Before the Dawn by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

one accomplished.
    Pulling a utility knife from a pocket, Max leaned in close to the displayed jewelry. Only one wire connected the necklace to the alarm, but she would have to work gently not to set it off.
    Blood was rushing to her head, and she could feel her face growing hot, like a flush of terrible embarrassment . . . just a little longer and everything would be fine . . . fine. . . .
    Hanging there upside down, Max wished absently that a dash of bat DNA had been added to her genetic cocktail—then maybe this stunt wouldn't make her so dizzy. Carefully scraping back the plastic coating on the wire, she exposed about two inches of gleaming brass strands, put the knife away, and pulled out a wire of her own with alligator clips at either end. Attaching the clips at both ends of the section she'd cleared, Max took out her wire cutters, slowed her breathing again, and clipped the alarm wire in the middle of the cleared section.
    She held her breath for a few seconds . . . but no alarm sounded, no lasers blasted at her, and the mines didn't go off.
    Releasing the wire from the necklace, Max gazed fondly at the huge blue stone, and for the first time all evening, a true, wide smile creased her face. She lifted the necklace—feeling a real reverence for its value, if not its history—and gave it a quick kiss . . .
    . . . then, as if her lips had done it, the alarm sounded.
    And all hell broke loose.
    “Shit,”
Max whispered, her vocabulary of “forbidden” words far greater now than she'd ever heard from Colonel Lydecker.
    The thief suddenly realized the necklace had also been resting on a pressure alarm—a security measure that had somehow not made its way into the Brood's stolen plans. The alarm siren squawked like a gaggle of angry geese, a grating, obnoxious sound Max decided she would have hated even under innocent circumstances.
    As opposed to these guilty ones. . . .
    The first laser drilled the stand the necklace had been on, and exploded it in a shower of wood and velvet, just as Max pulled herself up out of the way. Despite the mines in the floor, which were presumably now activated, choosing the lesser of bad options, she kicked her feet out of the suction cups, and dropped to the carpeting as lasers blasted holes in the room all around her.
    At least where she'd alighted, there hadn't been a mine. . . .
    Grabbing the Plexiglas shell of the exhibit, tucking it to her like a big square football, Max did a forward roll and popped to her feet just as a laser fired a blast at her face.
    She dodged left, reacting with the lightning inhuman speed bred into her, though she nonetheless felt the heat of the blast as it shot past her right cheek, and she could hear her hair sizzle as her nostrils filled with the burned smell of it.
    Leaping with all her considerable might, she flung herself onto one of the exhibit cases in the middle of the room just as another laser blast chewed the floor not far from where she'd been standing, setting off the small blast of one of the mines. They obviously weren't meant to kill, only to maim.
    That was a relief . . . she guessed. . . .
    She only had a few seconds now until the lasers would target her again. Hefting the Plexiglas box, she threw it halfway across the remaining distance toward the door. It hit, but the sound of its impact was swallowed by the explosion of another mine, and the box disintegrated, making shattering music in a cloud of black smoke.
    Leaping to the safety of the crater she'd created, Max knew all planning, any strategy, had disintegrated along with that box . . . from here on out, she'd just have to stay smart and get lucky. She ran to the door, dodging and cutting all the way. To her great surprise, she wasn't reduced to a bloody mess by another explosion—the number of mines must have been minimal, to keep the building damage down.
    She twisted the knob and found that the door had autolocked when the alarm went off—another tidbit absent from the