Free Scorpion Deception by Andrew Kaplan

he shouted at the shadow. Don’t move, asshole!
    The shadow detached from the side of the flower stall and ran toward the Avenue de Wagram. A Middle Eastern–looking man in a windbreaker. Scorpion started after him. He needed him alive, he thought, running as hard as he could, wondering why the man hadn’t fired first.
    The man, wearing a windbreaker, hopped onto a motorbike parked vertically between cars. Dodging a passing red Citroen, Scorpion raced toward the curb. He needed to get out of traffic and get a clean shot. He had almost reached the curb when he got his answer about why the man in the windbreaker hadn’t fired.
    A bullet pinged off the cobblestones less than two inches from his foot. Scorpion dived between two parked cars and wriggled under one of them. He peered out from beneath the car. The shot had made no sound. Whoever fired must have been using a sound suppressor.
    He quartered the area looking for the source of the shot. It hadn’t come from behind, from rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. Other than the man in the windbreaker, he had spotted no one and no one had followed Sandrine down the stairs to the Metro. So where the hell did the shot come from? he wondered, pulling off his jacket.
    His thoughts were broken by the sound of an engine revving. Scorpion peeked out from under the car and saw the man on the motorbike cut into traffic. He flicked his jacket out toward the sidewalk while rolling the other way to the street, looking around wildly while snapping into a kneeling shooting position. He was about to fire when something moved, a shadow or a reflection; something out of the corner of his eye made him look up, and he just had time to roll back under the car as another bullet ricocheted off the cobblestones, barely missing his head. He heard a woman scream and saw another woman, crossing the street to the Metro with a small dog, look up. He watched her, the sound of the motorbike fading up the avenue.
    The shot had come from a roof or upper floor apartment building on Avenue de Wagram near the little square. The middle-age woman with the dog shouted, “Aidez-moi! Police!” —Help! Police!—scooped up her dog and ran to the Metro stairs. A couple walking across the square ran back from where they’d come.
    The shot had come from above on his side of the street, Scorpion realized. It had to be a rifle because even a marksman couldn’t have come so close while shooting from above at that distance with a pistol. Also, he wouldn’t have been in an apartment, because before he and Sandrine decided to take the Metro to her place, they hadn’t known they would be walking to the Place des Ternes. The tails must have spotted them heading this way, figured out where they were going, and the sniper—part of the front tail team—went into the apartment building above the pharmacy. He would have gone up to the roof for what should have been an easy kill. It was the red Citroen that saved him, forcing him to step aside, spoiling the sniper’s first shot.
    Whoever they were, they were good. He wouldn’t get lucky again.
    It was about four meters from under the car to the front door of the apartment house. A ledge between the top floor and the roof would give him some protection from the sniper shooting vertically down. There would be no time to ring the bell for the concierge; it would take perhaps seven or eight seconds to bump the front door lock with his Peterson universal key. He would only be vulnerable during the two or three seconds on the open sidewalk.
    It would all depend on how fast the sniper’s reaction time was, he thought. Also, a pure vertical shot was difficult; the kind people almost never fired in their lives. The bullet would not have a curved trajectory. The sniper would have to adjust the sight lower than normal to hit the desired point of impact. Scorpion knew that moving fast, at night, he would present a minimal target from