Atop the Times Square tower, he tapped the zoom button to move in even closer. The world came alive with vivid color before him, and the situation converged into focus.
The two gangs below were both made up of pasty white men, so Nolan guessed they had to be Russians and Irishmen—likely Russian mafia and IRA, who had been fighting over inner-city territory the last few years. They’d brought tools for the fight, armed with handguns, blades, long steel pipes, brass knuckles, and more, easily visible beneath their shirts or hanging out of the back of their pants. Their faces were stoic, but their eyes, locked on their counterparts across the way, were ablaze with hatred.
Their numbers were impressive, but Nolan didn’t feel threatened. These men had no training. They were thugs with guns and knives that didn’t fit in their hands. Little boys pretending to be men.
His worry was for the crowd. If Nolan had known this many people would turn up in New York City just to find out what the billboards meant, he never would have placed those ads. Neutralizing the gangs didn’t give him pause, but the thought of doing so in such a way that the pedestrians didn’t get caught in the crossfire did. Once he laid into these guys, weapons of all kinds would appear instantly. His only option was to strike fast and hard, take them down before they could hurt anyone.
It was so hot this day, Nolan’s one-of-a-kind graphene-infused combat fatigues felt like an oven, yet he could sense heat of a different kind pouring off of the gangs on the streets below. The crowds were backing away from both groups by several paces, giving them as much space as the increasingly tight confines would allow. But they hadn’t withdrawn entirely, watching in abject fascination, unable to tear themselves away.
It was the train wreck principle. Morbid interest and curiosity were basic human nature. Nolan wished terribly just now that they weren’t. Especially when a blood feud was sure to break out at any second, and—
Hold up.
His thoughts halted. It struck him that this situation was perfect for his needs: two rival gangs about to explode into a turf war, smack in the center of arguably the most famous street corner in the world. Between the restaurants and retail outlets lining the streets were several major news agencies. All he had to do was descend to the ground at just the right moment and save the day.
The whole world would be able to watch.
It was so perfect it could have been scripted. And Branford had casually proposed that morning that Nolan camp out at Times Square, thinking that something dangerous might inevitably occur there, what with the size of the crowds waiting for the billboards’ messages to play out.
He wouldn’t dare.
Would he?
“General,” Nolan said into his earpiece. “Please tell me—”
“Heads up,” said Branford, cutting him off. “They’re on the move.”
The question would have to wait.
He looked down over the side of the building and saw that twenty-five stories below, on the ground, the two gangs were crossing the streets to meet in the middle, right in front of the Times Square building, on the footsteps of the tiny New York Police Station positioned there.
“I need to hear what they’re saying,” he mumbled.
After a brief silence, Branford replied into his earpiece, “Hold your left hand out in the direction of the gangs. Arjay says he built a sound wave amplifier into the palm of your glove. Touch the tips of your thumb and ring finger together to activate it.”
Nolan almost laughed. “Gotta be kidding. . . .” But he did as he was told. As promised, he could immediately hear what was being said on the ground below, as long as he kept his hand trained on the right spot.
The leaders of the two gangs were arguing, chests puffed out, spitting obscenities and testosterone at each other. Nolan didn’t pay much attention to the specifics of the dispute; it was something about disrespecting one another. Nolan growled. Respect. An argument, essentially, over nothing.
It felt like fingernails scraping across the chalkboard of creation. Every time he thought about it, a lead brick settled in his stomach and his head started to pulse with the earliest sign of a migraine. Something deep inside wanted to stop this kind of thing once and for all. He couldn’t lose himself right now though and warded off the sickening sensations by compartmentalizing his thoughts regarding the state of the world.
But he kept his eyes peeled. It was going to happen any second now, and when it did, he had to be ready. He felt his muscles coil. He pulled out Arjay’s prize toy—a contraption that looked like a sleek oversized pistol—and grasped it tight with his right hand. He threw his jacket’s hood up over his head.
All right, Arjay, don’t fail me now.
He heard glass shatter and looked down. Flames were rising at the base of the police station, pouring forth from two or three glass bottles that had been tossed there. He saw several guns appear and heard the screaming begin.
The gangs ran, converging on one another atop the central median in Times Square.
A blood-filled battle was seconds away from breaking out down there, and hundreds of bystanders were going to get caught in the crossfire.
Showtime.
12
Why does this look like a gun when you made so much noise about being opposed to weapons?” he’d asked Arjay several days ago, examining the all-important device that Arjay called the grappler. The younger man had produced the grappler with great flourish and fanfare, and assured Nolan that it would save his life and make his work easier, many times over.
It was jet black with a handle, barrel, and trigger much like a pistol, only it was quite a bit larger than a typical handgun, and it had a spearlike silver tip at the end of the barrel. It was heavier than a gun, too, by two or three pounds. It felt solid and powerful in Nolan’s hand.
“It is not a gun,” Arjay replied, “it is something better. As I would have you to be.”
Arjay took the device in his own hand and pointed it at the far wall, a good two hundred feet on the opposite end of the subway platform, and tapped a small red button right where his thumb rested. Four spikes expanded outward in north, south, east, and west positions from the silver tip, forming a grappling hook. When Arjay pulled the trigger, the silver hook shot out as fast as a bullet, if not faster, and instantly found purchase on the lever that served as the handle to the men’s restroom. Arjay handed Nolan the grappler and told him to pull.
Although Nolan could see no wire, he knew one had to be there because the grappler held fast in his hand, refusing to move back even an inch away from the door that was so far away. When he pressed the trigger down about halfway, the line loosened and he could move with it. When he mashed the trigger down tight, the line not only strengthened but started to recoil, and he was forced to let go of the thing lest it rip his unprepared shoulder off, winding its invisible wire back inside itself and traveling like lightning back toward the silver hook.
“Wow,” he said, massaging his shoulder.
“Apologies,” said Arjay, retrieving the grappler from where it had shot out of Nolan’s hands. “I neglected to tell you to release the hook. Pushing that red button expands the four spikes; it also brings the spikes back in and lets you retract the entire rig in seconds.”
“Got some serious velocity to it,” Nolan remarked.
Arjay nodded. “Strong too. The hook will penetrate wood, brick, even concrete up to three inches thick. But be cautious. I would not have you aim it toward anything living.”
“I can’t see the wire. . . .” said Nolan.
“The wire is an improvement on the same fiber filament that illusionists employ when appearing to fly on stage. Less than one millimeter in thickness, yet it should support about twice your weight without strain. You have nearly a full kilometer coiled inside.”
“Huh,” Nolan said. “What would happen if my fingers got caught in the wire?”
Arjay eyed him sideways. “Exactly what you think would happen. Always wear your gloves.”
Nolan was already thinking of the tactical uses for such a device. “Say I’m in a hurry . . . Can I use it to zip from rooftop to rooftop?”
“If you are suicidal,” Arjay shot back. “Imagine holding a rope tethered to the back of a bullet train. Use the grappler horizontally and you will not have gravity to assist in controlling your trajectory. Assuming you even survived the impacts you would suffer along the way, you would acquire bruises and broken bones all over your body. It is for going up and down. Nothing else.”
Nolan smiled at the memory, his thoughts lasering in on the gangs and the innocents far below, and how he was about to do everything he could to keep anyone from getting hurt, or worse. It all came down to this moment.
Nolan jumped.
Falling fast, he twisted and shot the grappler toward the very spot where he’d been standing only seconds ago. The grappler hooked instantly onto the ledge and he executed a fast but controlled descent. Finally, when he’d reached about two stories off of the ground, he mashed the red button at the back of the grappler while holding down the trigger to both release the hook and recoil the wire. Before landing, he’d already replaced the grappler to its resting place on his right hip.
His special boots absorbed most of the impact, just as Arjay had promised they would. Arjay had built shock dampeners into the boots’ soles, assuring Nolan that the boots were designed to disperse the shock of a landing from even three stories up. They could handle no more than three stories, though. And they offered a kind of kinetic optimization, giving Nolan a little extra momentum in his step, so while practicing, he’d found he could actually run marginally faster while wearing them. Best of all they were lithe—light and flexible—despite their bulky appearance, lacing up to several inches above his ankles.
Arjay prided himself on thinking of everything, and the boots were no exception. The tread design, for instance, was based on the sole of a popular work boot, so anyone trying to trace Nolan would find nothing distinctive about his shoeprint.
Even though the boots absorbed the landing beautifully, Nolan let himself fall to one knee, his training taking over. He heard a handful of screams from the vast crowds on either side of the block. And then there was a cacophony of chatter, rising fast as excitement overtook the pedestrians who assumed that this was the reason they were there.
Nolan’s attire no doubt helped with that assessment. Clad in loose-fitting military fatigues that were outfitted with his custom-made equipment, Nolan found it hard not to feel as bad to the bone as he appeared. He wore a black army-style flak jacket over black cargoes that were tucked into his black boots. At Nolan’s request, Arjay had added an oversized white hood to the jacket that he could flip up to conceal his head. His special glasses removed any chance that his eyes might be visible. Only his mouth might be seen from beneath the hood, but that was a grotesque mess thanks to Branford’s precision handiwork with a pistol. A single emblem marked his chest: a large white hand, matching the hand used on the billboards. His black gloves completed the ensemble.
Nolan stood and glanced both ways, finding himself exactly where he’d wanted to be: standing precisely between the rival gangs. Arjay’s ingenious equipment couldn’t have functioned better.
The gang members on the front lines on either side of him took a sharp step backward at his dramatic, unexpected drop from the sky. He calculated that six men could currently strike at him after taking approximately four paces toward him.
He took the first few seconds of shock on their parts to scan the crowd from behind his goggles. The zoom had been turned off, but now, swamped by so many faces, he almost wished it was still on. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, watched him.
Nolan swallowed the rising bile in his throat. The only other time in his life when he’d been in a crowd this size was upon his return home from the war, where a ticker-tape parade was held in honor of the escaped POWs from his unit. But that was in the open-air historic streets of D.C. Here, skyscrapers boxed him in with this vast sea of people, and every single eye was fixed on him.
He took a deep breath, using calming techniques he’d been practicing for months. Placing a gloved hand inside his jacket, he gripped his sole weapon tightly and let out a slow huff of air.
13
Branford had convinced Arjay to make one defensive weapon for Nolan; Arjay had fought the idea from the beginning, but eventually the general had worn him down with concerns over Nolan’s safety. Arjay agreed only on the condition that it be a nonlethal instrument. Nolan didn’t let the young man know that in the right hands, even a paper clip could be lethal.
Arjay’s invention was a slender metal tube, like a pipe, about a foot and a half long. There was a seam in the center that separated it into two distinct rods.
“Twist it,” Arjay had explained to him, mimicking the proper motion with his hands. He twisted one hand forward and the other back, like wringing out a wash cloth.
Nolan copied the motion, and the dual tubes turned in opposite directions until they clicked and stopped. From each end shot out more metal tubes of nearly the same size, only narrower, and then another set followed, until the stick had grown to over six feet long.
Nolan whistled. “I’ve seen retractable staffs before, but they couldn’t hold their shape in a fight. They always bent at the seams.”
Arjay was unmoved by this concern. “This one will not.”
Nolan held the staff in one hand, at its center, and it remained perfectly balanced, still and threatening. Impressed yet again by Arjay’s skill and ingenuity, he took several steps back and sprang into action, twirling the staff in his hand like a baton. Raising it over his head, he continued twirling until he spun and jabbed the air with it. Next he swept it through the empty space around him, as if taking down multiple enemies using both ends of the staff, and then twirled it again until it landed neatly beneath one arm, tucked under his armpit.
More than satisfied, Nolan stood at ease and twisted the center rods again until it retracted down to its original length.
“Amazing,” he said with sincerity. This thing was beyond flawless. It was a precision work of art.
Striding the median in Times Square, Nolan saw that everyone’s attention had shifted to him. From the Irish and Russian gangs closing in on both sides to the scores of pedestrians, they all had to be wondering who he was and how he had managed to fall out of the sky right between these two warring factions.
With the full attention of the crowd, he twisted the staff until it expanded, right before their eyes. He held it under his arm and spread his legs apart in a defensive posture.
It was a very obvious threat. An unspoken invitation to attack.
“Who are you supposed to be?” spat one of them.
Nolan stood perfectly still, but his mind was whirling, his eyes quickly taking in the weapons and numbers of both gangs. He leveled his focus on the teenager near the front of the Broadway gang who’d spoken up—a pale-skinned blond boy sporting short sleeves that molded to sizable biceps underneath.
Nolan considered what his response might be to the young man’s question, but it was an exercise, nothing more. He’d decided months ago that he wasn’t going to speak while in his vigilante guise. For too long, people relied on empty, pointless words. And what would he say? That he was there to fix the city, eradicate immorality on her streets, and see her citizens live by their consciences? There was no explaining such things in cynical times. His billboards promised action. He needed to show the better way.
And yet he didn’t want to come across as the cold, detached, all-business automaton either. In his bones, he had to do this. Doing nothing was making him sick. The world was a nasty place and somebody needed to take a stand, draw a line, and push back against the darkness. He couldn’t afford to not let himself feel things like compassion and empathy for those who were suffering. Allowing emotional responses to assimilate into his actions had been trained out of him long ago. Yet now he knew he had to find a way to integr
ate those feelings into his actions, or all of this was for nothing.
It was a work in progress.
Instead of speaking, he held up a single black glove with fingers stretched out wide. Chatter from the onlookers rose in volume, and Nolan knew the gesture had had the desired effect: it was the outstretched hand, just like the one on the billboards. Just like the one on his chest.
He glanced at the buildings on either side of the street and noted that at least two major networks already had cameramen who were hurriedly positioning themselves with tripods to capture what was happening.
A gunshot went off, and Nolan felt a slight thud against his rib cage, but the bullet bounced off his graphene fabric and fell to the ground. He didn’t even lose his footing.
Thank you, Arjay.
As fast as he could, he rounded on the one who’d hastily pulled out the pistol and grabbed the gun by the barrel. After triggering the manual release so that the gun came apart in the gang member’s hand, he knelt and swept his staff across to knock the kid’s feet out from under him.
Two others rushed in from the opposite gang, but Nolan spun at the last second and whacked his staff hard enough against one’s head to knock him out. Continuing the same motion, he swung around and jabbed straight into the other man’s stomach, sending him to the ground, cradling his abdomen. The two men went down so fast they almost hit the ground simultaneously, ultimately toppling into each other in a heap upon the double yellow lines at the center of Seventh Street.
Nolan rose to his feet again like a bullfighter, ready and waiting to take on whoever would step up next. But he could tell something had changed in the electricity of the moment. It was worry, fear, the subtle sense that the dynamic on the battlefield had been drastically altered.
These gang members were sizing him up, knowing now that he wasn’t some clown in a black combat suit. Several of them seemed to have registered that he was the source of the “better way” billboards, and were probably wondering if he was there to make an object lesson out of them.
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