by Neil Hunter
Rolf, it appeared, lived by a different set of rules.
There was no time to warn anyone to get out of the way. The action had started, and there was no way to stop it going through its deadly cycle.
Cade dropped to one knee, swinging up the .357 in a single movement, tracking in on the guy closest to him. He saw the ugly snout of a sawed-off shotgun — an ideal combat weapon in the close confines of the tunnel — and reacted instinctively. The auto pistol crackled with fire, Cade triggering fast and accurately.
His bullets ripped into his target’s chest, picking him up and driving him backward before dumping him in a bloody, squirming heap on the floor of the tunnel.
Beside him Janek had tracked in on his adversary, his weapon up and firing before the guy could clear his own scattergun from his clothing. Janek’s bullets drove deep into his torso, gouging slivers of wood from the shotgun’s stock as they peppered his body. He twisted around, screaming, blood erupting from his tattered clothing, and crashed face-first into the curving tunnel side.
In the seconds given to him by his dying accomplices, Rolf managed to pull out his own handgun. It was a large laser-sighted Beretta .44, one of the newer versions of the weapon. He turned, waving the gun as he tried to lose himself in the crowd. They scattered before him, panic lending strength to their limbs.
Rolf reached out and grabbed a teenage girl by the loose front of her tunic. He swung her around to cover his front, his arm pulled tight against the girl’s throat. The Darksider jammed the muzzle of his weapon against the side of the trembling girl’s head. Despite the glittering fear in her eyes, she managed to remain silent, offering no resistance.
‘You want this bitch dead?’ Rolf yelled. ‘Then try and stop me. I’ll kill her.’
Janek waved Cade back, moving to the side of the tunnel where he merged with the deep shadows, out of Rolf’s sight.
Cade remained where he was, the auto pistol sagging in his fist. He let Janek make the play, accepting that the cyborg’s superior skills were the only ones capable of putting an end to Rolfs dangerous game.
Rolf had cleared the fringes of the crowd and was fast vanishing in the darkness farther down the tunnel. He kept the muzzle of his pistol pressed to his hostage’s skull.
‘Nobody follows me,’ he warned. ‘First one I see move, I’ll blow her brains all over the goddamn tun -’
He never completed the word. There was a single shot, coming from the darkness off to his right. The bullet cored through his skull, burning deep into his brain before blowing his head wide open.
As Rolf arced backward, he lost his grip on the girl, who immediately dropped to her knees. The Darksider’s gun hand jerked up in the air, finger pulling back on the trigger. His bullet whacked into the tunnel roof, splintering tiles. Rolf’s body hit the floor, kicking and jerking away his final moments in silent agony.
Cade moved to stand over the Darksider. Rolf's gun lay on the ground close by the twitching fingers of his right hand.
Cade kicked the weapon clear, then crouched beside Rolf. He ignored the bloody wreckage of the man’s head as he made a thorough search of Rolf’s clothing. There was a thin wallet tucked inside the man’s wide belt. Flicking through it, Cade found more than three thousand dollars in cash and a credit chip. There were a couple of vid-phone cards. They were preprogrammed cards, with the number already coded in, so the caller didn’t need to know the number he was calling. Once in the vid-phone slot, the card fed the number sequence to the machine and placed the charge for the call to the owner of the number.
‘Run a check on these when we get back to the office,’ Cade said as Janek appeared at his side. ‘And the credit chip.’
‘What was Rolf doing with a credit chip?’ asked the young woman who had forced the game to its abrupt conclusion.
‘Darksiders don’t have credit chips. Or guns.’
‘I’d say, Lisa, that Rolf was probably working with the people who’ve been kidnapping Darksiders,’ Janek observed.
‘Bastard!’ Lisa said angrily. ‘He sold out. He gave our people to those hijackers.’
She turned to face the Darksiders who were crowding around. ‘Rolf sold us out,’ she repeated. ‘Betrayed us to for money.’
Cade stood up. ‘We’re only guessing at the moment,’ he advised her.
‘Guessing? What’s there to guess?’ a man yelled. ‘You check that credit chip. That would have been Rolf s ticket out of the tunnels. Made on our backs.’
Cade felt inclined to agree with him.
The way things were stacking up, he and Janek had stumbled on to some well-organized hijacking operation. Only this time, instead of high-tech goods or computers, the merchandise was human.
The hijackers were rounding up Darksiders.
The question was why?
What were they doing with the tunnel dwellers?
‘You mentioned the reporter who came down here,’ Cade said. ‘Kate Bannion?’
Lisa nodded. ‘I met her up top when I was buying supplies from a friendly store owner. We talked, and she told me who he was. I asked for her help. I was worried about Harry and all our Darksider friends. I didn’t know where to turn. So we arranged for her to come down here and do some investigating.’
‘And she did?’
‘Yes. I met her as we’d arranged. She spent a day with us.’
Lisa’s face clouded over, memories darkening her thoughts.
‘What happened?’ Cade asked, suspecting the worst.
‘There was another raid. The hijackers were scouring the tunnels. I tried to lead her to safety, but we got separated. By the time I came back to search for her, it was too late. She’d disappeared.’
‘Any idea what happened to her?’ Cade asked, sensing Janek listening closely.
‘I guess the hijackers took her. Finding out about Rolf makes me think he probably told the hijackers about her being with us.’
Janek watched his partner’s face as he digested the words. The cyborg didn’t need to ask Cade how he was feeling.
There was only one answer to that. It was not a reply Janek favored.
He knew his partner only too well, and he knew the way Cade would view Lisa’s revelation.
Their present assignment had already plunged them into a tangle of deceit and violence. The fact that Kate Bannion was missing, obviously involved with the hijackers, brought a new perspective to the case.
What had been a tough case now became very personal. And when Cade took things personally, it became unsafe to walk the streets.
Chapter Eight
It was like coming out of a deep, dreamless sleep. Awareness returned with hazy slowness, accompanied by a soothing warmth that seemed to beckon her back into the shroud of security and closeness. Yet into that cocoon of womb-like drowsiness intruded light and a growing sense of the tangible world. It pierced the soft darkness, letting in chinks of light, forcing her to open her eyes and accept that sleep was over.
Kate Bannion focused on the gray ceiling above her head, trying to get some kind of grip on reality. Questions began to crowd her sharpening mind, and with the passing seconds the mood of sedated softness vanished, leaving her more alert, curious and angry.
She realized that her sleeplike state had not been natural. Some substance had been administered to her, making her lose consciousness.
But for how long, and where was she now?
Kate wanted answers, a great many answers, to questions that took her all the way back to New York and the Darksiders and her message to Thomas Cade: I’ll make it up to you later. Promise.
Kate had broken the connection and replaced the handset on the vid-phone.
She leaned back in the couch, staring at the blank screen for a few seconds.
Looking beyond the vid-phone, she took in the misty view of the city through the window of her apartment. It was only eight-thirty in the morning, yet already the day had settled into its mode. Gray and overcast, with soiled clouds sliding through the
heavy sky. Rain dribbled down the glass of the large window.
Kate reached for the pot and poured herself a final cup of coffee. She relished the rich aroma and the strong taste. There was no way she would ever compromise and buy the processed stuff. It cost her extra, but she only drank the genuine article. She picked up the coffee beans from a little Cuban delicatessen near her apartment. It was owned by a shriveled old man who claimed he’d been in the second Bay of Pigs invasion force, the one that actually got ashore and retook the island from the stubborn remnants of the Communist regime. That had been more than thirty years ago, so the little Cuban looked the right age, even if his story was ragged around the edges.
She pulled her thoughts back to her it current assignment. She had a story of her own to follow. It was going to take her into the lowest levels of New York society, the place where no one from the topside ever went.
Kate was going to talk to the Darksiders.
The Darksiders were the unseen, if unacceptable face of the city. The outcasts of a society that pretended they didn’t it even exist because that was the easiest way to deal with them. No one ever paid any attention to the Darksiders as long as they stayed in their dark, endless tunnels beneath the city.
The Darksiders obliged. They were content. The city and its problems were something alien to them. All they needed and wanted was to be left to their own ways. They were almost a race apart, yet still a section of humanity.
The Darksiders’ origins went far back in the city’s history. They had always been there, it seemed. Some among them had become homeless due to a run of bad luck, and others didn’t fit in, either because of personality flaws, or because they had come to despise the normal life of the city and became subterranean dwellers. They evolved over the long years into an organized subculture, with their own strict laws and rules of conduct.
There was little unrest among the Darksiders themselves. Prompted by need, they banded together and developed a code of existence that was based on caring for one another and avoiding confrontation with the authorities.
There had been some problems with a certain wild element, yet the Darksiders took care of that themselves.
The troublemakers vanished deep in the labyrinth of passages and tunnels that went deep below the city and were never heard from again.
No one knew just how many Darksiders there were. Some said thousands.
Others put the figure into the hundreds of thousands. There was no way of coming up with an accurate count because no one ever took the time to make one.
Kate Bannion had been as guilty as anyone when it came to thinking about the Darksiders. She occasionally allowed herself to dwell on their existence when she picked up some small item about them in the news. Apart from that, they remained a shadowy subject just out of her reach.
That is, until she met one of them.
It had been in the Cuban delicatessen.
Kate had gone in to pick up some of her coffee. The store had been deserted, except for a thin, pale-faced young girl haggling with the store owner. She wanted to buy canned fruit and was doing her best to knock down the price. In order to get rid of her, the Cuban gave her the cans for a cut price. The girl handed him some crumpled bills, then turned to leave, almost bumping into Kate.
There was something in the young girl’s haunted face that touched Kate’s heart. She judged herself to be a caring person, and the moment she looked into the dark-ringed eyes set deep in the pale white face, she knew the girl had a great weight hanging over her.
Not a word passed between the two women, and moments later they separated. The girl slipped out of the store.
Kate remained where she was for a few seconds longer, then turned and followed the young girl out of the store: She caught sight of her disappearing down the alley beside the store. Kate followed.
The alley was shadowed, littered with empty packing cases and trash. There was even the burned-out hulk of an old car.
Kate walked along the alley, aware of the chilly silence that surrounded her. Stepping into the alley had removed her from the normal sights and sounds of the street and transported her into a world of half light.
For a moment Kate thought she had missed the girl. She peered into the shadows, unsure of herself.
‘Why have you followed me?’
The voice came from the darkness where the abandoned car pressed close to the alley wall.
Kate turned and spotted the young girl’s slim form. ‘You looked like someone who needed help.’
‘From a Topsider?’
Kate frowned. ‘A Topsider? I don’t understand.’
‘Our word for you. Just like you call us Darksiders.’
‘You come from the tunnels?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t realize you came out to buy your food.’
‘We don’t all steal.’
Kate smiled nervously. ‘That’s not what I meant.’
The girl edged out from the shadows.
‘One of the children needed fruit. She’s been ill.’
‘Something is troubling you, and I can tell it’s more serious than just an ill child. Are you in some kind of trouble? Maybe I can help.’
‘How can you help?’
‘I work for one of the city’s newspapers. By writing about your problem, I can call attention to it, perhaps bring about changes for the better.’
The girl laughed. The sound had a bitter edge to it.
‘Topsiders helping us?’
‘We don’t all turn our backs,’ Kate said.
The girl dropped a can of fruit. It rolled across the alley, and Kate bent to pick it up. She held it out, noticing that the hand reaching for it was very white, the flesh almost translucent in its paleness. When the girl’s fingers brushed her own, Kate felt foolish the second she acknowledged the girl’s flesh was warm. She wondered just what she’d been expecting.
‘Could you help?’ the girl asked suddenly. Her voice echoed the desperation in her eyes.
‘I can try. Tell me what’s troubling you.’
‘They’re taking Darksiders. They come at night with their lights and their guns and they take our friends away. If anyone interferes, they are beaten. Sometimes killed .’
‘Who’s doing this?’ Kate asked. ‘And why?’
‘No one knows. If you really want to help, come and talk with us .’
‘I will. Tell me where and when.’
‘Do you know the old Link Tunnel? The one they closed in ‘47? You can reach it from the Battery Interchange. There’s a service tunnel at the end of Platform-1. Walk along it for a quarter mile and you reach the Link. I can meet you there.’
‘When?’ Kate asked.
‘I need time to talk with friends. Convince them you’re genuine.’ She stared at Kate. ‘Are you?’
‘Yes. By the way, I’m Kate. Kate Bannion.’
She held out her hand. The girl studied it for long seconds before she took it, gripping Kate’s hand tightly.
‘Lisa,’ she said softly. ‘Kate, I’m scared.’
‘There’s something you haven’t told me,’ Kate said. ‘It’s more than just a lot of people going. Am I right?’
Lisa nodded, tears welling up in her eyes. ‘Last time they came, they took my man. They took Harry, and I’m certain I’ll never see him again.’
Kate reached out and took the slim body in her arms, holding Lisa close, and knew she had to do something to help.
Mid-morning the following day found her in the service tunnel. Clad in a one-piece jumpsuit, her compact disc recorder over her shoulder, Kate followed the shadowy figure of the transit cop she had paid to show her into the tunnel. He’d been full of himself, only too eager to help her because he recognized her from a photograph in the newspaper when she’d had a big story printed some months back.
That and the roll of dollars she’d slipped him turned his initial surliness into fawning eagerness.
‘Now you take care in there,’ he’d advi
sed, playing the big brother. ‘It can be dangerous. Those Darksiders are harmless enough when let alone, but they don’t always take kindly to strangers. So watch yourself.’
He brandished his electro-stick to emphasize his words.
The look in his eye made Kate feel he wasn’t exactly thinking of her in such a brotherly way.
As they had moved deeper into the tunnel system, Kate felt the closeness edge in on her. The confines of the dim tube, with its dripping water and loose floor, added to her discomfort. She had no love for underground places. The darkness and the odd smells, the echoing sounds that seemed to rattle around forever, all went toward unsettling her. But Kate had been in grim places before, and even if she didn’t like them, she squared her shoulders and pushed on.
She would do her job, but she was damned if she was going to enjoy it.
Her guide halted, turning, his face grinning at her from the glow of his flashlight. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
‘Down the ramp. At the end you’ll find yourself in the old subway tunnel. After that you’re on your own, because nothing could get me to go any farther.’
Kate refrained from giving him the answer that was on the tip of her tongue. She simply turned and carried on walking, flicking on her own powerful flashlight. The beam danced ahead of her as she reached the ramp and followed it down to where it merged with the larger, and seemingly darker, main tunnel. Only when she reached this section did she turn to look back. The Link Tunnel was deserted. Her guide had gone.
The heavy gloom of the tunnel closed around her. It felt almost alive. She knew it was simply the effect of the darkness and the close, stale air. Underfoot the flooring was loose and littered with trash. Her feet sank into soft substances she just didn’t want to know about. She began to hear soft noises, scratchy, rustling sounds, occasionally accompanied by harsh squeaks. Kate knew what caused those sounds. An involuntary shiver coursed down her spine. The shaft of light from the flash picked up the reflection from beady red eyes. They were watching her movements.