with a blistering oath in Polish and fired down the stairwell, ducked a returning burst, then fired again, her grip steady as if on a range. There was the sound of something falling at the bottom, then silence and the stench of cordite. She started to move, and Rhion shook his head violently, waving her back. Distantly, over the long, continuous ululation of the air-raid sirens, another siren could be heard, the grating two-note seesaw of the police.
Rhion made a gesture with his fingers.
There was a clattering below and Saltwood saw, past Sara’s shoulder and down the stairs, a Storm Trooper leap out of hiding behind a door in the hall, spinning to point his gun away from them, toward the front door, as if startled by something there. Sara fired. The man flung out his arms as the bullets smashed through his rib cage, and went sprawling. The four of them barreled down the stairs. Oddly enough, Saltwood could see nothing in the downstairs hall that might have startled that last Trooper into exposing himself to Sara’s fire.
“Check the shed out back for a car,” he ordered, and Sara vanished through the rear door under the stairs while Saltwood methodically stripped every body he could find of weapons, spare clips, money, and papers. The police sirens were getting closer. Von Rath must have got to a phone. Rhion and Sara appeared at the back door again at the same moment Sara’s father emerged from another door, carrying the sort of string shopping bag German housewives took to market, bulging with bread, cheese, bottled water, and beer.
“Car out back,” Sara yelled. “We threw two spare gas cans in the trunk.”
Tires crunched in the gravel out front. Saltwood made a dash for the back, hoping against hope they’d make it out of the alley before the inevitable flanking parties blocked both ends. Rhion paused in the doorway and made a gesture of some kind with his staff. From the front drive there was a shattering explosion, yellow and white light stabbing through the gathering twilight.
So there was some kind of radio-controlled bomb in the truck after all, Saltwood thought, as the Professor dashed to join them, the crystals in the staff head winking sharply in the reflected light of the fires. So much for Goering’s expertise.
The car was an open staff Mercedes, gray, sleek, and well cared for. Despite the fact there were no keys in the fascia board, it was running. Somehow it was no surprise to Saltwood to learn that Sara could hot-wire cars. The fugitives piled in over the doors with their gear, guns, magic wand, and picnic lunch. Then Tom had it in motion, roaring out into the narrow, moss-cobbled alley in time to see two motorcyclists and half a dozen running Storm Troopers appear around the corner to their left and a earful of machine-gun-brandishing Luftwaffe to their right.
“Right!” Rhion yelled, half standing in the front seat and raising the gleaming Spiracle against the evening light.
“We’ll have a better chance—” began Saltwood, jamming into first.
“RIGHT, goddammit!”
Not quite knowing why, but figuring the odds were really pretty much the same, Saltwood swung the wheel right and floored it.
For a second Tom thought the bang he heard was a bullet—single-shot auto—but then realized it had been the sound of the oncoming Luftwaffemobile’s right front tire blowing out. The big car jumped, swerved frenziedly, then slewed sidelong into the brick wall of the alley. Saltwood scraped paint from his own right-hand door on the stone alley wall as he barely avoided the still-bounding vehicle and gunned on up the alleyway while the other car caromed into the foremost of the motorcycle’s brigade, coming to a stop with one bumper against the alley wall and the other braced on the corner of the shed, effectively blocking all further pursuit from that direction.
“Well, I’ll be—go to hell,” Tom said, his eyes on the rearview mirror.
The flames rising from the front courtyard seemed awfully comprehensive for just one car, and there was no pursuit from that direction, either. If the pursuit cars were parked close around the truck, a spark could have jumped...
“We’ve got to switch cars.” Sara leaned forward over the back of the seat. “They’ll know we’ve got a staff Mercedes. Turn that way, down that alley...”
“You know Berlin?” Tom demanded, obeying.
“Don’t you?”
“Just the main streets, from the maps.”
In the gathering twilight it was growing hard to see, for every house was blacked out, every street lamp in this quiet