Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (22 page)

Trailing them had been like stalking big game—or tracking a patrol of elite
enemy commandos scouting unknown territory. In some ways, Mac-Namara found the
challenge exhilarating. It was a high-stakes game of wits and skill that he had
played many times before, in many different parts of the world. At the same
time, he was conscious now of an underlying sense of fatigue, a slight dulling
of his perceptions and reflexes. Perhaps the strains of the past several months
had taken a higher toll on his nerves and endurance than he had first reckoned.

The shaven-headed man he was observing suddenly straightened up, going fully
alert. The man whispered a few words into a tiny radio mike fixed to his
collar, listened carefully to the reply, and then leaned forward to peer
cautiously around the edge of the doorway.

MacNamara rapidly shifted his view to the other watchers, noticing the same
unmistakable signs of increased readiness. He shifted his own stance and
breathed out gently, tamping down the first surge of adrenaline as his body
prepared itself for action. The vague feeling of weariness fell away. Ah, he
thought, here we go. The prolonged period of waiting motionless in the cold and
dark was almost over.

Still peering through the night-vision scope, he panned across the front of
the Plaza Mercado. A man and a woman had just come out of the

building. They were standing together on the
sidewalk out front, carrying on an animated conversation. He recognized the
slender, attractive woman straightaway. He had seen her bustling around the
Lazarus camp. Her name was Heather Donovan. She was the local activist who
handled press inquiries for the Movement.

But who was the dark-haired man she was talking to? The clothing, boots, and
cowboy hat all suggested he was a local, but somehow MacNamara doubted that was
really the case. Something about the way the tall, broad-shouldered man moved
and held himself was oddly familiar.

The dark-haired man swung around, pointing toward the concrete parking
garage off down the street to the west. For that brief instant, his face was
plainly visible. Then he turned away again.

Malachi MacNamara slowly lowered his night-vision scope. His pale blue eyes
were both amused and surprised. “Bloody hell,” he muttered under his
breath. “The good colonel certainly has a talent for popping up wherever
and whenever one least expects him.”

Brick paths curved through Santa Fe's
central Plaza, circling the various monuments and winding under a spreading
canopy of trees—towering American elms and cottonwoods, firs, maples, honey
locusts, and others. Wrought-iron park benches painted white were set out at
intervals along the walkways. A thin scattering of fallen
leaves lay on patches of grass and hard-packed earth.

Surrounded by a low iron railing, an obelisk commemorating the Civil War
battles in New Mexico
stood in the very center of the square. Few people remembered that the bloody
war between the North and South had spread this far to the west. In some spots,
thin rays of light filtered through the trees, cast by the street lamps
surrounding the Plaza, but otherwise this centuries-old expanse was a place of
darkness and dignified silence.

Jon Smith glanced at the slender, pretty woman walking beside him.
Shivering, Heather Donovan hugged her black cloth coat tightly around

herself. Whenever they crossed the broken streaks
of pale light between the shadows he saw her breath steaming in the chilly
night air. With the sun long gone, the temperature was dropping fast. It was
not uncommon for Santa Fe's
daytime highs and nighttime lows to vary by as much as thirty or forty degrees.

After they finished their tea at the Longevity Cafe, he had volunteered to
escort her to her car, which was parked on a side street not far from the
Palace of the Governors. Though plainly surprised by this old-fashioned act of
chivalry, she had also accepted his offer with evident relief. Santa Fe was ordinarily a very safe city, she
had explained, but she was still feeling a little jittery after seeing the
horrors outside the Teller Institute.

They were just a few yards away from the Civil War obelisk when Smith
stopped abruptly. Something was wrong, he thought. His senses were sending him
a warning signal. And now that they had stopped walking, he heard others—two or
three men, he judged —moving quietly up the path at their backs. He could just
make out the faint crunch of heavy boots on the brick pavement. In the same
moment, he noticed two more vague shapes slipping through the shadows under the
trees ahead, drawing steadily nearer.

The Lazarus Movement spokeswoman noticed the figures closing on them in that
same instant. “Who are those men?” she asked, clearly startled.

For a split second Smith stood still, hesitating. Were these guys FBI agents
sent by Kit Pierson? He had been sure that he was under surveillance earlier
that afternoon. But when he had checked for tags before heading to the
Longevity Cafe he had come up empty-handed. Had he missed them earlier?

Just then one of the men moving in from the front strayed into a small pool
of light. He had a shaved head and wore an Army fatigue jacket. Smith's eyes
narrowed at the sight of the silenced pistol the man held out and ready. So
much for the FBI, he thought coldly.

They were being surrounded—boxed in on the open ground in the middle of the
Plaza. His instincts kicked into gear. They had to break out of this trap
before it was too late.

Reacting quickly, Smith grabbed Heather Donovan's arm and tugged her with
him to the right, around the curve of the obelisk. At the same time, he drew
his own pistol from the shoulder holster concealed by his corduroy jacket.
“This way!” he muttered. “Come on!”

“What are you doing?” she protested loudly, too shocked by his
sudden action to pull away. “Let go of me!”

“If you want to live, come with me!” Smith snapped, still drawing
her away from the open space around the Civil War monument and toward the
darkness under the surrounding trees.

One of the two men who had been coming up behind them stopped, aimed
quickly, and opened fire. Phut. The
silencer on his pistol reduced the sound of the shot to that of a muffled
cough. The bullet tore past Smith's head and smacked into the trunk of a tall
cottonwood tree not far away. Phut. Another
round shattered a low-hanging branch. Splinters and falling leaves rained down
on them.

He pushed the Movement spokeswoman to the ground. “Stay down!”

Smith dropped to one knee, swung his SIG-Sauer pistol toward the shooter,
and squeezed the trigger. The weapon barked once, a loud crack that echoed back
from the buildings surrounding the Plaza.

His shot, fired hurriedly and on the move, missed.
But the sound of gunfire drove three of the four attackers he could see to the
ground. They went prone and began shooting back at him, firing rapidly.

Heather Donovan screamed piercingly, pressing herself flat against the hard,
unyielding earth.

Pistol rounds whined close by, either thudding into the trees on either side
or spanging off a nearby park bench in showers of sparks, torn bits of metal,
and pulverized white paint. Smith ignored the near misses, concentrating
instead on the one gunman who was still moving.

It was the shaven-headed man he had first spotted. Hunched over in a

crouch, the gunman was sidling off to the right,
trying to make it back into the shelter of the trees and then come up on his
flank.

Jon squeezed off three shots in rapid succession.

The bald man stumbled. His silenced pistol tumbled to the ground. Slowly he
fell forward onto his hands and knees. Blood poured out of his mouth. Black in
the dim light, it spilled across the brick pavement in a widening pool.

More bullets ripped past Smith as the wounded man's comrades kept shooting.
One round punched through the broad felt brim of his brand-new Stetson and tore
it right off his head. The hat sailed off into the shadows. They were getting
way too close, he thought grimly—starting to zero in on him.

He threw himself prone and fired three more shots with his SIG-Sauer, trying
to keep their heads down or at least shake their aim. Then he rolled quickly
over to where Heather Donovan lay with her face pressed to the earth. She had
stopped screaming, but he could see her shoulders shaking as terrified sobs
wracked her whole body.

The three unhurt gunmen had spotted his movement. They were shooting lower
now, taking the time to aim. Nine-millimeter pistol rounds tore at the earth
all around Jon and the Movement spokeswoman. Others, slightly wider off the
mark, sent shattered bits of brick flying.

Smith grimaced. They needed to get out of here, and fast. He put his hand
gently on the back of the frightened woman's head. She quivered but stayed
down. “We've got to keep moving,” he said urgently. “Come on!
Crawl, damn it! Head for that big cottonwood tree over there.
It's onlv a few yards away.”

She turned her head toward him. Her eyes were wide in the darkness. He
wasn't sure she had even heard him.

“Let's go!” he told her again, louder this time. “If you stay
low, you can make it.”

She shook her head desperately, smudging her cheek against the ground. She
was frozen, he realized, paralyzed with fear.

Smith grimaced. If he left her and scrambled into cover behind that tree,
she was dead. If he stayed with her out here in the open, they were probably
both dead. The smart move was to leave her. But if he ran for it, he doubted
the gunmen would leave her alone. They did not seem like the kind who believed
in letting potential witnesses live. There were limits to what he could stomach
—and abandoning this woman to save his own skin would blow right through them.

Instead, he raised his pistol and began firing back at the barely visible
gunmen. The SIG-Sauer's slide locked open. Thirteen rounds expended. He hit the
release catch, dumped the empty magazine out, and slapped in his second and
last clip.

Smith saw that two of the gunmen were in motion, edging rapidly to the left
and right while staying low. They were trying to outflank him. Once they were
in position, they could nail him with a murderous crossfire. The trees here
were too widely spaced to provide cover from all angles. Meanwhile, the third
man was still shooting steadily to keep Jon's head down —covering the pincers
movement by his teammates.

Smith swore silently. He had waited too long. Now he was pinned down.

Well then, he would just have to fight it out here and see how many of the
enemy he could take with him. Another bullet slammed into the ground within
inches of his head. Jon spat out bits of torn grass and dirt and took aim,
trying to draw a bead on the attacker swinging around his right flank.

More shots suddenly rang out, echoing across the Plaza. The gunman moving to
his right screamed in agony. He went down, moaning loudly and clutching at his
mangled shoulder. His comrades stared at him in shock for a moment and then
whirled around —frantically looking toward the shadowy mass of trees along the
square's southern edge.

Smith's eyes opened wide in astonishment. He had not fired those shots. And
the bad guys were using silenced weapons. So who else had just joined this
fight?

The new gunfire continued, hammering the ground and trees around the two
unwounded gunmen. This unexpected counterattack must have been too much for
them. They fell back rapidly, retreating north toward the street fronting the
Palace of the Governors. One of them dragged the wounded man to his feet and
helped him hobble away. The other made a sudden dash toward the man Jon had
hit, but more bullets lashed the pavement at his feet—driving him back into the
concealing shadows.

Smith saw movement at the edge of the trees to his right. A lean gray-haired
man came out into the open, advancing steadily while firing the pistol he held
in a two-handed shooting grip. He slipped into the cover provided by the Civil
War obelisk and reloaded his weapon, a 9mm Browning Hi-Power

Silence again fell across the Plaza.

The newcomer looked across toward Smith. He shrugged apologetically.
“Very sorry about the delay, Jon,” he called softly. “It took
longer to work my way around behind those fellows than I anticipated.”

It was Peter Howell. Smith stared in utter amazement at his old friend. The
former British Special Air Service officer and MI6 agent wore a heavy sheepskin
coat over a faded red-and-green flannel shirt and a pair of denims. His thick
gray hair, normally cropped short, was now a long, curling mane that framed a
pair of pale blue eyes and a deeply lined face weathered by years of exposure
to the wind, sun, and other elements.

Both men heard the sound of a car suddenly racing along the north edge of
the square. Brakes squealed as it stopped briefly and then roared off into the
night—heading east along Palace
Avenue toward the ring road of the Paseo de
Peralta.

“Damnation!” Peter growled. “I should have realized those
lads would have backup and a quick way out if things went pear-shaped for them.
As they have.” He hefted his Browning. “Keep
watch here, Jon, while I conduct a quick recce.”

Before Smith could say anything, the older man loped forward and vanished
into the shadows.

The Lazarus Movement spokeswoman raised her head warily. Tears ran down her
face, trickling through the dirt streaking her pale skin. “Is it
over?” she whispered.

Smith nodded. “I certainly hope so,” he told her, still scanning
the darkness around them —making sure no one else was out there.

Slowly, shakily, the slender woman sat up. She stared at Jon and at the
pistol in his hand. “You aren't really a reporter, are you?”

“No,” he said softly. “I'm afraid not.”