'No, I'm not a cop. They don't get to shoot people on general principles. Or torture them. You hear that, Jukic? We'll be moving along with the torture in a minute. Just so you know.'
His groan was noticeably louder, and he kicked out with one leg as though trying to push himself toward the door. Donna Gambaro fetched a pair of running shoes from the same dresser drawer in which she had stored her jeans. She sat on the end of the bed to pull them on. Caitlin could see that her hands were shaking, but she was doing her best. She kept the gun on Jukic as she spoke to Gambaro.
'Do they have guards in the hallways, Donna, do you know?'
Donna paused in the job of trying to untangle a knotted shoelace.
'Not always, no,' she said. 'Only the big guys get bodyguards. Sometimes some of the guys who came through here were just fighters or soldiers, you know. They got sent here as a reward. I talked with some of them. They weren't all bad. Some were pigs, of course. You never knew what you were getting. But that's men all over, isn't it? Anyway, no. There's not always guards in the halls.'
Caitlin fetched a couple of photographs of Bilal Baumer from one of her pockets.
'You ever see this guy come in?' she asked.
'No,' Donna said, after a brief look. She began searching the drawers, as if looking for something lost in the clothing. Jukic levered himself up on one elbow and gave the impression of a man who was about to start protesting again, leading Caitlin to drive another kick into his guts to quiet him down.
'That's good to know,' she said. 'Now, Donna Gambaro, you look to me like someone who can handle herself. That's good, too. The thing is I have to ask old Jukic a few questions, and… well, things are probably going to get ugly. Very ugly. I'm afraid I can't let you go until I have the answers I need. When I get them, we can both leave together, out the same window I came in. I'll be on my way then. But if I were you, I'd probably get my ass hunkered down somewhere nearby as quickly as possible. Do you understand?'
'Miss,' Donna Gambaro said as she located a locket that obviously meant something to her, 'I don't know who you are, but I used to wait tables at Hooters. I know when things are about to get ugly and when it's time to go. You won't need to tell me twice. Are you going to torture him?' she asked, pointing at Jukic.
Caitlin took the fighting knife from the scabbard in her boot. 'A little bit,' she said.
In fact, she hardly needed to hurt him at all. Jukic, an Albanian, who was listed in her files as running a medium-size pirate crew of mostly Balkan origins, gave up the information she needed a few seconds after she cut off the tip of his little finger. She had thought she was going to have to harvest at least half of his digits, but perhaps kneeling on his hip wound as she made the cut helped.
She got an address no more than a few blocks away that the Albanian gang leader insisted was the last command post he knew of for the jihadi fighters who had brought so much grief to New York. It didn't show up on her PDA, so chances were that it hadn't been known to the military. There was no guarantee Baumer would be there, but if it was manned by his own people rather than pirates, she might have a shot at getting to someone with better information than Jukic.
He was now balled into a fetal position on the floor, shaking and sweating and keening in a high-pitched, almost childlike fashion as he bled all over the carpet. 'Fucking Germans. Fucking Turks,' he repeated over and over again until Caitlin put two bullets in his brain and shut him up forever.
She killed him without warning or obvious provocation, causing Donna to jump with fright again.
'Sorry,' Caitlin said. 'You don't mind, do you?' The former Hooters waitress looked at her the same way one might regard a dangerous dog one had stumbled across in a dark alley.
'No,' Gambaro said, but none too certainly. 'No, fuck him, I guess. Can we go now?'
The window in the bathroom was still open, giving them access to the roof of the apartment house across which Caitlin had come. She hadn't intended to enter the hotel through that particular window until she noticed the flickering light of a candle inside as she approached. The sash was already raised a few inches, and Caitlin was able to lift it without too much effort, although she did have to take her time with it lest the sound of the wooden window frame rumbling upward alerted the occupants. Luckily, Donna had had Jukic well and truly distracted as Caitlin came calling. It was her scream, however, upon seeing the assassin silhouetted in the doorway to the bathroom that had brought Jukic's bodyguard into the room. Caitlin had shot him twice in the head before pistol- whipping his boss into submission.
Amazing what can happen in a New York minute, she thought as the two women dropped a couple of feet onto the roof of the neighboring building. Despite being loaded down with all her equipment and wearing heavy jump boots, Caitlin landed almost without a sound, whereas Donna struggled and grunted and heaved herself through the aperture before touching down with a loud bang.
'Ma'am, do you think I could come…'
'No,' Caitlin said before she could finish. 'I'm sorry, Donna, but you can't come with me. It's gonna get a lot worse before I'm done. You'd be way better off just hiding out in one of these buildings. It won't be more than a few days before things shake themselves out here. Whatever you do, though, Donna, do not go back to the hotel. Even if you have friends there, leave them. Do not try to rescue them. You'll fail and you'll die.'
The rumble of distant explosions grew louder as if to emphasize her point. They had reached the tiny cabin at the top of the stairwell providing access to the roof of the apartment house. The sun had not yet fully arisen, but there was more than enough light to make them out. Caitlin hurried the woman along out of sight.
'You don't need to go much farther,' she said. 'But you do need to get out of this building. They'll look for you here. But if you take yourself along the street a ways, get yourself bedded down, and then keep your fucking head down, you will get through this, I promise.'
Donna Gambaro looked anything but certain as Caitlin entered the stairwell, but throwing a glance back over her shoulder at the Plaza seemed to strengthen her resolve.
'All right, then,' she said. 'Whatever you say.'
'Remember,' Caitlin said. 'Do not go back to the hotel. Move quickly and get out of sight. You've got maybe half an hour till Jukic is missed.'
She gave Gambaro a reassuring pat on the shoulder before turning and hurrying down the darkened stairs.
If she was following the playbook, Donna Gambaro would have been dead, too, or at least trussed up and stashed away somewhere so that she couldn't interfere with the run of events. But as somebody who'd once been held captive and abused in a very similar fashion to the former waitress, Caitlin was well past giving a shit about the playbook.
Good luck, kid, she thought.
47
New York The shopping was a terrible disappointment. Jules had been hoping there might be one or two choice items somewhere along Fifth Avenue that she could take home as a souvenir of their visit to New York, but everyplace she looked had been comprehensively looted. Takashimaya was a burned-out shell in front of which a headless body swung by its heels. And Lord knew she'd never had any luck at Saks, anyway, so why bother trying now, especially when that particular block appeared to be swarming with jihadi whack jobs and pirate asswits-she really did like that cheeky Polish character-all heading into Rockefeller Center.
Jules used her binoculars to scope out that stretch of the avenue from their hiding place within the rubble of St. Patrick's. There was a lot of movement down there, which meant it couldn't be long before there was a response from the U.S. Air Force. Every time the pirates massed in any numbers, they got pounded flat.
'Looks like they're gonna make a stand there,' the Rhino said around the stub of an unlit stogie. He was growing impatient, grunting and shaking his enormous and ugly head, which still was magnificently ornamented with the stupid Viking helmet.
'Do you think we might be done with the retail therapy soon, Miss Jules,' he asked. 'We really shoulda stayed over on Madison. Fifth seems to be lousy with tourists.'
Jules ignored him. He was grouchy from having to drag his oversized ass through the tumbledown ruins of the cathedral to reach a safe vantage point where they could observe the activity on Fifth. There appeared to be a real concentration of ragheaded crazies in the shell of Saks. Every window in the department store was broken, and half
