Evi hoped Chuck Dwyer had given her the right apartment number.
She stopped at apartment 1712 and pounded on the door. She restrained herself. In her state it wouldn’t take much to splinter the door frame.
Chuck Dwyer opened the door. Chuck was in the process of dressing, and Evi could smell a woman back in the apartment.
He couldn’t hide his shock. He stood there, staring at a naked woman covered with blood and grease.
Evi didn’t have time. She pushed through into the apartment, slamming the door shut behind her. Chuck was trying to squeak out a comprehensible monosyllable and not doing a good job of it.
“I’m using your shower.”
She had to get the gunk off of her, or she had little chance of getting anywhere, past anyone. Chuck, still trying to talk, stared into her eyes.
Damn it! She’d forgotten about her contacts.
In his eyes she could see her own reflection, her own eyes. She could see her yellow iris and slitted pupil quite clearly, and Chuck was probably staring at the green reflective glow from her retinas. Cat eyes.
Chuck finally managed to say, “Y—you’re a frank . . .”
Frank. In other words, frankenstein. Lower on most people’s lists than the moreaus. Lower because her designers had the temerity to actually fiddle with the human genome. It had taken half a century for people in the States to achieve an uncomfortable acceptance of the engineered animals that kept pouring over the border.
An engineered human was still a horrifying concept.
Evi didn’t even like the word. There should be a kinder word in general usage. Even the term moreau, arising from nearly the same source, sounded better.
It didn’t really matter that Chuck knew. The penthouse was dead for her. Probably the whole of New York as well.
What really bothered her was the fact that a guy who was once actively trying to get into her bed was now looking at her as if she were a diseased animal. Better to not even try giving him an explanation.
“Chuck, does the woman in the bedroom live in the building?”
Chuck nodded.
“Take her back to her apartment. The police will be here soon and it would be good for you if you never saw me. Say you spent the night there.”
She went into the bathroom and didn’t bother to close the door. She didn’t care what Chuck did. It was irrelevant what he told the cops. Her trail of grease and blood would lead to his apartment. Nothing Chuck could say would compromise her position.
She had told him the truth. His silence would be for his benefit. Especially if the Agency was in the mood for disappearing someone.
Three minutes under a cold blast of water and she didn’t look like a refugee from a war zone. She hit the dryer and grabbed her pack off the john. In the pack was a one-piece all-purpose black jumpsuit. It was denim made from engineered cotton. It was faded gray in places and didn’t look like a stealth number. Its one special aspect was the carbon-fiber monofilament microweaved into it. It would deflect a knife, and while it wouldn’t stop a bullet, it could slow one down enough to save her life.
It was also broken in to the point where it didn’t feel like it was sanding her skin off when she put it on.
There were a pair of her special contact lenses in her backpack. Unfortunately, during all the running and jumping, their case had popped open. The one brown lens she found had torn in half.
“Damn,” she whispered as she flushed the lens.
She took out a pair of chromed sunglasses. If the cops saw her eyes, they would stop her. Her eyes could adjust to the light level. The only problem was that the sunglasses cut out the high end of the spectrum.
Chuck—and whoever the woman was—had split the apartment. Chuck had the New Yorker’s sense of self-preservation.
Now all she had to do was get out of the building with the sniper watching. She doubted a wave of cops would deter the gunman, whoever he was.
The sniper didn’t make sense to her. Unless he was supposed to pin her down for the dogs. But it sure felt like the sniper was doing his best to kill her. In which case the hit team swarming the building was irrelevant and costly.
Evi had the feeling that if she hadn’t seen the peeper, she’d be dead.
Who was behind it, and why the overkill?
She locked Chuck’s door behind her and did Chuck a favor. She kicked it in. The door frame split, and the door swung open. Chuck would receive no embarrassing questions about how she got his combination.
Out in the hall there was a slight haze in the corridor that probably only she could see. She could smell smoke coming from the north stairwell. The fire door leading there was flashing its red fire-warning lights. The scene behind its rectangular chicken-wire window was white and opaque. The door was radiating brighter than the heat vents.
She sensed that most of the civilians had taken the stairs. The floor felt empty. The occasional apartment door hung open, and a few stragglers were heading for the other stairwells.
She’d wanted to take out the hit squad, not torch the building.
Evi hated explosives.
She hung back by the unusable exit until the last of the civilians filed away. She wanted to melt in with the civilians and evacuate out the stairs. But it was doubtful she could get by the cops before they realized her part in this chaos. Not to mention that there were at least a half-dozen felonies sitting in her backpack.
Her internal clock told her it was five-ten. The cops would be around the base of the building trying to figure out exactly what happened. The fire-rescue people would be here as well. Probably headed up the north stairwell. She hoped that if there was a team five, they had the sense to bug out when the hit went sour. A shootout in the lobby between dogs and the NYPD would complicate things for the fire fighters.
Once the floor felt empty enough, she went to the elevator shafts.
She pulled on a pair of black leather gloves as she stood in front of the chromed doors. Then she shoved her fingers into the gap and pushed the doors open. No elevator. The elevator for this shaft was home on ground level, with a dog on top of it.
Evi took some climbing line out of her backpack, hooked a carabiner to the carbon-monofil-strengthened belt on her jumpsuit, looped the line through, and hooked the end of the line to a strut inside the shaft. She tossed the rest of the line down the shaft and watched it unravel. The rope hit bottom without snagging on anything. She started rappelling down the elevator shaft.
She hit floor five and heard the gunshots and the screaming downstairs. There was a team five, and it was engaging the cops.
Pretty soon the SWAT team would arrive.
She landed on top of the elevator and looked down at the dog. Little blood, but quite definitely dead. This was going to be the last body they found, so she gave herself a chance to search this one. Ten minutes, tops. She already knew how he was outfitted. She wanted to know what else the dog carried. No wallet, no ID, but she didn’t expect any.
The dog didn’t have much. He had one ramcard, black and unmarked with the exception of a long number on the top edge. She pocketed it.
The dog also carried cyanide capsules. She let out her silent laugh again.
Ten minutes, her time was up. The gunshots were becoming more sporadic. From the sound, the dogs had a habit of spraying automatic fire. They were probably running low on ammo. With that thought, she spent an extra ten seconds retrieving the dog’s weapon and a few clips. The Mitsubishi was a decent gun, and after removing the jumpsuit and the rope, she had room in the pack for it.
She kicked the remaining loop of rope off the top of the elevator and into the neighboring shaft. The elevator there was still stopped at the penthouse, so she could see all the way down to the water that collected in the shaft below the third sublevel.
She lowered herself over the side of the elevator,
more dangling than rappelling now, toward the foul-smelling, stagnant water. Even in such a high-class place on the Upper East Side, she could see rats, real ones, small sleek and black, swimming in the muck down there. It didn’t bother her much. She used to be squeamish, but that was before they nuked Tel Aviv.
She rested her feet on a girder that crossed the shaft a few centimeters above the water. It was slick footing. The girder was covered in brown slime that smelled of rotten algae. Evi unhooked herself and left the rope. She drew the Mishkov, sans extension, from the backpack and listened at the door. She heard only the faint echoes of the chaos in the lobby.
She shoved her left hand into the gap and pushed the left side of the elevator door open, using the right half for cover.
The garage was empty of people, human or nonhuman. Evi knew it as soon as the door slid open. Only empty ranks of expensive metallic-painted cars. No odor except for the faint ozone-transformer smell from the cars and a slight smell of smoke. Evi rolled out of the shaft, still expecting to be shot at. Nothing, but she couldn’t count on it to last.
She had a brief unprofessional thought about her Porsche. She didn’t go in that direction. If it wasn’t wired to explode, it certainly had a tracking device in it. In any event, the sniper would start pumping shots into the car the second it showed on the street.
She headed for the far end of the parking garage. In the far corner, across from the entrance to the garage, there was a manhole in the concrete. That was what she was heading for.
The lights didn’t reach far back. That entire end of the garage was swathed in gloom. Evi’s eyes adjusted to the darkness as she moved toward her destination. As she left the influence of one light, another light began to resolve itself.
A sleek, metallic-blue General Motors Maduro sports coupe was parked back here. The power plant was emitting a barely visible infrared glow. It must have been operating no more than fifteen minutes ago.
And it was parked on the manhole.
She got unreasonably angry. She put her gun away and punched the driver’s side window of the low-slung sports coupe. The plastic safety window cracked and collapsed into the car in hundreds of small pieces. The shock of impact started the aching in her overworked shoulder.
The garage echoed with the piercing sound of the Maduro’s car alarm. That was a little much. The high-frequency resonance of the alarm made it feel like her enhanced ears were bleeding.
She pulled the parking brake, shifted the car into neutral, grabbed the wheel, and started pushing. Her first intent was simply to move the car off the manhole, but the alarm got to her. She ran down the center of the garage, pushing the coup down a gentle incline. She let go when the Maduro was going at a fair clip.
Right toward her own car.
She hit the ground as the coupe crunched into her Porsche. A bomb was set off by either a proximity or a vibration switch. The explosion killed the Maduro’s alarm and set off every other one in the garage. She heard pieces of the black Porsche fall by her and skate across the floor. She looked up in time to see a momentary ball of flame engulf three cars.
The sprinklers came on.
Someday she was going to have to control her anger. But while she had wasted the Maduro, she had also saved the innocent bastard who would have gotten too close to her Porsche.
She had to vanish quickly now, before the firemen got down here to clean up the mess. She ran back to the manhole, hooked two gloved fingers in two separate holes and lifted the metal cover. She set it down, jumped into the darkness, and pulled it shut after her.
A nice thing about Manhattan, in her situation, was the fact that if you wanted to get from point A to any point B, you could do it underground. There was more architecture buried under Manhattan than there was under Jerusalem.
The manhole was access for ConEd, AT&T, Mann-Sat, and a few hundred other data companies to the main comm trunk into the building. She landed in the concrete tunnel and ran, being careful not to slip on the scum of ice that lined the bottom of the concrete tube.
It was five twenty-five. She had been awake nearly an hour. She ran down the comm tunnel, trying to piece things together.
It was obvious that the mercs weren’t trained as a hit squad. Their vests and their tendency to spray their weapons made her think that they’d been an infantry unit. Maybe special forces trained for heavy armed resistance, not stealth, not hit-and-run.
Well-trained, expensive, and not what she would send in for an assassination attempt.
The sniper was a different story altogether. If she had stopped moving under the stare of that gun, she’d be dead. If the sniper had been alone, she’d be dead. If she hadn’t broken routine by starting her workout a half-hour early, obviously before the sniper had reached position, she’d be dead.
Evi didn’t like those kinds of ifs.
She stopped under a grate that was probably three hundred meters away from her entrance. She could hear, echoing behind her, sounds of commotion in the parking garage, probably firemen.
She climbed up a few rungs in the side of the tunnel and pushed the grate up and to the side with her right hand. She winced a little. The strain from the 250-kilo repetitions was getting to her.
The grate was padlocked to a bolt in the concrete, but water and corrosion had done most of her work for her. The bolt came loose from the wall.
She came out into a recess under the subbasement of the peeper’s building. She was playing a dangerous game here, but she wanted to know who was trying to erase her. She gently replaced the grate, so, she hoped, the firemen and cops wouldn’t hear.
She now stood in a rectangular concrete recess in the floor of the peeper’s basement. The walls next to her snaked with cables of every description running from the tunnel to just under the level of the basement floor. To get to the basement proper, she had to push up against a white enamel panel that roofed the recess.
This panel was unlocked, and it levered up with a hydraulic hiss. Evi crawled out and closed it behind her.
This basement was cleaner than the one to her building. Stark white modular panels were everywhere. Air-conditioning, communications, heating, power, everything was behind square panels that were flush with the walls. All of it sat in a cavernous room indirectly lit by soft fluorescents hidden near the tops of the walls.
The elevator was easy to find. It was a newer maglev design, and the gigantic toroidal magnet housing filled half the basement. The elevator door was recessed nearly two meters inside the outer wall of the magnet.
There wasn’t a keypad. So Evi called “Up?” in the hope that the elevator was voice activated. It was. The green up arrow lit above the door.
The elevator hushed into place with a tiny whoosh. The games she’d played in the shafts across the street wouldn’t work here. No cables. No real shafts.
“Twenty-four,” she said as she walked into the cylindrical elevator.
Ding. It heard her. The elevator’s response had a slight English accent. “Going up.”
Once she got to his floor, she’d be able to find the peeper’s room. She would smell the blood.
She felt a brief two-G acceleration, and an even briefer deceleration. The doors slid open on a plastic-white corridor. The carpet was a stain-resistant splatter-brown pattern that made the walls appear whiter than they actually were.
She saw three cameras, covering the three axial corridors visible from her central location. She wasn’t too concerned about them. This building wasn’t very security conscious, as shown by her easy access. Also, the guards here would be lazy and probably paying more attention to the chaos across the street.
As she’d thought, she smelled the peeper’s blood. Three doors down, she could tell. The door was ajar.
She ran up to the door and listened. Nothing. Evi wanted to take out the Mishkov, but the cameras were watching. She pushed the door open
with her foot and tried to look casual for the cameras while still using the doorjamb for cover.
The blood-smell was ripe in the room. She’d plugged him in a major artery. Blood had soaked into the carpet by the chair, a pint or two, and the blinds on this side were practically painted. The British Long-Eighty binoculars lay on the ground by the chair, the slight green glow from the LCD eyepieces the only light in the room.
The peeper, however, was gone.
Evi ran in, carefully avoiding stepping in the blood, and checked all the rooms in the apartment. The apartment was empty of both bodies and furniture. The peeper’s corpse was gone. Someone had to have taken it. Even if the peeper had survived, he certainly wouldn’t be ambulatory. Evi grabbed the Long-Eighties. There was a ramcard in them. Maybe the peeper had recorded something useful.
She looked at the carpet by the door. She could see a faint bloody impression. A human shoe, size 14, large person, probably male. The nap was already returning to an upright position. It didn’t look like the guy was carrying a body.
Evi felt her nostrils flare. She could barely see the blood on the brown carpet in the hall, but she could follow the smell. She broke into a silent run, bent over in a crouch, following the trail.
Chapter 3
She followed the trail of the peeper’s blood with a growing incredulity. The building here might not be as security conscious as hers, but she did pass a dozen cameras as she followed the smell of blood down a flight of stairs and into a parking garage adjoining the building. She couldn’t believe someone carrying a corpse would have been ignored by the guards.
However, they had been. The peeper’s remains had made it down the stairs, up three levels in the garage, and to a parking space reserved for apartment 2420. When she reached it, there was still the ghost-smell of burning rubber. The vehicle feed was still emitting some infrared.
The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2 Page 3