‘No.’ But Lena did step back, closer to the edge. ‘Poppa made all kinds of threats. He said I’d never have another girl. He said he’d marry me off to some made man out of town. He said he’d send me away to Italy–’
‘Go,’ Andrea interrupted.
‘What?’
‘Italy. Go there. Volunteer to go there. Get out of this place, out of his sight. New start, new people. I know you speak Italian. Get an apartment in Rome and some hot-blooded Italian girl with jet-black hair and eyes you can sink into. Get away from me, and him, and all this shit!’
‘I… I hadn’t thought of it like that.’
‘Yeah, well, you’re grieving for what we had. And I know I was your favourite, and I like to think I was pretty good…’
‘You were amazing.’
‘Uh… thanks, but I still don’t think I’m worth jumping off a building for.’
Lena sagged and moved away from the edge and Andrea stepped forward. The blonde did not resist as Andrea looped an arm around her shoulders, and at that point Cygnus flew up from below, dropped onto the rooftop, her arm wrapping Lena from the other side.
‘Weren’t going to let me do it anyway, huh?’ Lena asked, looking up at the taller blonde.
‘No,’ Cygnus replied, ‘but it was better if you didn’t try. I hear Rome is beautiful in the spring.’
‘I guess I’ll find out,’ Lena replied. ‘And there better be plenty of hot girls out there or I’m coming back and jumping.’
‘It’s where my mother’s family came from,’ Andrea replied. ‘They tell me I take after her side of the family.’
‘Well… that’s okay then.’
~~~
The cold woke him. David Tonaldo opened his eyes and saw only blackness around him. He was reaching for the light when hands grabbed the front of his pyjama jacket, pressing him against the mattress.
‘Don’t scream,’ Twilight said softly, ‘don’t call out. Do not make a sound.’
‘What do you want?’ Tonaldo growled back.
‘Lena out of the way, without further damage. If I hear she’s been harmed, or you’re not letting her go, I’m going to push you off a roof.’ She released him, stepping back, but the shadows remained thick around them.
‘You think you can just come in here, making demands–’
‘Yes. Any time I want to. Think about that.’
He did, apparently. ‘So… why haven’t you offed me?’
‘Because that is not my primary aim anymore. Don’t get me wrong, you’re criminal scum and me and Cygnus are going to pull your house down around your ears, but the man who killed my brother is dead. I thought you were responsible, but Andy was just a pawn in the war between you and Ghostfire.’
‘Huh. You actually do care about her? Lena?’
‘A lot more than I care about you, yeah. She’s a nice girl and she’s stuck in this rat hole because you won’t let her be herself. So let her go somewhere where it won’t matter.’
‘I’m… going to. I have some friends in Italian immigration. She’s going out mid-week. Six months to see if she likes it and then… We see where it goes from there.’
‘Good.’
‘And… Your brother. I meant what I said that time, in my office. I don’t like losing men and he was a good kid. I liked him. Wasn’t pushy, not too eager to please.’
‘He was an idiot. But he was my brother.’ She stepped away again and this time the shadows followed her. ‘Oh. The Excelsior. If you keep shipping that crap in, we’re going to have to get mean about it. And they gave some to me before I ended up like this so maybe you should think about dropping it before you get a lot more aborto whores after your blood.’
Tonaldo opened his mouth to respond, but the shadows fell away before him and there was no one to talk to.
22nd April.
Twilight crouched on a rooftop opposite Tonaldo’s apartment building, watching the windows. There was nothing much happening and the light was out in the room Lena had occupied until that morning. Andrea had been working so there had been no way to see her off, and it would likely have been a bad idea anyway, but Heather had made a few calls to check that Miss Lena Tonaldo had, indeed, left safely and was due to arrive in Italy within the next hour.
To his credit, David had been in his office quite late and it did not seem like it was work which kept him there. He had spent a lot of time staring at a framed photograph, or the ceiling. Neither Andrea nor Twilight could bring themselves to think of David Tonaldo as a sentimental man, but family tended to be important to men like him. It was quite possible that he was missing his troublesome daughter, but they were pretty sure he would get over it.
Getting to her feet, Twilight turned… And there was someone watching her from the other side of the roof. Crouched, but from the looks of her, and it was a her, not especially tall. High boots with low heels, some form of swimsuit-style costume with a cowl and a cloth covering the mouth and nose, and a cape. There were wrappings around her arms which were likely there as bracers because she was carrying a bow, and there was a box-shaped quiver hung from her belt. The skin on show was pale and there was too little light to make out colours properly, but Twilight thought the pale eyes were blue or green.
‘Our mysterious archer,’ Andrea said.
‘So it would seem,’ Twilight replied. ‘Question is…’
The question was going to have to wait. The girl turned, ran a few paces, and jumped, clearing the gap to the next building easily.
‘Nimble little minx,’ Twilight said, pulling the shadows up around her.
The girl came to a sudden stop as Twilight stepped out of nothing ahead of her, and then bolted left, dropping to the fire escape below. Sighing, Twilight stepped through to the street, but the girl had apparently guessed that move, jumped across two buildings, and was running for an alley across the street.
‘She really doesn’t want to talk,’ Andrea commented as Twilight took them through to the far end of the alley only to see their quarry climbing up to the rooftops. When they arrived above she was nowhere to be seen. There were enough air ducts and access door structures to make it a guess which way she had gone.
‘I just want to talk,’ Twilight called out, but there was no reply. ‘Fine. If you can hear me, and you’re a good guy, go and see the Huntress. Otherwise, next time I see you we’ll have words.’ She waited a beat to be sure the girl with the bow was not going to answer, and then stepped through a shadow into nothing.
24th April.
‘She came to the Den last night.’ Red was on the speaker so that both Andrea and Penny could hear her. ‘She’s calling herself Skadi.’
‘Sounds Scandinavian,’ Penny commented.
‘Very good. Norse goddess associated with bow hunting, winter, skiing, stuff like that. The goddess was a jötunn, a giant, and she really doesn’t match that part, but she uses a bow and she’s an Ultra.’
‘The jumping was a bit of a giveaway,’ Andrea said. ‘She seemed to see pretty well in the dark too.’
‘Well, she’s five-eight, copper hair, green eyes. Kind of cute. I suggested she should take more care of the people she puts down. She’s new at this. I could tell, but she admitted she’d only registered recently.’
‘Think she might be trouble?’
‘I think… she might need watching. She’ll make mistakes. June’s back in two days, right?’
Penny grinned. ‘The twenty-sixth, yes. You want me to pick her up again?’
‘No, I’ll get her this time. I’ll bring her back in the morning. Later.’ And the line went dead.
‘Is it possible to die from sexual excess?’ Penny asked.
‘Don’t think so,’ Andrea replied. ‘Well, probably not. I mean… They do take breaks.’
1st May.
One of the bedrooms in the suite had been converted into a planning room. There were boards on stands with various notes pinned to them. Several of the pins had bits of string connecting them to other pi
ns. There were three computers in use. The knaves were busy and Diamond’s mind was at work as she lounged on the bed.
‘Have we isolated the trunk they’re using for the alarm system?’ she asked.
Rex tapped one of the boards. ‘Located and we can tap in and block the call.’
‘And we’re confident of the take?’
One of the knaves, a younger one Diamond had recruited for his computer skills, looked up and grinned. ‘Oh yes. We have the deposit box numbers we need and I’ve tracked the bonds back to Tonaldo. Should net us… two million, maybe more.’
Diamond nodded. ‘Explosives, munitions?’
‘I got the explosives you wanted,’ Rex said. ‘We’re good on small arms, but I sourced a couple of rocket launchers in case we get trouble from the Ultras.’
Diamond smiled. ‘I think our deck is stacked. Rex, honey, for now we focus on playing this hand, but after that I want you to look into some outside help. I think we may need to run a bluff for Cygnus and Twilight. I do suspect they may notice we’re here after this hand and we don’t want them joining the game so soon.’
‘I think I know a few people I could get over here on short notice,’ Rex replied. ‘I’ll make some calls.’
3rd May.
Grant-Bryson National was not a large bank chain, but it prided itself on having very secure vaults and a record of no successful robberies, even by Ultras. Part of that security came from a little known fact to most of the population, but a better known one to many criminals: a number of crime families used Grant-Bryson National banks to store valuables. Anyone hitting one of their branches was asking for a world of trouble.
Diamond stood in the foyer of its Uptown branch surveying the scene. Her red dress was fairly conservative and there was a wide-brimmed, red hat to go with it, which helped conceal her face. She had watched her boys arriving, four of them, matching the number of guards around the room, but she needed one more thing before they could start.
‘Lines are down.’
The voice in her ear was the last thing they needed to do to prepare. ‘Let’s deal, boys,’ she said, her low voice carrying to the microphone in her hat brim.
Four men drew silenced automatics and fired. Four guards dropped to the floor.
In the few seconds of shock-induced disability which followed, five more men, including Rex and Jack, came in through the bank’s doors, locking them behind them. Sub-machine guns were produced from under coats as the men marched in, but no shots were fired. The weapons were for show and last resort, and Diamond preferred to never need a last resort.
‘Everyone on the ground,’ Rex ordered. ‘Face down. Stay quiet and no one gets hurt.’
Diamond dropped to the floor with everyone else, playing the part of an innocent victim, but her eyes were on the glass front of the building, watching for anyone trying to interrupt their activities.
‘Silent alarm was tripped,’ the voice in her ear announced. ‘They think they have help coming.’
Rex and Jack were already on their way into the back of the building where the vault was located, leaving the knaves to guard the front. Diamond allowed herself a small smile; everything was going according to plan. Now if they worked at the speed required, there would be nothing to worry about on the way out.
Inside the vault a high-energy laser drill was employed to bypass the locks on several of the deposit boxes. Negotiable bearer bonds were removed and placed in a bag, replacing the bulky device which had previously occupied the space and now sat in the middle of the vault floor. A slab of plastic explosives was placed in each of the emptied boxes. A couple of other, random, boxes were opened and explosives placed in them. The entire operation took fifteen minutes, but it was within timescales.
The two men marched back out of the vault area, Rex carrying the bag as though it weighed nothing. He walked across the foyer to where Diamond was lying, grabbed her arm, and yanked her to her feet. She let out a squeal of protest and then went silent as he glowered at her. Two of her knaves grabbed a young man from the floor and began hustling him toward the doors.
‘Everyone stays down for five minutes after we’re gone,’ Rex said, backing toward the door with an apparently cowed Diamond in his grasp. ‘Anyone moves, these two are dead. If we see cops, these two are dead.’ He backed through the doors and hustled Diamond toward a van at the side of the road, pushing her in before climbing in himself. There she was pushed roughly to the floor beside the young man, the van doors were closed, and they set off into the midday traffic.
Thirty seconds later, the fuel-air explosive device in the vault erupted into a cloud of vapour to be ignited a second after that by the bombs in the boxes. The bank patrons and staff were just beginning to stand when a ball of fire boiled out of the vault and engulfed them.
~~~
‘Oh… Jesus,’ Cygnus muttered as she dropped to the pavement in front of the half-destroyed bank. She had seen the news, changed, and flown over at top speed, but Svetilo had managed to beat her there and was busy helping the emergency services go over the foyer area where fires were still licking over the more flammable pieces of furniture.
The tall, muscular, Russian woman spotted her immediately. ‘Aha! I knew you would be here. Excellent. Now we have the heavy lifting equipment we can proceed. Can we find Cygnus some gloves? We don’t want those pretty hands getting burned again.’
‘You were waiting for me?’ Cygnus asked as she took a pair of thick gloves from a fireman and began pulling them on.
‘Da. I am strong, but between us we can move mountains. There has been a large collapse in the back. There are almost certainly no survivors, but if anyone is alive they must be rescued and soon.’ Svetilo started for the back of the room. She was wearing a dark purple micro-dress and heeled, stiletto boots, totally inappropriate for the work and so her.
‘Did anyone in the foyer get out alive?’
‘Alive, yes. Unharmed… Twelve severely injured, eight dead. Concussion damage, third-degree burns. None of these people will be speaking of their attackers soon.’
‘Fuck. This isn’t a typical bank robbery.’
‘Net. Whoever planned this had the twisted mind, da?’
The vault access was blocked with fallen masonry and they began pulling it free, watching for further falls as they went. They found the first body a couple of yards in, crushed under a block of concrete and burned to the point that it was barely recognisable as human.
‘What the Hell did this?’ Cygnus asked.
‘It looks to me like fuel-air explosive device. Thermobaric weapon. Military and hard to get. Big ones are difficult to tell from nukes, but they are very effective at wiping out the evidence. Manager’s office should be on the left here.’
Pushing and pulling at fallen concrete beams, they managed to clear the doorway. The door had been blown inward by the enormous overpressure of the explosion, and that was what had killed the manager. His face and chest had been smashed in by the reinforced door even before his desk had been driven backward, almost cutting him in half.
‘There is body on floor under desk,’ Svetilo said. Cygnus could tell she was getting stressed because her English was getting more Russian.
Dreading what they would find, they pulled the desk away from the wall. The manager’s body slumped forward onto it with a sickening squelch, and Cygnus diverted her attention from that sight by looking down at the body under it. It was a woman, maybe twenty-five. Her face would likely have been pretty if her left cheek had not been badly burned, but… Crouching down, Cygnus felt for a pulse on the girl’s neck.
‘Overpressure will have torn her lungs apart,’ Svetilo said, her voice choked. ‘She–’
‘I’ve got a pulse,’ Cygnus interrupted. ‘It’s weak, but…’
Svetilo was already rushing to the doorway. ‘We have live one!’
Cygnus was a little surprised her shout failed to bring the ceiling down on them.
~~~
David Hopkirk
hung from his wrists in the back of the van, secured to a ring in the ceiling by ropes which were threatening to cut off his circulation. He had to admit that the view was good, if dimly lit. Barely a foot from him was the woman in the red dress who had been taken from the bank with him. Her arms were pulled up over her head and the result was a pair of impressively up-thrust breasts, but somehow he could not quite bring himself to be aroused by that just now.
‘D-do you think they’ll let us go?’ he asked. They had been parked somewhere, just where was impossible to know, for a while. Time had become meaningless after his arms had started to go numb.
‘I don’t see how they could, sugar,’ Diamond replied. ‘We’ve seen their faces.’
‘But the people in the bank…’
‘Everyone was lying down. Not a good angle to look from. We’ve had plenty of time to look right at them.’
‘Oh… I… I guess I’m not going to forget the big guy. He looked like he wanted to crush my skull every time he looked at me.’
Diamond smiled. ‘You don’t want to be worrying about Rex, hun.’ She pushed up onto her toes, pulled at the ropes, and then dropped her arms. David’s eyes widened. ‘He’s just a big old teddy bear. Of course, a bear’ll pull your arms and legs off if it needs to, but you stay out of its way and it won’t bother you.’
‘You… You’re with them!’
‘Oh no, hun. They’re with me.’ She bent down and picked up her hat, reaching into the crown and pulling out a diamond-shaped, sharpened metal object. The edge glinted in the dim light of the overhead bulb. ‘No, you don’t want to be worrying about Rex. You need to worry about me.’
Stepping closer, she pulled out the neck of his T-shirt and began slicing it open with the shuriken. ‘We are going to have so much fun,’ she told him.
4th May.
Twilight watched the van for ten minutes before stepping down from the rooftop in Deale Harbour and checking it more closely. The last van she had watched like that had contained a maniac with a machine gun and she was in no hurry to repeat that performance, but this van was still and quiet.
It just looked wrong. The parking was haphazard, as though the driver had stopped and vacated in a hurry. It was a box van, a fairly large one, but there were no markings on it, and the small windows in the rear doors had been painted out, but not especially expertly. And, somehow, it just felt bad.
Shadows (Ultrahumans Book 2) Page 13
