by Mike Cooper
“Inside?”
“The hotel. Plank’s waiting.”
“All right. One minute.”
“Good.” He hung up.
I gave the street one more long look. If something was screwy, I couldn’t tell. I put the decoy phone away and walked briskly over to the Grand Plaza.
As I entered, it occurred to me that Ganderson must have just tracked me down by the cellphone’s autolocation. I had to figure out a way around that, someday.
A tall, aloof doorman swept me through the brass doors with a slight bow. Inside, the lobby was warm and welcoming, if dimly lit. A waterfall tumbled two stories down the far wall of the atrium. Recessed alcoves, full-grown trees in planter boxes, and several different levels—up two stairs, down three, and so forth—created a space filled with semiprivate areas to stand or sit and talk and wait and people-watch. As luxury hotel foyers go, it was more than pleasant.
Over near a broad, plushly carpeted stairway leading to the mezzanine, wide-screen monitors listed events and ballrooms. I headed that way.
At the top of the stairs, someone slipped up next to me and said, “Silas.”
I suppressed an automatic reaction, barely. The slightest bit more adrenaline and I’d have lit up the entire floor.
“Calm down.”
“Zeke?” I stared. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I told you, I’m on the job. The question is, what are you—”
“You’re working here?” I felt dumb.
“Like I said.”
“For who?”
“A blowhard named Ganderson.”
“Fuck!”
“What—” He stopped, seeing my expression. “Shit.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“We’re down to zero degrees of separation, aren’t we?”
I glanced around. “Can we get off the floor?”
We found an unused facility room down a hallway on the mezzanine. It was surprisingly large inside, dark and quiet, with blank partitions set up across half the floor. Empty desks trailed power cables. It looked like a group of trade-show exhibitors had just left, or was about to arrive.
Behind us the door closed silently.
“I’m just additional security,” Zeke said. “Exactly like I told you.”
“What did Ganderson say he’s worried about? Your rates are too high just to fend off a few overzealous photographers.”
“The deer hunter seems to have put everyone on edge. This conference, all that fucking money—these guys are worth what, hundreds of millions? I was watching them in the dining room just now, and you could tell, they’re scared.” Zeke allowed himself a small smile. “Of one man with a rifle. Somehow I thought it would take more than that.”
“The soft underbelly of the kleptocracy.” I rolled my shoulders. “Ganderson wanted me here. Specifically.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me he’d hired you.” Zeke was still put out.
“You didn’t mention his name either, when we were on the phone.”
“Why should I?”
It was true, we’d both kept a secret too many.
“Sorry,” I said. “Bad habits.” I ran down my experience with Ganderson once more, in case there were other blanks to fill in.
Zeke thought for a moment. “You think Ganderson knows we’re connected, you and me?”
“No.”
“Me neither.” I knew Zeke would never talk about me, just like I would never talk about him. Not to a civilian. “When does Plank come in?”
“Is that who’s speaking?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“Just something about a VIP guest.” Zeke paused. “Hang on. You mean Plank? The deer hunter’s next target?”
“Apparently, the whole world has heard he’s making a statement tonight. But Ganderson didn’t give you the name?”
“No.” I couldn’t see Zeke’s face well in the dark room, our only illumination being from light under the doors. But he seemed to be getting pissed. “He should have.”
Something rattled in the corridor outside. We stood silent, waiting while it rolled past. A waiter’s cart, maybe. The noise faded down the hallway.
“Are you on a permit?” I said. A concealed-firearms permit, that is—in other words, was he strapped.
“Sidearm only.”
“That’s all it takes.” I thought. “How many of you are there?”
“Don’t know. A dozen in the briefing. Others—?”
“Anyone we know?”
“No. Basic jarheads. The chief was senior, though. Fort Bragg through and through.”
“He say so?”
“Of course not.” One clue, that. “Had the look. He’d been scrapping, too. His left wrist was wrapped with bandage tape.”
That caught my attention. “Five-eight, all gristle, blue eyes, buzzcut?”
“You know him?” But Zeke wasn’t slow. “Shit. Saxon?”
Clearly Zeke and I had over-fucking-compartmentalized. I’d forgotten Zeke had never seen Saxon, even though I’d talked about him enough. “Four hours ago he kidnapped Clara, took out everyone at her library, and tried real hard to kill me.”
“What?”
He was having trouble believing me. I couldn’t blame him, but we didn’t have time for exposition.
“Tell you later.” As one mind, we were out the door, moving fast down the hallway. Zeke loosened his jacket.
“She okay?”
“I think so.” I wasn’t sure about myself, though. I was practically glowing with adrenaline.
“I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Where’s Saxon now?”
“Don’t know.” Zeke slowed, checking each banquet room door we passed. Most were empty. “The main group’s in the ballroom, down there. Ganderson wanted me near the door. Saxon could be anywhere.”
Fifty yards ahead the corridor opened up, into a two-story space, with crystal chandeliers and broad double doors opposite an elevator bank. White-clothed tables, empty now, had been arrayed to form a cocktail area. The room was almost deserted, just a couple of men in suits grimacing into their cellphones. Behind the double doors we could hear banquet noise: someone on a microphone, too garbled to understand; low chatter; glass and flatware clinking.
“If I see Saxon,” I said, “I’m going to—”
POP! POP!
And just like that, shooting, inside the ballroom.
“Left!” Zeke sprinted for the far left door, leaving me the right. We hit them at almost the same instant.
We crashed through, and entered bedlam.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Standard fancy-dinner setup: a hundred, hundred-fifty guests at round tables scattered through the room. Older men and a much smaller number of young women. Dais at the front with a speaker’s table and podium. Two large projection screens to either side, currently showing a brightly colored bar graph. Vast stacks of identical books for sale, or handing out, at a table in the rear.
And everyone moving. Shouting. Diving for the floor, jumping up, running into one another. All pretty much by the book for a live-fire urban-terror situation.
Except one thing—half the hedge fund motherfuckers had their own weapons.
Handguns everywhere! Automatics, mostly—nines, 1911s. A guy in front of me was crouched behind his table holding a polished, silvery Desert Eagle in two hands. A woman next to him had a little pink Cobra .25, waving it the other way. Over there a young man in a classic Weaver stance, wild-eyed.
“Holy shit.” Zeke’s voice cut through the yelling and crashing, twenty-five feet away.
“Police!” I screamed, as loudly as possible. “Everybody stand down!”
That just drew attention my way, and I was abruptly staring into gun barrels from every direction.
Thank you, NRA. I’m not sure how a total deregulation of firearms equates to liberty, but it was sure as fuck invigorating the rubber-chicken-and-boring-speech paradigm.
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“Over there!” I’d spotted Saxon himself, standing at the edge of the dais, scanning the melee. He held an MP5 submachine gun by his side. A few heads swung, following my gesture.
Someone fired from deep in the other side of the room, in the middle of a desperate bunch who had run for the kitchen doors. A scream, the yelling even louder. Another shot, then another.
Suddenly, it was a war zone. Idiots all around the room pulled their triggers. The intense noise stunned a few people and drove the rest into blind panic. Blood and haze filled the air.
What the hell. The lady with the Cobra was screaming right next to me, so I grabbed her arm, closed my hand over hers so she wouldn’t pull the trigger, and took the gun away. Then I fired at Saxon, right before he went backward off the dais, leaping for safety. Couldn’t tell if I winged him or not.
I hit the carpet myself, elbow-crawling as fast as I could for the book table. The doors were a deathtrap—jammed by people trying to escape, then dying in place as others fought to get through.
Zeke had the same idea, diving behind the three-foot stacks of hardbacks just as I arrived. Bullets thwacked into the books, knocking them into the air and throwing out puffs of shredded paper. We huddled in the slight shelter.
“Insane!” Zeke shouted over the din. “I want a broker’s license!”
“They can’t all be carrying reloads,” I yelled back. “This should die down in a few seconds.”
And it did. The firing sputtered to a halt, replaced by moans and wails and pointless shouting. In the relative quiet I risked a look around the tumbled heap of books.
Saxon also reappeared, walking cautiously toward the center of the room. We saw each other at the same instant. He had the advantage, raising his MP5 immediately and firing a burst—but I was still protected behind our literature berm, and the bullets pounded harmlessly into the books.
Zeke looked out the other side, raised his pistol and shot Saxon square in the center of mass. He went down hard, falling on his weapon, and didn’t move.
Sometimes things are easy.
“Got to find Ganderson,” I said. “Figure out what the fuck is going on.”
“Go ahead.” Zeke ejected the magazine from his Beretta, left the slide open, and wiped all the metal with a cloth napkin from the floor. “I’ll try to calm everyone down here.”
“Lots of accidental deaths just happened. No one’s ever going to sort it out.”
“Exactly.” He tossed his cleaned weapon onto the floor, twenty feet away.
The shooting had stopped, but everything else was still pandemonium. The first, largely misguided attempts at first aid began—waving air at dying faces, tearing open bloody shirts, tying on improvised tourniquets that would halt all blood flow and lead to unnecessary amputations. Everywhere crying, sobbing, voices shouting.
“Kinda feels like a car-bombed street market, doesn’t it?” Zeke stood up.
“Not as well organized.”
“These people haven’t had as much practice.”
Zeke saw someone he recognized, apparently one of the security men, and waved him over. In a moment they’d found another, then started a rough triage, going through the room. Faintly we could hear sirens and fire truck horns somewhere outside.
“What were those first shots, do you think?” I asked. “Before we came in?”
“Dunno. If I had to guess, I’d say some dumbass drew his weapon to show off to his girlfriend. Accidents happen.”
“No shit.”
Zeke glanced at the Cobra, still in my hand. “Leave that here.”
“What?”
“When ESU blows in, they’re going to shoot everyone who looks like any kind of a threat.”
“Hmm.” The NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit did have a reputation.
“Look around.” He gestured. “Everyone in here who’s halfway functioning is on their phone.”
He was right. Cellphones were pressed to ears everywhere.
“And they’re saying anything. First responders will be expecting Mumbai.”
“Okay, okay.” Look like a terrorist and I might very well die like a terrorist. “It’s not mine anyway.” I handed him the pistol.
At the center entrance I helped pull a few bodies from the stack—most of them still alive, actually—and cleared the doorway. Stepping through, I found a few other survivors stumbling for the stairs, down to the lobby. A woman in a white uniform, from catering or something like that, looked around the corner near the elevators, hesitated, then sprinted past. I couldn’t see into the lobby, too far from the escalators, but it was noisy down there, too—more shouting over the waterfall.
BANG!
The lights went out.
I leaped into a forward roll, automatically, slammed into a wall and kept going. The explosion hadn’t sounded quite like a gunshot, but who knows—my ears had been saturated with battle noise so long now I couldn’t count on them.
Emergency lights snapped on, battery-powered floods at widely separated points in the hallway.
“Silas! Silas, down here!”
Well, that was easy. Ganderson himself, poking out of one of the banquet rooms farther down. He waved me forward, an urgent swimming motion.
“Come on!” His voice was more than a whisper, less than a yell. “What’s happening in there?”
I rose to my feet, wary, and jogged down the corridor. My feet made no noise on the carpet. The shouting faded a little behind me.
At the door, Ganderson stepped aside to let me in, while keeping watch toward the ballroom. He seemed to be alone. The room inside was almost empty—two flat handcars of chairs, stacked up, and some folded tables along one wall. A single battery lamp in the corner cast a pale light.
“Where’s Terry Plank?” I said.
“Don’t know. He was supposed to come later.” Ganderson came in behind me, letting the door close, and checked his watch. “Actually, in about twenty minutes. He didn’t want to take any chances being spotted beforehand.”
“Lucky him.” I noticed that Ganderson held his .45, the one with the laser mount. Finger outside the guard, pointed properly at the ground and away from both of us, yes. He paid it no attention, but I didn’t let my eyes wander. “If he’s still out there, he’ll soon be surrounded by every duty officer in the city. Safe as a kitten.”
“Good.”
“Listen, what’s with all the fucking ballistics?” The entire world seemed to be better armed than I was. “That roomful of Wall Streeters had more armament than a rifle battalion.”
Ganderson shrugged. “Hobby shooters, like me. Plus a lot of guys who saw Marlett and Faust go down and figured if the police can’t do their job, they need to protect themselves.”
“And a fine job they’ve done of it, too.”
“We had private security. They should have been keeping order.”
Right. I’d almost forgotten why I was here.
“Was Saxon one of yours?”
“Who?”
But it was too late. Even in the dim, shadowed murk, I’d seen Ganderson’s eyes twitch.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“Fuck, he was. You hired Saxon!”
“Calm down, Silas.”
Confirmation. Saxon worked for Ganderson, and Ganderson and Blacktail were partners. No wonder his goons had found us outside Blacktail’s office—Ganderson had been tracking me all along, with the cellphone, just as he’d found me outside ten minutes earlier.
And the client Walter had sort of recognized? Who else? Ganderson, who was always in the news somewhere. He was preparing to flee, with the millions he’d earned from his spree.
“You were killing your own.” I still couldn’t believe it.
Ganderson didn’t say anything. He exhaled, long and slow, then lifted the .45 to aim directly at me.
Maybe he was ready to shoot, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was just fucking around. It didn’t matter now.
My hands were already in front of me, three feet from the
pistol. I sprang forward, arms reaching.
Ganderson fired, twisted away and stepped backward, all at the same second. The shot missed. So did the second and third because I’d struck his left arm. I scrabbled for a grip on his wrist as I collided, and we went down, clawing at each other.
A blur. He kept both hands on the pistol, trying to shove it toward my stomach. I kicked with one knee, grabbed his arm, head-butted in the direction of his chin. He squirmed sideways.
For an old guy, Ganderson was strong. All those five a.m. swims paying off.
He pulled the trigger three more times, rapidly. The last shot barely missed my head—I felt the sonic crack of a bullet inches from my ear. Desperate, I got one hand on his, over the grip, and squeezed. Hard as I could. Somehow, tearing at the tendons, I caused his trigger finger to spasm, and five more shots flew into the floor.
That was it—the magazine should be empty.
But Ganderson realized the situation as fast as I did and rolled away. In a completely lucky punch, he whacked me on the head with the gun barrel as he went. I phased out for a moment.
A few seconds later I was back on my feet, but Ganderson had retreated to a corner, protected by the two chair racks. With a moment’s respite he’d pulled a new magazine from his pocket and tried to ram it in.
“I’m not part of this!” I yelled, but that was just distraction.
I was twenty feet from Ganderson, and he’d almost finished a reload. I had no weapon and nothing to prove. I ran for the door, crashing into it just as Ganderson finished, recovered and started firing again. Bullets followed me out.
Sprawling into the hallway, I looked left, right. Still just the battery lights, and no emergency responders in view yet. A couple of people too far away to be any help, even if they weren’t blood-covered and shocked. I remained on my own.
In another second Ganderson would be at the door, with unobstructed sightlines and fresh ammunition. The hallway was barren, empty of anything I might use as cover.
In front of me were the double doors to the room Zeke and I had conferred in. Twenty minutes ago and it seemed like a week. Without hesitating, I grabbed at the handle, pushed it open, and leaped through.
The door closed just as Ganderson came up. I could see his shadow in the crack of hallway light seeping under the door. Inside it was still as dim as before—the emergency light was obscured by one of the exhibitor partitions, casting black shadows.
