Repairman Jack [10]-Harbingers (24 page)

"Profit isn't everything. There's the matter of respect, which is very important to this man. I'll call him. Maybe he'll be less upset if he should have advance notice, although much in advance this is not."

"Thanks, Abe. I'll make it up to you some way."

He broke the connection and glanced at the departure board. Still had half an hour before takeoff. Should he call Gia?

Probably best not to. Better to explain in person instead of a cryptic phone conversation. He didn't think he was unreasonably paranoid. With his pay-as-you-go TracFone, calls were traceable to his number but not to him, since all subscribers were anonymous. But his calls weren't encrypted and were traceable to whomever he called. With Homeland Security and the Patriot Act in swing, no telling who might be listening in.

He'd wait till he was ready to stop by, then call Gia to give her a heads-up that he was back in town, and tell her he'd explain everything in a few minutes when he got there.

He wondered how she'd take the news. She'd been ambivalent about his new identity, but would she see the sudden change in plans as a lack of commitment to the baby?

No. She knew better. And she'd understand once he explained his reasons.

The call came over the speakers that his plane was boarding.

6

Ybarra, one of the yeniçeri on duty, placed a folded copy of the morning
Times
on the Oculus's desk.

"As requested, sir."

"Thank you."

As Ybarra left, the Oculus picked up the paper but did not unfold it. He feared the headline. If it said nothing about the Bay Ridge apartment, the woman and the child would have another day, perhaps more, to live. But if the story was there…

He took a breath, held it, then unfolded the paper. The air blew out of him in a choked
whoosh
when he saw a headline identical to the one in the Alarm.

He closed his eyes and lowered his head. He'd have to gather the yeniçeri. He'd have to tell them about the Alarm. He'd have to send them out to kill that woman and child.

The Oculus rested his elbows on the desktop and pressed his eyes against the upturned palms. At times like this he wished he hadn't been born with the gift. Because, in its own way, the gift was a curse. The Alarms could not be ignored—the Ally saw what was to be and demanded action. The enormity of the responsibility was appalling. If he kept the Alarm to himself, what would be the consequences? The Ally was not capricious. If it told him that a situation had to be addressed, then that was what must happen. To ignore it would be tantamount to aiding and abetting the Otherness.

He wished he were like any other man, wished he could wake up in the morning and go about his business without the crushing burden of the gift, without worrying about when the next Alarm would sound.

But the only escape from the Alarms was death. At times he'd considered that option, but then he'd think of poor Diana, and of how his mantle would fall on her shoulders when he was gone. He wished to spare her for as long as possible. For that reason alone he vowed to live to a ripe old age.

But now he had to deal with the matter of the Alarm.

He buzzed downstairs. Ybarra answered.

"Gather the yeniçeri. We've had an Alarm."

7

Gia hung up her coat and rubbed her hands together. Cold out here.

She'd put Vicky on the school bus and had scurried back to the warmth of the house. She filled the kettle and turned on the TV. A little tea, a little news, and she'd get to work on the studies for that dust jacket.

Over the years Gia had developed good working relationships with the art directors of a number of publishing houses. Sometimes she received detailed instructions on what they wanted; other times, like this one, she received no directive beyond, "Something bucolic, with a house in the woods."

She'd dipped into the manuscript they'd sent her—a dreary tale about a middle-aged college professor's extramarital affair with a student—until she found an obsessively detailed description of the woodsy retreat that served as their trysting place.

Now all she had to do was come up with a couple of rough ideas, dab a little paint on them to show the color scheme, and bring them in. The art director would choose one, make his comments on composition and color, and then Gia would begin the actual painting. Sometimes it was a chore, sometimes it was fun, but either way, commercial art paid the bills, leaving her time for her personal paintings.

But working on anything today would be difficult. Maybe impossible. Jack hovered over her thoughts. She wondered how he was—
where
he was—and if everything was going as planned. He'd sailed off into the unknown not for himself, but for the baby. He was trading everything he'd struggled to become, everything he was, for fatherhood.

She blinked back a tear and flipped through the channels until she came to
Headline News
. She stopped there for a quick rundown of what was going on in the world. Too-familiar footage of the smoking crater in the Staten Island storage facility flashed on the screen. She was raising the remote to switch the channel when the scene shifted to a view of a brick-fronted apartment house. "Bay Ridge" popped onto the upper left corner of the screen.

"—
BI officials have revealed that traces of the same compound that caused the Staten Island explosion were found in an apartment in this building in Brooklyn along with Arabic writing on the walls
."

Gia felt her gut clench—and that seemed to spur a kick from the baby. The so-called "terrorism expert" who followed didn't make her feel any better.

"From the amount of plastic explosive estimated in the Staten Island blast, I think we can assume that these individuals were out to do a lot of damage. Nothing like nine-eleven, of course, but considerable."

Gia rose and turned off the kettle. What if there were other "individuals" with other caches of explosives? If so, she didn't want Vicky locked down in a school if all hell broke loose.

She hurried to the closet. It wasn't rational, and it was most likely an over-reaction, but she didn't care. She wanted her little girl with her today.

Looked like Vicky would get a second day off this week.

Gia's hand stopped in midreach for her coat.

A second day off… like yesterday. The explosion had occurred the night before, and Jack had been intent on keeping Vicky out of school. He'd said it was because he was leaving, but had there been more to it? In the demimonde he moved through he often picked up rumors and tidbits of news before they hit the papers.

She'd have to ask him when he got back. Right now she was going to catch a cab and head for Vicky's school.

8

As Jack waited for his bag, he couldn't help thinking of the last time he'd been in a baggage-claim area… how he'd left to get the car… how he'd returned to a charnel house.

But that had been LaGuardia and this was Atlantic City International: pretty far down on the list of terror targets, he imagined. Still he couldn't wait to get back to the car and wrap his fingers around the grip of his Clock.

He found his bag and carried it to his car. He dropped it in the trunk, opened it, and removed the Altoids tin he'd bought at a convenience store near the airport.

The first thing he did when he got behind the wheel was check for the Glock in the clip under the front seat. Still there. He patted it. Welcome home.

Then he opened the tin and tipped out the Starfire within. Here was why he'd checked his bag instead of carrying it on. If the security folks at the gate were doing their job, they'd have wanted to examine the contents of a metal case they couldn't see through, small though it might be. But checked bags weren't put under that kind of scrutiny.

He turned the round over in his hand a few times, then pocketed it.

Next up, call Gia.

He'd planned to wait until he was back in the city and just a few minutes from her door. But en route he'd seen the headline about an apartment in Bay Ridge in his neighbor's Miami
Herald
. He'd borrowed the front section and learned that the FBI had broken the story about the connection between the apartment and the explosion. The article also mentioned the Arabic scrawl Jack had seen on the wall. It translated as,
God is Great. Jihad forever
.

Swell.

The mood back in the city would be tense—only a tiny fraction of what it would have been had the cockroaches succeeded—but Gia might be worried for herself and Vicky and the baby. He figured she'd be more comfortable knowing he was around.

He tapped in her number.

No answer at home. He didn't leave a message but called her cell phone instead. Again, no answer. This time he left a message.

"Hi, Gi, it's me. Things didn't work out with the trip so I'm headed home. I'll explain everything when I get there. See you in a few hours."

He broke the connection and sat there.

Odd. He could usually get hold of Gia at one of those two numbers. She wanted to be always available should the Vickster need her. The only time she'd leave it home or turn it off was when she was with Vicky.

A vague unease settled on him. He started the car and gunned it toward the exit. A two-hour drive lay ahead of him, longer if he hit construction.

The unease grew stronger.

9

"A woman and a child?" Cal said.

The thought turned his stomach.

"Not just a woman," the Oculus said, his expression bleak. "A pregnant woman."

Cal groaned. Even worse.

He and about a dozen other yeniçeri had gathered on the first floor and stood in a semicircle before the Oculus. Miller had been called but wasn't answering his phone.

What was happening? Cal wondered. Some of the Ally's Alarms over the past few months had been pretty damn strange. More than strange—disturbing. The young girl, the Arabs—okay. That was the sort of thing he expected, the kind of work that made him proud to be a yeniçeri. The girl and a lot of New Yorkers were alive today because of those two Alarms.

But this…

"Are you sure we aren't supposed to stop this from happening?"

The O shook his head. "I was shown a yeniçeri behind the wheel."

Cal looked around for Miller but he hadn't arrived yet.

"I don't get it. First that woman back in November, then—"

"It is the same woman."

Cal heard Zeklos's voice whisper, "Oh, no."

He looked at him. Zek's face was ashen, his lips trembled.

"Thanks a lot, Zek," Hursey said. "Now one of us has to pick up after you."

"Shouldn't even be here," Jolliff muttered.

Both were Miller buddies.

"Let's not get sidetracked," Cal said. He turned to the Oculus. "If this is the second Alarm about this woman, the Ally must think she poses a serious threat. Any idea what?"

The O shook his head. "None. Perhaps the baby…"

Yeah. Maybe the baby.

"Any idea about the father?"

Another head shake. "Again, none. But for all we know… maybe it he-longs to the Adversary."

There was a scary thought. But…

"Yeah. And maybe not." Cal thought of something. "These Alarms aren't infallible, you know. Look what happened last time. You saw a truck hitting this same woman, but it didn't. Zeklos missed her."

Everyone looked at Zeklos, some with naked hostility. The little man took a step back.

"It doesn't show
the
future," the O said. "It shows a possible or probable future. It shows me near things and far things, little things and momentous things. On Sunday it showed me explosions on buses and bridges—a future it wanted stopped. And we stopped it. But as you all well know, every so often it shows me a future it wants us to
make
happen. Like this one."

"So none of this is carved in stone."

"I don't think it can be. Because there's always the unforeseen, unpredictable variable of the human factor."

Again a number of the yeniçeri glanced at Zeklos.

But Cal couldn't stop wondering about the Ally's methods. In fact, the methods used by both sides. Neither employed full frontal attacks, no shows of naked force. Both pulled occult strings from behind the scenes, manipulating events through human agents.

Why? Why no overt aggression? Did they save that for elsewhere—pitched battles in interdimensional space? Were there rules for dealing with sentient species?

Cal had come to the conclusion that this cosmic game—and that was what it seemed to be—had no hard and fast rules, but rather guidelines that compelled each side to act without revealing itself. Perhaps they had a scoring system that awarded style points to the side that could gain or keep the upper hand with the most elegant medley of obscurity and élan.