Clive Cussler The Heist by Du Brul Jack

Author:Du Brul, Jack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

21

Bell saw nobody, but as he was about to climb up to the fourth floor, he heard a metal door slam above him. He corkscrewed up the last flights of stairs and came to the door he’d just heard. He stood to the side and flipped it open. Like so many times tonight, his action drew a barrage of gunfire. He ducked low and peeked out for a moment. The roof was too dark to see many details, but it looked like a cluster of men were rushing for a far corner of the building. He slid out through the open door and moved to his right, taking a route the fleeing thieves wouldn’t expect.

The building was so big that it was hard to see what was happening when the men reached the roof’s edge. It looked like they were jumping off the building because every few seconds the group seemed smaller. He sped up. Suddenly there was only one of the thieves left. He raised his pistol to fire, but the man simply vanished. Bell ran forward and reached the edge a moment later. He looked down.

The lawn below was nearly black, but there was enough light from a handful of nearby streetlamps to tell there was no one down below. He remembered the zip line running across from the Department of Agriculture. There was another one here. It was attached near the eaves of a shed-like elevator housing and ran out into the night in the direction of the grounded barge that didn’t look so grounded any longer. A tugboat was standing by to haul it away, its stern fixed to the barge by thick hemp lines.

He heard the sound of a person zooming along the length of the line. It reminded him of the tearing of a long piece of paper.

Bell didn’t pause. He stripped his belt from its loops, threw it over the steel wire, and with a running start leapt off the building. The strain on his arms was immediate but manageable and his grip was firm. The problem was the friction between the leather and steel kept him to little more than a snail’s pace.

Bell tried shifting his body to gain more speed, raising his legs and trying to make the belt jump off the wire to go a bit faster. He had barely made a hundred feet when at the other end of the zip line, the last thief to drop off the roof reached the barge.

A distant voice called out from the gloom ahead. “I hope you know this isn’t personal.”

Bell recognized the voice immediately, the mass murderer from the Staten Island Ferry. And then the wire was cut and he went from a controlled descent toward the river to a nearly four-story free fall.

He dropped through space for the first ten feet, his stomach an empty hollow inside his body, and then he felt scratchy wooden fingers grabbing at his head, body, and limbs. A tree. He was falling through a leafless tree.

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