Read Online The Man of Bronze by James Alan Gardner - Free Book Online Page A

removal. Grabbing another Uzi from a fallen thug, I started quietly forward . . . listening for danger.
    If I were a clever mercenary—or even a mutton head with a sense of self-preservation—and if I saw five of my comrades venture down a corridor without coming back, I’d think,
Perhaps going down there myself isn’t the best strategy.
Instead, I’d take a position watching the mouth of the corridor and prepare to shoot anything that emerged. On the off chance some of the bad guys had such a glimmering of intelligence, I stopped near the end of the corridor and lowered myself to the floor. Silently, I belly crawled the rest of the way forward. Then I tossed my spool of suture cord into the next room, bouncing the cord off a side wall.
    Tink.
    Immediately, two Uzis opened up on the source of the sound. Immediately, I opened up on the gunmen holding the Uzis. Aiming at the muzzle flashes, I scored shots on both men; but as soon as I’d fired, I rolled away fast from my original position, just in case I wasn’t the only one trying to trick the opposition into betraying its location.
    Another gun flared in the darkness:
trrrrrrr.
Linoleum fragments stung me, kicked up by a flurry of 9-millimeter Parabellum blasting the floor where I’d been lying a split second earlier. I fired back at the source of this new attack, but the brief light of my muzzle flashes showed the man ducking out of sight behind something big and solid. Without hesitating, I dived back down the corridor, just as another rain of bullets slapped into my previous position.
    Darkness and silence returned . . . giving me a chance to sort out what had just happened. The room in front of me was the entry area where the doorman met incoming patients and patted them down. The “something big and solid” between me and the mercenary could only be the doorman’s safe: the vault where he stored visitors’ weaponry. If I recalled correctly, the vault’s walls were four-inch steel that no bullet could penetrate.
    The mercenary had taken cover behind the toughest protection in the building . . . certainly tougher than the flimsy walls around me. If the bad guy knew where to fire, he could kill me straight through the plasterboard. Fortunately, he
didn’t
know where to fire; and shooting at random would just waste ammunition.
    I waited for what I knew would come next.
    “Oi!” the man called. “Can we talk?”
    His accent was Australian . . . not that it mattered. I didn’t answer because the moment I spoke, he’d know where to aim.
    “I saw you just now by the muzzle flashes,” the man said. “A woman, right? Right? Don’t know who you are, but you aren’t our target. We’re after a sod named Reuben Baptiste. Actually, we aren’t after him either—just what he’s carrying.”
    He waited for me to betray myself. I didn’t.
    “Maybe it’s like this,” the gunman said. “You’re, what, a spy or something? An international assassin in Warsaw on a mission? You see guys with guns, and you think they’re after
you.
Understandable mistake. And I don’t give a damn even if you
have
killed everybody I came with. More money for me when I bring home the goods.”
    Did that mean he was the last mercenary standing? Or was it a ruse? No, it was probably true. I’d seen nobody else in the front room . . . and since that’s where the stairs to the bell tower came out, that’s where the survivors from upstairs would gather.
    I tallied up numbers again. If I’d disabled three hooligans with the oxygen tanks—a reasonable possibility—this man was my final opponent.
    “I’m willing to let you go,” the man was saying. “I’ll even sweeten the offer with money. You get me Reuben Baptiste and the boss’ll put you on the payroll. He’s generous, you’ll see. And he’s got a good eye for talent. A woman like you, he’d give you a Silver Shield right off.”
    A Silver Shield? Meaning a shiny force field? Apparently, the silver grenades were only