“No. He didn’t have to. Spend your whole life on the streets of Brooklyn, you know that look, believe me. He got the word on the phone. Somebody was coming to whack him.”
“Did he say who called him?” the English detective asked.
“Yeah. He said it was his buddy Lavon over at the Bide-a-Wee rest home. Joey used to go over there all the time and watch ballgames with his old pal Benny Sangster.”
At that moment, someone in the crowd screamed.
Congreve whirled about and saw a large woman in a black babushka pointing upward at another soaring attraction just across the midway from the Ferris wheel. It appeared to have been out of operation for many years. The blackened and twisted wreckage of the tall wrought-iron structure resembled the Eiffel Tower after a bad fire. The thing was enormous. It had to be almost three hundred feet tall. Congreve raised the binoculars to his eyes. A third of the way up, at about a hundred feet above the midway, a man in white coveralls was rapidly climbing the superstructure.
“Captain Mariucci,” Congreve said, “I think we have a problem.”
“What have you got?”
“Up there.” Ambrose handed him the binoculars.
“Aw, shit. I don’t believe this.”
“What’s going on, Captain?” Gumpertz asked, looking up.
“We’re screwed, that’s what’s going on,” the captain said. “You see that little guy all the way up there? He’s going to climb high enough until he’s got a clean shot at your employee Mr. Bones.”
“You got any idea why they want to whack him?”
“He’s the last witness in a thirty-year-old murder case Chief Inspector Congreve here and I happen to be investigating. And there ain’t dick we can do about it at the moment.”
“No shit?” Gumpertz said. “He never told me about that.”
Mariucci was already on his phone and barking orders to the ATAC command. He needed backup, goddamnit. He needed a cherry-picker, he needed a chopper. Now.
“Mr. Gumpertz,” Congreve said, taking the man by the arm and pulling him through the crowd, “what on earth is that thing?”
“That’s the old Parachute Jump. Brooklyn’s Eiffel Tower, we used to call it in the old Dreamland days. She was built back in 1939 for the World’s Fair. Out of service, as you can see. For about thirty years. Piece of rusted junk that could fall down at any minute, but you should have seen it in the glory days.”
“No elevator, I don’t suppose.”
“Elevator? You kidding me? Nah, the only route up the Chute is the one that maniac is taking. Question. Why don’t you just shoot the bastard?”
“I’m sure the captain is trying to arrange that as we speak. A helicopter with a sharpshooter would be helpful. The question, to be sure, is time.”
“Haven’t you got a gun?”
“Not on me, no.”
“Look at that little guy go! Climbs like a frigging monkey.”
“A skillful display.”
“You guys didn’t exactly come prepared, did you?”
“Not for this. Good God, where is that bleeding helicopter?”
A woman in a black raincoat stood slightly apart from the crowd now gathered at the base of the Parachute Jump. She had a paper cone of fluffy pink cotton candy in her left hand. She let the spun sugar melt on her tongue as she watched the madman’s ascent of the tower. The sagging fences around the base were hung with faded signs depicting a skull and crossbones and the word DANGER. Decades of salt air and neglect had made the derelict iron structure dangerous indeed. Four park security men were still arguing about who should climb up and bring the man down before he got too high. No one had yet volunteered.
A low murmur of approval greeted the climber’s virtuosity every few feet. He moved upward with a grace and agility that hardly seemed human. And strength. With powerful strokes, he pulled himself upward from girder to girder and he danced from beam to beam with amazing speed. It appeared that he would be successful reaching the summit as long as he didn’t slip. Or as long as one of the rusted iron girders did not give way beneath his feet.
The wind had come up, and with it, a sharp ozone bite to the air. It had begun to rain, softly at first, and then sheets of it. Lightning filled the black sky above the tower. The woman held her breath when she saw a flash of it etch the Chinaman’s silhouette against the sky. He appeared to lose his grip on a girder. He stood on the beam, arms pinwheeling, his body swaying. Finally, through some miracle, he was able to regain his balance.
He continued upward.
Once Joe Bones was dead, she and Hu Xu would go after the Englishman. The Scotland Yard detective named Ambrose Congreve. He was somewhere here in New York City. With Congreve and the two American witnesses dead, maybe her father’s confidence would finally be restored. Since childhood, Bianca’s sister, Jet, had been the darling, his perfect angel. How could Father love Jet more?
She saw a door opening and she was going to use it. Jet had betrayed their father. Major Tang said she was sleeping with the enemy. Bianca saw her chance. She’d kick the fucking drugs. Kick all the stupid, stupid men who abused her out of her bed. And, one day, one day soon, she’d kick her treacherous sister right out of her father’s heart.
Bianca threw her head all the way back and let the pelting rain strike her full in the face, relishing the sting of the slanting raindrops.
Bianca Moon thought she might finally find the one thing she’d been searching for these last twenty-seven years.
Redemption in her father’s eyes.
And, of course, love.
Chapter Thirty-six
Gulf of Oman
“JOHNNIE BLACK, YOU GOT A BOGEY APPROACHING, TWENTY- five miles out.” Alex Hawke couldn’t believe his ears. He thought he’d had enough airborne excitement in the last few days to last a lifetime. The “incident,” as it was now referred to, aboard the USS Lincoln, was one of those memories that was not going to fade rapidly. For two days, the mere act of waking up in the Lincoln sickbay had come as something of a surprise.
What’s this? Still here, old fellow?
Yes. Bruised (his neck and right shoulder were a lovely shade of violet from slamming into the canopy when his seat broke loose) and battered, but still here. With a brand-new airplane from Aviano in Italy. And now, Archangel, the American AWACS plane directing Operation Deny Flight, the still-dewy no-fly zone over northern Oman, was warning him that a bogey, a French Mirage F1, was fast approaching him.
He craned his head around inside the bubble-shaped canopy of the F-16 Fighting Falcon and radioed his wingman. “Jim Beam, Jim Beam, this is Johnnie Black.” The American pilot, whose name was Lieutenant Jim Hedges, was floating just off his starboard wingtip. “You got this guy?”
“Uh, roger that, Johnnie Black. I have him at heading two-sevenoh, maintaining twenty-five thousand feet at four hundred knots. We’re doing low to high, is that right, sir?”
“Affirm. We are doing low to high, Jim Beam,” Hawke said.
Low to high meant he wanted his wingman to go low and look for more bad guys while he alone climbed upstairs to confront the single known enemy. He had his reasons for this but he had been ordered not to share them with his American wingman. He was sure Hedges thought this whole mission was a crock, but there was nothing he could do about that right now.
He had taken off that morning at 0600 hours from Aviano Air Base in Italy, en route to Saudi Arabia for a fuel
