“Beautiful day,” a man standing next to him said.
Quentin couldn’t place the accent. German, or something farther east. Maybe Czech. Maybe Polish. Maybe Ukrainian.
Quentin turned to see the man. He had dark eyes, dark stubble on his chin, jet-black hair tied into a ponytail. The sleeves of a black T-shirt were stretched over his carefully toned biceps.
“I’d like to know where he is.” The man spoke his English carefully, as if weighing each word to make sure it was correct.
“Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quentin said.
The man lifted his chin, indicating the rest of the tower above them. “Up there? Right now?”
Quentin shook his head. “Can’t help you.”
The man stepped a few inches closer, lowered his voice a notch. “If he finds something up there, he will give it to me. Along with the other item that was taken. I will take both of them, and then you will be free to leave.”
“Okay, you got me,” Quentin said. “I did take those towels from the hotel. They were so soft, I couldn’t help myself.”
“Do you see those people behind us?”
Quentin glanced over his shoulder. A family of four were looking out over the city. Mom, dad, one boy about twelve, a girl maybe eight or nine.
“The girl will go over the railing first,” the man said. “Then the father, who will try to fight me. I will break his nose first, which will blind him and make it easier to throw him over. Then the boy. Then the mother, after watching the rest of her family die.”
Quentin looked into the man’s eyes. Then he noticed the red star tattoo on the left side of his neck. Quentin hadn’t received the same briefing that Nick and Kate had, but he didn’t need it. He already knew all of the major players in this game. The Brotherhood had hired the Roter Stern Korps to help find the Raubgold for them, and this man standing in front of him was one of them. If he got his hands on this map, they’d all be one big step closer.
The man reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a black carbon fiber knife with a six-inch blade. “When is he coming down?”
“How about now?” Nick said, as he swung down from the railing and kicked the man in the face.
The knife fell to the ground. Behind them, the mother screamed and grabbed one child. The father grabbed the other.
“This way,” Nick said to Quentin. He went to the stairway that led down to the lower levels. The gate was closed and locked, with a sign indicating it was for emergencies only. Nick kicked the gate and it flew open.
The two men pounded down the metal stairs two and three at a time, each flight cutting back and forth in a crisscross pattern. From below them, Nick and Quentin heard the pounding of footsteps, coming up to cut them off. The footsteps were getting closer.
Nick looked above them, saw the man from the top platform coming down. “You sure you didn’t bring your parachute?” he asked. “And maybe an extra one?”
He looked through the interior of the structure. The opposite side was about twenty feet away, up here where the tower was at its thinnest, but there were no stairs on the other side. Nick took the spindle of metal rope, weighed the hook with one hand for a half second, and tried to hurl it across to the other side. It clanked against the metal and fell. Nick pulled up the hook, tried again. It clanked and fell again.
“We’re about to have a real party here,” Quentin said, looking up at the one man coming down, then down at however many men were coming up. It sounded like at least three or four of them.
Nick took a breath, gave the hook a kiss for good luck, and tossed it across the gap again. This time it caught and held.
“Go,” Nick said. “You first.”
Quentin looked down the interior of the tower, at what had to be a five-hundred-foot drop to the level below them, then he looked at the metal cord stretched across the twenty-foot gap.
“Go!” Nick said.
The man above them was just a few flights away. Quentin climbed over the railing, grabbed on to the cord, and tested it to see if it held his weight. It sagged, but it didn’t break. He let go of the railing, trying not to look down. He passed one hand over another, like a monkey traversing a vine. Although a monkey would have done it without thinking, without expecting to die every second.
The man from the top had reached Nick and stood a few feet away from him on the same platform. It was Nick’s turn to notice the gym-toned arms and the red star on his neck. Nick put both hands up.
“Give it to me,” the man said.
“Sorry,” Nick said. “Can’t do that. Do you have any idea what I went through to get it?”
The man charged, and Nick sidestepped at the last possible moment, deftly wrapping both hands around the man’s wrist and guiding his blundering momentum over the railing. The man had half a second to look back into Nick’s eyes, not so much terrified but totally dumbfounded, before he fell five hundred feet and crashed onto the roof of one of the lifts.
There was a brief silence as the men below them paused to watch their fellow soldier sailing by at terminal velocity, then they started pounding their way up the stairs again. Below them, the intermediary deck was in pandemonium, with everyone screaming and trying to get away from whatever had just caused such a stunning impact.
Quentin had worked his way across the cable and reached the other side of the tower. He turned and saw his son following behind him, moving much easier and faster.
“Sure, you got the gloves,” Quentin said, freeing one hand at a time to shake them out and blow on the cable burns.
“We have to keep moving,” Nick said. “Be careful.”
“Too late for that,” Quentin said, as he started to follow his son down the interior of the latticework, working from one horizontal to the next like a giant ladder. From below, they heard police officers shouting instructions and blowing their whistles. By the time Nick and Quentin hit the ground, the whole tower would be on full terrorist-event alert.
“If we get separated,” Nick said, “I’ll meet you at La Terrasse. It’s on the Seine. We’ll have a nice lobster bisque with champagne.”
“Can we get out of this alive first before we make lunch plans?”
Nick kept climbing down the latticework, warning Quentin whenever he found a handhold with too much oil or pigeon shit on it. When they reached the bottom of this interior section, they were still only halfway to the ground.
“How do we get out of here?” Quentin said, looking around him. With all of the lifts in the tower shut down, at least four hundred people were jostling in every direction at once, trying to reach the stairs.
“Just act natural,” Nick said, brushing off his jacket. They both joined in the throng, going with the flow to the nearest set of stairs. They got halfway down when they saw another group of three men fighting their way against the tide, elbowing their way up the stairs.
“There he is!” one of the men shouted, as soon as he spotted Quentin.
The Foxes both turned around and went back up, pushing their way through the crowd. When Nick finally reached the top of the stairs, he turned to locate his father.
Quentin was gone.
* * *
Kate heard the police whistles as she got closer. A dozen tourists rushed by her, running away from the tower, then another group and another until she was pushing her way through a wave of humanity.