by Sean Black
‘Yeah. Hang on.’
Ty pulled a Mini-Mag from his belt and rotated the end ring. He shone it down the tunnel, but the beam died ten yards out.
‘Have to do,’ said Lock, with a complete lack of conviction.
Ty lowered the beam so the light pooled at their feet, just enough so they could pick their way over the rails and assorted debris.
Lock glanced back over his shoulder as voices echoed behind them. Reinforcements. Four Transit Authority cops. No bio-suits. Their courage not in question, their judgement less so.
The beam from one of their flashlights caught Lock flush in the eyes. He put his hand up. The cop on point motioned to his colleague to lower it. ‘Jesus, put that damn thing down.’
Ty jogged back to liaise. ‘You guys should have bio-suits on if you’re gonna be down here.’
‘Yours must be invisible,’ said the cop with the flashlight.
‘Our situation’s a little different.’
‘How so?’
‘We’ve both already been exposed,’ Ty told them.
Two of the cops took a step back. The cop with the flashlight made a point of standing his ground. ‘We had a fellow officer killed tonight,’ he said, his voice cracking.
‘All the more reason to let us do this right,’ Ty responded.
One of the flashlight cop’s colleagues started to pull him away. ‘Let’s go.’
The flashlight cop shrugged him off, slowly raising the beam of light and angling it past Lock. ‘So if everyone down here should be in bio-suits, maybe you and your buddy should tell all those people.’
Ty spun back round and tracked the light all the way to where it dead-ended, illuminating a subway train packed with people.
Ninety-three
Six cars. Each with a total capacity of two hundred and forty-six people. Plus a driver. Even allowing for it being two-thirds full, a low-ball figure on New Year’s Eve, that made a thousand people. All underground, in the dark, with Mareta lurking in the shadows giving a whole new meaning to the term Ghost Train.
Lock inched his way towards the side of the first car. It was crammed. Faces distorted against the glass of the carriage window; some terrified, others expectant, most stoic. Lock figured the stoic ones as native New Yorkers. The four cops Lock had asked to hang back and establish a cordon in case Mareta tried to slip past them edged their way up again as Lock reached the rear car.
‘We need to get these people out of here,’ said one of them.
‘No shit, Sherlock,’ muttered Lock, waving Ty round to join him from the other side of the final car.
‘She’s deep in the cut, if she’s even in there at all,’ said Ty.
Lock looked from the cars back to the Transit cops. ‘We got any more trains on this stretch?’
‘Just this one.’
He closed his eyes for a moment, thought back to what Mareta had told him in the cell when he’d probed her about her ability to escape detection, even when the odds seemed impossible. She couldn’t walk through walls, he knew that. But somehow she did.
When they look low, I stay high.
She hadn’t meant it literally, he was sure of that. She’d worked out one simple fact: the art of escape lay in first understanding where your enemy would look.
‘You OK?’
Ty’s voice snapped Lock back into the present. The Transit cops were inspecting the train now. He let them get on with it and pulled Ty to one side. He lowered his voice so no one could hear. A moment later they broke their two-man huddle.
Lock walked back to the cops. ‘Can I borrow your flashlight for a moment?’ The Maglite Nazi handed it over like it was his first-born, and Lock turned to the officer in charge. When he spoke he made sure it was loud enough that they could all hear. ‘You’re right, let’s get the juice back on and move this puppy up back to the platform. But tell the driver to take it slow. She’s in there somewhere. Has to be.’
As the lead cop jogged down to speak to the driver, Lock stayed close to Ty. ‘Soon as it’s stopped at 42nd Street, get the power shut down again.’
‘Roger that.’
Lock directed Ty to walk alongside the lead car while he crouched down next to the southbound tracks. From there he’d get a good view of the underside of the cars as they rolled past.
A few minutes later six hundred volts of direct current passed back through the third rail with a fizz, and the lights inside the cars flickered to life.
As soon as the last car had trundled slowly past, Lock made a point of following it back in the direction of the platform, catching up so that he was parallel with the third car. Two hundred yards up the track he switched off the Maglite. A hundred yards after that, he stepped into a service alcove abutting the tunnel wall, out of sight. Then he waited.
Hours of boredom, moments of terror. That was the job. But where bad bodyguards focused only on what to do during the moments of terror, a good bodyguard realized the real work was done during the hours of boredom. Lock cultivated the ability to stay switched on. To look and see. Not just to listen, but also to hear.
Up the tracks he could hear the passengers disembarking the train and the orders from a swarm of JTTF agents who’d joined the Transit Authority.
‘Stay where you are.’
‘Place your hands above your heads.’
‘OK, now you can move forward.’
That’s what he could hear. But it wasn’t what he was listening for.
Ten minutes passed. His eyes began to adjust to the darkness as the molecules of rhodopsin in the rods of his eyes metamorphosed, allowing him to discern the space around him.
Then came Ty’s voice. Plenty loud so Lock could hear it: ‘Hey, Frisk, the juice off now?’
Frisk exasperated: ‘I just told you it was.’
‘Didn’t hear you.’
Lock’s right hand tightened round the butt of his Sig. Soon she’d make her move. She had to. Once all the cars were searched and they realized she wasn’t there, they’d come pouring down the tunnel. More men. Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe.
Lock moved carefully, crossed his left hand across his body so that the Maglite rested on top of the barrel of his Sig. He pushed away thoughts of what was at stake. The lives that could be lost. Hundreds of thousands, potentially. Dismissing it from his mind proved a whole lot easier than he would have thought.
One guy jumping to his death from a burning skyscraper horrifies. A million people starving to death seems like what it is, a number.
The only number that mattered now was two. Him. And her.
He settled his breathing. Filtered out the noise from the platform. Stopped listening. Tried to hear.
And then it came. A scraping sound. A rat, perhaps. Again, this time louder, more distinct, more like someone hauling a garbage bag through a pile of wet leaves. Mareta. He closed his eyes, focused on the direction.
It sounded close. He could hear her breathing. She must have been no further than fifty feet from him this whole time.
He swivelled round in one movement. The noise came again. Far as he could tell she was moving down the tunnel, away from 42nd Street.
He centred himself, and clicked on the torch, catching wet, grey-black wall. He lowered the beam to what he guessed would be head height and swept left.
Mareta blinked back at him.
‘It’s over, Mareta,’ said Lock.
Her pupils fell away to dots. She managed a smile. Weak and unconvincing. ‘It’s never over.’
‘This time it is,’ he said, stepping out towards her, the cone of light spreading to the edge of her face as he got closer.
‘Don’t you remember what I said?’
‘All of it.’
‘And about death being an escape?’
A rustle of fabric. He didn’t need to lower the beam to her hands to know she was reaching down for the metal contacts which would trigger the explosive bound around her torso. She’d used her time in the tunnel well, re-rigging the detonator at
tached to the cell phone so that it once again linked to those hand-held contacts.
‘There’s no escape this time, Mareta.’
He lowered the beam of the torch to her stomach. Her left hand was rigid by her side, the contact wire pinched between index finger and thumb. Her right hand was clenched into a fist, inching its way down to retrieve the other contact wire which dangled from her waist.
‘Stop,’ Lock said, the Sig trained on her.
She complied.
‘OK, that hand there’ – he nudged the centre of the beam at her right hand – ‘bring it up again.’
She began to raise it, away from the wire, her fist still bunched, hard enough that her knuckles showed white. Then, as her right hand came level with her shoulder, suddenly she whipped her arm back, and up. A sudden flash of steel as she launched the knife hidden in her hand at Lock.
The burst of light reflecting off the whirling blade proved enough to put him off as he took aim. His shot cannoned high and wide as the blade found its target, embedding itself high in his chest, a few inches in from his left shoulder.
Lock stumbled forward and fell, the knife thumping in an inch deeper as he hit the tracks, the Maglite rolling from his grasp.
He felt his grip on the Sig weaken. The pain in his chest was intense. Each pulse of agony stronger than the last.
The gunshot brought shouts from both ends of the tunnel. He picked out Ty first.
‘Ryan?’
He could hear the fear in Ty’s voice when the echo of the question met with no reply.
‘Ryan!’
The cavalry was on its way. Lock felt it. But it was nowhere near close enough to save him now.
He heard Mareta step towards him, looked up just in time to catch her right foot square in his face. His neck juddered back.
‘Why don’t we escape together?’ she said, her right hand fumbling for the other metal contact wire.
‘Ryan!’
Ty’s voice again, one among many. Lock wondered why it sounded more distant when Ty had to be getting closer.
Lock tightened his grip around the butt of the Sig as Mareta’s hand went lower, then suddenly reappeared with the other contact wire. Inches between the two wires now. The circuit almost complete.
He took a breath and tilted his gun wrist up as far as the joint would take it.
His finger forced the trigger.
The recoil jolted down his arm so hard that tears sprang in his eyes from the pain that spread across his chest.
The round caught Mareta square in the face, obliterating her nose, cartilage splintering across her cheeks. She rocked backwards on the balls of her feet, her arms splaying out to the side as she tried to regain her balance.
She fell on to her back and lay there. No flailing. No death throes. Arms outstretched, and legs together, in a curiously Christlike pose.
Ty was first to her. He took no chances, firing once into her forehead then once through the bottom of her throat, the angle of the bullet enough to sever the top of her spinal column but stay clear of any explosives. With grim satisfaction, he turned to Lock.
Lock pushed himself slowly to his feet. Ty did his best to push him back down.
‘Help me up, you asshole,’ Lock grunted.
‘You’re hurt.’
‘Yeah, and you’re ugly.’
Ty pulled Lock to a standing position as JTTF agents swarmed in all directions.
‘Back the hell up, for Chrissakes! Let the bomb unit guys through!’ Frisk shouted.
Ty regarded Mareta’s corpse without a hint of emotion. ‘Pretty smooth wet work.’ Then he saw the colour dissolve from Lock’s face. ‘Dude, you need some attention. I can live with ugly, but you’re gonna struggle with that shiv sticking out of you.’
Lock held on to his friend for support. ‘One more thing to do.’
‘They’re both dead,’ said Ty, exasperated. ‘We’re done.’
Lock fixed his gaze back down the tunnel, towards the light. ‘One final thing.’
‘You don’t come all this way on New Year’s Eve and miss this, do you?’ Lock asked Ty as both men stood in the centre of the triangle that formed Times Square.
Two paramedics hovered close by. Their repeated attempts to give Lock all but the most basic attention had earned them only a snarl and a demand for some morphine to tide him over. ‘And not that weak-ass shit I had before.’
The ball descended in silence from a pole mounted on the One Times Square building. Save for law enforcement and other emergency personnel, the place was empty. Everyone stopped what they were doing to watch its progress. As the mass of crystal reached the end of its journey, signalling the passing of one year and the birth of another, Lock slumped against Ty’s shoulder, barely able to keep himself upright.
‘Happy New Year, brother.’
Epilogue
At the edge of the group of mourners who had gathered for Janice Stokes’ funeral, Lock spotted Carrie. No microphone, no camera, here only to pay witness to a life lived and lost. Nearby stood John Frisk and a couple of other agents from the JTTF.
As Janice’s coffin was lowered into the ground next to her parents, he reached out and touched Carrie’s hand.
She half turned, and smiled at him. ‘They finally let you out then.’
‘Got the all clear this morning,’ Lock reassured her.
In truth, he’d spent most of the time since it all went down being briefed and debriefed by an array of government agencies. He’d quickly worked out the reason it was taking so long: they wanted to be assured of his silence on certain matters.
They needn’t have worried. Bio-terrorism was as much about inducing fear as death, and the way Lock saw it, fear wasn’t something people were short on. Not these days, anyway.
Carrie leaned into him. ‘Is it OK if I . . .?’
‘Hundred per cent safe.’
She nestled her head in between his neck and shoulders, breathed in his smell, then kissed him gently on the lips. It made his heart thump inside his chest. Her hand fell into his.
He gave it a little squeeze and leaned in even closer to her. ‘I’m not sure people are supposed to make out at funerals. It may be considered inappropriate.’
They turned back round to face the graveside, still holding hands. On the other side of the grave, Lock caught sight of Don Stokes, sandwiched between two burly correctional officers. Don acknowledged Lock with a nod, handcuffs precluding a wave.
Don had pleaded guilty to his part in the exhumation of Eleanor Van Straten and was looking at two years. Cody Parker was staring down five and assured martyrdom status.
Nicholas Van Straten hadn’t made it, but the entire board of Meditech were under federal investigation and looking at the business end of twenty years in prison, corporate buccaneering now seen by the great American public for what it had been all along, high seas robbery.
There had been worldwide outrage at the use of the detainees. Middle Eastern countries in particular had had a field day, although Russia remained strangely silent. China didn’t chip in either, figuring, with typical neo-communist efficiency, that here, finally, was a productive use for dissidents. Congress and the President spun it as proof positive of the greater need for federal regulation over private enterprise, and no one on Wall Street dared contradict them, for fear that lights would be shone into other areas.
‘I gotta go say hello to a few people. You wait for me,’ Lock said, excusing himself.
‘I’ve waited this long, haven’t I?’ Carrie said, brushing away a stray strand of blonde hair from her face.
Lock approached Frisk and put out his hand. Frisk looked like he wasn’t sure whether to thank Lock or strangle him, so they kept it brief.
Don Stokes was being led back to a Department of Corrections truck when Lock caught up with him.
Lock glanced back at the grave. ‘I’m sorry about your sister.’
‘She stayed true to her beliefs.’
Lock didn’t have anyt
hing in reply that wouldn’t spark an argument. He was done with people. And their beliefs.
‘How you dealing with prison?’ he asked.
‘It ain’t as bad as you painted it.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘It’s worse.’
Lock was watching Don being put back in the DOC van when Carrie joined him at the bottom of the hill.
‘So what now?’ she asked him.
He turned to look at her. ‘You tell me.’
Her apartment still felt like a home. When Carrie went into the kitchen and closed the door behind her he scanned the photographs in the living room. Paul hadn’t made a reappearance. It was about the only thing that had truly preyed on his mind when he was in isolation.
Carrie called through from the kitchen. ‘There’s someone else here who’s missed you.’
‘You missed me?’ Lock asked, unable to keep the smile from his face.
‘Maybe just a little.’
He stepped through into the kitchen. Angel greeted him at the door, her tail a blur. Lock scratched behind her ear. She thumped one of her back legs against the floor by way of appreciation.
‘What you been feeding her? She’s put on weight,’ he said, stepping back and taking a better look.
Carrie laughed. ‘She’s pregnant.’
Lock studied the dog. ‘Guess you’re not so much of an angel after all.’
‘I spoke to Richard Hulme. Asked him if Josh might want the pick of the litter.’
‘What’d he say?’
‘He said he’d love one. They’re moving out to Washington, and he’s going back to work for the CDC.’
‘It’ll never work. Richard’s got way too developed a sense of morality to work for the government.’
‘I think it’ll be good for him. And Josh. There are too many bad memories in that apartment of theirs.’
‘Some pretty good memories in this one,’ Lock said, looking around.
‘What you thinking about, cowboy?’
‘Ah, nothing, forget it.’
She handed him a steaming mug of coffee.
‘Thanks.’
‘I’ve been doing some thinking too,’ Carrie said.
He could feel his heart jump back into his throat. ‘Oh yeah?’
