Over the PA system, as if in response to her thought, she heard, “FIRE!”
She heard the breaking of glass from the direction of the lobby and above her.
Below, the leather queen she had seen in the lobby ran into the theater. He was waving a gun, a matte-black ten-millimeter H&K Valkyrie. What she saw of his expression made her guess he was a regular customer of the rat back in the men’s room. He was screaming, “Fascist pigs! You’ll never take me back!”
He fired the gun again, at the screen.
The Pakistani dog had the most explosive orgasm in cinematic history. For a split second, the image distorted, turning upside-down and backward. Then the scene flipped inside out around the bullet hole. An arc of electricity shot out from the screen and hit a chair in the front row. The colors separated, and the screen exploded.
Evi dove to the ground too late to avoid being hit in the shoulder by a flying piece of mirror.
She slowly got back up, fully intending to shoot the nut with the Valkyrie. Unfortunately, the leather queen was nowhere to be seen. She could hear him, off somewhere else in the building, threatening to bugger any cop that came within ten feet of him.
Great.
Without the holo movie, her eyes took a moment to adjust to the dark.
By then, the fox was bolting away from the smoking wall where the screen had been, and the guy with the pants was struggling to get up off the ground. The other humans had made it out already.
Outside again, she heard “FIRE!”
She heard more breaking glass.
She began to feel the telltale sting of tear gas in her nose and eyes. Her left shoulder felt warm. She looked and saw a sliver of silver metal the length of her finger sticking out of the leather. She gritted her teeth and pulled it out of her shoulder.
The tear gas was getting worse. It was only a matter of seconds before the police stormed the building. She had no desire to fight it out with a well-trained SWAT team. At the moment she felt as though she’d have problems with a fifteen-year-old kid.
She rummaged in her pack. She had been equipped with a tear-gas grenade, and she had a mask to go with it. One of the eyepieces on the compact, black gas mask had cracked with all her running around, but the seal still looked tight. Evi took off her sunglasses and put it on.
She had one grenade left, a smoker. It gave off gas that was opaque to UV and IR. Unlike the tear gas, she wouldn’t be able to see through it. Neither would the cops if they were equipped with vision enhancement systems. If she dropped it, she might be able to slip somewhere unseen.
But where could she go?
The guy with the pants stumbled out an emergency exit. She could barely hear a cop outside order him to hit the ground with his hands in view.
She looked around the theater. The holo screen was a smoking hole in the wall smelling of charred insulation, gunpowder, and mercury. The walls were covered by heavy red velvet drapes. Tear gas was beginning to seep down from the gaps in a suspended ceiling.
The ceiling.
Evi dropped the grenade into the theater below and grabbed a handful of red velvet. There was a sharp pain from her wounded shoulder as she pulled herself up the wall. She tried to ignore it.
As she climbed, the theater filled with smoke. The dead-white smoke from her grenade hung heavy to the ground, building up like a fog bank. At the same time, the semitranslucent tear gas billowed in from the lobby and down from the ceiling. Soon she was enveloped in it.
The mask prevented the gas from becoming disabling, but it still felt like hell. It caused godawful itching all over her skin, especially her crotch. It drove daggers into the open wound in her shoulder, and her view out the cracked eyepiece was blurred and watery.
The white smoke from her grenade caught up to her and wrapped her in a gray fog. The smoke sucked up sound, but she could hear the muffled noise of the cops pouring into the lobby.
Her head bumped something. She looked up and saw a fiberglass acoustical tile, painted black. She held tightly to the drape with one hand as she pushed up on the tile. It gave, with a shower of black grime and a billow of tear gas. A fresh dagger twisted into her shoulder.
She pulled herself into the hole and pushed the tile back after her. It was a good thing she didn’t weigh much. The skeletal armature she rested her hands and knees upon was producing some ominous groans. For a while, she didn’t dare move. She just stayed still and hurt.
How long?
She could hear the cops storm in. They came in from all corners, the lobby, the fire exits, the balcony. She could tell when they hit her smoke; their movements became cautious. She could hear them talk, but between the smoke, the tile, and the mask, it was hard to make out more than a few sentences here and there.
“—ver the exits. Wait for the sm—”
“—ed and extremely dangerous—”
About half a minute, “—Bureau in five—”
The FBI? Something real big had been twigged onto her. She did a few more breathing exercises.
Where was the nut with the Valkyrie? She hadn’t heard any more gunshots.
The gas was dissipating, making it easier to breathe. A lot of the itching had stopped, but her left eye was nearly swollen shut.
“—clearing some—”
“—no sign of sus—”
The voices were becoming louder. They were on the balcony directly underneath her. The tear gas was letting up, and so, by now, was her smoke. Fortunately, she had calmed down enough that her metabolism would be cutting down on her heat signature. IR enhancers wouldn’t pick her up.
Evi started looking for an escape route.
“—back. Upper floors have cleared.” Pause, then, “None of the terrorists seen leaving the building.”
Terrorists?
“Yes, sir,” the same voice responded to something she couldn’t hear. “This is for everyone, hold your positions and wait for the Fed.”
There was grumbling from at least five sources down there.
“Orders, damn it!” The cop didn’t sound pleased. How long? Four minutes? Three?
How do you get out of a building ringed by police, in broad daylight?
Forget the building. Where could she go from here?
A light shower of plaster dust rained down on her head, accompanied by a creaking floorboard. Evi looked up at the original ceiling of the theater. There was a good reason for the suspended ceiling. The old plaster arches above her were, for the most part, crumbled and fallen away. She was looking at a study in dry rot and faulty wiring.
What was left in her pack?
Not much. Some bugging and surveillance devices, a tool kit, the peeper’s Long-Eighties, a spare barrel for the Mishkov, a med-kit and airhypo with a few dozen illegal drugs, and a military stun rod.
She pulled out the stun rod. She had carried one ever since that weird business in Cleveland, the business with the aliens. The rod measured a half-meter long, was dead black, and doubled as a billy club. It delivered a charge that would turn a hundred kilos of muscle to jelly for about fifteen seconds. She pressed the test button and a green LED winked at her.
The floorboard creaked, and more plaster filtered down.
This could work.
If you’re totally silent, if he’s not in radio contact with anyone, if you’re right and no one else is up there right now . . .
Abdel, she asked her mental voice, you got any better ideas?
Abdel didn’t.
She shouldered her pack and slowly, very slowly, raised herself into a squatting position under the creaking floorboards. She made sure to brace each foot next to one of the wires that supported the framework of the suspended ceiling. The last thing she wanted to do was try this only to end up pushing herself through in the wrong direction.
She wished she had a pair of morey ears. H
er hearing was good, but the engineers could only go so far and have the ears remain human-looking. Eyes were easier to hide.
She was relying only on her hearing to place the target, and that was very iffy. It was her one chance, and it was a slim one. She braced herself, grabbing an exposed beam with her left hand. Her fingers sank into the rotting stud that ran under the floor above her. She waited for the floorboard to creak again.
It creaked.
She brought the rod up with her right arm, putting everything she had into the swing. The rounded end of the rod hit the center of a floorboard. The board gave with an anemic crack that still ignited a shivering wave of pain all the way down her arm. The rod shredded some carpeting and kept going upward. For an agonizing half-second she feared that she had misjudged and wasn’t going to hit a damn thing.
The rod hit something and there was the telltale buzz of a discharge. She caught a whiff of charred fabric as something very solid thumped to the floor above her. More plaster rained down.
She wanted to wait to hear if there would be a reaction from other cops, but she didn’t have the time. She pushed two more floorboards up. They cracked much too loudly for her taste. She scrambled through the hole and the torn carpeting, wrenching her abused shoulder again. She bit her lip hard enough to taste blood.
She found herself in a dimly lit interior hallway. Sprawled on the cheap gray carpeting was a cop done up in riot gear; vest, gas mask, boots. The rod had hit the cop halfway up his inner thigh. The point was marked by a circular burn and a halfway-melted patch on his trousers. Evi withdrew the airhypo from her backpack as the cop showed signs of coming around.
The hypo was a high-pressure model that could shoot right through thin fabrics, which was good. Evi had no time to roll up a sleeve. The cop looked close to sitting up when Evi put the hypo against the stun mark and tranked the cop to high heaven.
No commotion, no pursuit . . .
No partners?
Shut up Abdel, it worked, didn’t it?
Evi pulled the gas mask off the cop.
The cop was a short-haired oriental woman. Even better, the cop was about Evi’s size. There wasn’t time for a complete makeover, but Evi could manage the pants and flak jacket over what she was wearing. With the cop’s gas mask she could pass at a distance. She hoped that would be all she would need.
She was rushing for dear life, pulling the stuff on, but she couldn’t avoid seeing the giant orange “FBI” on the back of the flak jacket.
The cops downstairs were still waiting for the Bureau. What was an agent doing here?
What was an agent doing up here, alone and with no backup? She had a bad feeling about that. The agent was oriental, female, about her size . . .
Evi pulled up one of the agent’s eyelids. The agent had been wearing contacts, and one had slid aside. A deep, almost iridescent, blue iris was beneath the brown contact, and there was no mistaking the reflective green retina. Evi could tell that the pupil was slitted, even when fully dilated.
Evi had always known that the Jordanian project’s technology was bought from the Japanese prior to the war. However, she had never expected to meet one of her oriental sisters. The pool of her species was so small that the agent was almost certainly a blood relative.
It was just as certain that the agent was there to make sure Evi was taken out. Evi didn’t know if she belonged with the peeper or the sniper, but it didn’t really matter right now.
She grabbed the agent’s ID. It read “A. Sukiota, Special Agent. FBI.”
“‘On loan,’ I bet,” Evi whispered.
Evi’d been “on loan” to the FBI before. There was a good chance that Sukiota belonged to the Agency.
She recalculated the dosage on the hypo and tranked Sukiota enough to keep her out of the picture for the next six hours. Then she lowered her through the hole in the floor, carefully so the cops below wouldn’t hear.
The sounds of more sirens came from outside. Must be the real FBI agents. Evi counted on a little interagency jurisdictional chaos to distract the players. Because, right now, there was no avoiding a blatant walk in the open.
She made it to the stairs, turned a corner, and almost bumped into a cop in full gear. Their gazes locked. She hoped that the jacket with the ID clipped to it would be enough. She also hoped that the cop didn’t know Sukiota . . .
Oh shit, her eyes! The cop was staring directly into her eyes. She’d forgotten about her sunglasses, and she didn’t have contacts like Sukiota.
However, the cop was just staring. He didn’t call out on his radio, he didn’t ready his weapon, he just stared.
Evi felt a wave of déjà vu crash over her. She had played FBI for the Agency before, and while in that situation it was procedure to follow the forms and pretend you were human, almost always the people you were working with figured it out. If Sukiota had been working with the NYPD for any length of time, there must already be rumors she was a frank.
It probably had yet to pass the cop’s mind that he wasn’t looking at Sukiota.
Evi hoped her mask muffled her voice enough. “Problem, officer?”
“No, none,” he said too quickly, and broke eye contact. He avoided looking at her now, keeping his eyes down toward the corridor he was watching. Better and better. Evi headed down the stairs.
Three flights she went down. She passed two more cops guarding the exits. She pretended to belong here and clamped down on the panic that was brewing inside her. The cops nodded as she passed, and she was thankful that no words were exchanged.
The stairway ended in a doorway under the marquee, to the left of the lobby exits. She looked outside and saw at least a dozen black-and-whites screwing the traffic up and down Seventh. She could pick out six snipers stationed across the street and wondered if one of them was Gabe. A half-dozen Dodge Haviers with flashers out were pulling up behind the NYPD, in some cases pulling onto the sidewalk to do so. Civilians were poking their heads out of windows, climbing onto parked cars, crowding traffic cops who were trying to keep the spectators at a reasonable distance.
Three aircars from the major NY vid news channels were hovering over Times Square, screwing the air traffic as much as the cops were screwing the ground traffic. All eyes were on the entrance of the theater, and she’d be walking out, center stage. She didn’t have much time to decide what to do next. Sukiota bought her some time and protective coloring, but she might only have a few minutes before someone found Sukiota.
She went through the pockets of Sukiota’s clothes, searching for inspiration. She came up with a small remote control with the GM logo on it. A host of buttons sat above an oval thumbpad. Where was the car?
Wait a minute.
She examined the control more closely. It belonged to a GM Maduro. A sports car like that was hard to miss, and no Maduro was parked outside.
She placed her thumb on the pad. If the car was anywhere around, the alarm should start going off. No alarm sounded. She suspected that this remote belonged to a metallic-blue Maduro that was now smoldering wreckage in a parking garage on the upper east side. Her hand clenched around the small remote control and she could hear plastic cracking as her knuckles whitened.
Somewhere, someone screamed.
She looked out at the commotion ringing the front of the theater. A knot of plainclothes NYPD was arguing with a similar knot from the FBI. They were standing, partially covered from the front of the theater by a SWAT van. They were all turning to look up, toward the marquee.
A cop to the rear, manning the police line keeping the civilians back, turned in response. The poor guy was nearly swamped by the crowd he was holding back. He was holding back a ten-foot line of potential riot all by himself.
She could hear the leather queen. He was the one screaming.
The snipers started to open fire on the marquee, and all hell broke loose.
; The lone cop who was swamped at the thinnest part of the police line took a running step, and his chest blossomed in a spray of blood. Evi couldn’t tell if it was the queen with the Valkyrie or a stray shot from the cops who were now firing unreservedly at the marquee.
The civilians moved. They were panicking. The cop who’d been shot fell over the curb, and suddenly a hundred civilians found themselves unconstrained. They wanted to go back, but there were too many of their fellows crowding behind them. They had only one direction to run.
The police line evaporated. Blue uniforms were swamped.
The leather queen either jumped or fell into the crowd.
Now or never.
Evi slipped out the door and ran for the riot and waded into the sea of leather, business suits, hard hats and fur, all the time feeling a sniper’s cross hairs focused on her back.
Chapter 7
She ditched the FBI flak jacket somewhere in the midst of the crowd of civilians, and the gas mask ended up in a waste kiosk on 42nd Street. Evi didn’t bother to retrieve the dollar or so the kiosk credited her.
The crowd returned to normal intensity by the time she reached Bryant Park. She turned off Broadway and eventually came to rest under the one remaining lucite-enclosed lion by the steps to the library. The weak noon glow from the white sky was dimming, and a few flakes were filtering down.
As she looked at the sky, three police aircars escorted a helicopter, going north, headed for the commotion up by Times Square.
She sucked in gasps of air, trying to relax, to think.
The only thing she could think about was how much her leg and her shoulder hurt.
Every instinct was calling out for backup. She needed to come in out of the cold. But there was no longer an “in” to go to. A large part of Evi’s carefully structured universe had fallen into a black abyss, and suddenly everywhere was hostile territory. It was the Axis invasion all over. She was sixteen again, cut off, abandoned.
She noted the way a few passing civilians eyed her and realized that she had better get inside somewhere and clean up. Evi looked up at the library and wondered if, like the Mishkov, the Mitsubishi in her bag was designed not to set off metal detectors.
The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2 Page 7
