up high, a few rooms and offices above the catwalk. The walls were white tile.
I heard footsteps approaching above me on the catwalk. A man with an assault rifle buckled across his chest. You walk on a catwalk, you tend to look down through the metal mesh. He saw me.
He opened fire. I ducked low behind a rounded vat and the shots drumming the copper sounded like a jangling of cymbals.
I could see in the distance, on a half-lower level, a long wall with a metal rectangle. The bay doors. That was where most of them would have been, I thought, when the fight began, waiting to do the work of the loading. If I stayed pinned down here they’d rush me.
I climbed inside the vat. It was low and dark and the singing of the bullets made it sound like crawling into a gong. The catwalk formed an L shape over the opening. I waited.
The rifleman stopped shooting. He was looking for me, not wanting to waste bullets, and he had thought I would just hide behind the vat. I listened for the soft scrape of his feet above me and threw myself into the opening, firing into the space between the flooring and the railing. He jerked and then he fell to the catwalk. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, but he was down and not shooting at me.
But all surprise was gone now.
I ran into the loading bay area, jumping over a railing, dropping to the concrete floor. I saw a man running toward me, raising a pistol. Two more men following him. Old pallets of bottles sat to my right and I dodged behind them. Gunfire exploded the tops and shattered sprays of glass, splinters, and stale beer fountained above my head.
Three to fight. I went still. I had a Glock in each hand, Piet’s wakizashi tucked in my back belt, and an explosive charge in my jacket pocket.
The gunfire stopped.
An awful echoing silence filled the room, the smell of cordite, of old beer.
I could hear a hissed argument in Dutch. “You go,” “No, you go,” cowards daring each other to find some courage. I thought of the people they’d helped kill at the train station. I tried to calm my mind, think of efficiency, like running along the edge of the building in parkour, find the line.
One called out in Dutch, “Throw down your guns, you can’t get out.”
I moved as quietly as I could to the corner of the large pallet I’d hidden behind. I raised the Glocks, aiming down each corner from the beer pallet.
No sign that anyone was coming.
Behind me, on the far side of the huge room, I heard a muffled scream from a woman.
70
YASMIN.
I didn’t have time to wait the three stooges out. The old pallets of beer were stacked in five long rectangles at one end of the dock space. Maybe forty feet between me and the external doors. I could hear at least two voices two pallets away. Like a run to make. Break it down into steps then commit each action as part of a more fluid movement.
My mind shifted to a gear it hadn’t been in since I tried to save Lucy in London. Overhead a bay of fluorescents loomed. I gunned the lights. The room plunged into semidarkness; the only light now came from the glow of the vat room.
Yasmin screamed again.
I studied the room with a traceur’s eye. Pallets to leap on, railing to jump, walls to bounce off. I could try to use parkour to outflank them. I wasn’t sure how steady the pallets were and usually I ran with hands free, not holding guns.
I saw movement to my left and I risked standing and firing a shot, then fell back to the floor. A babbling scream rose from the other side of the pallet.
I hurried down the passageway formed by the pallets. Suddenly glass crunched under my heels.
Gunfire exploded around me from three sides. In front, behind me, to my right.
Surrounded.
I retreated left, in the direction of the man I’d shot. I could hear feet scrabbling around, two closing behind me to cut off my retreat back to the vat room.
But I wasn’t retreating. They were only looking for me between the pallets. If I wasn’t where they expected, I could gain a momentary advantage.
I did a standing jump and yank onto the fifteen-foot-high pallets and ran along the edge. I saw movement to my right, another guy rounding