silent. Was the caller up there? He didn’t like the idea of a potential enemy standing somewhere above him. He took a small step forward and moved the flashlight, directing the beam upward, near where he thought he had heard the sound. Eerie shadows cast by scaffolding loomed before him, mixed with strange gray reflections as the light played off plastic sheeting draped here and there in the entry hall. He thought he saw a face, then realized it belonged to Neptune.
“I’m here,” he said again, and heard the question echo back to him, his voice sounding loud in the emptiness.
There was no answer. He took a cautious step out onto the mosaic.
Instantly, the area was flooded with light. He crouched low, gun unholstered, then realized he had set off some sort of motion detector. Security cameras were catching his foolish reaction. If the cameras had audio capabilities, he thought, they must be picking up the sound of his heart thudding in his chest.
He heard a brief, faint, rustling noise and saw a paper airplane sailing down from the second-floor gallery, making a vertical loop before gliding to a stop near Apollo’s golden curls.
Bredloe stayed where he was, angry now. “All right, Tactical, so he hasn’t shown. Is this your idea of a joke?”
The snipers slowly moved into view. “Is there a problem, sir?” one of them asked.
The lights went out again, apparently because no further motion was detected.
“Sir?” the SWAT officer called.
“You knew about these motion detectors?” Bredloe called up in the darkness.
“Yes, sir.”
He wasn’t going to let them know he had been riled. “Nothing. Return to your posts. Let’s give him a little more time.”
He heard them moving.
He waited. The building was silent.
The airplane still lay on the tile. It annoyed him to think that a situation this serious could be reduced by those hot dogs into fun and games. He walked out to the center of the mosaic, causing the motion detectors to light the entry again. Keeping his eyes on the upper level, he bent to pick up the airplane, setting the flashlight down just long enough to tuck the paper into his jacket pocket. As he picked up the flashlight, the lights above him went out again, which puzzled him — he was still moving, so the detectors should have kept them on.
Suddenly he heard a mechanical sound from somewhere on the scaffolding, and then a loud bang behind him. He caught a brief glimpse of shadowy objects falling from above, like bats suddenly stirring from a cave, and tried to move out of their path — but the first of the bricks struck hard on his back and shoulders, making him shout in pain. He heard the tactical team shouting from above as he moved his arms up, trying to shield his head, but this only caused his forearms to be broken and his fingers smashed, so that he fired the gun even as his hand lost its grasp on it, and dropped the flashlight almost in the same instant. He doubled over, crying out for help, stumbling forward, and still the awful rain continued, bruising and breaking him. One glancing blow to his head hit hard enough to bring him dizzily to his knees, the next felled him completely, so that he sprawled against the white wings of Apollo’s horses, staining them with his blood, and lost consciousness as tiles of the sun god shattered all around him.
13
Monday, July 10, 7:25 P.M.
St. Anne’s Hospital
Pete Baird met Frank at the entrance to the waiting room. He looked shaken, and Frank was afraid that he had arrived too late.
Pete had been paging him, leaving messages on his home answering machine. Frank had heard Pete’s voice on the machine as he had followed Irene into the house, saying, “Bredloe’s at the emergency room at St. Anne’s — he might not make it,” and Frank had hurriedly picked up the call. Only twenty-five minutes had passed since then — but maybe it had been twenty-five minutes too many.
Pete must have read the fear on his face, though, because he quickly said, “No — we haven’t had any more news yet.”
“He’s still in surgery?”
“Yeah. It’s not looking good. Head injury and all kinds of bone fractures and cuts and bruises and God knows what else. Head injuries worry them the most. Miriam hasn’t even been able to see him yet — she’s really shaken up.”
Frank looked across the room and saw Bredloe’s wife, pale and silent, staring toward the doors that led to the surgery center. Next to her was Chief Ellis Hale himself, who sat stone-faced while one of his aides tried to calm a distraught Louise Oswald. Not far from them, several men from the division huddled together, speaking in low voices. Lieutenant Carlson, Jake Matsuda, Reed Collins, and others. They had seen him enter, but he had not been met with scowls or coldness — not even from Carlson. Like Pete, they had apparently decided to cease hostilities for the moment.
Frank turned back to Pete. “Was Miriam with him when it happened?”
“No — I thought she might have been, when I first heard it was the Sheffield. Captain had his picture in the paper over the weekend, ’cause he went with her to some shindig they had there on Friday. So I figured she had taken him back to the building for some reason — but that turns out not to be the case.”
“What happened?”
“The captain had a whole operation set up down there, and on short notice.” He described the precautions Bredloe had taken.
“So what was this anonymous caller meeting him about?”
“He wouldn’t tell anyone. According to the Wheeze, she came back from running an errand for him at a little after five o’clock, and he was on the cell phone with someone then. She locked her desk up and was ready to call it a day when the captain asked her to get Tactical on the line — one of many calls.” He paused, eyeing Frank speculatively. “She said he’d been acting weird ever since he talked to you.”
