An old academic tried to make a run for the door from the stacks but Cage saw him and fired. The rounds tore through him and cut him down in a heartbeat. He thudded to the floor, briefly clinging to a book-laden trolley before finally collapsing into the blood-splattered carpet.
“I asked what you want?” she said again, defiant.
“You’re coming with me,” he said.
She looked down at one of the students. He was half-dead and lying on his face a few meters from them. She was horrified to see that the bullets had blown his lungs partly out of his back and they were now inflating and deflating like balloons. She thought she was going to be sick. This was the kind of thing her grandfather had refused to talk about whenever anyone asked him about the time he got back from France after World War Two.
“I don’t understand.”
“You will do,” Cage said. “Don’t make me hurt you, Dr Starling.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Death was only seven seconds away. One false move was all it would take to fall the fifty-two floors down the outside of the Istanbul Sapphire and hit the concrete below. That wasn’t seven seconds he wanted to experience.
Jed Mason marked the glass pane with a black cross and carefully placed a suction cup over the center of it. He set the wheel-holder to seventy centimetres and gently traced a circle in the window to make sure he’d gotten everything right. He pulled a small bottle of cutting fluid from his bag and squeezed it thickly into the score-line, but as he wiped the sweat from his forehead, he dropped the bottle. He cursed as he watched it fall hundreds of meters to the ground, disappearing long before it hit the street far below.
Once he had seen someone leap from a skyscraper back in his home town of London. What had surprised him most was the noise. When the jumper hit the ground it sounded like someone firing a cannon. He could never forget that noise but thankfully the plastic bottle went down without a fight.
He pushed around ten kilos of pressure against the wheel-holder and gently moved the cutter around in a clockwise direction until he had made a full circle. Then he retrieved a glass tapper from his bag and set the intensity to minimum before placing it on the score-line and pressing it against the window. He released the bolt and opened a section of the glass. A clean cut would require him to do the same from the other side but that was impossible, and besides, he didn’t need a clean cut.
He heard his earpiece crackle. “How are we doing?”
“I’d be doing better if you’d stop interrupting me, Milo,” Mason said.
When he’d gone full-circle he pushed gently on the window with the suction cups and it popped out in a perfect circle. He placed it inside the room before pulling himself through and landing quietly on the carpet inside. He checked the way was clear and then walked across the plush office to the door on the far wall.
“I’m in,” he said.
“Received, Jedediah,” said Milo.
“Just make sure the chopper’s ready, Milo, or I'm a dead man walking. And don’t call me that.”
“We’re all good to go, Jed,” Milo said. “Kat called in a second ago.”
“Good, because we all know what happened to the last man who tried this.”
The radio silence that followed told him everyone knew. Another crew had attempted this mission just a few days earlier and one of them had ended up in a high rise trash compactor on the penthouse’s mechanical floor.
“You’re the best, Jed,” Milo said. “Just remember that.”
Maybe.
Mason opened the door and looked into the corridor. He moved silently along the corridor and passed various expensive works of art hanging on the walls before reaching the door he needed. It was locked, but they always were, and better than that, this was just a common pin-tumbler.
From his bag he got his tensioner spanner and a rake and placed the spanner in the bottom of the lock plug. He pulled back on the spanner until he got the pressure right and then slid the rake in the top of the keyhole, sliding it back and forth until he got the small gap between the driver pin and the key pin to line up with the shear line. Five seconds later the pins aligned and he was able to pull the spanner around and open the lock. The door was opened.
He stepped inside the room and it almost took his breath away. He was looking at the definition of opulence crafted in Persian rugs, floating staircases and a wall-window giving a view of the entire Istanbul skyscape. An ocean of thick, plush pile carpet in pale cream stretched in every direction and grand mahogany furniture was carefully placed all over the apartment.
He shook his head. Luxury penthouse apartments at the top of exclusive skyscrapers were a world away from where Jed Mason grew up. Those mean streets were a distant memory now, blurred by the years and darkened by more recent pain. But their legacy lived on, and under the surface was a tough, stubborn man who had learned to look after himself the hard way.
The intel they had from one of the apartment cleaners was that the safe was behind the large reproduction of the Mona Lisa hanging behind the desk. It was expensive intel and now was the time to see if it was money well spent. Mason stepped down into the sunken part of the room and walked across the thick, cream carpet until he reached the wall. He removed the fake Mona Lisa from the hook and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the safe. It was a substantial gun safe, but he knew at once he could crack it.
Milo’s voice in his earpiece. “You got some company, Jed.”
“Who?”
“Two men in the living area directly below the study. They’re heading toward the stairs right now. I'm tracking them with the Sunagors.”
“How long?”
“Up the stairs, across the mezzanine and then they’re with you. Maybe ninety seconds unless they stop to give each other a massage or something.”
Mason sighed. “And how likely is that, Milo?”
“I’d go with ninety seconds,” Milo said. “If they go to the other side of the apartment I’m going to lose them, but if they head over to you then we’re good.”
“All right, I’m on it.”
He needed at least thirty seconds to get out of the room and head to the exit if he was going to make the escape plan work, so that meant less than sixty seconds to open the safe and get the asset.
There were three basic ways to open a safe. The first was with the key, or code, the second was to blow it with explosives, and third was Mason’s way.
He focused on the safe’s dial so closely that the rest of the world vanished from his mind. Concentrating hard on the sensation of the dial as it turned in his fingers, he was able to detect the slightest drop in resistance. Just through touch, he got the first number in less than twenty seconds. This was the result of thousands of hours of spin-testing every type of safe on the market and learning how all the various tumblers fell inside the lock mechanisms.
“How we going, Jed?”
“Just lining up the lock gates under the fence, Milo.”
Mason turned the final wheel until the fence dropped down into the lock and retracted the bolt.
“Ten seconds, Jed.”
“I’m in.”
The safe was open with ten seconds to spare and Mason hurriedly opened the door to reveal a long steel tube which was resting on top of a pile of large denomination Turkish and American bank notes. He checked quickly to make sure the asset was inside and then he slid the steel tube inside his bag.
Job done.
He turned to leave, but he was out of time.
Someone was opening the door.
CHAPTER FIVE
Moments earlier, and looking to her right, Ella Makepeace saw the broad grin on Caleb Jackson’s face and was glad he was in the van with them today. Urban climbing up the side of the Istanbul Sapphire might be Jed Mason’s idea of a good time but he could keep it. Ella’s idea of a good time usually involved a sun lounger, a large tumbler full of gin and tonic and enough ice to sink an aircraft carrier.