Vigilante (19 page)

Agnes had to fight the urge to roll her eyes. “I’m not trying to destroy him. I just want to understand him.”

Danny continued staring at her, his eyes heavy and judgmental. He said nothing.

“Look,” said Agnes, growing impatient, “I was told that if somebody wants to find out about martial arts fighting styles, nobody in town knows more than you do. I can pay you for your trouble, but if my information’s incorrect—”

“The claim is accurate,” he said.

“Then name your price,” she replied. “I’ve cut together a video disc with clips of several fights The Hand has been in—”

Again Danny interrupted her. “Three weeks ago, very late at night, my sister was emptying trash into a large bin in her backyard. A pair of men grabbed her, muffled her cries, and dragged her six blocks from her home in the dead of night. They hid her beneath a patch of trees in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge.

“After removing her wedding ring, earrings, and a gold necklace my mother had given her as a child, these men tied her to a tree and began to rip off her clothes. What they didn’t know is that her nine-year-old daughter had witnessed her abduction and called the police. But the police never came.
He
did. He not only saved her life, he saved her dignity, her humanity, her peace of mind.”

Danny Sze stood from his chair and looked deeply, uncomfortably into Agnes’s eyes. “There’s nothing you could expose, nothing you could reveal about this man’s character in one of your articles, that I don’t already know. I’d die before I’d help you denigrate him.”

Agnes didn’t flinch. She merely sighed. Unfortunately, in the last few weeks, she’d gotten used to this sort of treatment. Everyone was in love with The Hand, and everyone hated her for trying to break the magic thrall that he held over them.

“That’s a great story,” she said, digging into her carryall and retrieving a file folder. “But you left out a crucial detail. The abduction was retribution for your sister’s teenage son—your nephew—who the day before tried to end his membership in the Flying Dragons. The Hip Sing Tong triad doesn’t look kindly on such things, do they?”

“How do you know that?” Danny hissed, his demeanor suddenly dark.

“Wouldn’t it be a shame,” Agnes said, leaning in a hair toward Danny, “now that your nephew has decided to turn his life around and make a fresh start—wouldn’t it be a shame if evidence reached the authorities of his involvement in over a dozen robberies, at least seven grand larcenies, nine felony assaults, and more counts of grand theft auto than even
I
could turn up?”

She handed Danny the file and watched as he opened it and examined the contents. After sifting through it, he finally looked back up at her, his face smoldering.

“Shall I deliver this to the local precinct, then?” she asked.

Danny muttered something under his breath in what she thought sounded like Mandarin—and given his tone of voice, she was sure he’d made a vulgar observation about her—and then said, “Give me the disc.”

Twenty minutes later, Danny had finished watching the clips of The Hand fighting various enemies. He handed her a list of martial arts styles that he recognized The Hand using, which included Jujitsu, Muay Thai, Krav Maga, Silambam, Gatka, and Jogo do Pau. Several of these, he said, were martial arts that focused on the use of quarterstaffs, which wasn’t surprising since that seemed to be The Hand’s defensive weapon of choice.

Agnes thanked him for his help, left the file about his nephew in his possession, and left.

———

It was after eleven o’clock that night when Agnes had a sudden flash of insight while sitting at her desk. There was no one else working that late, so the place was dark except for emergency lighting and her desk lamp.

She’d been reviewing the various fighting techniques on Danny Sze’s list, exploring their histories, and trying to find out who might be trained in such techniques today, when she landed on an interesting martial arts magazine article that listed most of the disciplines from Danny’s list in reference to advanced combat training given to elite special forces officers in the U.S. Army.

The thought first came to her when she was pondering that along with The Hand’s proclivity for anonymity and the bizarre scars that likely covered most of his face.

She’d been slumping in her chair, fighting fatigue, when a notion shot through her like a bullet. She sat straight up, rigid.

It was ridiculous, her theory. Beyond preposterous.

It couldn’t possibly be true. Yet the more she tried to disprove it in her mind, the more she found that the facts supported it. It was impossible to discount, because it fit with everything she knew. It just made sense.

Agnes cupped both hands up around her nose and mouth, carefully considering the implications, the ramifications, the meaning of it. If it were somehow true . . .

But there was no
if
. She knew it was true. She felt it, with an inexplicable certainty that she knew not to doubt.

It was true. It was insane, it was impossible, and it was
true
.

She’d promised to figure it out, and she’d done it. She was the first person to solve the puzzle, and now . . . now she had to decide what to do with it.

There was only one answer, of course. She hadn’t been working so hard for so long to discover The Hand’s true identity only to help the man keep his secret. She had too much at stake, and landing this exclusive reveal would secure her position at the paper for years. Who knew? It might even be enough for the board to hand her Lynn Tremaine’s job.

So that was it, then. She was going to do it.

Better head home and get some sleep.

She paused for a moment, logged on, and updated her status: “Tomorrow, I will tell the world who The Hand really is.”

A
gain Nolan found himself running up the side of a building. It was a sticky, starless night and his grappler had taken him to the window of one particular apartment on the outskirts of Greenwich Village. It was dark inside, but thermal and night vision revealed that no one was home.

“
So we’ve moved on from helping people and bringing criminals to justice, and have now turned to breaking-and-entering,
” said Alice. “
I don’t feel good about this.
”

Nolan was still getting used to hearing her voice in his ear. Branford and Arjay had finally given her a headset of her own.

“
It’s the only tactical option,”
replied Branford’s voice over the com.
“You’ve seen what this woman says about The Hand. If she says she knows his true identity, I think we have to take her seriously.
”

“
This Ellerbee woman,
” said Alice,
“I don’t know how anyone can take her seriously. She writes the most one-sided, biased pieces of ‘journalism’ I’ve ever read. She’s not reporting the news, she’s spitting in its face.
”

Nolan heard the crinkling sound of newspaper and assumed that Alice and Arjay were again reading over Ellerbee’s latest article—a scathing commentary on the ego required to believe you could do that which the police and the government could not.

“
Jealousy leads people to such disgusting actions,
” said Alice’s disapproving voice. Nolan heard the crinkling again and figured the newspaper had just been balled. “
I have a question,
” she continued. “
So what if she knows? If she’s figured out that Nolan’s The Hand and tells the world
 . . .
why does it matter? I mean, I figured it out, and it didn’t change anything for me. Most of the city—most of the country—loves Nolan. He’s created something bigger than himself, and I don’t see that being erased by his real name. Even the president knows, so it’s got to come out sooner or later.
”

“
There is the matter of his faked death,
” said Arjay, who had been given his own headset as well. This used to be a two-way call, but now it was a party line. Nolan wasn’t sure he liked that. But Arjay did have a point.

“I reminded Thor that it was in his best interests to keep my secret,” said Nolan as he retrieved a glass-cutting knife that Arjay had made for him. “But the fact is, I’ve got just as much to lose as he does. If people know who I really am, their perception of me becomes tainted.”

“
You can’t be serious,
” said Alice. “
You’re a war hero! The most famous one there is. Your rep wouldn’t take anything away from The Hand. It would probably give you even more fans.
”

“
That’s not the point—
” Branford started to explain.

But Nolan took up the explanation as he pulled out the small piece of glass he’d cut down near the bottom of the window, where the latch was. “Nolan Gray is a human, identifiable man. He’s damaged, he has weaknesses and flaws. He comes with preconceived opinions. But The Hand is something better. He’s a symbol. A nameless, faceless representation of an ideal.”

No one said anything on the other end of the line, and Nolan assumed his point was taken. Or possibly that they were all wondering how many times he’d practiced saying that in his head.

He reached through the tiny opening he’d carved into the glass and unlocked the window. Once it had slid upward, he was able to slip inside the tiny apartment.

From the start, this whole thing had stunk of a trap. Ellerbee’s bold claim to her followers that she was about to unmask him . . . It was exactly what someone would say if they wanted to lure The Hand out into the open. And it had worked.

Ellerbee’s apartment was horribly unkempt. It was the residence of a person who hadn’t spent any significant time there in weeks, apart from changing clothes and the occasional bite to eat. The kitchen—where he climbed in through the window—was a disgusting mess, with half-eaten food on nearly every surface.

The next room was no better. It appeared to be her bedroom, but he couldn’t see the bed anywhere beneath the piles of dirty clothes. Her wardrobe closet stood wide open, but only one or two items were hanging inside.

Alice’s voice came through Nolan’s ear, the sound of revulsion.
“How do people live like that?”

Nolan didn’t care about her mess. He was just glad Agnes Ellerbee wasn’t home.

“
I don’t see a desk,
” noted Branford. “
See if it’s out—
”

His voice was cut off by a crinkling sound again, but this time Nolan knew it wasn’t paper he was hearing.

“What is that?” he said over the static. “Do you hear it?”

“
Yeah,
” Branford replied. “
They’re expanding one of the tunnels about five blocks south of here. Must be generating some kind of interference.
”

“In the middle of the night?” Nolan wondered.

“
The tunnels tend to be in use during the day,
” remarked Arjay.

Nolan found the reporter’s living room. Still using night vision, his muscles tensed when he saw Agnes Ellerbee slumped over on her desk, unconscious.

This was all wrong. Nolan sensed it before he knew it. Something was way, way off.

“
How did she not hear you come in?
” asked Alice.

There was something wet on the floor beneath the woman. Something that showed up as a bright hot white in his night vision . . .

“
Is that—?
” started Branford.

“Blood,” confirmed Nolan, moving quickly to her side to check her pulse.

He heard Alice gasp.

It was far too late. Ellerbee’s blood was running down from her lifeless neck, just beneath the chin. She was hunched over in a pose of shock, her eyes still open. Her blood was pouring down the wooden desk and pooling on the carpet below.

“This is recent,” he said with alarm. “Within the hour.”

Branford’s voice was stern. “
Somebody’s trying to frame you—get out of there!
”

Nolan shook his head, then noticed that the dead woman’s laptop was missing from the desk, her Ethernet cord dangling freely with nothing to hook to. “No, it’s not a frame. Somebody wanted what she knew.”

“
Which means there’s a murderer out there who knows who you really are,
” Branford remarked, a comment punctuated by another burst of static.

“General?” Nolan asked, when the line remained quiet after the static vanished.

“
Nolan? Do you read?
”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“
Police band’s going crazy all of a sudden!
” shouted Branford, his words stilted from listening to the reports coming in on his end. “
There—there’s been some kind of explosion down at the Battery. . . . This is bad. . . . They’re saying there’s cops down. . . .
”

“Call in an anonymous tip about the reporter,” Nolan said. “I’m gone.”

W
hen Nolan Gray approached Battery Park at Manhattan’s southern end, he ascended to the top of the high-rise at One Broadway to try and gain a view unobstructed by the clouds of dense smoke filling the area. Fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances raced by below, disappearing inside the dark cloud. The spinning red and blue lights created a surreal, pulsing strobe effect within the smoke.

Battery Park was named for the location of the first batteries of cannons to ever be placed on Manhattan Island by Dutch settlers, but tonight the fort was impossible to see, even from more than eight stories above ground. Switching his glasses to heat vision, Nolan counted over thirty prostrate bodies at varying temperatures—some cold enough to be dead—scattered throughout the immediate area surrounding Castle Clinton. Zooming in tighter he discovered some of the bodies weren’t on the ground but below ground somehow.

“What’s beneath the Castle?” he asked.

After a moment, Branford said in a grave tone, “
The South Street Viaduct runs right under it.
”

It took a lot to get Nolan flustered, but this news made his heart skip. The viaduct was an underground traffic tunnel, completely closed off on all sides. A perfect disaster waiting to happen.