The last time Evi had seen Nohar, he had been in a hospital bed. She had dug him, and the four aliens, out from under a warren under NuFood. He had been in sad shape, and the Agency more or less forgot about him. She’d never emphasized Nohar’s role in the whole mess.
When she felt safe, and the night had wrapped around the city, she left the wreckage of the Chrysler Building and walked to a public comm. It took Eve Herman nearly ninety minutes and two hundred dollars to find Nohar Rajasthan again.
All the time Evi was thinking of aliens.
Her thoughts kept returning to the aliens’ lair under the NuFood complex. Organic shaped tunnels of polished concrete that had smelled of sulfur, burning methane, and aliens. The aliens emitted an evil bile-ammonia odor that she would never forget. The four creatures she’d captured made her think of white polyethylene bags of raw sewage.
She finally found Nohar at some New Year’s Eve party in Hollywood. On the other coast it was seven o’clock. If anyone was interested in Nohar, they hadn’t done anything about it yet.
What she hadn’t anticipated was how difficult getting to talk to the tiger would be, even when she found out where he was. It had been a long time since she had dealt with the real world.
The blonde who answered the comm was stoned out of her mind, and it took Evi nearly fifteen minutes to explain to her that the call wasn’t for her. At which point the comm was abandoned, leaving Evi with an oblique view of somebody’s expensive chrome Living room filled with nearly equal numbers of moreaus and humans.
She had nothing better to do, so she waited for somebody else to answer her call while she looked out at Third Avenue expecting the city to collapse in on her.
Both snow and traffic were getting worse.
Occasionally she shouted to get the attention of somebody moving close to the comm. Eventually, that worked. A pudgy lepine moreau noticed her yelling at the comm. Third generation, she thought. A Peruvian rabbit, probably a mixture of a half-dozen strains. But he didn’t look stoned.
“Hello?”
Finally. “I need to talk to Nohar Rajasthan.”
The rabbit cocked one drooping ear toward the comm. “What?”
Between the traffic on her end and the party on the other, she had to shout. “Nohar Rajasthan, I need to talk to Nohar Rajasthan!”
The rabbit nodded. “Rajasthan, right.”
The light at the end of one tunnel at least.
She watched the rabbit melt into the party, and waited for Nohar to show up.
She didn’t expect the black-haired woman who ended up sitting in front of the comm a few minutes later.
“Stephanie Weir?”
The woman grimaced and read Evi’s alias off the screen. “I know they don’t recognize it in New York,” Stephanie shouted over the party, “but the name is Rajasthan, Ms. Herman.”
Evi should have noticed the ring on her finger. “I wanted to talk to your husband.”
Stephanie smiled. “That was good. I didn’t even notice a wince when you said that.”
Evi sighed. “Can you get him for me?” She decided that Stephanie was one of those women who became excessively catty when she’d had a few drinks.
“No.”
Abdel, what do I do when I can’t throttle her? “It happens to be an emergency.”
Stephanie nodded. “Matter of life and death, do or die, now or never—You’d be surprised how common that is, Eve. They’re all emergencies. But it’s New Year’s. You’re going to have to wait until Thursday.”
There was a broad smile on Stephanie’s face. She was obviously enjoying what she was putting her through.
“It can’t wait—”
“Then I’d say another detective is in order.”
“Mrs. Rajasthan, there’s a good chance that someone is going to try and kill your husband if you don’t shut up and listen to me.”
Stephanie lost the smile. “You look—”
Evi wanted to punch in the screen. “You look! Tell Nohar his life is in danger—” Evi whipped off her sunglasses. “Get him!”
Stephanie looked as if she was about to make another comment. Instead she just stared at the comm, color draining out of her face.
Nohar had told her. Probably a long time ago, but Nohar had told her. Evi could read it in her face. She had never met Stephanie face-to-face, but she had made an impression on Nohar. Any description he gave would have included her eyes.
Stephanie backed away from the comm. “Damn,” she whispered as she pushed back into the crowd.
Now she was getting somewhere.
It took less than a minute for Nohar to get to the comm. The tiger was an impressive figure even on the comm’s small screen. The party was blocked by a wall of yellow and black fur, all shoulders and face. Nohar had wrinkled his muzzle in a grimace and was emitting a low growl. She noted a few gray hairs around his broad nose.
“You.” Nohar made it sound like an accusation. It probably was.
She could understand how he felt, but the attitude still annoyed her. “Six years ago, I promised my goodwill if you helped me out. I’m paying you back.”
“Point is?” Nohar was not one for a lengthy monologue.
“Point is, the company I work for is trying to assassinate me.”
There was a subtle transformation in Nohar’s face. If she weren’t an expert in reading moreau expressions she might not have noticed that Nohar had stopped displaying his teeth. The way his feline cheek was twisted, it would still be called a grimace. “What happened?”
“There’s a good chance I’ve been targeted because of what happened in Cleveland. Because of the ‘franks’ who ran Midwest Lapidary.”
“Shit.” Nohar let out a long breath. “That means—”
“Only maybe.”
She could hear Nohar’s claws rake the chair he was sitting on, even over the noise of the party. “What do I do?”
“Disappear. Go on a real vacation, pay cash, don’t tell anyone where you go, leave the country for a while.”
Nohar shook his head. “Asking a lot.”
“I’m not asking anything. What you and your wife do is up to you.”
“When will things be safe?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not making things easy.”
“I didn’t have to call.”
Nohar let out a low rumbling sigh. “I owe you one.”
“You did my job for me back in Cleveland. Consider it even.”
“Not quite. You’re one up on me. Let me give you something.” Nohar typed on his comm’s keyboard and text began to appear on her screen. It was an address. Evi knew enough about New York to know that it was deep in the Bronx, Moreytown. Nohar also typed “G1:26.”
Nohar gave Evi a close-lipped smile. “You might be able to use that.”
Nohar cut the connection.
What the hell was “G1:26” supposed to mean? Numbers separated by a colon. Greenwich mean time?
Evi used the memo function to record the note on Eve’s card. She’d ponder it later. Nohar obviously assumed she’d know.
She left the booth and started walking down Third, away from the Chrysler Building, away from Central Park, away, she hoped, from the more intense searches for her.
She kept walking south, hiding herself in the eternal press of New Yorkers. It was getting close to nine, and traffic was grinding to a stop. Half the cars she passed had out-of-state plates. Aircars buzzed above, their red landing lights like embers caught in an up-draft.
She kept walking, at random for the most part, keeping close to the buildings. She kept one eye open for the police. There, again, the holiday was working in her favor. The NYPD was understaffed to begin with. New Year’s in Manhattan overloaded them by an order of magnitude.
Why her and not Nohar?
She kept mulling over that question.
She was pretty sure, despite her warnings, that if the people who were after her were after him, they’d have gotten to him long before she’d called. For some reason, she was more valuable.
The only difference she could think of was the fact that she worked for the Agency, and Nohar was a civilian. The peeper’s team, the NLF, seemed to want her alive. And it seemed that the Agency was willing to kill her to prevent it. That extreme reaction by the Agency would make sense if it was something about the Agency itself the NLF was after.
She shook her head. If that was so, then where did the aliens fit in? They had to be involved, there were too many links.
And it still didn’t explain why the Aerie emergency number didn’t acknowledge her existence. If the Agency was trying to keep her out of the hands of the NLF, it was stupid to prevent her from coming in.
And who the hell was Frey talking to when he pretended to talk to the Aerie?
He was Agency, why didn’t he shoot her?
She walked south down the axis of Manhattan, her mind traveling in circles over the same set of facts. She managed to avoid crossing paths with any cops.
It was a few blocks south of Canal Street, right in front of the marble pagoda of the Chinatown Memorial, that she heard an aircar do a low flyby and realized that fatigue had made her careless.
She backed to the memorial and leaned against a brass plaque listing the dead from the ’42 riots. She was confronted on one side by post-riot buildings. Sleek security condominiums, shades drawn against the empty street. Behind her was the monument to the riot and five square blocks of inadequately lit park that had once been a business district.
The crowd had thinned a little, and the street here was mostly empty of traffic.
The aircar had buzzed by, and she suddenly realized that one of her engineered survival traits could be a severe liability. Her body’s metabolism had a very low thermal profile. It was supposed to help her hide from infrared imaging. However, that unusual heat signature would single her out of a crowd of normal humans . . .
The protection the crowd was offering her was illusory.
She stood out like a beacon.
She should have realized how tired she was. She must have been asleep on her feet to walk into a scene this perfect for an ambush. Abdel volunteered that she should have chosen a spot and gone to ground until she figured out what to do.
But she was still here and hadn’t been blindsided yet. She rubbed her aching shoulder and noticed that her hand was shaking slightly.
The snow was painting a thin cover on the ground, and she was beginning to feel the chill in the air.
While she was still in the midst of deciding where to go from here, she heard a car coming down Center Street. She didn’t want to take any chances. She faded into the shadow of the pillar bearing the memorial plaque and put her hand on the butt of the Mishkov.
The people walking back and forth down the streets ignored her.
The car, a white late-model Jaguar, jerked to a stop, double-parking almost directly in front of her, pointed the wrong way. She was so tense that she nearly shot the driver before she heard the voices. The voices from inside the car were a relief. They all sounded drunk. The car held a man and two women.
None of them sounded like a threat.
One of the women wobbled out of the passenger side door carrying what appeared to be a magnum of champagne.
Evi was about to holster her weapon when she realized she was hearing another engine, above her. The aircar was back in the vicinity. She looked up and didn’t see any lights. Legit air-traffic never cut the lights.
The civilians across the street were arguing.
“I told you we’d make it,” the man was telling the one bearing the champagne as he followed her out of the passenger door.
“Sure, and we only have, like, a half hour to go.”
The woman still in the car was the driver; she sounded the most sober. “You wanted to go to Desmond’s party first.”
“We should have stayed at Desmond’s. A fucking waste spending two hours in the car on New Year—”
“Girls, girls—” The guy was trying to calm things down. Meanwhile, Evi tried to spot the aircar. She would have been able to see if it weren’t for the streetlights. The bright mercury lamps were washing out her ability to see any infrared beyond a few meters. However, from the sound of it, the aircar was hovering.
She was in trouble.
A tiny, glowing infrared dot sprouted too close to her head and Evi ran. A bullet struck the pillar behind her. A chunk of marble shrapnel whizzed by her ear. The gun was silenced. She never heard it fire.
People cursed her as she slammed through the crowd.
Things were going too fast, and she still had no real idea where the aircar was.
She ran at the Jaguar. The trio hadn’t noticed the shot or Evi running at them. The guy was leaning in the driver’s side door and trying to coax the remaining woman out. “Come on, Kris, we’ll miss Diane’s party.”
Evi bolted across the street and felt more than heard the next shot hit the ground behind her left foot.
“Not until Red apologizes.”
Evi was halfway across the street and the infrared dot leapt ahead of her. She dodged as a bullet plowed out a small crater in the street.
“Come on, Sam, let’s leave her—huh?”
The one with the bottle had noticed Evi running full tilt across the street, gun down. She shoved her out of the way and dived into the open passenger door.
“Get out!” Evi yelled. She was pointing the gun at the driver, but only got a blank look in response.
“No, not my dad’s car.”
“Lady, this is a real gun.”
“You’re not steal—” A bullet punched through the roof of the Jaguar and split the armrest on the passenger door. That was too close. The driver let out a squeak and floored the Jaguar.
The man barely had time to dive for the safety of the sidewalk.
The woman, who looked barely nineteen, was looking at her. “They’re shooting!”
Another shot ripped through the rear window, shattering it. There was a shuddering scrape as the Jaguar bucked forward and sideswiped a parked BMW, slamming shut the driver’s door.
“Fuck, somebody’s shooting at us—”
They were in the wrong lane.
“Get in the right lane, lady!” Evi shouted as she struggled to sit upright in the passenger seat and get the seatbelt on. Then she began to reach out and close the passenger door.
“Name’s Kris,” said the driver as she swerved way over the center of the road, rocking Evi too far out the open door. Evi had a brief, terrifying, view of speeding asphalt as another gunshot shattered the passenger window. Kris was still talking, eyes locked on the road now, “My dad’s going to kill me.”
The Jaguar kept swerving to the right until it bumped up on the curb. Evi was thrown back into the car as a fire hydrant rendered the passenger door irrelevant. The door was torn away with Evi’s head barely inside the car.
The windshield in front of them shattered as another shot tore through the length of the car. Kris screamed. Snow began slicing in through the window, burning Evi’s cheeks. She didn’t want to look at the speedometer.
“We’re going to die,” Kris was saying now, “it’s New Year’s Eve and we’re going to die—”
“We’re not going to die—”
Kris somehow managed to slam the Jaguar through an invisible gap in the traffic on Broadway, scraping at least four cars on the way through the intersection. A bullet hit the hood of the Jaguar, and the engine began to make ominous grinding noises.
“Get under some cover. They’re in an aircar.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Look at the road!”
Kris snapped her head around. The Jaguar had drifted into the wrong lane again. A van was headed right toward them, horn blaring.
Kris pulled a cornering move that shouldn’t have been possible. From inside the car it felt like the ninety-degree turn the car did had a point on the corner. The van scraped by the rear of the Jaguar, and Evi heard its windshield shatter as the sniper let loose another shot.
The Jaguar streaked through an alley, plowing boxes and garbage in front of it. Evi maneuvered around in the seat to look out the rear window. She could finally make out the aircar through the snow. It was a faint shadow lurking in the crack of sky between the buildings.
Evi braced the Mishkov on the back of her seat and aimed. The shot was as difficult as it could be, hitting a barely visible high-speed moving target from a moving platform. She gave herself one chance in ten.
She fired the Mishkov and Kris screamed. The sound was a deafening explosion in the enclosed space, even over the roar of the wind through the broken windows.
The aircar looked undisturbed.
Evi took another bead on the flyer as a bullet plowed into the trunk, about a foot away from her. Before Evi fired, the Jaguar pulled a shuddering left turn back into the open to the blare of a dozen horns.
The aircar could be anywhere now. Evi had lost it in the glare of the streetlights. The Jaguar passed a restaurant window, which shattered as another shot missed them.
Evi looked ahead of the car. The Jaguar shot through a crosswalk, clipping the front of a cab, and Evi got a look at a street sign—
How the hell did they get north on Hudson? There must have been a turn or two Evi had missed. However, that explained the traffic. Their car was shooting by dozens of vehicles.
“Get off of Hudson!”
Kris took a hard left across another crosswalk, crashing through a sign directing people to the Holland Tunnel. A bullet shattered what was left of the driver’s side window. Kris was screaming to be heard over the wind. “Damn it! Who are you?”
Kris was crying. Her tears were diagonal streaks in the wind.
She jumped another curb and sideswiped another cab getting onto Canal Street. They were heading straight for the Hudson.
Evi kept watch behind them, looking for the aircar. It was still lost in the glare of the streetlights. She thought she saw a muzzle flash, but since the gun was silenced and nothing hit their vehicle that time, she couldn’t be sure. “Kris, I’m sorry—”
“You’re sorry?”
“I should have pushed you out of the car.”
“I’m soooo happy.” Another shot plowed into the hood of the car, and the engine’s grinding became an ominous rumble.
Up ahead Evi saw a giant orange detour sign. Kris ignored it.
They passed another sign, unlit, which read, “New West Side Expressway, Southbound.” Under it was another sign, blackened with old grime, “CLOSED.” They hit an entrance ramp and slammed through a rusty chain-link fence.
The road immediately began to shake the car’s suspension apart. The rattling under the car’s hood took on an urgent tone.
They passed a third sign, “NY Urban Infrastructure Renewal Project. New West Side Expressway opens May 2048. Your tax dollars at work.” The old sign sprouted a bullet hole as she read it.
The Jaguar bumped through a gigantic chuckhole as they passed a last sign, “Expressway condemned. No Trespassing. Enter at own risk.”
Now we’re going to die, she thought.
Abdel gave her a mental slap for getting fatalistic in combat. Think that way and you will die.
She tried to ignore it when Kris pulled a shaky U-turn to avoid a hole that crossed all four lanes and fell straight through to the ground, twenty meters or so. Instead, she tried to get another bead on the aircar. Fortunately, on the abandoned expressway there were no active streetlights and Evi could pick out a flying shadow banking low over the Hudson to follow them. There was a point, at the end of Kris’ turn, when the aircar seemed to hover for a split-second, almost stationary.
Evi aimed at the brightest infrared source and fired.
Kris screamed, “Shit,” at the sound of the gunshot and the Jaguar swerved and sideswiped a guardrail, knocking a chunk into the darkness. But Evi thought she saw the flying shadow sprout a spark near its mid-section. She’d hit it . . .
Unfortunately, the aircar showed no signs of slowing down or stopping.
Smoke began to emerge from the Jaguar’s hood, carrying the taint of ozone and burning insulation. Red lights began to blink on the dash. The inductor was overheating, the superconductor was losing charge, and the rattle was turning into a scraping whine.
Kris was pumping the accelerator, and they were still losing speed.
Evi looked up ahead, and they were aiming right for a thirty-meter gap in the expressway.
The sniper in the aircar fired again, and this time Evi heard the shot. It wasn’t the gun she heard. It was the right front tire of the Jaguar blowing out and shredding.
“Hang on!” Kris yelled over the screech of the brakes.
Evi could tell when they hit the hole in the road, because the screech of the brakes stopped and the bottom fell out of her stomach.
The Jaguar spent a full second in free-fall, its nose arcing downward. It seemed to Evi that the second washed the night clear of sound. The Jaguar tumbled and she saw, briefly, the crumbling concrete support pillars rush by the front of the car. Then she was looking straight at a pile of rubble that sloped up under the condemned expressway.
There was a bone-jarring crunch, and then all she could see was an airbag. She’d been turning to face forward under the seatbelt. The shoulder belt dug into her left shoulder, and she felt a burning wrench. The car had stopped moving, and for a moment it felt as if the car were going to stay here, vertical, nose-end into the ground. Then, as the airbag began to deflate, she felt the car tip backward.
The Jaguar slammed its wheels into the rubble. She heard the inductor explode under the car, releasing the smell of melting ceramics and burning insulation. She wrestled the airbag out of her face as the Jaguar slid down the grade.
The hole was receding above them as the car slid backward and stopped.
“Kris?”
Evi looked to her left when no answer came. Kris was leaning back in the driver’s seat, eyes wide open. A trickle of blood was running from her mouth, and her head was leaning much too far to the right.
“Shit, no,” Evi whispered.
There was no airbag draped over Kris’ lap. The cover that housed it had popped off the steering wheel, and perfectly centered on the cover was a bullet hole. The bag had never inflated.
“No! She’s a damn civilian.”
She popped her seatbelt and felt for a pulse in Kris’ neck. “Please, I don’t want to be responsible for this. Everything else, but not this, too.”
As the plastic fenders on the rear of the Jaguar started burning from the heat of the melted inductor, she placed her right fist between Kris’ breasts and began pumping. She ignored the shivers of agony that it drove into her shoulder. Five pumps, then she pinched Kris’ nose shut and breathed into her mouth. It was like blowing into a hot water bottle, tasted of blood.
No pulse.
Five more, breathe.
No pulse, no reaction.
Five more, breathe.
Nothing.
“Don’t die!”
Five more, breathe.
She heard an engine above her.
“Damn it! Not now!” She was shouting now, it felt like someone was driving a hot poker into her guts. Damn them, whoever they were. Didn’t they care who got in the way? She bent over and pulled the Mishkov out of the footwell, where she had dropped it.
Evi could see the aircar clearly now. It was silhouetted through the hole, against the night sky. She clutched her injured arm to her chest and braced the Mishkov against the dashboard and aimed at one of the forward fans.
“BASTARDS!” Evi fired.
There was a grinding whine from above her. A shower of sparks erupted from the front of the aircar as a blade from one of the forward fans sheared through its housing. The aircar’s nose dipped and its tail began rising. The car became terminally unbalanced. It fell out of the sky, the fans giving it a lateral acceleration toward the river. The nose of the aircar skipped along the side of the slope of rubble and caught on a chunk of concrete. The car flipped on its back, fans still going, and started rolling. It rolled past the Jaguar and plowed into a concrete retaining wall.
Evi lowered the Mishkov and started shaking, watching the aircar.
The aircar’s power plant exploded in a flower of sparks, orange flame, and toxic smoke.
The smell of burning plastic finally got bad enough to make her turn around. The Jaguar’s trunk was burning now. She unhooked Kris’ seatbelt and, gingerly, dragged her away from the car. Once Kris was clear of the wreck, she tried CPR again, not caring if a survivor from the aircar decided to shoot her, or about the agony in her shoulder, or if Kris’ blood could be tainted . . .
And she knew it was hopeless five minutes before she stopped.
For a while, she just looked at Kris. Kris had been blonde, attractive, nineteen.
“Damn it, what else could I do?” She asked no one in particular.
You can’t get soft-hearted in your line of work.
“Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work, Abdel,” Evi whispered.
You were drafted, too.
There was a distant sound of popping, and at first she thought it was gunfire. Then car horns began sounding, along with foghorns from the river, and she realized that the popping was the sound of fireworks.
She reached down and closed Kris’ eyes.
“Happy New Year.”