The Sydney Bridge Climb was advertised on the plane and in the airport. Groups of tourists were escorted to the top of the bridge to enjoy the stunning view and have their pictures taken above the beautiful city. Two of them were slumped unconscious on the catwalk, laid out by Van Pelt. He had broken past them and was racing toward the top.
A girl saw Kincaid and screamed.
“There’s another one!”
Kincaid ran straight at them, pointed to the side she was going to pass, and ordered in a shout louder than the wind, “ Disperse!”
The tourists shrank from the sight of a determined woman with blood streaming down her face. She blasted past them.
She saw Van Pelt fifty feet ahead, running like the wind.
The bastard was home free, running fast and easy, untroubled by his wound, and again taking advantage of being so much faster than she. A second climbing party suddenly materialized ahead of him, between him and the crest. The leader was shouting into a walkie-talkie. Without hesitating, Van Pelt jumped from the catwalk to the girders that traversed the bridge and ran, balancing himself hundreds of feet over the roadway and train tracks, racing across them to the opposite arch.
Kincaid followed. Her heart soared. She had better balance. She could run faster on the girders. In fact, the faster she ran the better her balance—as long as she didn’t miss a step and plunge a foot through a hole in the steel. He was picking his way more slowly, tiring, limping, stiffening up like a man afraid of falling. She was only twenty feet behind when the SR mercenary reached the far arch and scrambled onto its catwalk. His way was clear. There was nothing between him and the summit and when he crested it and started down he would go even faster. Kincaid reached the catwalk, scrambled over the rail, and ran after him.
A lone figure appeared at the top of the arch.
Kincaid blinked, gasping for breath, half-blinded by her own blood, thoroughly confused. The tourists’ voices had been weirdly hallucinatory. What she thought she saw now was even stranger. Hunched over a mobile phone, peering myopically through wire reading glasses at the yellow glow of a Google Map, the lone figure looked like a bridge climber who had somehow gotten lost, untethered from his group at the top of the bridge 450 feet above Sydney Harbour. He looked up from his phone at the sound of their pounding feet and removed his reading glasses as if to take a better look at the enormous Van Pelt charging the narrow catwalk straight at him. He slipped his glasses into his pocket, put his phone in another, and stood up straight.
“Janson!” The sight of his innocent specs and the span of his shoulders sent an invigorating blast of adrenaline through her arms and legs. No way she would let Paul Janson beat her to the catch. Kincaid summoned her last reserves for a final burst of speed to tackle Van Pelt’s ankles.
Van Pelt thrust his right shoulder forward like a battering ram. A loud yell stormed from his lips, a feral howl of destruction. He hurled his left hand in a pile driver blow with all his running weight behind it.
Paul Janson slid inside the arc of the mercenary’s fist, and Kincaid knew she had lost the race. But she had to admit that the traditional prizefighter punch that her partner chose from his close-combat arsenal was a thing of awesome beauty. With a synchronized explosion of footwork, hip pivot, and body momentum, the hand that had pocketed his mobile phone closed into a fist and flew with precisely directed energy. Quick as flame, smooth as oil, it traveled the shortest possible distance to strike the running man’s jaw with the audible crunch of a meat cleaver and lifted him over the guardrail and into thin air.
The SR mercenary fell with a scream of astonishment.
Plunging toward the water far below, wheeling through the beams of light that decorated the arch and illuminated the highways on the deck, buffeted by the wind and drifting like a kite, Hadrian Van Pelt took a full seven seconds to fall 450 feet.
Doubled over, Kincaid gasped, “I almost had him.”
* * *
PAUL JANSON LAUGHED, giddy with relief to have her back safe. “What in hell did you think you would do with him when you caught him? He outweighed you by a hundred pounds.”
“His gun was empty— Sweet Jesus, look at that son of a bitch!”
As Van Pelt’s falling body dropped through the last band of light, they saw him twist around and turn a somersault in the air. With his arms held high and his feet pointed down, he knifed cleanly into the black water.
Janson grabbed his phone, switched off the Google Map, and touched Redial.
“… Me again. A man just jumped off the Harbour Bridge, dead center. He cut the water clean with his feet, so he could have survived.… Tall, blond hair, broad shoulders, right arm in a bandage. Confirmation would be appreciated.”
He told Kincaid, “My friend with the Australian Crime Commission says sharks came back when Sydney cleaned up the pollution. Your boy just jumped into a harbor full of bulls and great whites.”
“Poor sharks.”
“There’s the harbor patrol.”
“Good. This time I want to see a body.”
Blue flashing lights were setting out from both North and South Sydney shores and racing toward the center of the mile-wide strait between Milsons Point and the Central Business District. Janson handed Kincaid a mini water bottle from his windbreaker. As she gulped gratefully, he spit on a handkerchief and wiped the blood from her face.
“Ditch that gun in case we run into the cops.”
Kincaid threw Mikie’s Tomcat into the harbor. “Where to?”
“Canberra. My friend on the commission traced Dr. Flannigan to a package tour. I have people watching his hotel.”
They walked down the arch, side by side, bumping shoulders like a couple heading home from a late-night date.
“Paul?”
Janson leaned close to hear her over the wind.“What is it?”
“Don’t you think that SR is going to way too much trouble for revenge? They had a whole program in place to nail me. Plus, what they did to our phones? No professional wastes that kind of energy on payback.”
“They could be doing it for the money. What if someone hired SR to hunt us?”
“Who?”
“Whoever hired SR to hunt the doctor.”
“Why?”
Janson had been weighing that question since Securité Referral had hacked their phones. “Clearly, we’ve threatened somebody.”
“We’ve been hired to capture Iboga. That threatens Iboga and SR.”
“Yes, but Iboga hasn’t the assets to hound us.”
“SR sure as hell has.”
“Yes, but what if SR is essentially what they appear to be—hired guns doing a job?”
“Like us.”
“In essence,” Janson agreed. “We’re paid by Ferdinand Poe to capture Iboga and we’re paid by ASC to rescue the doctor. SR is paid by somebody to protect Iboga and kill the doctor.”
“Are you thinking we threatened the same people the doctor did?”
“I’m thinking what I’ve been thinking all along. We can kill two birds with one stone when we grab the doctor. Even if he doesn’t know who is hunting him, Dr. Flannigan must have a good guess why. We can work it back to who.”
TWENTY-SIX
I rented a bicycle,” the blonde told Terry Flannigan when he called her cell phone. She had a breathless little-girl voice and she sounded very excited. She had actually gasped like a teenager when she heard his voice. “Canberra’s the most wonderful city for riding a bike. I’ve been riding every day. But I had a feeling you would call today, so I put a picnic in my basket.”
“I’m not exactly in bike shape,” Flannigan admitted freely. He was a firm believer in warning young women not to expect a lot when he took his shirt off.
“There aren’t any hills. Just flat, wonderful paths. They go all around the lakes and miles and miles out into the countryside. There are private spots where you can lie in the grass all by yourself.”
“I used to ride bikes,” he said, hoping her picnic included a blanket. “Where do I rent?”