Vertigo

by Wesley Cross

  “This is beautiful,” the boy whispered, looking far in the distance, “but my grandma will kill me if she ever finds out.”

  “This will be our little secret, I promise,” she said, not being able to contain a smile.

  After a while, the sounds of the search died down, and Audrey decided to risk going back into the building and looking for the roof exit. Trying to get up on the ledge turned out to be much more difficult than sitting down, but finally, she managed to stand up and move to the window. She peeked around the frame into the hallway for a few seconds, but there seemed to be no movement, and she dug her nails under the top of the window frame and pulled. Her fingers, slick with sweat, slipped, almost making her lose grip.

  “Mother—” she started under her breath but caught herself. She wiped her hands on her blouse as best as she could and tried again. This time, the window gave. Audrey let Dalmar climb through first and then followed him as well. They came to the narrow ladder leading to the roof, and Audrey checked the lock. It was opened. Overwhelmed with emotion, she pulled the boy into a fierce hug.

  “We’re okay. We’re okay.”

  The roof, covered in hot, sticky tar, was almost bare, save for the few air-conditioning units and a large electrical access box. A pair of red emergency Exit signs drowned the area in the ominous blood-colored glow. Audrey took a few steps to look around, her feet almost getting glued to the surface with each move. Now, when they finally were on the roof, she regretted leaving the broom handle back in the administrative office. Without it, there was nothing to barricade the door with.

  There was a sound of a truck driving up to the school, and then the hail of automatic fire ripped the silence without warning, making them both jump. A few seconds later, an explosion shook the building, briefly illuminating the dark skies.

  “There.” Dalmar pointed at the electrical access box. “We should hide behind it.”

  They sprinted toward the box, and as they made their way around it and squatted out of the line of sight, the roof door flew open with a bang. Hidden behind the box, Audrey watched as two men climbed out to the roof and frantically looked around as they backed away from the hatch. They were not pursuing them, she decided; they were fleeing. But her hiding place was going to be compromised any second now.

  “Listen to me.” She turned to the boy. “No matter what, stay out of sight, and don’t make a peep. Do you understand?”

  She made him lie down so he would be less visible, and then stepped out from behind the box and made a few strides toward the two men.

  “All right,” she said, startling them and almost causing them to unload their rifles at her, “you got me. But by the sounds of it, you’re going to need me alive.”

  12

  July 2007

  Kenya

  There was some shouting on the roof as Mike Connelly stuck a miniature video camera on a flexible cable over the edge of the roof door. The grainy image showed a woman held by a burly man with a pistol to her head, keeping her in front of him as a live shield while another man trained his automatic rifle in the trapdoor’s direction. There was no sign of a boy.

  Connelly slowly opened the hatch and rose above the threshold, leading with his gun. “Easy there, big fella.”

  “Let us go, or we kill her,” the burly man shouted in accented English as Connelly cleared the edge, keeping him in the sights of his MK23.

  “That is not how it works, asshole,” Connelly replied, moving to the side and letting his teammates climb out as well. “If you kill her, you’ve got no bargaining power, and I promise, you will wish you were dead before it’s over.”

  “I’ll kill her, I swear,” the man shouted again, pressing the pistol into the woman’s temple. “Go back.”

  “No,” Connelly said, “you’re not listening. She’s the only reason why I haven’t shot you yet. Keep her intact, and you’ll get to see another day.”

  The boy’s absence was complicating things—there was a chance that the woman managed to hide him before they took her hostage, but without knowing it for sure, taking action could jeopardize the kid’s life. Mike strained his eyes, trying to read the faces of the two men in the dim light of the emergency signs.

  The broad-shouldered fighter didn’t strike him as a religious zealot and Connelly suspected he could reason with the man. But the other combatant, short and thin, with a pale face and a long scraggly beard, seemed to be on the verge of panic, his fingers straining on the trigger of the AK-47. He planted his left foot on the low barrier that separated the roof from the void below, and his muscles seemed tight like a coiled spring.

  The way Connelly saw it, the man was ready to rain lead on infidels and jump to his death, to make sure they weren’t going to be able to take him alive. And the way the short man looked back and forth between his comrade and Connelly as they talked, Connelly suspected the man didn’t understand what was being said. That wasn’t going to help to ease the situation.

  “Let us go, right now,” the big man repeated. His hands kept moving the woman, so she was squarely between him and the weapons of Connelly’s team.

  “Listen,” Connelly said, “I think your buddy doesn’t understand what’s happening and it’d be better if everybody was on the same page. Tell him to put down the weapon, then do it yourself, and then we can have a conversation.”

  “He won’t do it,” the burly man said and threw a glance at the other fighter. “He’d rather die in the name of Allah than let the infidels capture him.”

  There was some desperation in the tone of the man’s voice. If not for his partner, he could be reasoned with, but with the other man ready to die a martyr, the list of options was rapidly shrinking.

  “You should try,” Connelly encouraged the man.

  “I can’t.” The man’s breathing became faster. “I’m sorry, I really can’t.”

  A quick movement caught Connelly’s eye and before he had time to process what he was seeing, a small shadow dashed from behind an electric box and crashed into the short insurgent, knocking him off the roof. The rifle barked as the man instinctively squeezed the trigger, sending a few bullets over Connelly’s head.

  Startled, the burly fighter loosened his grip and then cried out in pain as the woman pushed his arm away. A trickle of blood ran down his elbow and then dripped to the ground, and a second later, the pistol fell out of the man’s hand.

  “Bitch,” he shouted, trying to hit the woman with his good hand, but she pushed him hard, and this time Connelly had a clean shot.

  The first bullet hit the man in the shoulder. He stumbled, taking a step back, and Connelly added two more to the man’s chest.

  “Dalmar,” the woman cried out and ran to the boy, who was now sitting next to the edge of the roof, scooping him into her arms. “I got you. I got you.”

  “I killed him,” the boy said in a half-whisper, his entire body trembling, as Mike approached them. “I killed that man.”

  Connelly squatted next to the two of them and patted the boy on his back without saying anything.

  “I pushed him off the roof,” the boy said.

  “You did well, little man. C’mon, buddy,” he said finally and stood up. “Let’s get you guys out of here. I don’t think staying here for too long is a wise idea.”

  “Where will you take him?” the woman asked, standing up next to him. “He has some family in the village, but I don’t know if he’s going to be safe there.”

  Connelly looked at the woman. Her face was pale and smeared with dirt; her clothes were in disarray but she looked cool and collected, and he couldn’t help but admire her. Over the past few hours, she’d been through what most people never had to experience in their entire lives. She witnessed a murder, then was kidnapped and bound. Then she had to listen to another captive being tortured and killed while she and the boy were left for what seemed to be an inevitable death as well.

  And yet, she found the courage and wits not only to save herself but also to protec
t a kid who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even now, the first question out of her mouth wasn’t about her own safety but the boy’s.

  “There are no survivors here,” he finally said. “Dalmar will be okay if we return him home.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he looked at the boy, “but you have to promise me, Dalmar, that you will never, and I mean, ever, tell anyone what’s happened here. You were not here, do you understand?”

  The boy looked up at him, his face serious as if studying Connelly’s face for clues.

  “I did a bad thing,” he finally said. “He was a bad man, but killing is worse. But I didn’t know what else to do. I had to protect Miss Audrey.”

  “You didn’t kill him,” Connelly said and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You tried, and that’s okay because you were trying to protect Mrs. Hunt. But before you pushed him, my sniper shot him straight through his heart. Look at the radio tower over there. I’m going to ask my sniper to send me a signal, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  They looked, and a second later, a faint light blinked twice on top of the dark silhouette of the tower.

  “Did you see it, Dalmar?”

  “Yes,” the boy said.

  “I told you. It’s not on you.”

  The boy looked back at Connelly, a mix of fear and desperate hope swirling on his face.

  “You want to see the signal again?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The faint star blinked twice again and then three more times in rapid succession.

  “He shot his rifle, before he fell, remember?” Connelly pressed. “He did it instinctively after a bullet hit him. You were trying to help, but you only pushed a dead man. It’s not on you. But you must never tell anyone that you were at school today, then you’ll never be in danger again. Are we good?”

  “Yes,” the boy said seriously and stretched his hand out. “We’re good.”

  Connelly shook the boy’s hand and turned toward the roof’s door, gesturing to his teammates to follow. They had to make it to the rendezvous point in less than two hours, and they still had to make a detour to deliver the boy to his relatives in the village. There was no time to spare.

  As they walked out of the school and headed west, Smith and Garcia taking turns to entertain the kid, Audrey Hunt caught up to Connelly and squeezed his arm.

  “He fits right in,” he said, pointing at the boy, who was now marching between his two teammates. “I might end up taking him with us.”

  “Thank you,” she said in a half-whisper, “for what you told him. And for what all of you did, of course.”

  Connelly looked at her as they walked by the hut with the two large words LOVE LIFE written on it in the bold white paint.

  “Just doing my job, ma’am,” he said, a smile coming to his lips. “Just doing my job.”

  13

  July 2007

  New York

  Chen hung up the phone and crossed the last name off her list. Her father was a first-generation immigrant who’d originally moved to California from mainland China, where he married an Irish girl before they both moved to New York for business. Most of their friends and distant family, from her mother’s side, still lived in the San Francisco area. She called everybody early in the morning New York time, ignoring the three-hour time difference, half-hoping to get voicemails rather than having some prolonged and painful conversations.

  The strategy mostly worked, but preparations for the funeral still took Chen almost until noon. While they grew up in a family of a non-practicing Buddhist and a self-proclaimed “lazy Catholic,” neither of the sisters were religious, and she figured Mary wouldn’t care for a religious ceremony.

  The funeral home she called suggested a closed-casket burial but she only shuddered, remembering the grisly photos of her sister’s remains—having them in a casket, even a closed one, seemed wrong. She opted for a cremation instead, and after looking at an obscenely large selection of urns of all shapes, colors, and sizes on the funeral home’s website, she picked a simple, silver-coated urn. Now, having taken care of the dead, she was itching to take care of the living. Unlike the detective, she was convinced that Mary hadn’t taken her own life and that Peter Shultz didn’t go out willingly either.

  She switched between windows and logged into the IRC chat room. To her delight, there was a small green dot next to Delgado’s name, indicating that the user was online. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, typing a message to him.

  I have new information. We need to meet.

  We just did, came an almost immediate reply. Talk.

  Not like this. Meet me in the RW. Somewhere public.

  No.

  It’s bigger than you think. I need to know that I can trust you.

  You have 30 seconds to tell me what you came here to tell me. Here, not in the RW.

  Please, she pleaded. It’s not just the hack. They killed my sister. Other people too.

  There was no reply for a while and for a painful moment Chen thought Delgado disconnected from the chat.

  Meet me by Peter Cooper’s statue in exactly one hour, the message said. Third Ave and East Seventh. If you’re late or not alone, you will not hear from me ever again.

  The green light next to Delgado’s name blinked and changed into gray, indicating that the user was no longer online.

  Chen looked at the clock on her laptop—12:47 p.m. She considered her options. She could walk to Ditmars Station, which would take her less than fifteen minutes, and grab the W or the N train to the city, but that would be tight. At this time of the day, the notoriously unreliable trains weren’t running as frequently as during the rush hour. Taking a taxi was a risky bet as well, but she figured she had enough cushion to get to the meeting on time even if she hit traffic. She called the local car service, grabbed her keys and the laptop and rushed outside. A few minutes later, a livery cab pulled up next to her house, and she jumped in.

  “Should we take the FDR?” the driver asked after she gave him the address.

  “No,” she said, “take Twenty-First Street to the Midtown Tunnel. It’ll be faster.”

  They got lucky—the traffic was light, and except for a few blocks when they got out of the tunnel, they almost didn’t slow down. Chen got off on the corner of Second Avenue and the famed St. Mark’s Place with almost thirty minutes to spare. She walked west to Third Avenue and then turned south until she hit a small park, Cooper Triangle, named after Peter Cooper. The statue of the bearded American industrialist sitting in a throne-looking chair and gazing into the distance dominated the northern corner of the tiny park.

  She took a seat on the bench facing the monument and looked around. It was a fascinating part of town—an eclectic mix of grandiose past of the Cooper Union Foundation building, sleek lines of the ultra-modern twenty-one-story tower of the Standard Hotel, and the hulking boat-like silhouette of the Cooper Union Academic Building designed by the celebrated Thom Mayne.

  “Hello, Witch,” a voice said behind her, and a moment later, a petite woman of Japanese descent sat next to her on the bench. She was wearing a transparent tank top with a black bra underneath and a pair of distressed jeans. But that was the only ordinary thing about the woman.

  Her jet-black hair was cut into a blunt, chic bob framing a delicate, heavily made-up face with high cheekbones and eyes so dark they almost bordered on black. A magnificent red and green dragon tattoo was slithering up her right arm, around her shoulder and neck, and finally resting its head with half-closed eyes on the left side of the woman’s chest.

  “Hello, Delgado,” Chen replied. “I thought you were a man.”

  “Delgado isn’t here. I’m just the messenger,” the woman said in lightly-accented English and moved her hair back to one side. Only now Chen noticed a small black microphone in the woman’s ear.

  “That’s not what we’ve agreed on,” Chen said.

  “Look, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m trying
to help. Delgado never meets anyone in person like this. This is as much as you get—take it or leave it.”

  Chen studied the woman’s face for a few seconds. Behind the impenetrable façade of a doll face, there was an unmistakable wit, and a no-nonsense attitude.

  “Will he answer my questions?” she pressed.

  “We’re here, aren’t we?” the woman responded, avoiding using a definitive pronoun.

  “My name is Helen Chen, and I’m a freelance contractor for the DOD,” she began.

  “You also work for the CIA,” the woman interrupted her.

  “Yes, sometimes I contract for them as well, but it’s not important. My sister, Mary Chen, died in what the police ruled a suicide by jumping from her apartment window. Before her death, Mary hired a mergers and acquisitions company led by Peter Shultz to facilitate the merger between my sister’s company and an outfit out of San Francisco. Said Peter Shultz died of an apparent suicide a few days before my sister’s death.”

  The woman tipped her head to one side as if listening to the microphone in her ear.

  “Why do you think it’s connected to the hack?”

  “I found a draft of an email. It appeared to be an invitation to a meeting, and it was supposed to be about Guardian Manufacturing. Isn’t that what you meant by the Keeper’s Workshop—Guardian Manufacturing? I don’t think she ever sent it and I don’t know who was the intended recipient. But I suspect that Guardian didn’t want the merger to go through, so they killed Shultz, and then Mary.”

  The woman nodded as if agreement and closed her eyes for a few moments, listening to what was being said into her earpiece. Then she pulled out a piece of paper from her back pocket and a ballpoint pen, wrote down a few lines of text, and gave the paper to Chen.