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Eye of the Archangel
A Mallory & Morse Novel of Espionage
By Forrest DeVoe Jr. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2007 Forrest DeVoe Jr.
All right reserved. ISBN: 9780060723804
Chapter One
Your Lucky Day
The South African sunlight grew thick with dust motes, angling through the tall windows, and these swirled like troubled water as the sentry fell through them and bounced to a stop at Laura Morse's feet. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open. He looked as if he were singing hymns. His pistol slid from its holster and clacked on the plank floor. He should at least have been able to get his gun out, Laura thought disapprovingly. When they haven't been properly trained, it makes you feel like such a bully. She dropped to one knee and touched a slim hand to the guard's throat to check his pulse. The gesture was not so different from the one she'd just used to disable him. They were seventy kilometers east of Johannesburg, and it was the beginning of May, the middle of South Africa's autumn, but it was stifling hot in the guardhouse and the air was close and filled with the bookish scent of old, heated wood.
A lean, gray-haired, gray-eyed man stepped through the door behind her, closed it, and went over to the microphone on the guard's desk. He flicked it off and glanced down at the fallen man. "You always make the boys cry," he murmured.
"Only when they takeliberties," Laura said.
"Don't have to tell me that, hon," Jack Mallory said ruefully, and looked again at the guard on the floor, this time with a touch of fellow feeling. He and Laurie had been partners nearly as long as they'd been field operatives for the Consultancy, and once or twice he'd tried making a pass at her. He supposed he was lucky not to have gotten what the guard got. "Well, we're clear back there. We got the woods and the whole back lawn to ourselves." He pivoted easily on his heels, scanning the guardhouse and the sun-bleached slope outside—he might have been surveying the guests at a garden party—and began searching the small hexagonal room, sketching a knot in the air with one forefinger as he opened the first cabinet. In response, Laura took two short lengths of nylon rope from her jumpsuit and began binding the guard's hands and feet. Her narrow face was creased with concentration. She had never been good with knots.
Not quite forty seconds later, Mallory let out a pleased grunt and set a loose-leaf binder on the guard's desk. Inside it were a handful of mimeographed pages in acetate sleeves. Laura examined them from over Mallory's shoulder, staying well back from the windows so that anyone looking down the slope at the guardhouse would see a solitary armed man, as expected, and not a man and a thin, wheat-blonde young woman in a snug gray unitard. The first page was a typewritten schedule. They examined it and simultaneously checked their watches, but the unconscious sentry wasn't due to be relieved for nearly forty minutes. One way or the other, it would all be over by then. The next page was a circuit diagram of the big house up the hill, which Laura folded neatly and tucked into a pouch at her hip, and the third was the house's floor plan. Last was a map of the entire estate. Mallory detached this and set it next to the floor plan, and they studied it together, Laura with mounting dismay.
"They got the hillside pretty well covered up from any of these windows along here," Mallory remarked. "They might not have guys at all of 'em, but they ought to have a guy at at least one of 'em. Guess we'll use the tunnel, like we said. Thank God they got one, anyway. Been kind of embarrassing if Analysis got that one wrong."
"Can't we circle through the woods and do the south wing?" Laura said. Her voice was the usual Boston Brahmin monotone, and only someone who knew her as well as Mallory did would have heard the apprehension in it.
Mallory shook his head. "You saw those woods. Maybe in midsummer. Not now."
Laura nodded. Perhaps, she thought, it'll be a big tunnel. Like a subway. If it's not some little rabbit warren, where you feel you've been buried alive . . .
"It'll be fine," Mallory said, and patted her shoulder.
Moving together as if they'd rehearsed it, they took the guard by the shoulders and knees and shifted him to the edge of the little room. A hatch had been set into the center of the hexagonal floor. Mallory slipped a small high-powered flashlight from a pouch on his thigh, flicked it on, and drew his Browning. He positioned himself before the hatch and nodded to Laura; as she pulled it open, he swept the opening with flashlight and gun, then leapt lightly down. When entering strange and possibly booby-trapped tunnels, gentlemen always go first. Laura's muscles tightened as Mallory's feet struck the invisible earth below, but silence followed; no blast from a buried charge, no hiss from a tightening trip-wire. In a moment she heard him whisper, "Clear."
Then, "Little snug."
Her stomach grew chilly. She switched on her own flashlight, followed her partner through the hatch, and pulled it shut.
It was worse than Laura had feared. Whoever had built the access tunnels between the big house and its guard posts hadn't wanted to shift any more dirt than absolutely necessary. The tunnel was barely two feet wide, and the ceiling so low that it almost brushed her spine as she crawled forward on hands and knees. Damp, splintery planks held back the earth above and around them, soft and bowed with age, half-slimy to the touch. The air was thick with mildew. It was, she knew, a bad place for Jack. The Consultancy's most senior agent was noted for fearlessness, but there is no fearlessness among intelligent men, only the mastery of fear, and Laura knew Mallory had always been prey to a . . .
Continues...
Excerpted from Eye of the Archangel by Forrest DeVoe Jr. Copyright © 2007 by Forrest DeVoe Jr.. Excerpted by permission.
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