The Third Magic (11 page)

It would be a good long drive to Wyoming in the stolen Cadillac—long enough to assemble and perfect the device he had picked up in the airport locker, and to practice with the new handgun that had also been waiting for him.

Titus didn't work quickly unless he had to. He always had backup plans, and backups for backups. For his current assignment, he had planned for so many contingencies that the possibility of actually accomplishing the mission on this try was fairly remote. Only a zealot concerned with getting publicity would sacrifice himself in something like a bombing. A professional of Titus's caliber would never move forward with a plan if even one element went awry, and his employers knew this.

After the mission—or, what was more likely, when the mission was aborted because a part of the plan was found to be faulty—Titus had made arrangements to be picked up in Alberta, Canada, within two days of the assignment. If this route of escape was not possible, he was to travel eastward to Atlantic City, New Jersey, within two weeks.

Whether the mission was successful or not, it would be up to him to stay alive for those two weeks.

They would prove to be two of the most difficult weeks of his life, and would begin with a chance encounter with a biker named Pinto.

HOGS IN BATTLE

Sturgis, South Dakota

"Y
ou a cop?" asked
the man who smelled of blood. He was leaning against a rail outside a bar, where a constant stream of people flowed around the two of them.

Launcelot helped Hal to his feet.

"Look like one," Pinto added. He took a toothpick out of his pocket and examined it before placing it in his mouth. His fingers were stained with blood.

None of my business,
Hal thought. Some criminal types could spot cops from a mile away. They were usually drug dealers, creatures accustomed to being tailed. It was hard to deceive them. But other sorts had the nose, too. Some killers. During his FBI days, Hal had encountered a few who'd made him as soon as he stepped into the room.

He had the same talent. Not with every crook, certainly— he'd go crazy if he got the vibe with every petty thief who crossed his path—but sometimes. When there was something off. With murderers, when the killer was the kind of sicko who needed to kill. Hal could sniff them out at a hundred yards.

Pinto was one of those.

"I don't like cops."

"Get lost," Hal said.

Pinto took a step toward him.

In the next moment, the door to the Full Throttle Saloon opened and the ten other knights walked out. They moved swiftly to surround Hal. Dry Lips sauntered implacably between the two men.

Pinto spat out the toothpick. Then, with a soundless motion of his wrist, a switchblade leaped into his hand, the blade pressed against Dry Lips's big neck.

There was the slightest of rustles as the others adjusted themselves for combat. Launcelot, Kay, Bedwyr, MacDaire, and Tristan drew their swords in unison, the shafts whistling softly as they exited their scabbards. Gawain and Fair Hands, both experts with the light spear, held their weapons in the air as if they had suddenly materialized there. Geraint Lightfoot drew a dagger, prepared to throw. Agravaine ran his tongue along the cold silver of the hook that had replaced his left hand. Lugh slowly dragged into view the ball-end of his favorite weapon, the unwieldy but thoroughly effective, at least at close range, mace.

"I think you'd better put down the blade," Hal said.

"How about I take his fat head off?" Pinto taunted, rubbing Dry Lips's bald head with his knuckles. The big man's eyes widened.

"Shouldn't have done that," Hal said a split second before Dry Lips lifted the biker into the air behind him by the crotch. Pinto flew into the street, landing headfirst in the wheel of an airbrushed Bourget 230 chopper, causing it to fall over.

The milling crowd stopped cold. The fallen motorcycle had made it personal for all of them. In an instant the knights had surrounded the perpetrator. Agravaine's hook was already inside Pinto's nostril and drawing blood.

"Leave it," Hal said. Reluctantly, the men withdrew their hardware. Lugh looked hurt. It was the sort of thing Hal was always doing. It made no sense not to kill the blackguard on the spot. It made them all look bad.

Then, slowly, the crowd parted and a three-hundred-pound Greaser with a Pancho Villa mustache and a tattoo on his arm bearing the legend "Pure Poison" over a skull and crossbones strode forward. "Which one of you knocked over my bike?" he demanded, the skull seeming to come to life as he flexed his muscles.

The knights stepped back to reveal Pinto on the ground, blood and mucus from his nose spraying over the flawless chrome of the Bourget.

"Be my guest," Hal said, offering the man a little salute. "Come on, let's get out of here."

Pinto raised his head. "I'll kill you, cop," he wheezed.

"T
his cannot be countenanced,"
Dry Lips complained as they neared the motorcycles. "I was deprived of my proper right to defend myself."

"Aye, he should have been allowed to kill the knave," MacDaire agreed. "'Tis only seemly." The others nodded.

"You can't kill anybody, okay?" Hal said.

"But surely if the fiend's got a knife—"

"I'm saying it would make things complicated, that's all." Hal mounted and put on his helmet. "Look, guys, I know it's hard to walk away from a jerk like that, but I'm thinking about Arthur. He can't have any attention drawn to him, not yet."

"And why not?" Kay rumbled. "The boy's lived eighteen years as a child. It's time he showed himself."

"True enough," Tristan said. "He was at this age when he pulled the sword from the stone."

Hal blinked. "He was?"

"Aye. Eighteen, and by just a day or two," Kay confirmed. "He was my squire."

Dry Lips waved his hands in the air. "Arthur's nothing to do with this. That one over there was a smelly mole, and mine by right to tread on till his blood ran red."

"No," Hal insisted. "I don't want anybody to get killed, even him, understand? It'll just cause problems. Now let's go for a ride or something. By the time we get back to the rally, snot-nose'll be long gone. Okay?" He fastened the helmet and revved the engine. "Okay?"

Truculently the others followed suit.

God, but I'm getting tired of this,
Hal thought for the fiftieth time that day. What happened to the days when he didn't have anyone to worry about except himself? He wasn't cut out to be a Boy Scout leader, especially with this gang of delinquents. "Move it out," he said, waving lackadaisically.

In his rearview he saw Pinto staggering away from the Bourget and its owner. The crowd was shouting encouragement: Clearly the man with the tattoo was a popular personage at the rally. Poor bastard, Hal thought. The guy who had called him a cop was a born loser if he ever saw one. He was half the size of the Bourget owner. And if he tried the stunt with the switchblade on that one, the crowd would knock him down and see that he never got up.

Still, he was tough. As Hal picked up speed, he saw the small man leap onto a motorcycle and peel away from the parking area with a screech of tires.

It took a moment or two for Hal to realize that Pinto was headed toward him. As the caravan of knights pulled onto a two-lane highway, Hal saw that the man behind him was pulling something out of his saddlebag as he rode.

It was a gun.

Oh, great,
Hal thought, feeling a hundred years old. Just great. After the events of the morning, an impromptu gunfight was just what he needed.

He veered off the road onto the hardscrabble dirt. What everyone needed was time. Hal and the knights would just clear out for a little while, long enough to give the creep with the gun a chance to come off whatever bad high he was on.

In the distance, he saw smoke from the campfires in the makeshift tent villages that had grown up around Sturgis for Rally Week. Nobody would follow them out here, he thought.

He was wrong. The gunman was right behind them, gaining fast. As he drew closer to Hal, he aimed his weapon carefully. Then he fired.

It took Hal a moment to take in the entire scene. First, there were the knights, who were beginning to realize that all was not well. Too far from the campsite even to be seen, they were slowing down, confused, and generally making targets of themselves.

To make things worse, a cream-colored Cadillac was cresting a hill on a road cutting through the countryside where they were riding, its driver blissfully unaware that he was heading for what promised to be a first class disaster. And of course, behind him was the nut from the street in front of the bar, teeth bared and shooting his gun like Yosemite Sam. It was a big gun, too, from the sound of it, probably a .45 Magnum.

It was indeed a Magnum. It tore a hole the size of a dime into Hal's side as he tried to signal the others to turn back toward the town. He skidded out of control, falling off the motorcycle a second before it hit the ground. He was quickly losing feeling in his right arm. Blood was pouring from beneath his jacket onto the dry, yellow grass. And the nut was coming directly at him.

"Oh, man," Hal muttered. This was not a method he would have chosen to depart this life, shot by some fool at a motorcycle rally while the knights wandered off without a clue about how to live in the twenty-first century. "Hell of a thing," he slurred, beginning to feel stuporous.

Pinto was screaming like a banshee and aiming at him with both hands.

And then in the next instant, the gun was flying behind him, and the scream of victory had turned into a wail of confusion and pain. Pinto's right hand was moving up and down mechanically. Growing from the center of its palm was Lightfoot's dagger.

Stunned out of shock, Hal managed to roll aside as the gunman's bike moved over the spot where he had lain a moment before.

Launcelot rallied the men into a charge. Eleven motorcycles came together in a single point. Fairhands and Gawain lifted their spears. Lugh swung his mace over his head with a whoop of delight. Six swords gleamed under the midday sun.

At that moment the Cadillac came over another hill. The driver's face was a mask of bewilderment.

No one paid attention to the car. By the time the charge was in full force, Pinto had pulled the dagger out of his palm, and his hand was now spraying blood in all directions. His face was virtually painted red with it, making him look even more ferocious as he careened blindly forward.

In the front rank of the charge, Gawain let loose his spear. It caught Pinto a glancing blow on his shoulder— just enough of a wound to cause pain. The second spear, belonging to Fairhands, missed the man entirely, hitting instead the windshield of the Cadillac, which shattered into a million shining crumbs, and then coming to rest at an angle on the left side of the driver's neck.

The Cadillac swerved wildly, heading toward Pinto and Lugh, who was immediately behind him. More out of panic than anything else, Lugh let fly his mace, which sailed over the biker to land with a thud on the Cadillac's roof. At nearly the same moment, Pinto's motorcycle crashed into the side of the car just behind the stunned driver, who still had Fairhands' spear lodged in his flesh. As Pinto was ejected from the bike and shot neatly into the Cadillac's back seat, the driver began to cough up blood.

Through the final moments of this debacle, a siren and a cloud of dust from the direction of the town announced the presence of the authorities. For a brief moment, every head turned toward the approaching police vehicle.

Pinto was the first to move. Inside the car, he sat up, wiped the spray of blood from his eyes, and then yanked the spear-tip from the driver's neck. The man's blood was copious, but not spurting, and Pinto was familiar enough with wounds to know that he would probably live, at least for a day or so. He snaked his one functional, if bloody, hand over the gaping hole in the driver's throat to stanch the flow of blood.

"Get going," he growled. "Now."

A hundred thoughts ran through the driver's head at once, but all were superseded by the inescapable, if temporary, need to obey the psychopath who was holding his throat in a death grip.

Titus Wolfe floored the accelerator.

F
ortunately for Pinto, the
man in the cream-colored Cadillac was, despite his infirmity, an exceptionally good driver. Also, although he was unaware of this fact, the man had even more to lose if waylaid by the police than Pinto did.

In the back seat, next to Pinto's blood-stained buttocks, was the molded plastic case containing the one-of-a-kind components for the bomb that was created to destroy a nuclear missile base. Piercing the case with several four-inch spikes was a medieval iron mace.

It took Titus less than seven minutes to lose the local cops. They weren't the problem. The problem was Pinto, who had kicked the suitcase, mace and all, onto the floor in an effort to make himself more comfortable while he was performing crude first aid on a man he believed to be just another hijacked driver.

"For God's sake," Titus objected through a gush of his own blood. "Be care—"

"Shut up, shithead," Pinto responded, getting a firmer grip on Titus's throat. He felt uneasy, at a level of consciousness he did not quite understand, that the driver of the Cadillac did not appear to be as terrified as he should. He felt even more uneasy after the car skidded to a stop and a gunshot from the front seat thudded through the upholstery.

Pinto gave a little yelp as he looked down reflexively to see if he had been hit. In that moment of confusion, Titus whirled around, gun in hand—it was a small Beretta, an extra to be carried in one's sock, but capable of real damage at point-blank range—and stuck it beneath Pinto's chin.

"I think you had better be the one to shut up," Titus rasped, drooling blood.

Pinto screamed. It was a wild, charging battle cry such as Titus had never heard. All he could see for the moment was a close-up of Pinto's teeth—smelly brown tombstones going in all directions—while the Beretta was knocked out of his hands.

Later he would puzzle over that moment, wondering if he had lost his weapon to this psychotic ignoramus because of his injury, or because he had just never encountered anyone as crazy as Pinto before. Agents, even terrorist agents, operated under some sort of guidelines. They used reason. Even if they were willing to die during the course of a mission, they generally tried to stay alive. They talked, threatened, fought, deceived. They didn't just scream into your face.

A split second after Pinto knocked the gun out of Titus's hand, he dived into the front seat. Titus saw that coming, at least. He tried to break Pinto's nose, but by that time they were both so covered with blood that the heel of his hand, which was supposed to kill Pinto, instead merely slid off his face without even stopping the crazy biker from lunging at him. The gun discharged again, into the door, when Pinto's foot inadvertently got the trigger mechanism stuck on the seat adjustment lever. They both dived after it, crashing their heads together. Titus vomited blood into Pinto's lap. Pinto tried to kick him away. The movement of the seat caused the gun to go off several more times before finally coming loose from the lever and sliding beneath the passenger seat, where it was lodged too tightly for either of the men to retrieve.