I scooped up the reins and gave one quick snap against the horse’s neck while popping his sides with my heels, like I’d seen in a dozen movies. It worked. The horse bolted forward, nearly hurling me over its bouncing rump. I clung hard to the reins, yelling at the top of my lungs, not trying to steer or guide it, just employing the Kropp method of dealing with disaster: hang on for dear life and pray you don’t get killed.
I was almost to the trees when I heard the motorcycles. I risked a glance over my shoulder: two of them, coming up fast on big Harleys, wearing the standard-issue black jack boots and tinted visors. Only these weren’t cops; they were agents of darkness, and that meant one thing: they wouldn’t stop until they were dead—or I was.
I wasn’t sure how much horsepower a Harley had, but I figured it was more than what I had. Nueve had disappeared into the trees, leaving me totally defenseless, and what kind of rescue mission was that? A trail snaked through the winter-bare trees, and I hit it at full gallop as bullets hit the trunks on either side, peppering me with five-inch splinters and chunks of wooden shrapnel.
The trail widened and suddenly Nueve was riding beside me. I guessed he had pulled off to wait.
“We’ll never outrun them!” I shouted over the thundering of the hooves and the roar of the killers’ bikes.
“I’m drawing one off!” he cried. “Here!”
He tossed the shiny weapon he had pointed at the farmer into my lap. “Wait till I’m clear,” he called. “The rounds are heat seeking!”
And then he was gone, whipping the horse off the trail and into the trees, riding with his cheek practically laid on the horse’s neck to avoid being knocked off by low-hanging branches.
A bullet whizzed by my ear. I twisted around and pulled the trigger without bothering to aim. The gun kicked in my hand and I saw a tiny contrail stream from the muzzle toward the rider no more than twenty feet back.
There was a soft whumph! on impact. The bullet tore through the bike’s gas tank. The rider was close enough for me to see my reflection in his visor as the Harley exploded into a fireball, hurling his body forward, a fiery human projectile that came straight at me.
I goaded the horse’s flanks and snapped the reins against its neck, and he answered with a burst of speed. The burning rider missed hitting my horse’s rump by a foot.
Nueve and the other rider were nowhere in sight, but I didn’t pull up and I didn’t slow down. The trees were thinning out and I could see open pastureland ahead. Now what? Just keep riding or stay in the trees?
With ten yards between me and the na**d sky, I yanked the reins hard to the right, and my horse lunged off the trail. He must not have liked dodging trees at full gallop any more than I did, because all at once we were back on the trail—or it may have been a different trail; I was very disoriented by that point.
Same trail or different trail wasn’t the thing that mattered though. The thing that mattered was the dude on the Harley coming straight at me at fifty miles per hour.
I raised my weapon. Even without the heat-seeking rounds, I don’t think I could have missed, we were that close.
My finger tightened on the trigger as he spun the bike around, waving an arm over his head frantically before yanking back on the throttle and spraying me with dirt and slimy dead leaves from his back wheels. I noticed then he wasn’t wearing a helmet and the back of his head looked awfully familiar, but it was already too late: I’d pulled the trigger.
Spitting smoke, the round took off toward the back of Nueve’s head.
The Spaniard had guts, I’ll give him that. He waited until the mini bomb was almost on him, then dove off the bike into the trees. He didn’t fool the missile though. It veered away from the bike and toward him, hitting the tree trunk he dived behind and exploding on impact. The tree jerked, swayed, then tumbled down across the trail, the sound of its branches cracking and splitting very loud in the cold air.
I dismounted by the fallen tree and walked unsteadily to where Nueve lay curled in a ball. When I bent over to check his pulse, his hand shot up and grabbed me by the throat.
“I told you to be careful, Kropp. You could have killed me!”
I lost it. It really was too much, after all I’d been through that week, to have this jerk scold me like I was some little kid.
I hadn’t asked for any of it—in fact, I had wanted the exact opposite, and here he was acting like I had dragged him into this crap.
I grabbed his wrist and tore his hand away, and then I hit him as hard as I could in the jaw. He fell back onto his butt with a startled expression.
“Maybe that’s my problem,” I snarled at him. “Maybe that’s why I can’t extract myself from you nutcases—I keep killing the wrong people! You knew who Jourdain Garmot was the whole time, didn’t you? You knew he was Mogart’s son, didn’t you?”
“Does that matter?” he asked, rubbing his jaw, but somehow smiling his annoying ironic smile.
“You’re damn right it matters! You knew who he was and where he was, and you could have stopped him!”
I pulled my fist back to pop him again. He scooted backward and rose to his full height.
“I am authorized to kill you if I have to,” he said.
“Really? Well, that’s where I’m one up on you. I don’t need anyone’s authorization!” I raised the handheld rocket launcher and took dead aim at his little Spanish smile.
“Do that and you will never reach the airport alive,” he said.
“How did you find me at the warehouse?” I asked.
“We followed Vosch, of course.”
“Jourdain said they weren’t followed.”
Nueve shrugged.
“What is the Thirteenth Skull?”
He stared at me, stone-faced.
“Jourdain needs it so Michael will return the gift. The gift is the Sword, isn’t it? Jourdain’s after Excalibur and he needs the Thirteenth Skull to get it.”
He didn’t say anything. He just shrugged.
“Don’t shrug,” I said. “Don’t ever shrug again in front of me, understand?”
“It is only a shrug.”
“Don’t change the subject either.”
“I didn’t. You changed the subject.”
“Stop it. It doesn’t matter who changed the subject.”
“Then why tell me not to?”
“Yes or no, you knew the whole time Jourdain was behind all this.”
“Why does it matter?”