Damage Time

by Colin Harvey

  Then they slowed to a stop and but for the ringing in Shah's ears, the world was silent.

  Shah levered himself upright. He headed aft, to where Kotian had to emerge. Shah was on the port side; there was a fifty-fifty chance that Kotian would walk right into them.

  Kotian didn't. He emerged onto the flat aft section before Shah could reach it, dragging a clearly still-groggy Aurora, followed by two large men.

  No Hampson, Shah thought. What happened to him?

  The group moved so slowly, even Shah could catch them. He thrust Bailey's gun into the base of the last man's spine. The man stiffened. "Keep very still," Shah said into his ear, took the man's gun, and passed it to Bailey.

  And their luck ran out.

  Kotian looked back and saw them. He fired but luckily the shot went wide. In one movement Kotian grabbed Aurora, spinning her around to make a shield and backed away. Meanwhile the first goon drew his gun, so Shah fired and dropped him, prompting the second to lift his hands into the air. By the time he had refocused on Kotian, Shah's quarry had gone.

  Bailey scuttled away to the bow of the grounded Lion.

  Using Kotian's man as a shield, Shah edged around to where Kotian had gone.

  Kotian had already dropped to the ground off the broken boat, still holding Aurora as a shield. He yelled, "Keep back!"

  "Move!" Shah prodded Kotian's man, and they followed, slowly.

  "I said, keep back!" Kotian fired into the air.

  "I'm not Shah," Bailey shouted back. "She doesn't mean anything to me, except that she's a hostage that you're going to release. And we're keeping your man in between–" Shah heard two shots, and the man in front of him slumped.

  Bailey screamed, "There was no need for that!"

  "He was expendable!" Kotian released his choke-hold on Aurora, grabbed her hand and ran, dragging her along in his wake.

  Bailey jumped off the boat and ran after them.

  "If you want to live, you won't drag too much, my dear!" Kotian panted.

  Except for the last few days when he'd been holed up in various tenements Kotian trained every day but already running into the wind was taking its toll. It was harder than running up a steep hill, and his legs felt leaden and his lungs couldn't draw breath far enough in to prevent light-headedness. But he needed to speak; "Shah thinks you're my accomplice – he isn't coming to rescue you, just take you in with me."

  Aurora's long strides matched his, and since she was more than twenty years younger, she didn't look as if she was finding it as hard as him. But she didn't waste breath answering.

  "Stop!" A woman cried behind them, and Kotian heard the crack of a gunshot.

  Bailey might have been firing into the air, but Kotian couldn't be sure. He turned, took aim, and fired. Bailey dropped as if coshed.

  "Gotcha!" Not want to kill a cop? Why ever not? It's wonderful!

  He dragged Aurora off again, the exaltation giving him a little more speed, another minute's endurance. Then Kotian saw lights and barriers ahead, and as he reached the FDR Levee circling Manhattan's southern tip, turned at bay, hand still clamped over Aurora's wrist.

  When he reached her prone body, Shah felt Bailey's neck, found a faint pulse. Praying her piece wasn't voice-locked, he said "One one two, ambulance and police home in on this signal. Officer down."

  Then he stood, his wound radiating throbbing pulses of agony. He jabbed the syringe with the second stimulant cocktail into his leg, and started walking again – even with the drugs, he couldn't manage to run.

  Incredibly, they were waiting for him, twenty yards beyond the beginning of the levee, standing on the very wall, water from the breaking waves soaking them, Kotian with his arm around Aurora's throat, holding her as a shield again.

  Shah shouted into the wind, hoping that his voice would carry, "There really isn't nowhere to go, Abhijit."

  "Do you love her?" Kotian yelled back, gun jerking at Aurora's throat..

  Shah pondered. If I say yes, he'll kill her. What to do, what do I do?

  "No." Shah stepped forward, hoping he'd guessed right. "She means nothing to me. Just shoot the bitch."

  LXXIII

  Van Doorn bit his lip, but managed not to urge the driver to go faster. The rain was finally slackening, but was still heavy enough to make driving dangerous.

  He was sure Kotian had planned his escape – holed up for several days until the weather played into his hands – to coincide with a near-miss from a hurricane. Any closer, and movement around New York would have been impossible, but a Class Four Hurricane sweeping across Maryland caused just enough chaos to give Kotian cover, without stopping him moving.

  And Kotian had planned it, van Doorn was sure. New Yorkers knew how paper-thin the city's resources were, how badly they were stretched. They could barely cope with the storm, let alone dozens of robberies and homicides, to that last diversionary explosion in the marina while The Lion of Bangalore slipped away. Even the lightning strikes had briefly played into Kotian's hands by knocking out the communications networks.

  But once Shah had found out that Kotian had a boat (and van Doorn really, really didn't want to think how Kotian's defense team would portray Shah's interrogating the hotel's night manager) it was only a matter of time before they got him. Still, the comms network had come back online just in time.

  "There," the driver said, rousing van Doorn from his thoughts and swerving close to the body. Van Doorn jumped out and ran through the rain to where she lay.

  He had almost reached the makeshift command center at the 79th Street Boat Basin's Marina when the call had come through. He had prayed ever since then that it wasn't another diversion, but equally that it wasn't Sara. The heat-tracking camera's footage of the boat grounding implied an answer to the first possibility–

  "Don't move her!" An arriving paramedic shouted, as van Doorn lifted a lank strand of hair to see the face. The medic barged him out of the way and went to work. "It's a gunshot wound to the upper abdomen," she shouted to her colleague. "Get her onto a stretcher and into the ambulance."

  "Still a pulse?" Van Doorn yelled back as the paramedics gently shifted the woman onto it and into the ambulance. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry when he saw that it was Sara Bailey. He'd hoped, however ludicrous it was that someone else had taken her eyepiece. That rush of emotion told him how hard he'd fallen for the young woman.

  "Still a pulse," the paramedic said. "But it's faint and irregular. She's lost blood, and we won't know whether it's hit a vital organ. We can work on her now."

  He was dismissed, van Doorn realized.

  Suddenly adrift, then refocusing on the job, he returned to looking for Kotian and Shah, who wouldn't be far away. They might as well be joined at the hip, van Doorn thought. If he were honest, that suited him. He could have pulled Shah in, but the man was van Doorn's best chance of nailing Kotian, although he'd never admit it publicly. Van Doorn wondered whether the visibility was good enough for SWAT snipers to be able to tell them apart, if they did a line on them. Assuming they hadn't lost them again.

  There. Van Doorn used the zoom facility on his eyepiece. It wasn't very good, but good enough to show two – no, three – figures on the levee wall.

  It's like watching a snail-race, Aurora thought.

  Kotian had backed away, slowly. The levee was almost eight feet thick in parts to keep the rising waters at bay, but even so the footing was treacherous, especially with the storm lashing the harbor, and flood water spilling over the wall and pooling on the road. So Kotian had to keep looking down, which slowed him up.

  Had Shah been fully fit, he could probably have overhauled Kotian in seconds. But even with the curtain of rain reducing visibility to fifty meters or less, it was obvious from the way Shah's leg dragged and he regularly stumbled – once nearly falling into the water – that he was hurt. And had Shah been overhauled by Kotian, her captor would probably have shot him.

  Aurora barely wanted to live since she had heard Shah urge Kotia
n to shoot her. That Kotian hadn't was little consolation. She wanted to live just enough to stop her from trying anything foolish, so instead she let the man she once thought she might learn to love drag her away from the man she had learned to love, and waited her time.

  The gap was narrowing – down to five meters now. Kotian yelled, "Stay back, dammit!"

  Still that bloody remorseless man kept coming. Beyond him, Kotian saw the flashing lights indicating reinforcements, and that the NYPD were busy setting up roadblocks.

  Kotian felt like an animal in a trap. There was no way out. But he was torn between shooting Aurora, shooting Shah, or killing himself. For sure, there was no way that they were going to take him alive and scoop his brains out.

  Now they were barely three meters apart, and still Shah tottered like some low-budget cyborg whose batteries were running down. Toward Kotian, slowly, purposefully.

  Finally Kotian crumbled. He shouted "Final warning, Shah!"

  Still the bastard kept coming. "Stop, dammit!" Kotian

  screamed into the wind. Maybe he can't even hear me.

  Shah staggered, nearly fell into the harbor. Kotian willed gravity to help, but of course it didn't. Nothing worked for him in the end. Even that phobia of water that Shah had admitted to, weeks before, hadn't helped.

  "I'll shoot!" Kotian screamed, and then as Shah closed on them to the point where he couldn't miss, Kotian fired.

  Even with the wind, the gun was so close to her ear that Aurora heard the click of Kotian slipping the safety off.

  I could be inside in the warm, she thought, living the life: champagne. Caviar. Sex. If she had only turned down that innocuous request from Kotian to seduce a cop. It had seemed like fun.

  She felt Kotian take aim, and as he squeezed the trigger she jerked her shoulder up and bit his other hand, the one around her throat, as hard as she could.

  Shah guessed that if Sunny hadn't ripped his memories the waves soaking through his boots would have stopped him in his tracks, reducing him to gibbering paralysis. If he wasn't so tired, and the pain from the gunshot wound didn't throb through his body in waves, he might have smiled at the irony of some good coming out of the attack.

  Instead he walked on. Another step. And another.

  He was so focused on just being able to reach Kotian that, although he saw his quarry taking aim, the message still didn't reach his feet.

  The shot flying harmlessly into the air broke his trance. A microsecond later Kotian's yell had him lunging for them. Kotian's gun flew through the air and caught Shah a glancing blow on the side of the head that sent lights dancing across his vision. Then he held a sobbing Aurora in his arms.

  Shah just had time to shout in her ear, "I lied to him. Of course I love you," and kissing her – briefly, tenderly – before lowering her off the wall to the ground.

  Breaking into a Frankenstein-ish lope, Shah set off after Kotian again.

  LXXIV

  Kotian should have been away and gone. But when Shah looked up, teeth gritted against the waves of pain that accompanied each step, he saw that Kotian had stopped, his head lowered like a bull ready to charge.

  Shah looked around.

  Barriers blocked the road ahead and the side streets, lights cascading across Battery Park, even bouncing off the Jersey shore on the far side of the sound. Lights were starting to come on there, even at Ranger Place. The hockey stadium had never looked so forlorn.

  Wonder if the SWAT teams're in place, Shah thought. Do they want Kotian alive? Shah wondered whether he could keep going for just a few feet more.

  Kotian turned, an animal at bay.

  To buy the SWAT teams a few more seconds Shah shouted, "You killed my children!"

  For a moment Shah was unsure whether Kotian had heard, so strong was the howling gale. Kotian shouted, "An eye for an eye."

  "You admit it then?"

  Kotian's laughter carried top notes of despair. "Why not? But I didn't kill the girl. Nor your grandchildren and their mother."

  "You might as well have!" With each sentence, Shah stepped a pace closer.

  "I did them a favor!" Kotian yelled. "They won't remember what they saw. I regret that but it was necessary. You had to see what you caused, Shah."

  Shah yelled, "You know what? You wasted your time!"

  "What do you mean?"

  "It was like watching something happening to strangers, or an old flat screen horror movie. Awful, yes, but not relevant to me."

  "You're lying!" Kotian screamed.

  "Don't you understand?" Shah yelled. "To be truly horrifying, I needed an emotional connection to the victims, but I don't have any. They're strangers to me, no matter how much I tried to connect with them. No one's ever survived an attack like the one I did. I amassed so many of my old memories again, but I couldn't get any emotional connection. There was no context to them. In stripping my memories down to bedrock, Sunny robbed you of your greatest weapon." He laughed scornfully. "You shouldn't feel bad – it was your useless son who fucked up, even from beyond the grave!"

  "Nooooo!" Kotian screamed.

  He ran at Shah, who reached for the gun that should have been in his pocket. His hand closed on emptiness, and he cursed.

  Kotian's hands reached his face, fingers splayed to gouge his eyes.

  Shah tried to bring his knee up into Kotian's groin, but it was his wounded leg and it didn't even connect before a scream erupted from somewhere deep inside him.

  Then Kotian's hands moved to his throat. They grappled on the wall, waves breaking around their legs. The fight lasted barely a half-second before Shah's legs gave way. He felt the tug of the wash like a giant child's fingers, poking, grasping, tugging. Before he could grasp what was happening, they were sucked into the water, Kotian's hand still around Shah's windpipe.

  Something thudded into Shah's back: a ladder. He grabbed it one-handed. Kotian's hands squeezed tighter, but couldn't get a purchase through Shah's coat-collar. Shah swung righthanded, his fist thudding into Kotian's temple.

  Kotian released his grip on Shah's throat, but before Shah could react, Kotian's hands formed a lattice of fingers and thumbs pressing down on the top of Shah's head, his head butting the hand with which Shah held onto the ladder.

  Shah was already soaked, frozen and exhausted before they'd fallen into the water and the sucking wash was draining his last reserves faster than a vampire. His fingers slipped from the ladder.

  Kotian got on top, pushing down while Shah's own boots pulled him down.

  The pressure eased, just for a second and with his last strength, Shah shrugged off Kotian and gasping, sucking the air into his lungs, grabbed for the ladder.

  He felt a hand.

  "Come on!" Aurora screamed into the wind.

  Shah took it, and with free hand grabbed for Kotian's collar where he lay limp in the water. He looked up, at Aurora holding onto the ladder one-handed (is that Kotian's gun in her hand against the ladder?) while frantically scrabbling for greater purchase on his coat with her free hand.

  "He's only stunned!" Aurora screamed. "I hit him with his gun! Just let him go!"

  "NO!" Shah roared. "He. Is. MINE!"

  Shah felt his grip weakening, and that giant child had him by the legs and was pulling him under. It was all too much, and Shah just wanted to let go… of everything.

  He heard a chugging sound, and a bright light played along the levee wall.

  "The River Police!" Aurora screamed, but it was too late.

  Shah let go. The water closed over his head, and all the memories, of his mother, his father, meeting Leslyn, Perveza's birth, even his nights with Aurora, they all played through his mind, but it was too much effort; so much easier to look back through his life and treat it as a book that he'd finished, savoring the good passages.

  Hands grabbed him from above and below, hauled and pushed him up into the air. He thudded onto something that he dimly realized was a boat, then flopped across its deck.

  Someone rolled hi
m over on his face, and hands on his back pumped the water out of him. They turned him over; someone else grabbed his nose and blew air into his mouth.

  Eventually the indignation of the assault on his body was too much, and he writhed away. He stared into the barrel of a rifle. Beyond the gun, others were working on a body: Kotian.

  "I'm a cop," Shah tried to croak, but when he reached for his badge, his pocket was empty. It didn't matter, he decided, and started to laugh at the symbolism.

  "Relax guys," Stickel said. "He's one of ours."