The Dark River fr-2

by John Twelve Hawks

  Naz was grinning as if he’d just performed a magic trick. “See? What’d I tell you?”

  Devon pushed the control lever down and the train jerked forward, picking up speed as it left the abandoned station. The car rocked back and forth, and then they were heading north beneath the streets of Manhattan. Devon stopped at the Spring Street station, but didn’t open the doors. He waited until a green light flashed in the tunnel, then pushed the lever again.

  Gabriel got up from his seat and stood next to Maya. The window in the door was open a few inches and warm air pushed into the car. As the train shifted onto a new track, it felt as if they were traveling through a secret part of the city. Light appeared in the distance, reflected on the tracks; there was a clattering sound and then they glided slowly through the Bleecker Street station. Gabriel had traveled on the east-side line several times before, but this experience was different. They were safe within a shadow land, one step beyond the scrutiny of the Vast Machine.

  Astor Place. Union Square. And then the door to the control room popped open. The train was still moving, but Devon wasn’t touching the controls.

  “Something’s going on…”

  “What’s the problem?” Maya asked.

  “We’re a maintenance train,” Devon said. “I’m supposed to be running it. But the computer took over when we left the last station. I tried to contact the command center, but the radio’s dead.”

  Naz jumped up and raised both hands as if he were trying to stop an argument. “It’s no big deal. There’s probably another train up the line.”

  “If that was true, then they would have stopped us at Bleecker.” Devon stepped back into the control room and moved the lever again. The subway car ignored his efforts and passed through the Twenty-third Street station at the same moderate speed.

  Maya drew the ceramic gun she had taken from Aronov. She kept the weapon pointed at the floor. “I want the train stopped at the next station.”

  “He can’t do that,” Naz said. “The computer is running everything.”

  Everyone was standing now-even Sophia Briggs and the girl. They held on to the poles in the middle of the car as lights flashed through the windows and the wheels clicked like a ticking watch.

  “Is there an emergency brake?” Maya asked Devon.

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if it will work. The computer is telling the train to keep moving.”

  “Can you open the doors?”

  “Not unless the car has stopped. I can release the safety lock and you can open them manually.”

  “Good. Do that right now.”

  Everyone looked out the window as they rolled through the Twenty-eighth Street station. The few New Yorkers standing on the platform looked as if they were frozen within that instant of time.

  Maya turned to Hollis. “Push the door open. When we reach Forty-second Street, we’re going to jump.”

  “I’m staying on the train,” Naz said.

  “You’re coming with us.”

  “Forget that. I don’t need your money.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about the money right now.” Maya raised the gun slightly, pointing it at Naz’s kneecap. “I want to keep away from the cameras and get on that train at Grand Central Terminal.”

  Devon switched off the safety lock as they left the Thirty-third Street station. Hollis forced back two of the side doors and held them open. Every few yards they rattled past a steel I-beam holding up the tunnel ceiling. It felt like they were traveling down an endless passageway with no way out.

  “Okay!” Devon shouted. “Get ready!” There was a red lever with a T-shaped handle mounted on the wall of the car’s control room. Devon grabbed the handle, pulled down hard, and there was a screeching sound of steel scraping against steel. The subway car began to shiver but the wheels kept turning. As they approached Forty-second Street, the New Yorkers waiting in the station backed away from the edge of the platform.

  Alice and Sophia jumped first, followed by Vicki, Hollis, and Gabriel. The train was going slowly enough that Gabriel managed to stay on his feet. Looking up the concrete platform, he saw Maya pull Naz out the open door. The wheels of the train kept screeching as it disappeared into the tunnel. People on the platform looked startled, and one man punched out a number on his cell phone.

  “Come on!” Maya shouted, and they started running.

  8

  The van drove around the concrete security barrier and stopped at the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance to Grand Central Terminal. A National Guardsman standing in front of the train station approached them, but Nathan Boone motioned to one of his mercenaries, a New York City detective named Ray Mitchell. Ray lowered the passenger window and showed the soldier his badge. “Got a call about a couple of drug dealers doing business in the terminal,” he said. “Someone said they had a little Chinese girl with them. Can you believe it? I mean-come on-if you’re selling crack, get a babysitter.”

  The Guardsman grinned and lowered his rifle. “I’ve been in the city for six days,” he said. “Everyone here is a little crazy.”

  The driver, a mercenary from South Africa named Vanderpoul, stayed behind the wheel as Boone got out of the van with Mitchell and his partner, Detective Krause. Ray Mitchell was a small, fast-talking man who liked to wear designer clothes. Krause was his opposite: a large, awkward cop with a flushed face who seemed to be permanently angry. Boone paid a monthly retainer to both police officers and gave them occasional bonuses for extra work.

  “Now what?” Krause asked. “Where’d they go after they jumped?”

  “Hold on,” Boone said. His headset was relaying continual information from two teams of mercenaries as well as the Brethren’s computer center in Berlin. The technicians had hacked into the New York transit system’s surveillance network, and they were using their scanning programs to look for the fugitives.

  “They’re still in the subway station on a transit level,” Boone said. “The cameras are getting a direct feed as they walk toward the shuttle train.”

  “So we go to the shuttle?” Mitchell asked.

  “Not yet. Maya knows we’re tracking her, and that’s going to influence her behavior. The first thing she’ll do is get away from the cameras.”

  Smiling, Mitchell glanced at his partner. “And that’s why she’s going to be caught.”

  Boone reached back into the van and took out the aluminum suitcase that contained the radio tracking equipment and three sets of infrared goggles.

  “Let’s go inside. I’m going to contact the response team parked on Fifth Avenue.”

  The three men entered the terminal and walked down one of the wide marble staircases built to resemble a part of the old Paris opera house. Mitchell caught up with Boone as they reached the main concourse. “I got to make things clear,” he said. “We’ll guide you around New York and run interference, but we’re not taking anybody out.”

  “I’m not asking you to do that. Just deal with the authorities.”

  “No problem. I’ll check in with the transit police and tell them we’re at the terminal.”

  Mitchell took out his badge, clipped it to his jacket, then hurried down one of the corridors. Krause stayed with Boone like a giant bodyguard as they approached a central information booth with a four-faced clock mounted on the roof. The size of the main concourse, its arched windows, white marble floors, and stone walls, confirmed his belief that his side was going to win this secret war. Millions of people passed through the terminal every year, but only a few of them knew that the building itself was a subtle demonstration of the Brethren’s power.

  One of the Brethren’s strongest supporters in America during the early twentieth century was William K. Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon who had commissioned the construction of Grand Central Terminal. Vanderbilt requested that the main concourse’s arched ceiling be decorated with the constellations of the zodiac, five stories above the marble floor of the station. The stars were supposed to be arranged as if they were in a Med
iterranean sky during Christ’s lifetime. But no one-not even the Egyptian astrologers of the first century-had ever seen such an arrangement: the zodiac on the ceiling was completely reversed.

  It amused Boone to read the various theories as to why the stars were shown this way. The most popular idea was that the painter had duplicated a drawing found in a medieval manuscript and that the stars were shown from the point of view of someone outside our solar system. No one ever explained why Vanderbilt’s architects had allowed this odd conceit to appear in such an important building.

  The Brethren knew that the ceiling’s design had nothing to do with a medieval concept of the heavens. The constellations were in the correct position for someone concealed inside the hollow ceiling, looking downward at travelers hurrying to their trains. Most of the stars were twinkling lightbulbs in a powder-blue sky, but there were a dozen sight holes as well. In the past, police officers and railroad security guards had used binoculars to follow the movements of suspicious-looking citizens. Now the entire population was being tracked with scanners and other electronic equipment. The reversed zodiac suggested that only the watchers from above saw the universe accurately. Everyone else assumed that the stars were in the right place.

  A call came in on the sat phone, and a former British soldier named Summerfield whispered into Boone’s ear. The response team had arrived at the Vanderbilt entrance and had parked behind the van. For this operation, the team was comprised of mostly the same men who had worked in Arizona. The New Harmony operation had been good for morale; the necessary violence had unified a group of mercenaries with different nationalities and backgrounds.

  “Now what?” Summerfield asked.

  “Break into small groups, and then enter from different doors.” Boone looked up at the schedule board. “We’ll meet near track thirty-the train going to Stamford.”

  “I thought they were getting on the shuttle.”

  “All Maya wants to do is protect her Traveler. She’ll hide as quickly as possible. That means going down a tunnel or finding a maintenance area.”

  “Is the objective still the same?”

  “Everyone but Gabriel is now in the immediate-termination category.”

  Summerfield switched off his phone, and Boone picked up another call from the Internet team. Maya and the other fugitives had reached the shuttle area, but they were lingering on the platform. Boone had killed Maya’s father, Thorn, in Prague last year, and he felt an odd personal connection to the young woman. She wasn’t as tough as her father, perhaps because she had resisted becoming a Harlequin. Maya had already made one mistake-and the next choice would destroy her.

  9

  Naz had guided Maya and the rest of the group through a warren of stairs and passageways to the Times Square shuttle. The platform was a brightly lit area where a shuttle train departed from one of three parallel tracks. The gray concrete floor was dotted with blackened pieces of chewing gum that formed a random mosaic. A few hundred feet away, a group of West Indian men with steel drums pounded out a calypso tune.

  So far, they had avoided the mercenaries, but Maya was sure they were being watched by the underground surveillance system. Now that their presence in New York had been discovered, she knew that the full resources of the Tabula would be used to find them. According to Naz, all they had to do was walk down the subway tunnel and take a staircase to the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. Unfortunately, a transit policeman was patrolling the area and, even if he disappeared, someone might tell the authorities that a group of people had jumped onto the tracks.

  The only safe route into the tunnel was through a locked door labeled with the tarnished gold lettering KNICKERBOCKER. In a more convivial era, a passageway once led directly from the subway platform to the bar of the old Knickerbocker Hotel. Although the hotel was now an apartment building, the door remained-unnoticed by the tens of thousands of commuters who walked past it every day.

  Maya stood on the platform feeling very conspicuous as commuters hurried to board the shuttle. When the train clattered out of the station, Hollis approached her and spoke in a quiet voice.

  “You still want to get on the train going to Ten Mile River?”

  “We’ll evaluate the situation when we reach the platform. Naz says there aren’t any cameras there.”

  Hollis nodded. “The Tabula scanners probably detected us when we left the loft and walked through Chinatown. Then somebody figured out we were using the old subway station and hacked into the transit computer.”

  “There’s another explanation.” Maya glanced over at Naz.

  “Yeah, I thought about that, too. But I watched his face in the subway car. He really looked scared.”

  “Stay close to him, Hollis. If he starts running, stop him.”

  A new shuttle train arrived, took on a new crowd of passengers, and then rattled west toward Eighth Avenue. It felt like they would be standing there forever. Finally the transit policeman got a call on his radio and hurried away. Naz ran over to the Knickerbocker door and fumbled through the keys on his ring. When the lock clicked, he smiled and pulled the door open.

  “Special subway tour goes this way,” he announced, and a few commuters watched the group disappear through the doorway. When Naz shut the door, they stood close together in a short, dark passageway. He led them past a manhole cover and then down four concrete steps to the subway tunnel.

  Everyone stood between one set of tracks as Naz pointed at a third rail filled with electric current. “Be careful with the wooden shield that covers that,” he told them. “If it breaks and your body hits the rail, you’re dead meat.”

  The tunnel was black with soot and smelled like sewage. Water trickled down the drainage channel; it oozed through the concrete wall and made the surface glisten like oil. The City Hall station had been dusty, but fairly clean; the tunnel to Times Square was littered with trash. Rats were everywhere-dark gray ones nearly a foot long. This was their world, and they weren’t afraid of humans. When intruders appeared, the rats continued to rummage through the garbage, squeaking at one another or scurrying up the walls.

  “They’re not dangerous,” Naz said. “Just watch where you’re going. If you fall down, they crawl all over you.”

  Hollis stayed close to their guide. “Where’s this doorway you were talking about?”

  “It’s right around here. Swear to God. Start looking for a yellow light.”

  They heard a low, rumbling sound, like distant thunder, and saw the headlights of the approaching shuttle. “Next track! Next track!” Naz shouted. Without waiting for the others, he leaped over the third rail to the adjacent track.

  Everyone but Sophia Briggs followed Naz. The old woman looked exhausted and slightly confused. As the lights of the shuttle got closer, she took a risk and stepped directly on the wooden cover of the third rail. It held her weight. A moment later, she passed through the gloom and joined the others.

  Naz darted up the track and then came back looking excited. “Okay. I think I found the door to the stairway. Just follow me and-”

  The shuttle train on the next track absorbed the rest of his words. Maya saw quick flashes of different passengers framed within the windows-an old man with a knit cap, a young woman with braids-and then the train was gone. A candy wrapper flew up in the air and drifted downward like a dead leaf.

  They kept walking to a juncture that led off in three different directions. Naz took the track on the right and then led them to an open doorway illuminated by a single lightbulb. He climbed up three metal steps and entered a maintenance tunnel, followed by Alice and Vicki. Hollis reached the top of the steps and shook his head. “We need to slow down. Sophia is getting tired.”

  “Find a safe place and wait for us,” Maya said. “Gabriel and I will bring her along.”

  Maya knew that her father would have betrayed the rest of the group to save the Traveler, but she couldn’t fall back on this strategy. Gabriel wasn’t going to leave anyone behind in the tunne
ls-least of all the woman who had been his Pathfinder. She looked down the tunnel and saw that Gabriel had taken Sophia’s knapsack and placed it on his own shoulders. When he offered his arm to Sophia, the old lady shook her head vigorously, as if to say, I don’t need anyone’s help. Sophia took a few steps forward and then a red laser beam cut through the gloom. “Get down!” Maya shouted. “Get-”

  There was a sharp cracking sound and a bullet hit Sophia in the back. The Pathfinder fell forward, tried to get up, and then collapsed. Maya drew her revolver and fired down the tunnel as Gabriel scooped up Sophia and ran toward the steps. Maya followed him, pausing in the open doorway to fire again. The laser beam vanished as four dark shapes retreated into the shadows.

  Maya broke open the revolver and used the ejector rod to push out the empty cases. She was reloading as she entered a maintenance tunnel with brick walls, and found Gabriel on his knees embracing Sophia’s limp body. His brown leather jacket was covered with blood.

  “Is she breathing?”

  “She’s dead,” Gabriel told her. “I held her and she was dying and I felt the Light leave her body.”

  “Gabriel…”

  “I felt her die,” Gabriel said again. “It was like water flowing between your fingers. I couldn’t hold it back…couldn’t stop it…” He shivered violently.

  “The Tabula are very close,” Maya said. “We can’t stay here. You’re going to have to leave her.”

  She touched Gabriel’s shoulder and watched as he gently lowered Sophia’s body onto the floor. A few seconds later, they hurried down the tunnel to a stairway landing where the others were waiting. Vicki gasped when she saw the blood on Gabriel’s jacket, and Alice looked as if she were about to run away. The child’s head moved back and forth. Maya sensed what Alice was thinking: Who will protect me now?

  “What happened?” Vicki asked. “Where’s Sophia?”

  “The Tabula killed her. They’re right behind us.”

  Vicki put her hands to her mouth and Naz looked like he was about to run away. “That’s all,” he said. “I quit. I’m not part of this.”