The Darkest Day (22 page)

On the other side of the door was a dark room full of cardboard boxes and piled junk. A dim glow of moonlight shone through a window. The man with blond hair moaned as Victor dragged him by his ankles through the doorway and deposited him in an unceremonious heap while Raven performed a quick recon.

Victor searched through the man’s pockets while he breathed with a high-pitched wheeze because his nose was crushed flat. He found a wallet, spare ammunition, a radio, a cell phone and the suppressed Ruger in black leather shoulder rigging. Victor took everything and dropped it on the floor out of the man’s reach.

He held up the wallet for the man to see. ‘Personal effects? That’s such a basic error. I guess you must be part of the B team, Mr Sean Pachulski.’

The man’s eyes began to focus as his senses returned. His gaze flicked between Victor and Raven. Despite the obvious pain and his captive status he was angry and defiant beyond bravado. This was a warrior.

‘
Fuck you
,’ Pachulski shouted.

He was somewhere in his forties, face aged further by sun, alcohol and tobacco. Gold glinted at his neck and around his left ring finger. Tattoos and scars covered his thick arms. He had a Bronx accent.

Victor brought a finger to his lips. ‘Shh.’

The man growled, ‘I’m gonna kill you.’

‘Of course you are.’

He tried to stand to deliver on his promise, but his right shoulder was useless – dislocated or suffering from a torn rotator cuff. He couldn’t get himself upright with only one arm. The more he tried, the more he cried out in pain.

‘Have you finished?’ Victor asked.

Pachulski stared, nostrils flaring in rage and frustration.

Raven returned and said, ‘It’s clear. We’re alone.’

Victor nodded and looked down at the warrior. ‘Did you hear that?’

The man said nothing.

‘Do you understand what that means for you?’

‘I’m gonna fucking kill you,’ Pachulski hissed.

He rolled back on to his front and tried to stand. For all his determination, he had neither the strength nor coordination to do so with only the use of a single arm.

‘I respect your will,’ Victor said, ‘if not your distorted sense of reality. You couldn’t kill me with two hands, a gun and backup. Now you can’t even stand.’

‘You’re a dead man.’

‘Empirical evidence states otherwise.’

The rage became acceptance. He stared. ‘Shut up and kill me, you fuck.’

Victor said, ‘All in good time.’

Raven gestured for him to hurry. Victor gestured to say that he had it under control.

‘Your shoulder looks painful,’ Victor said.

‘I’ve had paper cuts that hurt more,’ Pachulski growled. ‘You’re a pussy.’

‘I need some answers.’

‘Go fuck yourself.’

Victor said, ‘I’m not a vindictive type but try not to swear and I assure you this will go a lot easier.’

The man sneered. ‘You think you can torture me and I’ll talk? Fuck you. Fuck you.
FUCK. YOU.
’

There was no false confidence, but defiance and self-belief wrapped up in fury. A powerful combination. This was a man who would not be broken without considerable effort. Any pain would fuel that anger and solidify the defiance. It might be hours before his will cracked. Victor considered for a moment.

‘I believe you when you say that, Mr Pachulski. I don’t think pain is going to make you tell me what I need to know.’

‘You’d better fucking believe it.’

Victor said, ‘But pain can be an emotional as well as a physical response. What other emotions are there? Fear? That’s no good; I can’t scare you. Love? What do you love most in this world?’

The man named Pachulski hesitated, not knowing how to answer; confused or wary of some trap or manipulation attempt.

‘I said: what do you love most in this world?’

Still, the man gave no answer. His eyes narrowed, suspicious and growing nervous.

‘It’s not a trick question,’ Victor assured.

Victor held open the wallet so Pachulski could see the contents, in particular a photograph behind clear plastic.

The man stared. Swallowed.

Victor said, ‘Is this what you love most in this world?’

Pachulski said nothing. He didn’t blink.

Victor said, ‘You have a beautiful family, Sean. May I call you Sean?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Your two girls look just like their mother.’

Anger and pain left the man’s face, replaced by fear.

‘You’re a bit broader now than in this picture. A couple of years old, is it? That would make your girls… Seven and eight? Something like that. The little one looks like she’s trouble. I can see the mischief in her grin.’

The man tried, but failed, to stop his eyes welling.

Victor took out a credit card, examined it for a second, then held it up for the man to see. Victor did the same with the driver’s licence. He tapped the printed address.

‘This is exactly why you don’t take personal effects with you on a job, Sean. And this is exactly why I have no one in my life. Are you going to tell me what I need to know?’

Tears streamed from Pachulski’s eyes, flowing over his temples and into his hair.

‘You don’t live that far from here,’ Victor said. ‘In fact I was close to your address earlier today. I think I can be there in about twenty minutes.’ He looked to Raven. ‘What do you think?’

She said, ‘The roads will be clearer now, so maybe fifteen.’

Pachulski’s eyes were as red as his bloody nose.

‘I can have your two girls on the radio within half an hour,’ Victor continued, ‘begging Daddy to save them. Will you be brave enough to tell them you can’t?’

The man wailed.

‘Tell me everything I need to know and when I walk out of here I won’t make a detour.’

Finally, Pachulski spoke between sobs: ‘How do I know you’ll keep your word?’

Victor said, ‘The only thing you can know for certain, whether or not you tell me what I want to know, is that I will kill you. There’s nothing you can do to stop that happening. It’s not personal, Sean, but you work for people trying to kill me. I haven’t stayed alive this long by showing my enemies mercy. ’ Raven glanced at him. ‘So, you’re dead. Like I said, a certainty. But if you don’t tell me who sent you then I won’t kill you until after I’ve made that detour we talked about.’

Pachulski blinked the tears from his eyes, swallowed, and said, ‘I’ll talk. I’ll talk.’

‘Good,’ Victor said.

Raven said, ‘Where’s Halleck?’

Pachulski said, ‘I don’t know, I swear.’

‘Then where are you guys based? Where’s your HQ?’

‘Brooklyn,’ Pachulski answered. ‘Floyd Bennett Field.’

‘What’s that?’ Victor asked.

‘It’s a disused airfield,’ Raven explained. ‘I know where it is.’

Victor said, ‘How many of you are there?’

‘We had twenty-four,’ the man said. ‘I’m not sure how many are left now. I’m sorry, I —’

Raven said, ‘Where’s the bomb? Where’s the C4?’

His mouth hovered open. ‘What bomb? I don’t know anything about a bomb.’

‘Why did Halleck base you guys at an airfield?’

‘Waiting for a delivery,’ Pachulski said.

‘Details,’ Raven demanded.

His words came out fast and frantic: ‘That’s all I know, I swear. Halleck is having something delivered. I don’t know what. I’m a foot soldier, that’s all. I don’t know anything else. If I did I would tell you.
I swear
.’

‘I believe you,’ Victor said. ‘Relax.’

‘So you won’t hurt my family now?’

Victor said, ‘I don’t need to any more, do I?’ and broke Pachulski’s neck.

The street was empty when they left. The rain fell in a light but steady drizzle. The breeze was intermittent and cold. The moon pierced through the clouds above. The city beneath was dark and quiet – a rare instant of peacefulness in an otherwise chaotic metropolis.

Raven said, ‘Floyd Bennett Field is at least twenty miles away. It’s right on the bottom of Brooklyn. That’s a hell of a lot of ground to cover as fugitives.’

‘What choice do we have?’

They kept their eyes moving as they walked, looking out for cops or Halleck’s men.

‘Would you have done it?’ Raven asked.

‘Done what?’

She frowned. ‘Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean. The stuff about the kid. The daughter. Was it a threat or would you have followed through if he hadn’t talked?’

Victor said, ‘We’ll never know, will we?’

She was quiet for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t have let you, had it come to it.’

Victor didn’t respond.

Raven said, ‘Maybe you only want me to think there’s no line you won’t cross. Maybe that’s why you won’t tell me.’

‘Believe whatever you wish.’

No one gave either of them a second glance as they threaded their way through a crowd of citizens out to pick up supplies of perishable goods being sold cheap by a local supermarket looking to offload them before they spoiled. He paid for a loaf of sliced white bread and ate three slices as he walked to get some simple carbohydrates into his system. Raven took a slice for herself. Victor gave the rest of the loaf to the next person he passed.

He felt a little light-headed from the fight with Guerrero. Not concussed, but hard blows to the head made the brain rattle inside the skull. He could have some swelling, or in an extreme case an aneurysm. If it was the latter, it didn’t matter about the people after him because he would be dead soon regardless. If it was only the former the light-headedness might progress to feeling faint or dizzy or nauseous. Neither of which would help him get out of this situation. He needed his mind sharp and fast, not dulled and slow.

They passed a man in an astrakhan fur hat who stood sheltering in the doorway of a closed store. The man was laughing to himself. About what, they would never know.

They walked south for almost an hour, back into Manhattan until all around Victor tall buildings rose high into the night sky, but whereas their façades should glow from lit interiors and glimmer with the infinite lights of the city at night, they were dark and featureless. Moonlight shone off their glass windows and the windscreens of abandoned cars. Traffic lights suspended on long beams hung useless. A homeless guy lay next to a bin on the pavement, buried under a deep pile of blankets, lost in the slumber of alcohol, unaware of the blackout and its effect on the city.

Something was wrong.

Victor did not see or hear anything that alarmed him, but he sensed it regardless. He noticed the change within himself. He felt the physiological adjustment to danger. His subconscious had detected some threat and had responded by sending out messages to release hormones, which in turn resulted in the elevation of his heart rate and a heightened state of alertness.

He didn’t yet know why, but the organism wherein his consciousness existed knew all it needed to prepare him for fight or flight.

This was the innate feeling of something being wrong – the inexplicable bad feeling – that modern humans sometimes experienced but often ignored. For Victor, his life often depended on heeding its message.

He saw no other people. He heard no one approaching.

He moved anyway. Raven detected it also, or saw his reaction to it, and followed his lead. Victor did not know where the threat would come from, but standing still and waiting for it to manifest was not his style. That would be idiocy. He picked his own battlefields. He had not survived this long by being reactive.

A few metres along the street, he understood. On a storefront up ahead were pinpricks of floating red light, growing larger and further apart.

Vehicle tail lights were red, but if these were tail lights they would grow smaller and closer as the car moved further away, not larger and further apart as they drew closer. Which only left one type of red light they could belong to.

They were the lights of a police cruiser approaching, maybe a block away, light bars glowing but siren silent not to alert him.

His subconscious, always alert and processing data, had noticed anyway, many seconds before his conscious mind was aware of those pin dots of red light and had worked out what they meant.

Now, they were both heading straight towards the threat.

Raven saw it too and they backtracked, turned, walking fast. They took a set of steps leading down to get off the road, heading into an alleyway, narrow and stinking, and louder with the ambient sound of the city, trapped and intensified.

The cop car approached, out of sight behind them and up the steps, but he heard the rumble of its exhaust becoming louder despite the attempt at stealth. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the cruiser drive past the mouth of the alleyway. He glimpsed two cops inside. The red glow of the light bars played over the concrete steps, casting shadows where once had been darkness.

They waited, wrapped in shadows and leaning against a damp wall, until the rumble of the exhaust had faded into the background murmur of the rain.

For now, they had avoided the cops, but those inside the cruiser would not give up so soon. The car would circle the area searching for them and only leaving again if they were sure the sighting they were responding to proved to be false. Or maybe they wouldn’t go at all, convinced of their presence, or they might call in reinforcements to join the hunt. There was nothing for it but to keep moving.

Active, not reactive.

They passed under a bridge. The rain struck riveted steel in a jarring patter. Junk burning in a charred barrel sent yellow and orange flames licking beyond the blackened barrel rim. The smell was abhorrent. Three homeless men stood around it, forming the corners of an equilateral triangle, warming their hands. Their faces were empty and thin, worn down to masks of skin and hardship. Firelight flickered on empty wine bottles around them. Glowing embers floated skyward.

Victor and Raven walked past the men, knowing they stared the whole way, but he kept his focus ahead. He had seen from their body language that they were not going to bother them. This was no more than a curiosity to them. The homeless men might speculate why they were down here with the lowest of the low, but the vagrants were not any kind of threat. These men had bigger problems to deal with, like staying alive for one more night.

They emerged from under the bridge and back into the rain. They took a set of concrete stairs back up to street level. He did not want to end up trapped with the river on one side of them and cops on the other. They would become hypothermic long before they reached the other side, even if they were fortunate enough not to be struck by some barge or ferry. Victor had no desire to die, and even less so in a river, freezing and drowning, body washed out to sea, maybe never found, remains eaten by sharks.

He pushed on, crossing a metal footbridge over a road, his steps more like shuffles, splashing water from puddles up his legs. The noise of the traffic below was a loud roar of engines and exhausts, echoing under the bridge.

Sirens sounded behind them, growing louder with each passing second. Maybe the one from before, or a new arrival. He straightened his back and focused on his gait to appear not as a man fleeing but as a pedestrian walking. Raven did the same. A couple not worth investigating.

In the darkness and rain, the deception worked. The cruiser sped past. It didn’t even slow.

Not the one that had been looking for them before, but another. Maybe responding to some other emergency.

They waited until it had gone and walked fast – a couple in a hurry, stressed and harried, but not chased. They had to find somewhere to hold up, and soon. No one they passed paid them any attention. Civilians were more concerned with the rain and the blackout or so used to keeping themselves to themselves it made no difference how fast he and Raven walked or how suspicious they acted.

The rain was falling harder as Victor and Raven entered a plaza. He began to shiver as he weaved past people, avoiding the umbrellas that seemed determined to find his eyes. People still struggled in fruitless attempts to get their phones to work through the downed networks. The collective glow from the screens up-lit their faces, disembodied in the otherwise darkness.

Raven said, ‘We’ve got company.’