Chapter 18
With Max's rear end barely in the car, she dropped the clutch and all four wheels spat the stones that had assaulted Max's feet moments before. The wheels found purchase and the 22B was launched into the night.
"I told you to watch the bloody foyer!" Lara scolded as she shifted into second.
"What?!?" Max pointed towards his ears - Lara noticed a small amount of blood collecting in one.
"Foyer! FOYER!!! You were supposed to watch the FOYER?"
"You could have told Mr. Green about the secret passage from the conservatory!" Max shot back at her with equal malice.
"Conservatory?"
"What? Never mind. I doubt we're gonna catch her, not even in this - looked like she had a Katana or Ninja or something like that."
"We'll get her..."
Max was not able to ask for clarification as Lara whipped the car into a tight right-hander onto a gravel road that seemed to appear from nowhere. The back end of the car started to break loose, but a Lara gave the throttle a little jab and the rear came back into line as the weight transferred back there.
Lara hit her high-beams, which penetrated quite far in the dark, revealing a twisting gravel path that led into the woods.
"I trust you know where you're going..." Max commented as he reloaded the MP-5 and fiddled with the night vision scope.
She nodded.
Lara blasted through another tight corner, snatching the emergency brake to slide the car around the nearly one hundred eighty degree curve.
"For someone who claims to hate rally, you aren't too shabby at it..." Max stated as centripetal force shoved him towards his door.
Lara did not respond, her focus more on her driving than the ramblings of her passenger.
"So, what happened up there? I heard the shots."
"Bloody bitch got the drop on me."
"Hey, I heard that! Don't feel so bad...usually, these jerk-off bad guys send in a dozen people making more noise than the circus - you don't find too many who deal in their own dirty-work any more."
"I know, the house's security was designed around more than a single intruder."
"Problems in the past?"
"You could say that..."
Lara trailed off as the gentle left she was take became much less gentle, she let off the throttle and cut the wheel, but that only succeeded in inducing more oversteer and breaking the rear end loose. Max felt butterflies in his stomach as the car got more yaw than it was designed for and began to spin out of control.
Applying throttle quickly, Lara tried to bring the rear end back in line. Her effort was partially successful, and the car started to line back up, but not before the driver's side rear quarter-panel slapped against a tree. The two were jostled, but continued down the road.
Max opted not to bother Lara with any more questions and concentrated on their next meeting with Elder. She was a slippery one, that was sure, but Max was ready for her next tricks. They would be facing her on an open road, with few places for her to hide.
She would be his.
Without warning, the gravel path that they had been traveling on came to an abrupt end. Lara mashed the brake pedal under her bare foot, but did not turn the wheel. The Subaru came to rest in the middle of the road, blocking it.
"Are we ahead of her?" Max asked in disbelief.
"At least a quarter of a kilometer," Lara replied as she got out of the car and took cover behind the front fender.
Max was just rounding the rear of a car when a single light appeared on the horizon. It was headed in their direction at a very high rate of speed.
"Either that's Elder or the fastest damn pa-diddle I've even seen."
Lara did not respond, instead, she extended shoulder stock on both of her weapons, laying one on the hood of her car in reserve. They both raised their weapons towards the light in unison.
Just as it went out.
The noise from the motorcycle's engine let Max and Lara know that it was still bearing down on them, but the dark road would not tell them when or where it would attempt to pass. Lara began to sweep the road with fire from her machine pistol, eventually expending the magazine and swapping the weapon for its twin on the hood and continued her blind firing.
Max held back, trying to get an identifiable image in the green mess of the scope. He was also shooting left-handed this time - but there was no chance of him scoring a hit on that bike shooting from the hip - laser sight or no. He caught a glimpse of something heading for him and managed to cap off four shots before realizing that the bike was neither going to swerve nor stop.
He dove away from the car an instant before the cycle hit it. While Lara's Impreza out-weighed the bike by more than seven times, the motorcycle had been traveling at over a hundred miles an hour when the two had collided The impact was enough to spin the rear of the Subaru ninety degrees in Lara's direction.
Max was concerned for a moment, then saw that Lara too had opted to dive out of the way and was safe on the opposite side of the road. He began to stand, but found that his right leg was numb. He examined the area and saw that something had made a clean cut through his calf, and was only now starting to bleed. He applied direct pressure as Lara approached.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm gonna need some stitches, but I'll live," Max then looked about, "Where is she?"
"She took the high road," Lara replied glibly and pointed down the street.
At least a hundred yards away, Max could see a lump in the middle of the road and was quickly reminded of films he had seen in driver's education more than a decade earlier.
"No way she could have lived through that."
"I'm not in the business of taking chances..." Lara replied as she pulled her shotgun from the car.
Max stumbled to his feet, "got your back."
"You're a bloody mess, sit down," Lara gently pushed him onto the mangled trunk of her car and stated to approach the body in the road.
As her feet padded along the smooth asphalt, Lara started to sense that something was wrong. She was no stranger to those feelings, she had been party to a huge premonition upon her long approach to the Dagger of Xian, and somehow knew that there would be no friends waiting for her upon her arrival in the Antarctic.
Her approach to the fallen rider was another one of those moments.
She looked back to the car, Max sat there, butt of his weapon resting on his thigh, eyes scanning to and fro. For the first time, having him around had made Lara feel better. After seeing him covering her, the doom that her stomach was transmitting to her subsided quite a bit.
About twenty meters shy of the body, Lara's worries became even less and she started to see traces that things were not well up ahead.
When her grizzly trail to the body finally ended, Lara saw that her caution was unwarranted - this person was obviously dead before the collision had occurred. Though the deceased female form wore a helmet, there was a hole, roughly nine millimeters in diameter, through the visor. A spider-web pattern spread out from the point of impact. Both the cracks in the surface and good amount of blood made it impossible to positively identify the corpse. It was this slight doubt that made Lara undertake the nasty proposition of removing the figure's helmet.
With the headgear free, thick black hair streamed over the shoulders of the body and onto the tarmac. The young woman's undamaged eye had a decidedly Asian look to it.
This woman was not Elder.
Lara jerked open the deceased woman's backpack and retrieved the strongbox from her aquarium, then gave an angry yell and hurled the box to the side of the road. She turned and started sprinting back to where Max was waiting.
"What's wrong?" Max asked as he tightened his grip on his weapon.
"She was a bloody diversion!" Lara hissed as she spun and delivered a back pivot kick to an undamaged quarter panel on the Subaru, her bare foot denting the sheet metal.
"But you got the box back, right?"
"That box was my diversion!"
"But the secret basement..."
"The pieces were not in the basement, I had them in my office! I assumed she pinched them and was using the attic to escape."
"Why the set-up in the basement..."
"Max, you idiot - my house has to be the best known secret in the Kingdom! Everyone knows about it - didn't you ever play that stupid buggering game?"
Lara punched at the single unbroken window, shattering it and bloodying her knuckles.
"No, I didn't want to come here with preconconcieved notions. Sorry, I didn't know..."
"Well, now the pieces that I did have are now with Elder - thank you so very much!"
Lara's rage was going about unchecked, Max was not sure what to do about it as she still held a shotgun in her hands. She started to raise the weapon with the intention of shooting the car, but seemed to regain her composure.
"We'd better get back home, I might be wrong..."
