Phipps watched the new signal brighten on his tracer as they got closer and closer. Then, in a matter of seconds, it faded to nothingness.
The old man must have detected something in his posture. "What is it, William?"
Phipps wordlessly handed the tracer back.
He braced himself. Sometimes the old man took bad news by "keeping in practice"—calmly, coolly pulling out his favorite automatic and extinguishing someone at random. Phipps was the only one within easy reach.
But the old man simply sighed. "Home, William."
Harris and Doc traveled for quite a while, changing subway lines a couple of times.
After that, it only took one call to find her. Harris could have cheered when she came on the line: "This is Gaby."
"It's me."
"Let me call you back."
He gave her the number.
A minute later the phone rang under his hand. He picked it up. "Hi."
Her voice dropped nearly to a whisper. "I'm at another phone. I didn't know if they monitored incoming calls."
"Good thinking. Creative paranoia is probably very helpful right now."
"What the hell went on in my apartment?"
"Two fake cops jumped in and grabbed my friend Doc. They must have been waiting around for you to come home. We got out of there. Did the real cops get the guys I left there?"
"No."
"Damn. Did you tell the cops I was supposed to be there?"
"Give me some credit for intelligence, all right? I said that I got an anonymous call saying that the people who grabbed me before knew I was staying with Elaine. So I decided to go home instead."
"Thanks."
"No, thank you. The cops in New Rochelle say somebody broke into Elaine's house after we left. So you score big points there. Did you use that device you were talking about to find me?"
"No, I used my poor, misfiring brains. I figured that even if the police were through with you, you wouldn't want to leave them so fast . . . knowing there was somebody after you. So all I had to do was find out which precinct was nearest your place. Sixth."
"Yeah, I'm getting to be a fixture here. They have kind of a museum display in their squad room, and I'm on a first-name basis with every bit of memorabilia."
"I need to talk to you, Gaby. I can fix it so the guys after you can't follow you."
"How?"
"This tracer thing doesn't work if you're in the subway. When you leave the police, take a cab and see if you can get the driver to lay down some rubber. You have to shake off anybody following you, at least for a minute or two. And use that minute to get down to the subway. Meet us at the platform at Eighty-sixth Street and Lex."
She was long in answering. "It may be a while before I can get out of here."
"We'll wait. I'll be easy to spot. I'm wearing the gray suit my grandfather was buried in."
"Okay."
Harris hung up and returned to the bench where Doc sat.
A couple of hours had worked changes on Doc. He now wore sunglasses, a sweatsuit jacket, and the Phantom of the Opera T-shirt Harris had bought in a corner store during a brief solo return to street level.
Harris had also been at him with tricks barely remembered from his college theater career. Doc's hair was now gray—streaked with shoe polish applied with a toothbrush in the bathroom. His skin was dark with the orange-brown tan that came out of a bottle. He looked older, his features lined with makeup pencil. Harris could have put an additional twenty years on him—Elmer's glue, toilet paper, and makeup base could do an amazing job of simulating wrinkled, sagging skin—but he hadn't wanted to get too elaborate. This disguise might be adequate to keep the police from noticing Doc if they had a description of him from witnesses outside Gaby's place.
Doc's wrists were bound up in bandages, but his hands, where they showed, looked better anyway. Dead flesh was slowly peeling away, revealing pink skin beneath. Doc was a long way from being healthy, but the injury was healing much faster than any burn Harris had ever seen. But then, it wasn't exactly a burn.
And Doc was more alert. He looked as happy and energetic as the losing quarterback in the Super Bowl, but he was awake and could walk under his own power.
He looked up as Harris returned. "You found her."
"Yep. We'll meet her where I told you."
"We cannot wait for tonight, Harris. The deviser chasing Gaby will catch up to us. He is very capable. Or all the iron around us will kill me. I'll begin the ritual as soon as we return to the park."
Harris sat down beside him. "You don't have the book."
"I remember the ritual. I remember everything." He made it sound like a sentence handed down by an unfriendly judge. "Not always when I need to, unfortunately."
"Are you up to it? You made it sound like it wore people out. You're already wiped out."
"I can do it."
"That's not what I asked."
Doc looked at him wearily. "Harris, it does not matter. We can't protect her here. We have to get her back to the fair world."
The phone jarred Phipps out of his sleep; he answered it out of reflex. "Six one two. No, wait—"
"You're not at your extension now," the old man chided him. "But you will be. Fast. I have one of them again, William."
"Don't you ever sleep? Never mind. I'll be right there." Phipps hung up. The old man's office was only an elevator ride away from his bedroom, an arrangement that the old man found convenient. Groggy with lack of sleep, Phipps staggered to his feet.
It wasn't dawn yet, but the traffic of men and women through the subway system had started to pick up when Harris spotted her coming off the uptown number six. He waved and she ran to him.
She wrapped herself around him, held him close. For a moment, he floated around in the suburbs of heaven.
She pushed him back to look at him. "You're really okay."
"Yeah."
"That suit sucks."
"You romantic thing, you."
She looked uncomfortable. He knew her too well, knew she'd just remembered yesterday's dinner. He let her step away from him.
He turned and gestured. "Gaby, this is my friend Doc."
Doc made the effort to stand and gave her a little bow.
She gave him a searching glance. "Doc what?"
"MaqqRee," Doc said. "You may call me Desmond if you prefer."
"Desmond," she repeated. Harris saw her struggle not to wince. "Doc is fine," she said, then looked at Harris. "Okay. You think you can tell me what's going on?"
"We need to go over to the conjurer's circle in Central Park. I mean, the circle of white stones."
"But if what you said was true, as soon as we go up, their tracer thing will show where I am. If it really exists."
Harris pulled the tracer out of his jacket pocket and turned it on. Doc's glow at the center of the screen had completely absorbed Gaby's.
"That doesn't show anything."
"It will when we reach the surface," Doc said. "And it will let us know how much time we have."
The three of them reached the circle of stones and Doc immediately began setting right those that had fallen over or been moved.
"So where were you all day?" Gaby asked, maddeningly persistent.
"You won't believe me. Not until Doc shows you this trick," Harris added. "I've got a question for you. Gaby, have you ever heard of anybody who looked like you, had sort of the same name? I've seen a woman called Gabrielle. Your spitting image. Nobody knows much of anything about her."
Even in the moonlight he could see her swallow. "No."
"Did you just accidentally say no when you meant yes? You always said women don't really do that."
"You bastard." The heat in her voice surprised him. "Don't make a joke out of this."
"Then don't lie."
She tried to glare at him, but she looked guilty instead. She stared down at the grass. "Harris, don't laugh, okay? But I've always felt connected to somebody else. I mean, I've always had thes
e dreams about meeting a sister I never met. When I was a kid I used to drive my parents crazy—`Are you sure I wasn't twins? Did you leave another baby at the hospital?' That sort of thing."
"What did they say?"
"They said that reading too much was rotting my brain." She looked up again and tried to gauge his expression.
"Oh, yeah. Hell, they said that the last time I saw them." Harris turned the tracer on again. The bright glow was still distant—but now it was moving slowly. "Doc, I think they're onto us."
Doc nodded. His circuit done, he knelt in the circle's center and began unloading things from his pockets—gold coins, a small gold cylinder with an opening at one end, tiny statuettes carved of stone.
"Give me that thing." Gaby took the tracer from Harris' hand and trotted off a few dozen yards, looking intently at the screen. She wandered back and forth out on the grass for a minute, long enough for Doc to start chanting, before she returned.
She handed it back to him. "Okay. It picks him up. It picks up this other signal. I'll take your word for it that the glow in the middle is me. What's he doing?"
"I know it sounds like he's trying to cough up a hairball, but it's all part of the ceremony." Harris eyed the tracer screen with concern. The incoming signal, still northeast, was getting closer, faster than he liked. "Doc, can you snap it up?"
Doc shook his head, not interrupting the flow of foreign syllables.
Gaby eyed the distance to the nearest stand of trees. "Look, if that really is them, we ought to get back into the subway."
"We'll be fine." Harris spoke with confidence he didn't feel. "When Doc finishes, they won't be able to get at us. You need to trust me about this."
She gave him a hard look. "You're making it hard. Not telling me what this is all about."
"You really won't believe it until you see it."
"Try me."
Doc interrupted his recital. "Harris." His voice was rough and weak, and Harris could see sweat pouring down his face. "Almost done. Are you staying?"
"Hell, no." Leave Gaby to go back to the fair world alone?
Harris took a last look at the device. The incoming patch of light was very close now; its edges nearly touched the edges of Doc's glow.
Doc began his chant again.
Gaby looked suspiciously at the two men, then her eye tracked something behind Harris. He turned to look . . . and saw the park grass writhing, curling and dying in a wave front spreading out from the circle of stones.
"See?" he told her. "It's real."
"This is your trick?"
There was a sharp crack from the east, and a little spray of dust kicked up two inches from Doc's knee.
Doc flinched and bent to be lower to the ground, but he kept chanting. Harris swore and looked toward the source of the noise—where a half-dozen men, bobbing pale faces out in the darkness, were running at them from the direction of the Met.
Gaby grabbed Harris' jacket. "God, Harris, we've got to get out of here." She dragged him half off the circle.
He grabbed her around the waist, spun her down to the ground as gently as he could. "Not yet."
She looked at him, her eyes wide, as if he'd pulled off a Harris mask to reveal the face of Adonis beneath it. She hit his shoulder. "What the hell are you doing? We have to go."
"Not yet. Trust me."
Another crack, another section of ground twitched as if hurt.
Dammit, dammit, dammit! Harris bore Gaby down, flattening her by sheer weight, covering her as much as he could. He pulled one of the fake policemen's pistols out of his pocket, saw her eyes get even wider.
He aimed it in the direction of the oncoming men.
No. If he missed, he might start raining bullets down on the museum. There could be people over there. It would be enough just to make them duck for cover. He lowered his arm a bit, aiming into the ground thirty or forty yards away, and pulled the trigger. He was startled by the way the gun kicked in his hand, by the painful loudness of the shot, but he brought the gun back in line and kept firing.
The three closest faces disappeared. He marveled that he might have hit them anyway. Then the three men returned fire from prone positions. Dust kicked up around Doc, and something high-pitched whistled inches over Harris' head.
His gun clicked on empty and he dropped it. He began groping around in his pocket for another revolver.
Gaby hit him again, ineffectually. "Get off me." There was fear in her voice. He felt a moment of pain as he realized it was him she feared.
He got out the second captured revolver and aimed it.
"Harris, you're crazy."
Harris began firing again—one shot, two. There were only two faces out in the darkness now, and one of them was shouting to the others. The return fire abruptly stopped. The two faces kept coming, one of them much higher off the ground than the other.
Gaby's hand clamped down on Harris' balls with a grip of steel. He jerked in pain and fired an accidental shot into the air. "Jesus, let go!"
"Let me up, or I Will Tear It Off!"
Harris writhed. It hurt worse that way, but he couldn't help himself. And that face was getting closer—
That face. Adonis, not more than ten yards from the edge of the circle. Harris took aim and fired. He missed; he couldn't hold his aim steady. Not with a furious nutcracker clamped on him.
Five yards. Adonis was so close that Harris wouldn't be able to get to his feet in time. Harris fired again.
The shot hit Adonis in the nose. A gross spray of blood and meat, black in the moonlight, blew out the back of Adonis' head.
Adonis jerked to a stop and looked surprised.
Then it kept coming.
And it began to grow, stretching unnaturally just before it reached the boundaries of the circle. Moving too fast to slow down, Adonis, ten feet tall and growing, reached the edge—and stopped there like a mime running into an imaginary pane of glass.
Doc fell over on his side and turned to look at Adonis. He was in time to see the old man, a stretched, twelve-foot-tall version of the old man, stride up to the edge.
The old man's face, twisted in anger, peered down at the three of them—and Gaby, finally seeing what was going on, gasped at the sight of their elongated attackers. She let go of Harris.
Doc looked at the old man. He said a single word: "Duncan." His tone was pained, not surprised.
Then the world popped.
The bubble of light in the conjurer's circle dwindled to nothing. Adonis and the old man just stood there as Phipps tentatively approached.
It was bad. The old man's shoulders were shaking. "Sir?"
The old man spun on him. It was his I'm-just-about-to-lose-it look, all trembling anger ready to erupt. "It was him," Duncan hissed. "He's found me. Like he always does."
"Sir, we need to get back to the cars. The police will be coming."
The old man looked at him as though he'd spoken in a foreign language, then finally nodded.
The other men had hung back, brushing off their clothes. As he reached them, the old man quietly asked Phipps, "Who started shooting?"
"That was Kleine, sir."
"Kleine!" The old man smiled at the startled gunman. "How is your lovely daughter?"
"Uh, just fine—"
The old man drew his automatic and shot the man between the eyes. Bloody matter blasted out the back of Kleine's head.
Unlike Adonis, the gunman didn't keep going. He just fell over backwards.
The rest of them hurried back to the cars.
Chapter Twelve
Harris rolled off Gaby and gulped in the air of Neckerdam. The stars above the city glittered down at him.
Nobody was shooting at him. But his arms were still shaking.
Gaby rose, looking around. "What the hell is happening here?"
"Doc!" That was Alastair, pelting up the roadway leading to the manor house. He skidded to a halt beside the collapsed body of his friend and knelt to check his pulse.
"They shot at us," Harris gasped out. "I don't know if he was hit." He reached over to pick up the guns he'd dropped—and froze. They lay where they'd fallen, but they were now deformed, twisted as if exposed to some enormous heat. Like Gaby's pepper spray.
"What the hell is happening here?"
Alastair gingerly probed around Doc's back, then peeled him out of the sweatsuit jacket. "I don't think he's been hit. A bad poisoning, though. I wager he ignored it."
"Much as he could." Harris wearily tried to sit up, then decided against it. His groin still hurt. Better just to stay here for a minute.
"And then commencing a devisement like this. Exhaustion and shock. The idiot."
Gaby stood over Harris and glared at him. But her voice was deceptively sweet. "Are you going to tell me? This is the last time I ask nicely."
Weary, he grinned up at her. "Welcome to Neckerdam. Gaby, meet Alastair Kornbock. Alastair, Gaby Donohue."
"Grace, child. Harris, help me carry him to the car, will you?"
Doc didn't wake up, but didn't get worse. They got him up to his room in the Monarch Building and Alastair sent the two of them away.
They found Jean-Pierre and Noriko back in the lab. Jean-Pierre spotted Gaby, put on a predator's smile, and walked up to her as if dragged by magnetism. "Harris, introduce us."
"I'm surprised to see you two awake." Dawn was finally lightening in the east, but Jean-Pierre and Noriko looked alert.
"We were preparing to spell Alastair out at the estate. Harris, your manners."
"Oh, yeah." Jean-Pierre's sudden, deliberate charm put Harris off. "Gabriela Donohue, this is Jean-Pierre Lamignac and Noriko Nomura."
Noriko bowed.
"Grace," said Jean-Paul. "So, you are the famous Gabrielle. Doc's description does not do you justice." He bent to kiss her hand.
She watched this with a bemused expression. "You remind me of my uncle Ernesto."
"Truly?"
"Yes. He's in jail where he belongs."
He straightened, his expression confused, and she turned away from him. "Harris, your friend Doc is in bed, all your fires are put out . . . it's time for you to give me some answers."
Gaby caught on faster than Harris had. "Wait a minute. When you say `Sidhe Foundation,' you don't mean the pronoun. You mean like in `banshee.' "
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