Blood of the Assassin - By Russell Blake Page 0,12

shattering as it flew from his hands, another blinding shriek of pain shooting up his left leg as ligaments protested the abuse.

When he came to a stop he was still in one piece. He forced himself to stand; his leg almost gave out, but thankfully it held. Jean-Claude limped away from his landing spot, leaving the notebook, and gimped to the roof door, praying that it was open.

The first silenced bullet thumped into the steel frame a foot from his head. He ducked, wrenching the handle with all his strength. A second shot slammed into the stone doorjamb just as the door opened, and then he was through. He vowed to go to church every morning for the rest of his life as he twisted the lock closed, pausing to take in the heavy steel plate and the industrial hinges.

It would take them a while to get through that, he thought, and then descended the steps as fast as his brutalized leg would allow. As he reached the second floor he heard thuds from above, but they were too late. By the time they got into the building, he would be gone.

Outside on the street, he was the only pedestrian to be seen. At the corner, he glanced around and dared a look back at his building, where a car was double parked outside, partially blocking the two lane street – finding a parking spot was impossible in Berlin, even for desperate murderers. He didn’t wait for the killers to make it back to ground level, instead setting off in the direction of the subway, which he could reach in two minutes, even in his condition.

When he entered the station, he briefly considered the torn knee of his two-hundred-dollar gabardine slacks and shook his head, muttering to himself. He fished in his pocket for some change, and his fingers brushed against the flash drive as he dug out the fare.

A tiny bit of innocuous micro-circuitry that Heinrich had paid the ultimate price to protect.

He had never been so happy to see a train come down the tracks in his life, and when he boarded, one of only a few bleary-eyed pre-dawn travelers, he took a seat and exhaled with relief.

Whatever was on the flash drive had to be, in Heinrich’s words, dynamite. It had already claimed one blood sacrifice, and Jean-Claude couldn’t help but believe, as he fingered it in his pocket, that there would be more where that came from.

The train rocked from side to side as it shuttled down the tracks, and when Jean-Claude got off at the third stop, he had decided that whatever had landed in his lap would require him to be extraordinarily cautious – he would stop at the first open internet café and check to see what was on the drive. If it was as big as Heinrich had intimated, he would be on the next flight out in the morning, so he could deliver it in person to his superiors and hand off the responsibility to others, taking himself out of the line of fire and hopefully landing at least a commendation, if not a promotion, for his expeditious handling of the matter.

Whatever it was.

A creeping sense of dread tickled his stomach. He had a feeling that Heinrich had made the find of his life.

Jean-Claude only hoped that he would live to tell about it.

Chapter 5

Associate director Rodriguez sauntered down the corridor to the briefing rooms in the bowels of CISEN, the Mexican intelligence agency that was the south-of-the-border equivalent of America’s CIA. When he arrived at the largest, he checked his watch and then entered without saying a word, a file in his right hand. A dozen sets of eyes followed him as he made his entrance and paused inside the door. The long rectangular conference table was cluttered with coffee cups, bottles of water, soda, and pretzels, and most of the attendees had a notepad and a pen in front of them.

A hush settled over the gathered men as Rodriguez moved to the seat at the head of the table, and when he sat down, there was an expectant shuffling, the meeting’s star finally arrived. He absently brushed his fingers through his expensively coiffed brown hair and adjusted his tie, a nervous affectation he’d been guilty of since his first job in government service twenty years earlier. Rodriguez looked around at the faces of his subordinates and leaned forward.

“We recently had a disturbing bit of information come in from one