Echo of the Reich Read Online Free PDF

something that told them that the man they were looking at was more than capable of matching them blow for blow and that, whatever they started, he would be quite capable of finishing.
    And as they stared at him, Cross’s two companions walked across to the table and flanked him, one standing either side of him. The conversations in the bar died away again, as the locals switched their attention to the silent tableau in their midst. After a few seconds, the biggest of the three men in front of Cross shrugged, then turned round and walked away, the other two following him.
    As Cross sat down at the table, his two companions looked at each other, and one of them nodded. Then they both strode across to the bar to order a round of drinks. Pints, obviously.
    “Time for introductions, I suppose,” the man who’d bought the drinks said, after taking a sip of his beer. “My name’s Charlie Williams, and my mate here’s called John Eaton. Is your name really Alex Cross?”
    The third man shook his head. “No,” he said, “but I’ve got a very good reason for using an alias, so if it’s okay with you two—in fact, even if it isn’t okay with you—I’m sticking with it.”
    “We can live with that. So you’re not happy about the Olympics either?”
    “I don’t give a toss about the bloody Olympics. That’s just a good target. I’ve got my own reasons for doing what I do.”
    “And they are…?”
    “Personal, mate, that’s what they are. Let’s just say I was shat upon from a great height, just for trying to do my bloody job, and this is one way of getting some kind of payback.”
    Williams nodded. “Okay. So you’ve got a grudge against authority. But we couldn’t help overhearing what that young copper said about you. Were you really targeting the hockey stadium?”
    Cross took a sip of his beer and grinned at him. “To be perfectly honest with you, I had no idea what was on the other side of the fence, except that it was a part of the Olympic complex. That was good enough for me.”
    “And what were you going to do once you’d broken in? That’s stadium’s finished, as far as we know.”
    “The usual. Break some windows, smash up anything I could, spray a few slogans on the walls. I know I can’t do anything to stop these Games from going ahead—there’s nothing one person can do about an operation as big as this—but I wanted to hit out, do some damage.”
    Cross took a swallow of his beer and then looked sharply at Williams.
    “So what were you picked up for?” he asked.
    Williams smiled briefly. “Much the same as you, actually,” he replied, “with one big difference. You said it yourself. There’s bugger all one man can do, but it’s completely different if you’re part of an organized group.”
    “So there’s more than just the two of you?”
    “Exactly. We were just a diversion, something to keep the coppers on their toes and chasing us, while the rest ofour people got inside a completely different part of the site, and set to work doing some really serious damage.”
    “Like what?” Cross asked.
    “You’ll read about it in the papers tomorrow,” Eaton interjected. “And that’s the other thing you’ve been doing wrong. There’s no point in breaking a window or spraying a wall. They just get the glaziers in the next day and replace the glass, or use industrial cleaner to remove the paint. It’s just a nuisance—hardly slows them down at all. So what we do is target the equipment. We hit the bulldozers and the cranes and generators, all that kind of stuff. You can do a lot of damage to a diesel engine with a hammer, if you know what you’re about, and a few bags of sugar poured into a fuel tank really screws them up. That can pretty much write off an engine.”
    “And why are you doing it?”
    “There’s more than one reason why we’re involved.”
    “Yeah?” Cross looked interested.
    But Williams just shook his head and turned his attention back to his pint of