by Alex Irvine
“Report every forty-eight hours,” Mantis instructed. “Frequency-switching schedule is as before.”
“Understood.”
“You are to depart immediately. Mantis out.”
In the silence that followed, Ike leaned against the wall and considered his options.
He was posted up at the corner of Duane and Hudson, running a parallel mission to the JTF’s big push down at city hall. His task was to keep the local bad guys off the JTF’s six so they could stage in Foley Square before moving down Centre Street to City Hall Plaza. From his position, he could see all the way down Duane to the southern edge of Foley Square. Between him and the JTF force, which was running final checks before moving out at seven, the street was empty. He was listening in to their chatter over the mission frequency. Everything seemed normal.
It was normal where Ike stood, too, which was to say that the ordinary band of murderous thieves was stirring in the lower floors of the apartment building on the northeast corner, right across from where he was leaning against the wall of the Duane Park Building. They called themselves the Duane Park Family—DPF for short—and exacted tribute from any ordinary citizens they ran across. As a result of their brutality, there weren’t very many ordinary citizens anywhere near this area anymore.
JTF intel officers suspected the DPF was allied somehow with the larger and even more murderous gang currently living in city hall. That likely meant that once they heard the shooting start, they would head that way. Ike was supposed to send up a flare if that happened, and slow them down as much as he could.
The problem was, he now had a new mission. Mantis had called him into action, and he couldn’t say no.
He also didn’t want to leave the JTF force, and his fellow Division agents, open to an ambush while they were engaged with city hall. Conflicted loyalties were a bitch.
It was five minutes before seven.
Ike glanced over his shoulder at the building behind him. The ground floor was empty—looted small businesses—and above it maybe twenty stories of apartments. He’d never seen anyone go in or out.
A plan started to come together. Ike slid around the corner to the building’s main lobby door. Diagonally across the intersection, he saw some of the Family clock his presence. Perfect.
It was three minutes before seven.
Ike raised his M4 and hosed down the DPF members milling around outside the building across the intersection. Then he dropped his magazine and ducked inside the apartment lobby, snapping a new magazine into place as he sprinted past a reception desk and ducked behind it.
The plan was simple. Play cat-and-mouse with the DPF for a few minutes, get them completely focused on him, then ghost on them and call in an engagement report. That would pull them away from the action over at city hall, and also give Ike a head start on his mission for Mantis. Everybody wins, except the DPF.
The Family members still walking after his initial barrage charged across the street after him, with more coming out of the building behind them. Ike waited until they were converging at the doorway, and then he popped up and emptied another magazine. When the hammer clicked on an empty chamber, he turned and ran down a side hallway. He wasn’t worried about running into a dead end. Thanks to updated fire codes, newer buildings like this almost never had them.
Fifty feet down the hall, he had a choice of left, back toward the Hudson Street side of the building, or right, which would take him to loading docks and a fire exit. He chose right, making the turn just as bullets from the pursuing Family punched into the far wall.
The right-hand hall ran straight down to a fire exit door. But between Ike and that door were three others, all open.
And all with civilians peering out, eyes wide and terrified.
Shit, Ike thought. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone in this building.
Guns appeared in the civilians’ hands. They saw Ike’s Division gear and aimed past him as he got to the far end of the three doors, with the fire exit at his back. The civilians were firing down the hall, keeping the Family members back for the moment, but it wouldn’t last.
Ike had a decision to make. He was far outgunned, and needed elsewhere, but he didn’t want a bunch of dead civilians on his conscience.
He backed into the fire door, shoving it open. “Get out! Everyone!” he shouted. “Now!”
The civilians started to spill out of the open doors. One of them opened into a laundry room, Ike saw, another a row of connected offices. At least a dozen people came out, half of them kids. Still in the doorways, the few of them who were armed kept watch down the hall.
Ike glanced over his shoulder. The fire door opened into a small elevator atrium. On the far side was a glass door with a parking garage visible through it. “Go,” Ike urged the last of the civilians, nodding at the glass door.
The first of them put her hand on the door’s push bar . . . and the door blew out in a shower of glass as bullets from outside tore her apart.
The DPF had guessed where they were going, and gotten there before they did.
Screaming, the armed civilians charged into the atrium, firing through the door at the DPF out in the garage. Now they were in the way. Ike had no field of fire on the Family. Besides which, there were probably more of them still in the apartment lobby hall, waiting to make their move.
He looked back through the fire door and saw he was right. They were coming. Time to take drastic action. Bullets rang off the steel fire door as Ike ducked behind it. He pulled grenades from his belt and rolled them down the hall, one, two, three, then braced himself behind the door.
The three explosions were like three sharp kicks in his shoulder. He pivoted around the door and ran down the hall, passing bodies and fallen ceiling tiles. His boots crunched on broken glass as he passed the hallway juncture and dove out through a broken window on Hudson. He ran south as far as Chambers, then hooked a right.
It was eight minutes after seven. He could hear the crackle and stutter of the battle over at city hall.
Ike tapped his watch face. “This is Agent Ronson,” he panted as he ran. “Need fire support and medical, Duane and Hudson. Multiple hostiles, civilian casualties. Repeat, need fire support and medical, civilian casualties.”
He kept running until he was out in Battery Park City, then slowed to a walk. JTF comms chattered in his ear. Fully engaged, no resources available. Then ISAC pinged him a notification that a fellow Division agent was en route to Hudson and Duane.
Good luck, brother, Ike thought. Or sister.
He headed down the esplanade to the Battery Park City ferry terminal. It had been abandoned over the winter, but the JTF had reclaimed it a month back and now used it as a launch for river patrols.
He hailed the crew of a boat that was just coming in. “Need to get to Jersey,” he said, jumping aboard. “Like, now.”
Thanks to the orange circle on his watch and the matching one on his pack, they didn’t ask any questions. Ike was grateful for that.
16
AURELIO
Aurelio caught the call from Ike Ronson five minutes after he’d engaged a group of hostiles who were firing from the entrance to the Chambers Street subway station at the corner of City Hall Park. Mostly he was keeping them pinned down so the main body of the JTF force could get into place around city hall without taking fire from the rear. When he got Ronson’s distress call, Aurelio had a decision to make. The JTF force was mostly in place, but he was pretty sure some of the gang’s perimeter guards were still down in the station, around the stairwell where Aurelio couldn’t get at them . . . unless he went down and rooted them out.
The call to protect civilians was what decided him. Ronson had called from Duane Park, not even a half mile away. Aurelio held his position until the last of the main JTF force had passed Chambers Street. Then he peeled off and headed around the back of city hall along Chambe
rs, jogging up Broadway to Duane Street and keeping up the pace all the way to Duane Park. Behind him, the sounds of the battle faded into a confusion of echoes. ISAC showed him the location of the firefight where Ronson had called in: toward the back of an apartment building on the south side of the small park.
Aurelio went in, noting bodies all around the entrance. He didn’t know Ike Ronson well, but he knew Ronson could fight. All Division agents could. Putting the scene together as he went, Aurelio saw that the firefight had spread down a connecting hall that ran to the back wall of the building. There he found more bodies, and signs of explosions. Three open doors on the right-hand wall ahead of him were blackened and speckled with shrapnel. At the far end of the hall was a steel fire door, dimpled with bullet impacts.
He got to the end of the hall, glancing in each of the open rooms in turn. They were full of bedding, extra clothes, the flotsam of desperate people. The air was thick with the smell of cordite.
The fire door was almost closed, showing a two-inch gap. Aurelio could see blood on the floor in the doorway. He leaned on the door and felt it bump up against something soft and heavy. His contact-lens HUD didn’t show any other Division agents in the area. Where was Ronson? ISAC hadn’t pinged out a notification of an agent fatality.
Aurelio set his feet and leaned harder against the door. It slid open, slowly. A thick smear of blood spread along the arc it made as he cleared the doorway and stepped into a small elevator lobby with a shattered glass door hanging open on the far wall.
That was where he found the civilians Ronson had mentioned. Fourteen of them. Five men, three women.
Six children.
All dead.
Automatically Aurelio checked the time. Seven thirty-one. Ike Ronson had called in twenty-three minutes ago.
He took in the scene, trying to suppress the part of him that rebelled against seeing murdered children and keep cool long enough to understand what had happened here. Three of the adults had been armed. They were near the shattered door, cut down trying to defend the rest. The concrete floor of the parking garage beyond the door was littered with shell casings. The rest of the civilians were grouped together in the corner away from the glass door. Aurelio had pushed two of them aside when he wedged his way in.
There was no sign of Ike Ronson. Whoever had killed all these people had come in from the garage, that much was clear. But Ronson had done his fighting out in the hall. The grenade explosions and the multiple bodies ISAC tagged with the identification DPF told that story.
The DPF had pursued Ronson into the building. He had fought back. Somewhere along the way he had gotten all the civilians into the elevator lobby. Then they had died defending themselves.
“ISAC,” Aurelio said. “Pinpoint location of Agent Ronson’s distress call.”
A small hologram spawned from Aurelio’s watch face. It showed the area bounded by Hudson, Chambers, Greenwich, and Duane. A red dot blinked on Chambers just west of Hudson . . . a good five hundred feet from where Aurelio stood.
It took him a long time to be certain of what he was seeing, but Aurelio Diaz was a man who believed in evidence. And the evidence stated that Ike Ronson was nowhere near the fight when he’d called in.
That meant these fourteen civilians had died because he ran out on them.
Aurelio felt pure fury, like heat running through his face and hands. This would have been cowardice if a civilian had done it, but understandable cowardice. For a Division agent to do it was absolute treachery.
He looked down at the bodies around him. The kids could have been his kids. The adults could have been the people in the DC settlement taking care of Amelia and Ivan. They were dead because of Ike Ronson.
As of that moment, Ike Ronson was a rogue agent.
“ISAC,” Aurelio said. “Locate Agent Ike Ronson.”
There was a brief pause. Then another hologram from Aurelio’s watch face showed a bright red dot in the middle of the Hudson River, moving steadily toward the Jersey side.
That son of a bitch, Aurelio thought. He’s running.
In that moment, Aurelio decided he was going to follow.
In the next moment, ISAC’s AI voice sounded in his ear. “Warning. Identified hostiles entering the building.”
Aurelio’s HUD spread to include the entire first floor. A group of hostiles had come in the building’s front door. ISAC labeled them DPF. They must have seen him come in. Did they think he was the same agent who had run out on the civilians before?
Didn’t matter. Aurelio counted nine bogeys on the HUD, clustered together in the building lobby. If they were after him, they would come straight to the back of the building and down the hall toward the fire door. He reoriented the HUD to include part of the parking structure as well. Nothing out there. At least not yet.
As a practical consideration, the elevator lobby was a bad place to make a stand. The bodies made footing uncertain, and as long as Aurelio had to worry about more of the DPF showing up from the garage, he was potentially fighting on two fronts.
He ducked through the fire door and sidestepped into the closest open door. Kneeling in the doorway, he waited as the group of bogeys came down the hall.
He got visual on the first and put him down, three shots to center mass. A second and third target were already emerging into view as he took the first down. They brought their guns up, but Aurelio was already locked in, and they dropped right next to the first. He ejected his magazine and reloaded. Six left.
Wild gunfire sprayed down the hall. None of them knew exactly where Aurelio was, so they were just trying to pin him down. Meanwhile others would be trying to get to a better firing position, or looping around to come at him through the parking structure. Even a violent rabble had usually watched enough TV to absorb some basic tactics.
Squatting low, he hooked the G36 around the door frame and fired a burst to chase them out of the hall. Someone started screaming down the hall, but Aurelio didn’t look. He sprinted up one doorway and ducked in. It was another thirty feet or so to the juncture where the back hall met the way to the front door. Aurelio figured he probably had another minute or so before they could get around the block and into the parking structure.
When he heard the DPF’s return fire, he could tell they were still focused on the third door. Good. They hadn’t seen him. Now they thought they knew where he was, but didn’t, and he could use that against them. A grenade would come in handy here, but he was out. He’d used them all on the Chambers Street subway entrance back over by city hall.
He did have smoke, though. He popped a smoke grenade and rolled it down the hall. Cries of alarm went up as the gang members saw it. They didn’t know the difference between smoke and frag grenades.
That gave him time to go the other way, back out the fire door. He shut it behind him and tiptoed among the bodies, out through the shattered glass door into the parking structure.
The street entrance was ahead and to his right, a narrow driveway with a pedestrian door next to it. Aurelio cut diagonally across the space, giving him a good angle on part of the street outside. He pressed against a concrete pillar and watched, glancing back when he heard bullets smacking into the fire door. The DPF inside were still firing blindly. Sooner or later they would come out, but Aurelio’s plan was to be somewhere else by then.
There they were. Three of them, jogging into the garage driveway. They slowed and approached the elevator lobby door. “Fucker’s never going to see us coming,” one of them gloated.
“He will if you don’t shut up,” another said.
Aurelio shifted around the pillar. They were forty feet away, holding still while they decided how to go into the lobby. A long burst from the G36, belt-high, dropped all three before they had a chance to turn around.
Now it was time to go. Let the others come out and see what had happened . . .
No. Th
en they were going to think he was the same agent who had run out on those kids. Aurelio couldn’t live with that. He didn’t want them spreading the word that a Division agent had betrayed his pledge. Later Aurelio would settle things with Ike Ronson personally, but right now he had the reputation of the Strategic Homeland Division and all of its agents weighing on him. He waited.
A couple of minutes later, the fire door opened. A man peered through. Aurelio waited. The man pushed the door farther open, scanning the garage from the glass doorway. Holding the door, he waited for his pal to come through. Counting in his head, Aurelio thought that made nine. Six killed, one wounded, two at the door. He called up the combat HUD again and saw that ISAC wasn’t showing any more hostiles in the area.
All right, then. Aurelio switched to single shot. He sighted on the man holding the door open and squeezed off a shot. Blood spattered the door frame and the target went down. The second man ducked, glancing in Aurelio’s direction. That’s right, Aurelio thought. See me. You go through this city killing children, I’m the last thing you’re ever going to see.
He pulled the trigger again.
17
VIOLET
Two days after the attack at the pond, a JTF patrol showed up at the Castle to bring Wylie home. Noah and Junie were with him. It had been a strange time around the Castle without Junie. Mike limped around and did the best he could to keep things organized, but he didn’t have much energy so the kids were pretty much on their own.
Violet ran to greet her, and then stepped back as Noah and Wylie came in. Wylie looked pale, but he was walking on his own. “You okay?” Violet asked him. It sounded kind of dumb and obvious when she said it, but it was the only thing she could think of.
He nodded and sat down in a big chair off to one side of the big entry room on the first floor. “Yeah, I’m feeling better. Wasn’t so good the first day.”
