Politika

TWENTY-NINE

Nimec waited in the mouth of the alley, standing lookout as Noriko and Barnhart moved through the shadows in back of the Platinum Club. Barnhart had a pair of cable cutters in one hand, a MagLite in the other. His Benelli pump gun was slung over his shoulder. They were leaving footprints in the snow, but there wasn’t much they could do about that. Besides, if Nick stayed true to form and didn’t come back until the next day, the footprints would have filled in before they were spotted.

The telephone connection box was mounted at eye level on a wall outside the building; on a surveillance run two nights earlier, Nori had found it by tracking the lines coming from a telephone pole on the adjacent side street.

She stopped now and examined the rectangular metal box, moisture steaming from her nose and mouth, snow rustling between her ankles. After a moment, she reached out to Barnhart and he handed off the cable cutters, directing the flash beam onto the box. The phone wires entered the bottom of the box through a PVC plastic conduit. The same line, she knew, would be used to transmit signals from the alarm system to its monitoring station. Although it was possible Roma had installed a dedicated line for his system, or even a cellular-link backup, she doubted it. As a member of Barnhart’s undercover strike force during his years with the FBI, she had broken into many mob-controlled premises, and almost to a one had found them protected with crude, easily circumvented systems. Big Paul Castellano’s mansion on the hill had been the singular exception, but the Gambino family don had always held lordly pretensions. Not so Roma. He was a gangster of the old school and would undoubtedly rely on his heavies for security.

Noriko brushed some snow off the PVC conduit and opened the cable cutters around it. The air trembled with lightning. A food wrapper broke away from a trash spill up the alley, skittered past her foot. Her lips compressed with effort, she clipped the pipe halfway through, then rotated the cutters and clipped the other half of the pipe, exposing the insulated wires inside it. She severed them with a single quick cut.

Barring some unlikely fail-safe, the phones and external alarms were out of commission.

She passed the tool back to Barnhart and gestured to her left. Several yards farther along the wall, he could see a back door that opened into the alley. He nodded and they hastened over to it, Nori in the lead.

She crouched at the door as Barnhart turned his flash onto the lock plate below the knob. Then she produced a flat leather case from a patch pocket on her coveralls. Zipping open the case, she selected two needle-like steel shims from the large set inside it, clamped one between her teeth, and inserted the working end of the other into the keyhole. She raked it deftly across the bottom cylinder pins, felt one, then two, of them activate. Seconds later she extracted the pick from the keyway, switched it with the one in her mouth, and used the second to jiggle open the remaining tumblers.

The latch slid back with a metallic snick.

Noriko glanced over her shoulder at Barnhart and he nodded again. She reached for the doorknob. If there were a fire bar or something of that nature across the inside of the door, they would have to try to gain access from the street, where they would be in a much more visible — and risky — position.

She twisted the knob, applied slight pressure to the door with her shoulder.

It eased inward a crack.

“Abracadabra,” Barnhart muttered, squeezing her shoulder.

A relieved breath hissing out between her teeth, the tension draining from her muscles, Noriko carefully replaced the shims in their case and returned it to her pocket. Barnhart swung the MagLite toward the mouth of the alley and thumbed it on and off twice. Nimec returned the all-clear signal and sprinted out of the shadows to his companions, a nylon duffel bag in his hand.

Suddenly they heard the rumble of an engine, saw the yellow sweep of headlights on the snow-covered blacktop, and froze outside the door, waiting. A second ticked by. Another. Then a Sanitation Department snowplow went clattering past the alley, turned left at the corner, and moved off down the avenue.

Nimec motioned for them to enter the building.

Barnhart went in first, his tools in his pockets now, both hands around the pump gun. Its underbarrel light threw a tight conical beam into the gloom beyond the door. They could see a narrow back stairwell leading upward to the left, a hallway straight ahead of them.

Barnhart glanced at the others, angled his chin toward the steps, and started to climb them.

They followed him up without hesitation.

Lightning ripped into the street lamp on the corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Narrows Avenue just as Nick Roma’s car turned off Shore Road in that direction. His face registered surprise as the sodium bulb flared brightly and then blew in terminal overload, sprinkling the road with its jagged, smoking remains. On the Lincoln’s radio the voice of Michael Bolton dissolved into snaps, crackles, and pops.

“Son of a bitch,” the driver muttered.

In the backseat, Roma stared out his window. All along the avenue, spindly winter-bare trees swayed in the wind roaring off Gravesend Bay.

He shot a glance at the dash clock.

“It’s almost eleven-thirty,” Nick said edgily. “What the hell’s taking you so long to get where we’re going?”

“It’s this fucking weather,” the driver said. “I take it any faster, our wheels’ll be all over the road.”

Roma responded with an indeterminate grunt. He wondered if Marissa would be wearing that short, white lacy thing he’d given her last week. Wondered how fast he would peel her out of it once he stepped through her door. God, God, he was so coiled with tension, so wound up with need, he didn’t think he’d be able to wait until they got into bed. Maybe later they would take a bath together, bring one of his bottles of wine with them…

“Shit!” he said abruptly, slapping his leg in frustration. What was wrong with him? The wine. He’d forgotten the goddamn wine at the club.

He glanced over his shoulder at the sedan following behind them, glad he’d instructed his bodyguards to stick close until he reached Marissa’s. At least now they’d have a chance to make themselves useful.

“Val, listen to me,” he said, leaning forward over the seat rest. “Call the others. There’s a plastic bag in my office, near the desk. It has two bottles of wine in it. Tell them to head back and get it, bring it over to the girl’s place, and ring her bell. I’ll come to the door and take it from them.”

Val nodded, took one hand off the steering wheel, reached for the flip phone in his pocket.

“And Val…?”

The driver briefly met his eyes in the rearview.

“Tell them to be quick about it,” Roma said.

“Our boy Nicky’s been living the high life,” Barnhart said quietly, angling his underbarrel flash into the plastic bag beside Roma’s desk. The light glinted off two bottles of red wine. “He’s got a couple bottles of Chambertin just sitting around in here.”

“And expensive cologne,” Noriko whispered. She was at the desk opening drawers, her hand feeling around inside them. “Seems to be it, though. There’s zip in these drawers. No papers, no pens, not even a stick of chewing gum.”

Barnhart stepped over to her, pulled one of the drawers completely off its tracks, and set it on the floor. Then he reached back into its empty slot, searching for hidden compartments.

Meanwhile, Nimec was moving along the walls, sliding his gloved hands over them, probing for a recessed safe or cabinet. The only hidden devices they’d found so far were Nick’s giant television, theater-quality sound system, and a VCR/DVD reader that fed both systems. Predictably, the disk in the hopper was the first Godfather movie. But there were no other tapes, no disks, nothing else in any way unusual. The office was a blank slate. They had been inside the room for five minutes, and Nimec wanted to be out within ten. So far they’d been lucky, having located the office almost as soon as they reached the upstairs landing — aside from the entrance to a stockroom, there weren’t any other doors along the short, dead-end corridor — and its lock had presented no more of an obstacle to Nori than the one downstairs. Still, there wasn’t a moment to waste.

Finding nothing immediately, Nimec paused, looking around. Even in the darkness, he could see that the place was fastidiously neat and clean. If there were squirrel holes, Roma would be careful to keep them well camouflaged.

His gaze fell on the mirrored wall opposite the door and he turned quickly to Barnhart, tapping his arm.

“Shine the light at the mirror,” he said, pointing. “Start over toward the middle.”

Barnhart nodded and swung the Benelli around.

As Nimec moved closer to the wall, Barnhart’s flash shone on the floor-to-ceiling panels, throwing starry winks of brightness into the room.

Nimec’s eyes slid up and down the wall. Gesturing with his hand, he silently directed Barnhart to shift the flash to the left, signaled him to bring it down a little, then sliced his palm through the air in a halting gesture.

“You see that?” he said in an excited whisper. “Hold it steady. Right there.”

Barnhart nodded again. With the beam hitting the panel straight on, he could see a tiny area, no more than a half inch in diameter, in which its surface seemed to be transparent, as if there were a chipped or bald patch on the reflective layer behind it. Then he realized the spot was a perfect circle — much too perfect to be any kind of defect.

Nimec was practically standing flat against the mirror now, pressing down on it with the heel of his hand.

At the same moment that Barnhart realized he was looking at a two-way mirror, the panel opened out into the room, almost like the door of a medicine cabinet.

“My, my,” he said, training his light into the cubby behind it. “What have we here?”

Nimec knew there was no need for him to answer. What they very obviously had was a covert video-recording system — a surveillance camera and portable duplicating unit for creating automatic backup tapes. The blank round eye of the camera was lined up with the transparent part of the wall mirror and pointed directly into the room. Roma might not keep written records of his various dealings, Nimec thought, but that clearly did not mean he was without any records at all.

He stood there looking into the hollow space. On a shelf below the electronic components were three or four scattered videotapes and a sheet of color-coded adhesive labels. The cassettes themselves were unlabeled.

“Looks like he hasn’t gotten around to cataloging his latest epics yet,” Nori whispered. She came up behind Nimec, her laser-dazzler against her leg. “Wonder what’s on them.”

“I think that’s something we need to find out,” Barnhart said.

Nimec hastily snatched the tapes off the shelf, put them into his duffel, then ejected the tape that was in the camera and dropped it in with them.

“Come on.” He snapped the panel shut and turned toward the others. “We’d better get out of—”

The sound of an approaching vehicle clipped off the end of the sentence. The three of them exchanged quick, anxious looks. They could hear the sound of tires crunching on fresh snowpack. It was close, very close, maybe right outside the building. Then the engine shivered into silence, doors slammed, and there were voices. Coarse male voices out in the street.

Nimec crossed the room, stood to one side of the window, and peered cautiously around the frame. There were two men downstairs near the club’s main entrance, the dark outlines of at least two more in the car’s front seat. One of the men on the sidewalk wore a brown military-surplus bomber jacket with a fleece collar. The other had on a long tweed overcoat. Both were huge. He recognized them instantly, just as he did the vehicle in which they’d arrived. They were Roma’s thugs, the bunch who had been flanking him when he left the building half an hour earlier.

As Nimec stood watching them, the pair that had gotten out of the car turned toward the entrance, then strode under the awning and were blocked from sight.

Nimec snapped his head around to Barnhart and Nori.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said.

“Hey, come here,” the man in the Air Force bomber jacket said.

“What is it, Vasily?”

“Just come over here and take a fucking look, will you?”

The man in the gray overcoat stamped snow off his shoes and then trudged heavily up beside him.

Vasily had paused inside the entrance and was facing the wall, scrutinizing the status window on the security system’s master control box. The alarm was set on a thirty-second entry delay, so that anyone with the deactivation code would have enough time to punch it into the keypad — and turn off the system — after passing through the door. He’d been about to do exactly that when he noticed the reading on the LCD.

The second man looked at the backlit display. Its pale blue digital characters said:

Vasily glanced at him. “I don’t get it.” “Could be it’s the storm. Wind might’ve knocked out the power awhile. Or the phone lines.”

“I dunno, Pavel.” Vasily was shaking his head. “You want to check out the back door?”

Pavel was still for a second, his broad brow crunched in thought, balancing the minor hassle of having to walk out back against what his boss would do if it turned out that something really was wrong, and he and Vasily didn’t go investigate.

“Yeah,” he said, drawing a pistol from under his coat. “Better we don’t take chances.”

In Roma’s office, Nimec, Barnhart, and Nori heard the two bodyguards speak agitatedly to each other as they discovered the unlocked back door. Instants later they heard them racing up the stairs, saw lights blink on in the outer corridor, heard more rapid footsteps.

They were hustling toward the office.

The footsteps stopped outside the door.

Then extended silence.

The silence pressed.

The doorknob rattled, turned.

Nimec touched Nori’s arm above the elbow and he saw her glide into position, a dark silhouette against the deeper darkness of the room.

The door flung open, both thugs framed inside it, Uzi carbines held out in front of them.

Nori fingered a button on the control box of her laser and a blinding beam of high-intensity light streaked from the M203’s muzzle, hitting Vasily full in the face. He released a high-pitched, whooping scream, the subgun seeming to leap from his grip, hands clawing at his eyes. Nori held the weapon on him another second, its laser beam pulsing in the air like a bright white strip of the sun. He went jigging back into the hallway, slammed into Pavel’s shoulder, then went reeling into the corridor, his contortions throwing a delirious crop of shadows across the walls.

“My eyes!” he shrieked, sinking to his knees. His hands stayed over his face. “God, God, my fucking eyes!”

Ignoring him, Pavel threw himself back against the door wall, reached around the jamb with the Uzi, squeezed out a burst. Rounds crackled from the snubby barrel. Nori sprang out of the way as the deadly stream of 9mm bullets came rippling into the office, shattering the window, blasting chunks out of the walls, punching holes into the side of Roma’s desk, knocking over his chair amid flying wads of its chewed-up cushions. Spent casings swirled around the Uzi in a glittery blizzard.

Launching himself out of the darkness, Barnhart swung the Benelli toward the door, a flash-bang round already jacked into its chamber, and fired. There was a loud whump in the corridor, a sudden flare of brilliance, a swirling bubble of smoke. Pavel’s gun stopped chattering and withdrew from the entry. Almost simultaneously Nori took her finger off the laser control, hooked it around the trigger of the modified M16, and unleashed a sustained burst of VVRS sabots, laying a band of covering fire for her teammates.

“Now!” Nimec shouted.

The three of them plunged out of the office, Nori’s gun spewing a torrent of non-lethal rounds. When they reached the corridor, she pivoted to the right, spotted Pavel crouching near the door with the Uzi in both hands, and aimed for his chest. He flopped back in a graceless heap, his finger spasmodically squeezing the trigger of his carbine, the weapon discharging rounds in a crazy upturned fountain.

Gobs of plaster rained from the ceiling. Ricochets whined through the corridor in wild trajectories.

“Ah, shit!” Barnhart said through gritted teeth behind Nori.

She jerked her head around, saw him clutching his side, his face a twist of pain, blood slicking his fingers. A dark wet stain was already spreading over his coveralls. He started to wobble forward, his legs folding beneath him, but Nimec rushed over and got an arm around him an instant before he would have fallen to the floor.

The thug’s gun, meanwhile, continued to jolt and rattle. Nori whipped her head back around, leveled her rifle downward, and hit him dead-center in the chest with another gust of fire. A scream ripped from his throat and he thrashed on the floor as though suffused with voltage. After a moment he passed out, the Uzi dropping from his fingers with a metallic clatter.

“How bad is it?” Nimec said, helping Barnhart to his feet. He nodded his chin at the blood-saturated middle of his coveralls.

“Don’t know exactly.” Barnhart winced. “Hurts like all hell, though.”

Nimec regarded him steadily, his lips clamped together.

“We’ll try and get out of here the way we came in,” he said after a moment. “With any luck the rest of those guys will still be out front.”

Barnhart shook his head vehemently. “I’m not sure I can make the stairs. Head on down without me… I can hold my own if any more come up here… I’ll use that mope’s Uzi—”

“Do us a favor, Tony, okay?”

Barnhart looked at him.

“Shut up and cooperate,” Nimec said.

Barnhart shook his head again, but this time didn’t voice any protest.

Noriko hustled over to Barnhart’s left side, lifted his arm, and slung it around her shoulders. At the same time, Nimec continued bracing him on the right. He had drawn his Beretta from its holster with his left hand.

He swapped glances with Noriko, then nodded.

Half-carrying Barnhart between them, they started toward the entrance to the stairwell.

They had no sooner reached the steps than a third thug appeared on the landing below. He had a Glock nine in both hands and was raising it in a shooter’s stance.

His eyes slitted with concentration, Nimec got off two shots with his own pistol before the bodyguard managed to fire a single round. The first caught him in the right kneecap, the second in the left. He crumpled to the base of the stairs and rolled around there in spastic agony, howling at the top of his lungs.

“Shut him up,” Barnhart rasped. He unclipped a DMSO canister from his utility harness, passed it to Noriko. She noticed that its tubular surface was slick with blood, but said nothing.

Slipping out from under Barnhart’s arm, she sprinted down the stairs, held the canister over the screaming man’s pain-knotted face, and depressed the nozzle. A fine, nearly invisible mist hissed out of it. The thug raised his hands in front of his face in a warding-off gesture, his eyes wide, white, and bulging. Then his arms dropped like deflated balloons and his features went slack and he fell off into sedated unconsciousness.

Nori turned back toward her companions. They had almost reached the bottom landing, Nimec gripping the rail with one hand, supporting Barnhart with the other. Barnhart’s face was blanched of color and she could see a greasy patina of sweat on his cheeks. He was biting his lower lip, gasping a little with each descending step.

She hurried over to help him the rest of the way down, got his arm back around her neck. Together the three of them pressed through the rear door to the alley.

Cold air and snow blasted them the moment they got outside. Thunder was still skipping across the sky. They moved awkwardly toward the mouth of the alleyway, Barnhart stagger-stepping forward, a tortured grimace on his face, blood dripping from his midsection to the snow.

A fourth bodyguard appeared in the alley entrance, directly in front of them, sweeping an outthrust carbine back and forth like a divining rod. Slugs churned from the gun and whapped into the snowpack at their feet, kicking up powdery spurts of whiteness. Nimec hauled Barnhart sideways out of the line of fire, then jostled him against the diamond-mesh fence dividing the alley from the adjacent property. More rounds shivered from the bodyguard’s weapon, pecking at the brick outer wall of the building, striking a shower of sparks off a fire escape somewhere overhead.

Nimec extended his gun toward their attacker, triggered two rounds. But he was off balance, unable to take decent aim, and they went sheering ineffectually into the darkness.

The killer prepared to fire again. He seemed to have realized that one of his prey was wounded and swung his gun in their direction with a kind of slow, deliberate confidence, like someone about to take out a crippled fowl.

Nimec huddled against the fence, shielding Barnhart with his own body.

Nori fired her webgun a beat before Roma’s thug would have pulled the trigger. A hollow pop! issued from its barrel, and then the sticky webbing bloomed over him, ensnaring him from head to foot in a cocoon of microthin filaments. Stunned, he tried to tear free, but only became more tangled up in the cottony shroud, skidded on the snow, and took a pratfall that might have been comical under far different circumstances.

Nori dashed over to him as he lay there thrashing, and sprayed him full in the face with the DMSO. An instant later he ceased to move.

The webgun still in her hand, Nori ran past him to the alley mouth, peered up and down the sidewalk through blowing sheets of snow. Lights were flickering on in the apartment buildings along the street — obviously the sounds of the firefight had drawn some attention — but there was no one in sight.

She turned and padded back down the alley to her companions.

“You all right?” she asked Nimec.

“Yeah,” he said.

She looked at Barnhart. The perspiration was streaming down his face now, and the glazed, somewhat abstracted cast of his eyes gave her cause to fear he might be slipping into shock.

“Coast’s clear, as far as I can see,” she said, gripping Barnhart’s arm. “We have to get back to the wagon before somebody calls the cops, though. Think you can make it?”

He looked at her a moment and somehow managed a wan, grim smile.

“Race you,” he said.