Cry Darkness

by Hilary Bonner

  A noise behind her attracted Jones’s attention back to the sedan. A dark-clothed figure flew out of the car in a kind of somersault and landed flat out on the pavement. Jones thought that only happened in the movies. She hadn’t realized real people did it.

  ‘Freeze,’ yelled a male voice.

  The dark-clothed figure was holding a pistol in both hands, in the regulation police grip, and the pistol was aimed at Jones.

  Jones froze. For the second time in just a few minutes. Her gaze was locked on the man on the ground. There was quite enough light for her to be able to clearly see the man’s face. Jones recognized him at once.

  She managed to swivel her eyes towards Gaynor without moving her head.

  ‘You bitch,’ she said, as she watched Gaynor draw her handgun and level it. ‘You’ve set me up.’

  ‘Don’t be a dork,’ said Gaynor.

  Jones realized then that Gaynor was aiming her weapon directly at the man lying on the pavement.

  ‘Do not even think about it, asshole,’ Gaynor yelled. ‘Pull that trigger, and you’re dead too.’

  The man swung his pistol so that it was pointing at Gaynor.

  Jones retreated cautiously into a shadow. This was a stalemate, she realized. Gaynor and the man lying on the pavement were now aiming their weapons at each other. Neither of them was looking at Jones any more.

  This was her chance to escape, but she couldn’t get to her own vehicle without moving directly into the line of fire. She began to shuffle slowly backwards towards the cross street where Ed was waiting in his neighbour’s car.

  ‘I’m NYPD,’ she heard Gaynor yell at the top of her voice. ‘Drop your weapon, asshole. Now!’

  ‘I’m FBI. Drop yours.’

  ‘Yeah? How do I know you’re FBI? And why would I trust you anyway?’

  ‘Oh shit,’ said the man lying on the ground.

  Jones had backed away almost to the street corner. Hoping that the two adversaries were too engrossed in their battle of nerves to notice, she turned, and began to run full out.

  Almost at once she heard a gunshot. Quickly followed by a second shot. Then she thought she heard a scream. She glanced back over her shoulder, but she couldn’t see what was going on. In any case she was in too big a hurry to care much.

  She reached Ed and his car within seconds, wrenching open the passenger door and throwing herself and her bag in.

  ‘Drive,’ she shouted. ‘Just drive.’

  Ed stared at her, slack jawed. He looked terrified.

  ‘I heard shooting,’ he said. ‘What happened back there?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later.’ Jones shouted even louder, ‘Drive! Now!’

  The vehemence with which she delivered the instruction seemed to do the trick. Ed switched on the engine and slammed his right foot on the accelerator. The little car took off with a screech of rubber, hitting the pavement and then bouncing into the middle of the road.

  ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck,’ said Ed.

  Jones glanced back over her shoulder.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, as calmly as she could manage. ‘Just take it steady. There’s nobody on our tail.’

  Ed slowed a little.

  ‘Where am I going?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Anywhere for now, as long as it’s away from here,’ Jones replied, unconsciously echoing what Dom had said after she and Marion had been targeted by the Chevy truck.

  ‘It’s O.K. Corral back there. A gun fight’s going on.’

  ‘Was someone shooting at you, Sandy? You’re not hurt, are you?’

  ‘No. But never mind the questions. Drive, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Why don’t we go to the police? I can’t take much more of this. I can’t protect Mikey any more. And I don’t see how any of us can protect Connie. I’m frightened, Sandy. I really am …’

  ‘Protect Mikey? Listen Ed, one of those raving lunatics waving a gun around back there is the effing police, I’ve just discovered. Oh, and the other one is your dangerous half-wit of a brother!’

  ‘No. No. It can’t be.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. And I want to know how the hell he found us.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  Ed turned to look directly at Jones as she spoke, and seemed to lose concentration. The car hit the curb again.

  Jones grabbed the steering wheel and straightened the vehicle up.

  ‘Is it safe to stop?’ asked Ed weakly.

  Jones thought for a moment. They had been driving for more than ten minutes and had put a considerable distance between themselves and the Wall Street incident. They’d pulled out of the financial district into parts of New York where there was always traffic, day and night. They were no longer conspicuous.

  ‘I reckon so,’ she said.

  Ed turned into a side road and drew the car to a halt, slumping over the steering wheel.

  ‘Was Mikey shot back there?’

  ‘How the hell do I know?’ asked Jones, who was not feeling at all sympathetic concerning Mikey MacEntee. ‘It was all I could do to save my own skin.’

  ‘Oh my God! What’s he doing? What’s he playing at? Was he on his own?’

  ‘He seemed to be. As far as I could make out. It’s how he got to be there in the first place that I want to know.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with me,’ said Ed quickly. ‘I haven’t spoken to him since early this morning. I certainly didn’t tell him I was meeting you, or where. You believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know what to believe.’

  Jones studied Ed carefully. He looked a complete wreck. Could it really be possible that he had deliberately led his crazy brother to them?

  ‘I thought at first that Gaynor had set us up,’ Jones continued. ‘But she didn’t react like that.’

  Jones raised her hands to her face, trying to concentrate, to apply logic to a desperate situation.

  ‘Let’s try and work this out, Ed. It goes without saying, I hope, that I didn’t tell Mikey anything. When he questioned me at Princeton, I didn’t even have anything to tell. You say it wasn’t you. That leaves Gaynor, Dom or Connie. It’s idiotic that it would be Connie. Apart from which Dom’s got her under guard almost. He won’t leave her for a minute. None of this makes any sense.’

  Jones tried desperately to think how a professional would. How they did it in all those movies she’d watched. The idea of electronic surveillance sprung to mind. It was perhaps the only other alternative.

  ‘Could Mikey have bugged your car in some way, like you think he did your phone at home?’

  ‘Sandy, this isn’t even my car.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Jones was angry with herself for forgetting. ‘And, anyway, he homed in on me. We were a hundred yards or so apart when he turned up. Modern surveillance equipment is usually dead accurate. It would have led him straight to you. Not me.’

  The interior of the car was cool. But Jones was sweating.

  Suddenly she smashed one clenched fist into the dashboard, and with her other hand reached into her jacket pocket.

  ‘Your pen, Ed,’ she said. ‘Your fucking pen. I didn’t return it to you. Did Mikey give it to you by any chance?’

  Ed nodded.

  ‘Yes. Just a few weeks ago. For my birthday.’

  Jones produced the pen and began to attack it. She unscrewed its shaft and inside found a tiny battery attached to an equally tiny cylindrical object.

  ‘That’s a transmitter,’ she said.

  At once she got out of the car and hurried around to the driver’s side, at the same time throwing both the transmitter and its battery on the ground and crunching them beneath her feet.

  ‘Move across, Ed,’ she commanded. ‘I’m driving, and we’re getting out of here. Mikey, or some other bastard, could still be tracking us.’

  She slammed the gear shift into drive and took off at speed, only slowing down when they had put several blocks between themselves and the abandoned surveillance gadget.

  ‘I just ca
n’t believe it,’ said Ed. ‘I really liked that pen. I carried it with me all the time. Mikey knew that. It never occurred to me for a moment.’

  He broke off and grabbed Jones’s arm.

  ‘Oh my God. Is it a voice transmitter? Does that mean he’s heard all that we’ve been saying tonight?’

  Jones shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘For a start he didn’t behave back there like a man who knew what he was getting into. I think he just followed the signal when he picked it up. And you know what, I also think it could have been a chance thing. We recently did an item on modern surveillance on my TV show. Even the most powerful of these particular little babies will only work within a radius of a couple of miles or so. They’re air-band, not satellite or anything like that. Now, we believe that Mikey had no idea you were in New York, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But this is where he works most of the time?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘So suddenly, I reckon, we come into range of him and his radio receiver, after we’ve taken off in our separate cars. The signal bleeps at him. He tunes in, but doesn’t get any conversation because I’m on my own with your pen. He gives chase, and tracks the signal down straight to where I’m having my confrontation with Gaynor. Does that make sense to you?’

  Ed nodded. ‘I guess so. Mikey was obsessed with me knowing more than I was telling him about RECAP and Paul. And he was always into spy gadgets. Even as a boy.’

  ‘This is the sort of gadget anybody can buy on the net, Ed. It’s not very sophisticated. I very much doubt it’s FBI issue.’

  Ed gave a little snort.

  ‘The FBI probably don’t trust him with any of their stuff,’ he said.

  ‘Well, there are restrictions, you know,’ Jones pointed out. ‘More than likely the bastards encourage their people to do this kind of thing unofficially. They’re not supposed to go round bugging people. Remember the row when it was revealed that George Bush had authorized the use of electronic surveillance equipment on private citizens after 9/11? All hell broke out in the UK too, when the boss of the Met was caught out secretly recording telephone conversations.’

  ‘I’ll bet Mikey’s got in way out of his depth,’ said Ed, with uncanny accuracy. But then, he was Mikey’s brother.

  ‘His whole life has been that way,’ Ed continued. ‘A series of games that eventually catch up with him. Some game this time.’

  ‘I just wonder who he’s reporting back to,’ said Jones. ‘There has to be somebody. And just how far up the chain of command in this crazy country? That’s what I’d like to know.’

  ‘It’s all totally unreal, Sandy, isn’t it?’ Ed commented. ‘My brother bugging me. Connie on the run. Paul dead. Marion dreadfully injured.’

  Ed fell back in his seat. He looked worn out.

  ‘Where are we going, anyway?’ he asked.

  ‘Round in circles at the moment,’ Sandy replied. ‘But I’ve just had an idea. We’ve really got to get out of this town and out of this country fast, Ed. It’s even more dangerous than I realized. And our only bargaining tool, the only thing that might stop whatever is going on here, and save Connie, is the Ruders Theory. So it’s more urgent than ever that we get to the UK—’

  ‘But how?’ Ed interrupted. ‘Do we really dare risk trying to fly out of a New York airport after what’s just happened?’

  ‘No, we don’t. In fact I don’t think we can risk any US airport.’

  ‘So what are we going to do then?’

  Ed sounded beaten.

  ‘We’re going to drive to Canada,’ said Sandy Jones.

  Meanwhile, Mikey, still lying on the pavement just across the street from the stock exchange, was aware only of a terrible burning sensation in his left thigh. She’d shot him. The bitch had shot him.

  ‘Throw your weapon to one side,’ Gaynor shouted.

  Mikey’s eyes opened wide. This was for real. And it was all such a shock. Mikey had actually never fired a gun in anger before. And even now all he’d done was to fire a warning shot over Sandy Jones’s head. The bitch who’d winged him had presumably done so because she’d thought he was firing at Jones. He’d never intended to do any such thing. He’d wanted to find Ed, that was all. He’d expected to find Ed. Instead he’d found that danged Dr Jones and a trigger-happy broad who said she was a police officer.

  Mikey prepared to throw his gun away, just as Gaynor had commanded. Gaynor took a step forwards, her eyes and her gun levelled on him. She sure was one hell of a frightening woman, Mikey thought.

  The wail of a police siren cut through the quiet of the night. A patrol car was hurtling down Wall Street towards them. Gaynor turned to look at it. The barrel of her pistol wavered slightly. A surge of adrenaline burst through Mikey. He twisted his body around and, ignoring the pain of his injured leg, more or less dived into his car, slamming the door behind him.

  Gaynor focused her full attention on him again, and aimed her pistol at his head through the glass of the window.

  ‘Stop, or I’ll shoot!’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ said Mikey, surprising himself. He switched on the engine and drove off, thankful that it was his left leg which had been injured.

  In his mirror he saw the patrol car pull to a halt alongside Gaynor, who was still pointing her gun after his car. She didn’t shoot. Mikey knew that New York cops rarely dared fire after fleeing suspects any more. Not unless lives were endangered. And if they got caught out breaking the rules they could end up in jail for longer than the villains.

  Gaynor couldn’t believe it when the cop car arrived. Nobody would have had time to call the police yet, even if there had been anyone about to witness the shooting. The patrol car must have been just cruising around, she reckoned, until its team had been alerted by the sound of gunfire. She had no idea of the odds of one turning up like that in the middle of the financial district in the early hours of the morning, but she reckoned they were pretty damned long.

  She took her shield from her pocket and held it out in her left hand, while continuing to grasp her police issue revolver in her right hand.

  ‘I’m NYPD, Detective Gaynor Jackson,’ she called, as soon as the front doors of the cop car opened, and two uniformed officers emerged.

  ‘Put your gun down,’ came the reply. ‘Throw your shield towards us. Then put your hands up.’

  Gaynor obeyed at once, groaning in frustration. Sandy Jones was long gone, presumably with Ed MacEntee in tow. And now she was starkly aware of Mikey’s car disappearing into the distance. Neither of the two cops now studying her shield seemed interested in giving chase. But then, the thought occurred to her suddenly, maybe that was a good thing. She didn’t recognize either of the patrolmen. They weren’t from her precinct. Maybe that was a good thing too.

  She had no idea who Mikey was, but she did know she had to think fast if she was going to keep her job. And maybe even her life. After all, she was up to her ears in a highly dangerous situation which was beginning to show every sign of being part of a major conspiracy. It was time she started to think of herself rather than Dom’s friends and a project that was at best idealistic.

  She managed to fairly quickly contrive a story about apprehending a suspect in an armed robbery case she was working on, whom she’d spotted by chance. He’d pulled a gun on her. She’d managed to wing him, however the patrol car had arrived and he’d escaped.

  Her story didn’t sound very plausible, even to her. And she’d shot a civilian. Or at least, that’s what she’d let the two patrolmen believe, because she chose not to mention that her adversary had claimed to be FBI. But the patrolmen didn’t show a great deal of interest. Gaynor reckoned they were probably nearing the end of their shift. She knew they’d file a report, though. And therefore, of course, so must she, albeit one which would be rather economical with the truth.

  Gaynor wondered if she’d taken one risk too many. She was capable, clever and tough. But, just like Mikey, Gaynor realized that
she could be getting out of her depth.

  In spite of having been shot, Mikey felt vaguely pleased with himself as he hurtled down Wall Street in his big black sedan, leaving Gaynor and the police patrol car safely behind. He’d surely acted just like a proper special agent for once.

  Then he remembered the mess he’d got himself into. And his brother. He wasn’t entirely sure whether he’d wanted to find Ed in order to help him, or whether he was the one who wanted Ed’s help. He hadn’t really thought at all when he’d picked up the signal from the bugged pen on his tracking receiver. He’d just taken off in hot pursuit. His receiver hadn’t picked up any speech until he’d arrived in Wall Street, and that had been too muffled to decipher.

  Now he was almost certainly in bigger trouble than ever – the thought of which, coupled with the speedily increasing pain in his left leg, brought him swiftly back to cold reality.

  Jones had been quite right. Mikey’s bugging equipment had not been FBI issue. He had bought it from a distinctly dubious online supplier. It was no longer picking up any sort of signal. In any case he had no intention of even attempting to keep on the tail of the tracking device. Sandy Jones seemed to have somehow or other acquired the pen he’d given Ed. Mikey didn’t even know for sure that Ed was in New York.

  And he had to get himself some medical treatment. Fast. But he knew what happened when people with gunshot wounds turned up at a hospital. The police were notified at once.

  Gingerly he touched his left leg with one hand. It was beginning to feel as if it were on fire, and his trouser was sodden with blood. He was sweating profusely. His vision had started to blur. There was a set of traffic lights just ahead, and Mikey didn’t notice until almost too late that they were on red. The jolt of stopping suddenly sent a searing flash of pain from his injured upper leg right through his whole body.

  Mikey felt ill. He had just displayed the kind of bravado he’d always aspired to. Now he was truly terrified again. He was at the heart of an operation which was going more and more pear-shaped every minute. His brother was almost certainly in danger. Maybe he was too.

  He couldn’t cope. Also, he might bleed to death, if he didn’t act soon. There was only one person in the world he could think of who could help him now, who would make sure that he got medical treatment, who would understand his motives for trying to chase after Ed the way he had. Just one person who knew what a valuable servant he had been to the American government.