The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2) (20 page)

I don’t see the man in brown, but I get a glimpse of Vanda on the next block. He’s slowed to a walk, but it’s a New York pace that covers ground at a furious rate. He doesn’t look back. I don’t think he has any idea that I’m following. He ducks around a corner—

And it happens a third time: The air shifts, and then the thunder of another massive explosion rolls across the city. This one comes from somewhere uptown, the blast reverberating between the towers. People scream. They evaporate from the sidewalks, fleeing inside, leaving no obstacles to slow me down.

I sprint to the corner, peer around the black marble base of the building.

The next street is just like the last street: crammed with cars all going nowhere. A few people mill between them. Horns honk. A middle-aged woman runs toward me along the sidewalk, awkward in high heels. Vanda is beyond her, almost at the end of the block. I step around the corner.

Maybe he’s got a handler using a microdrone to watch over him. Maybe the man in brown is hunkered down somewhere out of my sight, watching to see if anyone is following the boss. I don’t know. But I’m halfway down the block when Vanda gets the word that I’m coming.

He’s crossing the next street, surrounded by stalled cars, when he turns to face me. I see the iridescent glimmer of his anonymous mask. He lets the rifle case drop to the ground as he uses both hands to aim a massive handgun in my direction. I can’t fire back, not with civilians on the sidewalk and in the cars. Some of them see his weapon and scream. I duck into the recessed entry of a pastry shop, praying he won’t shoot if he doesn’t have a target.

No shot comes.

Is he waiting for me? Or is he running?

I scan the cars, their drivers, the fleeing pedestrians across the street, looking for the man in brown because I do not want him to get behind me.

I wish to God I had my HITR—the M-CL
1
a Harkin Integrated Tactical Rifle is equipped with onboard muzzle cams that let it look around corners—but all I’ve got is a
police pistol with no electronic sights. It’s a museum piece. All of NYPD’s budget must have gone to armored personnel carriers—but at least the pistol doesn’t lock up when an unregistered user handles it.

Ten seconds go by. Eleven. Twelve. I lean out, all too aware I’m not wearing a helmet. My helmet is in my dad’s ruined apartment, along with my dead sister. Too bad I didn’t have a chance to rig up. I peer around the edge of the concrete, imagining my forehead shattering—but nothing happens. Vanda is out of sight and the only civilians left are hunched down in their cars, most of them yelling into phones.

I wish to God I had the squad’s angel.

I expend three more seconds debating what to do. If Carl Vanda’s priority is to see me dead, he’ll wait for me somewhere and hit me from ambush, and I’ll never know it’s coming. But I don’t think that’s his priority. He gunned down a cop. NYPD is going to put out every effort to discover who’s behind the veil. The current chaos and carnage won’t stop them from coming hard after him and he knows it. They’re probably tracking him right now with a microdrone.

They’re probably tracking me.

Fuck it.

I make my decision and go, running hard to catch up to Vanda again, calculating that he must have turned onto the cross street to disappear so quickly, but when I reach the corner, he’s nowhere in sight.

“Where did he go?” I shout at a cabdriver who’s made the mistake of leaving his window open. “Which way?”

The man hunches deeper into his seat, but he gestures down the block. “Next corner.” It’s a short block.

I dart between the cars, reach the sidewalk, and run hard. I’m almost there when a fourth explosion rips into the city.
This one too is far away, but for a moment all sound vanishes except death’s thundering roar as it claims more souls.

With the sound of my footsteps covered by that cloud of noise, I hurtle around the corner—and discover that my assessment of Carl Vanda’s priorities is wrong. He’s waiting for me, just a few feet away, along with the man in brown.

Vanda is standing half hidden behind a scalloped column that’s part of the façade of a new condominium. He’s got his gun out, but he’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the man in brown, who’s crouched behind a concrete planter close to the curb. Brown has one hand raised to his farsights. He looks like a man still organizing his assets. Maybe he’s lost contact with the drone. Maybe he’s lost contact with his handler. But it’s certain that he doesn’t expect me quite that soon. When I pop into sight, he recoils in surprise.

Vanda doesn’t. Stepping clear of the column, he turns to target me with the fléchette gun.

I can’t stop. I’m going too fast. So I keep going and dive for his knees.

Vanda’s gun goes off. The fléchettes fan out, but my dive has put me under the trajectory of the spray. A barb clips my shoulder. Another pings against my titanium foot. I wrap an arm around Vanda’s legs and take him to the ground.

He hits the sidewalk with his shoulder and that saves his head, but his weapon is pinned under him. I still have the cop’s gun. I try to jam it against his throat, but he grabs my wrist with his free hand. We’re grappling, rolling across the sidewalk. He loses the hat, and the mask goes with it, but his gun hand is free.

His face is inches from mine: teeth bared, eyes squinting, every muscle engaged. I pitch my pistol away and use two hands to go after his weapon, slamming the back of his
gunhand into the concrete. His grip breaks, the fléchette gun falls loose, and I grab for it—but the man in brown has found an opening. He kicks the gun away. Kicks me in the ribs. Then in the belly. Maybe in the head, because I miss a second or two. By the time I check back in, Vanda is up, talking in a low, growling voice:

“She is out of control.”

He’s not talking to me. I’m already dead as far as he’s concerned.

“I’m putting an end to this chaos. Niamey is glass.”

Somehow I’m on my back. I glimpse the fat muzzle of the fléchette gun centering on my face. I see it like a still image, frozen in time, gripped by a large hand, tanned skin darker than Vanda’s, a smoky, pale-blue sky beyond. I kick at that hand. I propel my robot feet up like a gymnast initiating a backward somersault, titanium impacting flesh just as the little steel arrows are released. The deadly fléchettes buzz away into the sky, the gun spins into the street in a shower of blood, and the man in brown retreats, cursing, “
Fucking
hell, fucking hell.”

I roll over onto my shoulder, then scramble on hands and knees to the shelter of a parked car, expecting to die at any moment, but when I look back, they’re gone. Both gone. The sidewalk is deserted.

I squat in the gutter for a few seconds, hunched over my bruised ribs, with my shoulder bleeding and my eye starting to swell shut. But I have enough vision left to see a glistening trail of blood on the concrete, leading to fancy brass doors at the foot of a skyscraper.

Where the fuck is my gun?

Maybe they took it, but if so, why didn’t they stay long enough to shoot me with it?

I lean out around the car that’s hiding me and look for the gun in the street. Next I look under the car—and that’s
where I find it. I have to get down on my belly to reach it, trying not to breathe too hard because my ribs fucking hurt.

Armed once again, I eye the building, but it’s a luxury tower, the security system is not going to let me inside, and right now I’m an easy target from any window overlooking the street.

Sense kicks in and I backtrack to the corner. I wait there, watching—and a minute later a helicopter lifts off the roof five hundred feet above my head.

It has to be him. I retreat again, in case he’s thinking of taking a wild shot at me, but the helicopter speeds away toward the Hudson.

And I remember his furious threat:
Niamey is glass.

That’s what I remember. But did I hear it right? Because to do something like that . . . it doesn’t make any fucking sense to me.

•   •   •   •

I try to call Delphi, but the city’s network is overwhelmed and I can’t get a link. So I text her instead—
I’m coming back
—hoping the text won’t take too long to go through.

My shirt is torn and bloody where the fléchette grazed me, but the bleeding has mostly stopped. I’ll deal with the wound later. For now, I just jam the gun into my pant pocket—but the pocket isn’t deep enough to hold it. So I try sticking it into the waistband of my pants at the small of my back, the way I’ve seen it done in movies. It’s damn uncomfortable, but at least the gun is out of sight under my shirt as I walk back past gridlocked traffic.

People have come out onto the sidewalk again, gathering in pensive knots. Bits of conversation reach me as I pass, escaping a background noise of sirens and the low, pounding roar of helicopters:

“. . . phone went out with the second blast . . .”

“How many did you count? Four?”

“What’s been hit?”

“. . . seven bombs on Coma Day.”

Sirens rise in an earsplitting howl right behind me. I turn to see a convoy of emergency vehicles creep into the intersection I just crossed. Leading the way is a pair of motorcycle cops rapping knuckles on car windows, directing the drivers to move their vehicles to the sides of the street and onto the sidewalks if they have to. A center lane slowly opens, wide enough to allow a fire truck to pass. Four squad cars follow, their sirens wailing.

I shove my fingers in my ears and keep going, thinking more about what Vanda said:
She is out of control.

She.

His wife, Thelma Sheridan?

Though she’s a prisoner in Niamey, she’s also a hero to the paranoid types who want to get rid of the Red at any cost. Delphi said there are bombings somewhere in the country almost every day—but today is different. Today is the first day of Sheridan’s trial. It’s the day to make a statement.

Vanda must have concluded the bomb that almost killed him was placed by Thelma Sheridan’s supporters. He couldn’t have been involved. He couldn’t have known it was going to happen or he wouldn’t have been in the building across the street. He came to kill me in person—a lesson to anyone else thinking of fucking with him—but he was taken by surprise.

She is out of control.

A car bomb in the street was a stupid way to try to kill me. The terrorists who did it couldn’t have known if the blast would be the correct scale or channel in the proper direction, or if I would even be in the apartment. But
terrorism isn’t science. It doesn’t have to be smart, it doesn’t have to be logical. It just has to fuck with your head.

My head is telling me I’m dangerous for anyone to be around, that innocents die when they get near me. Lissa died. Delphi almost died. I wonder how many blameless civilians are buried in the rubble that used to be my building?

It’s not like this operation was even centered on me. Four bombs went off. I was almost an afterthought.

I trot ahead of the fire engine to get away from its brutal siren. As I reach my block, I hear another rumble from somewhere far uptown.

The count of the explosions climbs to five.

•   •   •   •

Cars are still smoldering, filling the street with stinking, toxic smoke. Someone has draped a jacket over the face of the dead cop. I cross the street, to find seven more bodies laid out in front of my ruined building. These are uncovered; some of them are burned. Ambulances are on scene, their lights flashing but their sirens mercifully silent. I look for Delphi, but it’s my dad I see, halfway up the pile of rubble, wearing a now-filthy dress shirt and slacks as he works with three other people to dig someone out.

A text comes in from Jaynie:
No traffic allowed into city. Holland and Lincoln Tunnels closed. Bridge traffic one way only: out.

“Shelley.”

I whip around. It’s Delphi. Her face is dirt streaked, her hair dull with dust, her fingers seeping blood, and her clothes filthy. She eyes my bruised face, my half-closed eye. “Did you kill him?”

“No. He got away.”

Her gaze shifts to my dad as he and another man lift a concrete slab, sliding it farther down the heap, and she
starts trembling. “At least he didn’t kill
you
 . . . though realistically, it’s just a matter of time.”

“Delphi . . .” I reach for her and she responds, hugging me, holding me tightly while I tell her the truth. “It’s going to be like this. You were at Black Cross. You know the kind of things Vanda-Sheridan is willing to do—and the kind of things we have to do too. And it’s only going to get worse. Vanda has more nukes.”

She looks up at me, blue eyes even brighter surrounded by dirt. “You know that?”

I nod. “I heard him. He wants to nuke Niamey. Shut down the trial. Shut down his own wife and the crazies who do shit like this in her name. So I’m going after him, but I’ll take you home first if you want me to.”

This draws a bitter smile. “I don’t need help getting home—but you might need help getting to Wyoming in one piece.” She half turns in my arms. “Your gear’s over there. I got it out of the apartment.”

“
Shit
, you went back up there?”

She shrugs. “It took a few trips—your rig is heavy—but I wanted to get your things before the police closed off the building.”

“You’re amazing.”

She’s been helping with the search and rescue. That’s why her hands look like they do, but as the fire truck arrives civilians are ordered to clear out of the site. My dad climbs down the rubble heap, and sees me. We glare at each other for a second and a half, and then we embrace.

“Why are you still here?” he asks.

“I’m on my way out. You coming with me?”

I’m not surprised when he shakes his head. “This is my home. I want to know who did this. I want to see them burn.”

I nod. He has his own mission now, his own purpose, his own story.

So it’s just Delphi and me.

I text Jaynie:
Can you get into Brooklyn?

While I’m waiting for an answer, I get the first-aid kit from my pack and we all clean our cuts and bruises. Delphi glues the gouge on my shoulder, and I put on a clean but stale-smelling T-shirt that I find stashed at the bottom of my pack.