The Green And The Gray

by Timothy Zahn

  The drivers were gone.

  He caught his breath, his feet still thudding across the loose dirt, his brain refusing to acknowledge what his eyes were telling him. In that single instant of inattention, without any fuss, bother, smoke, or mirrors, all eight men had vanished as if swallowed up by the earth itself.

  The pack of cops in front of him obviously didn't believe it, either. They charged straight through into the miniature forest, guns ready, heads wagging this way and that as they searched for their quarry. Five seconds later, they ran out the other side, jogging to a confused halt. "What are you waiting for?" the lieutenant shouted, sounding as bewildered as everyone else looked. "Come on, they're there somewhere. Find them. Damn it all, find them!"

  Fierenzo held the phone to his ear, the taste of stomach acid in his mouth. "All of them?" he asked.

  "All of them," Powell gritted, his voice as angry and troubled and just plain scared as Fierenzo had ever heard it. "Eight grown men, vanished in a clump of trees a rabbit shouldn't have been able to hide in."

  "What about the vans?"

  "To hell with the vans," Powell snarled. "Up to now I've been willing to play along with this without anything stronger than your personal say-so. But this has gone way beyond partner loyalty."

  Fierenzo winced. "Should you be saying this sort of—?"

  "Don't worry, I'm in the stairwell," Powell growled. "But I'm serious. You going to tell me what's going on, or do I have to bail?"

  Fierenzo gripped the phone tightly, his eyes darting to where Roger sat very still across the coffee shop table. "I can't," he said, keeping his voice steady. "Not yet. I gave my word."

  "Something's about to happen to this city, Tommy," Powell reminded him tightly. "If you know anything—anything—you have a sworn duty to report it."

  "I've reported as much as I can, Jon," Fierenzo said. "I'm still working on it at my end, just as you are at yours. Trust me a little longer, will you?"

  He heard Powell take a deep breath. "We are both going to burn in hell," the other said at last. "All right, a little longer. But that's all. Those soldiers of yours are on their way, and we have no idea when or where or how they're going to hit the city."

  "We'll find them," Fierenzo promised, wishing he had even a shred of hope that he could actually do so.

  "We'd better," Powell said. "I'll talk to you later."

  Fierenzo punched off the phone. "They got away?" Roger asked.

  "Of course they got away," Fierenzo bit out. "The idiots let them park their vans right beside a clump of trees."

  Roger made a face. "There wasn't anything you could have done."

  "Of course there was," Fierenzo snapped back. "I knew what Greens can do. I could have warned them."

  "You think they would have believed you?"

  "That's irrelevant."

  "Hardly," Roger said scornfully. "Lot of good you'd do anyone locked in the psych ward at Bellevue."

  "Lot of good I'm doing right now," Fierenzo muttered.

  "Melantha's alive and free," Roger reminded him. "That's a pretty fair amount of good right there."

  "I suppose," Fierenzo conceded, mentally shaking away the cobwebs. Time to stop feeling sorry for himself and attack this thing logically. "Okay. They've switched vehicles, so we can't shadow them.

  If they keep quiet even other Greens can't detect them, so putting Melantha's parents out as spotters won't help. What else have we got?"

  "I don't know," Roger said, fiddling with a coffee stirrer. "You suppose the Grays have a way of spotting them at a distance?"

  "I doubt it," Fierenzo said. "If they could, they should have nailed Melantha a lot sooner."

  "It still wouldn't hurt to run it past Jonah," Roger pointed out, glancing surreptitiously around the coffee shop and lifting his left hand.

  "Okay, but just ask him about Green detectors," Fierenzo warned. "Don't tell him why we need to know. Or what was in Caroline's message."

  Roger frowned. "You're not going to tell them?"

  "Not yet," Fierenzo said. "I don't want anyone else in the picture until we have a plan." But—

  "No argument," Fierenzo said, glaring across the table. "I'm not in the mood."

  Roger glared back, but nodded. "Fine," he said. Twitching his little finger, he lifted his hand to his cheek.

  This was, Smith groused silently to himself as he drove slowly through the streets of Stony Hollow, turning out to be a truly rotten day.

  He'd alerted Powell and Cerreta to the existence of the white vans, only to have the drivers of those vans somehow elude thirty cops and escape. He'd located Caroline Whittier, only to get run off the road and lose her. He'd called in the description of the red Ford pickup, including its plate number, only to be told that it hadn't been spotted since it disappeared from Smith's own sight over that hill.

  On the other hand, he hadn't officially clocked in for work today down at the Two-Four, and even though Powell had assured him he would take care of it, he suspected his partner Hill would be claiming a big chunk of his hide when he did show his face at the station house again.

  And now here he was, driving around in a slightly banged-up car through the modest towns scattered along the highway, looking for God only knew what. It would have been so much handier if the men in the vans had abandoned them somewhere near where they'd picked up their new rides; say, beside a car-rental agency or bus station. But they'd been smart enough not to leave behind any such obvious pointers.

  But Caroline Whittier and the old woman she'd been riding with might not have been so clever. If they'd ditched their pickup somewhere around here, and if he could find it, maybe he could figure out what the whole bunch of them were now driving.

  It was a faint hope, he knew. But at the moment it was the only game in town. At least it was better than going back to Manhattan and facing Officer Hill.

  Ahead, an increased speed-limit sign marked the edge of this particular town. Speeding up, keeping his eyes peeled, he headed for the next.

  Cerreta didn't quite slam the phone down as he hung up, but he wasn't all that far from it. "No, I take it?" Powell asked, cupping his palm over the mouthpiece of his own phone.

  "Even less than no," the lieutenant confirmed with a scowl. "He said he might just refuse my next warrant request, too, just to make up for interrupting his morning with this one."

  "It didn't matter to him that a cop is missing?" Powell asked, feeling a fresh twinge of guilt over the lie.

  "Sure it did," Cerreta said sourly. "He said that if we can prove Tommy's disappearance is connected with these people, he'll be happy to entertain our request for a warrant. Only we can't prove that." He lifted his eyebrows. "Or can we?" he added, his eyes suddenly very steady on Powell's face.

  It took Powell two tries to get the word out. "No."

  "Because I'd hate for something to happen to him if someone else could have prevented it," Cerreta went on, that half-suspicious look still on his face.

  "Yes, sir," Powell said. "So would I."

  Cerreta held his gaze a moment longer, then gave a microscopic nod. "Anything new with Messerling?"

  Powell lifted his phone slightly. "He's activating S.W.A.T. units all over the city," he said, relieved to be on firmer ground. "I've got Hill and Grosvenor checking with DMV for any other vehicles registered to those restaurants."

  "While we're at it, we'd better put someone on the restaurants themselves," Cerreta decided, picking up his phone again. "Outside and in. No law against a cop having a cup of coffee in the restaurant of his choice."

  There was a click in Powell's ear. "I've got a preliminary deployment schedule now," Messerling's voice said. "You want to take this down?"

  Powell scooped up a pen and pad. "Go ahead."

  "No soap," Roger said, lowering his hand. "Jonah says they don't have any way to distinguish Greens from humans, at least not at any distance. Our infrared signatures are similar, we look pretty much the same on a sonic pattern readout, and entro
pic metabolism detectors are no good beyond about five feet."

  "What the hell's an entropic metabolism detector?" Fierenzo lifted a hand. "Never mind—it doesn't matter. What about those metal brooch things?"

  "The trassks?" Roger shook his head. "He said they're not going to show up as anything other than ordinary metal. It's the Green psychic manipulation ability that makes them work. We could still watch for people wearing them, I suppose."

  "Assuming they're stupid enough to leave them out in the open instead of in their pockets."

  "There's that," Roger conceded. "What do you think they're planning?"

  "Well, the basics seem obvious," Fierenzo said. "They're assuming you've relayed Caroline's disinformation to Torvald, which means they expect Grays to gather at the north end of the island to wait for the phantom Damian and his Warrior escort to show up. That gives Nikolos the choice of coming up right behind them—say, over the George or the Triborough—and slaughtering them while they're facing the wrong direction, or else coming up into Lower Manhattan to take out the women and children who've been left behind in supposed safety."

  Roger shuddered. "Or head directly into Brooklyn and Queens, where the bulk of the Grays still live."

  "Point," Fierenzo said, grimacing. All they needed was for Nikolos to expand this to the other four boroughs. "The question is whether Nikolos would prefer a straight-on attack against fellow fighters, man to man, or would he'd prefer the terrorist route of targeting civilians so as to throw the fighters into disarray."

  "So what do we do?"

  Fierenzo turned and stared out the window at the cars and people passing by. That was a damn good question. He had some ideas, but they all depended on at least partial knowledge of the Green strategy. "We go to the hotel and wait for Jonah and the others," he decided. "Maybe when we put our heads together we'll come up with something."

  "Don't you think it's about time to alert Torvald and the other Grays?"

  "Let's talk to Jonah first," Fierenzo said, giving his mouth a final dab with his napkin and standing up. "Whatever Nikolos has planned, I doubt he'll move until it's dark."

  "You willing to bet all our lives on that?"

  Fierenzo looked out the window again at the people of his city. "I don't think I've really got a choice," he said. "Come on, let's get out of here."

  44

  It was nearly two o'clock, and the rumbling in Smith's stomach had finally become too loud to ignore, when he arrived in downtown Kingston.

  From a Manhattan perspective, of course, the term "downtown" seemed rather quaint. Still, there were a couple of small but adequate-looking restaurants in what the signs called the Historic Rondout Section of town along the riverfront. Picking one at random, he parked and headed in.

  "Afternoon," a young woman greeted him as he stepped inside. "Table for one?"

  "Please," Smith said, nodding. "And a red pickup if you have one."

  The woman blinked. "A what?"

  "Never mind," Smith said. He really should know better than to try to be funny on an empty stomach. "I've spent all day looking for a wayward red pickup, that's all."

  "A red Ford pickup?" a new voice called.

  Smith looked around the empty dining area, finally spotted the face peering out through the low window leading back into the kitchen. "Yes, as a matter of fact," he said. "New York tag NKR—"

  "Oh, it's got plates?" the other interrupted him. "Never mind. Gail said this one didn't have any."

  "Wait a second," Smith said quickly, not sure he believed this. He'd been killing himself trying to find this truck; and these people already knew where it was? "They could have taken the plates off."

  "They?" the waitress echoed, frowning. "It's not yours?"

  "No, but I'd really like it to be," Smith said, pulling his badge and ID from his pocket. "Officer Jeff Smith, New York Police. If that's the truck I've been looking for, it may have been involved in a kidnapping."

  The woman's face settled into hard lines. "I'll call Gail right now and find out where it is."

  "Gail doesn't know," the cook called to her through his window. "Call Rolf Jacoby—he's the one who actually saw it."

  "Okay," the waitress called back. "I'd better get Hank on it, too. He's the police chief," she added to Smith.

  "Great," Smith said, watching her hurry to the cash register podium. In certain parts of New York, he suspected, the truck could have sat abandoned for a week before anyone bothered to bring it to anyone else's attention. An hour in a small upstate town, and everyone in a five-mile radius knew all about it.

  He shook his head. "God bless America," he murmured.

  The pickup had been left neatly parked behind one of the local lumber yards. A police car was waiting when Smith arrived, with a single uniformed cop standing beside it. "You must be Smith," the other said as Smith got out of his car and walked toward him. "I'm Hank Fishburn."

  "Pleasure, Chief," Smith said cautiously. "First off, I want you to know I'm not trying to poach any of this from your jurisdiction."

  Fishburn snorted. "The whole state got an alert about two hours ago on this thing," he said. "No one mentioned a red pickup, though."

  "I told Manhattan about it," Smith assured him.

  "Report must have gotten lost in transit," Fishburn said. "Happens way too often. Anyway, the point is that I get the feeling jurisdictional infighting is pretty much out the window. What can we do to help you?"

  Smith breathed a silent sigh of relief. "For starters, I need to find out where the people from this truck went."

  "The rest of my force is canvassing the area," Fishburn said. "I understand you're also looking for some people who were in white cargo vans?"

  "Right," Smith confirmed. "They're long gone by now, but if we can figure out what kind of vehicles they switched to we might at least be able to find out where they've landed in the city."

  "Well, there's one place in town that rents cars, plus a couple more within a ten-mile radius,"

  Fishburn said, forehead wrinkling in thought. "Is there anything to indicate they had any business here in Kingston?"

  "I think so, yes." Smith pointed at the truck. "If all they wanted was to ditch the truck, they could have had their friends pick them up someplace out in the woods. Fifty yards off the road, and we wouldn't have found it for a month."

  "Yeah, that makes sense," Fishburn conceded. "Your boss Powell's supposed to be sending me a photo of this Mrs. Whittier. Once we have that, we can start a more thorough search. In the meantime

  —" he lifted his eyebrows "—you never did get your lunch, did you?"

  Right on cue, Smith's stomach growled. "That can wait," he said.

  Fishburn shook his head. "There's no point in starting before we have that photo," he pointed out reasonably. "My people are already doing everything that can be done right now. He gestured back toward his car. "Come on," he said. "My treat."

  Smith gave him a tight smile. "And while I eat, you'll see if you can find out what's really going on?"

  Fishburn smiled genially, putting a hand on Smith's shoulder and giving him a gentle but irresistible nudge toward the car. "Something like that."

  "What if I can't tell you anything you don't already know?"

  "Then you're buying dessert."

  "God of heaven and earth," Stephanie murmured, her eyes wide in a suddenly pale face as she sat on one of the beds between Jonah and her husband. "Two hundred Warriors?"

  "We think it could be as many as that, yes," Fierenzo told her.

  "And you have no idea where they are?" Ron said.

  Even from across the hotel room, Roger saw Fierenzo's throat tighten. "Not yet," he acknowledged, his voice steady. "We're working on it."

  "Glad to hear it," Jonah said, only a trace of sarcasm in his voice. "And when exactly were you planning to bring in the real experts on Greens?"

  "If you mean the rest of the Grays, I don't know," Fierenzo said. "At this point I'm not even sure we should."
/>
  "You're not sure you should?" Jonah echoed. "Fierenzo, you're talking about a mass slaughter here.

  Two hundred Warriors—" He broke off, looking over at the three Greens and his brother Jordan, huddled together on the other bed. "Zenas, you tell him."

  "The Pastsinger memories of the last war indicate that a single Green Warrior can usually handle four to seven Grays," Zenas said quietly. "And there are, what, about seven hundred of you?"

  "Six hundred eighty," Ron said. "But only about four hundred of us are adults and teens who could fight." He looked over at his wife. "That includes the adult women."

  "Do the math, Fierenzo," Jonah said darkly, looking back at the detective. "With four hundred of us, the sixty Green Warriors we thought they had would have given us a six to one ratio, a pretty fair balance of power." He looked at Roger. "Two hundred Warriors is quick annihilation."

  "You have to warn them, Detective," Stephanie said, her eyes pleading. "You have to."

  Fierenzo sighed. "The problem is Nikolos," he said. "More specifically, what precisely he'll do if the Grays don't behave the way he expects them to."

  "What are you talking about?" Jonah demanded. "You mean if we don't dance to his tune—?"

  "Let him talk, son," Ron cut him off, his voice quiet but firm.

  "Thank you," Fierenzo said. "Let's say we do tell Torvald exactly what we think Nikolos's plan is.

  Do you think he'd bother sending people to upper Manhattan to counter what we all expect to be a feint? Or would he concentrate on defending the main Gray areas?"

  "Probably the latter," Ron said, nodding. "Yes, I see the problem. If we don't send a strong force to the northern end of the island, Nikolos will probably shift to another plan."

  "Exactly," Fierenzo said. "Unfortunately, we don't know what this Plan B is."

  "Are we sure we even know what Plan A is?" Laurel asked.

  "Not entirely, no," Fierenzo admitted. "But the pieces we do have will be useless once he realizes Torvald and Halfdan aren't playing ball. And at that point we won't have any handle on him at all."