There wasn’t supposed to be any Axis armor anywhere near this position. It was supposed to be massed up north, in Lebanon.
Worse, the armor was moving. The sound of the moving tanks merged in a single deep bass note. Evi’s crag resonated, and she felt the sound deep in her chest.
She hoped the rest of her strike team got a chance to use the uplink. Somehow intelligence had managed to misplace at least two divisions of Arab armor.
The armor stopped.
An infinity of sand sucked up the noise from the column. The only sound that carried to her was a radio from somewhere. It broadcast someone counting down in Arabic. For some reason, she felt an urge to look up into the moonless night sky.
A huge black glider flew in low, soundless, and incredibly fast. It was only in sight for a second or two, but she could tell, from the sloped lines of the thing, it was a stealth aircraft.
The count was on one hundred.
She told herself that air defense was going to get the damned thing.
Silently, the infantry that was accompanying the armored division took cover down on the ground or behind the tanks. The tanks themselves began to button up.
The glider was pointed at Tel Aviv, so of course air defense was going to get it. No Arab aircraft, all through the war, ever got that far into Israel.
The count was on fifty.
Evi had a very bad feeling.
Twenty.
She resisted the urge to look back to where the glider had gone.
Ten.
She felt warmth on her cheeks. She whispered to herself. “Please.”
One.
There was a blinding flash of white light from the west, behind her.
• • •
She jerked awake.
She wiped off her cheek and looked around the darkened theater. Little had changed but the movie.
It was still the same overheated musk-filled dark. The atmosphere made her feel sticky. She could smell three different species and counted seven other people in the seats. Only one of them, a ragged-looking moreau rat whose fur was coming off in patches, had been there when she’d ducked in the place.
A large and slightly blurred holo screen was showing an impossibly endowed canine moreau who was loudly and sloppily sodomizing a hefty human woman who was similarly endowed in corresponding areas. There was much rustling of fur and rippling of naked flesh.
Not all the moaning was coming from the screen, and the musty smell of fresh semen certainly didn’t come from the dog.
She squinted at the screen. She could tell from the short brown coat that the dog performing up there was probably Pakistani. The way his ear was flapping, she could almost make out the tattoo that would place the dog’s unit.
What the hell was she doing?
She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. Who cared what unit a porn actor used to belong to?
She wished she could have risked flying the Peregrine off of the island. But by now the aircar had topped out at its maximum ceiling and followed Seventh Avenue out past the Statue of Liberty. Where it should have found its rest, safe under the waves of the Atlantic.
She’d been in the porn palace for at least two hours before she had fallen asleep. She’d been waiting for the black hats, but the only thing that had caught up with her was fatigue.
That meant the NYPD, the black hats, and anyone else involved were still sorting through the mess and trying to figure out what had happened. Just like her.
She massaged her leg and winced. Her calf was beginning to swell, and she felt as if she had just ran a marathon. It seemed as if someone had used a belt sander on parts of her body.
She owed her life right now more to luck than to her own skill, and if she didn’t figure out what was going on, she would end up dead.
A human male was sitting two rows in front of her. He was grunting, and his seat was banging rhythmically. That was where most of the fresh musk was coming from. Wet sounds came from in front of him, out of Evi’s line of sight.
She tried to tune the guy out as she thought.
Assume two teams, the sniper’s team and the peeper’s team. The peeper’s team might only want to capture her. They could afford to hire those Afghani dogs as their front line. The Mitsubishis and the cyborg doberman showed they had access to old Japanese technology. The peeper had been speaking Japanese to someone. From the looks of things, to the guy with the doberman.
The cyborg doberman worried her. All the neural interface technologies were supposed to have been lost or destroyed by the Jap megacorps when the Chinese nuked Tokyo. That was twenty-some years ago.
The sniper’s team wanted her dead, period. The sniper’s team would have set the bomb in her Porsche.
That didn’t explain Frey. He showed up out of nowhere. He was living too damn close to her own address. He was too unconcerned about the coincidences.
Frey had known something.
Frey had obviously had some contact with David Price. “Price was right,” Frey had mumbled to himself. Price was a member of the domestic-crisis think tank she worked for. He was the one member who had deigned to meet with her socially, despite the fact that she wasn’t human.
Price was a political scientist. He specialized in conspiracy theories.
And Frey was worried about Hofstadter, her and Price’s boss. A German economist, of all things.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that Frey knew what had happened to her. He had been running flat out to the scene. What really bothered Evi was the fact that he seemed to know what was going on, and he was the only one running toward Evi’s building. He should have called in some Agency support before he dived in.
“Is the Agency involved?”
It came out in a whisper only she could hear over the grunts from the screen.
That was a frightening thought.
There was only one way to find out. She had to call in.
She put on her sunglasses, gathered the pack up from under her seat, and walked out of the theater and into the lobby.
The manager was sitting behind the concession stand. Huge and buddhalike, he watched her with jaded eyes. Then he bent to return his attention to the card reader in his hands.
The atmosphere under the yellow lighting was as moist and sleazy as that in the theater. A public comm squatted next to a magazine rack that held packs of garishly labeled ramcards. A sign above the rack read “NH/IS.” She noticed titles like “Animal Lovers,” “Lapdogs,” “Morey Love,” and the creative “Sex, Sex, Sex.” She slipped into the half-closet that housed the comm. From the smell, the place wasn’t just used for outgoing calls.
Someone had drawn a rather anatomically detailed erect penis on the screen of the comm. She didn’t figure the Agency would care. She slipped in one of her false bank cards and called the emergency number.
The screen stayed blank after she gave the number. It didn’t even show snow or a test pattern. Even with the dead screen, she could hear the soft electronic sounds of a connection being made.
“Aerie,” a voice announced. One she didn’t recognize. That wasn’t suspicious in itself. The Agency rotated controllers, often without notice. It had been six years since she’d contacted the field office. Of course she’d be unfamiliar with anyone who manned Aerie nowadays.
She started with her code designation, “Bald Eagle—”
“You’re on a proprietary comm channel. Where did you get this number?”
“What? This is Bald Eagle—”
“There is no Bald Eagle.”
Oh, shit.
The transmission was filtered, but she heard a voice in the background. “I DL’d her data image. Cut the comm before the channel is compromised. We don’t want any sampling of our encryp—”
There was a blue phosphor wink as the comm was cut.
/> The Aerie didn’t know she was an operative. She couldn’t come in.
“What the fuck is going on?”
For once, she was at a loss for what to do.
She looked out from the public comm booth and into the lobby of the theater. It was suddenly a totally alien environment. The artificial yellow light reflected off the pictures on the racks of ramcards. Contorted bodies took on the aspect of hieroglyphics. Transparent cases held devices of undecipherable purpose and origin. Evi stared at the leather-clad man perusing the “Bi, TV” rack of ramcards. He had slick leather boots that came to mid-thigh, a studded leather vest over a bare chest, a ring through one nipple, and a bulging codpiece. He resembled an inhabitant of another planet.
“Get a grip, Evi.” She echoed Abdel’s mental voice.
What was she going to do?
Price, she thought. Frey had mentioned his name, and Price knew her. She knew his address, she could call him. Would he be home? It was New Year’s Eve, of course he’d be home.
Evi called Price.
The message came back that Price’s home comm was not accepting any incoming traffic.
She slammed her fist into the side of the comm in frustration. The buddha manning the desk looked up from his card reader.
She called the think tank, Hofstadter’s private line. The office comm would forward the call to Hofstadter, wherever he was. She was leap frogging over proper procedure, but Aerie was supposed to handle things like this. If Aerie didn’t acknowledge her—
Hofstadter was in his office. Behind him was a man she didn’t recognize. “Isham, what’re you doing in Times Square?”
The way he said it made her suspicious. “I’m safe, but all hell’s breaking loose—”
“I know, I know. Have you called in yet?”
“Yes, but the—”
Hofstadter was reddening. “Damn, damn, damn!”
The man behind Hofstadter leaned over and whispered into his ear. “Gabe’s last report puts him ten minutes from target’s position—” She wasn’t supposed to hear it, but humans had a tendency to underestimate her capabilities.
Hofstadter pushed him back roughly, “Shut up, Davidson— Isham, get over here, to the think tank. We need to debrief you.”
She was backing away from the comm. Hofstadter? Frey had said, “Gabe, you bastard,” when she’d mentioned the sniper. Gabe was the sniper, and her boss and this man Davidson were running him.
“Isham,” Hofstadter was saying as she backed out of the booth.
As she headed to the theater doors, she could still hear him talking. “Davidson, you idiot, the frank heard you.”
Hearing Hofstadter call her a frank finally made the panic clamp on. She backed up to the doors feeling a hot iron band grip her sternum. It felt as if the world were collapsing in on her.
She could hear Hofstadter cut the connection.
She leaned against the black-painted lobby doors and went through the relaxation exercises that Abdel had taught her. She breathed deeply and closed her eyes.
Behind her she could hear the city noise over the moaning in the theater. The door rattled with the traffic on Seventh, the workers readying things for New Year’s, the sirens . . .
Sirens?
Evi opened her eyes.
Sirens were the ubiquitous city noise in New York, but these were getting louder, closer, and there were a lot of them. It could be anything.
But in her line of work, paranoia wasn’t only an occupational hazard.
It was a survival trait.
She opened the door and looked outside. The sun was a cold white spotlight that sucked the edges off the people on the street. The rows of porn palaces seemed to go on forever with their yellow signs and ranks of almost explicit holo displays that kept showing the same five frames, over and over.
And shooting down Seventh toward her theater were three NYPD aircars in tight formation, flashers and sirens going.
She slammed the black-painted door shut. The sirens kept getting louder. It wasn’t just the three cars either. She could pick out at least four more by the sound.
Gabe was supposed to be ten minutes away—
No, this wasn’t the sniper.
Could the NYPD be after her, too? She didn’t intend to stick around and find out.
However, Seventh was out.
Looking for an exit, Evi’s gaze passed glass cabinets of dildos, vibrators, and devices less comprehensible, as well as the endless racks of ramcards.
The manager was still watching her. The volume was peaking on the sirens, and the crowd noise was intensifying outside.
She was rapidly being cornered. She had two choices: go back into the theater or go up the stairs to the restrooms, balcony, and, presumably, an old projection booth.
The leather queen was staring at her, too.
She ran up, away from the stares. She was hoping the restroom had a window. She rounded the landing at the head of the stairs and pushed through the first door she came to.
The smell was overpowering. Five flavors of human and nonhuman excretion. She had to sidestep a drying pool of vomit on the rust-stained hexagonal tile. However, at the end of the short line of stalls, there was a small black-painted rectangular window. She made for it.
Outside she could hear the whine of feedback from someone opening the channel on a PA system.
She raised one foot and set it on a radiator that shed rust and flakes of white paint. Her nose passed in front of a piece of graffiti asking for volunteers to ride the hershey highway.
Outside she could hear a too-amplified voice. “. . . TESTING, ONE, TWO—” It degenerated into more feedback.
With her head even with the small window she scratched some of the black paint away from a corner with her thumbnail. Taking off her sunglasses, she put an eye to the hole in the paint.
Outside, the PA system squawked, “Attention. You have five minutes to release your hostages. Throw out your weapons and come out with your hands in plain view.”
She saw another window in a brick wall. It was about three meters away. She looked down, and there was already a group of cops swarming the alley below.
That was damned quick for New York. What the hell was going on?
And what was that bit about hostages?
All she knew was that one of her calls must have triggered the cops. But this response time was unheard of for the NYPD.
Unless all those squads were already there, primed and waiting for a call.
She sat down on the radiator in frustration. For the first time she noticed the row of urinals. She’d stormed the men’s room.
She had five minutes to decide what to do.
The patch-balding rat ran into the restroom carrying a large bag of something. He slid in the vomit, almost fell, and ducked into a stall, all without noticing Evi.
Over and over he was saying, “Damn, damn, damn pink cops . . .”
There was a rustling sound, and then the rat started flushing.
There was ringing feedback from the police PA system. “You have four minutes, come out with your hands in sight.”
If her time sense was right, the cops had just cheated her out of twenty seconds. Must have fast watches.
She took the silenced Mitsubishi out of the backpack and prayed that she wouldn’t have to use it on a cop. The rat came out of the stall without his package. He saw her and threw himself on the ground, groveling.
“Don’t shoot, harmless me, do nothing, don’t shoot.” The rat kept babbling, facedown on the filthy floor. Evi passed him and smelled the strongest concentration of flush she had been near since she’d been in Cleveland. The hallucinogen, flush, had the unmistakable smell of spoiled cherries.
As she slipped out of the bathroom, leaving the rat prostrate, she thought that it was an appropriate sme
ll for the john in a porn palace.
Her silent laugh hit her involuntarily.
Chapter 6
“Okay, Evi, the good news is that real cops don’t shoot human-looking people without warning.”
She covered the hallway with the Mitsubishi. No one in sight. The hallway led straight through the building, with a stairway at either end. It was bathed in red half-light that nearly hid the cracked plaster. The speckled-red carpet was worn through in places to the black rubber underside. Five doors, all on her right, toward the theater. The door at the other end of the hallway had to be the women’s room. The door in the center, the old projection booth. The doors flanking it must lead to the balcony.
“The bad news is, they’ve warned you.”
She made her way to one of the balcony doors and pushed through.
She made her way down the aisle and asked herself, again, now what! She had a slight edge in the dark, but she wasn’t trying to hold her position, she was trying to retreat.
Below her, chaos was brewing.
On the screen the Pakistani dog was spurting toward the audience, helped along by the tongues of his human partner and a female vulpine. The spectators down there weren’t paying attention. They seemed to have just realized that the building was surrounded by cops.
Two humans were fumbling toward the lobby in the dark. The guy who’d been sitting in front of Evi earlier was busy trying to get his pants on. Getting up from the floor next to him was a morey fox who bore a passing resemblance to the vulpine porn actress who was now licking the semen off the dog’s fur. Two human women were running down the aisle toward the emergency exits.
Of all of them, the vulpine seemed the calmest. She was dressed like a streetwalker, and Evi supposed she’d been through raids before.
All of a sudden, Evi heard a gunshot.
Who the hell was shooting? That shot was going to bring the cops down on the theater faster than the actresses were going down in the movie here.