City of Iron

by Williamson, Chet

  "What the hell happened here?" Joseph asked.

  "An explosion? Some force—"

  Joseph looked at the tangle of iron for a moment. "You know," he said slowly, "maybe Holberg intended it to look like this. We know that he was asking Guaraldi about explosions . . . maybe because he was working on this—sort of an intentional artistic destruction."

  "But remember," Laika said, "Holberg wasn't even supposed to know that he was working on this."

  "I don't buy that. You can't do something this complex—rent a warehouse, order supplies, create this thing—and not know it. And he knew enough to hide the records."

  "Maybe he was hiding them from himself," Laika said, then sighed. "Or maybe you're right . . . maybe it was all planned and Holberg just faked the fugue states to surprise Guaraldi with the piece later. There's just one problem with that."

  "What?"

  "Look at the size of it, and look at the door. He'd never have gotten it out of here."

  Joseph looked at the door and nodded. "But what if he just intended to show it here?"

  "In this neighborhood?" Laika was glad to see him nod again in agreement.

  They continued walking around the vast sculpture and at the far end of the room found a rickety wooden table. On it were a number of badly soiled and stained sheets of paper, each of them eighteen by twenty-four inches. They all contained enigmatically complex pencil drawings and series of numbers running down the sides.

  The drawings were mostly of angles and lines, and what looked like measurements were written next to every line and angle. The pile of papers was nearly six inches thick, and she and Joseph were careful not to get them out of order as they leafed through.

  "Plans?" she asked.

  "I think so. You know who has to see this?"

  "Yes. Guaraldi. He worked closely with Holberg, so he might be able to make something out of it all."

  They examined the rest of the sculpture, but found only more iron joinings interrupted by seeming chaos. The longer Laika looked at it, the more her sickness waned, as if the work were slowly seducing her, until, in its own bizarre way, it seemed dangerously beautiful, like a monument to bone and sinew. The rust that crawled up the pipes somehow added to its gritty glory, and the puddles on the floor reflected the discordant structure above like pools of blood.

  "We need to take photos," Joseph said, breaking in on her reverie. "I'll get the camera in the trunk."

  "No." Laika shook her head. "Let me go. I need a breath of fresh air." She did not realize how badly she needed to get out of the warehouse until she spoke. The air was cloying and thick, with a trace of salt. It was like breathing through a bloody nose.

  "Let me go with you. Those kids—"

  She waved a hand dismissively. "They'll be no problem now. Besides, even if they were. . . ."

  "I know. You could take 'em." Joseph smiled. "I'll just poke around here. Don't be long, though. This place even gives me the creeps."

  Laika took out her flashlight as she opened the front door and stepped into the parking lot. She thought about holding her pistol, but decided not to. After all, she could draw it in two-tenths of a second, should the need arise.

  As she shut the door behind her, she hesitated for a moment, checking the terrain, listening, watching, and even smelling the air. Once, in Haiti, the scent of an enemy agent's body odor had alerted her to his presence as she'd entered her hotel room. His plan had been to kill her, but he had died instead. Ever since, Laika had used all of her senses to fight her battles.

  It was a good thing she had. There were probably many men who used a little-known German scent called Knize Two, but she knew only one who did, and had told him several times that he splashed it on too liberally, until he got angry and told her to mind her own business.

  James.

  For a moment she could not believe that he could have been so unbelievably stupid as to follow her and Joseph out here to no-man's land. He probably figured since he was a brother, he had nothing to fear. He would learn otherwise soon enough, if she had rightly sized up the gangbangers she and Joseph had confronted.

  Laika looked around slowly and saw, parked far down the street, a car that hadn't been there before. James's Jaguar. There were the long, lean lines he was so proud of, even though he kept the car garaged most of the time. As she watched, shadows came out of the night around the car, and in the flurry of movement she could imagine busy hands stripping what they could from James's vehicle.

  She wondered why he had come, what he wanted. The only thing certain was that his stupidity knew no bounds. Shaking her head slowly, she walked out onto the cracked and uneven parking lot, shining her flashlight on the ruined asphalt in front of her. She would easily enough hear his feet on the loose stones if he came running up to her.

  She had just unlocked the trunk and was lifting up the lid when something beneath the car grabbed her right ankle and pulled hard. She was off balance, so let herself fall backward, twisting to cushion the fall with her forearms and hip. A single kick and she was free, spinning into a crouch, ready to draw her gun.

  Her flashlight had fallen so that it shone under the car, and James's angry, surprised face looked out at her. He scrambled out from under the car, more slowly than he would have liked, she was sure, for by the time he was out, Laika was on her feet, standing with her arms at her side, her flashlight in her hand.

  "What the hell was that all about?" she said.

  He was panting with the exertion of getting out from beneath the car, and it took him a moment to get his wind back. "I need to talk to you," he said breathlessly.

  "Well, you think a good way to do it is by hiding under my car and grabbing me? Talk, hell—you wanted to hurt me, James."

  He shook his head as though he wasn't sure, and then said, "Yeah, maybe—shit, you hurt me, and that sonofabitch guinea did, too." Laika felt her temper build like a cold fire, as James gestured to the empty parking lot. "Other boyfriend's in there—nobody here to protect you now, baby. So I want you back, or payback."

  "You'd better take payback, asshole. If you can."

  Chapter 25

  James Winston's nostrils flared in fury, and he started for her. His wild charge was pitifully easy to evade, and her leg sweep took him to the ground without a follow-up strike.

  Then she knelt over him and hit him four times hard in the face. The second blow broke his nose, and the fourth his jaw. She stopped when she heard it crack.

  James lay there, gasping in pain, his eyes open wide in shock. Laika grabbed his shirt and hauled him up toward her until his bleeding face was only inches from hers. "You don't know what you're into here. Get the hell out while you can, James. The 'guinea' you're talking about would have killed you like that. And next time I see you, I'll do it."

  As she spoke, the panic in James's eyes was slowly replaced by understanding and then rage. "I'm gonna kill you—" he grated out, trying to sniff back the blood that ran copiously over his mouth and chin. "You bitch. . . ."

  She shook her head, amazed at his spirit and his stupidity. "I still don't think you get it." Then she struck him hard once more, just at the bottom of his rib cage so that ribs cracked and the air went out of him in a tremendous burst, making him start to vomit. Somehow, he rolled onto his side so that what came up didn't choke him.

  "Get up," she said. "Get out of here." She kicked him lightly in the side, and he pushed himself to his hands and knees, still vomiting. She waited until he stopped, then kicked him again, harder. He fell over onto his side, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "You're going to keep hurting, James, unless you go now," she said. Another kick in the side, and now he rolled over again and stood up slowly.

  Her next move was purely out of anger. She slapped his face with her open hand, hard, across his cheek. "Run." It was as much a growl as a word.

  James whimpered and staggered away from her, toward the dark street where the boys were stripping his car, destroying still another dr
eam. She tried to watch him go without a trace of sympathy.

  She knew that she should have killed him, driven the bridge of his nose up into his brain with the heel of her hand. She and Joseph could have weighted his body down and dropped it in the river, or just let it float, for that matter. He was lucky, very lucky, to get away with his life. She wasn't concerned with how the gangbangers would treat him when he returned to his car, if they were still there. Let them kill him, she told herself. She should have. She knew she should have.

  Laika picked up her flashlight and lifted the trunk lid. She took out the camera bag and closed the trunk, concentrating on the task ahead, trying to cleanse her mind of what had just happened. But when she turned back toward the warehouse, she saw Joseph standing in the doorway.

  "You knew him," he said, as she walked up to him.

  "Yes."

  "Is he connected?"

  "No. He's got nothing to do with our business."

  "Personal, then. What did he want?"

  She thought for a moment. "Revenge, I think."

  "Then he'll be back. You know what you should have done."

  "Of course I know. But don't make it sound so damned easy—you don't know a damned thing about it."

  "You're right, Laika, and I don't want to know a damned thing about it. But even more, I don't want him, whoever that was, to know a thing about us."

  She looked at him long and hard. "You're a desk jockey, Joseph. Have you ever killed anybody?" He didn't answer. "Have you ever looked in a person's eyes and seen life there, and you knew, you knew absolutely, that you were going to take that light out forever?" She jerked her hand in the direction in which James Winston had disappeared. "I gave him what he deserved. I made him hurt. But he didn't deserve to die. Not yet."

  "What if he comes back?" Joseph said softly.

  "Then I'll kill him," she said, just as softly. "I promise that I will kill him."

  They went back inside then and took several rolls of film of the sculpture, recording it from many angles. Then they rolled up the papers they had found, turned out the lights, and, with a nearly palpable relief, locked the warehouse behind them. Joseph, with a lopsided smile at Laika, took a hundred and fifty dollars in bills from his money clip and put it half under a piece of concrete block.

  When they got into their car, Laika noticed something she hadn't when she'd gone outside earlier. There was a circle on the front windshield in white chalk. Several squiggly lines were drawn through it. "It's a gang mark," Joseph said, as he brushed it off. "Probably to tell everybody else to leave the car alone."

  As they drove away, Laika noticed that James's car was still there, what was left of it. James himself was nowhere to be seen.

  Tony was sleeping on the couch in the living room when Laika and Joseph came through the door of the apartment. He awoke immediately and insisted on hearing what they had found at the warehouse. After they told him, he filled them in on his adventures with the Esoteric Order of Dagon, and Joseph nodded.

  "'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' " Joseph said. "That's the Lovecraft story the Order appears in. So they think Lovecraft had a divine visitation from Cthulhu before he wrote his story, huh? Next thing you know, he'll be the new Joseph Smith."

  "There wasn't anything vaguely Mormon-like about this bunch," Tony said. "But I think they know even less than we do about what happened to Holberg."

  "Did they say anything about this sculpture?" Laika asked. "Whether or not Holberg had told them about it?"

  Tony shook his head. "Not a thing, but we didn't have much of a conversation. So when do I get to see it?"

  "We'll go over tomorrow," Laika said. "Take Guaraldi with us, see what he makes of it, and if he can interpret the papers we found."

  Tony snapped his fingers. "Jeez, speaking of tomorrow, Melton called. That medium, Elissa Meyer? She's going off on a book tour in two days, so the only time she can visit the house in the next month is tomorrow night."

  "What?" Laika said. "That doesn't give us any time. Joseph?"

  He merely smiled. "We don't need any. We can take Guaraldi over to the warehouse tomorrow and still show up Elissa Meyer tomorrow night. I'll just have to pick up a few things."

  "Crucifixes and holy water?" Tony said with a smirk.

  Joseph ignored him. "We'll call Melton in the morning, tell him we'll be there. Now I'm ready to get some sleep."

  Sometime just before dawn, long after the gang had retrieved their money that Joseph had left for them and returned to wherever to sleep off a rough night's work, two figures slipped furtively from the shadows surrounding the warehouse. They were dressed in black from head to foot, and seemed not so much to pass through the night as to wear it. One of them carried a small black bag.

  They glided to the door of the warehouse through which Laika and Joseph had left several hours before, and after a few minutes of small, economical movements, the locks yielded to their efforts. Not until they were inside with the door shut firmly behind them did they turn on their powerful flashlights.

  For several minutes they stood looking at the structure of iron towering above them, and at the burst and broken pieces scattered here and there. They walked around the whole work, shining their lights everywhere, though they did not turn on the overhead bulbs.

  Then they started to examine the wooden sheathing that covered the wall separating the anteroom from the warehouse area. When the man with the bag found the proper spot, he handed the bag to the other person, who opened it and began to take out several small tools which were passed to the technician.

  Within fifteen minutes they had finished what they had come to do. They left the building, locking it behind them, placing the padlock precisely the way it had been, and blended once more into the darkness. There was no trace of their presence, save for what was now hidden between the wooden panels of the wall.

  Chapter 26

  When Quentin McIntyre went into his office the following morning, he was happy to see that, along with the daily quota of newspapers, Alan Phillips had also put a CIA report on his desk. Phillips was going to be a winner, McIntyre was certain. One of those agents whose life is their work and vice versa.

  He read the report first. It was a précis of an internal CIA memo that concerned Anthony Luciano's latest assignment. It stated that Luciano had been assigned to Azerbaijan and had supposedly been there for the past six weeks. McIntyre smiled and shook his head. Skye, he wondered, just what are you up to?

  He pressed a buzzer on his desk, and Phillips came in. "Alan," McIntyre said, "I want you to start a three-priority search for Anthony Luciano. I don't believe a word of this memo. I know that was him in Plattsburgh, so let's begin with New York State and branch out from there if we strike out."

  "You think it's a Company operation here in the States?"

  McIntyre nodded. "There's no other reason Luciano would have for being in Plattsburgh. He was investigating those deaths at that hunting lodge, I don't know why. But I'm sure someone in the Company does, probably Richard Skye. Let's try and check all his internal correspondence, see if there's any mention of Luciano in connection with other agents. He had two other people with him in Plattsburgh. Let's see what we can get to mesh."

  After Phillips left, McIntyre took out the clipping from The Inner Eye and looked at it again. "I know you," he whispered. "Azerbaijan, my ass. . . ."

  At 10:30 that morning, the people Adam Guaraldi knew as Drs. Florence Kelly, Kevin Tompkins, and Vincent Antonelli of the National Science Foundation were driving Guaraldi to the warehouse in the Bronx. As they crossed over the Third Avenue bridge, Guaraldi was still flipping through the pile of papers they had shown him when they'd picked him up a half hour earlier.

  Laika was sitting with him in the backseat, looking at the papers and watching his face for any reaction. "Does it make any sense to you?" she said.

  He nodded. "It's Peder's work all right, but much different from his usual manner. I mean, he prided . . . prides himself on c
ontrolled chaos. But this is uncontrolled. I don't know what he's saying here. And the draftsmanship . . . it's Peder's, but almost in a different hand—more rushed, hurried. He was usually real meticulous in his plans. This isn't like him." Guaraldi turned a few more pages. "But I can see how this might fit together."

  "Do you think the pages were in order?" she asked.

  "No. I don't believe so. Like here. . . ." He took a page from near the top of the stack. "See, this piece would seem to go with . . ." Then he pulled a piece from the center. ". . . this one. You see?" Laika didn't, but she nodded anyway. "It's like a huge jigsaw puzzle," Guaraldi said, riffling through the sheets.

  Wait until you see the sculpture, she thought.

  As they drove down the street to the warehouse, Laika noticed that James's car was no longer parked there. If he'd gotten past the gang, he probably had had what was left of it hauled away. She figured that was what had happened, since if it had been up to the police, the vehicle would have sat on that street until it had rusted out.

  Joseph parked the car near the door, and they got out. Guaraldi looked around in amazement. "Here? Peder came here? My God, how?"

  "We're not sure," she said, "but we checked this morning, and there was no record of any cabs taking riders to this location. So either he used unlicensed cabs, took the subway, and walked a few blocks, or he drove himself."

  "That's impossible," Guaraldi said. "He didn't know how to drive."

  Laika unlocked the door, walked through the anteroom, and turned on the lights. Guaraldi followed, and let out an unbelieving gasp when he saw what occupied the huge room.