Shadow of the Giant Page 0,103

two more guards joined the two who had walked with him from upstairs. His limousine sat idling at the curb. The back door opened.

He saw someone jogging toward him from among the parked cars.

It was Ivan Lankowski. Alai had rewarded him for his loyal service by putting him in charge of the administration of the Turkish nations of central Asia. What was he doing here? Alai had not called him back from service, and Ivan had not written or called about coming.

Ivan reached into his jacket. Where a gun would be, if he was armed with a shoulder holster.

And he would be armed; he had carried a gun for too many years to be comfortable without one now.

Alamandar got out of the open back door of the limo. As he rose to his feet, he shouted at the guards. "Shoot him, you fools! He's going to kill the Caliph!"

Ivan's gun was out. He fired, and the guard to Alai's left dropped like a rock. The sound was strange - the barrel had a silencer, but Alai was close to being directly in front of it, so it wasn't so much silenced as shaped.

I should drop to the ground, thought Alai. To save my life, I should get out of the line of fire. But he couldn't take the danger seriously. He didn't feel as though he were in danger at all.

The other guards had their guns out now. Ivan shot another one, but then the bullets - not silenced - flew in the other direction, and Ivan fell to the ground. His gun did not slip from his hand; he maintained his grip on it to the end of his life.

Or maybe he wasn't dead. Maybe he could spend his last moments explaining to Alai how he could betray him like this.

Alai walked to Ivan's body and felt for a pulse. Ivan's eyes were open. He was already dead.

"Come away, my Caliph!" shouted Alamandar. "There may be other conspirators!"

Conspirators. There was no possibility of other conspirators. Ivan didn't trust anybody enough to conspire with them. The only person Ivan absolutely trusted was...

Was me.

Ivan was a perfect shot. Even at a run, he could not have aimed at me and then clumsily hit two guards.

"My guards," said Alai, looking up at Alamandar. "The ones he shot - will they be all right?"

One of the other guards jogged back to look. "Both dead," he said.

But Alai already knew that. Ivan had not been aiming at Alai. He had come here with one purpose in mind, the purpose that had guided him for years. Ivan was here to protect his Caliph.

It flashed into Alai's mind with immediate clarity. Ivan had learned of a conspiracy against the Caliph, and it involved people so close to Alai that there was no way for Ivan to warn him from a distance without running the risk of alerting one of the conspirators.

Alai reached with one hand to close Ivan's eyes, while with the other he pulled Ivan's pistol from his slackened fingers. Still not taking his eyes off of Ivan's face, Alai fired the pistol upward into the guard who was standing over him. Then he calmly aimed at the guard who had gone back to the bodies and fired. Alai had never been as good a shot as Ivan. He could not have done this while running. But kneeling, he was all right.

The guard he had shot without looking was lying on the pavement, twitching. Alai shot him again, then turned to Alamandar, who was getting back into the limo.

Alai shot him. He fell into the car and it screeched away from the curb. But the door was not closed yet, and Alamandar was in no shape to close it. So as it passed Alai, there would be a brief moment when the driver would be unprotected by the heavy armoring and bulletproof glass. Alai laid down three quick shots in order to have a better chance of catching that moment.

It worked. The car did not turn. It ran into a wall.

Alai jogged over to the still-open back door of the car, where Alamandar was panting and holding his chest. His eyes were on fire with rage and fear as Alai leveled Ivan's pistol to fire.

"You are no Caliph!" gasped Alamandar. "The Hindu woman is more of a Caliph than you are, you black dog."

Alai shot him in the head and he fell silent.

The driver was unconscious, but Alai shot him, too.

Then he went back to