Unknown 9 Layton Green (reading e books TXT) 📖

She was a wolf, not a lamb, and she preferred to run at night.

Because of his profession, Professor Cardona had special access to the Alhambra. Late that evening, following his instructions, Zawadi entered the Alhambra complex with one of the night tours before slipping into a room at the Palacios Nazaries, the Moorish royal palace. At the stroke of midnight, once the guards cleared the grounds, she would leave the room and meet the professor in the same courtyard in which he and Dr. Corwin had spoken.

A secret midnight rendezvous. Classic Society behavior.

As the minutes ticked by on an ornate grandfather clock, Zawadi sat on an ivory-studded chair and contemplated the beauty and symmetry of the vaulted honeycombed ceiling. The room was of modest size for the palace. It had probably belonged to a member of the sultan’s harem.

At midnight, once silence encased the Alhambra, Zawadi slipped into the corridor and made her way to the arcade surrounding the famed Court of the Lions. The moonlit plaza was an exquisite sight. A forest of marble pillars, ornamented with delicate filigree tracery and Arabic calligraphy, supported the concentric archways of the arcade.

The courtyard stretched over a hundred feet long and sixty feet wide. An alabaster fountain guarded by marble lions was situated at the intersection of two barren channels, part of a hydraulic system that had once carried water throughout the palace. Zawadi was no scholar, but she knew that every inch of the Alhambra was rife with symbolism and meaning, including this courtyard: the spacing of columns and arches set according to the golden ratio; the channels of water symbolizing the rivers of paradise; the gorgeous fountain meant to evoke the heavenly garden of Islam.

Moonlight bathed the courtyard tiles. Zawadi stayed close to the pillars while she paced the perimeter, scanning for the professor. As a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of her left boot, an annoyance that broke her concentration for a split second, she heard a voice call out in the darkness.

“Looking for someone?”

Zawadi spun to her left. The voice did not belong to an aging Spanish professor, but to someone much younger, and with a Chinese accent.

By the light of the moon, she saw a muscular man in his late twenties, dressed in jeans and a motorcycle jacket, leaning against a column on the opposite side of the courtyard. Though his stance appeared nonchalant, she noticed one hand poised near his pocket and the other behind his back. If Zawadi made a sudden move for her gun, he could easily draw his weapon and slip behind the pillar, or escape into the hidden depths of an alcove.

As could she—which was exactly why she had chosen that spot and not advanced into the courtyard.

“I’m afraid the professor won’t make it tonight,” he said. “Or any other night. His last supper did not agree with him.”

Had they been watching the professor? Was I not careful enough?

Her eyes on her enemy the entire time, Zawadi inched her left hand toward the back of her leather pants, deciding to test his awareness.

“If you draw your weapon,” he said evenly, “my snipers will gun you down.”

“Why haven’t they already?”

“You know why.”

Zawadi did indeed. Though not an insider, her close connection to Dr. Corwin, as well as her tactical knowledge of dozens of Society missions, made her an invaluable prisoner.

Tranquilizer darts did not fare well with ballistic clothing, which they would know. They would have to take her another way. Still, if she tried to escape, she had no doubt they would shoot her and hope to avoid a fatal wound.

“Do you know who I am?” the man asked.

She quickly ran through her mental catalogue of top Ascendant assassins. “Not really,” she lied, because she could tell he thrived on ego.

He introduced himself, though she already knew he and Daiyu were a Chinese brother-and-sister team said to be rising quickly through the ranks of the enemy. Jianyu was the cold-blooded killer, while Daiyu, a computer and technology savant, was his eyes and ears. Together they had infiltrated some of the most impervious Society strongholds.

Zawadi had to contend not only with Jianyu and whomever he had brought to the Alhambra, but with an enemy watching from afar.

“I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you,” he said.

As they spoke, Zawadi studied the darkness, listening and smelling and sensing, recalling a mental image of the layout of the palace grounds. Of course, Jianyu was using the dialogue to stall while his associates moved into place, and Zawadi thought she knew where the trap was being laid. “Why is that?”

“Because I would like to personally take Dr. Corwin’s legendary bodyguard off the board.”

“An ego trip is a journey to nowhere.”

“Not ego. Career advancement.”

“You should have shot me when you had the chance,” she said.

“You wouldn’t have agreed to meet in a place that a sniper could easily reach, and you’ve protected your position with civilian targets since we spotted you on the ascent. And you obviously chose a different hiding place in the palace to wait than the one in the message we intercepted, or your journey would have ended there.”

Zawadi smiled in the darkness. “I see you’ve done your homework.”

In an abundance of caution, she had indeed chosen a different room in the palace, in an opposite wing.

“My homework also tells me you’ll refuse to surrender,” Jianyu said.

She noticed he had shifted his position ever so slightly, lowering his center of gravity, readying for action. “You’re a good boy for doing your studies, but it’s time to return to school.”

He chuckled. “Is that so?”

Before he could react, Zawadi stepped behind the marble pillar, reached into her sleeve for a handful of pellets that were in fact tiny pressurized canisters, and threw them on the tiles at her feet. A column of gray smoke exploded around the pillar, obscuring her from view in a twenty-foot radius that expanded rapidly.

Instead of racing back into the palace through one of the smoke-covered