Free Two Graves by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Page B

she glimpsed on one of the papers, plucked out of her memory at random.
    “Impossible! Laufer’s dead.” The man, the Nazi, appears taken aback, the cruel confidence on his face changing into alarm, uncertainty.
    Her fingers close around some of the papers, curling them up and partially crushing them, and she lifts them from her handbag, just enough to show the black swastika on the letterhead.
    Taking an impatient step forward, the man reaches out to snatch them. But hidden in their wrinkled folds, curled around it, lies her can of Mace, which she scooped up as she gathered the papers together. As he glances down, reaching for the bundle, she lets fly with a blast directly into his face.
    The man topples backward with an inarticulate cry, the pistol dropping to the floor as his hands fly to his face, the papers scattering. Snatching them back up, she kicks the gun aside and sprints for the door, running through the altar-like room beyond to the staircase and hurtling down to the second floor, taking the steps three at a time, the heavy knapsack like a millstone around her shoulders. This is where it starts to happen: the feeling of drifting, of heaviness in her legs, of semi-paralysis. From upstairs she hears harsh words, German, guttural, the tread of heavy feet.
    She runs past the counterfeiting room, past the bedrooms, hearing always behind her the sound of the man’s pounding feet. She races down to the first floor, gasping from exertion, still strangely slowed as if by molasses and fear, but manages to reach the front door, grasps the handle.
    Locked. And all the first-floor windows are barred.
    As she turns back, a gun goes off behind her, the round taking a hunk out of the door frame. She flings herself into the sitting room, slipping behind a large display case that stands away from the wall of the room as if in preparation for being removed. Pressing her back against the wall for support, gripping the wainscot rail, she raises her feet and cocks her legs; a second later the man enters and she kicks forward with both legs, heaving the case down onto the man. He leaps to one side as crockery, pewter, books, and glass come crashing, again in slow motion; the man only partially escapes being crushed, the top edge of the falling case catching his knee, knocking him to the floor with a howl of fury.
    Leaping over the case, she runs from the dining room. Another shot rings out and she suddenly feels the tug in her side, with a flowering of heat so scorching that the pain of it almost brings her to her knees.
    She half runs, half falls down the narrow staircase to the basement, tears past the heap of books, leaps onto the chair she had placed earlier, wriggles out the opening in the window. She hears the thud of footsteps overhead: the man is on the move again, but the tread slower, heavier, favoring one leg.
    She thrashes through the ailanthus trees to the rickety table pushed up against the eight-foot brick wall, scales it, kicks it away as she leaps over, landing in her friend Maggie’s backyard.
    Here she pauses. All is quiet. Still, she must keep moving. She enters the back patio and then Maggie’s kitchen, closing the door softly behind her and leaving the lights off.
    One AM: Maggie wouldn’t be back from work yet. She examines her side, bleeding profusely, and is relieved to find the round only grazed her skin.
    Quickly she moves through the dark, silent apartment to the front door. Then—carefully, very carefully—she cracks it and peers out. East End Avenue is quiet, a few cars passing by beneath the soft streetlights. She darts out, closes the door behind her, and scurries northward, scanning the avenue fortaxis, her side hurting, shoulder aching under the weight of the knapsack. Not a cab in sight.
    And then it happens. Just like all the times before: the screeching of brakes, the slam of a door, the clatter of running feet.
    “Halt!”
comes the harsh cry
. “Hände hoch!”
    Another man is running