by Jon Land
“Why am I here?”
“Because I need you. I had known about your imprisonment in the stockade for years, but waited until the time was right to arrange your release. Your potential was there. I only sought to bring it out to its fullest, to let the rage in you blossom so you might serve me better.”
“Serve you?”
“It will be by your own choice.”
Seckle tried to touch his face. The chain’s wouldn’t let him. “Last night, your helicopter?”
Leeds nodded. “Dispatched because the time has come to put your skills to infinitely better use.”
“Where am I?”
“A facility I have appropriated for the time being. You haven’t asked about your wounds.”
“I can move. I can breathe. I can see.”
“You can do far more than that, my good fellow. Besides one cracked rib, a shotgun graze in your side, and some very nasty burns, your wounds are strictly superficial in nature.”
Seckle looked down and saw the white gauze bandages wrapped around both his hands. He could feel the bandages over his left temple and above his eyebrow as well.
“I’m going to remove your chains now,” Leeds told him. “They were put in place for your own protection until your situation could be adequately explained. Now that that has been done, you deserve to be released. You and I are alone in here. If you wish to kill me, I suppose you could be successful.”
Without hesitating, Leeds used a key first on the manacles fastened around Seckle’s ankles and then on the ones around his wrists. Tiny Tim stretched the life and blood back into them, rising slowly to a sitting position.
“What do you want from me?”
“Your participation in a new order of the world.”
“Who are you?”
“The person who made you, Seckle. The person who lifted you out of the human scrap heap you had been dumped into, so you might have a chance to be even more than yourself again.”
Tiny Tim looked interested now. “And this … new order?”
“Coming very soon. Yours to be a part of, if you so choose. It will be a world you were made for, my brother, a world that is made for you.”
“Interesting.”
Andrew Harrison Leeds smiled. “There’s someone else I’d like you to meet.”
Chapter 37
“SIGN IN, PLEASE.”
The driver of the large armored truck marked FEDERAL RESERVE scribbled his name on the appropriate line and returned the clipboard to the gate guard.
“You know the routine,” the guard said.
“Oh yeah. This place gives me the creeps. Looks too damn new.”
“It looks new because it is new.”
The Kansas Depository was one of only two facilities outside Washington responsible for printing new money and disposing of the old. Though construction was well underway before the government opted for an elaborate money replacement program, the facility proved perfect for the task of minting the new currency. Only slight modifications in the machinery were required, since Kansas was outfitted to take on a large measure of the printing load anyway.
Of the nine levels comprising the facility, only four lay aboveground. These contained the money presses and general offices that were open for public tours on a daily basis. What the public never saw were the five underground stories that contained the massive storage facilities for freshly minted money and the high-tech shredders and furnaces used for disposing of the old. The underground levels boasted ceilings in excess of forty feet high, and two of them were literally jammed with plastic-wrapped stacks of soon-to-be-shipped currency.
The complex was surrounded by a ten-foot-high electrified fence. Upward of fifteen men patrolled the perimeter at any given time, with another twenty serving inside the depository, many responsible for watching the workers. Floodlights streaming from the rectangular building’s roof kept the outside brightly lit twenty-four hours a day. There were four machine-gun towers and a titanium steel gate at the entrance that could hold back a tank.
The midnight truck had been right on time, and with the clipboard back in his bulletproof shed the head guard activated the gate’s opening mechanism to allow the truck to slide into the complex. The truck entered the building through a garage door on the first floor, where another security gate waited. Once this station was satisfactorily passed, the truck’s contents could be unloaded under the watchful eye of ten armed guards who were in turn watched by two supervisors. The system had checks and balances for its checks and balances.
The bags of “dead” money were tossed from the truck and piled by one team, then dumped down a shaft that looked like a giant laundry chute by another. The chute formed the first step on the road to what depository workers referred to as “the ovens.” To reach the ovens, the dead money first had to be dumped out onto conveyor belts that sent the bills through a massive shredder before the remains were burned. The depository was open twenty-four hours a day, but only for sixteen hours were the shredder and ovens operational. The shipping of new bills and receiving of old ones went on continuously.
On this night, deep inside one of the bags dumped down the chute from the truck making its midnight run, Jared Kimberlain shifted his frame. An oxygen mask drew air from a tank on his back, but precious little remained. He clawed the dead bills away from his head and chest area and climbed upward like a swimmer fighting for the surface. When his fingers felt the touch of canvas, he removed a serrated knife from his belt and sliced neatly through. The tear grew into a gaping hole easily big enough to accommodate his emerging shape.
The rest would be much easier. A backpack strung from both his shoulders contained a dozen canisters of the latest concoction Captain Seven had brewed.
“I call it GS-7,” the captain had told him. “Short for Good Shit Seven. Best batch I ever made, if I do say so myself. What we got here is highly explosive aerosol of exceptionally high density, droplets less than a micron in size so they literally stick to the air. Toss a match in, and everywhere it’s spread goes poof!”
Kimberlain’s plan was to gain access to the roof where the air-conditioning evaporators were placed. There he would empty the canisters into the filtration system. In a matter of minutes, the whole building would be inundated with GS-7, spread through the labyrinth of air ducts. After the building had been evacuated, Leeds’s deadly money would be a match-light away from destruction.
The Ferryman pulled the rest of himself from the tear in the canvas. He sat atop the heap of dead money and stripped off his mask and air tank. This was the third sublevel. On the floors below lay the shredders and furnaces used to dispose of money like this. Directly above lay the two floors where Leeds’s poisoned bills were being stored.
It took Kimberlain’s eyes a few seconds to adjust to the scant lighting of this level. He blinked rapidly to clear them and started to climb from the pile. As he moved he glanced around the room, and what he saw froze him in place.
Stacked against one of the walls were bodies, heaps and heaps of them, all dressed in the uniforms of those charged with guarding this installation. They had been murdered, which left one undeniable truth:
All the guards had been replaced by Leeds’s men, who were now in control of the depository. Men who must be products of Leeds’s Renaissance project, just as Hedda was, which made them formidable adversaries at the very least. And, of course, there was something else.
Leeds was here! In the depository!
And he must have known Kimberlain was coming.
Kimberlain assessed the situation. Even though Leeds was expecting him, there was a good chance the madman didn’t know he was there yet. He clambered down the pile of dead money and moved for the elevator bank. The Ferryman touched the up arrow, and less than thirty seconds later the compartment doors started to slide open.
Inside, one of Leeds’s six personal guards opened fire as soon as the doors were halfway open. Twenty of the submachine gun’s thirty bullets sped out in
a three-second burst, and the man lunged out to finish the job if need be.
Kimberlain had pressed himself against the wall alongside the elevator as soon as it came to a stop. He recognized the gunman as one of the six who had led him around on his iron leash back on Devil’s Claw Island. The Ferryman rammed a fist into the man’s throat. The gunman’s Adam’s apple broke free and lodged in his throat. Gasping, he tried to swing the gun round, but Kimberlain grabbed his head and twisted.
The man’s neck snapped with a resounding thud. Kimberlain dragged him halfway into the still-open elevator compartment, so the doors would be unable to close, rendering the elevator useless. Then he moved for the stairs.
Another pair of Leeds’s best-trained men were waiting on the ground floor when the sound of gunfire reached them. They tensed, Kimberlain’s presence in the building apparently verified. Each drew his weapon. One tried the elevator. Nothing happened. It was stuck somewhere on the lower floors. The other gestured for the stairs, and they headed for them.
They took each level in utter silence, one advancing ahead while the other maintained cover. When they reached the third sublevel, they could see its exit door wasn’t closed all the way. The two men moved to either side of the door and waited. They nodded in unison and burst through, one after the other with two seconds spacing, so that if an ambush awaited the second would have the shooter’s location pinned down before he emerged.
There was no one anywhere. They were about to try the next sublevel when both noticed the guard whose gunshots they had heard lying half inside the elevator compartment. Together they moved toward him, wary of each step. When they reached the compartment, one turned his back to the open doors while the other yanked the dead man out so the elevator could be used again.
The body was halfway out when the Ferryman popped the elevator’s ceiling hatch open and emptied the rest of the dead guard’s machine gun into the two men beneath him. Then he lowered himself back down and pressed “3.”
The guard waiting on the third floor heard the elevator coming and steadied his gun before it. The climb seemed to take forever, and he debated in his own mind whether he should open fire as soon as the doors began to part and risk killing one of his fellows.
His back tensed as the compartment locked home. There was a soft thump, and the doors started to open.
The guard still hadn’t made his decision when Kimberlain burst through the stairwell and leveled a silenced Beretta nine-millimeter his way. Four bullets slammed into him and shoved him through the open elevator. The doors closed, the elevator staying just where it was.
Two more to go, Kimberlain thought.
And then Leeds.
Leeds’s two remaining guards were under orders not to leave the fourth floor under any circumstances. The idea was to stop Kimberlain from reaching the roof if he made it this far. They formed the last barrier, and for this reason Leeds had chosen his best men for the post. One carried an M-16 with explosive-tipped bullets. The other handled a custom-made semiautomatic shotgun with a circular twelve-shot feed clip. A hit anywhere with it was a guaranteed kill.
They were standing at either end of the hall when the elevator began to rise their way. The one with the M-16 signaled the other to hang back. They had been well briefed long before on the capabilities of the Ferryman, and the fact that he had made it off the island indicated his reputation was well earned. Take nothing for granted, Leeds had warned them, take nothing at face value.
The elevator opened, and the guard closest waited a beat before spinning toward the doors. His eyes regarded the entire compartment in the length of a heartbeat, noted the open ceiling hatch above, and …
“Shit …”
… the four bodies piled on the floor below, one still holding a pistol. The guard raised his hand and signaled the man on the other end of the hall to come this way. The man backpedaled to keep close eye on the stairwell at the same time, the only other route of access to this floor.
“They’re all dead,” he heard the guard at the elevator say. “They’re—”
The soft spits came next, and the approaching guard spun around in time to see the Ferryman burst out from the cover of the corpses as the elevator guard crumpled. The approaching guard managed to get off two shots from his shotgun, both of which sailed wide, before Kimberlain’s three bullets slammed into his chest.
Kimberlain held the gun leveled for a time longer, wanting to be sure. The pistol the first guard had glimpsed upon entering the compartment was actually held in his hand. The Ferryman hadn’t even had to move to fire the first burst. It was the second that had worried him, and the other guard had cooperated brilliantly by doing just what he should have done.
“No chains this time, boys,” he muttered to himself, and headed on down the corridor.
The exit door at the end of the hall led up to a ladder that accessed the roof. The Ferryman pulled it down and climbed up toward a steel hatch. He popped it open and hoisted himself onto the roof.
He had made it! But how much time did he have before Leeds realized his guards had been neutralized? He had to make it enough… . In any case, there was no longer a need to evacuate the building prior to detonation with Leeds’s people the only remaining inhabitants.
The roof was lit irregularly by floodlights, and Kimberlain began his search right away. It didn’t take long to locate the pair of central air-conditioning evaporators that were responsible for channeling cool air through the entire depository. The trouble, he could tell from this distance, was that the evaporators weren’t running. Again something uneasy prickled his neck. He moved forward and touched his hand to one of the heavy steel machines. It was warm, almost hot. They had been in operation until very recently, perhaps even the last few minutes.
Leeds! It had to be Leeds!
Fortunately, the Ferryman had come with a contingency plan, albeit a less sure one. A number of ventilating baffles were situated across the roof, each connecting with a separate line of the building’s duct work. There might be eight in all, ten even. Empty the contents of one GS-7 canister into each, and the explosive aerosol would drop downward eventually to envelop the entire inner shell of the building. An explosion less dramatic, but equally effective, would result upon detonation.
Kimberlain located the first baffle and pried it open with his screwdriver. It would take him fifteen to twenty seconds to empty each aerosol can manually. All he had to do was turn the top-mounted valve and hold it in place, according to Captain Seven’s instructions.
Kimberlain turned the valve and started to ease it toward the open baffle. A slight hissing sound reached him as the GS-7 began to escape.
“Stay as you are, Ferryman,” came the voice of Andrew Harrison Leeds.
Kimberlain swung round to see him standing just in front of the door to the roof where he must have been waiting. Tiny Tim stood alongside him with machine gun in hand and gauze bandages covering the many wounds he suffered at the Towanda Family Resort. As Kimberlain watched, the two of them eased across the roof, stopping halfway between the door and him. He calculated that the cover of darkness had prevented both his adversaries from seeing him place the draining can of GS-7 upon the sill of the nearest baffles.
“I’m so glad you could join us,” Leeds continued. “There’s someone who’s been most eager for the pleasure of your company.”
And through the door stepped Winston Peet.
“You disappoint me,” Leeds said, coming forward in Garth Seckle’s shadow, the monster’s machine gun aimed straight ahead. Peet hung back behind them, empty eyes never leaving the Ferryman. “So predictable. I anticipated each and every one of your moves.”
“Tell that to the six guards I passed on the way up here.”
“Them?” the madman scoffed. “I left them for your enjoyment. I believe that you dispatched them in less than eleven minutes following your entry into this building. Splendid. I would have expected closer to thirteen.”
“I saved the last
two minutes for you.”
“Did you now? You know, you really would have been much better off to let me dispose of you colorfully on the island. Now stand very still and remove the pistol from your belt with only two fingers.”
Kimberlain realized his calculation had been correct: Leeds could not see the canister. Its explosive contents continued to spread into the air over the roof. He removed the pistol from his belt.
“Now toss it in front of you.”
Again Kimberlain obliged.
“The backpack next,” Leeds instructed. “Carefully, please.”
The Ferryman stripped it from his shoulders slowly, eyes shifting from Peet to Tiny Tim as he readied his next move.
“It doesn’t have to end this way for you,” Leeds told him. “You need only to give the word, and a place can still be made for you here.”
“With you?”
“Is that so bad?”
“I don’t approve of your taste,” Kimberlain said, looking solely at Tiny Tim.
Leeds’s gaze tilted toward Peet. “Your friend has seen fit to join my order. You should follow his lead.”
“Sorry. Not my style.”
“Really? Stop fooling yourself, Ferryman. You know you belong with us, but you do not admit it. Why don’t you ask your friend Winston? He gave up the fight. He is where he belongs.”
“That true, Peet?” Kimberlain asked.
“I’m sorry, Ferryman.”
“It’s my fault. I should have left you alone.”
“Or killed me when you had the chance. It would have been the only way, because no one changes. Not you. Not me.”
Peet had drawn closer to Tiny Tim while he was speaking. The sight of the two of them together flanking Andrew Harrison Leeds made Kimberlain see just how small and unimpressive the maker of all this was. Leeds’s face was more gaunt and skeletal than ever. His thick dark hair was plastered back over his head, looking like paint sprayed onto his scalp.
“It’s over, Leeds,” Kimberlain said finally. “Give it up. You’ve lost. Even your giants can’t help you finish this the way you wanted.”
