"Oh, Veil." Reyna sighed.
"Oh, but there's more. As always, Archangel's controller has his own angle. Archangel has just about ruined this man's career, as well as put him in the hospital. The controller wants revenge, and—with the Pentagon's acceptance of his plan to set Archangel free—he thinks he has it. He knows just how crazy and violent Archangel is, and he thinks that the worst punishment that can be inflicted on Archangel is to set him free, to cut him loose from the armed forces. As a civilian, Archangel will have no franchise to wreak destruction. With no way to calm his demons, Archangel will self-destruct, end up killing himself with booze and drugs, or simply die in some alley. And to make certain that Archangel understands the name of the game, the controller imposes his own private penalty: Archangel is given an indeterminate sentence of death. He will be placed under constant surveillance by the controller's men, and he's informed that if the day ever comes when he finds peace of mind or true happiness, that will be the day he takes a bullet through the brain."
"Veil," Reyna whispered as she took a tentative step forward, "that's a terrible story."
Veil held up his hand, stopping her. "It's a story that can't be told, Reyna. After all that's come out since the end of the war, the story of Archangel wouldn't seem like such a big deal. But it's still a very big deal to the controller, who survived the damage to his career and now occupies a very high, and very sensitive, post in the CIA's Operations Division. He can't afford even to be identified, much less embarrassed. All the old rules, including Archangel's death sentence, still hold, even after all these years. Without realizing it, your friend has been busily tripping any number of invisible alarm signals. Believe me, the controller knows exactly what your friend is up to, and your friend is damn lucky he isn't dead already. In any case, he soon will be if he doesn't drop the project—and that includes burning his manuscript and any research records he's kept. The manuscript and records will be destroyed in the end, anyway; it's a question of whether he does it himself or lets his assassins do it for him."
Reyna drew in a deep breath, then threw her head back and defiantly brushed a strand of hair away from her face.
Then she pushed Veil's hand aside, stepped forward, and wrapped her arms tightly around his waist. "You are Archangel, aren't you?"
"If I were," Veil said quietly as he stroked the woman's raven-black hair, "it means that your friend can get me killed too. And you, since he's got such a big mouth—and these people hear everything. Do you understand?" He waited until he felt Reyna's head nod. "Good. We're going to have to find a way of convincing your friend to stop writing about Archangel if he wants to save his ass. And my name can't even be breathed."
"Yes, Veil. I do understand."
"Let me think about the problem. You'll do the groundwork, and I may follow up by scaring the shit out of him— without hurting him or letting him know who I am."
Reyna lifted her head and parted her lips slightly. Veil was about to lean over and kiss her when the shots rang out.
Veil immediately leapt to the ground and listened. There were more shots—rifle fire and what could have been the cough of a shotgun. The sounds were carrying on the night air from somewhere across the expressway, to the southeast.
"It's Toby!" Reyna screamed.
"Take it easy," Veil said, holding her tightly. "It may not be. The police wouldn't just start shooting like that unless they were returning fire, and Toby wouldn't know what to do with a gun if he had one."
"They're vigilantes, Veil! I know they've got Toby down there! They're killing him!"
"Not yet, they haven't," Veil said flatly as he started to lead Reyna out of the cemetery and toward the car. "If they'd killed him, they wouldn't still be shooting. Don't panic. If he's dead, there's nothing we can do about it. If he's alive but in trouble, it won't help him if we panic. We'll get in the car and head over there. Turn up that radio."
Veil quickly led Reyna the half block to where the car was parked. He eased Reyna into the passenger's seat, then slid in behind the wheel and started the engine. The firing had stopped abruptly—something Veil regretted, for he now had nothing to guide him to the site. He pulled out onto Fifty-third Street and turned right, heading for the overpass that would take him to the other side of the expressway. As he approached the intersection, an unmarked police car with a portable flasher on its roof sped through the intersection from Veil's left, barely missing the front of his car.
With his right hand Veil reached across the seat and braced Reyna as he floored the accelerator and twisted the wheel to the right. The well-tuned car responded instantly, screaming around the corner on two wheels. The car bounced down, fishtailed, then straightened out as Veil sped down the street after the police car.
"Good grief," Reyna murmured through clenched teeth.
Veil glanced at the speedometer; they were going sixty miles an hour and still gaining speed. "Brace your hands against the dashboard," he said evenly.
Reyna's face was bloodless, but her mouth was set in a determined line. "What will he do if he sees you chasing him?"
"Nothing, I hope. He'll probably assume I'm another cop. In any case, he's not going to stop for us."
The deadly popping of gunfire had resumed; it was closer now, somewhere in the streets off to their right. Veil kept the accelerator to the floor as he sped across a bridge. The car hit the peak of a shallow crown, soared through the air, then slammed back to the ground. The gap separating him from the police car had narrowed to a few yards, and the back of the driver's head was now clearly visible.
Suddenly Reyna clutched at Veil's arm with both hands, almost causing him to lose control of the car. "Oh, my God," she said with a gasp. "That's Carl Nagle!"
Veil, who had been focusing on the car's trunk, now shifted his gaze to the driver's head—and saw that Reyna was right. Questions flashed through his mind and were instantly dismissed. It seemed doubtful that Nagle would be riding around in a stolen police car, yet the flasher— and the police radio he undoubtedly had inside the car— could have been stolen, or purchased, some time before he'd fallen out of favor with all the various powers that had ruled his existence. For the first time Veil saw beneath the thuggish exterior of the man to what had to be a keen, if hopelessly twisted, mind; an outlaw, hunted by both the police and the Mafia, Carl Nagle had managed to wire himself into everything the police did. Veil debated whether or not to tell Reyna that Nagle was on his own, running from everyone, then decided that it would serve no purpose other than to frighten her even more than she already was. Gabriel Vahanian was dead, he thought, and now he was the one looking up the ass of the tiger.
"Lie down on the seat," Veil said calmly, gently squeezing Reyna's knee. "I won't let him hurt you. I promise."
Reyna did as she was told, ducking down and curling into a ball on the seat, but both hands continued to grip Veil's leg.
Nagle suddenly turned hard to the left. Veil stayed with him, narrowly missing a parked car. At the next block Nagle turned right; Veil followed, expertly keeping the car under control as the rear end fishtailed. In the block ahead he could see a milling knot of people and the flashing lights of police cars.
The brake lights on Nagle's car came on as he abruptly pulled over to the curb. Veil reacted instantly, again planting his hand on Reyna's chest and bracing her as he slammed on the brakes. He eased up to prevent the brakes from locking, slammed them on again, and brought the car under control, stopping it at the curb across the street from, and slightly behind, Nagle's car.
Veil immediately ducked down and peered over the dashboard at Nagle; the man was sitting rigidly in his car, radio microphone in his hand, staring down the street. Imprisoned in his own world of desperation and madness, apparently he had never even noticed the car pursuing him.
"Veil . . . ?" "It's all right. Nagle doesn't know we're here. You stay right where you are."
Reyna's voice was a croaking whisper. "Toby?"
"No sign of him, but a
lot of men are pointing toward a building under construction. He must be in there someplace."
"Thank God he's still alive," Reyna said in a small voice. "Are there police?"
"Yes."
"Veil, maybe we should talk to them now. This is getting pretty hairy."
"Hang in there, sweetheart. Remember, if Toby is taken into custody, the odds are overwhelming that he'll die— and his tribe along with him."
"I just don't want him to die now."
"There's still time. Nobody's gone into the building yet, and Nagle's still in his car. I want to see what he's up to."
Veil waited, and after another minute Nagle began speaking into his microphone. Down the street, a uniformed officer leaned into his car, obviously listening to his radio. Nagle released the transmit button on his microphone, waited a few seconds, then pressed it and spoke again. The patrolman suddenly began shouting orders to the other police on the scene as he pointed to his left.
"Veil . . . ?"
"Nagle's working on his own, Reyna. He's feeding phony information to the police down the street now."
Even as Veil spoke, there was a flurry of activity among the group of policemen by the building; they ran to their cars, got in, and drove off. The crowd that had been milling in the street and on the sidewalk gradually began to disperse. One man reached down into a garbage bin and retrieved a shotgun from where he had hurriedly thrown it at the approach of the police. He and six other men walked halfway up the block, then disappeared into a bar.
"Veil . . . ?"
"Shhh. Just stay there."
Almost ten minutes passed. Then the door of the car across the street opened. Nagle stepped out and began walking casually down the middle of the street, toward the building skeleton. In one hand he carried a powerful flashlight, and in the other what appeared to be an Uzi submachine gun equipped with a custom-made silencer. He stepped up on the sidewalk and vanished through an opening in the fence surrounding the construction site.
"Nagle's gone into the building," Veil continued as he opened the door and got out. "You stay put. Lock the doors."
"Veil?" Reyna cried out as she sat up and reached for him. "What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to kill the son of a bitch," he replied evenly as he blew Reyna a kiss, then closed the door.
Veil, moving as silently as death, ran down the street and across the intersection to the construction site. He waited, pressed back against the fence next to the opening, listening. When he heard nothing, he darted through the opening, angling across to the opposite side. There he crouched low in the darkness, listening again. This time he heard the faint, shuffling sound of footsteps on wood scaffolding.
Suddenly a bright cone of light from Nagle's flashlight pierced the darkness on the second floor of the steel skeleton. There were more shuffling footsteps, then the clatter of loose boards. Veil thought he heard a faint, low rumble, as if Nagle were talking to himself.
Veil straightened up and moved off to his right. At the corner of the building he reached up and gripped a steel girder, then began to climb up the grid work. Suddenly he heard a can clatter, back near the entrance. He turned his head in time to see the unmistakable figure of Reyna—a master tracker undone and made careless by her terror of the monster that was Carl Nagle—trip and fall through the opening in the fence. A moment later she cried out in pain.
Veil immediately released his grip on the steel and dropped back to the ground. He landed, then sprinted through the rubble-strewn darkness toward where Reyna lay at the bottom of a wedge of dim light cast by street lamps. Without slowing his pace he ran through the light, reaching down as he did so and grabbing a handful of Reyna's jacket, jerking her off the ground and carrying her to the other side of the opening just as a burst of fire, sounding like nothing so much as a person spitting watermelon seeds at an impossibly fast clip, raked across the fence just above Veil's head. He fell on top of Reyna to shield her with his body, holding her head down with his hand, burying his own head in her thick hair and waiting as the pfft-pfft sound of bullets striking wood slowed in tempo—then stopped.
Veil got up on his hands and knees and, pulling Reyna along with him by her belt, scurried forward to the shelter of a wide support girder.
"Shh, shh," Veil intoned to the whimpering Reyna as he held her tight. Her eyes were wide with horror, and her breath came in short, panting gasps. "You have to control it, Reyna. Shh."
Finally Reyna was able to control her sobbing, although she continued to breathe in gasps. "Wh-what in—God's name?"
"It's called a submachine gun, sweetheart," Veil said, peering around the girder and looking up. Nagle's light was out. "Unfortunately, that particular model fires up to three hundred rounds a minute."
"He plans to use that on Toby?"
"Obviously, he'll use it on anyone who gets in his way— he'd use a cannon if he had one. There's no time now for details, but Nagle's on the outs with both the cops and the crooks. He's out of his head but not so crazy that he isn't thinking. He needs the heroin in the Nal-toon to finance an escape out of the country. I didn't tell you before because I didn't want you more frightened than you already were. Now—what the hell are you doing here?"
Reyna clung to Veil as she shook her head in fear and frustration. "I got to thinking that Nagle had a gun and you didn't."
"I don't need a gun to kill Nagle, Reyna."
"But there's also Toby to consider. I'm not sure you fully appreciate how dangerous he is. The man can almost literally see in the dark; to him you're probably just another enemy. If you passed him in the dark, he might kill you. It was just you against both of them."
"Didn't it occur to you that I'd considered that?" Veil whispered angrily. He swallowed his irritation, took a deep breath. "Thank you, Reyna. I know how you feel about Nagle. Coming in here took a lot of guts."
"I wanted to call out to Toby, explain to him what was happening."
"Who's there?" Nagle's voice was right above them.
Veil signaled with his hand for Reyna to crawl along the foundation to the next girder. "Somebody who's going to take that toy away from you, Nagle, and shove it up your ass. Just be patient. I'll be up there in a few minutes."
"Kendry?! Is that you, you fucker?"
"Get out of here, Nagle," Veil said in a casual tone, his voice carrying easily in the steel-amplified darkness. "Unless all your brains have run out your ears, you have to know this play is over. Somebody's bound to hear that thing, even with a silencer, and you must have sprayed at least a hundred rounds into the street. Your ex-colleagues on the force are probably on their way back here right now. My advice is to split and try again another day."
He could almost feel Nagle straining to hear in the darkness, and Veil listened with him. There was no wail of police sirens.
Nagle's answer now came—a burst of fire. But the angle was wrong, and the bullets plowed harmlessly into the dirt a few feet from where Veil was standing. Veil moved in a crouch along the foundation to where Reyna was waiting.
"Veil," Reyna whispered urgently, "I have to talk to Toby. He has to understand what's happening."
"You're not going to talk to anyone," Veil whispered back in a firm voice. "Nagle may think it was me who stumbled in through the entrance. We're going to take our time and work our way very carefully around the building, and then you're going to scoot your cute ass right back out the way you came in."
"No," Reyna answered in a tone filled with quiet determination. "You don't know everything, Veil Kendry. Believe me, you need me to protect you from Toby. We're in this together, and I'm not leaving here without you."
"Reyna—"
Reyna suddenly released Veil, turned, cupped her hands to her mouth, and called out in the clicking language of the K'ung. Her lilting voice rose and fell, eerily beautiful as it echoed back and forth inside the steel shell.
"That you, Alexander?!" There was a burst of fire, fifteen yards wide of the mark. "Oh, kid, if you think what
I did to you before was something, wait until I get my hands on you this time!"
"What did you say to Toby?" Veil whispered.
"I kind of introduced you, said that you were with me and trying to help him too. I asked him not to harm you and told him that the other man was his enemy and wanted to kill all of us. I asked him to trust us and to try to escape when he had the chance. I told him where we'd parked the car, then asked him to go there and wait for us."
"Do you think he'll do it?"
"No," Reyna answered after a pause. "But I didn't think it would hurt to try."
Suddenly a powerful beam of light cut through the darkness and swept across the fence in front of them. There was a clatter of loose scaffolding, and Veil peered around the edge of the girder to see the light descending a ramp.
Nagle's rumbling voice was stretched taut with madness. "You ain't carrying, Kendry. If you were, you'd have used your piece by now. I'm going to shoot you in half, you fucker, and then I'm going to fuck that girl's brains out— literally. I'm going to kill her with my cock."
Veil put his fingers to his lips to warn Reyna into silence. He motioned for her to lie flat on the ground, then reached down to his boot for his knife. Back against the steel, Veil again peered around the edge of the girder. Nagle was three quarters of the way down the ramp, flashing his light around the ground floor.
Suddenly there was a thud, then a clatter that sounded like wood against steel.
"What the fuck?!"
Veil watched as Nagle rubbed his forehead, then put his hand into the light. There was blood. He cursed again, then shined the light into the darkness above him. Something that looked like a line of night flashed down through the light, and Nagle cried out in pain as he shined the light on the inside of his right bicep, where a featherless arrow hung loosely from the flesh. He pulled out the arrow and flung it away, then fired a burst of gunfire up into the darkness.
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