heaved his breath back into his body and surveyed the carnage scattered all around him: Virgil, Milo, Zara and Caleb out cold, Ella half-dead and gasping for breath on the floor, and he could barely move. Ezra was only just crawling to his knees. To think all of this destruction was done by just three of these people didn’t fill him with confidence about having to fight any more of them.
Zara came to, slid off the desk and winced in pain as she rubbed her throat. “Did I try and swallow a motorbike or what?”
“You got choked by Kiya.”
“What happened?” Virgil said groggily.
“Otoshi empi uchi,” Zara said.
“What the hell?”
“Downward elbow strike delivered to the middle of your face is what happened,” Zara said, checking the young man’s eyes. “Follow my finger.”
Virgil did as he was told and Zara was satisfied he was okay. Her LAPD training had included first-aid, and she’d had plenty of opportunity to use it on the streets during her time on the force. “You’re going to be fine,” she said, getting to her feet. “Still ugly, but fine.”
“Thanks, Zara.”
But Zara had already turned to see the enemy. “Over there — they still have the codex and they’re getting away!”
Kiya and the surviving Ravens gave no indication of what they were thinking as they dragged Eva toward the fire exit. Tekin was holding her now, and Kiya was in the lead.
“Freeze!” Zara yelled, and raised her freshly reloaded weapon.
Neither the Bride nor the Ravens paid any attention, and the only response was when Tekin spun around and fired his M6 at her while his free arm was still gripping Eva around her neck.
“Dammit,” Zara said. “No clear shot with Eva in the way.”
Ahead of him, the woman, the one Ezra had called Kiya, was clutching the codex in her hand as she booted open the emergency exit’s panic bar and vanished in the night air. Seconds later Tekin and Dariush made the same escape, releasing Eva at the last second before fleeing into the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Kiya looked back at the American archaeologist for a second and turned and fled. She had what she needed — the Nectanebo Codex. All she had to do now was deliver it to the Lion, and with luck she would never see these people again. But who were they? Their fighting and persistence was impressive. Perhaps the Hidden Hand would reach into their lives and find out everything about them.
“Venite!” she whispered urgently, and without warning she turned on a dime and walked with purpose toward the street, a gun held tightly in her right hand. Walking in the rain-soaked London night, the cool rain felt good on her face as she filled her lungs with the damp air and decided what to do next.
They fled through the London crowd, bobbing and weaving as she went but never drawing attention to her presence. With each step she took, she brought the future that Occulta Manu wanted for the world a little bit closer to reality.
With the codex in her pocket, Kiya looked over her shoulder and watched the chaos unfolding back at the museum. Turning into Oxford Street, she saw a police car screech toward her and pull up on the sidewalk.
She saw her two Ravens in their long black trench coats reaching for their lethal M6s and lifting them into the aim. The policemen fired first, but the Ravens ended the gunfight in seconds. They all heard the screams of innocent pedestrians now running for their lives on the sidewalk and then she saw a cab driver who was distracted by the sight of the gunfight; the taxi mounted the sidewalk and crashed into a bus stop.
Havoc exploded all over the street now. People whipped out their phones and called the police, others ran for cover wherever they could find it. One party of Chinese tourists on the top deck of an open-top bus leaned over the side and started filming it as if it were a movie.
Leaving Ezra and the others back at the museum to deal with the authorities, Mason, Zara and Caleb sprinted after the thieves, stumbling out into the night to find the corpses of the dead anti-terror policemen and Dunford sprawled on the steps of the British Museum. Somewhere in the distance they heard the sound of car alarms and panicked people screaming.