by Eric Brown
The main street had become suddenly busy. Pedestrians passed back and forth between the stores he could see from his vantage point, and every time someone came into sight he tensed with expectation. Everyone, now, was a potential assassin. He told himself that there was nothing to stop Reeves - or rather LINx - from assuming the identity of a woman. With a chu, anything was possible . . . This made Halliday all the more jumpy, and ten minutes later his heart leaped into his throat when someone turned into the sidestreet.
It was a well-dressed blonde girl with a pretty face, perhaps twenty, or so she seemed. She climbed from a taxi in the main drag and ran down the sidestreet, burdened with designer shopping bags, and Halliday tensed. She was slim and quite obviously a woman, but when she turned into the mews Halliday stepped from the covered walk and followed, his right hand straying to the freeze beneath his jacket.
The rational part of his mind recalled Wellman’s description of Reeves as short and stocky. There was no way, he told himself, that this woman could be Reeves, no matter how well disguised. At the same time, he was taking no chances. He hurried after her and she half-turned at the sound of his pursuit, gave a quick, startled look and moved to the door of one of the apartments halfway along the mews. She fumbled with a pass-card, glancing behind her, and Halliday cursed himself and continued walking.
He retraced his steps across the sidestreet and stationed himself in the walkway. A minute later his communicator vibrated against his ribs. ‘Hal here,’ he said.
‘You still awake?’
‘Just about. All quiet at this end.’ But I nearly froze an innocent girl who looked nothing like Dan Reeves, he added to himself.
‘Anything at your end?’ he asked.
‘Quite a bit of river traffic, but no one’s dropped by yet. The good thing is, I can hear the engine of every boat that passes, so unless the bastard paddles up in a canoe I’ll have plenty of warning.’
‘Talk to you later.’
‘Okay. Take care.’
Halliday cut the connection and waited. Ten minutes after the false alarm with the blonde woman, a taxi turned in from the main drag and idled along the street. Halliday peered into the vehicle, trying to make out the appearance of the passenger. Behind the tinted windscreen he saw the head and shoulders of a man. He tensed again, expecting the cab to halt by the mews and the passenger to climb out. He foresaw his route to the mews being blocked by the taxi if it lingered after dropping off its fare: he would be forced to walk around the cab, wasting precious seconds.
In the event his fear proved unfounded. The taxi motored past the end of the mews and dropped the guy off halfway down the sidestreet. Which could, of course, be a deliberate ploy on the part of Reeves to catch off guard any potential assailant.
Halliday watched a middle-aged man pay the driver and walk back along the street towards the mews. The guy was short, as Wellman had described, but not at all stocky.
The man paused, checked his pockets, and turned into the rear entrance of one of the waterfront restaurants, and Halliday began breathing again.
Thirty minutes later, a van bearing the logo of a combined locksmith-cum-security advisor turned into the sidestreet and halted before the mews. Halliday’s heart began a laboured pounding as he watched a short, stocky guy seemingly in his mid-twenties, jump from the cab and disappear down the mews. Halliday set off after him, the freeze out and ready to use. He rounded the van and increased his pace. The guy was halfway along the mews, carrying a tool-box which might contain any of a dozen lethal weapons. Halliday raised his communicator to his lips. ‘Barney,’ he whispered. ‘He’s on his way.’
‘You need help?’
‘I’ll nail him before he reaches the house.’ He paused. ‘If you don’t hear from me in the next few minutes, I’ve fucked up.’
He pocketed his com. He was a couple of metres behind the guy. He raised the freeze, and was about to use it when the guy slowed, looked at the numbered doors along the row and moved to the house which the blonde woman had entered earlier. He knocked on the door and the woman answered, gave a nervous glance at Halliday and let the security man enter.
Halliday returned to the sidestreet and resumed his vigil, his heart thumping as if he’d just completed the New York marathon in world record time. If he’d been in the woman’s position, with a shifty-looking character loitering outside, he too would have called in a security expert.
Annoyingly, the locksmith’s van was blocking his view of the mews.
He got through to Barney.
‘Hal, what’s happening?’
‘False alarm, Barney. Close call - guy matching the description turns down the mews. I nearly froze him. I’ll be in touch.’
An hour passed, with the regular fifteen-minute wake-up bulletins from Barney. The locksmith-cum-security advisor returned to his van and drove off, giving Halliday a clear view of and access to the mews once again. He hoped the blonde woman had been reassured by whatever the expert had advised. Carry a weapon at all times, he thought, and if the guy bothers you again, shoot first and ask questions later.
The cold was getting to him. He was sheltered from the worst of the wind, but as the day progressed, the temperature dropped. He looked up at the thin strip of sky between the eaves of the enclosing building; it looked grey and laden with snow. He turned his collar up and hunched against the chill.
Halliday decided that the next time Barney called, he’d suggest a rotation of duty. The thought of the warm house appealed. Also, in the hallway by himself, he wouldn’t be prone to so many paranoid assumptions that everyone in New York, even slim young women, was Dan Reeves in disguise.
He looked at his watch. It was almost three-thirty. In another thirty minutes or so dusk would begin to draw in, and the job of apprehending Dan Reeves would be made just that bit more difficult.
He wondered if he’d make it back in time for dinner with Kim. At the thought of her, he felt a quick pang of guilt. He was deceiving Kim; he’d promised her that he would leave this case well alone, fight shy of evil spirits. He wished that he’d had the strength of character to sit her down back then and explain that there were no such things as evil spirits, and that, in order to survive, he had to work. Instead he had taken the line of least resistance, and lied. He had balked at facing the emotional, the personal, consequences of opening up and talking to Kim about what he thought and believed. He had bottled it up, as ever.
He considered what his sister had often told him, that with his upbringing was it any wonder that he found it impossible to show and share emotions? At the time he hadn’t been able to work out if Sue was being perceptive, or cruel. She had possessed an acute psychological insight and delighted in using it against him. He thought of his father, who for so many years had been unable to bring himself to talk about the events of the fire. As much as it pained Halliday to admit it, and despite doing everything to avoid being compared to his father over the years, there was no denying that he was his father’s son.
The silent jarring of his communicator interrupted his reverie. He fumbled the device in his cold fingers and replied.
‘Hal, Christ, I though you’d really fallen asleep this time.’
‘Not sleeping, just frozen to the bone. How about we swap over, Barney?’
‘Fine by me. Give it another fifteen minutes, okay? I’ll call at four and if your end’s quiet, we’ll switch.’
‘Talk to you then.’
He looked forward to the warmth of the house, and later an evening with Kim, this case out of the way and forgotten.
On the main drag, the multi-coloured lighting displays in the shop-fronts were coming on, bright in the gathering darkness. On the opposite side of the street, a ladies’ fashion outlet switched on its holo-façade, a radiant representation of a crimson evening gown. Halliday smiled to himself. He’d bring Kim here when all this was over, treat her to a new dress.
His communicator vibrated. ‘Hal, if it’s quiet at your end, let’s make the sw
itch now.’
‘Fine.’ Halliday looked along the length of the sidestreet. ‘Okay, Barney.’ Then he stopped. ‘Hold it a second, something’s happening. Might not be important. I’ll be in touch.’ He cut the connection.
A sleek red sports car had drawn up with a screech, effectively blocking the end of the sidestreet. As Halliday watched, a yellow cab braked behind it and a woman jumped out, handed a wad of notes to the driver and advanced on the first car. She banged with a clenched fist on the roof, shouting abuse. Halliday felt a momentary pang of alarm, soon doused. This was nothing more than a row between lovers or husband and wife. He was not going to make the mistake this time of assuming the worst.
He was about to get in touch with Barney when the door of the red sports car opened and a man climbed out. He was short, stocky, broad across the chest.
The woman, small and flame-haired, launched herself at him, pummelling at his chest with ineffective fists. The guy held her off, the blows more of an embarrassment than a threat. She was shouting at him, the words lost at this distance. Halliday turned away, finding something distasteful about watching other people’s emotional disputes.
He heard footsteps. The guy was walking down the sidestreet, pushing away the woman who clung to him and pleaded with loud, incoherent sobs. The man halted opposite Halliday, by the archway, and turned to the red-haired woman.
‘What’s happening to you?’ the woman cried. ‘You’ve changed. You’re a different person!’
The man grabbed her shoulders, pulled her to him and spoke with slow deliberation. Halliday failed to catch the words. He wanted the couple to go away and leave him to his vigil.
The woman spoke again, and Halliday could hardly bring himself to believe what he was hearing. ‘And this damned stupid disguise,’ she cried. ‘What’s got into you, Dan? What’s going on?’
Halliday’s belly seemed to freeze. In retrospect, he knew he should have acted then. He should have dashed out and used the freeze while Reeves was distracted. At the time he could only watch in disbelief.
What happened then seemed to take place in slow motion. The guy reached into his jacket and from an under-arm holster produced a revolver. With infinite patience he held the weapon at arm’s length and took aim. The expression on the woman’s face, already abject, dissolved into terror. She fell to her knees, her mouth open, and was reaching out to her executioner with pathetic entreaty when he shot her through the forehead at point-blank range.
Halliday saw it happen. He saw the kneeling body give a terrible spasm and fall backwards, arms flopping. He saw the body hit the ground and bob back, still on bended knee, in a posthumous parody of gymnastic vitality. He saw all this and could do nothing to save her life, paralysed as he was with shock.
Dan Reeves calmly holstered his revolver, and then looked up and saw Halliday watching him. Halliday tried to move, to reach for his own gun. If anything, the shock of discovery was more traumatising than that of witnessing the killing.
Halliday had time to tell himself that Reeves had no way of recognising him; he was wearing the chu, after all. But he had seen Reeves commit murder or, rather, he had seen LINx kill the woman. This, in itself, would be sufficient to sentence him to death.
Time slipped from an extended second of frozen inaction to sudden acceleration. Before Halliday could move, Reeves pulled out his revolver for a second time and fired. The report of the shot echoed deafeningly in the narrow street. The bullet passed through the padded bulk of Halliday’s jacket, missing his body. He dived, rolling across the ground, and came up on his knees, clutching his automatic. In that instant he forgot that Dan Reeves was an innocent man, dismissed his earlier intention to take him alive. He aimed and fired, and the bullet struck Reeves in the gut and punched a wad of blood and muscle out through a ragged exit point in the small of his back.
Reeves staggered, and Halliday expected him to fall.. What happened then served only to banish any notion that his opponent was still human. Instead of falling, Reeves turned and ran, and as he did so Halliday made out a mess of gut and entrails spilling from the gaping wound in his back.
Halliday fired again, missing this time, and then gave chase. Reeves was already well ahead but he was running into a dead end. Halliday slowed, amazed at how Reeves seemed to be ignoring his injury and sprinting without any ill-effect. He wondered if it was LINx in his neural interface, blocking all signals of pain from the doomed man’s consciousness.
Reeves came to the end of the street and turned. Halliday fell into a crouch, automatic extended. ‘Stop right there or I’ll shoot! Drop the gun!’
Reeves turned right and left like a hunted animal at bay. ‘Drop the gun and you’ll live, Reeves,’ Halliday shouted, as if appealing to whatever vestiges of humanity remained beneath the commanding program of the artificial intelligence. Perhaps, if Reeves could be reached, his elemental desire for survival triggered, he would be able to overcome the puppet-master and save himself.
Even as he thought this, Halliday knew it was a futile notion.
Reeves raised his revolver. Halliday fired and hit Reeves in the upper arm. He jerked, the gun spilling from useless fingers. His left hand reached into his jacket, but a cry from Halliday stayed the movement. Halliday ran towards Reeves, crouched three metres away, gun held in both outstretched hands, centred on the man’s head.
‘One move and you’re dead!’
They faced each other, immobile. Halliday feared that as soon as he made a move for the freeze, then Reeves would go for his concealed weapon - the cutter? The thought of it, of what the cutter had done to Carrie Villeux, paralysed him with fear.
He willed Barney to appear, to bail him out.
An eerie aspect of the encounter was that Reeves had not once cried out in pain, even though he was missing a good portion of his gut through the cavity in his back, and the bone of his upper right arm was irreparably shattered.
Reeves reached out and pulled over a container of trash. Halliday dodged the bin as Reeves vanished through a door to his left. Cursing, he waded after Reeves, through a tide of vegetable peelings and plastic packaging and kicked the door open. He peered into a kitchen, all steam and pandemonium. People screamed as Reeves, spilling more blood than was humanly possible, pushed his way past startled chefs and waiters. Halliday gave chase, yelling at everyone to get down as he tried to take aim through the melee of flying bodies.
Reeves careered past a cooking range. He reached out, grasped the rim of a boiling pan and pulled it over. It hit the tiles with a dull thump and spilled a tide of boiling gravy. Halliday could do nothing to avoid the slick: it splashed around his feet, burning his ankles, almost bringing him to his knees. He clutched at the range and somehow kept his feet, pushed himself towards the door through which Reeves had fled.
He made the door and dived through. He was in a long, low-lit restaurant, the sudden intrusion of two gunmen on the scene bringing a startled halt to the business of dining.
Ahead, Reeves collided with a waiter, sending the man crashing to the floor in a welter of plates and cutlery. Halliday caught up with Reeves and raised his right arm. He pressed the release stud on the canister of freeze. Reeves gave an involuntary cry - the first sound he had made during the chase - and the air filled with the chemical reek of liquid nitrogen and ammonia. The gas hit Reeves in the upper chest and head, and he fell backwards into a conveniently-placed chair.
Halliday sat down across the table from the dying man, dragging in breaths with great gulps. He lowered the freeze and, panting, sighted Reeves down the length of his gun. This time, he was taking no chances.
He was suddenly aware of the silence. He looked around, taking in the shocked expressions of the diners. They were sitting absolutely still as they stared in open-mouthed disbelief at the mutilated man and his pursuer, now at rest.
He found himself wanting to apologise for the interruption.
Reeves was frozen in the act of pulling a second revolver from his jacket. His
gun arm was raised before his face, the muzzle of the pistol set like ice a matter of inches from his mouth. As Halliday watched, he saw a brief, terrible flicker of life appear in the eyes behind the chu. Reeves was trying to move, and Halliday was sure then that he was propelled not by the program of the artificial intelligence but by the overwhelming human impulse to bring his own suffering to an end.
Before Halliday could reach out and take the gun, Reeves achieved his aim. He managed to lift his mouth over the muzzle of the revolver and pull the trigger. A spray of atomised brain and skull-shrapnel hit the ceiling and rained down over the diners.
Only then did the screaming begin, followed by a stampede for the door. A waiter stood beside Halliday, staring. Halliday looked up.
He produced his identification card, held it for the waiter to read, and said, ‘Get me a brandy.’
The waiter fled.
The upper half of Dan Reeves’ head was missing, but the lower jaw and face were still intact and clothed in the malfunctioning chu. Amid the devastation of the man’s head, the chu played a selection of ghastly, smiling mouths, one after the other.