by John Shirley
“Why?”
But Pearce himself had wondered if Merwiss might’ve been the one who’d tipped off Tranter and Grampus to the meeting the day they’d tried to kill him. Merwiss theoretically hadn’t known about the meeting. Even Pussler hadn’t known till minutes before attack. But Merwiss had helped set up the cryptography that Pearce had used that day to talk to Pussler. He could have monitored the call and decrypted it, if he was fishing for inside information.
And there was another reason to suspect Merwiss. That gambling addiction. That made him vulnerable to being bought off. Pearce had recently discovered that Merwiss was in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He hadn’t been in debt when Pearce had hired him. Apparently he’d been “clean” from gambling for years. But he’d had a relapse into throwing away his money in the casinos soon after starting work for Pearce. He claimed to be in therapy for it now. But maybe he’d sold Pearce out to pay off that debt...
“Why do you think someone’s onto you there, Pussler?” Pearce asked.
“I heard a weird noise in the hall outside the door. I looked through the peephole and there was some guy hustlin’ away. It was a fat guy so I thought it might’ve been Merwiss but I wasn’t sure.”
Could Merwiss be monitoring this line? Pearce wondered.
“Pussler,” Pearce said. “The mask is going up, right here and right there.”
“Uh—okay,” Pussler said. He cut the line and his face vanished from the screen.
The mask is going up was code for, “I’m going to deal with this myself”. Meaning that Pearce was coming over there in person.
Pearce wasn’t fully recovered from his concussion, but there was no one else he trusted besides Blank and Wolfe. Blank never got involved in anything violent. He was only a go-between. He couldn’t handle this. And Wolfe was on an assignment, up to his neck in it at that old lodge auditorium.
Pearce had to handle this himself. It might be that Pussler was just being paranoid...
Still, Pearce had to know for certain.
He strapped on his favorite pistol, put on his leather overcoat and his cap, and hurried out the door.
#
Wolfe decided to take his chances in the crowd.
Probably none of these people knew him. Lots of them were casually dressed; and lots of them were openly armed. Being militia types, some of them wore Army coats from Military Surplus. His own stripped-down Army coat would fit right in.
He’d found a crawl space that took him over the audience, and then over the balcony. From there he climbed down a maintenance ladder into another storeroom and, casually as he could, sauntered out to the balcony. The place was jam-packed, mostly with men, everyone staring raptly at the stage. Nearly every seat was taken. From the look of these chuckleheads, there must be some major militia types in here, including some the feds would like to know about. And who was that? It was the Dousch Brothers, sitting together like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, surrounded by obvious bodyguards. The fat, lumpy-faced brothers were oil industry tycoons notorious for their “astroturfing” anti-environmentalism and anti-liberalism. Rumor had them connected to neo fascist groups based in Switzerland.
There were two more Graywater mercs up in the balcony, weapons on straps over their shoulders. One had an Uzi, the other had a Mack 10. Both sentries were listening to Van Ness speak from the stage.
Van Ness. Wolfe struggled with an urge to take a shot at Van Ness from the shadows of the theater, just blow him away right here and now. The son of a bitch had ruined Mick Wolfe’s life. Van Ness had trashed his reputation and got him tossed in the brig for a year. And what a miserable year it had been. Only the exercise room, a couple of friends to play chess with, and the prison library had made the Army’s disciplinary barracks bearable.
Maybe just one squeezed-off burst at Van Ness with the suppressed Mack 10. He could go back up to that attic and shoot him from above, and then...
Wait, was that Stan Grampus over there, sitting toward the top of the balcony? The guy who’d tried to kill Pearce?
It was. His face was sharply recognizable to Wolfe after all that image enhancement.
Grampus was sitting in the back row of the balcony, right next to Winters. The hitman was frowning with concentration, trying to make out what Van Ness was saying, despite the mic feedback and echoes, and Winters, a white-haired man with a broad red face, was smiling with satisfaction at the gathering—like the cat that slowly tortured, eviscerated, and finally ate the canary.
Grampus was twitching in his chair, squirming about as he tried to pay attention to the speaker. Wolfe remembered that the police file said Grampus had an amphetamine habit. Looked like he’d popped some pills not long before the show.
Stan Grampus had swept-back black hair, his gaunt face decorated with a goatee. On the side of his neck was a clumsy blue tattoo of an iron cross. He was a small, wiry looking man wearing a brown leather jacket, a black shirt with a turquoise bolo tie. Somewhere under that coat he was sure to be armed, probably with a nine millimeter pistol.
Wolfe walked up the carpeted stairs along the aisle, trying to get above Grampus, to keep him in view.
The general plan, now that he had a sense of what this joyful little convocation of lunatics was about, was to follow Grampus and hopefully find out who he worked for. But maybe Grampus’s real boss was already apparent—sitting right next to him. Maybe it was Marlon Winters, and by extension, Verrick, since they were both on the board of directors of the mysterious Iceberg Investments.
Wolfe reached the top of the stairs where a carpeted walkway stretched horizontally behind the highest row of seats. Grampus and Winters were on the farther side, a few rows down...
But coming up the stairs near them was a Graywater sentry, looking narrowly at Wolfe.
Wolfe turned the other way, as if searching for a place to sit. He still had the Mack 10 on his shoulder. But there were a lot of guys sitting in the audience proudly displaying their firearms...
Might’ve got myself in a crazy tight place here, Wolfe thought sourly. If this armed audience gets the word and turns against me....
He’d once asked a medic how many times a man could get shot and live. The medic had said, “Depends where they shoot you, dummy. What else? Once in the head will kill you if they get you right between the eyes. But people’ve been shot three times in the head and lived because the bullets didn’t go into the most vital parts of the brain. I’d guess four times would be the max, though, for the skull. But maybe you could take fifty times in the legs and live—if, you know, you don’t bleed to death...”
Wolfe wasn’t anxious to test out these theories today.
He took the PearcePhone out, adjusted the device so it transmitted to the Bluetooth device he had hidden within his ear. He heard himself being discussed:
“Yeah, Four’s down here with blood all over his head. Somebody sneaked up on him and cracked him a good one. He swears he never gave that response on the phone, One. So that means the bastard is infiltrating, he’s probably right here in the building...”
Uh-oh. The sentry on the roof had woken up.
Wolfe flicked the phone onto, “Blot out all local phones except this one.”
That should keep them from communicating. But it was probably too late...
“You!” barked a Graywater merc coming toward him. “What you doing with that Mack 10! We don’t allow any automatic weapons in here! Drop it—now!”
This wasn’t good.
Wolfe waved at him and said, “I’ll take it out to my car!” he spun on his heel and saw that the other Graywater guard, alerted by the report from Four, was raising an AK47, not bothering to yell a warning. The AK sputtered and bullets zipped close to Wolfe’s right side. Some of the audience members yelled in alarm; a lot of them ducked down. But it wouldn’t be long before some of the militia audience would be up hunting for a target with their side arms, eager to prove themselves.
Wolfe snapped the Mack
10 up and fired it, all in a split second—and he was a better shot than the guard. The merc caught the auto pistol rounds in the teeth, and got them blown out the back of his head. He staggered back and fell, and Wolfe ran down toward the dying guard, knowing the one who’d shouted at him to drop his weapon was not far behind.
“Get down!” Wolfe shouted, as the now-alarmed crowd milled and buzzed. “There’s some lunatic with a gun who’s gotten in here!” He was taking the steps downward three and four at a time, hoping the audience would mistake him for one of the guards. “Get down, folks! We got your backs here! Hold your fire!”
“Stop him!” said the guard behind Wolfe. But Wolfe noticed the merc hadn’t opened fire—too much risk of hitting the audience, the people he’d been hired to protect.
Wolfe had reached the bottom row, where most of the audience members were heading for the exits. Others were waving guns around, shouting incoherently, looking for a target. Wolfe pointed at the sentry up on the stairway, the merc pounding down after him.
“There he is!” Wolfe shouted. “He’s infiltrated the place!”
That wasn’t going to work long—but it kept the crowd confused and occupied long enough that Wolfe could slip past those remaining in the front row of the balcony. A bullet from somewhere on the stage below cracked by close overhead. Then Wolfe ran to the storage room door, yanked it open, slipped inside, and slammed it shut behind him. The metal door immediately dented inwardly, in two places where bullets struck it. Wolfe found a pile of chairs to one side and tipped them over in front of the door to block it. Then he climbed the ladder to the crawl space.
He scrambled along the crawl space, going toward the street, away from the stage this time. A tense three minutes, trying not to cough in all the dust, and then he had gotten to the back wall over the corridor he’d first come to.
Wolfe looked around, found no egress except a dust-caked metal vent that gave onto the outside wall. Wolfe sat, leaned back, and kicked out the vent. It pivoted out to the right and hung from a rusty hinge. He looked through the opening, found he was at the front of the building over a small marquee. It was not a short drop but doable.
There was just room to squeeze through—he hoped. Be embarrassing to die stuck in this vent hole. He decided he had to abandon the Mack. It would get in the way climbing through and it might go off if he dropped it—which could alert the guards to his position.
He tossed the auto pistol aside in the crawl space, then squirmed through the vent, feet first and face down. He could hear the crowd rushing out the front doors, some of them in a panic, some shouting at the others not to rush, not to go nuts with their weapons. Hold your fire, damn you!
Fitting through the vent gap at the shoulders was painful—Wolfe almost put a shoulder out of joint. But then he was through, hanging from his hands in the cold night air. He let go and dropped—almost thirty feet down. The noise from the crowd hid the sound of his drop onto the lower roof. It stung, and his shoulders hurt, but he was intact.
Wolfe drew his .45, crossed the tarpaper base of the marquee support, to the right side.
There—the limo. It was Winters, getting in...and a Crown Victoria was pulling up behind it. Wasn’t that the car Tranter had driven that day?
And Grampus was getting into it...
Wolfe couldn’t follow both men. He’d have to tail the car transporting Grampus. If he could get down there...but just below him was one of the Graywaters, hurrying past, gun in his hand, looking for Mick Wolfe.
Wolfe pulled out the PearcePhone, tapped for one of its specialized apps, and just as the limo and the unmarked car were pulling away from the curb into the one way street, he used the ctOS hack to turn the traffic lights at the corner, suddenly turning them from green to red, no yellow in between. The cars just getting to the corner screeched to a halt. A minivan was rear-ended—just a fender-bender. The Crown Victoria and the limo were stuck in honking traffic, for the moment.
But those Graywater thugs were still down there, looking for Wolfe. He could kill them—or plunge them into a different kind of darkness.
Wolfe hacked into the ctOS power grid controls, then hit Blackout, four block radius.
A second passed. Two, three, four. Maybe it wasn’t going to work. And he heard someone shouting from the roof. Had they spotted him from up there?
Then the darkness fell over the street in a series of expanding blackouts zones, light after light going out. In seconds it was pitch dark outside, except for the swiveling headlights of the cars.
The blackout increased the panic on the street. The crowd still streaming from the building milled and shifted, people running chaotically by.
Wolfe put the phone and his gun away, climbed over the edge of the lodge sign, and dropped down into the darkness, narrowly missing a huffing man hurrying past. Wolfe flattened against the building, watching for the Graywater thugs. They were as hard to see out on this dark street as he was.
Wolfe decided he was pretty well hidden, and pushed his way through the crowd, almost getting knocked over in the darkness, to a car illegally parked on the sidewalk, maybe belonging to Graywater. It was a late model SUV. He pulled out his phone, found the app, and used it to trigger the car’s electronic locks. The SUV unlocked and the engine started for him before he’d even gotten in. He got behind the wheel, keeping his head down as much as he could. Up ahead he could see the Crown Victoria carrying Grampus had wormed its way through the traffic to the corner, and was just turning right.
Wolfe hacked into ctOS again, switched on the neighborhood power, turned the traffic lights on, and then drove to the corner—and turned right. The Crown Victoria was just a half a block up ahead...
CHAPTER NINE
Aiden Pearce had borrowed a pretty nice looking Porsche off the street to take him to the building where he’d put Pussler in storage.
It was late, and Pearce was wondering what was up with Wolfe. There’d been no report from him yet. But he wasn’t going to interrupt Wolfe with texts or phone calls. Probably be too dangerous to distract him right now.
There was the building—an old tenement Pearce had bought for a song, using money swiped from gangsters, on the Southside near the waterfront. He was renting most of the rooms out for about one tenth of the market value, chiefly to elderly people on a fixed income. He kept that upstairs corner room for his own safehouse. Maybe it wasn’t so safe now, if Pussler was to be believed.
Pearce parked around the corner, got out into a cold wind, and walked upstream through it to the old brick tenement standing alone on the corner. The buildings on either side of it had been demolished. The bricks of the tenement had gone black with pollution, but he’d had all the windows replaced, the plumbing fixed, and there were new lights around the building.
His head swam as he walked up toward the back door, and his stomach churned with nausea—it was the concussion. He was pushing it. Still needed some recovery time.
He circled the building, putting up his mask, one hand expertly activating the app on his ctOS control phone, blotting out the security cameras before he got into their range.
Pearce picked his way through the rubble left over from the demolition, keeping close to his own building. He hurried to the back door, and tapped the unlock combination on his phone that opened it electronically. The door popped open for him.
He drew his gun and looked around inside. He didn’t see anyone, but he could smell detergent from the laundry room, could hear a dryer humming in there. He hurried to the back stairs and started up them—then had to stop at the third landing to keep from throwing up. He waited till the nausea passed, then continued, more slowly this time, till he got to the top floor. He pushed through the door—and down the hall. No one there.
The only sign of life was someone’s television yammering behind an apartment door. Canned laughter. Theme music.
He moved on till he came to the corner apartment door. It opened with a conventional lock and key—unless you knew that t
here was an electronic control over that same lock, and you just happened to have Aiden Pearce’s smartphone. In which case you didn’t need the physical key.
His fingers found the black market app, and the door clicked.
Pearce flicked his gun’s safety off, then put his left hand on the knob, turned and pulled it open.
Immediately he saw Pussler, slumped on the floor, leaning crookedly against the wall of the small living room. Pussler lay in a spreading pool of blood. A large hunting knife was sticking out from under his ribs. But his mouth was moving, his eyes opening.
He was alive. Barely. And probably not for long.
“Jesus, Pussler,” Pearce muttered.
He stepped over to Pussler, went down on one knee by him—and Pussler whispered. “He’s hidin’ in the bathroom, bro. You were...my friend...he’s...”
Pearce straightened, spun, pointing the gun at the bathroom door, just as it opened. There stood Clyde Merwiss: a rotund, slack-mouthed man in a stained t-shirt, pointing a pistol at Pearce.
Pearce recognized the gun as the one he’d given to Pussler. Merwiss had somehow decoded the door, gotten in, stabbed Pussler, taken the gun...
But Pearce let Merwiss squeeze the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Pearce had seen that Merwiss had left the safety on.
Merwiss stared down at the gun.
“You left the safety on the gun, Merwiss,” Pearce said.
Merwiss fumbled at the gun, Pearce stepped in and tore it from the programmer’’s grasp.
Merwiss gasped, and took a step back. “Look...”
Pearce kept his pistol on Merwiss and glanced around. “This is the place I was in when I made the appointment with Wolfe. I sent the message to Blank, from the PC in the bedroom. And Blank decoded it from the electronic billboard, and he told Wolfe. And you must’ve had some transmission bug in that PC. I shouldn’t have trusted anyone to set it up for me. You just seemed...” Pearce shook his head sadly. “I have a tendency to try and help out losers.”
“I...wasn’t going to hurt you, Pearce. I just...”