Clawback (15 page)

“Nah. Just another stakeout. Vivianna thought she might be able to talk her way in, though.”

The woman at the entrance, no doubt. Good strategy to send her over to the cops, rather than Darryl.

“She’s your talking head?”

“Vivianna’s smart,” said Darryl. “More than most on-air reporters.”

“Uh-huh. I can see that.” I stepped away from the truck, letting Clara follow, moving out of Darryl’s earshot—not that he’d hear much over the multiple broadcast and sideline channels he had running.

“Friend of yours?” I asked.

“We met in school. He’s a nice guy.”

“And a good contact, to be sure.” I squinted at the building’s upper story. “Let me guess—Faust’s got the penthouse.”

“Of course. Fifteen thousand square feet, four full baths, three fireplaces, and a private deck with rooftop garden. LEED certified, very green. The taxable value is twenty-one point four million.” Clara was deep into her phone.

“On the assessor’s database, are you?”

“No, the realtor that sold it to him last year. The video tour is still online.”

“I’m sure it’s gone through a tear-out since then.”

“Maybe.”

“Guys like Faust need to piss on their trees.”

“I thought you didn’t know him.”

“They’re all alike.”

In the sunshine I was getting warm. I took off my jacket and held it over one arm. The pockets sagged, heavy from my cellphone collection.

Across the street Vivianna disappeared through the entrance, one guard taking her in and the other resettling himself across the doorway.

“She got in,” I said.

“What?” Clara looked up. “Hey, you’re right.” She quick-stepped back to the van. “Darryl? Do you have visual?”

He’d pulled out a camera trunk of ballistic aluminum to sit on, focused on the raft of controls and slider boards. He gestured
meaninglessly and didn’t say anything, other hand pressing the headset to his ears. On the largest screen, right in front of his face, a low-res feed showed vague and unrecognizable shapes in a jagged bounce.

“I didn’t see a cameraman with her,” I said—quietly, not to disturb Darryl’s concentration.

“Spy tech. The audio’s easy—pinwire mic and a Nextel. But cameras have become so small recently that people have started carrying them in, too.”

“Right.” Darryl had one ear for us after all. “She’s got a filament lens inside the jacket pin. The transmitter’s on her belt. Looks like a cellphone holster if you’re not paying attention.”

“Is that even legal?”

“She tells them they’re on the record.” He shrugged. “And shows them a little microcassette recorder, twenty years old. They draw their own conclusions.”

“That seems just over the line from entrapment.”

“We’re not taking pictures for court.” Darryl worked some buttons, and the screen view sharpened. “Honestly, we’re not even taking them for on air—the video quality is too poor. But it’s nice to have a record, and this way Vivianna doesn’t have to write notes.”

Knowing what I was looking at, the picture became a little clearer. Not moving much, a shiny surface with a line down the middle and a panel to one side with a block of round buttons—just as I figured out Vivianna was inside an elevator, the doors slid open in front of her.

It was odd, watching with no sound. The scene was open and
bright, with indistinct objects lurching this way and that as Vivianna walked and turned. When she stopped, it seemed to be in a living room—white everywhere, long black couches, color on the walls that must have been art, and floor-to-ceiling windows, drapes pulled all the way to either side.

“What are they saying?” asked Clara, but Darryl ignored her, still working the board, apparently trying to improve the reception.

Now Vivianna had turned to face a new figure: a trim tall man, middle-aged, graying hair cut almost but not quite too short for fashion. He reached out to shake Vivianna’s hand—the pinhole camera lens distorted everything around the periphery of its view, and it looked even more bizarre when he abruptly raised her hand to brush his lips over it.

“Did he just kiss her hand?” Clara shook her head. “Yech!”

I filed a mental note under Clara, Preferences, Physical Contact. “Is it Faust?”

“Probably. The picture’s not great. But who else would be up there?”

They were standing next to the loft’s vast window now, and Faust swung one arm, displaying the view. We didn’t need audio, the dialogue was easily imagined: “You can see all the way to Connecticut from here.” “Amazing.” “I’d call it a million-dollar view, but—” chuckle “it cost a lot more than that!”

Vivianna dutifully turned to look out the window. Instead of the Hudson, it faced north, across the other loft buildings of the neighborhood, then uptown. Most of New York’s spires were visible.

“Lean down,” I murmured.

Clara looked at me. “What?”

“If Vivianna were to lean forward, the camera would see the street below the window—where
we
are. We could wave. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Well, Darryl laughed, at least.

Inside, Vivianna and Faust seemed to be talking—or he was, gesturing widely, face animated.

“Can’t you put them on speaker?” Clara said. “This is kind of pointless.”

“Oh, sorry.” Darryl reached to the controls.

CR-ACK!

For a second, cognitive dissonance—the shot came from outside, up above us, but I saw the window behind Faust, on-screen, go opaque with spider crack. Then another shot, this one blowing out the window, and the image became a tumult of motion and noise as Vivianna fell or dived for the floor.

“What the fuck?” Darryl, staring.

“Someone…what…shit…
gunshots
?” Clara, ducking into the van, looking back and out.

I spun, eyes raised, searching for the shooter. In my peripheral vision I noticed the cop by the cruiser doing the same.

A third shot, and I had him. Directly across from Faust’s building, an old warehouse, four stories, with rows of nineteenth-century windows on each floor. At the top, one was open—all the others reflected sun or blue sky, but this one was black and empty.

“Up there!” I tossed Clara my jacket. “Stay in the truck!”

The patrolman and I arrived at the sniper’s building simultaneously. He had his sidearm drawn, holding it pointed down, finger outside the trigger guard. We crashed through the door into a marble-and-mirrors lobby. Two uniformed doormen had come around the security desk, both staring. One held a cellphone like a walkie-talkie, the way construction workers do, midcall.

“Stairs?” The cop shouted at them. One pointed to a door alongside the elevators. “Back entrance?”

“Through here.” The other gestured behind him, to a corridor leading away from the desk.

The cop looked at me. “Who are you?”

“I’m just—”

“Stay here! Don’t do
anything
.” He glanced at the doormen. “I’m going after him. Can you shut down the elevators?”

“Sure.”

“Do it now. Freight elevator, too, if there is one.” The man with the phone clicked off and went to the desk, reaching for an unseen panel. “No one’s a hero, right? Backup will be here in a minute or two. Someone comes down the stairs, you just watch him go.”

The officer disappeared into the back corridor. The remaining three of us looked at each other.

“All residences up there?” I asked.

“Yeah.” The shorter doorman had dark circles under his eyes and that worried-about-my-green-card look. He appeared willing to assume I was authority of some sort, and I was willing to let him. “And the landing pad.”

“
Landing
pad?”

“For the private helicopters.”

Of course. “Who’s on the fourth floor, about halfway down that way?” I pointed, more or less in the direction of the open window.

“No one. Three units and they all remain empty.”

“Unsold?” The building looked too clean, too sparkly, to have been renovated more than a year ago.

“I think that is right.”

I could hear sirens now, but not close.

“You should stay behind the desk,” I said. “Keep—”

A sudden crashing from the back hallway, then an unintelligible shout—and three gunshots, almost inseparable.

“Fuck.” I moved toward the hall, while the doormen sensibly dived for the floor.

The sniper came out just as I cleared the edge of the desk. For an instant we stared at each other.

It was the man from the park—the lean, stubbled one who’d led the attack on Clara.

He wore a button-down shirt and khakis, straps of a small backpack over both shoulders—and a handgun held in both hands, right in front of his chest, pointed outward.

His surprise at seeing me may have slowed him down, a fraction of a second, just enough. I was still moving, at speed. He got a shot off, but I’d already begun to drop and the round went high. I hit him hard, midcenter. We tumbled, his torso catching the corner of the desk.

Wiry as a snake, he somehow managed in that halfsecond to twist, elbow me in the head, and land on top when we hit the floor.
Another blow to my stomach and he rolled away, already coming to his feet.

Jesus, he was
fast
.

BR-A-A-APPPPP!

The front windows of the lobby exploded inward, bullets shredding the plaster wall just to the sniper’s left. He jerked his handgun up, tracking the new threat, and fired back twice. I lunged off the floor, punching toward his groin, but he moved just enough to deflect the blow with his hip.

Another fusillade came from the street.

Perception shifted to frame by frame. I could almost see him thinking it through—an instant of indecision—as I punched with my other hand. He blocked my second strike as easily as the first, then abruptly spun backward and somehow flipped back into the hallway. Like we were in some Jet Li sequence—fucking
ballet
. And then he was gone.

No movement. Noise came down the long tunnel of my blown hearing. The doormen were huddled behind the desk, but no blood was visible so I figured they were unharmed.

I got up and ran after the gunman.

Stupid? Positively, in retrospect. In the moment—training, adrenaline, anger, who knows why—I was going to apprehend the cocksucker. He’d been within a whisker of killing me, and I’d slipped the bonds of rationality.

The policeman was lying fifteen yards in, crumpled in front of a steel exit door, under the red alarm connected to its push bar. The sniper couldn’t have gone over him and out because the alarm would be ringing. That meant the other way:

Up.

I hit the stairwell running. If he was one floor up and waiting to shoot me,
fuck
him—but he wasn’t.

Four flights—twenty seconds. Breathing hard when I got there, yes. The metal door in the headhouse was only slightly ajar. Finally, some sensibility returned, and I stopped for a moment to think.

The walls appeared to be utilitarian cinder block, which could certainly stop handheld calibers. I stepped to the hinge side of the door, reached up and—while flattening myself against the wall—shoved it open from the top corner.

No reaction.

The roof—what I could see of it—was black membrane, with a walkway of duckboards meandering over to a set of huge, beige, humming HVAC units. A three-foot parapet covered over with patinized copper walled the edge.

My hearing had begun to return, and that’s when I noticed a slow whine, gradually accelerating and getting louder. I stood still, puzzled. A dynamo? An engine? A motor of some sort…

A
helicopter.

I recognized the sound just as the rotors began to turn, slowly whipping the air.

A private helipad, the doorman had said. Either the assassin had arrived by air, or he was taking advantage of someone else’s ride.

But if he was operating a helicopter, he wouldn’t have two hands on a firearm, covering this doorway. Right?

I went out in a combat tuck, low and fast, off the edge of the duckboards and rolling behind the air conditioners. No shots. The chopper’s noise rose to full pitch, overwhelming the rooftop, while rotor wash began to blow dirt and bits of debris my way.

It was a—shit, I don’t know, I’ve always hated the fucking things. A little executive model, dark blue, with a bubble cockpit and a tiny passenger area behind the pilot. Inside the plexiglass I could clearly see a single occupant—the gunman—who was indeed too preoccupied to think about shooting at me.

On the other hand, the bird was about to fly. One skid lifted from the roof in a tentative way. The engines whined even louder.

I sprinted toward it.

The next seconds were a fractured blur.

The assassin saw me coming and jerked the cyclic. The helicopter surged upward just as I arrived. Instead of crashing the door, I collided with the skid, even as the entire craft began to glide horizontally above the roof. Knocked off balance, I grabbed wildly, not thinking—

—and a moment later I was yanked into the air, the skid in my armpit, dangling like a hooked fish as the chopper shot over the edge of the roof.

My whole body swung wildly, this way and that, as the gunman bobbed the helicopter. He must have known I was there, my weight screwing up the flight vectors. A kaleidoscope of the buildings, the street, the tops of cars, the white faces of people staring upward, all flashed past my eyes.

We seemed to be over the West Side Highway, but on top of everything else, some sort of inner-ear dislocation had completely bollixed my sense of up, down and sideways. Wind and the roar of the chopper’s turbines overwhelmed my hearing.

I thought I saw flashing lights below, maybe a fire truck or a police van. Just a glimpse—

The landing gear jerked under my arm, and I almost slipped off.
I yelled and couldn’t hear myself, grabbing at one arm with the other to lock my grip on the skid. Pain flared down my side as I tightened the death grip, squeezing it into my armpit.

Uptown? My thoughts were broken and unconnected. Heading north.

The helicopter dived, and for an instant I felt weightless. Cars and light poles rushed up—then the pilot yanked us into a screaming climb, and the skid was almost pulled from my hold. I gasped, swinging wildly, a monkey on a bucking rope.