Read Online Rembrandt's Ghost by Paul Christopher - Free Book Online Page B

quick glance. He looked appropriately nervous but still in control. Together they went down the steps and turned right. The two men behind them made no polite allowance for the pedestrian traffic—they simply moved straight ahead using Finn and Billy like the prow of a ship. The people on the sidewalk moved obediently aside, heads bent, blinded by their umbrellas, concentrating on their own feet. Kidnapped in the middle of a crowd. If Billy and she got into the car, it was all over. This wasn’t a simple mugging—this was something much worse. If the kidnappers had been waiting for Billy and Finn, it meant that they’d been followed, from Tulkinghorn’s or maybe even before that.
    Tumble. The word came to her out of nowhere. Miss Turner, her phys ed teacher at Northland, had called it that. Miss Turner, inventor of Turner’s Torture Exercises. Miss Turner, who had fought a faint mustache and too much testosterone. Miss Turner, with more than a hint of Marine drill sergeant in her background. Never something sexy like “gymnastics.” Tumbling. Jackie Chan and how to take a fall.
    There was another prod. Finn kept on walking. It was now or never because Finn knew without a doubt that if they climbed into the blue Audi, they were dead. Something grabbed at her—a coldness and anger. It was more than the fact that she’d been in this position once or twice before in her life: under the streets of New York, a hundred feet down in the Caribbean, in the jungles of the Yucatán with her mother when she was a kid. This was different. This was something innate, something Miss Turner could never teach, only perhaps encourage. Something you were born with. Something diamond hard in her mind—a deadly preternatural calm.
    “Jolly good,” she said quietly, hoping Billy would understand. They were past the island in the middle of the road on their left that held the church of St. Mary Le Strand. A number 52 Waterloo bus went by, tires hissing on the slick gleaming asphalt of the roadway. There was a steel barrier between them and the street now, a line of newspaper boxes chained to it along with several bicycles. To their right was the closed and abandoned entrance to the Strand Underground Station, out of use for more than a decade.
    They turned the corner on to Surrey Street. The traffic sounds abruptly faded. A few yards away, she saw the dark blue Audi pulled up onto the wide sidewalk beside the old Strand Station exit, a shadowy figure behind the wheel. The lights were off but the engine was running, exhaust wisping in the rain. Three against two. Twenty, perhaps thirty seconds and it would be too late. Her roving eyes found a low wrought-iron gate beside a door, a pair of neglected rubbish bins, and a little pile of builder’s junk. God bless you, Miss Turner from Northland High School, wherever you are. Tumble.
    “Jolly good!” yelled Finn at the top of her lungs. She went into a simple tuck and roll, her hand reaching out blindly, fumbling, grabbing the length of old narrow plumbing pipe. She came out of the somersault, facing back the way she’d come, and swept the pipe around as hard as she could, aiming for the knees. The pipe connected and she felt the shivering, wet crunch of impact run up her arm. The man screamed and dropped his newspaper and his umbrella. She saw that there really was a gun in the man’s hand, a flat, chunky-looking automatic. Then chaos.
    “Is do nach bhfuil seans ar bith ann!”
screamed Billy, turning on his heel and bringing his booted foot up into the crotch of the man behind him.
“Perite! Irrumator Mentula! Spaculatum Tauri!”
Finn was vaguely aware of the man in the Audi getting out of the car.
    “This way!” she yelled, grabbing Billy by the arm. She took a few short steps, jammed the lead pipe into the chain around the steel grate covering the old station exit, and pulled hard. The corroded, rust-caked links snapped. She pulled the grate aside and raced into the station, Billy