Shadows (Ultrahumans Book 2) (17 page)

‘Lines are down.’

The voice in her ear was the last thing they needed to do to prepare. ‘Let’s deal, boys,’ she said, her low voice carrying to the microphone in her hat brim.

Four men drew silenced automatics and fired. Four guards dropped to the floor.

In the few seconds of shock-induced disability which followed, five more men, including Rex and Jack, came in through the bank’s doors, locking them behind them. Sub-machine guns were produced from under coats as the men marched in, but no shots were fired. The weapons were for show and last resort, and Diamond preferred to never need a last resort.

‘Everyone on the ground,’ Rex ordered. ‘Face down. Stay quiet and no one gets hurt.’

Diamond dropped to the floor with everyone else, playing the part of an innocent victim, but her eyes were on the glass front of the building, watching for anyone trying to interrupt their activities.

‘Silent alarm was tripped,’ the voice in her ear announced. ‘They think they have help coming.’

Rex and Jack were already on their way into the back of the building where the vault was located, leaving the knaves to guard the front. Diamond allowed herself a small smile; everything was going according to plan. Now if they worked at the speed required, there would be nothing to worry about on the way out.

Inside the vault a high-energy laser drill was employed to bypass the locks on several of the deposit boxes. Negotiable bearer bonds were removed and placed in a bag, replacing the bulky device which had previously occupied the space and now sat in the middle of the vault floor. A slab of plastic explosives was placed in each of the emptied boxes. A couple of other, random, boxes were opened and explosives placed in them. The entire operation took fifteen minutes, but it was within timescales.

The two men marched back out of the vault area, Rex carrying the bag as though it weighed nothing. He walked across the foyer to where Diamond was lying, grabbed her arm, and yanked her to her feet. She let out a squeal of protest and then went silent as he glowered at her. Two of her knaves grabbed a young man from the floor and began hustling him toward the doors.

‘Everyone stays down for five minutes after we’re gone,’ Rex said, backing toward the door with an apparently cowed Diamond in his grasp. ‘Anyone moves, these two are dead. If we see cops, these two are dead.’ He backed through the doors and hustled Diamond toward a van at the side of the road, pushing her in before climbing in himself. There she was pushed roughly to the floor beside the young man, the van doors were closed, and they set off into the midday traffic.

Thirty seconds later, the fuel-air explosive device in the vault erupted into a cloud of vapour to be ignited a second after that by the bombs in the boxes. The bank patrons and staff were just beginning to stand when a ball of fire boiled out of the vault and engulfed them.

~~~

‘Oh… Jesus,’ Cygnus muttered as she dropped to the pavement in front of the half-destroyed bank. She had seen the news, changed, and flown over at top speed, but Svetilo had managed to beat her there and was busy helping the emergency services go over the foyer area where fires were still licking over the more flammable pieces of furniture.

The tall, muscular, Russian woman spotted her immediately. ‘Aha! I knew you would be here. Excellent. Now we have the heavy lifting equipment we can proceed. Can we find Cygnus some gloves? We don’t want those pretty hands getting burned again.’

‘You were waiting for me?’ Cygnus asked as she took a pair of thick gloves from a fireman and began pulling them on.

‘Da. I am strong, but between us we can move mountains. There has been a large collapse in the back. There are almost certainly no survivors, but if anyone is alive they must be rescued and soon.’ Svetilo started for the back of the room. She was wearing a dark purple micro-dress and heeled, stiletto boots, totally inappropriate for the work and so her.

‘Did anyone in the foyer get out alive?’

‘Alive, yes. Unharmed… Twelve severely injured, eight dead. Concussion damage, third-degree burns. None of these people will be speaking of their attackers soon.’

‘Fuck. This isn’t a typical bank robbery.’

‘Net. Whoever planned this had the twisted mind, da?’

The vault access was blocked with fallen masonry and they began pulling it free, watching for further falls as they went. They found the first body a couple of yards in, crushed under a block of concrete and burned to the point that it was barely recognisable as human.

‘What the Hell did this?’ Cygnus asked.

‘It looks to me like fuel-air explosive device. Thermobaric weapon. Military and hard to get. Big ones are difficult to tell from nukes, but they are very effective at wiping out the evidence. Manager’s office should be on the left here.’

Pushing and pulling at fallen concrete beams, they managed to clear the doorway. The door had been blown inward by the enormous overpressure of the explosion, and that was what had killed the manager. His face and chest had been smashed in by the reinforced door even before his desk had been driven backward, almost cutting him in half.

‘There is body on floor under desk,’ Svetilo said. Cygnus could tell she was getting stressed because her English was getting more Russian.

Dreading what they would find, they pulled the desk away from the wall. The manager’s body slumped forward onto it with a sickening squelch, and Cygnus diverted her attention from that sight by looking down at the body under it. It was a woman, maybe twenty-five. Her face would likely have been pretty if her left cheek had not been badly burned, but… Crouching down, Cygnus felt for a pulse on the girl’s neck.

‘Overpressure will have torn her lungs apart,’ Svetilo said, her voice choked. ‘She–’

‘I’ve got a pulse,’ Cygnus interrupted. ‘It’s weak, but…’

Svetilo was already rushing to the doorway. ‘We have live one!’

Cygnus was a little surprised her shout failed to bring the ceiling down on them.

~~~

David Hopkirk hung from his wrists in the back of the van, secured to a ring in the ceiling by ropes which were threatening to cut off his circulation. He had to admit that the view was good, if dimly lit. Barely a foot from him was the woman in the red dress who had been taken from the bank with him. Her arms were pulled up over her head and the result was a pair of impressively up-thrust breasts, but somehow he could not quite bring himself to be aroused by that just now.

‘D-do you think they’ll let us go?’ he asked. They had been parked somewhere, just where was impossible to know, for a while. Time had become meaningless after his arms had started to go numb.

‘I don’t see how they could, sugar,’ Diamond replied. ‘We’ve seen their faces.’

‘But the people in the bank…’

‘Everyone was lying down. Not a good angle to look from. We’ve had plenty of time to look right at them.’

‘Oh… I… I guess I’m not going to forget the big guy. He looked like he wanted to crush my skull every time he looked at me.’

Diamond smiled. ‘You don’t want to be worrying about Rex, hun.’ She pushed up onto her toes, pulled at the ropes, and then dropped her arms. David’s eyes widened. ‘He’s just a big old teddy bear. Of course, a bear’ll pull your arms and legs off if it needs to, but you stay out of its way and it won’t bother you.’

‘You… You’re with them!’

‘Oh no, hun. They’re with me.’ She bent down and picked up her hat, reaching into the crown and pulling out a diamond-shaped, sharpened metal object. The edge glinted in the dim light of the overhead bulb. ‘No, you don’t want to be worrying about Rex. You need to worry about me.’

Stepping closer, she pulled out the neck of his T-shirt and began slicing it open with the shuriken. ‘We are going to have so much fun,’ she told him.

4
^th
May.

Twilight watched the van for ten minutes before stepping down from the rooftop in Deale Harbour and checking it more closely. The last van she had watched like that had contained a maniac with a machine gun and she was in no hurry to repeat that performance, but this van was still and quiet.

It just looked wrong. The parking was haphazard, as though the driver had stopped and vacated in a hurry. It was a box van, a fairly large one, but there were no markings on it, and the small windows in the rear doors had been painted out, but not especially expertly. And, somehow, it just felt bad.

‘Keys are in the ignition,’ Andrea commented as they looked in the cab.

‘And no one has stolen it. Can’t have been here long.’ She pulled off a glove and used it to open the door. There was no indication of ownership, nothing to tell who the driver was or what had happened to him. She pulled the single key on a basic, leather fob and walked around to the back.

‘Might be rigged,’ Andrea said as Twilight inserted the key.

‘Good point…’ She turned the key over and got no immediate response, and then backed off to one side and used her scabbard to push the lever handle down. The door bounced open an inch and there was still no explosion. ‘Well… so far so good.’ She stepped around the door and pulled it open.

‘Oh shit,’ Andrea said, her voice sounding flat.

‘Yeah…’ Twilight agreed, mumbling the word aloud. She was seeing what Andrea was seeing and she felt that the short phrase did not quite cover it.

There was a body hung by ropes from the ceiling of the van. The interior walls were more or less painted in blood, but that was hardly surprising given that there was no skin on the corpse and there was a long wound in its throat, cutting from one side to the other all the way down to the bone. The only reason the head was still attached was that it was wedged firmly between the stretched arms.

Blood began to drip, very slowly, onto the tarmac at her feet and Twilight stepped back, fishing her radio from her boot. It was circumstantial at this point, but it looked like their serial killer had taken another victim.

Part Three: Poker Face

New Millennium City, MD, 4
^th
May, 2014.

Twilight sat cross-legged on the kerb at the side of the road a hundred yards from the van, which was now crawling with crime scene people in white bunny suits. Another hundred yards away a cordon of uniformed cops was holding back a gathering crowd and a lot of press and cameras. A number of them had tried to get a comment from Cygnus when she flew in, but she was saying nothing and had taken up position beside her partner, waiting for the detective in charge of the case to come over. He had told Twilight she should stay put and was taking his own sweet time about talking to her.

‘That him?’ Cygnus asked as a tall, muscular man with short-cropped, sandy hair started toward them with a dark expression on his face.

‘Uh-huh, Detective Silvian.’ Twilight watched him approaching. He had some sort of hand cannon in a shoulder holster, she was willing to bet it was a .44 Magnum automatic, and from the way his trouser leg hung, he had a backup piece in a holster on his ankle. The body tone and the way he used it as he walked suggested he liked throwing his weight around and the excessive armament told the same story. This was probably not a nice man.

‘So, you just happened to be passing,’ Silvian said without preamble, ‘saw a parked van, opened it up, and found a body in it?’

‘Good start,’ Andrea commented.

‘Pretty much. It looked wrong.’ Twilight remained on the ground, even if that meant looking up at the towering detective. She did not feel like letting him ruffle her.

‘Looked wrong?’

‘You never get gut feelings, Detective? Last time I saw something like that a policeman was shot by the guy inside it. I wasn’t risking lives by letting some guy open the door first.’

Silvian gave a grunt, looking back toward the van. Then he said, ‘We’ll need that sword to check for blood.’

‘No, you really don’t.’

There was a triumphant glint in his eyes when he turned back to scowl at her. ‘You’re refusing to provide evidence linked to a murder investigation?’

Now Twilight got to her feet. ‘I’m refusing to hand over my sword unless you have reasonable cause to suspect it was used on that body. Have you ever skinned anything, Detective? A sword is not the most useful tool for that kind of job, and I don’t carry a knife.’

‘Hand over the sword, or I’m placing you…’ He stopped as Cygnus pulled her tiny phone from her boot and lifted it to place in her ear. ‘What are
you
doing?’

‘Calling the UID,’ Cygnus replied blandly.

‘What?’

‘You’ve clearly determined that an Ultra is responsible for these murders. That places it in their jurisdiction. I assume that you’ll be turning the case over to them as soon as you’ve arrested my partner, but I figured I’d save you the trouble and call it in myself. And then I thought I’d go explain to the press over there why you’ve just arrested Twilight–’

‘I need to get the sword tested to eliminate her from the enquiry,’ Silvian growled. ‘There is no solid evidence of an Ultra being involved at this time.’

‘Get some,’ Twilight told him, ‘and I’ll bring this in myself.’

‘You could’ve cleaned–’

‘Yeah, about that. You see any blood on me? That van is swimming in it so the killer must have been covered head to foot. And if I’m not then I either found the body, like I said, or I’ve had a lot of showers, and you really think I wouldn’t have cleaned the sword too?’

‘She’s very meticulous with that sword, Detective,’ Cygnus put in. ‘I’ve seen her spend an hour going over every bit of it. Not in the last couple of days, mind.’

‘I haven’t had to use it recently,’ Twilight said, shrugging.

‘If you’d like to throw around a few more baseless allegations while I’m here as a witness, I know a few good lawyers who can make sure you spend the rest of your career as a crossing guard.’ Cygnus gave him her best smile.

Silvian gave a grunt of disgust and stalked off back toward the van. They both heard him muttering something about ‘freaks’ as he left.

‘People like him make me want to smash something,’ Cygnus grumbled. ‘Let’s go home.’