Free The Atlantis Code by Charles Brokaw Page B

from all the other noises that trickled through the quiet night. She had them now, all tracking on her personal defense systems, each one indelibly marked.
    Sliding her hands into the pockets of her coat, she fisted the two Yarygin PYa/MP-443 Grach pistols she carried there. Both pistols held seventeen-round magazines. She had extra magazines tucked into an inside pocket. She hoped she wouldn’t need them.
    The men were patient, though, closing gradually from three sides.
    Without warning, Natasha turned and sprinted up the steps of a nearby building. Shadows filled the breezeway, and she felt fairly confident she would become invisible to her pursuers almost at once.
    They were determined not to lose her, though. The sound of their footsteps, hesitating for just a moment, came hard after her.
    Natasha ran, light on her feet and silent in her crepe-soled shoes. At the end of the breezeway, she leaped from the steps to her left and took cover against the building’s side behind a line of bushes. Taking out both pistols, flipping off the safeties with her thumbs, she waited.
    Two men ran through, stopped, and peered out at the open expanse before them. It was too bad there wasn’t another nearby building. Natasha thought they would have been confused longer.
    Both men drew weapons, obviously sensing that they were in danger. The presence of the weapons decided Natasha’s course of action. There were more of them. That number gave them the advantage. But she could make the odds stack more in her favor, right here, right now.
    She leveled her pistols.
    One of the men turned toward her. His pistol was raised, his arms bent to keep it close to his body as he held it in a shooter’s triangle before him. He looked at her just over the open sights.
    Natasha squeezed the trigger of the pistol in her right hand just as he saw her. The 9 mm round blasted through the space between the man’s widening eyes. She fired again, shifting to the other pistol, and put two rounds through the second man’s neck. From the way he tumbled, she suspected one of the rounds had severed the man’s spinal cord.
    Moving quickly, Natasha walked over to the two dead men. The flat, harsh cracks of her pistol shots echoed in the breezeway behind her.
    Kneeling, replacing her left-hand pistol in her duster pocket just for the moment, Natasha frisked the men. They had no ID. That wasn’t unusual. On an assassination assignment, the handler usually took all of a hitter’s identification so he—or she—couldn’t be traced back to the people who’d initiated the hit.
    The band on one of the dead men’s wrists caught Natasha’s attention as she heard voices over the radio headsets. They’d been alerted now. Whoever her attackers were, they knew she was armed.
    Natasha studied the wristband, recognizing it as a tactic used by special forces around the world. She flipped open the protective cover, expecting to see her own face.
    But the face in the picture wasn’t hers. It was Yuliya’s.
    Rising, Natasha plucked her other pistol from her duster, turned, and ran back toward the building where she’d left her sister.

CHAPTER 5

    ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT
AUGUST 19, 2009
     
     
    L eaning closer to the computer screen, Lourds studied the pictures of the mysterious bell. The images Leslie Crane had posted to various archeological and history sites had been professionally done. But the images didn’t show the entire surface area of the bell. They’d been taken from either side, leaving out a lot of the inscription. Thankfully, he had the rest.
    Leslie stood beside him, and Lourds was more conscious of the heat of her body than he wanted to be. He didn’t like distractions while he was working.
    The text that accompanied the images of the bell was simple and direct, merely asking if anyone had any knowledge of the history of the thing. A few responses had accumulated over the two weeks the images had been on the Internet sites, but nothing of them seemed out