Contents ( 44)
- DAUGHTER OF GOD
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- CONTENTS
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- EPILOGUE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
“Here’s the light,” a voice said. “Be careful. If he’s in there he’ll have his gun ready.”
“Maybe we should fire a couple of rounds in there just to be sure.”
Straining until blue lights threatened to cover his vision, Seth felt his body move forward, slowly at first, and then more easily. He was free!
But would he be in time? Any shot fired into the culvert would surely hit him.
He crawled frantically now, oblivious to the sharp edges of the culvert joints.
The bright circle of daylight ahead of him grew larger and brighter until finally his head emerged and then the rest of his body.
Gasping for breath, he rolled away from the pipe and lay there a few seconds.
“Don’t move, Mr. Ridgeway.”
Seth froze. Time stopped.
“Turn over slowly and get up.”
Seth rolled over slowly onto his back and then began to rise to his feet. In front of him was a man with a toothbrush mustache and a trilby hat. He held the ugly, stubby H&K MP5A machine pistol favored by the British SAS and the German commandos who had freed the Israeli hostages in Munich. It was a fast and deadly weapon at close range. The man saw him eyeing the H&K.
“Don’t try anything foolish,” the man said. “It will shorten your life considerably.”
“Go ahead.” Seth heard the voice at the other end of the culvert dimly as if through an old-fashioned megaphone. An. instant later a gunshot, followed by three more.
The man in the trilby jumped and looked at the mouth of the culvert. It was all the diversion Ridgeway needed. He leaped on the man, slammed an elbow into his face, and raised his knee into the man’s crotch. Seth felt the man’s testicles flatten out under the impact. The man’s trilby flew through the air as he doubled up in pain.
Seth grabbed the machine pistol from the man’s weakened grasp and started to run. The man began to scream.
“Over here! He’s over here.”
Seth emptied the clip of the H&K into the man, threw the gun to the ground, and sprinted through the woods toward Amstelveen.
SIXTEEN
The man from Moscow they knew as “the Patron” stood next to the desk in the warehouse office and frowned at the men assembled there as they stood about eating the last bits of lunch. Grease-stained McDonald’s bags carpeted the old wooden desk in the middle of the office.
The Patron did not like men like these. They were all KGB, all on the take from the Moscow Mafia, all loyal to Zhirinovsky’s organization. They were, he thought, the same sort of mentality and the same sort of men who paved Hitler’s way to power. There was Colonel Eduard Molotov. Next to him, a man called Sergiev. Towering over Sergiev was a hulking giant, the biggest human the man from Moscow had ever seen. They were the best of the lot; they were all gutter scum and he paid them well for their personal characteristics, political leanings, and considerable skills.