The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (41 page)

“I’m going to start walking the route,” Kimberlain said into his mouthpiece as dozens of clowns rushed past him to take their places ahead of Woody Woodpecker on Central Park West.

“Stay in touch,” said Cathy.

And the Ferryman turned to find himself face to face with the ever-smiling heartthrob, whom he had never laid eyes on before.

“Wow!” the teenager exclaimed to him, wide-eyed. “This is great! Never seen anything like it in my life!”

“I’ll bet you haven’t,” said Kimberlain.

Kimberlain walked even with the first phalanx of clowns and elves, who were costumed in droopy red suits with floppy hats and shoes to serve as advance notice of Santa’s imminent approach. By the time he passed Tavern on the Green he had counted over a dozen sidewalk food vendors and wondered if Cathy Nu’s security precautions had included a check of all contents of such steel containers. It wouldn’t take too many of them to be packed with
plastique
and abandoned to …

His fears were put to rest when he saw one of the police’s German shepherds sniffing his way down the street. The dog passed a hot dog stand with nothing more than a wide eye at a potential meal. There were a half-dozen such dogs walking up and down along the entire route, and anything he or Cathy might have disregarded their highly tuned noses would certainly pick up.

Above him one of the police choppers was streaking straight overhead down Central Park West, keeping a discreet height to respect the rising shapes of the huge balloons, which were starting to pass into their slots in the parade at regular intervals now. So far only Woody Woodpecker and Kermit the Frog had begun their walk, just to wet the whistle of the fans lining the route.

The Ferryman faded back a bit until he was even with the first of the major floats, a Masters of the Universe display featuring a green rubber dragon belching synthetic smoke as its head reared left and right. It seemed to be roaring as a muscular blond man stabbed at it with a fake sword.

He had spoken to Senator Tom Brooks just ninety minutes earlier to learn that much of the southern portion of Antarctica was still caught in a savage ice storm that prevented an airlift or help of any kind from the outside to Outpost 10. Soviet subs were steaming toward the area to lend assistance, and the carrier
John F. Kennedy
was en route as well, though three days away at top speed. It would be up to Danielle, then, to save the outpost, assuming she had been able to reach it before the storm hit. Kimberlain preferred not to consider the odds of that and turned his thoughts back to the problems at hand.

A whole troup of Macy’s employees dressed as clowns glided by him, and he noticed a figure in cutoff blue-jean shorts moving between them from the other side of Central Park West.

“Jesus H. fuckin’ Christ!” Captain Seven blared when he reached the Ferryman. “You didn’t tell me about all these fucking bands! How was I supposed to know about them? You think I sit home and watch this shit every year? Christ, you coulda told me the Seven Dwarfs were the grand masters and I wouldn’t have known any different.”

“What about the bands?”

“You got any idea the kind of vibrations their instruments make? Great way to set off a bomb, let me tell ya. Could be anywhere— above, below, to the sides. And how about the inside of all those drums? You have anybody check them?”

Kimberlain realized he hadn’t. “Hang in there, Captain. And stay close. Come in, Cathy,” he said into the walkie-talkie pressed near his lips. “Cathy, come in.”

“I read you, Jared. I’m heading toward the finish line.”

“We might have a problem.”

“What’s that? I didn’t hear you.”

Kimberlain stepped further away from the band passing him. “I said we might have a problem. Did anyone sweep the instruments these bands are using?”

“I supervised it personally.”

“Thank God.”

“I’m beginning to think we’ve got it all covered, Jared. I’m beginning to think we might have this whipped.”

“You can rest assured we missed something, Cathy. The trick is to find it before it’s too late.”

Kimberlain was uneasy as he approached Columbus Circle. It was nearly ten o’clock, and the fact that the vast security detail had turned up nothing was reason for alarm rather than celebration.

They haven’t found it because we’re missing something
.

He turned behind him and watched as the Spiderman balloon rode through the skies with muscular latex arms extended as if he were ready to topple one of the nearby skyscrapers. Before him at Columbus Circle an ancient-castle float passed, featuring a fairly famous actress confined to a tower room where throughout the parade it was a dashing young hero’s lot to repeatedly strive to free her. All the major floats seemed populated with celebrities in costumed roles. Made for better viewing, he supposed.

“Come in, Jared,” Cathy Nu called.

“Read you,” said Kimberlain into his walkie-talkie.

“I’m at the finish line,” she replied, and in the background he could hear the brassy beat of the lead marching band. “The head of the parade just got here, and Woody Woodpecker will be passing me before you know it.”

The Ferryman watched as before him the parade slowed to a crawl and then a stop to allow the band at the finish line a two- minute performance.

“It can happen anytime now, Cathy.”

“It can’t happen if we’ve stopped them from planting the explosives.”

“We haven’t stopped them yet. You can rest assured of that.”

The key was timing, Kimberlain thought to himself. There had to be a specific moment the explosion was planned for and a reason behind it. Perhaps that was what they had missed. Perhaps …

A huge clown came up alongside of him, and the Ferryman turned in his direction.

“I think you’ve found your true calling, Peet.”

Even the painted-on orange smile could not hide Winston Peet’s displeasure with the remark, or maybe it was just his displeasure in general.

“He’s here, Ferryman.”

“Quail?”

“I can feel him.”

“Why would he be here, Peet?”

“It will all be left to him in the end, Ferryman, and it will be left to me to stop him.”

The white-painted face and orange wig made him look ridiculous, yet children seemed fascinated by his size and drawn to him. Even as he was standing next to Kimberlain, a trio of boys appeared and pulled at his green outfit, stretching their hands upward to see how high they could reach on him. Instantly Peet melted back into the disguise by producing three balls to juggle adroitly as he moved to take his leave.

“There is a balance to everything, Ferryman, and Quail is a part of this one. What was before will be again, but then never more.”

Kimberlain felt a coldness creep over him. How could he have been so negligent? Of course, damn it, of course!

He was stripping his walkie-talkie from his belt and inspecting his watch in the next instant.

“Come in, Cathy!”

He would have to keep it simple, no time for long explanations.

Now he knew how to determine the “when,” but still not the “how.”

Lisa Eiseman was standing on West 50th Street when the sight grabbed her attention. She saw it just as Woody Woodpecker cleared the finish line and Kermit the Frog was passing in front of her, with Snoopy on roller skates not far behind.

An elf, one of the hundreds in the streets but the largest by far, and looking uncomfortable in his role, drew her eye.

Nearby a far smaller elf hugged a pair of twin girls and showered them with candy canes. At the same time a young boy had started tugging at the huge elf’s belt on the other block.

The elf whipped an arm backward and tossed the boy to the sidewalk, sliding back into the crowd as the boy began crying.

Lisa started following him along the parade route. Something about this elf was wrong. Her first thought was it was simply his attitude, but there was more, though she couldn’t say exactly what. She moved faster to close the gap, now making her way across to West 49th Street.

This elf had no interest in the children shouting up at him or trying for purchase on his floppy red costume. He beat a straight and narrow path down Broadway, looking as if he had taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up among other human beings. Lisa closed the gap to half a block and kept on his tail. Her heart began to thud. She looked about for Kimberlain or even Peet dressed in his fanciful clown outfit.

But what to tell them?

Trying to answer that question for herself, she pressed on.

Quail was aware mostly of time. Time was everything today, and time distracted him from the uneasy feeling of being out in the sunshine. His eyes hurt. He couldn’t stop squinting, and the unseasonable warmth made him feel hot and sticky within the confines of this ridiculous costume the circumstances demanded that he wear.

The black detonator the man behind the curtain had given him was pressed in his bulky outer pocket. It was necessary for him to be here now on the chance that the substance of the plan was uncovered prior to the magic moment he was to press it, thus forcing him to detonate the explosives early. Quail figured he would need five minutes to rush out of range of its effects.

The million deaths would make him the greatest murderer of all time, finally bring him out of the shadow cast by Peet. The world might not know, but Quail would, and that was all that mattered. All those nights cruising the freeways and back roads of the country looking for prey were nothing compared to this.

No, he couldn’t achieve his goal of tearing a still-beating heart from a chest under these circumstances, but the cries of one million dying in horrible pain would be better than even that.

Much better.

Cathy had greeted Kimberlain’s report with stunned silence.

“I can’t be sure,” he finished. “But it fits. It fits!”

“Give me two minutes.”

The Ferryman started moving faster down the route, veering left with the parade onto Broadway. He kept the walkie-talkie pressed to his ear the whole time and had moved in front of the crowds viewing yet another high school band at 52nd Street when Cathy’s call reached him.

“The explosion three years ago happened at precisely 11:03,” she reported.

“Christ,” Kimberlain snorted, checking his watch to find there were fifty-three minutes to go.

“You think it means—”

“I’m sure it does. But it doesn’t solve our problem. Knowing the ‘when’ doesn’t help us with the ‘how.’”

“I’ll alert the grid leaders. Now that we know the ‘when,’ maybe the ‘how’ won’t matter.”

The Ferryman didn’t bother arguing.

Lisa had lost the huge elf in Times Square in the shadow of the Newsday Building on West 43rd Street, where the crowd was fifty deep in some places. She held her ground as another band with too many drums and cymbals marched past her followed by a float made up as a turkey carrying riders dressed as pilgrims. In the swollen mass of bodies it was impossible to pick out a single figure, even a huge one dressed all in red.

But wait. Was that him just across the center divider moving beyond the blue and white Traveler’s Aid stand on 42nd Street? Yes! Yes! Still driven by her feelings, Lisa hurried in his tracks.

The subways charged with funneling the great masses of people to and from the parade area had been doing a yeoman’s job. The lines that ran closest to the route had been jammed to capacity all morning, despite the extra trains added to prevent a massive human backlog underground. As it was, the lines were long but they moved, and on such a beautiful holiday, spirits could tolerate that much.

The Seventh Avenue Express number-two train had just pulled out of the 42nd Street station with twenty-eight cars in tow when the on-board lighting died and the train slid harmlessly to a halt along the tracks directly beneath the parade passing above. Emergency lighting snapped on immediately but made barely a dent in the darkness engulfing the crammed-together passengers as well as the transit cops assigned to every single car.

“Power failure,” a father explained to his sons. “They’ll get it cleared up in no time.”

The father was only half right, for he could not have known that an explosion at a major subway transformer had shorted out the entire track system from the Harlem River to Brooklyn. The Seventh Avenue Express was dead on its tracks beneath 39th Street.

At 10:19 Kimberlain was walking along with a sixty-foot Garfield by his side when Cathy Nu’s frantic voice grabbed his ear.

“Jared, come in. Come in!”

He spoke while still raising the walkie-talkie to his lips. “Here, Cathy.”

“It’s the subway. The whole system’s out! There’s a train stuck beneath the parade route, five blocks from the finish line.”

A bitter chill flooded his body. Their precautions had left nothing out, had made sure everything was checked,
except
the subway cars themselves. The explosives must have been packed into them, the timing of the rigged power failure made to correspond to when the cars in question were beneath the route after ten o’clock.

“Where are you?” Cathy Nu was asking.

Kimberlain gazed up from beneath the green overhang of Tony Roma’s Place for Ribs. “Forty-seventh, no Forty-eighth.”

“I’m at Thirty-seventh. Meet me at the Forty-second Street entrance to the Times Square subway station.”

Kimberlain was already running, charging past the confused line of spectators before him as he outpaced bands, floats, and balloon handlers alike.

Damn you, Benbasset! Damn you!

There were barely forty minutes left until 11:03.

Quail saw the police figures with walkie-talkies stuck to their ears sprint by him en route to the nearest subway entrance. The subway! They must have figured out where the explosives had been placed. His orders were explicit in this regard: he was to use the detonator as soon as he was a safe distance away. But that wasn’t enough, he had realized.

He
had
to see it happen, had to see it all. And there was a way, even now with the substance of the plan so drastically altered.

He had just turned to head toward a fresh destination when a hand reached up for his shoulder and the Flying Dutchman swung to gaze into a pair of eyes he had seen before.