Fires of Midnight (12 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Fires of Midnight
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The blow impacted on a face that might have been a skull, there was so little flesh covering it. The extra six inches to reach the eyes put the enemy in the seven-foot-height range, big as Johnny Wareagle. Blaine felt the huge head arching away as he jerked his hand upward and skirted across the enemy’s brow.
He wasn’t wearing any night-vision device at all. There were only … his eyes, and McCracken raked his fingers across one of them, trying to angle his thumb for a piercing jab. The enemy grunted in pain, and his grasp on Blaine’s wrist slackened enough for McCracken to tear free. Momentum slammed him against the books on the other side of the aisle and several stacks of these went tumbling, too.
Blaine heard another loud, guttural grunt emitted just before the clanging noise of a metal-crunching collision. Still battling the darkness, he sensed more than saw a huge section of shelving caving in toward him, a shower of books spewing ahead of it. He darted sideways, just managing to avoid the initial spill and realizing the next section was starting to topple as well. The effect was not unlike dominoes and ultimately it caught up to him as he dashed down the aisle. McCracken felt himself pummeled by books and then his shoulder was racked by a huge section of shelving crashing down, pinning him beneath it.
M
cCracken flailed at the books and debris covering him. He managed to extract himself from the bulk of it, only to have a stubborn section of shelving resist all his attempts to lift it. His angle was all wrong, no leverage possible.
Footsteps approached him, soft, barely grazing the tile floor and not striking a single fallen book in the process.
He can see me! Blaine realized.
Whatever this bastard is he can see me …
McCracken sent his hands raking frantically across the debris-strewn floor for his SIG, abandoning the effort when it was clear it would yield nothing. He could feel the eyes that were not eyes at all upon him, taking their time. Blaine returned his attention to the last of the shelving, felt it start to give. He could yank his legs out now and scamper away for the dull glow of the exit sign.
Toward what purpose?
A book slid across the floor as a foot kicked it from its path. McCracken held his position, pretended to be struggling desperately to extricate himself from the toppled shelving.
The shape stirred. Blaine felt it as a variance in the air, imagined its outline looming over him, and waited. Its breath touched him. An arm that was more like a tentacle clawed through the darkness.
McCracken propelled himself upward, pushing off on legs he had pretended were still trapped. His head caught the huge shape under the chin and snapped its cavernous skull backward, gaining him the time he needed to lunge all the way to his feet. Something that felt like iron slammed into the side of Blaine’s head and staggered him. The shape thrust itself his way, and McCracken ducked under the oustretched arms. He pounded the thing in the kidney with fists interlaced and tried to angle in for its throat or groin. But the figure turned fast and Blaine felt an impossibly long hand close on his throat, starting to lift him off his feet.
Find a
weakness … . Gotta
be a weakness … .
McCracken thought of the monster’s eyes that were so comfortable in the dark. Breath wedged deep inside him, he dropped a hand into his pocket, feeling for his key ring and the miniature mag light attached to it. His fingers closed on it and he brought it upward, working his fingers toward the button.
He found it just as his feet finally cleared the floor. Pressed it to angle the beam of light straight into the monster’s line of vision.
The beam cut the darkness like a bullet slices air. The shape screamed and tossed him aside, flinging him hard enough into the shelving on the aisle’s other side to buckle it. Blaine tried to regain his footing, grabbing his first clear look at the enemy. It was man-shaped, but everything else about it was all wrong, elongated limbs and a narrow, bony face beneath a patchy dome. But the eyes were the worst. They seemed to bulge outward, the sockets too small to contain them.
Half blinded, the monster flailed at him desperately, forcing Blaine to backpedal until he was up against yet another bookshelf. He resteadied his beam on the onrushing shape, its hand raised before its eyes to spare them further agony. McCracken seized the opportunity to duck under the monster’s determined but unfocused surge. He joined its momentum and shoved it savagely forward into one of the uprights, mashing its face against the steel.
The monster bellowed and snapped both its arms backward, forcing Blaine off. It twisted viciously, snarling, when McCracken’s flashlight caught it again. Another guttural yell preceded a strike from the darkness Blaine never saw coming. The monster’s hand caught him in the wrist, numbing it and sending his key chain and minimag light flying.
The beam glowed on as it rolled across the floor, giving Blaine sufficient light to dash off before the monster had totally steadied itself. But the spilled books slowed his pace enough to steal valuable seconds, and a powerful hand latched on to his shoulder from the rear just as he reached the head of the aisle.
The monster was done with subtleties this time. Blaine felt himself being hurled backwards, into the air, slamming into a wall not far from where Gloria Wilkins-Tate’s body lay. Before he could recover his wind
and his balance, the monster fastened both its clawlike hands on his lapels and jerked him backward. McCracken felt his insides shake. His legs went wobbly. The monster threw a fist forward which Blaine just managed to duck under. Above him the wall cracked, showering him with plaster.
Everything was cloudy, growing dim. He blocked one strike, deflected another. But then the monster had him, fingers closing on his throat, the cartilage starting to contract under their power. Then, before he could even contemplate a response, the basement lights snapped back on.
The monster howled in agony, hands leaving McCracken to cover its eyes again. It backed up, staggering. Blaine gasped for air and saw the monster heading for the nearest exit door, disappearing through it before he could reclaim his feet.
 
T
he fat man answered the phone in a barely audible voice.
“Hello?” Thurman repeated.
“I’m here,” came the reply, a bit clearer. “You caught me with my mouth full. I was just in the middle of lunch. Anguilles Quo Vadis. You know what that is, of course.”
“No, I don’t.”
“We must give you some culture, Thurman, we truly must. Anguilles Quo Vadis are eels in a special green herb sauce I make myself from parsley, mint and chives. Of course you must have a special source to obtain eels at this hot time of year. Mine are frozen during the winter in their native Italy and shipped in special containers. Twenty-four hours and a phone call away.”
“Speaking of phone calls …”
“Be quick with your report. The eels are best when eaten hot.”
“I managed to keep McCracken alive,” Thurman reported.
“He’s not the sort of man who usually requires such assistance.”
“He did this time: went up against one of Haslanger’s creations in the main branch of the New York Public Library.”
“Ah, then the good doctor is getting a bit nervous.”
“He should be, with McCracken sniffing down his trail.”
“As we expected he would.”
“But there are more complications: Group Six is staking out Harry Lime’s apartment.”
The fat man’s voice fell slightly. “We didn’t expect that. How?”
“Cambridge was too much for them to resist. They made the connection faster than we expected.”
Thurman could hear the fat man chewing again. “How unfortunate … I thought they’d be drained of manpower by now.”
“Whatever they have left has been concentrated in Key West. We can’t match it on such short notice, even if we wanted to.”
“It would be ironic if our efforts end up helping Group Six achieve its goals. That is something we must avoid at all costs.”
“There may be a way out of this,” said Thurman.
“Go ahead.”
“Let them think they’ve won. Let them have the boy.”
“An inopportune suggestion.”
“Not really. Because we have McCracken.”
J
oshua Wolfe noticed the men watching Harry Lime’s apartment as he biked down South Street in Key West. He was not surprised to see them, but there were more than he expected and they weren’t making much of an effort to disguise their presence. There were three Ford Taurus sedans, a pair of men in each in addition to a construction crew, a mailman pretending to sort mail in his stalled truck and a trio of gardeners at work on the bushy landscaping that fronted Harry’s building in the Southpark Condominium complex. Not to mention the one or two who would undoubtedly be inside.
Josh rode without breaking pace, disheartened. Until this point he had still clung to the hope that the tragedy in Cambridge would not be linked to him. But sending this many men to wait for his possible appearance could only mean that they knew where the blame for the Galleria lay. The damn backpack he’d dropped while fleeing must have led them to him, and the Handlers knew, ultimately, he’d come here.
The Handlers … . That was the name he had given the emotionless men who appeared from time to time in his life and were never far away even when they didn’t. He knew none of them by name and in his younger years had viewed them as protectors. They always seemed to be there when he had a problem. He remembered walking home from high school one day when he was seven, remembered the beat-up Chevy that had pulled up, engine rattling. A creaky door thrown open on the passenger
side. An ugly, unshaven man reaching over to grasp him. Josh had frozen, could smell the stink coming off the man as the soiled hand grazed his shirt.
A car had hurdled atop the sidewalk behind the Chevy. A pair of men wearing suits had lunged out and stormed forward. One yanked Josh free of the tightening grasp. The other dragged the unshaven man from his car and kicked his legs out from under him. The man’s face broke his fall. That was all Josh saw before the other man brought him toward their car.
It was then that he realized the frequent moving he and Harry had done was the Handlers’ doing. Their next move came almost immediately after the incident with the man in the Chevy. Josh heard the phrase “broken security” several times during the explanation.
The Handlers had appeared less frequently as he grew older, seeming ultimately to disappear when he was enrolled at Stanford. All the same, he knew they were there. Maybe the janitor in the apartment building, or the graduate student living in the unit down the hall. He wanted to believe it was still for his protection but in truth had figured out it had probably never been. Watching him was all about control. If he stepped out of line or tried to run, they’d be on him.
That lasted until medical school and then Harvard, when they’d tried to separate him from Harry Lime for good. No one had ever told Josh that Harry had been settled in Key West, and he never made any effort to disguise the fact that he had found out; in fact, he wanted them to know, and was sure they did soon enough. To flaunt it still more he had visited Harry over Christmas. But there’d been no contact since then, and Josh felt awful about that. He’d meant to call; he really had. But then his work constructing CLAIR started taking off and he couldn’t tear himself from the lab.
He had done his utmost to keep CLAIR a secret from the Handlers, disguising the reason for his trips to both the Science Center and the Malinkrodt Laboratory. He doctored the logs to make it look as if he was working on something considerably more routine, and they had no reason to doubt him. If one had managed to follow him to the mall on Sunday, then that man would be dead now, the only one Josh didn’t feel bad for.
What he needed to do at this point, though, was to get his life back together, and that started down here at Harry’s. He had found the bike unchained in front of the youth hostel down the street and figured riding it would give the Handlers a tougher time spotting him. Besides, everyone rode bikes in Key West, at least those who shied away from the pink or yellow mopeds that otherwise dominated the island. After passing Harry’s building, Josh kept peddling down South Street toward the traffic light at the intersection with Simonton, planning his next move.
The presence of so many Handlers seemed to rule out any chance that Harry Lime was safe inside. They would have taken him away, so that Josh would have no ally nor any access to that ally’s legion of friends. A lump rose in his throat as the irrational fear that he would never see Harry again
struck him. It was possible, after all, and the possibility was enough to fill him with fresh resolve. He took strange comfort in the presence of the second vial of CLAIR in the backpack that had never left his sight on the flight to Miami or during the bus ride to Key West.
Of course, first he had to gain access to Harry’s apartment, and that was a significant task in itself, but one he was prepared for. What the Handlers might not have known was that the four units in each of the Southpark complex’s buildings had been built to be easily combined for the right buyer. A connecting door from the rear apartment on the first floor had been built into a closet, opening into a pantry just off the kitchen in Harry’s.
He swung his bike down Alberta Street and then onto Washington, which paralleled South. As he’d hoped, he could see no men either posted on that street or watching the rear of Harry’s building. He pedaled back to the Washington Street Inn and abandoned the bike on the sidewalk. Then he ducked down an alley that separated the inn from Harry’s building. A fence formed the boundary and the pair of rotten slats were even looser than they’d been in December when Josh had visited. He slithered through and found himself on a six-foot grass strip between the fence and the apartment to the rear of Harry’s.
One of the back windows was open, a screen in place. Josh thought he remembered that this particular apartment was rented on a seasonal basis. He could only hope the current tenants were absent as he worked the screen open and then hoisted himself up over the sill. Josh was no athlete but he was graceful enough to touch down lightly on the dhurrie rug covering a scuffed Spanish-tile floor. He caught his bearings and padded to the closet containing the door that led through to Harry’s pantry.
The closet was open, and Josh pawed through a collection of coats and garment bags to reach the rear. Obviously no one had informed the current tenants what the summer weather was like in Key West. He squeezed behind the clutter and felt for the knob. Then he grasped the bolt holding the door into place. Sliding it free, he turned the knob and pulled gently. The door resisted at first, then gave with a scratchy rasp across the tile. He opened it enough to expose the rear side of the pantry and peered carefully forward to make sure no one was in the kitchen. Satisfied, he cleared the meager contents from the widest shelves and lowered his backpack through the resulting gap. Then he squeezed himself between the shelves and straightened up when he was fully inside the pantry.
Josh’s heart was beating fast. His chest felt heavy. He was home, at least as close as he could come. Maybe it was the smell more than anything that confirmed Harry was gone, leftover pizza or day-old aftershave—all the things about Harry that Josh didn’t want to let go of. His feet felt heavy as he started forward, afraid of what might await him or, rather, what wouldn’t.
He had reached the doorway leading to the kitchen when a voice from the living room made him freeze.
“Anything?”
“Nothing on our end,” came the raspy reply over what must have been a walkie-talkie.
“I don’t think he’s coming.”
“You don’t get paid to think. Just wait. You’re due to be rotated in twenty minutes’ time.”
“I could use the sun.”
Josh advanced through the kitchen, careful when he neared the wide breach that led to the apartment’s living room section. There was a dining area as well, but Harry had seen no use for anything besides a small kitchen table. Josh slipped past the opening for the counter the fax machine rested upon. He caught no glimpse of a Handler and could only hope the man would not decide to suddenly enter the kitchen.
Josh reached the paperless fax and realized he had neglected to bring the screwdriver he needed to open it. No matter; Harry’s junk drawer would undoubtedly yield a Phillips head. He pulled it open slowly, the clutter inside making that task a struggle. Working as quietly as he could, he riffled through the mess and found a Phillips just behind a can of pepper spray, one of several Harry had always left all over the house for Josh just in case. He must have forgotten Josh hadn’t joined him on this move.
Josh focused his attention on the fax machine and turned it over, exposing its rear. Then he started working the Phillips on the first of the small screws. In December Josh had asked Harry why he never bothered to load the machine, and Harry’s response had centered around making people who wanted to send him things feel better. Harry didn’t care whether he saw the faxes or not; he never looked at the ones that came through anyway.
Josh left the screws in a pile and removed the machine’s backing. Its innards were easily accessible and hardly cumbersome. Everything was solid state and identifiable for someone who’d had the back off before. Josh knew the purpose of each circuit, diode and chip, as well as their locations. He located the chip he was looking for and popped it out. He had a small Ziploc bag ready and sealed the chip inside.
He was busy reattaching the fax machine’s back when the screwdriver slipped out of his hand. He tried to snatch it out of the air and nearly managed to pin it against the counter side. But it eluded him and hit the tile floor with a clang. A brief moment of total silence followed, panic rising as a lump in his throat. Then Josh heard the clatter of footsteps heading toward the kitchen. In a fraction of a second, he judged the distance to the pantry too great to manage in time. The first of a shadow had just scraped
over the white kitchen tile when Josh returned his hand to the junk drawer and grasped the can of pepper spray thumb finding the nozzle.
A man in a suit crossed into the kitchen in the same instant Josh lunged forward, compressing the pepper spray’s nozzle. He’d never fired it before and had no idea what to expect. The first thing that occurred to him was the power and focus of the reddish stream. The stuff came out in a surprisingly thick jet that struck the man right in the face. His hands clawed instantly for his eyes as he pirouetted across the tile floor, screaming. The Handler tried to extract the walkie-talkie from his belt and came out with a thin wallet instead which went flying toward the sink. He slammed his shoulder into a storage closet and reeled against the stove as the closet’s disturbed contents tumbled down.
The man was really wailing now, his face gone beet red. Josh watched him struggling to find the living room as he stopped to retrieve the man’s wallet on his way back toward the pantry.
He grabbed his backpack and squeezed it ahead of him between the shelves into the closet connecting the two apartments. He checked his pocket for the Ziploc bag containing the fax machine chip just to be sure and then hurried back to the open window that had allowed him access. He went through it too fast and fell hard to the ground. He rose, feeling the wind knocked out of him, and had to lean against the building to get it back. When his chest started working again, Josh pushed the broken slats aside to clear a path through the fence and started down the alley behind the Washington Street Inn.
A green Ford Taurus screeched to a halt nearby. Josh spun and sped off in the other direction. A decaying steel fence blocked his route into the backyard of the nearest house and he hurled himself over it. He ran through that yard, then ducked under a hole in the fence on the other side. This yard had a six-foot wooden fence surrounding it on three sides. But the front gate was open a crack and Josh rushed through, finding himself on Washington Street.
He sped toward a run-down motel that featured Casa Key West Vacation Rentals in its parking lot. These rentals included mopeds, which were lined up across the sidewalk for tourists and locals alike. Hopping on one of them for escape seemed like the best option until he saw another green Taurus tear past and then abruptly halt, shift gears and shoot backwards.
Josh was running blindly now, his lungs on fire and the pounding in his head telling him to quit. But he thought of Harry, the Handlers coming to take him away, and found the rage he needed to keep going. He could hear at least one of the cars still roaring after him as he ran across a series of adjoining yards, through bushes and over fences. He emerged near a house that was little more than a shack; a pair of rusty jeeps resting on their rims were wedged in a driveway fronting Waddell Street. Perfectly
green tennis courts lay directly ahead, enclosed by high iron fences denying him passage. If he had his bearings right, the beach was a mere block away, but the fence precluded a direct route to it even if he had wanted to head for the water.
Hearing the now familiar rev of one of the Taurus’s engines, he ducked into the thick tangle of bushes and hedges that fronted the Coconut Beach Club. He felt as though he were in a jungle, in this case a jungle that ended at an underground parking garage he had no choice but to enter. He charged through the brightly lit concrete garage and emerged on the other side. Then the jungle was back and he gratefully accepted its cover as one Taurus zoomed by, followed almost immediately by another.
He stopped to catch his breath and parted the bushes enough to see what lay ahead. The street ended at the intersection with Vernon and a small bar or restaurant called Louie’s Backyard. He couldn’t make out all of the sign, because a red truck was parked in the way. A man in a blue uniform toted an overstuffed white bag down a set of steps and hurled it into the truck’s rear, then retraced his steps inside.

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