Deadly in New York (10 page)

None of them made it.

One by one, the Ingram chopped through their bodies. For Hawker, who held the Ingram, it was like touching them with an electric probe. They jerked and jolted, and died with the screams on their lips.

Once again Hawker punched the empty clip free and slid a fresh thirty-two rounds into the smoking weapon.

There could be no running from this fight. He had fought his way in, and now he would damn well have to fight his way out again.

Or die trying.

Lieutenant Scott Callis had said it best. The goons who inhabited this building—men who killed to finance their drug habits, or killed for the sick pleasure of inflicting pain—didn't deserve the benefits of a benevolent judicial system.

They lived like rabid animals, and they should be hunted like such.

Hawker had just declared war on them.

It was a war only one could walk away from.

And Hawker was determined that he would be the only one to walk away.

There was no doubt they had him trapped. But there was one thing he couldn't afford—to be caught in a crossfire. Somehow he had to keep his rear covered.”

Hawker quickly dug into his canvas knapsack and produced a sausage-sized roll of C-4, military plastic explosive. He broke off a baseball-size chunk of it and molded it to the shattered window. Then he took a detonator attached to a D-size flashlight battery and a blasting cap. Hawker stuck the blasting cap into the C-4 and ran the wire across the open window.

Anyone who tried to climb through that window would get the surprise of his very, very short life.

Hawker trotted back to the dark hallway.

The voices downstairs were louder now, and there were heavy footsteps echoing in the stairwell. Hawker waited until the first figure appeared at the second-floor junction of the stairs, then cracked off three careful shots with the Ingram. A short, fat man screamed and grabbed his chest as his stub-nosed revolver was catapulted into the wall behind him. The man grabbed the handrail, then tumbled over it. He landed with a sickening thud on the bottom floor.

From below, an enraged voice yelled out, “We don't know who you are, motherfucker, but you're dead. You got that! You … are …
dead!”

Hawker couldn't resist. “Talk's cheap,” he taunted with a laugh.

When he was sure they weren't going to try another charge up the stairs, Hawker moved down the hallway to the other side of the building. As he suspected, there was another fire-escape ladder there. The moment he pressed his face against the window to get a look into the second alley, the Mafia goons below opened fire.

Hawker got his head back just in time.

From his knapsack, he took out a pint container of Astrolite, the liquid military mine explosive. Hawker had used it before. It was easy to carry, easier to use, and, best of all, it could only be detected by specially trained military dogs.

Hawker doubted if this band of Mafia killers had access to such a dog.

Hawker squirted the entire pint in the hall between the stairs and the second fire escape.

If he didn't have to use it, it would lose its effectiveness after four days and be completely harmless.

But Hawker hoped they gave him reason to use it.

He returned to the window of the second fire escape and drew more fire but purposely did not return it.

When he heard the first sound of someone pulling himself up onto the ladder, he ducked back down the hall and stopped at the stairwell.

“Hey, down there,” he yelled. “I'm ready to negotiate. You hear me?”

“Yeah, we hear you, asshole,” a gravelly voice called back. “And as far as I'm concerned, you got nothing to negotiate except how you die.”

Hawker tried to give his voice just the right touch of desperation. “You got no reason to kill me, buddy. Here's what I'll do. I'll tell you who sent me—in exchange for my life. That's fair, isn't it? Look, I've got enough hardware up here to blow you bastards to kingdom come. But there's no sense—”

“You're bluffing, asshole!” retorted the voice. “You're just about out of ammo, aren't you? And now you're whining for your life. It ain't gonna wash, dumb fuck. We're coming up there, and when we get done, you're going to beg us to kill you.”

Sure now that the trap had been set, Hawker retreated to a room at the rear of the building. He switched on the overhead light and forced the window. The window opened into a dead-air space between the Mafia headquarters and the building behind it.

Hawker had hoped to find a ledge there, but there was none. He was about to return to the stairs and fight it out, when he noticed an attic door set into the ceiling. He climbed up on a chair and pushed the door back. It opened into a space between the third floor and the roof.

Hawker crawled through the dust and stink toward a rectangle of light at the far edge of the attic. It was a wooden vent. Hawker kicked the vent away and stuck his head out to see the blackness of the Hudson River, three stories below. A pair of roosting pigeons fluttered wildly into the city darkness as he pushed himself through, onto the roof.

The roof of the building stunk of asphalt and bird guano, and it was still hot from the summer sun.

Hawker got to his feet and was just about to check on the progress of the men at the second fire escape when a sudden explosion shook the whole building, throwing chunks of the roof high into the city sky.

Hawker dropped to his belly and covered his head as debris tumbled down.

For a wild moment, he thought he had accidentally hit the electronic detonator in his knapsack and set off the Astrolite.

But then he remembered the booby-trap he had planted at the first window.

Hawker got shakily to his feet, making a mental note to use less C-4 plastic explosive next time.

If he lived to see a next time.

Hawker walked to the new crater in the roof and stared down into the room where he had first entered the building. The entire wall was gone, and most of the floor, so he could see right through to the second story. There were still only three corpses in the alley. Whoever had set off the booby-trap had been scattered in pieces with the debris.

Moving quickly, Hawker crossed the roof to the other side of the building. Four Mafia goons had worked their way up the second fire escape in single file. Hawker could have wasted all of them, but he didn't want to give away his position.

If the hunter moves too quickly from the blind, he will frighten the tiger.

And Hawker didn't want to lose this tiger. Not now. He had a feeling they wouldn't make it so easy for him next time.

He still had one major obstacle to overcome. He had to get back down to the ground floor.

If he waited for the four men on the fire escape to go inside, there was a chance he could work his way down the brick facade of the building to the iron ladder. But that was damn risky.

His second option was to try to jump from the Mafia headquarters to the next building, then hope to find a skylight entrance or another fire escape.

The third option was, at best, an emergency exit—to plunge the forty feet into the black Hudson River and hope that the water was deep enough and there were no submerged pilings to hit.

Hawker considered the water below. If the fall didn't kill him, the pollution might.

Hawker opted to jump to the next building.

The dead-air space between the Mafia headquarters and the broken-down apartment behind it was about twelve feet. That wasn't much in a broad jump pit, but it looked a hell of a lot farther at night. Three stories high. With nothing to break his fall but the asphalt below.

After pacing off the distance, Hawker got a running start—and hit a slick spot and skidded just as he pushed off with his left leg. For a long, sickening microsecond, Hawker knew that he wasn't going to make it. He flapped wildly in midair like a dying bird. All he could think of was that, if the fall didn't kill him, the Mafia thugs would take their own sweet time about finishing him off.

It was that thought which probably gave Hawker the will to stretch out the extra inch or so it took to lock his fingers on the lip of the next roof. His left hand slipped off at impact, but his right hand held firm, fingers digging, arm muscle straining, legs frozen perfectly still so as not to throw off his tenuous balance.

Slowly then, Hawker got his left hand back on the roof and held there for a moment, trying to regain his composure.

Below he heard footsteps and loud voices. If they saw him now, he was dead.

But that was a secondary worry.

Right now, he had to concentrate on pulling himself up onto the safety of the roof.

fifteen

Grand Cayman

Jacob Montgomery Hayes awoke, expecting sunlight to stream through the window with the sound of morning birds.

It was, after all, a bad dream.

Or was it?

As his eyes adjusted to the tropical darkness, his brain began to locate the injuries his body had suffered and began to register the intensity of the pain. It left him with the stark truth:

This was no dream.

If anything, it was hell.

Painfully, Hayes turned his head and looked at the glowing numerals of the desk clock. It was the one bit of hard reality they had allowed him. A clock. Something with which to measure the suffering.

It was 1:13
A
.
M
.

Hayes tensed as he saw the time. They would be coming soon. Every four hours without fail, they came. They came with their lengths of surgical tubing and their rubber gloves, and their scalpels.

Always the questions were the same: What had he done with the folder on Fister Corporation? Who else knew? Who was helping him?

Hayes allowed his head to fall back on the table where he was strapped, hands and legs, nude. An examination table—the kind you see in doctors' offices.

But these men were not doctors.

Quite the opposite.

They were killers. They were ghouls who enjoyed inflicting pain. Professionals who knew how to inflict pain without damaging the body.

But, so far, Hayes had bested them. So far he had refused to speak a word. Every time they came with their instruments of pain, he would draw on his Zen training—the ability to rise out of his own body and block out all earthly suffering; the power of
zazen
he had learned so many years before at the monastery on Crystal Mountain in the thin air of the Himalayas.

Again and again the words of his beloved Roshi returned to him:

“When your concentration becomes strong, instead of hobbling you, pain will spur you on if you use it bravely
.…”

Now Hayes was using his pain as bravely as he could. He had no thoughts for his own life. He had lived his life fully, and, besides, it was the nature of Zen to understand that one's own life means nothing.

But he had to hold out to give his friends Hawker and Hendricks time. Time to close in on the man who called himself Blake Fister. Time to learn his awful secret, and to destroy him.

Slowly the minutes slid by. Hayes could hear the crash of the Caribbean surf outside. He could smell the sweet scent of citrus and frangipani.

Twenty-four minutes after one by the clock on the desk.

Hayes wondered what Hawker was doing right now. Alive, certainly—for no one knew better how to stay alive than James Hawker.

Asleep, perhaps. Yes, James would certainly be asleep.

There was noise in the hallway, and the lights flashed on. Hayes's eyes rebelled against the glare of the neon.

Three men came into the room. Two of the men were in their late thirties or early forties. They were the men who had kidnapped him.

The third man was a Napoleon-sized man, squat and thick, with jet-black hair greased straight back. Despite his age, his paunchy face and lively dark eyes retained the confidence of youth. He was dressed in a white smock, like a surgeon.

Hayes noted the relish with which he pulled on the rubber gloves and then, idly, toyed with the mole above his left eye before selecting an instrument from the tray beside the table.

“Have you yet decided to speak to us, Mr. Hayes?” the man asked with a thin smile.

Hayes did not answer. He settled back on the table, willing his body to relax.

“No?” the man said, as he threaded one piece of surgical tubing into another. “Well, now, we must convince you then. Your stubbornness is to be admired—but hasn't it gone on long enough?”

Hayes closed his eyes as they used a pair of tongs to hold his penis and forced the tubing up him, probing at his bladder.

At first, their questions echoed loudly through the ripping pain. But then he willed his center of consciousness to drop low and deep within him, letting the words of his Roshi blot out all other feeling:

“One must meditate with a sense of dignity and grandeur, like a mountain or a giant pine, aloof of all wordly things
.…”

It was one thirty in the morning.

The torture would last until after two.

sixteen

London

From a sound sleep, Hendricks sat bolt upright in bed. His heart was pounding, and he didn't know why.

He listened carefully, staring hard into the darkness. Outside, rain fell against the window in a steady drizzle. There was the distant hiss of traffic in the streets as late travelers hurried through the cavern of London Town.

Hendricks threw back the covers and switched on the table lamp. His pocket watch had been placed neatly on the vanity along with his billfold, a brush, and a lethal-looking Walther PPK.

Hendricks looked at the watch.

Forty minutes after six in the morning.

What in the hell had woken him?

Disturbed by the strange anxiety that now flooded him, Hendricks picked up the cold weight of the automatic and began a methodical search of his room.

He was barefoot and wore gray pajamas.

All the closets were empty, the door to the hallway locked and chained.