Straight ahead, to the subway gazebo twenty feet in front of me. Down the stairs. I heard feet clattering after me. Loud echoes. A big crowd. Probably close to forty people, all strung out in a crazy Pied Piper chase.
I made it into a tiled corridor and out again into the underground plaza. No violinist this time. Just stale air and trash and one old guy pushing a broom with a threadbare head a yard wide. I ran past him and stopped and skidded on my new soles and changed direction and headed for the uptown R train. I jumped the turnstile and ran on to the platform and all the way to the end.
And stopped.
And turned.
Behind me three separate groups followed one after the other. First came Lila Hoth’s seven men. They raced towards me. They saw I had nowhere to go. They stopped. I saw looks of wolfish satisfaction on their faces. Then I saw their inevitable conclusion: too good to be true. Some thoughts are clear in any language. They turned suddenly and saw the NYPD counterterrorism squad hustling right behind them.
And right behind the NYPD guys were four of the eight federal agents.
No one else on the platform. No civilians. On the downtown platform opposite was a lone guy on a bench. Young. Maybe drunk. Maybe worse. He was staring across at the sudden commotion. It was twenty minutes to four in the morning. The guy looked dazed. Like he wasn’t making much sense out of what he was seeing.
It looked like a gang war. But what he was actually seeing was a fast and efficient takedown by the NYPD. None of their guys stopped running. They all piled in yelling with weapons drawn and badges visible and they exploited their big physiques and their three-to-one numerical advantage and simply swamped the seven men. No contest. No contest at all. They clubbed all seven to the ground and threw them on their fronts and slammed cuffs on their wrists and hauled them away. No pauses. No delays. No Miranda warnings. Just maximum speed and brutality. Perfect tactics. Literally seconds later they were gone again. Echoes clattered and died. The station went quiet. The guy opposite was still staring but suddenly he was seeing nothing except a silent platform with me standing alone at one end and the four federal agents about thirty feet from me. Nothing between us. Nothing at all. Just harsh white light and empty space.
Nothing happened for the best part of a minute. Then across the tracks I saw the other four federal agents arrive on the downtown platform. They took up position directly opposite me and stood still. They all smiled a little, like they had made a smart move in a game of chess. Which they had. No point in more cross-track exploits. The four agents on my side were between me and the exit. At my back was a blank white wall and the mouth of the tunnel.
Checkmate.
I stood still. Breathed the tainted underground air and listened to the faint roar of ventilation and the rumble of distant trains elsewhere in the system.
The agent nearest me took a gun out from under his coat.
He took a step towards me.
He said, ‘Raise your hands.’
SEVENTY-FIVE
Night-time schedules. Twenty-minute gaps between trains. We had been down there maybe four minutes. Therefore arithmetically the maximum delay before the next train would be sixteen minutes. The minimum would be no delay at all.
The minimum delay didn’t happen. The tunnel stayed dark and quiet.
‘Raise your hands,’ the lead agent called again. He was a white man of about forty. Certainly ex-military. DoD, not FBI. Similar type to the three I had already met. But maybe a little older. Maybe a little wiser. Maybe a little better. Maybe this was an A team, not a B team.
‘I’ll shoot,’ the lead agent called. But he wouldn’t. Empty threat. They wanted the memory stick. I knew where it was. They didn’t.
Median delay before the next train, eight minutes. As likely to be more as less. The guy with the gun took another step forward. His three colleagues followed. Across the tracks the other four stood still. The young guy on the bench was watching, vacantly.
The tunnel stayed dark and quiet.
The lead agent said, ‘All this hassle could be over a minute from now. Just tell us where it is.’
I said, ‘Where what is?’
‘You know what.’
‘What hassle?’
‘We’re running out of patience. And you’re missing one important factor.’
‘Which is?’
‘Whatever intellectual gifts you have, they’re hardly likely to be unique. In fact they’re probably fairly ordinary. Which means that if you figured it out, we can figure it out too. Which means your continued existence would become surplus to requirements.’
‘So go ahead,’ I said. ‘Figure it out.’
He raised his gun higher and straighter. It was a Glock 17. Maybe twenty-five ounces fully loaded. By far the lightest service pistol on the market. Made partly from plastic. The guy had short thick arms. He could probably hold the pose indefinitely.
‘Last chance,’ he said.
Across the tracks the young guy got off his bench and walked away. Long inconsistent strides, not entirely in a straight line. He was prepared to waste a two-dollar Metrocard swipe in exchange for a quiet life. He made it to the exit and disappeared from sight.
No witnesses.
Median delay before the next train, maybe six minutes.
I said, ‘I don’t know who you are.’
The guy said, ‘Federal agents.’
‘Prove it.’
The guy kept his gun aimed at my centre mass but nodded over his shoulder at the agent behind him, who stepped out and moved forward into the no-man’s-land between us. He paused there and put his hand in his inside jacket pocket and came back with a leather badge holder. He held it eye-height to me and let it fall open. There were two separate pieces of ID in it. I couldn’t read either one of them. They were too far away, and both of them were behind scratched plastic windows.
I stepped forward.
He stepped forward.
I got within four feet of him and saw a standard Defense Intelligence Agency ID in the upper window of the wallet. It looked genuine and it was in date. In the lower window was some kind of a warrant or commission that stated the holder was to be afforded every assistance because he was acting directly for the President of the United States.
‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘Beats working for a living.’
I stepped back.
He stepped back.
The lead agent said, ‘No different than you were doing, back in the day.’
‘Back in prehistory,’ I said.
‘What is this, an ego thing?’
Median delay before the next train, five minutes.
‘It’s a practical thing,’ I said. ‘If you want something done properly, you do it yourself.’
The guy dropped the angle of his arm below the horizontal. Now he was aiming at my knees.
‘I’ll shoot,’ he said. ‘You don’t think or talk or remember with your legs.’
No witnesses.
If all else fails, start talking.
I asked, ‘Why do you want it?’
‘Want what?’
‘You know what.’
‘National security.’
‘Offence or defence?’
‘Defence, of course. It would ruin our credibility. It would set us back years.’
‘You think?’
‘We know.’
I said, ‘Keep working on those intellectual gifts.’
He aimed his gun more precisely. At my left shin.
He said, ‘I’ll count to three.’
I said, ‘Good luck with that. Tell me if you get stuck along the way.’
He said, ‘One.’
Then: the rails hissed in the track bed next to me. Strange metallic harmonic sounds speeding ahead of a train way back in the tunnel. The harmonics were chased all the way by the push of hot air and a deeper rumbling. A curve in the tunnel wall was lit up by a headlight. Nothing happened for a long second. Then the train rushed into view, moving fast, canted ove
r by the camber of the curve. It rocked and straightened and came on at speed and then the brakes bit down and moaned and shrieked and the train slowed and pulled in right alongside us, all bright shining stainless steel and hot light, hissing, grinding, and groaning.
An uptown R train.
Maybe fifteen cars, each one of them dotted with a small handful of passengers.
Witnesses.
I glanced back at the lead agent. His Glock was back under his coat.
We were at the north end of the platform. The R train uses older cars. Each car has four sets of doors. The lead car was halted right next to us. I was more or less in line with the first set of doors. The DoD guys were closer to sets three and four.
The doors opened, the whole length of the train.
Way down at the back end two people got out. They walked away and were gone.
The doors stayed open.
I turned to face the train.
The DoD guys turned to face the train.
I stepped forward.
They stepped forward.
I stopped.
They stopped.
Choices: I could get on through door one, whereupon they would get on through doors three and four. Into the same car. We could ride together all night long. Or I could let the train go without me and spend a minimum twenty more minutes trapped with them on the same platform as before.
The doors stayed open.
I stepped forward.
They stepped forward.
I stepped into the car.
They stepped into the car.
I paused a beat and backed right out again. Back to the platform.
They backed out.
We all stood still.
The doors closed in front of me. Like a final curtain. The rubber bumpers thumped together.
I felt the draw of electricity in the air. Volts and amps. Massive demand. The motors spun up and whined. Five hundred tons of steel started to roll.
The R train uses older cars. They have toe boards and rain gutters. I ducked forward and hooked my fingers into the gutter and jammed my right toes on to the board. Then my left. I flattened myself against the metal and the glass. I hugged the car’s exterior curve like a starfish. The MP5 dug into my chest. I clung on, fingers and toes. The train moved. Breeze tugged at me. The hard edge of the tunnel came right at me. I held my breath and spread my hands and feet wider and ducked my head and laid my cheek against the glass. The train sucked me sideways into the tunnel with about six inches to spare. I glanced back past my locked elbow and saw the lead agent standing still on the platform, one hand in his hair, the other raising his Glock and then lowering it again.
SEVENTY-SIX
It was a nightmare ride. Incredible speed, howling blackness, battering noise, unseen obstructions hurtling straight at me, extreme physical violence. The whole train swayed and bounced and bucked and jerked and rocked under me. Every single expansion joint threatened to tear me loose. I dug all eight fingers hard into the shallow gutter and pressed upward with the balls of my thumbs and downward with my toes and held on desperately. Wind tore at my clothes. The door panels swayed and juddered. My head bounced against them like a jackhammer.
I rode nine blocks like that. Then we hit 23rd Street and the train braked hard. I was pitched forward against my left hand’s grip and my right foot’s resistance. I hung on tight and was carried sideways straight into the station’s dazzling brightness at thirty miles an hour. The platform rushed past. I was clamped on the lead car like a limpet. It stopped right at the north end of the station. I arched my body and the doors slid open under me. I stepped inside and collapsed into the nearest seat.
Nine blocks. Maybe a minute. Enough to cure me of subway surfing for life.
There were three other passengers in my car. None of them even looked at me. The doors sucked shut. The train moved on.
I got out at Herald Square. Where 34th Street meets Broadway and Sixth. Ten to four in the morning. Still on schedule. I was twenty blocks and maybe four minutes north of where I got on the train in Union Square. Too far and too fast for organized DoD resistance. I came up from under the ground and walked east to west along Macy’s imposing flank. Then I headed south on Seventh all the way to the door of Lila Hoth’s chosen hotel.
The night porter was behind the counter. I didn’t unzip my jacket for him. I didn’t think it would be necessary. I just walked up to him and leaned over and slapped him on the ear. He fell off his stool. I vaulted over the counter and caught him by the throat and hauled him upright.
I said, ‘Tell me the room numbers.’
And he did. Five separate rooms, not adjacent, all of them on the eighth floor. He told me which one the women were in. The men were spread out over the other four. Originally thirteen guys, and eight available beds. Five short straws.
Or five on sentry duty.
I took the roll of black duct tape out of my pocket and used about eight yards of it to bind the porter’s arms and legs. A dollar and a half from any hardware store, but as much a part of standard-issue Special Forces equipment as the thousand-dollar rifles and the satellite radios and the navigation systems. I stuck a final six-inch length across his mouth. I stole his pass card. Just tore it right off its curly cord. Then I left him out of sight on the floor behind the counter and headed for the elevator bank. Got in and pressed the highest number available, which was eleven. The doors slid shut and the car bore me upward.
At that point I unzipped my jacket.
I settled the gun at a nice angle on its strap and I took the leather glove out of my other pocket and slipped it on my left hand. The MP5SD has no fore grip. Not like the stubby K variant, which has a fat little handle under the muzzle. With the SD you use your right hand on the pistol grip and your left hand supports the barrel casing. The inner barrel has thirty holes drilled in it. The powder in the round neither burns nor explodes. It does both. It deflagrates. It creates a bubble of superheated gas. Some of the gas escapes through the thirty holes, which quiets the noise and slows the bullet to a subsonic velocity. No point in silencing a gun if its bullet is going to create a supersonic snap all its own. A slow bullet is a quiet bullet. Just like the VAL Silent Sniper. The escaping gas comes through the thirty holes and expands and swirls around in the inner silencer chamber. Then it passes to the second chamber and expands some more and swirls some more. Expanding cools the gas. Basic physics. But not by much. Maybe it reduces from superheated to extremely hot. And the outer barrel casing is metal. Hence the glove. No one uses an MP5SD without one. Springfield was the kind of guy who thinks of everything.
On the left side of the gun was a combined safety and fire selector switch. The older versions of the SD that I remembered had a three-position lever. S, E, and F. S for safe, E for single shots, and F for automatic fire. German abbreviations, presumably. E for ein, and so on and so forth, even though Heckler & Koch had been owned by a British corporation for many years. I guessed they decided that tradition counts. But Springfield had given me a newer model. The SD4. It had a four-position selector switch. No abbreviations. Just pictograms. For foreign convenience, or illiterate users. A plain white dot for safe, one little white bullet shape for single shots, three bullet shapes for three-round bursts, and a long string of bullet shapes for continuous automatic fire.
I chose three-round bursts. My favourite. One pull of the trigger, three nine-millimetre rounds inside a quarter of a second. An inevitable degree of muzzle climb, minimized by careful control and the weight of the silencer, resulting in a neat little stitch of three fatal wounds climbing a vertical line maybe an inch and a half high.
Works for me.
Thirty rounds. Ten bursts. Eight targets. One burst each, plus two over for emergencies.
The elevator chimed open on the eleventh floor, and I heard Lila Hoth’s voice in my head, talking about old campaigns long ago in the Korengal: you must save the last bullet for yourself, because you do not want to be taken alive, especially
by the women.
I stepped out of the elevator into a silent corridor.