A corner of the bed’s headboard exploded into toothpicks as he dived with her into the sitting room. As they landed, a dotted line of bullets popped instantly through the Sheetrock wall just above them. Gannon kicked closed the door. Then he flipped the cheap table and propped it against the wall with his back.
In the next room outside the broken window, Gannon could hear the high turbo whine of a helicopter hovering close above the hotel. Then he heard a sound at the window itself. Something was smashing at the glass.
It was a boot! Gannon realized.
Holy shit! There was somebody at the damn window! They must have been on a rappelling rope or something. They were coming in!
Gannon folded into the fetal position as the gun started up again blowing more holes through the wall. Bullets whined and pinged off the small two-burner stove across the room.
Gannon suddenly stared at the stove. He quickly crawled over and turned up the two gas burners as high as they would go. More bullets burst in through the shower tile as he speed-crawled low into the bathroom. He grabbed toilet paper rolls from under the sink and some towels and crawled back out.
The paper wrapper on the rolls caught immediately as he threw all of it up onto the clicking blue-flame stove burners. Then one of the towels began to burn.
The hotel fire alarm that went off a split second later was unspeakably deafening. There were two earsplitting blasts of what sounded like a circus clown slide whistle and then a recording began shouting.
“THE SOURCE OF THE ALARM SIGNAL YOU ARE HEARING IS NOW BEING INVESTIGATED. THE SOURCE OF THE ALARM SIGNAL YOU ARE HEARING IS NOW BEING INVESTIGATED.”
As the siren blast whooped twice again, Gannon glanced over and saw that all of the towels were burning now. He crawled over and grabbed one and opened the door into the bedroom. Keeping low, he thrust the burning towel under the edge of the bedspread and set it alight. It caught up immediately in a horrid chemical stink, and there was immediate thick black smoke. He threw another burning towel onto the desk.
When the bed was going pretty good, he peeked out around the burning bottom of it. The entire end of the room by the shattered window was covered in smoke, and the wall behind the desk was catching fire.
Gannon got to his knees, coughing, and grabbed the metal frame of the bed and hurled the whole burning mess of it up and at the window. Then he reached into the sitting room and grabbed the young woman by the hand.
He thought he was certainly going to get shot in the back as they leaped over the murdered reporter a split second later.
But the bullets didn’t come, and Gannon got the front door flung open, and they were out in the hallway with the black smoke chasing behind them.
51
They ran down the hall in the terrifying alarm squeal. Very confused-looking people were standing in some of the doorways of the other rooms.
“What the hell is going on?” said one of them, an old hairy guy in a bathrobe.
“The hotel’s on fire! Run!” Gannon yelled as he dodged past him around a corner.
On the other side of it was a pretty thirtysomething woman standing beside the stairwell doorway.
In midstride, Gannon registered three things about her almost simultaneously.
She had fear in her face. There was a phone in one of her hands and a semiautomatic pistol in the other.
Gannon didn’t break stride as he let go of the navy lieutenant’s hand. Instead, he tucked down his shoulder and hit the armed woman a lick at the upper chest that leveled her off her feet and sent both of them into the stairwell and down the stairs.
Gannon rode the woman down the stairs like a toboggan and landed his two-twenty hard on top of her at the bottom of the half-flight floor. As he got up, he could see that the nice-looking honey blond–haired woman wasn’t holding anything now and her face was showing pure shock. She was gasping and staring at where one of her broken left forearm bones was sticking up between her elbow and wrist, almost through the skin.
Gannon saw her phone there on the concrete beside her, and he stomped it with his new construction boot in a shatter of plastic and then lifted her fallen gun.
It was a Smith & Wesson stainless-steel .45, the single-stack stippled beavertail grip small in his big hand. He racked the slide and saw that there wasn’t even a round in the chamber. Gannon checked the eight-round magazine with a click and put one in the pipe with another. Then he cocked the bobbed hammer all the way back with his calloused thumb as he tucked it into his waistband.
He went back up the stairs into the corridor. For a split second, he gave serious thought to returning to the burning hotel room and killing the son of a bitch in the window who’d murdered Wheldon. Instead, he grabbed the navy lieutenant’s hand again and brought her down past the fallen woman.
The alarm was still clown whistling, and there was a pandemonium of people in the lobby when they arrived downstairs two and a half minutes later. Without looking at anyone, Gannon led them behind the empty check-in desk into the back. There were some desks and cubicles there and an emergency fire door in the corner with a push bar that Gannon immediately kicked open.
The eggbeater churning of the low-hovering helicopter above them was incredibly loud as they came out into the garbage alley on the east side of the building.
Then Gannon pushed through another gate, and they were out on 31st Street in the cold air, heading east down the sidewalk toward Sixth Avenue, running as fast as they could.
52
Reyland, in the fusion center, stood before the war room screen in a frozen rictus of wide-eyed baffled rage. On the screen above, smoke was pouring into what looked like a stairwell as a voice repeated, “The source of the alarm signal you are hearing is now being investigated. The source of the alarm signal you are hearing is now being investigated.”
“Emerson, you said we had a team on the floor.”
“We did,” Emerson said, typing into one phone as he cradled another with his shoulder and chin, “but they split up to cover both sides.”
“Who’s down?”
“Sanderson.”
“You put a rookie there on this!” Reyland yelled.
“No, you did, Reyland,” Emerson said, glaring at him. “I told you she wasn’t ready for our New York team, but she’s your buddy the senator’s niece!”
Reyland stood there infuriated. He looked back up at the screen. You could hear feet running somewhere in the distance, the sound of pounding.
“Fire! Fire! Fire!” someone yelled as an unseen door boomed open and closed followed by the bedeviled clown whistle again.
“Which one of you assholes did it?” Reyland yelled into the comm link on the desk speakerphone.
“What was that?” Ruiz yelled over the rotor thump.
“Who set the hotel on fire? Did I tell you to burn the place down?”
“It wasn’t us. It was the target,” Ruiz said over the rotor roar.
“Wheldon?”
“No, he’s down,” Ruiz said. “The other one. The guy. He lit the room up after we popped Wheldon. Then he dipped with the girl.”
“What guy? There’s a guy? Who?” Reyland screamed. “Where’s the girl? Where’s Everett?”
“She’s with the guy who set the room on fire. They made it out onto 31st heading east.”
“Arietta, what the hell is that drone for? Get me eyes on that street!”
“On it, on it,” Arietta said.
The screen changed to show the intersection of 31st Street and Sixth Avenue. A man and a woman were rounding the corner turning left, running north up the west-side sidewalk of Sixth Avenue.
The camera zoomed in.
The woman had brown hair.
“Ruiz, get that bird over Sixth Avenue. We see them. They’re heading north toward 32nd.”
They watched as the couple ran diagona
lly through the intersection on 32nd Street into a little park.
Reyland slapped a palm down on a desk as they suddenly disappeared under some leafless trees.
“Where the hell did they go?”
“Shit,” said Emerson, now standing by a laptop. “They went down some subway stairs into a station.”
“No, wait. 32nd and Sixth. That’s not the subway. That’s the PATH train entrance, isn’t it? The Jersey train?” Arietta said.
Emerson clicked at the keyboard.
“Double shit. It’s both. There’s a corridor that leads to the PATH train and another one a block long that leads to the subway.”
“Where the hell is our team from the hotel? Get them over there!” Reyland yelled.
“Wait, wait. No, this is a good thing. We have this... I’m patching in... We have a link to the MTA CCTV system,” Arietta said.
The big screen changed to show a tremendous grid of cameras, and Arietta brought up a screen of a platform with the commuter PATH train.
“I don’t see them,” he said.
“Gee, Arietta, I guess they’re not headed out to the Jersey Shore in January. Go figure,” Reyland said.
“It’s them! Look! Number 23. I just saw them,” Emerson said, pointing. “What’s that? The corridor. Where’s that?”
“It’s the two-block underground corridor that runs toward the subway station at Macy’s Herald Square,” Arietta said.
“Get our team down into the subway station at 34th and Sixth now,” Reyland said into the comm link.
“No, no! Tell them to stay on the road,” Arietta said, watching the screen where now the man and woman were running past homeless people down a wide gray corridor.
As they disappeared out of the frame, he brought up the next camera and picked them up again.
“We have eyes on them now. They have cameras throughout the entire system. If they get on a train, we’ll see them. The teams can follow from the surface.”
Reyland rubbed at his chin as they followed the targets across the grid of screens. At the entrance of the subway, they watched as the man paid for a metro card at a machine.
They got a closer look at him for the first time. A stocky white guy, close-cropped sandy hair, about six foot or so, around forty but lean-faced and fit.
Reyland looked at the shoulders on him. Reyland had played Division One college ball, second-string left tackle at Notre Dame, and he thought the guy looked like a running back, a tough, sneaky white boy faster than he looked.
“Arietta, hit this fool with the facial recognition,” he said.
A red square appeared around the man’s profile. Reyland took in his lean face, his blue-gray eyes. His goatee was the color of the Carhartt jacket he was wearing. Is he a hick or something? The reporter’s friend?
They waited. After a minute, the square turned purple.
“What happened? Where’s his license?” Reyland said.
“Purple means the computer can’t find it. Or he’s not in the DMV system.”
“It just works for the New York DMV system?”
“No, we’re tapped into all of them. It’s a national database.”
“What do you mean? He doesn’t have a frickin’ driver’s license?”
“Maybe he’s not American? Or it could be a glitch. Like I said, we’re still in the first stages of this thing.”
“Is he using a credit card?” Reyland said.
“No, it was cash,” Emerson said as the stocky guy swiped himself and the woman through the turnstile.
They watched them go down some steps to a platform. A train pulled in.
“Okay, Ruiz. Coordinate with the other teams,” Emerson called over the comm link. “They’re getting on an uptown F. Next stop is 42nd. Bryant Park.”
“Is there a camera on the train, too?” Reyland said.
“No,” Arietta said, “but there’s one in every station. We just need to keep tracking them. As soon as they get off, we’ll be waiting.”
53
Gannon got off the F train at 59th and Lex with the woman, and they went through the crowded station and down some dirty stairs to another platform and got a connecting uptown 4 train that had just pulled alongside the platform.
As they sat in the half-filled car, he took his first good look at the attractive young navy lieutenant. He saw there was a dazed, stalled-out look in her light brown eyes. She seemed to still be in a state of shock, but at least she was letting him lead her.
“Hey, how you doing?” Gannon said.
She blinked at him and took a breath and started coughing.
He patted her on the back.
“It’s just the smoke. I know this is crazy, but stay with me. We’re going to get through this. I promise. My name is Mike. What’s yours?”
She looked up at him wide-eyed.
“Hey, come on. It’s okay. Just talk to me. What’s your name?” he said again.
“Ruby,” she said, finally looking at him. “I’m Ruby.”
He took her hand again and stood with her as the train screamed into the East 68th Street–Hunter College Station.
“Okay, Ruby,” he said to her as they came out of the rattling doors. “Stay close. I know a place we’ll be safe.”
Up the stairs on Lexington the street was filled with moving cars and buses and there was a bunch of people milling around in front of one of the Hunter College buildings beside the subway.
They were stepping onto 68th Street’s southeast corner’s curb when the speeding SUV came at them out of the traffic on Lexington in a mad-dash diagonal. It was a black Cadillac Escalade with midnight tinted windows and there was a roar of horns as it jumped the curb twenty yards ahead of them and shrieked to a rubber-smoking skidding stop.
Gannon had just registered that its rear left passenger door was already open, when a slim man wearing black tactical clothes and a black balaclava popped out of it. Gannon watched as the man did a graceful crow hop onto the sidewalk and turned directly toward them, hunched over something in his hands.
It was a bullpup submachine gun, and as he leveled up with it to his shoulder to kill them, Gannon, already squared to target with the stainless-steel .45 up to his dominant right eye, shot him twice through the bridge of his nose just below his tactical goggles.
Gannon, moving at the waist to keep his center of mass, put two more in the driver’s door glass and two more through the rear windshield.
The slim man Gannon had killed was down against the left rear tire when he closed the distance between them. Gannon dropped the .45 and snatched up his fallen snub-nosed machine gun by its smooth doughnut hole–like grip.
It sounded like a box of dynamite was going off in Gannon’s face as he crouched and fired the unsilenced machine gun full auto into the car. Casings pinged off the inside of the open back door as he raked it back and forth and back and forth.
In the spray of the bullets, he killed the already-wounded driver with a head shot and hit the balaclava-wearing passenger beside him with another.
The last of the balaclava-wearing men was in the back seat. His left hand held a semiauto while his right scrambled at the door latch beside him like a falling man at the edge of a cliff.
He lifted the pistol as he turned.
Gannon put a point-blank burst into the side of his head.
In the ringing silence, Gannon raised the rifle to his right and to his left toward the sidewalk and street. He peeked behind him quickly over each shoulder, checking his spots.
There was a wind chime sound as he dropped the emptied rifle into the gutter on top of the pile of spent brass.
He turned to see Ruby standing there in frozen shock. He took her hand again without speaking and led her back the way they had come. Most in the pedestrian crowd around had also frozen up, but cars and buses were flowing
by on Lexington as if nothing had happened.
As they walked away, Gannon turned and saw the second man he had shot haltingly get out of the driver’s seat. The whole front of him from head to crotch was completely splattered in blood. As Gannon watched, he sat down on the sidewalk casually with his hands behind him and his head tilted back. Like Lexington was a beach, and he suddenly wanted to catch some rays.
They made the corner of 68th and turned east. The only sound Gannon could hear in his ringing deafened ears was the thump of his heart. Everything felt numb and dull. Like he was underwater. They walked toward Third Avenue slowly. The woman’s mouth moved. He tugged at her, nodding.
“Slowly,” he said.
It was hard to talk because he could only barely hear himself.
“We need to go slowly,” he said again.
They made it half the block. He wondered if he should turn around. He decided no. A quarter block left. Twenty feet. Ten.
Then they hit the Third Avenue corner and Gannon pulled Ruby to the right and yelled “Run!” as loud as he could.
They ran. Hand in hand at first, but then Ruby was getting it, running beside him on his left, matching him stride for stride. They made it to 67th and Gannon turned right again, running back up toward Lexington.
“No,” he heard Ruby say as she tugged at him.
“It’s okay,” Gannon said, heading back toward Lexington. “This is the way. The only way. Trust me. It’s okay. I promise.”
54
A dark blue evacuation of fired-up cops was pouring out of the 19th Precinct when they arrived at it. Without pausing, Gannon maneuvered around them as he tugged at Ruby’s hand, leading her straight in up the steps of the old ornate stone building.
In through the front door, a full-figured cop grabbed at Gannon as he was halfway through the worn vestibule. He was a puffy, pale uniformed sergeant with a pockmarked face. Gannon looked at the man’s eyes through his thick glasses.
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