The man dropped. Wales raced on up the steps, hoping that the brief burst of his Venn gun would not have been heard in the rocket-roar.
But a door above swung open, and light spilled out from inside the base of the giant Statue. Two men appeared in the doorway, drawing pistols.
"What—" one cried.
Wales fired, a prolonged burst. He had no intention whatever of taking extra risks by sparing life. These men, and the men they worked for, would have taken the lives of millions. There was no mercy in him.
One of the two in the doorway fell. The other, blood welling from his shoulder, tried to shift his pistol to his other hand.
Wales, racing up to them, heard pounding footsteps inside the statue, and he took no time to shoot again. He clubbed the Venn gun's barrel down over the head of the wounded man, and sprang over him and the dead one in the doorway, right into the base of the lofty figure.
A light burned in here. He ran to the foot of the winding stair that led upward. Frantic feet running up above him made reverberating echoes. He glimpsed a pair of legs on the stair—
He shot, and the legs crumpled and a man came sliding back down the stair, screaming and trying to aim his gun. Wales triggered again, and when the scream of richocheting steel and the echoes of gunfire died away, there was silence unbroken.
He started running up the stair. In a minute he heard Martha's voice calling, from down beneath.
"Jay!"