End Day (11 page)

“Confirm green light?” their spotter asked them both. This to make sure they had all heard and understood the order to apply lethal force.

“Confirm,” Balwan said.

“Confirm,” Carter repeated. He again slowed his breathing and slipped into a routine, a ritual that had become second nature. He snuggled into the buttstock, then dropped the rifle's safety.

“Laser targeting on,” Gaspers said.

Carter flipped the switch at the same instant as Balwan. Laser beams shot across the yawning divide between the buildings, above the deserted Manhattan street. Red dots jostled over the same one-inch space on the outside of the heavy glass.

“On three...” Gaspers said, his binocs locked on the distant window.

As their spotter began the countdown, Carter added the backbeat, which was his timing cue. One-and, two-and...

On three the Barrett roared. Carter didn't flinch; he hit the back beat with smooth finger pressure, and the Remington bucked into his shoulder.

The sound they created together was
boom-bam!
So tightly spaced it could almost have been a single shot and quick echo.

Downrange, the big pane of glass blasted inward. Four feet of its surface turned opaque in a crude circle. A puff of glass dust twinkled as it fell down the front of the building.

Working from the same rhythmic count, unspoken, from the same playbook, memorized, Carter and his partner rained down hell.

Boom-bam!

Boom-bam!

 

Chapter Twelve

Holding the fat sandwich, watching it drip juice in a puddle on the table, Ryan couldn't help but remember the beefy cheesies from Shadow World's Gloomtown—a sad, sick, toxic and eventually fatal joke on a starving-mad, expendable populace. Although similar in general shape, what he held in his hand was not powdered rock disguised as animal protein and perfumed with synthetic chemical aromatics. It was the real nukin' deal.

The fabled double bacon cheese.

Something loudly and endlessly discussed over countless hellscape campfires while skinned Norway rats sizzled with sharp sticks jammed up their butts and skanky root veg roasted on open coals until their skins turned black. The predinner conversations always hit the same central themes, speculation more or less elaborate depending on the amount of joy juice the campers had swallowed.

“I heer'd they was four inches high and eight across't.”

“I heer'd they weighed two pounds each.”

“I heer'd you could build 'em anyway you wanted, pickles, no pickles, extry grilled onions, fried egg on top.”

“I heer'd they came wrapped in special boxes like old-time birthday presents.”

The double bacon cheese was something Ryan Cawdor never thought he'd live to taste.

The first bite was so astonishing, he had to fight to keep from just wolfing down the whole thing. He chewed that bite slowly, eyes closed, savoring the blend of flavors and textures.

This was what the fuss was all about.

He swallowed, then picked up a strip of golden fried potato and bit it in two. It was hot, crispy on the outside, soft in the middle. A man could cry, it was so good.

On the other side of Vee, Mildred spit out a big mouthful of hamburger.

“Down!” she shouted. Then she rolled off her chair to the right.

There was no mistaking the nature of the situation. The six companions—Ryan, Krysty, Mildred, Doc, J.B. and Jak—had fought together so long, had survived so many surprise attacks that their responses were instinctive and instantaneous.

As Ryan twisted to his left, butt sliding off the chair, the ten-foot-tall, six-foot-wide pane of glass directly across the room from him shattered with a loud, crunching pop. Seemingly in the same instant, a heavy slug slapped the wall above him, and an inch from his right shoulder, the chair back took a center hit and rolled backward on its casters.

At the end of the table, the newest and least seasoned member of the team didn't instantly react to Mildred's warning. Jak lunged up from the floor, smashing Ricky with a shoulder, knocking him off his chair and onto the floor.

Ryan glimpsed the window, which was crazed, top to bottom. A single fist-size hole was in the middle of a wide, milk-white circle. One hole, two shots.

Longblaster fire. It was coming from the rooftop across the street, and they were sitting ducks.

To his left as he snatched his Steyr Scout by its sling, a second pane imploded, sending a whoosh of glittering glass shards across the floor. But he and the companions were already moving low and fast for the exit.

A third window collapsed, also to his left. The table shuddered as a bullet carved an ugly furrow across its width, spraying his head with splinters. Realizing the direction the shooters were team-tracking, he turned 180 degrees and grabbed Vee by the collar. As he dragged her the other way, she reached for the tabletop and grabbed her Desert Eagle and holster.

The shots that came after were wild, a big blaster and a smaller one, no longer coordinating fire. Tempered glass deflected the bullets. Working alone, neither shooter could put lead in the bull's-eye. Mildred ran in front of them for the exit. She slapped the light switch on the way out, plunging the room into darkness.

Pushing Vee ahead of him, Ryan cleared the doorway and put the hallway wall between them and the longblasters.

Down the brightly lit corridor, the other companions leaned against the same wall. None of them appeared to have been hit. Head-size holes had been blown out of the wallboard by the big longblaster. White powder and bits of plaster decorated the magenta carpet.

“Who is shooting at us?” Vee asked. “Is it Magus?”

“Snipering at us is not really Steel Eyes's style, my dear,” Doc said.

“Certainly not with enforcers playing on the team,” Mildred said. “It's more likely the NYPD. They probably have been on to us for a while. The security guards downstairs were wearing sidearms. Rent-a-cops don't usually come strapped like that. I should have put two and two together, but I didn't think it was possible for them to locate us that fast. Got to figure by now they have the building completely surrounded and an all-out assault on this floor is imminent.”

After a quick breath she said, “Are we really going to kill police?” She seemed disturbed at the prospect.

“They don't have a chance of getting past this weekend alive,” J.B. said. “But we do, if we can get back to Vee's apartment in time to jump back to Deathlands.”

“If we let them take us now, we're as doomed as they are,” Ryan told her. “We'll be turned to dust along with everyone else, and Magus will win.” As always he was thinking like a natural-born Deathlander: sec men were sec men, no matter the uniform or the flag they fought under. Raise a blaster, pay the price. It was the survivalist code. The companions had every right to live, even if it meant someone else had to die.

The shooting had stopped for more than a minute. It was the lull before the storming.

The attackers didn't want friendly-fire casualties.

They were coming; Ryan could feel it.

* * *

ESU L
EADER
Lieutenant Thomas Holmes stood with head lowered, eyes closed and his Glock 19 in his black-gloved fist as he got the report from Team Alpha's spotter through his earbud. It was not what he wanted to hear. He listened with disbelief, then a flood of anger. “How could you have missed them all?” he said. “Goddammit, I should have taken the shot myself!”

He let his fingertip slide off the com link.

And the cherry on top: Team Bravo had waited on the emergency stairway landing for a couple of minutes to confirm the snipers had stood down.

He keyed his com link again and said, “Go, go! All units go!”

He was first through the fire door onto the floor, pistol supported in both hands. At the opposite end of the hall, the other fire door was just banging back. The elevator doors slid open, and the car disgorged more ESU officers.

Kneeling behind and bracing their riot shields on the floor, they created bulletproof cover for their comrades to leapfrog. Holmes stationed men at the three entry points to keep the perps from doubling back and using them to escape. From either end of the floor, ESU moved from door to door, room to room, closing in on the central point of the conference room. As they conducted their headlong search, there was no clatter of automatic gunfire, only shouts of “Clear! Clear!”

Minutes later the entire force met beside the hallway entrances to the conference room. It was wall-to-wall men in black. Holmes looked at the faces of those closest to him. Their eyes were wide with shock and anger—the trapped perps had seemingly gone up in smoke.

“Check this floor again. Start over,” he said. “Check the heating vents, the ceiling. Every goddamned inch. They've got to be here.”

Sweeping off his balaclava, he turned on the light in the conference room.

A cold breeze was flowing through the breached glass panels. There were numerous bullet holes in the wall, overturned chairs; the fast food left behind on the long table was still warm.

No blood.

No sign of them.

“Where the fuck did they go?” he said aloud.

Chapter Thirteen

Vee pushed from the wall and waved for the others to follow. “This way,” she said in a voice that she hoped left no doubt she knew exactly what to do. She took them across the corridor, through a doorway and into a small, well-appointed anteroom with a posh desk and chair, phone, computer, file cabinets—the domain of the publisher's executive secretary. She quietly closed access to the hallway, then led them past the desk and through double floor-to-ceiling walnut doors that opened onto her boss's luxurious office suite.

From the corridor outside came the cheery ding of the elevator. Heavy boots tramped down the corridor. It sounded as if they were being invaded by an army.

Vee reached across the wide desk and snatched up a key from the base of the green-shaded lamp. Crossing to the rear of the room, she motioned to the private washroom and ushered the others inside. It had a white marble floor, countertops and backsplash. The walls were dark walnut paneling. There were no windows. There was no other exit. She pulled the door shut.

“What in nukin' hell are we doing in here?” J.B. asked as he took in the surroundings.

“A reprise of Custer's Last Stand, perhaps?” Doc suggested.

Vee ran a fingertip along the edge of the wall until she found the latch. When she pressed it, the entire panel popped open on concealed hinges, revealing what looked like a very narrow gray metal elevator. The front spanned just six feet. She slipped the key in the doorframe's lock. When she turned it, a motor whirred and the metal doors opened from the middle, revealing a car longer than it was wide, but just barely. The enclosure was lit by a bulb in an opaque circular housing in the ceiling.

“Get in, hurry,” she urged.

Seven bodies brushed past her and packed into the small space, toe-to-toe. She pulled the external panel closed as she backed in, then pushed a button on the brass console. The doors slid shut. Then the car began to drop.

They were all pressed tightly against one another. There was hardly any air to breathe, and what there was smelled like unwashed bodies, gun oil and burned cordite. Doc stood behind her, young Ricky in front—the teenager was almost nose to nose with her. He had a serious but rapturous look in his brown eyes, as if he was trying to drink her in. Doc was trying to make conversation in her left ear. He wanted to know how she had learned about the secret elevator and where “by the Three Kennedys” it was going to take them.

Meanwhile, something hard was poking her low in the back.

She hoped to hell it was the silver lion head of his cane.

“It's a long story,” she said over her shoulder, trying to shift away from the prodding, verbal and otherwise.

In fact it was more than a long story; it was the
same
story.

It had come from the publisher's Strike Force Thirteen covert-military-action series and a novel penned by none other than Kyle Arthur Levinson, the same author she'd had lunch with earlier—it was difficult for her to comprehend how radically her life had changed in just a few short hours. The writer had thought it would be hysterical if Strike Force Thirteen blew up his publisher's offices, killing everyone and everything—down to the mail clerk and the potted plants. The company seemed to attract authors with adolescent senses of humor, so that in itself wasn't a problem. The problem was Levinson had the Strike Force heroes base jumping twenty-two stories while the whole building exploded above them—this in full view of the NYPD, who had the building cordoned off with squad cars, ESU and sharpshooters. In Levinson's novel the heroes managed to land without a scratch and then escape three hundred cops on foot, while trailing their chutes behind. There was no explanation for this remarkable feat. Not even an attempt at explanation.

Chomping on the butt of his cigar, the publisher had glanced up from her synopsis of the absurd climactic scene and said, “Fire this fucking idiot, then fix it.”

Easy for him to say.

Levinson had numerous book contracts outstanding; he was one of the most prolific writers in the stable, so practically speaking, he couldn't be fired, at least not in the short term.

And Vee was the one who had to figure out and then write a new ending to the novel. Levinson couldn't be trusted to do the revisions himself; that had been tried before, with disastrous results. The setting of the final action scene had to stand as written; the whole plot had been leading up to the building's destruction. She had to find another way for the heroes to escape.

And it had fallen into her lap.

Enter Ivana, a stunning, leggy, blonde Russian woman in her early thirties, who the publisher said was an up and coming literary agent. In Vee's experience, New York literary agents could almost always speak English and usually wore clothes under their knee-length sable coats. When the publisher introduced Ivana to her, the Russian had uncrossed, then recrossed her long legs while lounging in one of the executive suite's leather armchairs—it was an indelible, Sharon Stone–
Basic Instinct
interrogation moment. Only there was no way to tell if Ivana was a natural—down there she was shaved as smooth as a baby's bum.

A week later, in the middle of a major publishing crisis, Vee had barged past the executive secretary before getting clear permission to breach the inner sanctum. As she'd entered, the door to the private washroom had been swinging shut. The publisher's face a furious purple, he'd jumped to his size-seven feet from the leather couch. Before the shouting had begun and she'd been driven from the room, Vee was certain she'd seen a smear of red lipstick on the fly of his gray pinstripes.

In her four-inch heels, the publisher's presumed mistress had to be a foot and a half taller than him—hard to miss. Ivana had never entered the floor from the main elevators, but Vee could always tell from the lingering scent of her expensive perfume whenever Ivana paid a secret visit to the boss in his office.

So she'd figured there had to be another way in and out.

It had given her a quick fix for Levinson's unbelievable ending—just add a hidden elevator and put Strike Force Thirteen in it—but by then, her curiosity had been piqued. She'd called the elevator company that serviced the building. And had gotten nowhere. They'd denied the existence of a fourth elevator. But after she'd circulated the question to friends on other floors, a woman who worked at an ad agency upstairs had pulled her aside and told her about the
real
private elevator. The ad execs used it to sneak call girls in and out, during and after business hours.

The publisher never used it as an entrance or exit himself. He came and went via the main elevators along with everyone else. It was for special access only.

Once Vee had started her after-hours search, it had taken her all of ten minutes to find the secret catch along a seam of the washroom's wall. The spring-loaded panel had swung out, revealing the elevator doors and a conventional key lock. She'd already known where the key was. Her boss was, if anything, predictable. He kept the key in plain sight on the tooled brass base of his antique, bankers' desk lamp. Since no one else knew about the elevator, there was no reason to go to the trouble of hiding it.

Doc was still whispering in her ear when the car lurched to a stop. The panels opened silently—there was no telltale ding. Vee stepped out of the sardine can into a short, windowless corridor that ended in a heavy metal door and took a deep breath of fresh air.

“Where does this lead?” Ryan asked as he moved past her to the barrier.

“Not to the parking lot,” she said.

She'd figured that out on her first trip down, long before she'd ever reached the bottom. If the entrance/exit door had opened onto the parking lot, call girls would be videoed driving in and out, and they'd need the key code to open the gate. No way would big-time execs give hookers that access. They would need to be in complete control, ride down in the car, take their entertainment back up with them, return them the same way—all without being seen.

Vee moved to the metal door, inserted the same key and unlocked it. The door opened outward; the hinges were on the inside. It didn't open far, a little more than a foot, then it hit something solid and stopped.

Peering around the door's edge, she saw the side of a white-and-red EMT truck, blocking the exit. It was parked very close to the wall, no doubt to allow other traffic to move past. Its idling engine made a steady low rumble.

Without a word, she squeezed through the opening.

Down the alley, a hundred feet to the right, was a squad car. Its light bar was flashing, but there was no one inside or standing nearby outside. She pushed the door back a little, creating a crack between it and the vehicle so she could look in the other direction.

The main police presence seemed to be concentrated inside the building's parking lot. Through the bars and wire of the security fence, she could see at least a half-dozen squad cars and that a black ESU van had pulled in past the gate. The EMT truck's tall, boxy body and the open door completely blocked them from line of sight. It was a narrow window of opportunity. Their rear was totally exposed.

“Come quickly,” she said to Ryan and the others. “The police can't see us. Get into the back of the truck. There's probably a driver sitting inside in the front. He or she needs to be prevented from raising an alarm.”

Jak easily slipped through the gap between door and frame. Moving by her, he opened one of the rear doors and disappeared inside. Vee expected some evidence of a struggle, the truck rocking on its suspension, maybe a cry for help or a thud or two, but there was nothing. When she climbed into the back of the vehicle with Ryan and J.B., Jak was holding a short-bladed black throwing knife to a terrified young EMT's jugular. The blue-uniformed man had his hands raised in surrender.

“Don't kill me. Don't kill me,” he pleaded over and over.

As the others jumped in and shut the back doors, Ryan and J.B. pulled the unresisting paramedic into the rear compartment and pushed him onto a seat on one of the two gurneys. Mildred found rolls of surgical tape in a medical kit, and they bound his hands, feet and mouth before strapping him down.

“Don't give yourself a heart attack,” Mildred told the EMT as she leaned over him. “Try to relax. As soon as we're clear of the police, we'll cut you loose unharmed, I promise.”

“Who's going to drive this wag?” J.B. said.

The answer was obvious: Vee was the only one who knew the city. She shouldered him aside and got in behind the wheel. The statuesque redhead followed her into the front compartment, climbing onto the passenger seat.

“Brace yourselves,” Vee said as she buckled her safety harness, then reached for a pair of switches on the dash. The truck's siren screaming and its light bar flashing, she dropped the engine into gear and stomped the gas. As she barreled past the cordoned-off parking lot, the uniform cops standing around turned to look, but they didn't jump in their cars and follow in pursuit. An EMT vehicle leaving a crime scene Code Three was not unexpected.

At the mouth of the alley, Vee braked hard. “Hang on!” she shouted over her shoulder, then cut a right turn onto an empty street. The truck's rear end fishtailed wildly. For a second she thought she was going to lose control and roll the damned thing. She heard her passengers slamming into the walls and floor as she powered out of the skid. Over the engine's howl, her new friends were cursing her. In her headlight beams, at the end of the long block ahead, was a barricade of parked, white squad cars. She was doing fifty, sixty, then seventy, and the barrier was coming up fast. There was no choice—she couldn't stop and chat. She aimed the truck between the front bumpers of facing vehicles in the middle of the row. If the heavy wagon hit with enough force, it was possible she could knock the lighter cars aside and plow through.

Seeing her speed, seeing the flashing lights, hearing the siren, the uniform cops hopped into their vehicles and backed them out of the way, clearing a path for her just in time.

She shot the gap, holding a steady seventy-five, roaring down the wide avenue's center line. In front of her, for as far as she could see, was more empty nighttime Manhattan street, deserted sidewalks. When she checked her side mirrors, there was still no pursuit.

They'd somehow managed a clean getaway, just like the one she'd written for
High-Rise Hell
, except for the exploding building, of course. It made her want to laugh, so she threw back her head and let fly.

Krysty looked over at her as if she was stark, barking mad.

As they approached the next corner, Vee slowed to a sedate thirty and turned left. After going another two blocks at moderate speed, she turned right, then shut off the siren and lights.

They rolled along in silence. Even though they were now well away from the action, traffic was extremely light for the time of evening. A car here, a car there. No taxis, no city buses at all. She guessed people were keeping off the streets because of the terror attacks.

“Hey, Vee,” Ricky said from the back. “How did you learn to drive this wag so good?”

“Well,” Krysty corrected him automatically.

“Research,” she said.