The hooked end had no sooner gashed away the wallpaper and plaster than a terrible sound filled Laika's head. It was the scream of a few nights before, sawing through her brain like an ax through a head of lettuce. She winced but kept her eyes open, watching as Joseph smashed the crowbar at the wall again and again. Plaster and laths showered to the floor, and the sound stopped, cut off as it had been before.
"There are passages between the walls . . ." Joseph said between blows. "Narrow enough for one person at a time . . . to go through sideways . . . put in for voyeurs . . . to see what was going on in the bedrooms. . . . The entrances were covered up years ago . . . when it was converted to apartments. . . ."
As the hole Joseph made widened, the vile smell that hung in the air grew stronger, so that all of them were wrinkling their noses in disgust. It was a combination of feces, piss, and death, as well as other things Laika couldn't and didn't want to name.
At last it was big enough for Joseph to slip through, and he did so, dropping the crowbar and taking a Maglite from his pocket. "Dr. Kelly?" he said to Laika. "Perhaps you'd like to accompany me to find our hidden friends?"
Laika nodded and stepped to the gaping entrance. "The rest of you, stay here," she said. "We'll be right back . . . I hope," she added under her breath, as she squeezed into the passageway.
Chapter 28
It was like something out of a nightmare, like crawling rough the guts of a creature of wood and nails. The stench was awful, and she saw all too clearly why. Piles of feces dotted the filthy floor, dark mounds in the dust that their passage stirred up. The dust swirled into her nose like a physical manifestation of the foul odor, and she tried hard not to gag.
Their lights jerked about constantly, so that there was never a chance to actually focus her vision on anything. Sight was a montage of splintered laths and cracked plaster, lit for split seconds by brilliant flashes of white.
They sidled, like crabs, sideways through the passageway, for there was no room to turn and walk. "Get your gun out," Laika said, extricating her own weapon.
"All right," Joseph replied, and paused just long enough to take out his pistol.
"Where the hell are we going?"
His voice came back in a series of grunts. He seemed to be having more trouble navigating the narrow space than the slimmer Laika. "About twenty more yards. It turns left up here. According to our measurements, there's about an eight-by-ten area unaccounted for. . . ."
The turn was ahead, as Joseph had promised. Laika flashed her light down the opposite passage and was chilled to see that it stretched away into darkness. It was like shining her flashlight into the night sky. She looked away from it and followed Joseph.
"Douse your light," she heard him whisper. She held her fingers over the lens, separating them just enough to let a needle of light shine through, and Joseph did the same. Ahead, she saw another light, dim and yellow, in which the dust particles performed their danse macabre.
Joseph shuffled ahead a few more steps and then turned another corner and vanished into the dim light. Laika sidestepped as quickly as she could, fumbling along, feeling as though she were moving through the thick broth of dream.
When her head cleared the corner, she saw the room and who and what were in it. The sight froze her for a moment, and then one of the creatures moved and the scream that had assaulted them before filled the room with its pain and fury.
She fumbled to bring up her gun, but before she could there was a sudden flash and a roar of gunfire that was deafening in the small room. The woman, if that was what the thing truly was, fell back, and something dull and gray-white dropped from her arms.
It was a baby. It landed on the filthy floor with a terrible liquid sound, and the woman who had held it struck the far wall and slid down it into a sitting position. Her eyes and mouth hung open, and Laika heard a bubbling sound in her throat. She coughed a mass of blood and phlegm that clung like a huge leech to her chin, dripping down upon the bloody wound in her chest, and did not move again.
The baby lay where it had fallen. Joseph's bullet had passed through its soft body into the chest of the woman holding it and had nearly ripped its left arm from its shoulder. But its sickly gray flesh told Laika that it had been dead a long time. It was so thin that it scarcely looked like a baby, reminding Laika heartlessly of nothing so much as a large, hairless rat. It was naked, and Laika saw that it had been a little girl.
She turned her eyes away from it, toward the only living stranger in the room. He was crouching in the corner, his eyes darting back and forth between Joseph and her, never looking at the dead woman or her child. His hair was a rat's nest of dirty brown curls, his face was gaunt, his frame spindly. Laika could tell that his mind was not right. He did not speak, but only looked at them, back and forth, back and forth, as though he were watching a tennis match.
Holding her gun, Laika crossed the floor, kicking aside the hatchet with which the woman had attacked Joseph, and knelt by the woman's side. There was no pulse. She looked up at Joseph. "Did you bring any cuffs?" she said.
He did not respond. Ignoring her questions and the wild-eyed glare of the man in the corner, Joseph was looking with horror at the dead baby on the floor.
"Dr. Tompkins!" Laika barked. "Look at me! Did you bring any cuffs?"
He nodded, reached into the pocket of his coat, and took out a pair of handcuffs. Laika stepped between Joseph and the sight of the dead and took the cuffs. "The baby was dead, Doctor. It was dead long before tonight."
She stepped over to the man in the corner and beckoned him to get up. He didn't move, and she could see both his hands, so she jerked him to his feet, spun him around, and slapped the cuffs on him. He made no protest.
They went out the way they had come in, the bound man between them, stepping sideways through the filth and the dust. Laika led the way. When they reached the opening, Laika pushed the man's head down and pulled him through. Joseph followed, still pale. The man looked at Clarence Melton, at Elissa Meyer, and at Tweed in the same uncomprehending way in which he had previously looked at Laika and Joseph.
"There are two more at the end of that passageway in a secret room," Laika said. "A woman and a baby, both dead."
"Dead!" Melton said.
"The woman attacked us with a hatchet—Dr. Tompkins had no choice. The baby's been dead for a while. You'll have to contact the police." Tweed quickly made a cell phone appear. He dialed it and spoke into it softly. "Tell them to come without lights or sirens," Laika cautioned the man. "There's no need."
"Was it the woman who . . . ?" Melton left the question unfinished.
"It was the woman who was screaming, yes," Laika said. "Probably from behind the wall. It must have made a pretty good sounding board, and she was loud to begin with." She looked at their captive. He seemed to have lost interest in them and was now staring down the hall, into the darkness at its end.
"They probably stole food from the workmen when they could," Laika went on, putting the pieces together. "And the so-called poltergeist activity was due to them. The areas between the walls are wide enough to walk through." She looked at Joseph. "Isn't that right, Dr. Tompkins?"
Joseph nodded, then spoke haltingly. "Yes . . . the place is honeycombed. The ceilings of many of the closets are false. That's probably how they got in and out of rooms without being seen." He seemed as though he was about to say something else, but simply waved a hand in the air.
"And that's all there were?" Melton asked. "Two of them?"
Joseph gave a slight shrug, and Laika answered for him. "There might be more. But if there are, they're behind the walls. Get a force of armed security people in here and track them down. You may find more, you may find nothing."
"But what about the lights?" Melton asked. "The lights in that room?"
Joseph sounded tired, but did his best to explain. "They're reflections, that's all. I checked the flight schedules at Kennedy, and there's an international flight that leaves at 11:53 and
circles east of the city. Its takeoff light reflects in one of the new taller buildings across the park."
"The Bradoff building?" Melton asked.
Joseph nodded. "Its windows are angled slightly downward, so the light bounces across the park and hits the windows on the upper floor for just a few seconds as the plane banks. You can't tell from inside, because it's not bright enough to notice it shining through the window. But it's enough to be noticeable from across the street." He shook his head sadly. "There are no ghosts here, Mr. Melton." Then he looked at Elissa Meyer and gave a weak smile. "There are no ghosts here, Ms. Meyer."
She smiled back at him. It was sad, and Laika thought it seemed sincere. "You are wrong, Dr. Tompkins. These poor people might have caused the recent disruptions, but there is still something here." Then her smile faded, and her look was less kindly. "And it is stronger now. It has the strength of those who have just died."
The look on Joseph's face was unmistakably guilt—undeserved guilt, Laika thought. But she had never fired a bullet through a baby, even a dead one. What Joseph must have initially felt when he thought he had killed a child must have been unbearable. It would take some time for that shock to wear off.
"Well, I hope you're successful in exorcising it for Mr. Melton," Laika said, with venom in her voice. "We've done everything humanly possible to show what was wrong with this place. Now it's your turn to sweep out the invisible. Doctor?"
She took Joseph's arm and pushed him gently toward the stairs. Then she grasped the cuffed man and led him in the same direction.
By the time they reached the sidewalk, a police car was there. Laika and Joseph turned their prisoner over, gave the officers in charge the necessary information, and showed the credentials that would ensure they would never be questioned on the matter again.
They waited while the officers called in their IDs. When they were cleared, they got back into their car without saying good-bye to Melton and drove toward the West Side, Laika at the wheel.
"You didn't kill the kid," Laika said into the silence. "And you had to kill the woman. You didn't have any choice."
"I know."
"Joseph?" she said after another minute. When she glanced at him, his face was lit only fleetingly by the street lights they passed. In the quick seconds of illumination it looked pale and sickly.
"Yes?"
"I hope I'm not out of line here, but have you ever terminated anyone before?"
He didn't answer right away, and she was ready to rephrase the question when he said, "Yes," softly.
She didn't know whether to believe him or not. She could log in and check his files. His kills would be in there.
But then she thought, why bother? It wouldn't change anything. And maybe if he hadn't before, it was for the best now. She had killed, and she knew Tony had more terminations on his conscience than any other five people she knew in the Company. So wasn't it time that Joseph Stein, far older than either of them, joined the club?
The thought made her angry at herself. Killing wasn't the measure of a person; she knew that well enough. Maybe she just wanted Joseph to be a killer so that the terminations she had carried out wouldn't seem so special. There were nights when some of them weighed more heavily on her than others. She had never killed except in self-preservation, but she had known a few of the dead, and even known the people some of them had loved. Thinking about them was what was hard.
She didn't say anything about those thoughts to Joseph. If he had killed, he already knew. If not, nothing she could say would make him feel any better about it. You had to deal with dealing death yourself. If you did it, you lay down with it in the nighttime, and you were alone with it. That was how it worked.
When you died, you died alone, no matter how many died with you. And when you killed, you killed alone, no matter who else was by your side. And if you didn't know that, you learned soon enough.
And once you learned, you could forget. She buried the dead woman and the dead baby deep down in her mind, with all the other dead, and began to think about Peder Holberg and his mad, final work of art.
Chapter 29
The following day, Richard Skye was speaking on the telephone to Mr. Stanley. The connection was encrypted and unbreakable.
"Melton's houses were a negative," Skye was saying. "Everything had a perfectly rational explanation. The operative Stein was forced to kill a woman who attacked him, but we've already glossed it. They're clean as a whistle. . . . Yes, most of the tabloids had something on it. Melton's happy, and we should be happy, since there's no mention of the team in the papers. . . . The Meyer woman? No, she won't say anything. I've had someone . . . talk to her."
Skye sat back and listened, then spoke again. "It was disappointing in that regard, of course. But this Holberg situation still looks promising. . . . Yes, the other man, Holberg's queer lover, is working on it now. Feverishly, it seems . . . I don't know, but I would expect within a few weeks. . . . Yes, I most certainly. . . . Good-bye, sir."
Skye hung up the phone and sat back in his chair. He looked at the closed door of his office suspiciously, but then smiled. No one was listening. There were no bugs in this room. Jenkins and Bailey went over it twice a week, and Skye secured his own phone lines himself. He knew the wires and the guts of this place. He should, after twenty years in it.
He tried to continue smiling at the thought, but his smile twisted into a sneer. In another year, if he played it all right, and found the captive and turned him over to Mr. Stanley, his life would finally begin.
Aldrich Ames and Harold Nicholson were pikers next to what Skye was capable of attaining. And best of all, he was selling information not to his country's enemies, but to Mr. Stanley, who was considered one of America's greatest patriots. That made a difference to Richard Skye. He was not a traitor, he was an entrepreneur.
And a good entrepreneur had to know when to make sacrifices. His pawns were moving on the board, and when they had the king in position, he would bring in his knights, regardless of what happened to the three operatives.
Pawns were, after all, expendable.
Although Laika Harris, Joseph Stein, and Anthony Luciano didn't know that they were considered pawns by Richard Skye, during the next few days they certainly felt like it. Sweatshirts and jeans seemed to be their uniform as they helped Adam Guaraldi reconstruct Peder Holberg's massive and clandestine work.
They had set up shop in the Bronx warehouse, complete with computers and cots for occasional naps. Guaraldi worked nearly around the clock, pausing only for quick catnaps of less than an hour. Laika estimated the man slept only four hours per day.
The three operatives worked two eight-hour, staggered shifts a day. Laika and Joseph might start, then Laika would go back to the city and sleep, while Joseph and Tony took the next shift. Then Laika would return, letting Joseph go sleep, and he would return to let Tony get his break.
Every week or so the pace would catch up with Guaraldi and he would return to the apartment he had shared with Holberg and sleep for twelve hours straight. At these times he seemed almost bitter about the inability of his body to keep up with the tireless pace he set himself.
The operatives helped him in any way they could and told him to consider them always at his service. Although he worked alone much of the time, particularly when dealing with the enigmatic plans, at other times he required their help, fitting large pipes and welding them into place, carrying tanks and hoses up and down ladders, moving piles of toppled iron to its new launching site.
The great structure had begun to be resurrected slowly, but with each passing day it seemed to Laika to grow exponentially, faster and faster, looking one day like some madman's idea of a rollercoaster, and the next like the skeleton of a building found only in nightmare. On another, it appeared to Laika as a helter-skelter mess of entrails, and on another as a pile of thin hands with long, branching fingers. Sometimes it seemed terrible, at other times, laughable. But it never stopped changing, shifting, gr
owing.
She uneasily noticed several times how the lights on the ceiling above cast strange shadows of the sculpture's evolving contours onto the floor. At times it seemed to her that she could almost make out symbols or runes on the dusty boards. Sometimes she could almost see faces, and then she would quickly look away.
The warehouse, despite Laika's efforts to keep the atmosphere light, continued to be oppressive, becoming more so as the once fallen iron pipes took up more and more of the space as Holberg's work continued to rise. Guaraldi seldom joined in the conversation, but on one of his infrequent breaks, Laika got him talking about Holberg's work in general.
"Peder believed in beauty," Guaraldi said, and Laika grimly noted that now he used the past tense. "But he saw reality. He saw life as it was, often ugly and raw. So he tried to see beauty in those things, too, tried to show that to others in his work. It may be too simplistic, and I doubt if he would have put it quite like that, but I think that's what his art was about." Guaraldi's gaze went to the insistent presence of the sculpture. "But I look, and I look, and I look again, and the beauty . . . I can't find it here, not in this."
Then he went back to his work, sadly, but with purpose. As the weeks passed and the sculpture grew, Laika started to see a pattern in it, but one that she could not define, like sentences in some unknown language, seen clearly, but impossible to decipher. The more it grew, the stronger grew the idea within her that somehow she knew this thing, that it spoke to her and showed her something with which she was greatly familiar—indeed, almost intimate. It was like trying to remember the name of a person you once knew very well, and whose face you can clearly see, but whose name is always just out of memory's reach. It was teasing and frustrating and challenging at once.
She was not the only one of the three to whom this sensation came. Late one night, when she was working the shift with Tony, he stopped dead, stared at the thing, and said to her, "Goddamn it, I know this thing. There's just something about it. . . ."
City of Iron Page 17
