The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  The trapdoor was just a panel resting in the roof of the elevator. When the sixteenth floor was passing by, she silently lifted it. She looked down, and her guess was right. Two Afghanis. Their shaggy gray fur was the tip-off. Both faced forward, pointing a pair of silenced submachine guns at the chromed door.

  Their black noses began to twitch in unison and the one nearest her began to turn. Noise and stale air from the shaft were blowing in.

  She straddled the trapdoor and grabbed the sides of the opening with both hands. She heard the metal crunch in her grip, and so did the canines.

  The elevator reached floor number seventeen, and both dogs were turning around. Too slow, she thought. She shot her legs through the opening and wrapped them around one dog’s neck. She hauled the dog upward, pulling with her arms. The other one wanted to shoot, Evi knew, but his partner was in the way.

  She yanked the dog halfway through the trapdoor, giving herself some cover from dog number two. She ended up on her back on top of the elevator, the dog still thrashing. He faced her, sputtering white foam on her stomach as he whipped his head back and forth. She grabbed the dog’s muzzle and snapped it shut with her right hand. Blood and a piece of tongue splattered warmly on her thigh.

  She used the dog’s muzzle as a lever-arm to break his neck.

  She unscissored her legs and rolled to the side of the elevator. The elevator passed floor eighteen. The corpse lay folded over the lip of the trapdoor. Its head looked back over the right shoulder as if it saw something interesting at the top of the shaft. Evi spared a look to her right, down the adjoining shaft. The neighboring elevator was down by the lobby, unmoving. She swung down and dangled by the side of the elevator.

  She’d just cleared the top of the elevator when the second dog started spraying the roof with gunfire. The corpse shook like it was having a seizure, and the shaft rang with the sound of bullets ricocheting. She worried about the cables and the motor.

  The dog ceased firing, managing not to hit anything vital. Evi stationed herself across from the trapdoor, bracing her feet in the metal strut halfway up the side of the elevator’s exterior. She ducked low and listened. She heard the corpse thud back into the elevator, and suddenly the shaft was filled with the odor of gunfire. She listened. Soon she heard the canine pull himself out of the hole.

  Nineteenth floor.

  She waited a heartbeat and popped her torso over the edge. The canine was standing on top of the elevator and, predictably, looking up. She sank her right hand into the dog’s crotch and lifted him up and off balance. She held on to the roof of the elevator with her left hand as she leaned her body back into the adjoining shaft. The canine had both hands on his gun, so he didn’t have a chance. Evi felt the cables brush her hair as she flipped the dog over her. The dog tumbled headfirst down the neighboring shaft.

  Inside the elevator, she heard the doors ding open: twentieth floor.

  Below her, she heard the dog hit.

  She vaulted to the top of the elevator and dropped through the hole. Her feet squished into the blood-soaked carpet. The canine that took the header had done quite a number on his partner. The inside of the elevator was ripe with the smell of wasted canine. She hit the emergency stop before the doors could close.

  Evi gave herself fifteen seconds to examine the body.

  The dog looked a little too healthy to be from the Indian frontier, so she guessed that he had originally been involved in Persia or Turkmen. Long time since the war, and the canine had since gone independent. The vest was vintage Afghani special forces, as was most of the dog’s outfit . . .

  The gun was a different story.

  She briefly considered running into her apartment for her own gun. The windows could stand at least one slug from her sniper’s weapon. She decided she didn’t have time—yet.

  She grabbed the dog’s gun and the radio that was clipped to one ragged ear.

  She pulled herself back up through the trapdoor and maneuvered through the girders supporting the motor. She gave herself another few seconds to admire the gun. Very rare weapon, Japanese make, something that just wasn’t seen anymore. It was hard to find Japanese anything after the Pan-Asian war. Weapons were unheard of. The small black Mitsubishi SG-2 was mostly plastic and ceramics. The only metal component would be the firing pin. Even without the silencer it was quiet as the devil.

  She checked the magazine. Nine-millimeter, plastic tip, antipersonnel. No wonder the cables and the motor survived the dog’s salvo. Full clip, thirty rounds.

  The earplug she salvaged from the dog wasn’t a human model, of course, but the plastic alligator clip that held it on was serviceable. She hung it off her earlobe. The speaker ended up facing the wrong way, but her hearing was good enough to make out the peeper’s Arabic. “. . . team one, repeat, package is on top of the shaft. Over.”

  Then silence.

  She ran through the door into the room adjoining the elevator shafts. She spared half a second to wonder what happened to building security as she rounded the green sheet-metal block of the main air-conditioning unit. The room was steaming from the building’s forced-air heating system. It used the same ductwork as the air-conditioning.

  She looked at the throat-mike and the radio connected to it. The throat-mike and the strap that held it on hung loosely around her neck. The radio itself was a small box that dangled between her breasts. On the box was a small recess with a row of four dip switches. They were the only controls. She figured they were the frequency pre-sets. It was a guess. The radio wasn’t a familiar model.

  She reached into the tiny recess with a slightly pointed nail and turned on switch number two.

  “. . . three to north stairs. Team one needs help delivering the package. The package is intact and unwrapped, repeat, package is intact and unwrapped . . .”

  Long ago, she had trained her laugh to be totally silent. There were just too many things in combat that ended up striking her as funny. When the adrenaline was really cooking, she could get inappropriately giddy. She was sure that “unwrapped” must mean she was assumed to be, wrongly now, unarmed. However, unarmed or not, she certainly was unwrapped.

  She stopped laughing. Abdel, during many training sessions, had told her that her sense of humor was going to kill her.

  She set down the SG-2 and turned the bolts on one of the side panels in the massive air-conditioning unit. She was careful to avoid making undue noise. If team three was made up of more canines, their hearing was to be respected, even if the furnace in the basement would cover most of her noise. Another worry was her smell. She had been engineered to avoid, as much as possible, having a signature odor, but she was covered with grease and blood that would broadcast her location well enough. Still, she’d be descending and the air currents were upward. She’d be downwind of them most of the way.

  The green panel came loose and she lowered herself into the ancient ductwork. She shimmied down a rectangular sheet-metal aluminum tube. The hot metal burned against her skin and seemed to do its utmost to amplify her every noise. The updraft of stale furnace air made her eyes water.

  “Team three to post office, floor eighteen, no sign of package. Over.”

  “Post office to team three, team one is not responding. Assume they delivered to wrong address, you’re to pick up the package now.”

  She hit a ceiling duct on the nineteenth floor. She trusted her sense of direction to get her to the north stairwell. She squeezed into a narrow transverse duct. By the time she got behind a grille overlooking a landing in the north stairwell, she was squeezing, gun first, through a tube that was barely a meter wide by a half tall. She couldn’t back up. She had scraped her knees, hips, elbows, shoulders and nipples raw.

  She got to the grate in time to see two canines rounding the stairs. Evi could tell the dogs were smelling something odd blowing out the vents.

  She clicked the SG on f
ull auto and sprayed the dogs through the vent, aiming high. Her aim was good. The first bullet caught the closest canine in the face. The dog’s face exploded in a mist of fur, blood, and flecks of teeth and bone.

  The other one was quick. He had seen the grating on the vent fly out and started firing immediately, but his gun was pointing the wrong way. She swept her gun on the dog. The dog swept his SG toward her.

  She felt a spray of cinder block dust as the dog hit too high above the vent. That had been his only chance. She tracked her fire into the canine, plowing shots into his vest. She pulled up slightly as the dog fell back against the railing. The dog’s gun ran away, firing into the ceiling, sending down confetti of broken fiberglass acoustical tile. He flipped backward over the railing as she clipped his neck with a shot. The canine merc tumbled down the center of the stairwell.

  The peeper was going nuts over the radio. “Team three, come in, team three. Where is the package, where are you? Over.”

  Evi squeezed out of the vent with some relief. No one from team three was responding to the peeper. Only the two of them. She looked over the railing to see where the second dog had gone.

  The corpse was folded backward over the railing on the opposite balcony on the fifth floor.

  She flipped the radio to another frequency pre-set.

  “. . . two cross over to the entrance to the north stairwell. Package has not been picked up. Team four will join you at the door. Do not pick up the package until team four joins you. Package is now wrapped . . .”

  That would be at least four dogs. Five if they had an extra in the lobby. This was getting messy. She’d gotten the four so far by surprise and an edge in the skill department. Time to change tactics.

  Team four had to make it up from the lobby, and they wouldn’t engage now until the two teams linked up. She had a chance now to get her emergency pack and her own gun.

  She ran up the stairs, leaving an obvious trail of grease and blood, and slammed through the door into the hall. The hall ran between the two penthouse apartments, and it had a stairwell on either end. It was done up in mirrors and red carpeting. The elevator was open, still stopped on this floor.

  She inched up on her door and punched in the combination. It was a risk, but she doubted anyone had made it up to the apartment yet. The lock chunked open. She shouldered the door open and dove into her apartment.

  The peeper went nuts again. “The package is in the penthouse! Repeat . . .”

  A shot from the sniper tore into one of the bedroom windows next to the French doors. The polymer held, the bullet now embedded in it. Evi’s view of the sniper’s building was now distorted and prismatic.

  That was good, the sniper now had the same distorted view of her.

  She kept moving, rolling through the door to her bedroom as the sniper hit the window again. Two slugs now sat in the center of concentric rainbows. The window began to make ominous creaking noises.

  She dropped the SG and swept her arm under her bed. She came out with a black backpack.

  Evi rolled to the corner of the bedroom and huddled behind the brick pillar that supported the end of the roof. It offered cover from the sniper. Another shot plowed into the window and it finally gave. The window snapped and sprayed pieces of itself all over the bedroom.

  “. . . repeat, package is in the southwest bedroom . . .”

  She pulled her weapon out of the backpack. It was an IMI-Mishkov LR 7.62, an Israeli design for the Russian secret service. She snapped on the extension, lengthening the automatic’s barrel by nearly a meter, and flicked off the safety.

  The recoilless Mishkov only held six shots, standard 7.62 millimeter rifle cartridges. She used it because it was the longest-ranged and most accurate handgun in existence, even though the extension was so finely machined that the accuracy crapped out after only a dozen shots. As she shouldered the pack, she made a mental picture of the neighboring apartment building.

  She silently thanked the sniper for clearing the window out of the way.

  Then, with her heart in her throat, she rolled out from behind the brick pillar and aimed dead center, at the window four up and three to the left.

  “Hurry, the package is moving . . .”

  She fired at the peeper’s window. As she rolled away from her firing position, she saw the Venetian blinds close as the peeper collapsed against them. Red stains spread along the slats of the blinds. The peeper’s windows weren’t bulletproof.

  “Now maybe you’ll shut the fuck up.”

  She had a moment to hope that didn’t go out over the air.

  The sniper missed the one shot she gave him. The bullet tore into her bed. Water sprayed as far as the ceiling. She’d just decapitated the hit squad’s command and control, partially blinded them as well, and she now had the evil things she kept in the pack for emergencies.

  The sniper missed another shot. The slug embedded itself in another window.

  She rolled back out into the hall, and the sniper finished off the window behind her. It wasn’t until then that she began to feel the cuts from rolling over the broken polymer. The grease on her skin got into the cuts, making her feel like a feline moreau was using her for a scratching post. She ignored the pain and headed for the south stairway, carrying her emergency pack in one hand and the Mishkov in the other. Teams two and four would be storming up the north stairway. She didn’t have much time.

  The south stairway was concrete, functional, the mirror twin of its opposite number. On the nineteenth-floor landing there was a vent grating, exactly like the one she had shot two canines through. The duct led straight across to the other stairwell. She could even catch a whiff of the carnage there.

  The vent was barely in reach. She set down the backpack and jammed her fingers through the grating, ripping it away, taking some of the wall along with it. She put the gun back in the pack and withdrew a small round grenade. She chinned herself up, wincing as she rubbed her nipples across the whitewashed cinder block wall. She looked down the vent, a straight aluminum tube down to a small rectangle of light, maybe thirty meters. She smelled canine blood, even over the forced air from the furnace. She listened.

  They were trying for stealth, but there were just too many of them. Of course, there was the predictable pause by the corpse. There was a slight echo effect as she heard them through the duct and over the radio.

  “Team two to post office, we’ve found team three. Returned to sender . . .”

  She’d never been fond of explosives. They were messy, imprecise, and likely to involve people other than the intended target.

  Her left arm ached. She raised the grenade in her right hand, pulled the pin with her teeth and made a quick estimate. She waited exactly one and a half seconds before she threw it through the vent. She dropped and rolled immediately. Two seconds later she heard the grenade hit the aluminum vent and roll half a second before falling out the other side. It was a close thing, but the alarm she heard over the radio told her that it had gone out the vent in the opposite stairwell and not into some side passage.

  Teams two and four only had an instant to recognize the grenade.

  The sound was deafening even though she was on the other side of the building. A belch of smoke came out of the vent preceding a pressure wave that made her ears pop.

  Evi hated explosives, but sometimes they were indispensable as an equalizer.

  The canine’s radio now only broadcast static. She tried the other settings and their combinations. She only got silence. In the best case that would mean she had gotten them all. However, the safe assumption was that the team doing the hit had discovered that their communications were compromised and were running on radio silence.

  In any event, the sniper was still out there. Also, despite their precautions—taking out security, using the penthouse elevator and the fire stairs, silenced weapons—the hit was no longer a secr
et. The fire alarm was going off, half the building would have just woken up, and the top of the building must be pouring out smoke.

  Ten minutes and the NYPD, the fire department, and probably a car from the Bureau would be showing up. In twenty minutes, the Agency would take over the Bureau investigation on behalf of the Fed. In a half-hour the vids would be parroting an official statement about random moreau violence. It would be a bland, simplistic story that would fit the facts while remaining a blatant falsehood.

  She had about that long to leave the building and come in from the cold.

  She couldn’t get caught up with law enforcement. Standard procedure for covert ops: get caught doing something a little to the left of legal, even by domestic forces—especially by domestic forces—the operative gets thrown to the wolves while the Agency cooks up a cover story, usually about rogue agents.

  Sometimes she wished it had been the CIA that recruited her. They’d eat a little bad press to save an agent.

  Her time sense told her it was four fifty-two in the morning.

  Chapter 2

  What the hell was going on? It had been nearly six years since she had been involved in anything really sensitive. Why was she suddenly targeted by a sniper and a team of Afghani mercenaries?

  She was running at top speed down the south stairwell wearing only the backpack slung over her shoulder. Panic was still clouding her thinking. She wasn’t ready for this shit.

  She could hear Abdel telling her that no one was ever ready for it.

  She decided that she had a minute, maybe a minute and a half, before the civilians heeded the fire alarms and started filling the stairwells. When she hit floor number seventeen, she left the stairwell and jogged down the hall. She could hear the civilians waking up behind their doors. In a few seconds, doors would begin to open.

  She passed an intersecting corridor and saw an old man, forty-five, gray hair, towel around his waist. He wasn’t looking in her direction. She smelled sweat, musk, and someone else in the room behind him. Then she’d passed the intersection.