I put the fingertips of my good hand to the side of my neck. It was throbbing almost too fast to count. I took deep breaths, willing myself to slow it down, until it was in the sixties.

"Try again."

"No thanks." I shook my head. "That plank is unbreakable."

Erich looked at Gobi again, then set his feet parallel with his shoulders. An expression of absolute focus, almost serenity, came over his face. I saw him draw back and swing his fist directly at the plank.

The whole wall exploded in front of us.

31. "Blow Up the Outside World"

-Soundgarden "RPG," Erich shouted, his voice barely audible over the aftershock.

I scrambled backwards, and all the geek inside me could think was, They're attacking us with role-playing games?

Gobi shoved me out of the way as a wide sheet of orange flame erupted through the gym. Bits of plaster and shreds of steel and gla.s.s fragments drifted through on a bitter cold wind, and through the hole in the wall, I saw it was dark out. Night had fallen. There were no windows here, and until that moment, I'd had no idea what time of day it was.

Erich again: "These outer walls are reinforced eighteen-centimeter steel. This is not supposed to happen."

"Oh, s.h.i.t."

"Stay down." Without bothering to glance back in my direction, he unlocked the wall rack of automatic weapons and started taking down what looked like an AK-47 and a banana clip of ammo, then jammed them together and tossed the loaded gun overhand across the room at Gobi. She caught it one-handed without so much as a backwards glance. Erich reached for the rack again and selected an even bigger machine gun for himself, snapped on the night-scope, then grabbed a pair of tactical vests and handed one to Gobi and held the other out to me. "Put this on if you don't want to die."

It sounded like a good plan, at least the not-dying part. I reached for the vest and almost dropped it, then pushed my arms through its webbing, feeling twenty pounds of high-impact synthetic polymer settle on my shoulders and neck like a yoke. Maybe that was how they saved your life-once you put it on, you'd never be able to leave home.

A second rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the already half-demolished gym with a lung-vibrating BOOM, this one coming directly up from below, and I felt my knees turn to Jell-O, shifting me off-balance. Somewhere to my left, a tall rack of barbells fell over, crashing against the floor, sending hundreds of pounds in weights rolling sideways toward the hole in the floor that hadn't even been there ten seconds earlier. Whoever was down there, I hope the weights landed right on top of him.

BOOM! A third blast, and all of Europe jumped and shook itself off like a wet dog. When my vision steadied I saw that Gobi and Erich had positioned themselves on either side of the hole in the wall, which was still actively blazing like a burning circus hoop about to spew a stream of Bengalese tigers. As if on cue, they both pivoted and started shooting down on the street. I'd seen them square off against each other, but I hadn't seem them fighting together. It was like watching a soldier and his shadow moving at the same time in tight, concise, almost ch.o.r.eographed maneuvers. I couldn't tell if I was more grateful or jealous.

After emptying the first clip, Erich ducked back to reload, slinging a machine pistol over his shoulder, and I saw Gobi step in and fire off another thirty rounds into the darkness. For a second or two, everything was hugely, ear-ringingly silent. I couldn't see who was down there, but whoever it was seemed undeterred by the counterattack, because the third fusillade of grenades came harder than ever. From overhead I heard the shriek of splintered metal as the ceiling caved in over Erich's gleaming display of Samurai swords and masks.

Gobi threw me a coat. "Time to go," she shouted, while Erich took up his post at the wall.

"Why do I need a-"

"It's flame-repellent."

I shoved my arms through the sleeves. "Where are we going?"

"Down."

"What?"

She grabbed me by the collar and we jumped through the hole in the floor. The twenty-foot drop turned gravity into a car crash, smashing us feet-first into the old wine shop, which was already on fire, empty gla.s.s bottles and wooden shelves splintering everywhere. Panic got me staggering to my feet, where I took in a lungful of smoke, doubled over, and suddenly forgot how to breathe, walk, or think properly.

"Idiot!" Gobi shouted. She made the word sound like an exciting new energy drink, something maybe mixed out of equal parts taurine and extreme annoyance. "Where are you going?" Grabbing my arm from out of nowhere, she yanked me forward, my feet blundering through the debris. In the smoke, all I could see were chaotic splutters of automatic gunfire among the broken bottles, like a garden of strange orange and red flowers.

We fell backwards through a hole in the wall, coughing and choking out onto wet concrete.

"Come on."

I stared up at the blazing skeleton of the storefront, dizzy from the fumes. My consciousness was already wavering in and out. "What about Erich?"

"He will be fine."

But she didn't sound like she meant it.

Don't black out, I told myself. Just hold on.

I tried to say something, and the world went dark.

32. "Wake Up"

-Rage Against the Machine "I'm here." I lifted my head, cringing. "You don't have to keep hitting me."

"That is inside of car door." Gobi's voice from far away, drifting in from somewhere on the far side of Greenwich Mean Time. "You keep knocking your face on it."

"Oh." My head cleared all at once, like a fogged windshield sliced across by wipers. I hadn't been unconscious, exactly, more like grayed out, a combination of carbon monoxide and a more than slightly heightened sense of reality, a kind of psychological alt.i.tude sickness. I realized that we were back inside one of Zermatt's little shuttles, rattling along the main drag at sixty miles an hour, except this time Gobi was the one steering it.

"How did they find us?"

"Matter of time."

"Wait, you're driving?"

"I can drive."

If this was true, it was only in the broadest sense of the word. She was careening wildly from side to side up the narrow street, jerking the steering wheel back and forth like she'd learned how to drive from one of those old movies where they apparently projected the background behind the actors' heads, blew air in their faces, and told them to steer.

Up in front of us, I saw dozens of lights filling the street, heard music and noise-a parade in progress now disrupted by the onset of World War Three. Gobi was aiming right toward it, one-handed, which allowed her to lean out the window and keep shooting at whoever was coming up behind us.

"Keep your head down."

"Where are we going?"

She didn't answer, and her eyes got very wide. I tried to think of anything that could actually take her by surprise, but I didn't have to wonder for long. In front of us, hundreds of Bavarian Santa Clauses were standing in the street, watching the fire start to spread.

"What the h.e.l.l... ?" I looked back up at the colorful banner dangling overhead and remembered what it had said-CLAUWAU. We'd arrived here in the middle of some kind of international Santa Claus convention.

There were Santas everywhere. Most of them looked as freaked out as I was, but in the chaos it was hard to tell. One of them spun around as we blasted past, and I wondered if Paula and whoever else was after us had the foresight to dress their a.s.sa.s.sins as Saint Nick. Another grenade erupted up from somewhere with a WHOOSH and a hiss, and a mob of men and women in red suits with pillows tucked underneath scattered in every direction. As the street finally started to clear, I saw one particular Santa, screaming, his beard on fire, running for the alley. Reindeer-real ones this time, having broken loose from their harness-went sprinting off after him in every direction. It was Santageddon.

Gobi swerved wildly around a second herd of Santas with matching Elvis pompadours and gold lame boots that seemed just a few seconds earlier to have been scaling a tall wooden pole in some kind of contest. The pole had fallen over, and Gobi steered around it, thumping the car's left tires hard enough that I heard something snap off underneath us.

"Where are you going?" I managed.

The answer was "Helipad."

"When we get to top," Gobi said, "leave all talking to me."

"You actually think they'll just let us fly out of here?"

"I think, yes." She held the machine gun up, then jammed her hand into her coat, brought out a wad of euros in a big metal money clip, and shoved it in my hand. "Hold on to this. In case we have to negotiate."

"Isn't that what the gun's for?"

The question was rhetorical and we both knew it. We had arrived at our destination. I didn't realize it at the time, even when I looked up and saw the big blue and white AIR ZERMATT garage opening in front of us to reveal a drive-in elevator the size of an aircraft carrier.

We drove in and the elevator began to rise, the doors opening at the top, allowing us to roll out onto the roof.

The helicopter was waiting for us.

The fuselage was red with white call letters painted on the side. Its propellor was already running, making that unmistakable pop-pop-pop of the blades accompanied by the high-pitched whine of turbines. I'd read somewhere about Vietnam veterans who couldn't stand the sound of rotors because it gave them flashbacks to the war, and at that moment I totally understood. Even though it was half a world away, the second I heard that familiar sound and smelled the exhaust, it was like I was right back in midtown Manhattan, gunfire and shouting, exploding gla.s.s and broken promises on the forty-seventh floor.

I glanced back down at Zermatt spread out below us, sirens and fire at the far end of the street, where, from the sound of it, the battle of the Hotel Schoeneweiss was apparently still in progress. Up above it all, the mountains stood almost lost in the distance except for a few faint beacons, tiny lights at their peaks.

Gobi and I got out of the car just as the chopper's hatch opened.

The woman who stepped through it was familiar too.

"Hey, Stormaire," Paula shouted across the helipad. She was wearing a black knit ski cap and parka, and grinning like she'd just won the Big Air compet.i.tion at the Winter X Games. Even from here, I could see the bruise on her face where Gobi had ax-kicked her back in Venice. "Written any good songs lately?"

This time her pistol was pointed right at Gobi.

33. "Cold Hard b.i.t.c.h"

-Jet For a second, n.o.body moved. We all just stood there, our clothes flapping like windsocks in the rushing air high above the lights of Zermatt.

Then I saw a red dot appear on Gobi's forehead, and traced it to a man in a long coat poised inside the helicopter, holding a rifle outfitted with a laser-scope, fifteen yards away. He was bald, with a long, almond-shaped face that tapered down to a trim silver-gray goatee, making him look vaguely satanic.

It took me a second to recognize him, but I made the connection soon enough. The last time I'd seen him he'd been wearing a priest's collar in the Grand Ca.n.a.l, when he'd come bursting out of the Louis Vuitton steamer trunk and opened his eyes, alive despite all the bullets that had been fired in his direction. Gobi's target, the one she'd failed to finish off. Right away I could tell that Gobi recognized him just by the subtle shift in her posture.

You should have killed him in Venice, I thought.

The man gave us both an amused glance, and in the chopper's interior lights I saw his lips tightening at the corners, like the spontaneous pucker of a time-lapse scar. I looked back at the red dot on Gobi's forehead. Counting the rifle and the pistol, she had at least two guns trained right on her, maybe more if Paula had another sniper waiting somewhere else. With the two of us standing out here exposed on the helipad, with all these mountains and rooftops around us, the idea didn't seem the least bit paranoid.

It had started snowing. White flakes began to drift down, little sugar-spun strands and helices swirling almost weightlessly through the landing lights. Lit by the rifle's laser-scope, they looked downright magical.

"Paula," I shouted over the helicopter's roar. "Where's my family?"

"They're safe," she said. "For now."

"Where?"

"You know, I was thinking maybe we should take some time apart." Her eyes flicked to Gobi. "See other people." She gave a sympathetic shrug. "It's not you, it's me."

"Whatever you say."

"Hey." Paula wrinkled her nose at me. "It was fun while it lasted, though, right?"

I glanced at Gobi. She'd turned her head so I couldn't see her expression, and even if I had, it would have been impossible to say what was going through her mind. She still had the machine gun from Erich's place, but I didn't know how much ammo she had left, and even if she was fully loaded, we were simply outgunned. She might have been able to take out one of the shooters, but not both of them, and that kevlar vest wasn't going to do any good against a headshot at fifteen yards.

"Once we're out of here with Gobi," Paula shouted, "you'll get a phone call. Your parents and your sister will be released unharmed."

"What if I don't believe you?"

"Who says you have a choice?"

She had a point. It was snowing harder now, big fat flakes drifting down from the sky, clogging my eyelashes. I brushed them away and took in a deep, throat-aching breath of cold air.

"Who's in charge now that Armitage is dead?" I asked.

That adrenalized grin came blazing back again. How had I never noticed how white her teeth were before?

"That depends," Paula said, "on who ends up with Gobi."

"What do you mean?"

Paula gazed appreciatively at Gobi. "She's a human weapon, Stormaire. The best mercenary around. One in a million. Armitage seriously underestimated her capabilities, and it cost him his life. I won't make that mistake."

"It's not like she's programmable," I said. "She's not just some machine that will do whatever you tell her."

"I think she will, once she finds out what I'm offering."

"And what's that?"