The Doomsday Key (Sigma Force 6)

Still, there remained many variables. How long would they need to be in there? How would they get out? What about weapons?

She knew they were moving too fast, too recklessly.

Seichan suddenly ducked behind the thick bole of a white oak. She couldn’t say why she felt the need to hide.

Just a prickling at the base of her neck.

She knew better than to ignore it. The human body was a big antenna, picking up signals the conscious mind often missed, but the deeper part of the brain, where instinct was rooted, continually processed them and often sounded the alarm.

Especially if trained from childhood, like Seichan, whose survival had depended on listening to those darker folds of awareness.

As she held her breath, she heard the crackle of dried leaves behind her. Ahead, a rustle of branches. She dropped into a crouch.

She was being hunted.

Seichan knew that spotters had followed them to France. Before leaving England, she had reported in with her contact. Magnussen knew their destination. The tail had picked them up again in Paris. It hadn’t taken Seichan long to spot them.

But she would have sworn no one had followed her from Bar-sur-Aube after she dropped off Kowalski. She had left her car parked at a roadside rest stop and headed into the woods alone.

Who was out there?

She waited. Heard the rustle behind her again. She fixed the location in her head. Pivoting out, she took in the view in one unblinking stare. A man with a rifle, camouflaged, crept through the woods, clearly military-trained. Even before she was done pivoting, she snapped out her arm. The steel dagger flew from her fingertips. It shredded through the leaves and impaled the hunter through the left eye.

He fell back with a cry.

She rushed forward and closed the distance in four steps. She slammed her palm into the hilt, driving it deep into his brain.

Without slowing, she snatched his rifle and continued upslope.

A boulder lay near the ridge. From her earlier survey, she had the entire terrain mapped in her head. Reaching the shelter, she slid and flipped over on her belly. She came to rest in a sniper’s crouch, her eye already at the scope.

A ping ricocheted off the boulder near her head.

She heard no gunshot, but the round’s passage had brushed through a pine branch. Needles puffed. She fixed the trajectory through the scope, spotted a solid shadow moving through a dappled one, and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle spat with no more noise than the snap of a finger.

A body crashed. No scream. A clean head shot.

Seichan moved again.

There would be a third.

She ran along the ridgeline, triangulating the most likely spot for a third assassin. She kept to the high ground. The map of the terrain overlay her vision, like the heads-up display inside a helmet.

If she had been setting up an ambush in this region of the woods, there was a tempting roost ahead. A lightning-struck dead oak with a hollowed-out trunk. If she had hiked another thirty yards, she would have moved into its field of fire. The other two assassins, sensing their prey about to stumble into the snare, must have let their guard down and closed in prematurely, foolishly exposing themselves in their haste.

Surely Magnussen would have warned them of their target’s lethality.

But these were men, mercenaries with egos to match.

She was only a woman.

She came at the tree from behind, from upslope. She slipped to it without disturbing leaf or twig.

Planting her rifle an inch from the back of the dead oak, she fired through it. A cry of surprise and pain erupted as a body fell out of the tree’s hollow on the far side. She came at him with her dagger.

He was burly, smelled of grease, his face stubbled with a black beard. He cursed at her in Arabic with a heavy Moroccan accent. She had the dagger at his neck, intending to interrogate him, to find out why she had been ambushed and who had sent them.

She could make him talk. She knew ways.

Instead, she dragged her knife across his throat, below the larynx, a silent kill, and kicked him in his face. There was no need to interrogate him, she realized. She already knew the answers to her questions.

Something had changed. A kill order had been sent by Magnussen. Catching her alone in the woods, they’d tried to take her out first.

She pictured Gray and the others. She ran headlong toward the parking lot. They had no idea.

She reached to a pocket and flipped open her phone. She jabbed in the number she had memorized.

As it was picked up, she let all her anger ring out. “Your operation! Just so you know, it failed!”

1:20 P.M.

Rachel stood with Wallace in a hotel garden at the heart of Bar-sur-Aube. She checked her watch. Kowalski and Seichan should have been here by now.

She stared out toward the street. The plan was to meet for lunch, to go over plans. They had rooms booked here. The hotel—le Moulin du Landion—had been stylishly converted out of a sixteenth-century water mill. The original canal still ran through the gardens, turning an old wooden waterwheel.

She should have been charmed by the place, but all she felt was ill. Her head pounded, her throat burned, and her fever was getting worse. She finally slumped and sat on one of the patio chairs.

Gray returned from the lobby. He shook his head as he approached. “No one picked up the keys.” He noted her sitting, and his face tightened with worry. “How are you feeling?”

She shook her head.

He kept staring at her. She knew what he was thinking. Seichan had sketched a general plan for entering the prison. They would attempt it tomorrow morning. Gray clearly wondered if she’d make it that long.

Suddenly Seichan appeared, passing from the street through the garden gate. She searched all around. The woman, always hyperalert, seemed especially edgy now. Her eyes were rounder, her gaze more flighty.

Gray must have noted the same. “What’s wrong?”

She frowned at him. “Nothing. Everything’s fine.” But when she noted they were missing one person, she tensed again. “Where’s Kowalski?”

“I thought he was with you.”

“I left him in town to do some research while I scouted the woods.”

“You left Kowalski to do research?”

Seichan dismissed the skepticism. “It’s all grunt work. I left instructions a monkey could follow.”

“Yet we’re still talking about Kowalski.”

“We should go look for him,” Seichan said.

“He’s probably found a bar open for lunch. He’ll find his way back here eventually. Let’s talk about what we’ve all learned today.” Gray motioned to Rachel’s table.