by Dan Simmons
"No civilians in there. If it moves, shoot it," said Hansen. If this Mickey Kee gets in the way, too bad.
"No tactical radios?" said Brubaker.
"We won't need them," said Hansen. He pulled a pair of long-handled wire cutters from his bag. "We're going to stay together. Brubaker, when we're inside, you and I will be at SWAT-ready, covering forward fields of fire, you on the left, me on the right. Myers, when we're moving together inside, you face rear, keeping your back against Brubaker's back. Questions?"
There weren't any.
Hansen used his key remote to lock the Cadillac, and the three men crossed the parking lot toward the looming station. The blowing snow covered their tracks in minutes.
Kurtz had arrived only half an hour earlier.
He'd planned to get to the station by seven, but the blizzard slowed them down. The drive that normally would have taken ten minutes, even in traffic, took almost an hour; they almost got stuck once and Marco had to get out and push to get them moving again. It was seven-thirty before the Lincoln came to a stop at the base of the drive leading up to the station. Kurtz and Marco got out. Kurtz leaned into the open passenger door.
"You know where to park this down the side street so you can see this whole driveway area?"
John Wellington Frears nodded from his place behind the wheel.
"I know it's cold, but don't leave the engine on. Someone could see the exhaust from the street here. Just hunker down and wait."
Frears nodded again and touched a button to pop the trunk.
Kurtz went around back, tossed a heavy black bag to Marco, who set it on the passenger seat and closed the door. Kurtz lifted the other bundle from the trunk. It was wiggling slightly, but the duct tape held.
"I thought you wanted me to do the heavy lifting," said Marco.
"It's a hundred yards to the train station," said Kurtz. "By the time we get there, you can have it."
They walked up the hill and kept near the high cement railing as they approached the tower. Kurtz heard the Lincoln shoosh away but he did not look back. Marco used the wire cutters on the fence and they slipped through, keeping close to the station as they went around to the north side, where Kurtz knew how to get in through a boarded-up window. It was dark up here near the hilltop complex of the abandoned station, and the tower loomed over them like a skyscraper from hell, but the light from the sodium-vapor streetlights in the ghetto nearby reflected off the low clouds and lit everything in a sick, yellow glow.
The blowing snow stung Kurtz eyes and soaked his hair. Before going through the window, he shifted the taped and gagged man from his shoulder to Marco's and took a flashlight out of his peacoat pocket.
Holding the flashlight in his left hand and the S&W semiautomatic in his right, Kurtz led the way into the echoing space.
It was too cold for pigeons to be stirring. Marco came in, and their two flashlight beams stabbed back and forth across the huge waiting room.
If Hansen got here first, we're dead, thought Kurtz. We're perfect targets.
Their shoes crunched on the cold stone floor. Wind howled beyond the tall, boarded-up windows. At the far end of the waiting room, Kurtz pocketed his pistol and pointed upward with the flashlight.
"That balcony should be a good vantage point for you," whispered Kurtz. "The stairway's mostly closed off and you could hear anyone climbing up it toward you. There's no reason for them to go up there—it's a dead end. If they come in the tower way, I'll see them. If they come in the way we did, they'll have to pass you here."
Kurtz fumbled in his left coat pocket, felt the Compact Witness.45 that Angelina had insisted he take—"It's served me well," she'd said as they stood in the penthouse foyer—and then found the extra two-way radio. They'd tested it in the penthouse but he wanted to make sure it worked here.
Marco dumped the groaning man and set his own earphones and radio in place.
"You don't have to actually speak into it," whispered Kurtz. "Just leave it on and thumb the transmit button if anyone passes you here. I'll hear it when you break squelch. Once if he's alone, twice if there are two guys, and so on. Give it a try."
Marco thumbed the button twice. Kurtz clearly heard the two interruptions of static. "Good."
"What if nobody shows?" whispered Marco. They'd shut off the flashlights while they huddled under the balcony, and Kurtz could barely see the big man three feet away.
"We wait until one and go home," whispered Kurtz. The cold in the waiting room was worse than outside. It made Kurtz's forehead ache.
"If I see anybody, I'm going to beep you and that's it. Soon as they're past me, I'm out of here. No one's paying me enough for this shit."
Kurtz nodded. Switching on his flashlight, he bent down, inspected the duct tape and cords, and lifted the heavy bundle. Marco climbed the littered and barricaded staircase carefully, but still made noise. Kurtz waited until the bodyguard was in place, out of sight but able to peer through the railings, and then he continued the next hundred feet or so up the main walkway into the tower rotunda.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
"Jesus God, it's cold," whispered Myers.
"Shut up," hissed Brubaker.
James B. Hansen said nothing, but he made a fist and pounded both men on the chest plates of their flak vests, demanding silence.
They'd come in from the south side, through the acres of empty service buildings, across the rusted and snow-buried tracks, across the windswept boarding platforms, through the fenced-over south portal, up the boarding ramps, and now were crossing the vast main waiting room. The view was uncanny through the night-vision goggles: brilliant, glowing green-white outside, a dimmer, static-speckled greenish gloom here in the deeper darkness. But enough reflected light filtered through the boarded-up skylights and windows to allow them to see a hundred feet across the waiting room. Abandoned benches glowed like tombstones; smashed kiosks were a tumble of shadows; stopped clocks looked like skulls on the wall.
Hansen felt a strange exhilaration. Whatever happened, he knew there would have to be a sea change in his behavior. The shifting personae and the self-indulgent Special Visits would have to stop—at least for a few years. If a dullard like this ex-con Kurtz could find the pattern there, then it was no longer safe. Hansen would have to settle into the deep-cover identity he'd prepared in Vancouver and practice self-restraint for years as far as the teenage girls were concerned. In the meantime, this unaccustomed public action was exciting.
The three detectives crossed the wide space in respectable SWAT search-and-clear form: Brubaker and Hansen holding their weapons cocked and ready, swinging the muzzles as they turned their heads; Tommy Myers, his shoulder touching Brubaker, walking backward with his weapon and goggles in constant motion, covering their backs.
The loading platforms had been clear. The ramps had been clear. This waiting room and the rooms on either side—clear. That left the main rotunda and the tower.
If Kurtz had not arrived four hours early—and Hansen would be amazed if the man showed that much discipline and foresight—then the plan was for the three detectives to take up a shooting position in a front room of the tower, preferably on one of the mezzanine levels surrounding the entry rotunda. If Kurtz approached across the parking lot on the north side, or from the driveway to the west, they could ambush him from the front windows. If he came in from the east or south, they would hear him approaching up the staircase now in front of them and have a free field of fire down into the rotunda.
That was the plan.
Right now, Hansen was busy using his goggles to sweep the small balcony on the south wall to the left of the main staircase. There was enough ambient light to show no one standing there, but the darkness between the rungs of the old railings was a jumble of green static. He checked the narrow staircase to the balcony—barricaded and Uttered. Still, it was probably worth clearing before going on to the rotunda, so—
"Listen!" whispered Brubaker.
A sound from the ro
tunda beyond the main staircase. A rattling. The scrape of shoes on marble or wood.
Hansen held the AR-15 steady with his left hand and used his right hand to shake the collar of each man's flak vest, enforcing silence and continued discipline. But he was thinking—Got you, Kurtz! Got you!
Marco stayed flat against the floor of the small balcony, raising his head just high enough to peer through the thick marble slats of the railing. He couldn't see who was down there—it was too fucking dark—but he could hear footsteps and once he heard urgent whispers. Whoever it was, they were moving through the blackness without flashlights. Maybe they were using those night-vision lenses or something, like the ones he'd seen in the movies.
As the soft shuffling came closer and paused ten yards below his balcony, Marco pressed his face against the floor. No use exposing himself when he couldn't see the fuckers anyway.
Marco clearly heard a man hiss "Listen!" and then the shuffling became footsteps hurrying up the main staircase toward the rotunda and tower where Kurtz had gone. Marco was alone in the huge waiting room. He took a breath and got to his feet, straining to see in the blackness. Even after twenty minutes here, his eyes had not completely adapted to such darkness.
He lifted the two-way radio, but paused before thumbing the transmit button. How many men had there been? Marco didn't know. But just beeping Kurtz twice wouldn't warn him that the opposition was moving around easily in the dark, using some high-tech shit or something. He could whisper into the radio, warn Kurtz.
Fuck him. Marco had decided that his best bet after the scary cocksucker had wasted Leo was to stick with Ms. Farino, at least until the shit quit flying, but he didn't owe anything to Kurtz. Still, if Kurtz got out of this alive, Marco didn't want him pissed at him. But that didn't warrant Marco risking even a whisper with hostiles in the building.
Marco silently thumbed the transmit button twice, heard the clicks on his earphone and then turned off the radio, pulled the earphone free, and crammed it all into his pocket. Time to get the fuck out of here.
When the long blade swept across Marco's throat from behind, slicing his jugular and windpipe and almost severing his spinal cord, he didn't even know what it was, it happened so fast and cut so deep. Then there was the sound sort of like a fountain, but Marco's brain did not associate it with the geyser of his own blood flowing out onto the cold marble floor.
Then his knees buckled and the big man fell, hitting his face on the stone railing but feeling nothing, seeing nothing. The midnight blackness of the train station filled his brain like black fog and that was that.
Mickey Kee wiped his eight-inch blade on the dead man's shirt, folded it back with his gloved hand, and glided back down the dark staircase as silently as he had ascended.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The dim green glow of the corridor above the main staircase brightened considerably as Hansen, Brubaker, and Myers stepped out under the rotunda ceiling. Ambient light from the windowed tower rooms above filled the junk-cluttered space with green-white static and ghostly, glowing shapes.
Suddenly Joe Kurtz's voice—completely identifiable as Kurtz's voice—called from across the rotunda. "Hansen. Is that you? I can't see you."
"There!" Brubaker said aloud.
Directly across the rotunda floor, perhaps sixty-five feet away, against the west wall—a human form, standing, moving behind a bench, turning as if searching out the source of the shout Hansen could see the bright glow of a titanium briefcase in the man's left hand.
"Don't fire!" Hansen called, but too late. Brubaker had opened up on full auto with his assault rifle. Myers swiveled and fired a second later.
God's will be done, thought Hansen. He thumbed the AR-15 to full auto and squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flare blinded him through the night-vision goggles. Hansen closed his eyes to shake away the retinal afterimages and listened while the rotunda echoed from the rifle blasts and the last ricochets whined away.
"We got him," yelled Brubaker. The detective ran across the open rotunda floor toward the man slumped over the bench. Myers followed.
Hansen went to one knee, waiting for the inevitable gunfire from one or more of the mezzanines above. Kurtz was too smart to be cut down like this. Wasn't he? This had to be an ambush.
No gunfire.
Hansen used his goggles to check out the darkest shadows under the mezzanine overhang as he moved carefully around the rotunda, staying back against the wall, keeping his rifle trained on any bench or tumbled kiosk that might give a man cover for an ambush.
Nothing.
"He's dead!" called Myers, the fat man's voice echoing.
"Yeah, but who the fuck is it?" said Brubaker. "I can't see his face through these fucking things."
Hansen was fifteen feet from the two detectives and the corpse when Brubaker's flashlight beam bloomed like a phosphorous bomb in his goggles.
Hansen sought cover behind a fallen bench and waited for the gunfire from above.
Nothing.
He flipped up his own goggles and looked over to where Brubaker's flashlight was swinging back and forth.
The man in the dark jacket was dead—at least three shots to the chest and one in the throat. It wasn't Kurtz. The man had been handcuffed to a wall pipe and still half hung from it, his upper torso draped across a bench. Hansen could see the face; the corpse's eyes were wide and staring in terror. Tape covered the mouth and ran all the way around the head. James B. Hansen's titanium briefcase had been taped to the man's left hand with twist after twist of the same silver duct tape.
Myers was tugging a billfold out of the corpse's pocket. Hansen ducked low, expecting an explosion.
"Donald Lee Rafferty," read Myers. "Ten-sixteen Locus Lane, Lockport. He's an organ donor."
Brubaker laughed.
"Who the fuck is Donald Lee Rafferty?" whispered Myers. The two detectives were beginning to realize how exposed they were.
Brubaker shut off the flashlight. Hansen could hear their goggles being swung down on the helmets' visor hinges.
In the green glow, Hansen duck-walked over to the trio, pulled the dead man's left hand back over the bench, and pried the taped briefcase open. It was empty.
What kind of stupid joke is this? Hansen remembered exactly who Donald Rafferty was, remembered the man's adopted daughter lying in the hospital, remembered the connection to Joe Kurtz and Kurtz's dead partner from twelve years ago. But none of this added up. If Kurtz really wanted the blackmail money, why this idiocy? If Kurtz's goal was to kill him, again why this complication? Even if Kurtz had his own night-vision goggles, there could have been no way he could distinguish one of the detectives from the other here in the rotunda. Kurtz should have fired when he had a clear field of fire.
If he was still here.
Hansen suddenly felt the deep cold of the place creep into him. It took him a few seconds to recognize the phenomenon—fear.
Fear of the inexplicable. Fear of the absolutely unreasonable action. Fear that came from not understanding what in hell your opponent was up to or what he might do next.
Quit trying to turn him into Moriarty, thought Hansen. He's just an ex-con screw-up. He probably doesn't know why he's doing what he's doing. Maybe it just amused him to have us kill Rafferty for him. He'll probably call me tomorrow with another time and place for the handover of the money and photographs.
Well, thought Hansen, fornicate that. No more games. Let Frears and Kurtz have the photographs. Let them do their worst. Time to leave. Time to leave the train station. Time to leave Buffalo. Time to leave all of this behind.
Myers and Brubaker were crouched behind the bench with him.
"Time to leave," Hansen whispered to them.
"We get to keep the money?" Myers whispered back, his breath hot and fetid on Hansen's face. "Even though it wasn't Kurtz?"
"Yes, yes," whispered Hansen. "Brubaker. Five yards to your left is the stairway to the front door. Wide stairs. Just twelve of them. The doors and windo
ws down there are boarded over. Clear the staircase while we give you cover. Kick the boards off the door or window. Shoot an opening if you have to. We're getting out of here."
Brubaker hesitated a second but then nodded and scuffed to his right and down the staircase.
Hansen and Myers stayed behind the bench, muzzles swinging to cover the mezzanine levels across the rotunda, then the opposite main-staircase doorway. Nothing moved. No shots from the front staircase. Hansen heard Brubaker kicking the hell out of the boarded door and then the shout "Clear!"
Hansen had Myers cover him while he shuffled to the staircase and then covered the fat man while he wheezed and panted past him and down the stairs.
Outside, the night-vision goggles were almost too bright. It was still snowing hard, but the drifted expanse of the parking lot glowed like a green desert in bright sunlight. The three detectives abandoned all pretext of proper SWAT procedure and just loped away from the station, running flat-out across the parking lot. Each man ran hunched, obviously half-expecting a bullet between the shoulder blades. But as they reached a hundred feet from the tower, then two hundred, then a hundred yards and better, they began to relax slightly under their heavy flak vests. It would take a master marksman with a high-velocity rifle, night-scope, and much luck to get off a good shot at this distance, in this snow.
No shot came.
Panting and wheezing loudly now, they passed the low boulders blocking access to the lot and came down the slippery driveway. The goggles gave them a view of everything for sixty yards in each direction. Nothing moved. No other cars were visible. The only tire tracks in the driveway, mostly drifted over now, were those of the Cadillac Escalade, which had accumulated two inches of new snow in the forty-five minutes or so they had been in the station.
"Wait," panted Hansen. He used the remote to beep the Cadillac unlocked and they checked the lighted interior before approaching. Empty.