After going two blocks, I turned left, went down the block and crossed at the corner, putting me on the same side of the avenue as the Con Ed van. I waited for a fairly large group of pedestrians to come my way and fell into step behind them, keeping to the inside of the sidewalk, away from the street. I took the extension cord from my pocket, tied a small loop at one end. As the group I was moving with came abreast of the van I cut across the sidewalk, ducked under the wooden barricade. New Yorkers are notorious for ignoring virtually everything that doesn’t directly concern them, so I wasn’t too concerned about being challenged by anyone but a cop as I hopped up on the running board at the back of the van. I dropped the small loop over the top of one of the handles on the twin doors, looped the rest of the cord tightly around both handles. Then I stepped off the running board, went around, and looked up at the side.
Any concerns I’d had about the van’s being nothing more than what it appeared to be were instantly dispelled when I saw the small, glass-covered viewing portals cut into the side of the van, partially disguised in the heavy block lettering of the Con Ed logo. I’d hit my mark, and now somebody, even if it was just a foot soldier, was going to pay for the murders in Seattle, after I got the answers to a number of important questions.
With a grim smile and wave up at the central viewing portal, I jumped into the cab of the van. I’d been prepared to hot-wire the vehicle, but somebody had thoughtfully left the keys in the ignition. After pulling up the seat as far as it would go, I turned on the engine, put the van into gear, and rumbled forward through the barricade, easing my way out into the traffic.
Checking the rearview mirror on the far side of the van, I could see that the unlikely sight of me hijacking a Con Ed van had finally attracted some attention; a knot of fifteen or twenty people were standing beside the broken barricade, some of them excitedly pointing in my direction. What I needed was some privacy and seclusion, things I wasn’t likely to find with a stolen van in the middle of Manhattan.
I cut across town to the West Side Highway, headed north. I kept checking in my rearview mirror, but I saw no cops and heard no sirens, and when I made it to the George Washington Bridge I felt I was home free—at least as far as pursuit was concerned. I still had some very dangerous cargo to handle.
I crossed the bridge on the upper level, got off in New Jersey at the Fort Lee exit. I circled on a ramp under the bridge, turned left on a street that led to the entrance to a park on the very edge of the New Jersey Palisades, overlooking the Hudson River. The park was closed for the winter, with a chain blocking off the access road. However, the weight of the van easily snapped the chain, and I rumbled in low gear up the snow-covered road into a tree-shrouded parking area. I turned off the engine and ran, slipping and sliding, back down to the street. There weren’t many cars, and I was hoping nobody would notice—or care about—the tire tracks on the access road. I pulled the chain taut, managed to tie the broken links together with my handkerchief, then ran back up into the parking area.
There was no sound from inside the box of the van—no pounding, shouting, or cursing, as might have been expected from a man or men who’d suddenly found themselves trapped and being carted around town to an unknown destination. I certainly hoped I hadn’t stolen the van when the owners had been out to lunch.
I went to the edge of the parking area and poked around under the bare trees until I found what I wanted—a long, firm stick. I trimmed one of the ends into a small fork, then returned to the van. I stopped a few feet to the side of the doors, drew my Beretta, and poked with my stick at the wrapping around the handles of the doors. It took some time and doing, but I finally managed to unwind the extension cord, leaving only the small loop over the door handle nearest to me. I threw away the stick and yanked on the extension cord. Both doors flew open, and in the same instant a fusillade of bullets poured out through the opening. I counted about ten shots in four or five seconds, from what sounded like two handguns. I waited until there was a lull in the shooting, then sucked in a deep breath, stepped forward, and peered into the interior of the van through a crack between a door and the side.
Inside the van, banks of electronic equipment lined two of the three walls; the men had not only been watching, but listening, probably by means of a bug somewhere in Garth’s apartment; telephone conversations could have been monitored by means of an NSA satellite. There were also cots, a portable toilet, and a small refrigerator—all the comforts of home.
Two men dressed in fur-lined leather coats were crouched toward the rear of the van, their guns pointed toward the opening. They must have caught a glimpse of my head, because suddenly they both turned their guns in my direction and fired simultaneously; one bullet ricocheted off the metal floor, while the other flew through the crack and passed just over my head. I fell to the ground, rolled to the opposite side of the van, came up firing. I caught one man in the chest, and the other in the right eye; both died instantly. I swung my gun up, leveling it on the barrel chest of the big man with the triangular face who was sprawled across the top of a bank of electronic equipment against the right wall, clutching at a ceiling strut for support.
“I’m coming down now, Frederickson,” the man said evenly.
“You do that.”
Gripping the strut with both hands, the big man swung down to the floor, landing easily on the balls of his feet just in front of the corpses of his two dead companions. Now he was all business, without a trace of the effeminacy he had displayed on the plane. Even standing still, and despite his formidable size, he gave the impression of someone with grace of movement, unexpected speed, and great strength. His face with its broad forehead was impassive, the pale eyes revealing nothing. If he was worried about what I was going to do to him, he didn’t show it—and that worried me.
The big man gestured disdainfully with his thumb at the bodies behind him. “I told them that what they wanted to do wasn’t such a good idea. You’re pretty clever, Frederickson. I believe I’ve underestimated you. I won’t do it again.”
“I don’t give a shit what you do, pal, as long as you’re doing it hopping on one leg,” I said as I aimed my Beretta at his right kneecap and fired. It was an accurate shot; the problem was that the big man didn’t stay where he was supposed to, and the bullet smashed into a computer console behind him.
With quickness matched in my experience only by Veil Kendry, at the moment I had pulled the trigger the man had grabbed the strut above his head, swung up and out of the bullet’s path. As I started to turn the gun on him for a second shot, I saw him release his right hand from the strut and flick his wrist. I knew enough to duck, and the star-shaped shuriken whistled through the air just above my head, slashing open my parka across the shoulder blades. I came up ready to fire, then had to fall to the ground as pieces of electronic equipment came hurtling out of the mouth of the van and crashed all around me. Something sharp and heavy hit my right shoulder, sending a spasm of pain up into my neck. I pushed the tape recorder off me and jumped to my feet, firing blindly into the mouth of the van. When I’d emptied the Beretta, I crouched, dropped it into my pocket, and whipped the Seecamp out of my ankle holster. Then I slowly straightened up, peered around the edge of one of the doors into the van.
The big man was gone.
I spun around, gun shoved out in front of me, and looked for footprints leading away from the van. There weren’t any. I suddenly realized where he was and started to turn back, but it was too late. There was a soft thud just behind me as the man leaped down from the top of the van. I was halfway around when steel-hard knuckles hit me squarely on the spine, at the base of my neck. All strength and feeling abruptly vanished from my body, and I toppled forward on my face into the snow.
With that single blow the man had snapped my spine, I thought, too much in shock to release the scream that was building in me. The only sensation I had was the cold of the snow on my cheek and in my mouth; in an instant I had become nothing more than a head on a useles
s body. I didn’t know if I had the courage to spend the rest of my life strapped in a wheelchair, and I hoped the man would finish the job and kill me.
“It’s true what they say about you, Frederickson,” the big man said casually. “You’re a real pain in the ass.”
I tracked him with my eyes as he walked to the front of the van, climbed up into the cab. The van started up, rumbled forward and over the rocks that served as a border around the parking area. It kept going through a snow fence, across the park toward the edge of the cliffs. The van never slowed as it crashed through the last barrier separating it from a three-hundred-foot drop and disappeared from sight.
The gunfire might have been muffled by the snow and trees, but the sight of a van toppling off the Palisades into the Hudson River was certainly going to attract attention, and probably cause a monumental traffic jam, on the George Washington Bridge, just below. I wondered how long it was going to be before a squadron of police cars came screaming into the park.
For a few moments I thought the big man had missed his timing and fallen into the ice-choked river along with the van. I had not seen him jump out, but after a few seconds his imposing figure rose from the ground. Casually brushing snow from his coat, he started to walk back toward me.
The big man was quite a magician, I thought. One of his tricks that I particularly appreciated was the one in which he apparently hadn’t crushed my spine after all, but only struck some particularly sensitive nerve cluster to paralyze me temporarily. I still wasn’t ready to do any polkas, but a blessed chill was beginning to creep along my fingertips and palms, and emanate up into my groin. Also, like oases in a desert of numbness, there were patches of what felt like prickly heat over the rest of my body.
The butt end of the Seecamp poked out of the snow a few inches from the fingertips of my left hand; if feeling continued to return, I was going to have a trick or two of my own to show the magician.
The big man walked up to me, crouched down, casually resting his forearms on his knees, so that I could see his face. He seemed totally unconcerned about the gun, although it was closer to me than to him. “Where the hell is Kendry?” he said distantly, looking around him as if he half expected Veil suddenly to materialize from the snow or surrounding trees—a prospect I found most inviting, if improbable.
“You’re asking me?”
“It was a rhetorical question.”
“Who are you?”
“Ah, I don’t think I want to tell you that, Frederickson. Knowing my name would only distract you and your brother from your primary job. In fact, I’ve already become an unfortunate distraction to you, and I regret that. I want you to find Veil Kendry for me, and after that matters will take care of themselves. You can forget about me now, because you probably won’t ever see me again; as I said, I won’t repeat the mistake of underestimating you.”
“I may not see you, but you’ll be around.”
“Of course—but there’ll be nothing you can do about it. I’m not a threat to you and your brother, unless you again choose to make me so. My only interest is in flushing Kendry, and I believe you have the best chance of doing that. He seems to be leading you along a trail, at the end of which he—through you—will have accomplished whatever it is he wants to accomplish. The sooner you reach the end of that trail, the sooner he’ll come out of hiding.”
I could feel cold in both arms now, but the rest of me was lagging behind. I knew I wouldn’t have more than one chance to get the gun, and I wasn’t ready to take it yet. “Why did you have to kill those people in Seattle?”
“I didn’t. I was on the plane with you, remember?”
“You ordered it done. It’s the same thing.”
“I didn’t order it done. The fee for my performing that sort of service is far too high to warrant using me for that kind of relatively simple operation. In fact, I didn’t even know about the killings until I overheard your conversation with the florist. Those killings were performed by someone else.”
“But you reported on where I’d been, and the people I’d talked to.”
“Yes. That I did.”
Now I could feel cold spreading along my belly and up into my shoulders. I grabbed for the Seecamp. With the speed of a striking snake, the big man’s hand shot out and snatched the gun out of the snow a fraction of a second before my hand got there. He ejected the clip, removed the round from the chamber, then flipped the gun back to me. “Here,” he said quietly. “Put that in your pocket with the Beretta. I certainly don’t want you to be defenseless.”
“Fuck you,” I said, struggling to work myself up into a sitting position. “If you’re so anxious to get to Veil Kendry, and you’re using me to do it, maybe I’ll just stop looking.”
“That would be a mistake, Frederickson, because then you would be pitting yourself against me instead of doing your job.” His voice, a soft, almost soothing baritone, suddenly took on sharp edge. “The chances that you and your brother will eventually survive this business are, in my opinion, nil. However, the only chance you do have to survive is to keep going. There are others who want to kill you now, so in a very real sense you and your brother are on a rapidly spinning treadmill; try to stop, and you’ll be broken. You already know far too much to suit these people, and the only reason you’re alive right now is because I’ve been able to convince them of your usefulness. But I didn’t say you were the only way to find Kendry. Still, you’re obviously the key player in a game Kendry’s chosen to play. Therefore, I want you to keep playing. If I decide that you’re only going through the motions, or are taking steps to protect Kendry from me, then I will retaliate by killing your brother as quickly and easily as I killed Colonel Po.”
“An intriguing threat,” I said, trying to get to my feet. My nervous system still wasn’t ready to handle that, and I slumped back down into the snow. “Why don’t the two of us hop into a cab and go down to his station house right now? Then you can deliver that threat in person. Garth will get a big kick out of it.”
“I don’t deliver idle threats, Frederickson.”
I believed him. “You killed Po?”
“Yes. That operation did require my skills.”
“Look, if you’re so damn anxious to find Veil, why don’t you help me? Give me information I can use. Who are you working for?”
“The names of the men who actually hired me and take my reports would mean nothing to you; they’re just fronts. For you to try to untangle all the blinds and double blinds in this chain of command would be a monumental waste of time.”
“All right, you untangle it for me. You have a very good idea of who’s behind the whole thing, don’t you?”
The big man’s thin lips curled back in a quick, disdainful smile. When he spoke, there was scorn in his voice. “Of course. It’s a man I’ve done special assignments for in the past. He never felt the need to hide his identity then; now he thinks he’s being clever. Actually, he’s a cretin who’s well equipped for certain kinds of work, but not for what he’s doing now. He’s way out of his depth. A man should know his limitations, and this one doesn’t. This man fights best in dark places; in the dark, he’s a savage and efficient alley fighter. But he doesn’t do well in the light; not well at all. That’s why, in the end, his whole strategy was doomed to failure from the beginning.”
“Why do you work for a cretin?”
The big man looked genuinely surprised. “For a great deal of money, of course. Also, in this case, I’m looking forward to meeting Mr. Kendry. I’ve heard a great deal about him.”
“I’d love to have you meet him, pal. You may be bigger than he is, but he’s better. He’ll shove your head up your ass.”
The big man laughed. “Spoken like a loyal friend.”
“You expect me to play Twenty Questions? Give me the name of the cretin.”
“I think not.”
“Why the hell not?! Why should you play games with me? You say you want to find Veil, fine. You want me to get to the
end of the trail, fine. Help me. The name of the man who wants Veil dead is the key to the box of secrets Veil wants me to open.”
The big man shook his head. “What you say is probably true, but knowing the name would only be another distraction.”
“Let me be the judge of that. Just give me the Goddamn name.”
“No.”
“Damn it, that’s insane!”
“Frederickson, there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that, if I gave you the name, you’d go after that man instead of tracking Kendry. That would accomplish nothing, except to quickly get you killed for your efforts. If you’re killed, then Kendry will abandon the game and simply do what he could have done in the beginning—hunt the cretin himself. Kendry could get to the man and kill him, but not without being killed, or captured, himself. That scenario is not at all in my interest.”
“What the hell are you talking about? You want Veil dead; according to you, that’s how he’d end up. What other interests do you have? What the hell difference does it make to you what I do with the information you give me?”
“It’s not important, Frederickson. Don’t worry about anything but following the trail Kendry has laid out for you.”
“Some trail. Why the hell did you kill Po? He could have given me a lot of the information I need.”
“I was asked to kill the man, and I was paid my fee.”
“You afraid you’re not going to get your money if somebody else kills Veil?”
“No. I have already been paid my full fee. But I take pride in my work, and I have a certain reputation to uphold if I expect to continue being paid my customary fees in advance. The kinds of people who hire me listen to reports of how assignments like this are carried out.”
“Then it’s future earnings you’re worried about?”
“Now I think you’re beginning to understand. I don’t want anyone else doing my job for me.”
Two Songs This Archangel Sings Page 13