Safe House (36 page)

When she came to me, I told her what it would cost to be my partner.

W
hen Pryce walked in the front door of Mama’s restaurant, he instinctively held his hands away from his body. Whatever he was, he had a pro’s nose—he knew he was one wrong move away from an unmarked grave.

He walked the gauntlet, past Mama’s register, past Clarence and Michelle sitting in one of the front booths, past Max the Silent wearing a waiter’s apron, past the Prof, although he couldn’t have seen the little man unless he looked under one of the tables. If he had, he would have seen the double-barreled sawed-off that was the Prof’s trademark back in his cowboy days.

They had his face now. Had his walk, his webbed fingers, the skull beneath his skin. Had him all, every piece of him. And soon they’d have his voice. They could pick him out of a crowd even with the best plastic surgeons in the world doing their work.

And he knew it.

But he kept on coming, right to my booth in the back.

Mama kept her position at the register. I’d already had my soup. And she didn’t serve it to outsiders.

He sat down. The muscle under his eye jumped. I knew by now it wasn’t an anxiety tic. Probably the last plastic-surgery job had gone a little wrong, damaged some of the nerves in the area. I wondered why they’d never fixed his hands.

“I know how to do it now,” I told him, no preamble. “But now it’s time to find out who you are.”

“What does that mean?” he asked, even-toned.

“You ever wonder,” I asked him, “if it’s only terrorists who have enough balls to drive a truck loaded with explosive?”

“I don’t get your meaning.”

“I’ve got a plan. But it needs something I don’t have. Six heroes.”

“Heroes?”

“Six men—six people, I guess they don’t need to be men—willing to drive trucks loaded with death.”

“You don’t mean—?”

“It’s the only way it can work,” I said, watching my unsmoked cigarette burn in the glass ashtray. “Lothar ever tell you who was in charge?”

“No. He said it was a collective. Everyone equal.”

“I think it’s this guy Scott. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s got to be the way you figured it. Six of them drive the rigs, plant them around Federal Plaza. The last one, he’s in the van, waiting for the pickup. Only thing is, there isn’t going to
be
any pickup. Soon as he knows they’re in place, he’s going to hit the switch. There goes the building. And the evidence.”

“So we have to interdict—”

“No. Sure, they’re going to have to convoy it—in case one of the rigs breaks down or something. And they have to
all
be in place before they detonate too. But what makes you think everything’s parked right near where they’re holed up? Odds are they don’t want to be bringing trucks over the bridges at that hour. Trucks aren’t allowed on the Brooklyn Bridge anyway. They got to have at least some of them stashed in Manhattan. Or just the other side of the Battery Tunnel—there’s plenty of warehouses around there. And the van, it has to be close by, right on top of the action. I don’t know the range of the radio detonator they’ve got, but it can’t be that far, especially with all those tall buildings around. What we need to do is take them down as soon as they park and separate. And we have to do it
quiet.
If the guy in the van hears shots, he’s gonna hit the switch and book.”

“But if the detonator man doesn’t hear anything, he’s going to wait a little bit and—”

“And blow it up. I know. That’s where your heroes come in. Some people say you’re a bounty hunter. A free-lancer working for cash. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know. But you had enough juice to make the cops and the media play along with the Lothar thing. So I figure you’re something else.”

“Such as?”

“Such as a . . . I don’t know a name for it. But every government needs people who can work outside the law. And I figure, that’s you.”

He didn’t say anything. The muscle jumped in his face a couple of times, then went as quiet as he was.

“There’s only one thing that’ll absorb that much explosive without killing everyone around,” I told him. “Water. You need to clear a path. Right to the river. The Hudson’s the closest. It’s only a few blocks. You need to take out the drivers. No gunshots. No noise. And you need six people to drive the rigs right to the river. Right
into
the river, it comes to that.”

“Six people to drive trucks loaded with explosive? Knowing that any second they could just vaporize?”

“That’s about it.”

“And what about the man in the van?”

“He’s the only one who we don’t know where he’ll be, right? He’ll be close, but that’s all we can count on. The way I figure it, he’ll probably wait until the first one of them comes back. That’s the only way he’ll know they’re all set up. Or maybe he’ll just have some time limit of his own.”

“It would have to be volunteers. . . .”

“Sure it would. You got that kind of people?”

“Yes,” he said, no inflection in his thin voice. Not saying anything about the hard part. Anyone who’s served in the military knows the U.S. government will let you die. They watch soldiers die all the time . . . for some general’s ego or some country’s oil. But there was only one way to stop all the Nazi drivers without making noise. And if that went wrong, it wouldn’t just be expendable soldiers who lost it all. Whoever gave
those
orders . . .

“I need something else,” I told him.

“More than . . . ?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

When I told him, he didn’t say anything.

“It’s time to lay them all out,” I said. “Face up. You got a handkerchief on you?”

He took a clean white one out of the side pocket of his suit jacket, not saying a word.

“Stand up,” I said. “Put your right foot on the chair over there.”

He did it. I took out the key to the ankle cuff and twisted it. The white patch was underneath, undisturbed. “Take the handkerchief,” I told him. “Peel that off. Carefully. Wrap it up tight. Don’t touch it.”

He did that too. At a gesture from me, he sat down again.

“When you get back to wherever you’re going, get that to a lab.”

“What will they find?”

“You know what a Nicoderm patch is?” I asked him.

“Yes, a time-release dose of—”

“That one is too. Only it’s not nicotine it was dispensing. You left that one on for thirty days, you’d be a dead man.”

He didn’t say anything, but the pupils of his eyes deepened.

“We’re all in now,” I said. “No more bargaining. No more threats. We’re a unit now. A hunter-killer team. I don’t know your game, but you know mine—I need Herk out of there. Alive.”

“But we can’t—”

I leaned forward and told him how he could.

And wished I had a god to pray to that I was right.

F
antasy haunts prison. At night, inside the cells, if you could see the pictures playing on the screens inside men’s heads, you’d see everything on this planet. Other planets too.

Some convict fantasies are sweet. Some are freakish. Some are beyond lunacy. But some are so common they’ve become classics. And if my old cellmates could see me . . .

Lying on my back on a king-sized bed in a luxo hotel suite, a beautiful naked woman on either side of me.

But they were holding hands across my chest, giving each other comfort in the presence of a man who had none for either of them.

Late Saturday afternoon.

Hard darkness outside. Soft darkness in the room.

When I tuned out the words, their girl-talk was soothing. My eyes were closed. I tried to drift into their mingled scent. Lose myself.

Time stood there, laughing at its joke.

Like when I was Inside.

Was my brother already gone? I was back in the foster home, waiting for my mother to come and take me away from the terror. Knowing inside me she never would and . . .

The phone rang.

Vyra sprang from the bed like a tigress, grabbing the receiver before the first ring was done.

“Hello?”

A split-second pause, then: “Oh, honey, am I glad to hear from you! When are you—?”

This time she listened a little longer before she said: “I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to—”

He must have told her to shut up, because she went quiet for a long minute. Then she took a deep breath and said softly: “Hercules, will you do something for me? Some little thing, just ’cause I miss you so much?”

He must have said okay, because she came right back with: “My scarf? You know, my pretty pink scarf? The one you said smelled like me? Would you wear it?”

The next words out of her mouth were: “No, I mean, wear it
anywhere,
darling. Just so I know it’s
with
you, okay? Then I’ll feel like I’m with you too.”

I don’t know what he said to that. Vyra replied, “Me too. I . . .” and put down the phone. “He hung up,” she said to me and Crystal Beth, her voice cracking around the edges.

“
T
his will be hard for me, mahn,” Clarence said. “It would be better if I did the—”

“Well, you
can’t,
baby,” Michelle said, honey and steel intertwining in her perfect voice to form an implacable ribbon.

“It is not right,” the islander said, trying to push his will past hers. “It is my job to . . .”

“What?” I asked him, trying for edgeless calm. We were too close to the flashpoint now to play around.

“I am the man,” Clarence said. “And Michelle is—”

“What?” she asked this time, the honey gone from her voice.

“My sister,” he said quietly. “My little sister. Who I love so much.”

Michelle stood up. Walked around the side of the booth and kissed Clarence on his ebony cheek. “Little sister’s gonna be just fine, baby,” she said calmly. “You just show me how to do it, and I’ll make you proud.”

“
I
f I knew the frequency, I could jam it,” the Mole told me, standing next to Terry in his underground bunker.

“But we don’t have—”

“This is a scanner,” the Mole said, holding up a box with a few rows of square LEDs. “I think I know the type of transmitter they must be using. If the range is narrow enough, maybe . . . but he has to have it armed. If he waits to arm it until the last second, there is no chance.”

“We can’t risk it,” I said.

“But Michelle . . .” the Mole said softly, fear driving the science from his voice.

“What is Mom gonna—?” Terry asked, picking up the Mole’s fear like it was forest-fire smoke.

“It’ll be fine,” I told the kid.

He ignored me, looking to the Mole.

“She will,” he promised.

“I have to be there,” the boy said. Only it wasn’t a boy speaking anymore.

I looked at the Mole. We both nodded.

M
ax was as angry as I’d ever seen him. No matter how many times I explained it, he chopped the air in a violent gesture of rejection.

“You know how it’s got to go,” the Prof said, agreeing with me. “We only get the one toss. We need a natural. And you can’t roll snake eyes with three dice.”

But when I signed that over to Max, his nostrils flared and his face went into a rigid mask of resistance. He wasn’t buying.

We went round and round. The mute Mongolian wouldn’t budge. Finally, he made a complicated series of gestures to Mama. She bowed and went off. When she returned, she had a stalk of green in her hand, some kind of plant I didn’t recognize. Max pulled out a chair, set it in the middle of the restaurant floor, pointed at it for me to sit down.

I did it. Mama licked the back of the green stalk and pasted it to the front of my leather jacket, right over the heart.

I sat there. Max walked up to me. I watched him carefully. Nothing happened.

Max held up the green stalk in his huge hand . . . the hand I’d never seen move. Making his point.

I held out my hand for the stalk. Gave it to Mama. “Put it back on me,” I told her.

She licked the stalk again, slapped it down over my heart.

I motioned for Max to step back. Further. Further still. Until he was at least ten feet distant. Then I made the gesture of rolling up a car window. Sat looking through the imaginary glass. Made a “Now-what?” gesture.

The warrior’s eyes narrowed to dark dots of molten lava, but he couldn’t penetrate the problem. And he knew it. If Max could get close, he was as unstoppable as nerve gas. But if they saw him coming, it was over.

He bowed. Not to me. To the reality we faced.

“
W
e can’t bring no outsiders in on this. Family only,” the Prof said in his on-the-yard voice. “That means we ain’t got but three ways to play. The Mole don’t jam, you got to slam, Schoolboy. Otherwise, Michelle’s gonna—”

“I know that,” I told him.

“You got to be the monster, my brother. Wesley’s gotta be there, you understand?” Telling me there would be no El Cañonero this time—he wasn’t family.

“I won’t miss,” I told him.

“You do, we’re all through,” the little man said, hand on my shoulder.

I
t was chilly on the roof, but I was colder inside. Sunday morning, three hours past midnight, the sun still a couple of hours short of Show Time. The primitive part of my brain pressured me to check in—howl at the moon just to hear the return cries and assure myself that my pack was close by—but I kept my hands away from the cellular in my coat. No traffic on the street, no traffic over the airwaves—that was the deal.

I made myself relax. Fall into the mission. Slow down. Think of something warm. Last contact with the other world: Crystal Beth, chasing Vyra out of the hotel bedroom with a hard smack to her bottom, giggling at Vyra’s squeal. Then coming over to me.

“It’s time,” she said. “You can do it now. I want you. Before you go, I want you.”

“I—”

“You
can
do it, darling. Hercules is alive. You know it now. I want . . .”

“What?”

“Your baby. I want your baby. I want your life in me no matter what happens. I swear to you, Burke. Listen to me: This is a holy promise. I will be a wonderful mother. I will protect our baby with my life. Our house will always be safe. Please, honey. Come on. No matter what happens, your child will have your name. You’ll never die.”