couple of hundred yards when another gun battle erupted not far from the location of the last one. Caitlin quickly took cover behind the body of a rusted Town Car that had had a prime parking spot in front of the apartment block on the morning of the Disappearance. Focusing on the intersection a few blocks down with a pair of compact binoculars, she caught a small band of men, maybe seven or eight of them, hurriedly picking their way through the snarl of auto wreckage that was always so much thicker wherever the traffic streams had met back in 2003.
'Motherfucker,' she said quietly.
There could be no doubt about it. They were attacking the very same building she was headed for. Cursing quietly, she returned to the lobby of the brownstone. She wasn't sure why, but the feeling of an unnatural presence was particularly strong here. Perhaps it was the remains of the Disappeared that lay in great profusion in the mud and muck that had flooded in with the recent bad weather. She hurried through the lobby regardless of the flesh- crawling sense of being watched and judged from beyond the grave.
Caitlin shuddered.
She was someone who dealt with death as a matter of routine. It was odd that she should suddenly find herself unsettled and affected by it now. She put it down to exhaustion and hurried on, her jump boots splashing through the filthy brown watery ooze. The fire escape was over near the elevator shafts, and she racked a round into the chamber of her shotgun before entering.
The stairwell was empty and pitch-black. So little ambient light made it in there that her night vision goggles struggled to illuminate the space. She hurried up three flights of stairs and exited after carefully sweeping the hallway for potential adversaries. There were none, just that same creepy feeling that recalled to her mind a line from her Shakespeare studies at the academy in Colorado Springs.
Now entertain conjecture of a time, when creeping murmur and the pouring dark fill the wide vessel of the universe.
'Or I could just shut the fuck up,' she muttered to herself in the dank, musty confines of the unlit third-floor hallway. Caitlin tried the door of the nearest apartment that she judged likely to have a view down Park Avenue. It was locked. She flipped up her night vision goggles and drove one powerful side kick into the wooden door just up and back from the handle. The latch and part of the frame shattered inward as the door flew open, flooding the hallway with a weak gray light.
A few strides carried her over to a pair of double-hung sash windows looking out across the overgrown median strip of Park Avenue. From there she could see the small band of men she'd observed two minutes earlier down on the street. Using the binoculars, she was able to count eight of them. They had two down already, one dead with half his head missing. The other was thrashing about screeching and clutching at the stump of one arm. A burst of fire had severed it just below the elbow, and he was bleeding out in great extravagant fountains. None of his comrades had moved to help him. They were all too focused on putting fire into the lobby of the building she was supposed to infiltrate. From the volume of return fire, which was accurate but by no means overwhelming, Caitlin judged there to be only two or three targets inside. Their bursts were much more discriminating, indicating a greater level of professionalism but also a more modest supply of ammunition. She scanned the face of the building with the binoculars, looking for the telltale signs of shooters preparing to drop plunging fire down on the attackers.
There was no sign of any such activity, meaning that either Jukic had lied under the duress of torture or his information was wrong or out of date. Caitlin favored the latter as the most likely explanation. The air force had been pounding any command and control cells it located, necessitating frequent movement by the jihadi leadership cadre.
'Well, that's just great,' she said aloud. 'Another excellent plan down the crapper.'
Her plan, such as it was, was predicated entirely on a swift but stealthy assault up the chain of command to put her within striking distance of her man. It was always going to be subject to the risk of critical failure at any number of points, but it was way galling to have it fail before she'd even really begun.
Caitlin dropped her attention back to street level. Another of the attackers was down, leaving five. She took her time to scope them out. None looked like the African or Caribbean pirates allied with Baumer's fedayeen warriors. These guys looked more like they might even have belonged here once upon a time. They appeared to be Latino, possibly Mexican, or maybe a crew from farther south. It was impossible to say, of course. But none of them were sporting keffiyehs or dreadlocks or any of the other giveaway headgear that might mark them as being linked to Baumer. Looking at these guys, Caitlin had the impression she was watching a small gang of dope smugglers on a day trip away from one of the struggling narcotraficante settlements down in the vast graveyard of Mexico City.
She ate an energy bar from one of her pockets and washed it down with a canteen of warm water.
This was going to take some figuring out.
49
New York 'We gotta get out of here, Miss Jules,' the Rhino shouted over the tearing snarl of his P90. 'This particular pachyderm is feeling very much like an endangered species right now.'
Jules poked her weapon above the rim of the concierge desk and squeezed off a short burst.
'Totally with you. My ass is way too pert after all the exercise I've had recently to have it shot off by Henry fucking Cesky's goons.'
That was what really hurt. Not her busted shoulder or the flesh wound she'd picked up just over her left hip that was leaking blood at an alarming rate. It was the fact that their entire trip to New York-a hazardous, grotesquely expensive, and diabolically difficult exercise in subterfuge, risk taking, and really, really hard work on that fucking road clearance gang-it was all a fucking crock. There were no Rubin documents, no maps of the Sonoma oil field, no title deeds, no contracts for exploration and extraction, nothing. There was nothing but a fucking trap, which they had walked into like a pair of numpty fucking nuff-nuffs. There probably wasn't even a Rubin. After all, they'd never met the guy face-to-face, just his supposed fucking lawyer. And he had sent them on a fucking cross-country snipe hunt for the sole purpose of delivering them to an address in New York, the most dangerous city in the world, where they could be ambushed by a bunch of hired guns and their bodies added to the mass graves of thousands of pirates and soldiers and ragheaded lunatics who were all going to be plowed under by the time this was finished.
And all because she kicked him off the boat back in Acapulco.
Jesus fucking Christ, but some people knew how to hold a grudge.
The Rhino crab-walked sideways a couple of feet from his last firing position to retrieve his battered-looking Viking helmet. It was badly dented and one of the horns was broken, but he put it back on after pushing the flap of skin hanging down from his forehead back under the rim. With so much blood coursing from that wound down his face and over his chest, he looked like a true barbarian as he popped up and loosed another short burst over the top of the concierge desk. She wasn't quite sure, but Jules thought that maybe there was slightly less fire coming their way than before. The taunting had certainly dropped off as their would-be murderers concentrated on the job at hand. The Rhino was pretty sure he'd taken out one of them with a head shot, and she knew for a laydown certainty that she'd pretty much scythed off the arm of another attacker who foolishly had jumped up to taunt them some more about how stupid they were for believing in fairy tales and how much Mr. Cesky was going to reward him for killing and raping her, possibly in that order.
'How's your ammo?' the Rhino shouted.
'Three and a half clips. How about yours?'
'I'm afraid I'm down to my last, Miss Jules.'
'Jesus Christ, Rhino. This isn't a fucking video game, you know.'
The deep bass boom of a shotgun thundered three times in rapid succession just before Jules heard the dry click of a hammer striking an empty chamber. She launched herself upward, bringing the P90 around with her good hand and sighting on a figure who was charging toward them through the shattered remains of the lobby windows. As he leapt a good three feet into the air to clear a jagged fang of broken glass, she fired, punching a hypersonic lead fist into his center mass while he was still airborne. He screamed briefly, but the concentrated swarm of lethal projectiles disassembled his lungs, air passages, and throat, instantly reducing his protest to a wet, strangled
