City of Ice

by John Farrow

  “Wrap him. Keep him warm.” Cinq-Mars tore off his own belt, slung it around one bloody stump, and pulled with all his strength. He knotted the belt, then used a screwdriver off the workbench there to twist the tourniquet until the wound did not bleed so much, and he lodged the screwdriver in back of the belt. LaPierre had lost quarts. He wasn’t giving him much of a chance. Déguire had his belt off by the time Cinq-Mars finished, and they did the same for the other stump. Mathers stood guard, waiting for a Hell’s Angel to show, wanting one to show, longing to drop a few before the day was done. “All right,” Cinq-Mars decided, “we leave him. Help’s on the way. We can’t do anything more.”

  “Come on, Émile, we can’t just leave him,” Mathers objected.

  “That’s what they want. To stall us and divide us. Bill, I don’t want this happening to the woman. She’s only a kid.”

  Mathers considered that aspect and changed his mind.

  “Understand, this is a diversion. They want to slow us down and separate me out. They have one of two objectives, maybe both. One, they want to escape. Two, they want me dead. I expect them to take another shot at me before making their break. I don’t intend to let them be successful.”

  “Where do we look first, Émile?”

  “Follow me.” He had his own memory of the ship’s plan. This time they walked quickly, moving targets, unpredictable and quick. He led them down a flight to the level of the engine room, and they huddled there behind a bulkhead. Cinq-Mars made another phone call. “Make contact with the ship’s captain. Shut the vessel down for two hundred seconds. All electricity. All air. Lights, everything. For exactly two hundred seconds I want perfect quiet. Got that? Over.”

  He looked into the faces of his young colleagues. “Load up, Alain, you’re short.”

  Jacking another mag settled Déguire down, although his fingers quavered. He was scared, but he looked like the Grim Reaper, while Mathers’s big brown eyes had bulged to the size of pucks. “What’s up, Émile?”

  “For all we know they’re off the ship already. The leader’s meticulous, we’ve seen how he’s cleaned up a crime scene. He probably has a way out we don’t know about, that nobody knows about, not even that captain. He’s old KGB, remember, not some doofus choirboy with the Hell’s Angels.”

  “So?”

  “I think he might want another shot at me. I think he wants me down. I could be wrong. But he needed to buy time and he’s bought it. All we can do now is assume he’s still aboard and interfere with his plans.” Cinq-Mars punched a number on his phone but didn’t send the call. “He asked me to call him back. When the lights go out, I will. When the lights shut down, we enter the engine room. Why’d he bring us down this far if not to pull us down farther? We work our way through the engine room in the darkness and quiet. Keep an ear for André’s cellular to ring. That’ll clue us if the guy’s aboard, maybe where. I’ll talk to him. I’ll call him back. You move on the sound. When the lights snap back, go. Keep one eye high, always. They like snipers. Remember, Julia comes out alive.”

  The shutdown did not occur as automatically as he had expected. First they heard the ventilation system expire, then various generators that warmed the giant holds. Finally the electricity was cut and the ship lay in darkness and utter silence.

  “Hand on the shoulder of the man in front. Let’s move.”

  He had memorized the way and made it across to the door without a fumble. Cinq-Mars opened the door. They entered the mammoth engine room, and what they hadn’t counted on were the backup emergency lamps aglow here and there. The gloomy lights cast strange and ominous shadows. He did not know if the light would help or hinder, but for now the lamps guided them through the dark and they moved across to the protection of a scaffold of pipes. Cinq-Mars pressed the Send button on his cellular.

  Away in the distance a cell phone twittered.

  Cinq-Mars discerned the shapes of his two young officers moving up.

  “Mr. Cinq-Mars?” the phone voice answered.

  “What do you want?” he asked, hushed.

  “You’ll die here today,” the man whispered, “or you’ll deal.”

  “What deal is that?”

  “The identity of the third party LaPierre was raving about. I want the foreign agent, M-Five, his name, rank, outfit, and address. What do you want?”

  “The woman.”

  “Yes, she insists she works for you. I fucked her mouth. You still want her?”

  Cinq-Mars waited.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even up. The woman for the foreign agent. Keep your phone turned on. I’ll be in touch.”

  He terminated their connection.

  In a crouch, Cinq-Mars moved swiftly through the dark. He was out of time. Above and alongside them rose the silent machines, as though this room was a mortuary for pistons and power. Someone caught his coat and he gasped. It was Bill Mathers.

  Cinq-Mars punched the Redial button for LaPierre’s phone again, but this time the call did not go through. His prey had not fallen for that ruse twice.

  Mathers and Déguire had maintained visual contact with each other, and Déguire signaled that he was moving up. Hunched over, Mathers and Cinq-Mars chose a different slant toward the same general area. In the faint gloaming they spotted other forms, other men crouched and waiting, scanning the black universe for signs of life. The cops had so far remained invisible to them. Next to Cinq-Mars, Mathers indicated that he would cross a space to gain a third advantage on the viper’s nest. Cinq-Mars agreed with a nod.

  Despite the open space, the darkness here was sufficient cover, but he was only three-quarters of the way over when the lights flickered on and Bill Mathers was hit by sniper fire erupting from the steel rafters. Déguire and Cinq-Mars concentrated their fire aloft and brought down the shooter, his body wrenching backwards, then slumping forward and contorting grotesquely on a rail. The rifle fell, clanging in the brightened works and echoing like bullets ricocheting.

  “Cover me!” Cinq-Mars yelled. He already saw the retreat of the tall, dark-haired man, and others, including Julia, backwards out of the room. He had foiled their ambush. Similarly, the gang had withstood his own attack. He changed clips on the go.

  A burst of gunfire caused Cinq-Mars to slump to the floor of the ship, and Déguire silenced that volley with a burst of his own. That shooter ran, passing through the same exit as his friends.

  “Bill!”

  Cinq-Mars turned him over.

  Mathers was breathless with fright and pain, his only wounds to his vest. “Holy. That hurts.”

  “Can you stand? Let’s get out of the open.”

  He needed help but managed to shuffle to a sheltered abutment.

  “What happened?” Mathers begged to know. He was holding the burning points on his chest.

  “She’s alive, Bill. She’s still alive. Her hands are tied behind her back, they’ve got her with them, but she’s alive. Did you see her, Alain?”

  Déguire had run over and was shaking as he drew a hand across his lips. “Her mouth is taped.”

  “Go!” Mathers urged them. “Go! I’ll follow if I can.”

  Cinq-Mars and Déguire ran in pursuit, and Mathers hobbled behind them. They took the door with extreme caution, knowing that each delay gave advantage to the Czar. The door opened onto a stairwell. The only direction was up, but they couldn’t spot anyone through the grillwork above them. The stairs exited at many levels, and each had to be checked. Cinq-Mars had the sinking feeling that he had lost them. Higher up—he’d lost track of the floors—he found the hatch used to depart the ship, riding a basket pulley, now cut, to a platform under the pier. In the darkness, in a labyrinth unknown to him, where the pursued had all the keys and the hunters would encounter only locks, Cinq-Mars knew that he’d lost them for good this time.

  He breathed heavily, Déguire at his side. Stared at the abyss. Mathers came alongside eventually, panting, hurting. “What now?” he deman
ded. He feared that his partner had quit.

  “He wants to trade Julia for the CIA guy,” Cinq-Mars told him. “That should keep her alive for a while. As long as she doesn’t give up Norris herself.”

  Mathers slumped against a wall to nurse his pain. “What do we do?”

  “We wait.”

  Mathers was half-laughing, half-weeping, shaking his head and muttering.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I nearly got blown up today. I did somersaults in a car. I seen some things—André’s cut-off legs. I got shot—vest or no vest, it hurts like fucking hell. Now you’re telling me that all we can do is sit on our asses and wait?”

  “It’s called police work, Bill.” Neither Mathers nor Déguire could tell if he was being serious, bitter, or wry.

  Cinq-Mars put his pistol in his pocket and confirmed that his cell phone was open to receive. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s check out life on deck. Prepare yourselves. There’ll be shit to pay for this.”

  Mathers was given a hand up, and the weary men mounted a gangway topside.

  The survivors, and other detectives, hung around in the common area outside Cinq-Mars’s cubicle, putting their feet up on chairs and desks to give their bones a rest. Tremblay had finally been released from the hospital—in the initial blast he’d suffered cracked ribs and a concussion, had been ordered held for observation, and unlike Cinq-Mars, had acquiesced. Only Déguire had not been roughed up during the day, but he was mentally whipped. He’d killed a shotgun-toting Hell’s Angel and contributed, along with Cinq-Mars, to the death of another, the sniper. Déguire had never deployed his weapon in the line of duty before, and periodically he shook. He was pale, knotted up. Occasionally he’d flash on LaPierre’s legs, shunted to a corner, blood soaking through the cloth of the trousers. Nobody was letting him go home alone.

  The bruises that Mathers had suffered in the blast were discoloring quickly and beginning to swell. He constantly moved his hands to his face as if to make sense of his pains. He’d recovered from the shots to his bulletproof vest, but any time he wanted to move his left arm he lifted it first with his right hand.

  Cinq-Mars tilted a chair back and rested both feet on a drawer jutting out from a colleague’s desk. The department had opened its war room down the hall—what was really an event room intended to cover demonstrations and riots—but no sign of the young woman or her abductors had been reported, and no one really knew who they were looking for.

  All the news was bad. André LaPierre had died. The Russian had called back and, expecting to be taped, had reverted to speaking with an accent. “Third party I want where to me I find him. In exchange, you to get girl. Call me between midnight and two minutes after with decision. You to use André’s number. When I see you come through your end, get girl back. Not until.”

  A murderous choice.

  The phone rang in Cinq-Mars’s office, and he struggled to his feet. He slouched in the doorway to his cubicle, studying the black device on his desk. He didn’t like the possibilities. He knew the Wolverines were hunting him down, anxious to be debriefed. Possibly they wanted to skin his hide. He hadn’t slept in twenty-five hours and couldn’t sleep now and wasn’t up to being questioned by cops with a grievance. He’d already been grilled on the biker deaths aboard ship, although in that climate the interview had resembled a celebration rather than an interrogation. In time, he well knew, that would change. His caller could also be Sandra, who phoned regularly to plead him home. He picked up.

  “Émile. It’s been a day.” Selwyn Norris.

  In his weariness he was breathing into the phone. “I’ve lost her twice,” he admitted.

  “I’ve got more bad news.”

  He didn’t want to hear it. Émile Cinq-Mars planted a fist on his desk and supported his weight. “Tell me.”

  “My doorman spotted a suspicious vehicle leaving the garage—a van that had no business inside. With all that’s gone on today, he thought I should be informed.”

  “And?”

  “I took your warning to heart, Émile. Checked my Q. Fortunately, I thought to use the passenger door to gain entry. Émile, it’s wired to blow. I now require the services of the Bomb Squad.”

  Cinq-Mars covered the mouthpiece with his palm and stretched the phone cord to the edge of his cubicle. He whispered through to Tremblay, “Bomb Squad, at the ready.” The lieutenant-detective jumped into action, and other officers began rising to their feet.

  “Seal the garage off until we get there, Mr. Norris. Let nobody in. Make sure everybody’s out.”

  “I’ve taken care of that. Émile, do you understand what this means?”

  Cinq-Mars listened to dead air awhile. “Yes.” His voice had gone hoarse.

  “Émile, I’m going to disappear.”

  “All right. Leave your car keys with the doorman. Make sure he doesn’t take the car for a spin.”

  “Done. I’m sorry, Émile.”

  “Yeah,” Cinq-Mars told him, and he was not feeling particularly vindictive, “I’m sure we’re all very sorry.”

  They hung up.

  Tremblay had joined him in the cubicle. “Tell me.”

  “Mountain Street. Alain and Bill know the address. Inside a garage, there’s an Infiniti Q Forty-five wired to blow. Wait!” Everyone froze. “This is a hit by the Angels. They trigger by remote, they do that a lot. That could mean we have to sneak the squad in and scan the street for a bomber.”

  Tremblay and Déguire left on the run. Only Mathers hung back with his partner.

  “Émile, can’t we turn this in our favor? Now that they know Norris by name and address, they can give us back the woman, or trade for something else.”

  Cinq-Mars rose to his feet. His body felt utterly fatigued, his mind bruised and blasted. “That’s not what this means, Bill.”

  “Why not?”

  “Norris might’ve been important enough to them that they’d be inspired to give us Julia back. That was a genuine hope, Bill, but nothing else rates. They didn’t find him so fast through Lajeunesse. Look how long it took us after we had identified the car. If they fingered Norris, it’s because she gave him up. Who can blame her? She lasted a helluva lot longer than André, and André was a rough boy. She had to have witnessed what happened to him. But the second she gave up Selwyn Norris, that instant, she signed her own death warrant.” He looked to one side, saw his own reflection in the window. “She’s gone, Bill. We lost her. God, I hope it’s swift. I pray we don’t count the pieces.”

  As the import of the news dawned on Mathers, he arched his back and neck and let his head drop forward. He wanted to scream, he wanted to tear the walls down. Instead he slumped into the chair again and held his head in his hands. Cinq-Mars merely turned and continued to stare at the window, as though his very soul and not merely his reflection was trapped between the panes. He felt the young woman’s death in his throat and heart, and he couldn’t see a thing outside.

  In the common area on the other side of the partitions, they heard the rush of voices and the frantic bray of commands.

  “Wait,” Mathers said, reviving. His head remained downcast, but he had raised a hand, letting it waver in the air. “You told me one time that we wouldn’t give up on that woman until we found her in a closet with a meat hook through her heart. That hasn’t happened yet.”

  Impatient with him, generally devastated, his anger only beginning to swell, Cinq-Mars wasn’t in the mood for false optimism. “Don’t be naive, Bill.”

  “No.” He commenced a chopping motion with the hand, raising his head. “No, Émile, listen. You’re right. She never could have held out against them. When the Russian called you the last time, he already had the name. He asked you for a name he already knew. They never could wire that bomb this fast. They already had Norris.”

  Cinq-Mars was interested. “You’re starting to think like me, Bill.”

  “When you call back at twelve, you’re free to give him Selwyn Norris, be
cause he has him anyway. He has something else on his mind. He wants something else.”

  “Sure. He’ll make me listen to her scream, like he did with André.” He didn’t want to think about André screaming.

  “He’s only testing you with Norris. To see if you’ll come across. He has something else in mind, Émile. We still have air.”

  He didn’t know if it was fatigue or a pervading sense of despair, but Cinq-Mars didn’t last long with the new wrinkle. He rejected the promise of hope. “I won’t know what he has on his mind until I call back, and when I do I won’t like it.”

  Tremblay poked his head in. “The action’s under control. We’ll go in by the street behind.”

  “It’s only a car. Don’t get anybody killed.”

  “Listen, Émile, I’m sorry, but the Wolverines are here again.”

  “Get off it.”

  “I can’t hold them back forever.”

  Émile Cinq-Mars put one hand on his forehead, covering an eye, as though the next word he intercepted would blow his skull off. He peeked first at Mathers, then at Tremblay, and a way out occurred. “Rémi, Bill has a perspective on the bomb, thinks it might open a door for us. Tell the Wolverines I have to go on-site, top priority. I need an edge before my midnight call.”

  Tremblay was happy to accept any viable excuse. Cinq-Mars had saved his life that afternoon, getting the bomb out of his car. As he’d said to him when they were both in the emergency ward awaiting treatment, one out of two isn’t bad. They had never figured on the truck. When that blast had gone off and they’d smashed around in the tumbling car, he had counted himself out. The last thing he remembered was reciting the names of his children. “I’ll tell their captain. Radio silence, Émile. Go in by Drummond. Promise me you won’t stop off—no expeditions. You look like shit cast in lead and cooked in a microwave.”

  The detectives didn’t say much on the drive back to Selwyn Norris’s apartment block. Cinq-Mars had forty-six minutes to kill before his midnight call and didn’t relish spending it talking to Wolverines. They’d want his full report—Norris, Julia, his excuses for invading the ship, for making a deal with the Czar without consulting them. They might want to arrest him for overstepping his authority—to punish him for not joining them. This beat that. They located the path the Bomb Squad was using to get to the rear of the building from the next street over and ran into Déguire there. Somehow, strangely, the three were glad to be reunited, as though what they’d been through required a slower form of separation.