He brought it up in time to fend off a slashing attack from the second man, the two knives clashing once, then twice, as though they were swords and this was a fencing bout. Tillman was aware that every movement was forcing more blood out of the deep wound in his side, but there was no time to think about that.
More worrying was the fact that he was facing a knife-fighter far more experienced and comfortable with this weapon than he was. He was giving ground with each feint and guard, backing towards the wall. He was going to lose, and he was going to die.
So he did the only thing he could think of. He bought a half-second with a wild horizontal slash, used it to back away another step — leaving his knife way out of line, his torso unprotected.
The assassin took the invitation, moving in with terrifying speed, but Tillman was already angling his body away from the blow, and because he had to make the call he decided it would be a high thrust to the heart. Luck was with him: his opponent, over-committed, leaned in past him. By this time, Tillman had dropped his knife. He grabbed the man in a two-handed embrace and pivoted on his left foot, adding his own momentum to the lunge.
They went through the tall window together, but the Elohim assassin was the lead partner in this short, ugly waltz.
Tillman kept the other man beneath him as they fell the twenty feet to the ground. They landed on bright blue tiles, in a shower of glass shards, and gravity delivered the coup de grâce.
Where they landed was a decorative apron next to the outdoor pool, in the middle of a dense crowd of sunbathing tourists — who screamed and leaped to their feet, scrambling to avoid the hard rain of broken glass and then to get away from the blood-boltered madman who reared up, staggering, in front of them, standing over a pulped corpse like a lion over his kill.
As they backed and ran from him, Tillman’s walkie-talkie vibrated on his belt. He thumbed the ACCEPT key and heard Diema’s voice.
‘Tillman! Rush! The plan’s shot. They were waiting for us. They’ll kill us first, then go after—’ Her voice was drowned out by the white noise of gunfire. An automatic rifle, from up close.
Tillman snatched up the walkie-talkie, already moving. He had plenty of empty space to move into, suddenly. The bathers were fleeing away from him on all sides as quickly as they could.
‘Where are you?’ he yelled.
He heard a single word. It sounded like ‘hill’, or maybe ‘kill’.
He hoped the boy would survive. He hoped they all would.
But he did what he had to do.
Kennedy heard the gunshots first — the precise, hammer-on-nail iterations of Diema’s handgun, followed by the nerve-shredding road-drill roar of an automatic rifle. A moment later, and much closer, a window shattered.
From where she was, the side of an awning hid the falling bodies of Tillman and the Messenger, and the first screams drowned out the sound when they hit. She only knew that violence was erupting all around her — and from this, that their plan had both succeeded and failed. The Elohim had taken the bait, but somehow they’d missed the target. Or else they were choosing to take her out in a way that involved a lot of collateral damage.
She took three steps in the direction of the sounds, but that was as far as she got. The people closest to her backed into her, turned and started to run, infected with the panic of those at the epicentre of the disturbance. Except that it wasn’t really running. In the space of seconds, as hundreds of people surged towards the few available exits, the crowd congealed into a single, struggling mass. Kennedy couldn’t swim against that tide: she tried to stand her ground and let it sweep past her, but even that was more than she could manage. She was carried with it.
Men and women with the hotel’s red logo on their chests — lifeguards, presumably — were trying to divert the tide and stop people from being crushed against the walls. One of them was shouldered aside by a fleeing man and pushed into the pool. Probably the safest place to be right then, Kennedy thought, but she had to find out what was happening, and she had to do it quickly.
She let the crowd carry her. Once she was downstairs, in the changing area, it would be easier to peel off and go her own way.
‘Itt!’ the lifeguards were shouting. ‘Here! This way!’ Two of them, a man and a woman, were holding a door open against the crowd’s barging, stumbling turbulence. Kennedy went through it and down the stairs beyond. Each step was a fight to stay on her feet and avoid being trodden under by the sheer press of people.
At the bottom of the stairs, emptying into the wider space of the changing area, the crowd spread out a little and the crush was lessened. Here, too, though, urgent men and women ushered them onward — ‘Itt! Itt!’ — and pushed them if they stopped.
A man stepped into their path and yelled into Kennedy’s face. ‘Itt kell mennem, asszony — itt!’ She went the way he pointed, through another door off to one side and into a white-tiled corridor that was mercifully empty. She’d already taken several steps along it when she realised that the man who’d just spoken to her hadn’t had the house logo on his chest. He hadn’t been wearing a T-shirt at all, but a plain white shirt and a linen-weave suit.
She stopped and turned, just in time to see the man pull the door closed and draw a bolt across, locking himself in with her.
55
As soon as he saw the man walking towards him with the knife in his hand, Ben Rush turned and ran. The street market was right there beside him and it was pretty much the only way that wasn’t blocked by shouting, screaming people, so that was where he headed.
But the knife-man was running too, and after one frantic glance over his shoulder, Rush knew that he wasn’t going to win this race on the flat. Jesus, this guy was fast!
So his only chance was to make it into a steeplechase. He vaulted over counters, to the indignant bellows of the stallholders, barged through clothes racks and stacked boxes, swarmed under tent flaps, and generally did his best to get out of his pursuer’s line of sight. But every time he thought he’d shaken him off, the bastard hauled into sight again, dogging Rush’s heels so closely that there was never any chance for him to go to ground.
Rush was young, and reasonably fit, but he knew he couldn’t keep this pace up for long. And it was getting harder to manoeuvre as stallholders and shoppers stopped what they were doing to watch the chase. They formed a semi-solid wall now, blocking him from most of the bolt-holes he might have used and giving the assassin — with their attentive, curious stares — a signpost that pointed towards Rush in real time.
If Diema had only given me a gun, he thought wildly. But how could he have started a firefight in the middle of a thousand innocent bystanders? And besides, he’d never fired a gun in his life. The only thing that was certain if he’d tried it here was that he wouldn’t have hit the one man he was actually aiming at.
He rounded a corner, legs and elbows pumping, and skidded to a halt. No more road. The market went all the way to the river, and that was where he was. There was a low parapet wall ahead of him. A long way below, the broad ribbon of Zela Utca, the river road, stood between him and the Danube. Not even an Olympic athlete could have jumped across that distance.
Rush thought furiously. He did have the paint grenade and he took it from his pocket now. Maybe he could let the guy get up close and then blind him with it? But he’d seen people messing with these things on YouTube — they sprayed paint in thin streaks, not in waves. They were a nuisance, designed for drunken prats who think damage to property is hilarious in itself.