Changing the tire had been the hard part. They pulled the battered Cooper out of the ditch. It started. It sounded bad, an arrhythmic clank coming from under the hood, but it would take them where Mortimer wanted to go.
They bade farewell to Jimmy, who took Tyler’s body with him when he left.
The Cooper wouldn’t go over thirty-five m.p.h. without the clanking getting bad, so they kept it slow, sticking to surface streets and avoiding the interstate. It took Mortimer, Bill and Sheila nearly two hours to reach the CNN Center.
They parked in front, sat in the car a moment and surveyed the scene.
Bill whistled. “What do you suppose happened?”
Mortimer shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Bodies. Wreckage. Flames. So much to take in all at once.
A large six-wheeled truck with an open-air bed was parked at an odd angle, one tire up on the curb, the driver’s door open. The driver’s legs were still in the truck, the rest of him on the ground, a pool of blood spreading out from his head. Forty feet away, a big Oldsmobile burned, the flames popping and snapping, a column of thick black smoke twisting into the air. A few dozen more bodies were scattered about, most in mismatched clothing, with the red armband the only thing they wore in common.
The stink of charred flesh made Mortimer’s eyes water.
The front doors to the CNN Center stood wide open, hanging askew on bent hinges. A jam of bodies clogging the doorway.
“I’m going to have a look.” Mortimer stepped out of the Cooper, drew the.38 revolver.
“I’ll come with you,” Bill said.
“Sheila, wait here and stay on the radio. If the battle shifts this way, honk the horn, give us some kind of warning.”
Sheila looked at the dead. “Okay.”
They had to climb over a pile of bodies three deep to get inside. Among the bodies were two men clad in the black suits of the Czar’s secret police. One had a knife through his throat.
They entered the lobby, looked around. More bodies, many locked in the final throes of hand-to-hand combat.
“It looks like they were fighting each other,” Bill said.
They walked toward the elevator for the other tower on the other side of the lobby, pressed the Up button.
The elevator door opened and a young man inside screamed, saw Mortimer’s revolver and backed away, dropping a half-dozen cans of food and a head of cabbage. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt and a bloody apron.
“Don’t shoot, man. I’m just the cook.”
Mortimer lowered the pistol. “What happened here?”
The cook knelt, began scooping the cans into his apron. “I don’t know, man. A bunch of those underground saboteurs hit while everyone was still asleep, really fucked everything up. Next thing I know all our own guys are killing each other. They’re swarming into the kitchen and grabbing everything, cleaned the place out like fucking locusts, a bunch of them saying how they’ll be damned if they’re going to stick around here and get killed.”
Bill snorted. “Looks like the proletariat bit the Czar in the ass.”
“This stuff’s mine.” The cook clutched the cans and the cabbage to his chest. “I fought for it fair and square.”
Mortimer waved his pistol toward the exit. “Get out of here.”
He didn’t need to be told twice, ran away and didn’t look back.
Mortimer and Bill took the elevator to the top. The door opened and they leapt out, ready for action. They saw and heard no one at all. Another corpse sat crumpled in the corner with his head bashed to mush. They walked past him, opening doors and finding nothing.
Mortimer tried the last door at the very end of the hall. Locked. He jiggled the handle, thought he heard voices on the other side. He angled the revolver down, shot the lock with a single blast and kicked the door open.
A dozen women gasped at his sudden entrance, one screaming. They all wore lingerie or string bikinis. Velvet sofas and plush chairs. Soft music played from a DVD player. The Czar’s harem. Mortimer was just thinking how cool it was to rescue a roomful of half-naked women when something smacked the back of his head.
The room whirled past his face in a blur and suddenly he was facedown in the shag carpeting. He felt a small hand grab a fistful of his hair, yank his head back. A cold knife blade against his throat.
“Wait!” shouted a familiar voice. “That’s my husband.”
“Sorry,” Anne said after they’d moved him to one of the velvet couches. “We’ve been stuck up here for hours since all the shooting started, and we don’t know what the hell’s going on. We’ve been waiting for somebody to open that door so we could make a break for it.”
Mortimer briefly related the pertinent details of the car battle and the apparent revolt among the Czar’s men.
“But we don’t know anything for sure,” Bill said.
They headed out to the elevator, the scantily clad women with Bill and Mortimer in the lead.
