Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel Read Online Free Page B

first stone landing. Slaton heard the metallic clatter of the man’s gun skittering down the staircase. The soldier was dazed, but he was also big and strong, with the thick muscles of a weightlifter. Slaton had a more pragmatic strength, earned from ten-hour days hauling stone and mortar. He began with an elbow to the face, the crush of cartilage audible. A knee to the diaphragm hammered the air from his opponent’s lungs. The man doubled over, and a kick to his temple with a steel-toed work boot finished the job. He nearly back-flipped down the next flight of stairs, ending facedown and completely still.
    Slaton rushed down and rolled him over. The man was out cold, his breathing shallow and ragged. Slaton performed a quick pat down but found no ID, nor any weapon besides the one that had bounded down the stairwell. He also noted a lack of body armor. They’d known he would be unarmed. A comm device was clipped to the man’s belt, a unit Slaton didn’t recognize with controls labeled in English. It looked damaged and he left it where it was. Then he found something more useful—on the man’s inner bicep, a familiar tattoo. A swooping, long-winged bird of prey with a lightning bolt in its talons. Polish Special Forces—GROM.
    The breathing stopped, and in the next moment he heard a sound from below. Reinforcements had arrived. Slaton strained to see down the darkened stairwell. The man’s gun was nowhere in sight. Ignoring the burn in his thigh, he ran back out to the roof. A siren blared in the distance, the police responding. He doubled back in the direction he’d come, retracing his steps, loose stones and broken bits of tile scattering as he ran. It was a counterintuitive move, and not without risk. Mdina was a classic fortress, hundred-foot walls and gated entrances, an ideal design for repelling marauding Byzantines. Yet as with any such defense, once the bastions are breached the fortress becomes a trap.
    At the roof’s end he looked straight down and saw what he wanted—twenty feet to his left, a second-floor balcony. They were common in the otherwise flat-faced tenements, added by noblemen over the centuries as platforms from which available daughters could be advertised for marriage. Slaton slipped over the roof’s edge, hung briefly by his fingertips, and dropped ten feet to the balcony. The next fall was slightly more, and he landed on the cobbled street in a parachutist’s landing, bent knees followed by a roll onto his left hip and side. He ran east, away from the building where he imagined his pursuers were cautiously climbing stairs and clearing rooms.
    He was wrong.
    Thirty meters ahead, at the next corner in the medieval maze, he saw one of the squat twins. The man spotted him immediately, and after a frozen moment Slaton turned. The man with the glasses was behind him, reaching into a shoulder holster.
    Cut off in both directions, there was only one option—he sprinted up a staircase that led to an observation deck. The overlook was empty, no lingering tourists appreciating the glittering jewels of Malta at dusk. Slaton veered right, and where the deck ended he mounted a two-foot-wide ledge that topped the outer bastion. A sheer stone wall vaulted upward on his right, and to the left was simply a black precipice. Arms outstretched for balance, he traversed the granite ledge like a man on a high wire.
    A bend in the wall approached, and Slaton knew what lay beyond—the patio of a popular restaurant, a sea of comfortable wooden chairs and square tables under candy-striped umbrellas. He had dined there some months ago, a lazy Sunday with pasta and bread, a steaming espresso his companion afterward. He remembered looking out over the island on that bright autumn day and seeing all the way to Sicily. Now he saw only distant lights and blackness, felt a chill wind swirling.
    Rounding the bend, the restaurant was there. The place was alive: waiters scurrying beneath strings of naked bulbs, early