The Darkest Day

by Tom Wood

  The man wailed.

  ‘Tell me everything I need to know and when I walk out of here I won’t make a detour.’

  Finally, Pachulski spoke between sobs: ‘How do I know you’ll keep your word?’

  Victor said, ‘The only thing you can know for certain, whether or not you tell me what I want to know, is that I will kill you. There’s nothing you can do to stop that happening. It’s not personal, Sean, but you work for people trying to kill me. I haven’t stayed alive this long by showing my enemies mercy. ’ Raven glanced at him. ‘So, you’re dead. Like I said, a certainty. But if you don’t tell me who sent you then I won’t kill you until after I’ve made that detour we talked about.’

  Pachulski blinked the tears from his eyes, swallowed, and said, ‘I’ll talk. I’ll talk.’

  ‘Good,’ Victor said.

  Raven said, ‘Where’s Halleck?’

  Pachulski said, ‘I don’t know, I swear.’

  ‘Then where are you guys based? Where’s your HQ?’

  ‘Brooklyn,’ Pachulski answered. ‘Floyd Bennett Field.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Victor asked.

  ‘It’s a disused airfield,’ Raven explained. ‘I know where it is.’

  Victor said, ‘How many of you are there?’

  ‘We had twenty-four,’ the man said. ‘I’m not sure how many are left now. I’m sorry, I —’

  Raven said, ‘Where’s the bomb? Where’s the C4?’

  His mouth hovered open. ‘What bomb? I don’t know anything about a bomb.’

  ‘Why did Halleck base you guys at an airfield?’

  ‘Waiting for a delivery,’ Pachulski said.

  ‘Details,’ Raven demanded.

  His words came out fast and frantic: ‘That’s all I know, I swear. Halleck is having something delivered. I don’t know what. I’m a foot soldier, that’s all. I don’t know anything else. If I did I would tell you. I swear.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Victor said. ‘Relax.’

  ‘So you won’t hurt my family now?’

  Victor said, ‘I don’t need to any more, do I?’ and broke Pachulski’s neck.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The street was empty when they left. The rain fell in a light but steady drizzle. The breeze was intermittent and cold. The moon pierced through the clouds above. The city beneath was dark and quiet – a rare instant of peacefulness in an otherwise chaotic metropolis.

  Raven said, ‘Floyd Bennett Field is at least twenty miles away. It’s right on the bottom of Brooklyn. That’s a hell of a lot of ground to cover as fugitives.’

  ‘What choice do we have?’

  They kept their eyes moving as they walked, looking out for cops or Halleck’s men.

  ‘Would you have done it?’ Raven asked.

  ‘Done what?’

  She frowned. ‘Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean. The stuff about the kid. The daughter. Was it a threat or would you have followed through if he hadn’t talked?’

  Victor said, ‘We’ll never know, will we?’

  She was quiet for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t have let you, had it come to it.’

  Victor didn’t respond.

  Raven said, ‘Maybe you only want me to think there’s no line you won’t cross. Maybe that’s why you won’t tell me.’

  ‘Believe whatever you wish.’

  No one gave either of them a second glance as they threaded their way through a crowd of citizens out to pick up supplies of perishable goods being sold cheap by a local supermarket looking to offload them before they spoiled. He paid for a loaf of sliced white bread and ate three slices as he walked to get some simple carbohydrates into his system. Raven took a slice for herself. Victor gave the rest of the loaf to the next person he passed.

  He felt a little light-headed from the fight with Guerrero. Not concussed, but hard blows to the head made the brain rattle inside the skull. He could have some swelling, or in an extreme case an aneurysm. If it was the latter, it didn’t matter about the people after him because he would be dead soon regardless. If it was only the former the light-headedness might progress to feeling faint or dizzy or nauseous. Neither of which would help him get out of this situation. He needed his mind sharp and fast, not dulled and slow.

  They passed a man in an astrakhan fur hat who stood sheltering in the doorway of a closed store. The man was laughing to himself. About what, they would never know.

  They walked south for almost an hour, back into Manhattan until all around Victor tall buildings rose high into the night sky, but whereas their façades should glow from lit interiors and glimmer with the infinite lights of the city at night, they were dark and featureless. Moonlight shone off their glass windows and the windscreens of abandoned cars. Traffic lights suspended on long beams hung useless. A homeless guy lay next to a bin on the pavement, buried under a deep pile of blankets, lost in the slumber of alcohol, unaware of the blackout and its effect on the city.

  Something was wrong.

  Victor did not see or hear anything that alarmed him, but he sensed it regardless. He noticed the change within himself. He felt the physiological adjustment to danger. His subconscious had detected some threat and had responded by sending out messages to release hormones, which in turn resulted in the elevation of his heart rate and a heightened state of alertness.

  He didn’t yet know why, but the organism wherein his consciousness existed knew all it needed to prepare him for fight or flight.

  This was the innate feeling of something being wrong – the inexplicable bad feeling – that modern humans sometimes experienced but often ignored. For Victor, his life often depended on heeding its message.

  He saw no other people. He heard no one approaching.

  He moved anyway. Raven detected it also, or saw his reaction to it, and followed his lead. Victor did not know where the threat would come from, but standing still and waiting for it to manifest was not his style. That would be idiocy. He picked his own battlefields. He had not survived this long by being reactive.

  A few metres along the street, he understood. On a storefront up ahead were pinpricks of floating red light, growing larger and further apart.

  Vehicle tail lights were red, but if these were tail lights they would grow smaller and closer as the car moved further away, not larger and further apart as they drew closer. Which only left one type of red light they could belong to.

  They were the lights of a police cruiser approaching, maybe a block away, light bars glowing but siren silent not to alert him.

  His subconscious, always alert and processing data, had noticed anyway, many seconds before his conscious mind was aware of those pin dots of red light and had worked out what they meant.

  Now, they were both heading straight towards the threat.

  Raven saw it too and they backtracked, turned, walking fast. They took a set of steps leading down to get off the road, heading into an alleyway, narrow and stinking, and louder with the ambient sound of the city, trapped and intensified.

  The cop car approached, out of sight behind them and up the steps, but he heard the rumble of its exhaust becoming louder despite the attempt at stealth. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the cruiser drive past the mouth of the alleyway. He glimpsed two cops inside. The red glow of the light bars played over the concrete steps, casting shadows where once had been darkness.

  They waited, wrapped in shadows and leaning against a damp wall, until the rumble of the exhaust had faded into the background murmur of the rain.

  For now, they had avoided the cops, but those inside the cruiser would not give up so soon. The car would circle the area searching for them and only leaving again if they were sure the sighting they were responding to proved to be false. Or maybe they wouldn’t go at all, convinced of their presence, or they might call in reinforcements to join the hunt. There was nothing for it but to keep moving.

  Active, not reactive.

  They passed under a bridge. The rain struck riveted steel in a jarring patter. Junk
burning in a charred barrel sent yellow and orange flames licking beyond the blackened barrel rim. The smell was abhorrent. Three homeless men stood around it, forming the corners of an equilateral triangle, warming their hands. Their faces were empty and thin, worn down to masks of skin and hardship. Firelight flickered on empty wine bottles around them. Glowing embers floated skyward.

  Victor and Raven walked past the men, knowing they stared the whole way, but he kept his focus ahead. He had seen from their body language that they were not going to bother them. This was no more than a curiosity to them. The homeless men might speculate why they were down here with the lowest of the low, but the vagrants were not any kind of threat. These men had bigger problems to deal with, like staying alive for one more night.

  They emerged from under the bridge and back into the rain. They took a set of concrete stairs back up to street level. He did not want to end up trapped with the river on one side of them and cops on the other. They would become hypothermic long before they reached the other side, even if they were fortunate enough not to be struck by some barge or ferry. Victor had no desire to die, and even less so in a river, freezing and drowning, body washed out to sea, maybe never found, remains eaten by sharks.

  He pushed on, crossing a metal footbridge over a road, his steps more like shuffles, splashing water from puddles up his legs. The noise of the traffic below was a loud roar of engines and exhausts, echoing under the bridge.

  Sirens sounded behind them, growing louder with each passing second. Maybe the one from before, or a new arrival. He straightened his back and focused on his gait to appear not as a man fleeing but as a pedestrian walking. Raven did the same. A couple not worth investigating.

  In the darkness and rain, the deception worked. The cruiser sped past. It didn’t even slow.

  Not the one that had been looking for them before, but another. Maybe responding to some other emergency.

  They waited until it had gone and walked fast – a couple in a hurry, stressed and harried, but not chased. They had to find somewhere to hold up, and soon. No one they passed paid them any attention. Civilians were more concerned with the rain and the blackout or so used to keeping themselves to themselves it made no difference how fast he and Raven walked or how suspicious they acted.

  The rain was falling harder as Victor and Raven entered a plaza. He began to shiver as he weaved past people, avoiding the umbrellas that seemed determined to find his eyes. People still struggled in fruitless attempts to get their phones to work through the downed networks. The collective glow from the screens up-lit their faces, disembodied in the otherwise darkness.

  Raven said, ‘We’ve got company.’

  FIFTY-TWO

  It took him an extra few seconds to identify them. He identified them because they used neither umbrellas nor phones and by their clothes, their postures and their actions. They were looking for him and Raven, and looking hard, drawn to the area by the police presence. Maybe they had access to police radios or scanners or were just receiving updates by cooperating agencies.

  The specifics did not matter for the time being. What mattered was avoiding them.

  He hadn’t seen these guys before. But that wasn’t surprising given the numbers Halleck had access too. These guys looked new. They looked and acted like a competent team brought in at short notice and asked to do a difficult job in difficult circumstances.

  One guy with black-framed glasses neared him, gaze sweeping back and forth, intense and thorough. The suppressed Ruger in the guy’s shoulder rig made the canvas jacket bulge. Victor lowered himself to one knee and retied his shoelaces until the man had passed by. Raven drifted away a little so they did not look like they were together.

  The team was all male, all fit and in shape, all wearing casual civilian attire. They were working in pairs, three mini-teams converging on their location from different directions.

  Whichever direction Victor and Raven headed, they would risk crossing one of the teams’ line of sight. Halleck’s men had been effective at spreading out across the plaza and implementing a sweeping pattern that offered few avenues to chance. But to wait would mean getting trapped between all six and a guarantee of eventual discovery. They had no choice but to go.

  Victor timed his move, approaching an arcade on the plaza’s west side using cover provided by a cute young couple with matching umbrellas. He passed behind one of the two-man teams, close enough to hear one say:

  ‘… we better get double for this…’

  As Victor and Raven drew near to the arcade entrance he had to veer away from the cute couple, but saw he had made it far enough in cover that he was going to get through unobserved by the six men. But another problem was waiting for them. Standing to one side of the entrance, in the shelter of an awning, was a squat cop with a huge stomach and neat moustache, who had removed the plastic lid from his waxed takeaway cup and was blowing on the surface of the hot coffee it contained.

  Don’t look up, Victor willed as he neared.

  The cop’s eyes were focused on the coffee. He lips were wet and pursed. Steam rose into the air.

  When Victor and Raven were less than ten metres away the cop raised the cup and sipped. He grimaced, the coffee too hot despite his attempts to cool it, and glanced up.

  Right at Victor.

  The cop blinked and looked away in an idle sweep of his surroundings while he waited for the coffee to cool. Victor and Raven continued towards the arcade, now only five metres from the cop.

  Who glanced back, a line of curiosity forming between his eyebrows as he searched his memory banks for why Victor looked familiar.

  When he was two metres from passing out of the cop’s line of sight, it seemed as if he wouldn’t be recognised, but as he entered the arcade Victor saw, via the reflection in the plate glass of a storefront, the cop leaning over to place his coffee cup on the ground, and follow.

  The cop followed them into the arcade.

  The cop had not reached for his radio. He had not yet called it in. No backup was on the way. He was not sure about Victor. The curiosity had yet to become recognition. The squat cop had no wish to report a false sighting. He wanted to find out more before acting one way or the other.

  For that, he needed to get close.

  Victor went to one knee as if to tie his shoelaces again. Raven kept walking. Victor left his laces alone while he listened to the footsteps approaching, using the loudening sound to picture the cop at four metres, then three, before stopping two metres behind him.

  ‘Excuse me, sir…’

  Had he been closer, Victor could have sprung up as the cop’s shadow fell over him, driving a fist into the cop’s abdomen and a palm strike into the cop’s jaw, taking him out of action fast and clean and maybe before anyone else saw what was happening. But the cop had stopped a tactical distance away. He was not sure about Victor’s identity, but he was not stupid either.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ the cop said again. ‘Can you turn around and show me some ID, please?’

  Victor did not turn round, because he wanted the cop to only see his face when he was standing and ready to act. He rose, nice and slow so as not to scare the cop and draw an unnecessary reaction.

  He turned.

  The cop’s gaze met his own. The cop recognised him.

  There was no mistaking the reaction, which gave Victor a split second to act as the cop went for the pistol holstered on his belt.

  Victor launched forward, driving an elbow into the cop’s jaw.

  His teeth cracked together and his head snapped back and he tipped over backwards, unconscious before he knew he had been hit.

  Victor caught him so he didn’t slam the back of his head on the ground. A hit like that on an unconscious brain could kill.

  He lowered the cop down and into a recovery position as if he were nothing more than a good Samaritan, glad no one seemed to have seen the attack and not too surprised by this. City folk more often than not went out of their way not to see troub
le.

  As he stood again, he heard a cry. A child, closer to the ground and not jaded by city life, saw the unconscious cop and the blood pooling out of his mouth. The child burst into tears.

  The mother looked to see what had upset her child, and gasped.

  Other people reacted and turned and stared at the cop, and in doing so at Victor.

  He didn’t speak. There was nothing he could say to change the fact he was standing over a knocked-out police officer. He fell wasn’t going to cut it. No explanation was going to convince anyone they weren’t seeing what was right before their eyes.

  He ignored the accusing stares and hurried away to where Raven waited for him. A teenager turned his phone in Victor’s direction to take a picture or record or whatever else kids did. Victor snatched it from the teen’s hand and hurled it at the closest wall. It smashed into pieces.

  ‘HEY, MAN. What the —’

  Victor ran.

  He didn’t have to look back to know someone from the team in the nearby plaza would have seen or heard the commotion and if not pursuing right now would be in moments.

  He followed Raven, vaulting over a barrier at the end of the arcade and on to the road. They weaved through the slow-moving traffic to the other side of the street.

  Victor heard the roar of revving engines and ahead of him two black Audi sedans turned a corner on to the street, bright xenon headlights sweeping over him. The cars roared closer, then swerved to pull over, tyres sounding a squelch of temporary resistance on the wet asphalt. Doors were open before the cars had stopped. More men in dark clothes spilled out. Four – two from each Audi.

  Victor and Raven took a sharp change of direction, crossing the street, heading east.

  The men followed, jogging while signalling commands and relaying updates via wrist-mikes to the team in the plaza. At least he hoped that was the case and there were not even more out there to cut him off.

  The street sloped at maybe fifteen degrees. Buildings dark with grime and pollution, made darker by the blackout, lined the road. Vehicles were parked nose-to-tail along the kerbs.