Blackjack Dead or Alive (The Blackjack Series Book 3) (9 page)

I almost drilled him, but instead fished a couple of Euro out of my pocket, not bothering to look at the amount and slapped it solidly into his hand. He lurched a little with the impact, and I froze, afraid I had hurt him, but he looked at the wadded bills in his hand and laughed. “Thank you, Signore,” he said with a canting tip of his head. “Enjoy Vienna.”

Acrid fumes chewed at my nares as I stepped onto the platform. The soldiers were less than twenty feet from me, but they were facing away, their attention on the two main entry ways onto the platform. Each were guarded by pair of Vienna police in tactical armor and helmets, rifles held low. Other officers, clad in dark blue uniforms, were calling out firm directions I didn’t understand, beckoning towards their cordon.

My delays on the train cost me any chance of getting lost in the crowd. Few people were left on the train, and what should have been a busy platform was nearly empty. The remaining passengers trickled towards the police cordon in loose packs, and for the second time in as many weeks, I was stranded alone, except this time, I was the island. I wanted to hunch my shoulders and stare at the floor as I started my own exit, but those were tells as old as crime. My next instinct was to slip through with the other passengers, but I towered over the next tallest person in the room who wasn’t wearing powered armor. After scuttling a few steps, I held my head up, tried to aim my eyes away from the soldiers who were scanning the platform behind heavily tinted faceplates, and tried to keep an easy pace.

Maybe it was the extra burst of adrenalin, lighting me up like the world’s most potent hit of cocaine, or the constant sitting in train cars. It was probably my impromptu skydiving. Whatever it was, sharp pain edged its way up and down my hips, starting at my coccyx and radiating down the joints through my legs and into my knees. I had to slow my step, my molars grinding as I tried to focus on keeping one foot in front of the other.

Sweat dimpled on the insides of my thighs and under my arms, the winter coat a tanning bed set to full power, the duffel bag I could have tossed into the sun weighed more than the plane I had thrown myself out of. I worked to smooth my features as I came within a few feet of the officer who was herding the crowd off the platform. Young, her hair in a tight bun that never bobbed as her head swiveled about; her voice hoarse from what must have been a solid twenty minutes of naturally projecting her voice into a space rife with artifact.

Her eyes were lasers though, and they locked on me as I approached the line of yellow police tape. I was barely shuffling, and each step was costly. I could hear my teeth grinding like a saw reverberating in my skull and bit down on the inside of my cheek to stop it. People were lining up behind me, but I saw the young officer focus on me, concern on her face. Part of me wanted to reach out and ask for help. My joints were on fire, the pain dashing down my legs and infecting my feet so that each footfall landed in a bucket of shattered glass.

I was almost past her when she held a hand out. I froze, glad for the respite, and though I knew it was stupid and amateurish, I looked around at the soldiers. The middle one had noticed what was happening, and alerted the other two. Their rifles were still slung low, but who knew what tech was running behind those faceplates. Facial recognition, information databases, microarray laser scanners, and those were the just the apps I could build with a laptop and a rainy afternoon.

I looked down at the officer who was asking me pointed questions in German, none of which I understood. I shrugged and hoped she would get the message, and then she said “English?”

I nodded and she said, “Do you need medical care?” Her English was good, though she enunciated with care, dwarfing the eighteen words of German I learned that basically amounted to “Where can I buy beer and sleep off a hangover?”

I took a moment to breathe, letting my face sag as I shook my head. “No thank you,” I said, my voice strained, but solid. “My tendinitis is flaring up. I have my prescription with me.” I shook the duffel bag, hoping that she didn’t want to check it.

She wasn’t barring my way anymore, but she still hadn’t allowed me to pass. I could feel the soldiers behind me, but dare not look their way. I could see she was puzzled, and I was about repeat my sentence when one of other officers, this guy in tactical gear, sidled up next to her and said a couple of words in German, flexing his arm at the elbow as he spoke. She smiled, and what would have been an otherwise aggressively plain face lit up into something quite attractive.

The smiled muted, her lips thinning into a compassionate grimace. “My brother suffers from this,” she said. “From playing tennis.” She waved me through and ignoring the shredding pain, I moved into the train station. Casting a final look over my shoulder, I saw the armored soldiers still looking in my direction, but holding their places near the train.

The first thing I noticed was a giant hole in the train station’s ceiling. Roughly the size of a compact car, it was near the center of the building, and large planks of wood, stone, and insulation littered the floor around it. The sun poured in, a stark contrast to the muted lighting indoors, and it added to my pain, so I stumbled away from it. I found a bench a few feet from the huge board that listed the train schedules and tried not to plop into it. Pratfalls were a bad way to keep a low profile. There were more police in the station, along with men and women milling about in dark olive uniforms with some nasty looking rifles that had to be Austrian army. Movement within the station was orderly, except in the area right where I had exited, where a huge area around the ticket counter was trashed.

The counter itself had been torn from the ground and thrown into the floor, much like what I had done in the hotel room in Milan. The air smelled like melted plastic, with a tinge of sulfur, and I found the source in the charred wreckage of a section of uncomfortable looking chairs, the seatbacks warped. Rows of chairs were strewn throughout the area, some snapped in half. One lay askew on its side, the rent metal giving the ten foot long row of chairs an L-shape, the short, mangled serif dangling at an odd angle. There were splotches of copper drying on the tiled floor.

I peeled my eyes away from scene, cradling my head in my palm and waiting.

The pain subsided after an inimitable amount of time. It wasn’t all at once or the tapering ebbs that cramps faded away to. It was more like when Atmosphero had electrocuted me, burning me to a cinder that left second degree burns as an aftertaste. The low burn stuck with me as I tested my legs. No stabbing pain, just an aftertaste I could deal with. Averting my gaze from the destruction, I found my train on the big board. It was delayed, along with every other train set to depart.

Grateful for the extra time, I got a plate of schnitzel and potatoes from a little food cart. I felt better the instant the food hit my gut, the burn in my legs and knees easing up as I meandered around the station. I returned to the food counter and had two more plates, and the pain subsided. I kept a careful distance from anything wearing a uniform, but they were content holding a perimeter, which made sense. I didn’t want to open my duffel and risk anyone seeing my designs, so I bought a coffee, found a small table, and watched people in the station.

Sitting alone among the moving throng, I noticed that what I had taken as orderly movement was actually shell-shock. There a shuffling quality to the way they walked and a vacant, zombie-like stare. It left me wondering what had happened. I didn’t try to step out of the train station for fear of being questioned, but I could tell the difference between people who, like me had debarked a train, and those who had come from outside by the way they moved.

Sipping at my coffee, I tried to ignore the curiosity, but it clawed at me as I saw those poor people shambling around the station. I thought about taking a direct approach and just asking, but I wanted zero contact with law enforcement. With my luck it would be the sole overachiever who memorized wanted lists and faces before work. Instead, I looked for gaps in their coverage, which were tiny, and present only when they changed shift, which took place every other hour.

I almost let it go, but I looked at the hole in the ceiling, and decided I had to know. The coffee had grown lukewarm as I slow played it, so I waited until the guard’s shift changed to down the rest of it and toss the cup, walking towards a large tinted sliding glass door that showed Vienna. The duffel bag swished at my side as I came within view of the outside, and I half expected to be stopped. That was when I heard a mechanical stomp from behind me.

Turning, I saw the armored soldiers moving towards me, flanked by the police I had seen on the train platform, along with half a dozen more armored soldiers and even more of the rank and file in their dark olive uniforms. They were bearing down on me, and I tensed, my fists balling up tight enough to stretch the skin across my knuckles taut.

I scanned the station and found it conspicuously barren. I’d been sitting the whole time, and they cleared the area. Probably put the people on the train platforms. Shit, the trains probably weren’t delayed. That was for my benefit, and I had been arrogant enough to fall for it. Now they were coming to collect me.

Fine.

Fuck it.

They wanted me?

They were going to wish they had left it alone.

I let the duffel bag slip off my shoulder and drop to the ground, the laptop hitting hard on the tiled floor. I planted one foot and slid the other forward, trying to spread my weight evenly, and bent my knees. The movement was mercifully pain free, even the aftertaste fading to nothing. I felt the winter coat strain on me, the seams pulling with my movements. It would tear away easily enough once the dance started.

I could close the twenty paces separating us in one leap, and one of the armored soldiers had been helpful enough to lead the pack, with everyone else a step behind him. Same scenario as the train, except more targets, more chaos. I was about to bear down for my jump, but paused. Something wasn’t right. They weren’t fanning out, or calling for backup, though I knew there were at least another dozen soldiers in the station. I turned around, expecting a firing squad lined up for the kill, and found the doors open.

The air was thick with smoke and silt, blown away from the station’s entrance by powerful fans used to scatter unwary insects looking to enter. Soldiers and police were pouring out of the station in pairs or small groups, most carrying bulky containers between them. None of them were barefaced, donning either a full-headed gas mask or a hospital grade filter mask before exiting to the street.

I turned to see the same young police officer who had empathized with my pain a few hours before break rank and favor me with a cautious wave, her expression an unspoken question that I answered with a tentative thumbs-up. Her features turned to relief and without a word, she stepped back into line. They were ten paces from me when I scooped my duffel off the floor, and stepped out of their path.

They passed me by without a glance. Even the young officer paid me no mind as she slipped a mask over her face. They walked through the doors, and I gave them a wide berth, allowing the last of their group to leave before following. I understood the need for the masks as my first full breath of the outdoor air irritated my throat. I hacked a loud cough that was swept up in the bustle of activity surrounding me. I drew the scarf tight over my mouth and stepped onto the sidewalk.

Police and military vehicles were parked along the street where the constant pulse of traffic should have been ferrying people to and from the station. It was late afternoon, and the sun was behind the station, but there was enough light to see thick particles floating in the air. Firefighters were spraying down an overturned car, burnt to the charred metal frame. The pavement was melted in places the painted yellow lines oozed into a formless, sickly blob, and there was a dip in the middle of the road reminiscent of a sinkhole, but on closer inspection turned out to be a spot where the sewer pipe had been exposed, the liquid asphalt having spilled in before solidifying.

A bus lay on its side, impaled by a light pole, the side split in a gaping wound filled with jagged metal edges. The churn of diesel engines drew my attention as a small caravan of military vehicles drove away from the scene, passing me on their way. In their wake the police vehicles remained, along with what looked like an entire medical pavilion. Three boxy ambulances flanked a tent that might otherwise be used to host an outdoor party. A flap opened and a person dressed in a full radiation suit came out, moving to one of the ambulances with long, exaggerated steps, as if moving through low gravity. Despite the distance, I could see the well-lit space inside the tent was lined with cots, like a triage unit on the battlefield.

I wanted to explore further, but I heard a loud braying from inside the station. Hurrying back through the doors, I heard a recorded message playing over the public address system. It was in German, but it was short. The recording paused for a moment, then began again in English: The trains were going to start running again.

An hour later, I was in a private cabin headed to Bucharest. I tried to relax, but every nerve was alight, as if all of my neurons were firing simultaneously. My breathing was a raspy staccato that I couldn’t steady, my pupils the size of dinner plates, my fists bunched in my lap for fear of accidentally damaging the train. Digging into the duffel bag, I grabbed one of the burner cell phones, tweezing it carefully between my fingers, worried I would break it. I had memorized Annit’s twelve digit phone number, dialing slow, and waiting as the call connected.