Authors: Jon Land
“I’LL HAVE CHEN SHOW
you upstairs,” Madame Rosa said. “But the authorities have been over the room a dozen times. You won’t find anything they haven’t already.”
“Won’t know that till I try, madame.”
Madame Rosa accompanied Chen and Blaine to the stairs and left them to go up on their own. Following behind the Oriental, Blaine drastically altered his estimation of the man, or perhaps just conceded it. He had known Chen’s kind many times over the years, mostly in ‘Nam. Quick, silent killers who could move with the air and vanish into the wind. They were nimble and lithe, capable of killing efficiently with their bare hands. McCracken had heard of several large and powerful men like himself who had fallen prey to their misjudgments of killers like Chen. He would have to make sure he didn’t follow them.
Blaine kept his distance as Chen led him to the third floor and unlocked a door no different from the others.
The inside of the room was something else again.
Obviously, Washington or Langley or both had decreed that it be left as it was, and no amount of days since the killing could stop Blaine’s stomach from pitching. The blood was everywhere, dried and blotchy, splattered against the walls and floor, soaked into the sheets. The scent of incense was thick in the air, but nothing could erase the lingering smells of death or the feeling of it. McCracken felt certain that even blindfolded he would have been able to pick this room as the one where violent death had occurred. A bit queasy, he stepped farther inside. Chen remained in the corridor and pulled the door three quarters closed.
Blaine could see it all happening in his mind. The children rolling atop Easton, young faces mechanical and uncertain, innocence adding to their fear and thus the perversity of the scene. Then the doors bursting open and two men rushing through, hot bullets tearing from their guns barrels, separating blood and bone from body and spilling them about. Thoughts of the confused, dying children made Blaine tremble, and suddenly the room felt ice cold.
He had to get out. Of course Madame Rosa had been right about there being nothing up here for him to find. But still he’d had to see and feel it all for himself. That much accomplished, he moved for the door.
In the corridor Chen was gone.
That did not fit. His orders would have been to stick close to this intruder into the private world of Madame Rosa. Then where was he?
Blaine pushed the question aside. He just wanted to be rid of this place. There was nothing that could be of any help to him here. He descended the stairs on his own, leery now, senses sharp as an animal’s at a killing field. He reached the ground floor. The brownstone felt deserted.
There was a noise down the hallway in the direction of Madame Rosa’s study, too brief to be identified but sharp enough to be out of place. Blaine moved toward it. Halfway down the corridor he drew the Browning pistol Madame Rosa had returned to him before permitting him to go upstairs.
He neared the woman’s office, uncomfortable with the silence. The door was ajar, and Blaine saw that the room was dark inside save for the light stolen from a window and the dull haze cast by the video monitoring screens. He was operating on instinct now, and it was instinct that led him through the door gun-first.
And instinct that made him pull his wrist back fast so the swirling object struck his gun instead of his hand. The Browning went flying.
Chen came at Blaine with his
nunchuku
, swinging them hard and fast in a blur of motion. Blaine ducked and a china lamp shattered into a thousand pieces. Blaine back-pedaled, steadying himself. The effectiveness of “nunchuks,” twin foot-long wooden blocks connected by wire or cord, was due mostly to myth. The Americans had made them into a flashy weapon when in truth they were the least effective and glamorous of any weapon from feudal Japan. McCracken had never had much faith in or fear of the nunchuks. You just had to keep your calm and seize the advantage when it came.
Chen charged at him again, snapping the nunchuks in a straight overhead angle, using one as a fulcrum to whip the other out from the cord. Blaine felt the hard wood whistle by his ear twice, dodging at the last instant both times. Chen now seemed like a cobra frustrated by the mongoose, his moves rushed and less certain, sweat forming on his brow. The advantage became Blaine’s until he tripped over something in the dim light and went sprawling. He found himself almost eye to eye with a dying Madame Rosa, whose head lay in the blood pouring from the narrow slit in her throat. So it must be wire, not cord, that strung the twin sections of the nunchuks together, and the wire was what Chen had used to do the job.
Chen swooped at him with a throaty scream and swung the nunchuks in a roundhouse fashion. McCracken managed to get to the side and raise his arm fast enough to keep the weapon from a killing blow, taking the full force on the fatty part of his forearm. The pain exploded horribly, but there was no time to be slowed by it. Blaine grasped the wooden section hard and pulled, only Chen went with his action instead of resisting it, coming straight in and lashing a kick under his chin as McCracken struggled to rise.
Blaine felt himself drifting backward, drifting altogether. His head banged against a table and he managed to move it in time to avoid Chen’s next strike, which split the table in two, showering both of them with splinters. Chen was off-balance now and Blaine came in hard against his legs, using his superior size and strength to its best advantage. He shoved Chen backward, but again the Oriental flowed with the move, using McCracken’s own momentum to smash him headlong into the wall. The nunchuks came down hard on his muscular back and Blaine felt his whole spine go numb.
Somehow he found the strength to rise and this time it was Chen who did the underestimating, coming in with a wide strike to finish him. The wood whistled through the air in a long arc, too long, giving Blaine the time to dart inside Chen’s center and grab his flailing arm when the nunchuk strike was well past its impact point. Blaine threw his right hip across the Oriental’s small body and circled his thin neck hard with his free arm with enough force to throw Chen up and over his hip. The Oriental’s back and head smashed onto the floor.
As he struggled to rise, Blaine slipped behind him, manipulating the nunchuks to his advantage now. Holding on to one section with his left hand, Blaine grasped the other with his right and drew the sections back fast and hard, yanking them apart. Whatever grip Chen retained on them was relinquished.
Blaine’s knee found Chen’s back at the same time the wire dug deep into his throat, slicing the flesh as smoothly as cheese. Blood sprayed forward. The Oriental’s head snapped backward and then slumped over obscenely to his chest, nearly severed from his neck. McCracken pushed the writhing corpse to the floor and stepped over it on the way to Madame Rosa’s body.
Incredibly, he found she was still alive. Just barely, but alive. Her dying eyes sought him out. He thought he saw her mouth move, trying to form the shadow of a syllable. Her face was ghastly pale and the blood was still oozing from the tear in her throat.
“Se … bas … tian,” she rasped, and the disjointed word seemed to come more from the slit in her neck than her mouth. “Se—”
She started the word again, but this time a gurgle swallowed it and her eyes locked forever on the six monitors broadcasting black and white pictures of what had been her world.
McCracken was back on his feet immediately. He had to get out of there before Chen’s people arrived. The front door was the only way out he knew. He found his Browning and held it before him as he rushed back up the corridor.
Still there was no one. What had happened? Where were Madame Rosa’s customers, her security guards?
He was almost to the door when a closet caught his eye. He threw it open and grabbed the first coat he saw, black cashmere and perfect for hiding his bloodied clothes. Shoving his arms through the too short sleeves, McCracken rushed out the heavy door into the street.
No doorman either. Madame Rosa’s seemed utterly deserted.
The cold air struck him and with it the pain. Blaine instinctively catalogued his injuries. His forearm was swollen thick and numb but nothing was broken. His back ached and made movement painful; again, though, nothing serious. Beyond that there was a throbbing through his entire body. He blocked out the pain, glad for the frigid air because it braced him.
Blaine didn’t run because that would draw too much attention. At a fast walk he passed several pay phones and debated using one to call Stimson at the Gap. No, his first priority was to escape the area. A cab would do; he needed a cab. Hailing one would mean staying in the same spot, perhaps for several minutes. Blaine decided to chance it.
Luckily, one pulled over in seconds. McCracken was in the backseat almost before the driver came to a halt.
“Take it easy, Mac,” the driver said. “You in a rush?”
“Yeah.”
“Where to?”
“Just drive.”
It was the icy stare in Blaine’s black eyes that made the cabbie turn back around, gulping air. McCracken needed time to think, to regroup and find a safe place from which to call Stimson.
And tell him what?
Madame Rosa had been murdered because she knew something, something she might have told Blaine if given time.
Sebastian
…
Her last word. But who or what was Sebastian and why would she send Blaine to him or it? Another connection perhaps, a link in a chain being severed one piece at a time.
He could tell that much to Stimson. It was all he knew. The people behind Easton’s murder were not going to leave a trail. All tracks had to be covered. Stimson would run Sebastian through his computers, Chen, too, and perhaps some of those tracks would be revealed. There was the microfiche to consider as well. If they had been able to decipher it at the Gap, Blaine’s job would be that much easier.
The cab reeled over the ice ruts like a roller-coaster car, until it stopped in traffic across from a group of merry carolers and Santa Claus ringing his bell. Santa shoved a copper cup toward passersby who tried to avoid making a donation.
Santa saw the snarl in traffic and moved into the street to take advantage of it. Blaine wondered if he got a percentage of the take for his trouble. He leaned back and squeezed his eyes closed, the cold air streaming through the window, keeping him alert. Horns honked, blared.
A bell disturbed him and forced his eyes open.
“Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!”
Santa was coming toward the driver’s side of the cab, aiming for the open window. Blaine slid over to roll it up, but the fake-bearded man got there too fast.
“Merry Christmas! Something for the poor and needy, sir?”
Blaine shrugged. Paying the man would be the quickest way to get rid of him. He reached into his pocket, groping for some change.
Santa thrust his copper cup farther into the car. There was something peculiar about the angle at which he held it …
Blaine’s hand emerged with a pair of quarters.
… and something even more peculiar about the way he held his eyes.
It was the eyes that moved McCracken to action more than anything. Just as Santa started his cup forward, Blaine lurched to the side and watched its liquid contents spray by him, splattering the upholstery. Hot steam began to rise as the vinyl and cloth beneath it melted.
Acid! McCracken realized, the Browning already in his hand.
Santa had his gun out, too, but Blaine sent two shots into him high and hard before he could fire it, staining his lapels the scarlet color of his suit. Santa pitched backward, slammed into another traffic-wedged car, and then slumped to the cement.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” screamed the cabbie, and his hand groped desperately for the door handle.
A number of bystanders chuckled because it looked like Santa had finally gone for one dollar too much. A few even applauded.
There was no mistaking the actions of the carolers, though.
In unison, as if rehearsed, they pulled weapons from inside their overcoats. The first out was a sawed-off shotgun and its wielder fired both barrels as Blaine hugged the taxi’s floor. The pellets turned the car’s frame into a pincushion and the cabbie’s head into splinters of bone. The shock of death forced his foot down, and the cab shot off to the right, colliding with one car, another, then pushing a third with it onto the sidewalk before coming to a stop.
Blaine was tossed violently one way and then the other. His hand grasped for the door handle and yanked it hard. The door sprung open and the movement threw his body onto the sidewalk. The cab itself provided cover.
The carolers fanned out in military fashion, oblivious to the screams and panic of those around them. A series of sprays from the machine pistol of one tore into the cab’s engine block and rocketed flames outward.
McCracken rolled away, exposing himself long enough for a pair of carolers to empty clips at him, chewing cement and spitting glass everywhere. He rolled again and found cover behind a truck.
He crawled under it and locked his Browning on two carolers gliding across the street with heavy rifles in hand before them. Only seven shots remained in the Browning, and his spare clip was still in the overcoat he had left at Madame Rosa’s. He had to make each shot count.
He squeezed off a pair at the two approaching carolers, taking both in the head and dropping them there. Before their bodies had even struck pavement, a hail of fire coughed up fresh tar before him, coming from two directions at once. The impact stunned him briefly, and he was only vaguely conscious of figures darting across the street to better their positions.
Christ, how many carolers had there been? Six? Eight? Ten maybe? … A fucking army!
Blaine could tell they were trying to encircle him. They would keep him pinned where he was with heavy fire while they readied a simultaneous offensive he could not possibly survive. He could hear the distant wail of sirens now, but traffic and icy roads considered, the police could not possibly arrive in time to be of any help to him. He would have to beat the carolers on his own.