The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  But he was still a part of what was going on, and he was hiding something.

  Just before they left, he asked, “When was the last time you talked to your superior?”

  “You mean the Aerie?”

  “No, that’s the field office. I mean Hofstadter, the man you report to now.”

  How the hell did Frey know that? “The week before my vacation.”

  “In person?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he seem . . .” Frey seemed to search for the word. “Worried? Preoccupied?”

  She thought back, but the only image she came back with was the picture of Hofstadter smiling to himself as he told her about her upcoming vacation. The plump German economist telling her how much she’d earned this, while all the time he seemed to be laughing at some private joke. She told Frey.

  Frey’s reaction was another subvocalization. “I should never’ve gone on vacation.”

  It had been five minutes, and Frey led her out of the apartment. He called to the elevator, “Down.”

  She had to confront him. She backed away from him, confident she could draw her gun faster if shit happened.

  “Doesn’t you being here, within a few blocks of me, strain coincidence?”

  Frey seemed unconcerned. He remained facing the elevator door, tapping his foot. “The Agency tries to spread their agents around, but I’m on vacation. If I were on duty, I wouldn’t be anywhere around—”

  “I’m on vacation.” Evi backed a little farther down the hall. There was an emergency exit to her immediate right, next to the bank of elevators.

  Frey stopped talking.

  “They hit me in my new penthouse—”

  Frey turned to face her. “I’ll clear this up when we get to the safe house.”

  Evi began to reach for the door.

  Frey took a step toward her. “I need your help—”

  The elevator doors opened, releasing the overpowering smell of human blood.

  Frey turned toward the elevator and said, “Oh, shit!”

  Evi dived at the door to the stairs; screaming at Frey to run. Not because of the smell of blood, but because the lone occupant of the elevator wore a familiar face.

  Somehow the peeper had survived.

  Chapter 4

  Evi was on overdrive, rolling out into the stairwell to the sound of gunfire. She was still figuring out what she had seen.

  The peeper had been in the elevator, wearing a blood-soaked trenchcoat. As the elevator doors opened, he had swung a Vindhya 10-Auto out from under his coat.

  The Vind Auto was Indian make, a ten millimeter submachine gun. It could empty a fifty-round clip in under two seconds. No one made a silencer for it.

  She never saw Frey move. He was a long time removed from the field. He had long ago been promoted to command and control. High enough up in the Agency to be far removed from the danger. His reaction was too slow, much too slow.

  The fire door closed behind her, muffling the jackhammer spray of the Vind. She concentrated on running as fast as she could while pulling the Mishkov out.

  She started going down, but she could hear boots on the concrete steps below her. She could smell at least one canine.

  Damn it.

  She started running up the stairs.

  She stayed close to the wall and made five floors before she heard the peeper explode into the stairwell, yelling in Arabic. The canine was running after her. That was bad. The Afghani dogs were fast, faster than most other moreaus, as fast as Evi. She’d have trouble outdistancing one even without the bruised muscle on her calf.

  She could see the shadow of the canine four floors down.

  Ten more floors and she looked again. The canine’s shadow was three floors away. The dog was gaining.

  How the hell did they find her?

  Frey turning didn’t make sense. If he was working for the black hats, his own team just blew him away.

  Only the canine was following her now. She couldn’t hear the peeper, and she should have been able to smell him, covered in blood as he was. The peeper must be trying to get back on the elevator, to get above her and cut off her escape. Her options were rapidly diminishing. The doors out of the stairwell weren’t offering much, the halls had no cover, no doors that opened into anything but dead ends. There was a good chance that the canine would catch up.

  The peeper was trying to be quiet, but she heard the pneumatic hiss of a door on the thirtieth floor. The canine was closing on her; it was only two floors away by the sound and the smell, and she had no time to stop and think.

  She could hear the peeper start down the stairwell.

  She rounded a landing on the twenty-eighth floor and faced the peeper. From his expression, he didn’t expect her to be this high up in the building yet. The echo of her Mishkov set the iron handrail resonating. She had been aiming at the peeper’s head. She didn’t want him getting up again.

  She had to be satisfied with hitting him in the neck, under the adam’s apple.

  She was already passing the peeper before he fully realized he’d been shot. He was slumping against the wall, clutching his throat. As she passed him, she hooked her left hand under an armpit and pushed him down the stairs. She hoped to give the canine some second thoughts.

  On the fortieth floor, the stairwell terminated in a solid red fire door.

  She hoped they didn’t have people on the roof.

  She slammed through the door, setting off the fire alarms. She was getting sick of the sound of sirens.

  She emerged on a flagstone terrace overlooking Central Park. She could hear the canine behind her, only a couple of floors away. The roof was flat with no cover for fifteen meters in any direction. Empty pool, tennis court, penthouse on the other end of the roof that she couldn’t make before the canine drew a bead on her.

  “Shit.” The curse came out in an uncharacteristic puff of fog. She was pushing the edge of her endurance. The canine was going to have to be slowed, somehow.

  Her left hand shot into her backpack and withdrew another grenade. She pulled the pin and tossed it down the stairs. She wished she had another frag grenade. In her situation it was common to wish for everything from a minigun to tactical air support. For now, tear gas would have to do.

  She slammed the fire door shut while the grenade was still in the air. What now? The dog was still just going to stumble up to the other side of the door. It was only a matter of seconds.

  Evi pulled the barrel extension for the Mishkov out of its thigh holster and did her best to wedge it between the door and the jamb. It didn’t want to go. She forced it and heard the screech of bending metal.

  Then she ran like hell toward the penthouse.

  She had only gotten three meters before she heard pounding on the other side of the door, but the door stayed shut. If she was lucky it would give her enough time to get into the house and behind something.

  She rounded the end of the empty swimming pool and saw someone moving behind the French doors of the penthouse. He was in his mid-thirties, wearing an expensive-looking robe. He had the door halfway open by the time he noticed her running at him.

  She reached the door and dived through the gap, tackling him. At the same time, there was the sound of tearing metal back by the fire door. Evi felt microscopic wisps of tear gas rip at her sinuses.

  She had her arms wrapped around the civilian as the back of his legs hit a low-slung couch. They both tumbled over it and into a sunken living room that was the twin of Frey’s. The canine opened fire as they hit the ground. The windows ripped apart behind them, and the couch started shaking from multiple impacts. She could tell the shots were going wild. Even with only a few seconds of exposure to the gas, the dog would be in sad shape.

  She was thankful that the canine mercs had the habit of spraying their weapons. She waited unt
il the dog swept his fire past the couch. When she heard windows tearing way off to her left, she whipped off her sunglasses, popped up, and braced the Mishkov on the back of the couch.

  The tear gas was invisible to ultraviolet.

  She took a second to aim.

  The Mishkov barked once. The canine’s head jerked up and to the left, as if someone had just cracked its neck like a whip. The dog fell backward, its Mitsubishi continuing to fire uselessly. The dog’s body followed the motion of its neck, turning to the left and falling into a heap. Its right leg jerked, once.

  The Mitsubishi stopped firing.

  Evi waited for another target, but for now it seemed that the dog was it.

  A sudden breeze carried away the tear gas. It brought with it the sounds of sirens and the smell of the East River. The sky to the east was beginning to lighten with the coming dawn. The light did nothing to lift the chill in the air.

  It was twenty after six.

  Underneath her a voice spoke in a very restrained monotone. “What do you want?”

  She looked down at the civilian and revised her original age estimate. He was a well-preserved forty, maybe forty-five. His hair was colored, but not his mustache, and he kept himself in shape. She figured him as a veep for some corporation or other. A fairly important one, she thought. She could read the guy’s expression and tell that he’d been in at least one exec terrorism-hostage workshop. He was following the numbers on how not to get yourself killed. She admired the guy’s self-control. She could smell that he was on the verge of a panic attack.

  She replaced her sunglasses and got off. She kept the Mishkov aimed at him as she backed away. “Get up.”

  He slowly got to his feet. The hostage training showed. No sudden moves, and he kept his hands in sight without being told. He didn’t even move to close the front of his robe. Evi gave him high marks. In some situations, modesty could get you killed.

  “Now what?” The same monotone, but she heard the fear resonate in the man’s voice. She was pretty sure this guy expected to die.

  “Do you have an aircar parked up here?” If he was really a veep, it was a reasonable expectation.

  He nodded. The air was cold from the broken windows, but he was sweating.

  “Company car or private?”

  “Private . . . a Ford Peregrine.”

  The sirens were becoming louder. She wanted to go over the canine’s body, but there wasn’t going to be enough time to find out anything new. The sooner she got out of here the better. “Well, I am afraid that I am going to have to trouble you for a lift.”

  • • •

  The Ford was a luxury sedan. Any aircar is a luxury item by definition. It had oversized leather seats, vat-grown wood paneling, and a nearly soundproof cab. Evi sat in the rear seat, concentrating on covering the veep with the Mishkov. The Peregrine slid into the noncommercial air corridor without any squawks over the vehicle comm, so she assumed that her veep hostage hadn’t done anything stupid.

  Once they hit two-hundred klicks per, shooting over Manhattan, he finally spoke. “Where are we going?”

  “You have an office and the codes to land there, correct?”

  He nodded. “Security will call the police. I can’t prevent that.”

  The veep seemed to be calming down. That was good. She would prefer to avoid civilian casualties. “Just land. The rest is my problem.”

  The Peregrine slowed and started a slow turn toward Brooklyn. For the first time some emotion showed in his voice. “Do you know who I am?”

  Evi shook her head. “You’re someone who needs to take a humility pill.”

  The Ford slowed and started descending toward the blue chrome obelisk of the Nyogi tower just as a sliver of molten orange sunlight started slicing across the eastern horizon. The aircar slid in on a preprogrammed approach and landed three levels down on the topside parking garage. No welcoming committee, and practically no cars either.

  “Don’t kill the engine, just open the canopy and get out.”

  He got out and started shivering immediately as the wind whipped his robe around. He was four hundred meters up in the open air with nothing but a silk bathrobe. She felt a little sympathy, but not much. In about ten minutes, his problems would be over. Evi had a feeling that things were just starting for her.

  “Open the hood.”

  “But the engine—”

  “Open it.” He might be speaking more freely, but he remembered who had the gun. Once the hood was open, she motioned him away from the car and got out of the back seat. Her bruised leg was thankful, even though she had only spent ten minutes in the back.

  She moved around to the front. With the hood up, she had to raise her voice to be heard over the flywheel. “Don’t move.”

  He didn’t.

  She looked next to the flywheel housing. There was no mistaking the bright orange plastic that housed the transponder and the flight recorder. She turned the Mishkov around in her hand. Then she slammed the butt of the gun on one corner of the sealed plastic box. The shock of the impact started a throbbing in her right shoulder. She could hear a slight pop over the whine of the flywheel.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the veep wince.

  She leaned over and saw a stress fracture halfway around the heat seal of the lid.

  She braced herself and brought the butt of the Mishkov down on the opposite corner.

  There was a much louder pop, and the slight hiss of pressure equalizing.

  She holstered the Mishkov and pried off the lid of the housing. Once it was removed, she was greeted with a black and fluorescent-yellow warning label that announced that unauthorized tampering was a felony. The label adorned the lid of a brushed-gray metal box. Four bolts held the lid on. Each was sealed with a thin coat of clear plastic.

  Evi looked at her gloves and wished she had a wrench.

  She gave the veep a cautioning look as she grabbed a bolt in either hand and turned. The plastic seal made an audible tearing sound, even over the flywheel. It took her nearly three minutes to loosen all four. Under the lid there were two panels. Red for the transponder, green for the flight recorder.

  Her gloves were shredded, so she took them off. Then she reached in and pulled the handle on the red panel. It slid out easily, along with the attached circuit board. The engine died immediately.

  She slammed the transponder unit on the concrete of a neighboring parking space. The board shattered with the slight smell of ceramic dust. She followed with the flight recorder. Electronic shrapnel went everywhere. She picked a small wire out of the wasted electronics.

  When she reached in and jumped the socket for the transponder, there was an obliging spark and the engine resumed operation.

  She turned around to face the veep. “Go.”

  He backed away slowly. He seemed unsure if he was getting away that easily.

  “Go, call the cops before someone else calls you.”

  He could take a hint. He made for the elevators.

  She slammed the hood shut and jumped into the cockpit. Five minutes seemed an inordinate amount of time to spend hot-wiring a car. But at least now, without a transponder, someone would have trouble tracing her movements.

  Evi lowered the canopy and engaged the fans. The Ford obliged and slid out into the onrushing sunrise.

  Manhattan unfolded beneath her and she dropped down between the skyscrapers. Illegally low, but not low enough to draw attention. She was safe, for a moment.

  However, without a transponder, if she hit either river, NYC Air Traffic Control radar would tag her like a signal flare. She didn’t want to mix it up with the NYPD. She was committing a dozen felonies by being airborne in this thing.

  A cloudy-white dawn light was catching the tops of the skyscrapers around her.

  She couldn’t believe what had happened
to her. It still made no sense. A sniper and the merc team?

  Wait a minute . . .

  The realization struck her so forcefully that she shot by the U.N. Building and had to pull a tight turn to avoid shooting over the East River.

  The mercs didn’t want her dead. They were trying to take her alive. They went in when she was most vulnerable, and the overkill made sense if they were aiming to take her without a fight. None of the dogs fired at her, except in self-defense.

  The guy with, the doberman paused to talk when he should have shot her. And what he said, asking if she would go quietly, had more than one interpretation.

  Abdel reminded her that the sniper was trying to kill her.

  She turned left around one of the cranes disassembling the Chrysler Building. Scaffolding shot by underneath her as she flew through where the eightieth floor used to be.

  Did the sniper necessarily have anything to do with the mercs?

  Two separate hits, simultaneously, was as bizarre a coincidence as Frey coming out of nowhere to save her. Unless they were somehow related.

  “What if the mercs wanted to take me alive, and, for some reason, the people running the sniper didn’t want that to happen?” she asked as she pulled a leisurely loop over Union Square.

  That would make sense if the sniper’s timing was dictated by the mercs’ operation. She had just returned from vacation, and this had been her first vulnerable moment.

  That still didn’t explain Frey.

  Enough looping around the city. No one was following her, and the longer she stayed in the car the more likely a cop would tag her. She descended toward a parking garage near Times Square.

  She’d cook the autopilot and send the car out over the ocean. Then she’d go to ground somewhere and call in to the Agency herself.

  Chapter 5

  It was bad. Evi was only sixteen, and she had never felt so alone. She was on the wrong side of the front, and somehow she had lost her team. She hugged a crag of desert rock, and less than fifty meters away she could see an endless column of moving armor. According to the briefing, it wasn’t supposed to be there. She and the rest of her team were supposed to take out a Jordanian observation post, preparatory to an air strike on a few small units of infantry.