Sandstorm (Page 31)

The gun went skittering down the hall.

Sweeping down, Painter snatched the abandoned Walther from the floor and leveled it at the stunned trio. “Now we’re doing things my way.”

Sandstorm

Desperate, Safia shoved the emergency latch to the roof door again. It refused to budge. She pounded a fist weakly against the jamb. Then she spotted a security keypad in the wall beside it. An old one. Not an electronic card scanner. It needed a code. Panic whined like a mosquito in her ear.

Each employee was assigned a default code. They could change it at their leisure. The default code was each employee’s birth date. She had never bothered to change hers.

A scuff of heel drew her attention around.

Her pursuer came around the lower flight, standing on the landing. The two eyed each other. The gunman now had a pistol in his grip. Not a tazer.

With her back to the door, Safia fingered the keypad’s buttons and punched in her birth date blindly. After years at the museum, she was accustomed to touch-typing entries into an accounting calculator.

Once done, she pushed the emergency latch.

It clicked but failed to budge. Still locked.

“Dead end,” the gunman said, his voice muffled. “Come down or die.”

Pinned against the door, Safia realized her mistake. The security grid had been upgraded after the millennium. A year was no longer defined by two digits, but four. Unclenching her fingers, she rapidly typed in the eight numbers: two for day, two for month, and four for her birth year.

The gunman took a step toward her, pistol stretching closer.

Safia rammed her back into the emergency latch. The door flung open. Cold air whipped over her as she tumbled out and darted to the side. A shot ricocheted off the steel door. Driven by desperation, she swung the door shut, slamming it into the masked face of the gunman as he lunged.

She didn’t wait, unsure if the door would relock, and fled around the corner of the rooftop exit hut. The night was too bright. Where was London’s fog when you needed it? She searched for a place to hide.

Small metal outcroppings offered some shelter: hooded vents, exhaust flumes, electrical conduits. But they were isolated and offered scant protection. The remainder of the roof of the British Museum looked like the parapet of a castle, surrounding a glass-roofed central courtyard.

A muffled shot blasted behind her. A door slammed open with a crash.

Her pursuer had broken through.

Safia sprinted for the closest cover. A low wall lipped the central courtyard, outlining the edges of the Grand Court’s glass-and-steel roof. She climbed over the parapet and ducked down.

Her feet rested on the metal rim of the two-acre geodesic roof. It spread out from her position in a vast plain of glass, broken into individual triangular panes. A few were missing, knocked loose by the blast last night and patched with plastic sheeting. The remaining panes shone like mirrors in the starlight, all pointing toward the middle, to where the bright copper dome of the central Reading Room rose from the middle of the courtyard, like an island in a sea of safety glass.

Safia remained crouched, realizing how exposed she was.

If the gunman searched over the wall, there was nowhere to run.

Footsteps sounded, crunching on the graveled roof. They circled around for a few moments, stopped for a long breath, then continued. Eventually they would head here.

Safia had no choice. She crawled out onto the roof, scuttling like a crab across the panes of glass, praying they would hold her weight. The forty-foot fall to the hard marble below would prove just as deadly as a slug in the head.

If she could only make it to the domed island of the Reading Room, get behind it…

One of the panes splintered under her knee like brittle ice. It must have been stressed by the blast. She rolled to the side as it gave way beneath her, cracking and falling through its steel frame. A moment later, a loud ringing crash echoed up as the pane struck marble.

Safia crouched only halfway across the vast roof, a fly stuck on a mirrored web. And the spider was surely coming, drawn by the crash.

She needed to hide, a hole to crawl into.

Safia glanced to the right. There was only one hole.

She rolled back to the empty steel frame, and without much more thought than hide, she swung her legs down through the frame, then wiggled on her belly. As her fingers grabbed the steel edge, she let herself drop, hanging now by her hands over the forty-foot fall.

She swung in place, facing back toward her initial hiding place by the wall. Through the glass, the starlit night was clear and bright. She watched a masked head peer over the low wall, searching the geodesic roof.

Safia held her breath. Viewed from outside, the roof was mirrored by the silvery starlight. She should be invisible. But already her arm muscles cramped, and the sharp steel cut into her fingers. And she would still need some strength to pull herself back up.

She searched down to the dark courtyard. A mistake. She was so high. The only light came from a handful of red-glowing security lamps near the wall. Still, she spotted the shattered pane of glass under her feet. The same would happen to her bones if she fell. Her fingers gripped tighter, her heart pounded harder.

She tore her gaze from the drop, glancing back up in time to see the gunman climbing over the wall. What was he doing? Once over the wall, he started across the roof, keeping his weight mostly on the steel-framed structure. He was coming straight at her. How did he know?

Then it dawned on her. She had noted the plastic-sheeted gaps in the roof. They were like missing teeth in a bright smile. There was only one such gap that was still uncapped. The gunman must have guessed that his target had fallen through and come to make certain. He moved swiftly, so unlike her own panicked crawl. He swept down on her hiding spot, pistol in hand.

What could she do? There was nowhere else to run. She considered simply letting go. At least, she’d have control over her death. Tears rose in her eyes. Her fingers ached. All she had to do was let go. But her fingers refused to unlatch. Panic held her clenched. She hung there as the man crossed the final pane.

Finally spotting her, he started back a step, then stared down at her.

Laughter flowed, low and dark.

In that moment, Safia realized her mistake.

A gun pointed at Safia’s forehead. “Tell me the combination—”

The crack of a pistol erupted. Glass shattered.

Safia screamed, losing the grip on one hand, hanging by the other. Her shoulder and fingers wrenched. Only then did she spot the shooter on the floor below. A familiar figure. The American.

He stood with his feet planted wide on the marble, aiming up at her.