The Loch Ness Legacy (4 page)

Tyler shook off the feeling and kept edging forward. He’d launch himself when he was within two body lengths. Any closer and the man might hear him.

He got within twice that distance when another explosion went off up above them. Grant must have intercepted another drone. Or missed. Tyler couldn’t tell. But the shockwave created enough of a tremor that the man in black leaned back to catch himself and turned slightly in the process so that Tyler was now in his peripheral vision.

The man froze. Then his head inched around until he was looking Tyler in the eye. He smiled.

Without the glasses, beard, and mustache, he was now recognizable as Carl Zim. Tyler had only seen a grainy photo of him, never in person. Zim’s wavy blond hair and angular nose lent the Aryan look he worshipped.

“Dr. Tyler Locke,” he said. “You’re late.”

“Actually, it looks like I’m right on time.”

Zim nodded at the bullet wound. “Did Gabrielle Cohen give you that? Jews are so unpredictable.”

“No, it was one of your friends. I see you managed to talk your way onto the maintenance crew even though you’re American.” Stalling was Tyler’s best tactical play at the moment.

“
Mon français est excellent
. One good thing about having a Parisian mother.”

Tyler rose and Zim did the same. The black he was wearing wasn’t a ninja outfit, but rather a tuxedo, stained and torn to make him look like one of the patrons escaping from the party. In the chaos below, he would be escorted to a safe position where he could slip away quietly before anyone realized who he was.

Zim was shorter than Tyler, but wiry and built for speed. Tyler could see cords of muscle flexing along his neck. Tyler’s gun was long gone, and Zim couldn’t have smuggled a weapon past the security screen. Fists and gravity were all they had to fight each other. Not good odds for Tyler.

“Grant will be here any second now,” Tyler said, “so you might as well—”

The words had the opposite effect from what he intended. Instead of hesitating or looking behind him, Zim threw himself at Tyler.

Without the ability to sidestep the attack, Tyler planted his feet and twisted his body so that his good arm would take the brunt of the impact. He planned to use Zim’s momentum against him and graze him enough to toss him off the catwalk.

Zim didn’t play along. He pulled up short and launched a roundhouse punch at Tyler’s injured bicep. Tyler ducked to protect his arm, but that put his ear in the path of Zim’s fist.

The jarring impact nearly ended the fight right then, but Tyler was able to grab Zim’s arm, throwing them both off-balance. They locked together, each of them grasping the other’s lapels to keep from going over the side.

Tyler used the only weapon he had left and head-butted Zim in the face, breaking the man’s nose. Blood gushed out, but Zim just grinned, the scarlet sheen coating his teeth. Tyler guessed it wasn’t his first broken nose.

Zim kneed Tyler in the gut and then loosened his right hand to sink his fingers into Tyler’s arm. Tyler let out a feral scream and nearly blacked out from the pain. He keeled over and fell to the grating of the catwalk. His head cracked into the metal and buzzed from the collision.

Zim spat a mouthful of blood. “Now you’re going to make yourself useful and cause an even bigger distraction when I get to ground level. See you down there.”

He placed a foot on Tyler’s chest and pushed. Tyler grabbed Zim’s ankle, but he had no leverage. He felt himself sliding over the side.

The buzz grew even louder. At first Tyler thought he was about to pass out, but he realized that the sound was not in his head. A shadow fell across his eye.

It was the Mayfly. Grant had gotten his text message and made the decision to pull it off protective duty.

Zim braced himself to beat back the quadcopter, which weighed only a few pounds. A hefty swat as it swooped toward him would be enough to send it careening into a girder.

But the Mayfly just hovered there. Zim looked at it in confusion, then shrugged and put his entire effort into one last shove.

Instead, his body went rigid as Tyler heard a new sound: the crackle of electricity. Two shiny metal leads protruded from Zim’s neck.

Zim’s face contorted in agony and disbelief. With all the strength he had left, Tyler pushed against Zim’s foot. Zim tilted back as if he were a mannequin and fell off the catwalk.

Tyler watched Zim’s descent. His head hit a girder as he tumbled, sending his body spinning to the ground. A thump was followed by shrieks from an unseen woman. The blood pooling under Zim’s head suggested that the impact was lethal.

Tyler lay flat for a few moments while he caught his breath. Then he remembered about Zim’s mission. Something he’d been hunched over. Tyler had to check it out and assess whether it presented any danger.

With supreme effort, he pushed himself up. He lurched to his feet and steadied himself before trying to walk forward along the narrow catwalk.

A bright light flashed directly in front of him. Before his brain could even process the sound of the explosion, he was thrown backward.

Tyler’s last thought before his mind went blank was that, just like Zim, he was falling.

Brielle stretched as she stepped out of the shower, the sudden burst of steam fogging the mirrors in the suite’s bathroom. She toweled off, not bothering to wipe the glass. She didn’t want to see the bruises that were just starting to fade. She took a sip from the flute resting on the counter. The hot soaks and fine champagne were doing wonders in helping her sore muscles recover.

She’d never stayed in such an expensive hotel room before. Not that she had anything against it; she simply never had been able to afford it. The sumptuous accommodations at L’Hotel in the chic Saint-Germain-des-Prés section of Paris were a thanks from the French government for her part in averting disaster at the Eiffel Tower, and she hadn’t protested at all when the gesture was made. She didn’t mind a bit of luxury while she planned her next move.

Nearly a week after the assault, the investigation was still ongoing. Only minutes after Tyler went searching for the missing maintenance man, snipers in a French Air Force helicopter took out the gunmen inside the gift shop pavilion, ending the attack. Five security officers had been killed, but Fournier survived, as did all of the guests at the party, though some of those who were caught in the blasts were still recuperating in hospital.

There were strange aspects of the event that continued to puzzle Brielle. Grant Westfield, an explosives expert in his own right, reported that none of the bombs would have been powerful enough to kill more than a few of the guests. Even if they’d all gone off inside the reception hall, at best the attackers would have killed several dozen partygoers, with no hope of targeting a specific guest. The person who had been controlling the quadcopters from the ground was still at large.

Another unsolved mystery was the segment of the operation on the catwalk under the Salle Gustave Eiffel, where Tyler had fought with Carl Zim. The bomb that had gone off there was just powerful enough to destroy a portion of the tower’s utilities, nothing more. The preliminary assessment was that the attack had been meant to disrupt the summit, but that it made little sense as all of the meetings had been concluded before that evening.

No group had yet claimed responsibility, but fingers had started to point. As they’d suspected, Zim had been the leader of the attack, but they weren’t going to get much vital info from him since his body lay in the Paris morgue. The rest of the gunmen were identified as members of a French right-wing extremist group who had sympathies with the neo-Nazi movement. It seemed like a clear case of fanatics attacking their new sworn enemies: representatives of the Muslim world that was encroaching on Europe and America.

And then they found out how the gunmen had lain in wait inside the pavilion.

A special exhibit showing rare photographs of the tower’s construction had been set up inside the second story of the pavilion, above the gift shop. Three hidden walls had been built into the design. The day before the attack, the five gunmen hid themselves and their weapons inside the display, going as far as using plastic bottles to collect their urine while they waited to emerge after the gift shop closed. Then at the prearranged signal, most likely the appearance of the maintenance men, they opened fire.

Of course, the investigators’ first priority was to discover who was responsible for the tower’s clever infiltration, and that’s where the situation got sticky. Following the money, they discovered that the display had been paid for and the photos supplied by a company based in Tel Aviv. The authorities were trying to sift through the documentation to find out who actually owned the company, information obscured by a series of shell corporations.

With the discovery of a potential Israeli connection, the recriminations in the Middle East were fast approaching a fever pitch. The Muslim nations claimed it was a conspiracy dreamed up by the Mossad as a means of punishing them for attacks against Israel. Tensions had escalated quickly, and armies on both sides were now poised on the brink of war, with planes, tanks, and soldiers massing along the Israeli borders. It would take only a spark to ignite a full-scale attack in either direction, and with rumors of nuclear weapons on both sides, the Western nations, Russia, and China could be drawn into a conflict that would result in the start of World War III.

That’s why Brielle drained her glass. No sense in letting it go to waste if nobody would be left to enjoy it next week.

She put on the silver Star of David necklace her grandfather had given her, dropped the towel on the floor, and tiptoed into the suite’s bedroom. She slipped under the covers and rested her head on Tyler’s chest.

He stroked her damp hair. “I ordered breakfast for us while you were showering.”

“Croissants?”

“And marmalade, although I never have understood the Brits’ fondness for orange jelly.”

“And I never understood how you Americans can eat cold pizza in the morning. It’s disgusting.”

“What else can you find to eat in a college dorm at six a.m.?”

“At the University of Edinburgh we had what is called a dining hall. Didn’t you have those at MIT?”

“Sure. But they frowned on going down to meals in your underwear.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

Brielle inadvertently ran her hand across the stitches in his arm. Tyler didn’t flinch, but she could feel him tense.

“Sorry. Does it still hurt?”

“I’m only glad it wasn’t my pitching arm. As it is, the doctors say I won’t be taking the Mariner’s mound for a few weeks.”

She supposed that was some American baseball metaphor. Just like a man to play down a gunshot wound and concussion requiring a hospital stay. The blast that Zim set off had thrown Tyler backwards, but through sheer luck he landed on the catwalk instead of going over the side. Three days of nursing in the suite made him feel well enough for more strenuous activities. He recovered quickly and thanked her well for the pampering.

“Grant made it home all right, I expect,” Brielle said as she ran her fingers along the channels between each of Tyler’s abdominal muscles. “He seemed reluctant to leave you until I told him I’d take care of you.”

“Yeah, he got the message after that. He’s back in Seattle now. I’m going there myself in a couple of days. When my sister heard I’d been shot, she insisted on meeting me there to make sure my recuperation goes smoothly.”

“Do you see her much?”

“No. Most of the time she’s traveling the world doing research into endangered species. She’s a zoologist. In fact, we don’t get to see each other that often because of our schedules, so it’ll be nice to spend time with her. Why don’t you come back and meet her?”

Brielle withdrew her hand abruptly, and Tyler stopped stroking her hair.

“We’ve talked about this,” she said. “I may not be a strict orthodox Jew, but this isn’t something that can be long-term. My parents wouldn’t understand. Family is very important to me.”

“It is to me, too.”

“So is my religion. Unless you plan to convert, let’s just enjoy our time here together.”

Tyler let out a tiny sigh, but he went back to caressing her hair. “Absolutely.”

Brielle didn’t mention that she would soon be near enough to Seattle to drive there. Wade Plymouth, who had called with the tip that led them to Zim, was the only other employee at Brielle’s boutique investigation firm. Her latest information revealed that his last known location was at a bar in a small town south of the Canadian border in Washington state. If she were going to track down her missing friend and colleague, that was the best place to start, and it wasn’t Tyler’s job to help her. She could tell that spending any more time with him would make it that much harder to tear herself away. A visit to his home would be a bad idea. Better to bask in one last day with him and leave it at that.

Tyler’s phone rang. “Grant,” he said with a smile when he saw the number. He took the call without moving. “I’m in bed with a beautiful woman, so this better be good.”

After a few moments, his smile disappeared and he sat up. “You’re sure?” He said “uh-huh” a few times, and then said, “Okay. Tell them I’ll be there tomorrow morning.” He hung up.

“What was that about?” Brielle asked.

“It looks like I’m going to California instead. Grant’s already booked me on Air France.”

“How soon?”

Tyler kissed her deeply, sending a shiver down her spine. After a long while, he pulled away and said, “We have some time left. Grant said the flight isn’t for another six hours.”

“What’s in California?”

“Pleasant Valley State Prison. The FBI is meeting me there so we can talk to an inmate. He said he’d only speak to the Feds if I was there as well.”

Brielle could see that the thought of the impending meeting troubled Tyler. “Why you?”

“Because I helped put him there. The prisoner is Victor Zim, Carl Zim’s older brother.”