Zero Hour

reinforcements when he showed up.

* * *

To Avram’s abounding surprise, Lathrop had been truthful about wanting to shorten their dance. And while he did not believe Lathrop ever did anything as a favor to anyone, he would nevertheless regard the accelerated pace of their final round a parting courtesy.

In keeping with its desirable spirit of brevity, Avram hustled toward the Benjamin Franklin Hotel on Sixth Avenue and 23rd from the flower market a few blocks north, another false sign-in name committed to memory (Mr. Landon), and another room number (twenty-seven) attached to it in his head. He was running early, or at least felt as though he was, since Lathrop never gave a precise time of arrival for himself. But perhaps that had more to do with his own state of exhilaration… an emotional peak that had for the moment lifted him past weariness, anxiety, and fatigue.

Soon enough — within half an hour, Avram expected — he would pay Lathrop for his entire lot of stones with the cash extracted from his safe-deposit box at Chase. And then he would be on his way. Urbaniak would set the large Kashmir in his Raymond Yard homage. Katari, charmed by blue fire, would be eagerly waiting to purchase it. And he, Avram…

For him there would be freedom, emancipation, liberation. Were there any better words to describe what he was gaining? Was it blasphemous to think of Lathrop’s stones as his own gift of p’solet, holy chips of immense value bringing him a transcendence he had only ever fantasized about having in a material world?

Avram saw the hotel midway down the block ahead of him and stepped it up. Ah, fuzzgrenade.com, softgel.net, or whatever that guitarist’s name had been, Avram thought. Ah, yes, what his splendid music meant. Someday in the near future Avram would look the kid up on the Internet, find him aboard the shuttle, drop him a huge money bonus, and look him in the eye without a shred of envy, but rather a bond shared only by those who let themselves become unbonded, who—

The pain in Avram’s chest took him all at once. Seized him around the heart like a crushing vice. He stopped on the sidewalk, his briefcase dropping from his numb left hand to the sidewalk, his hands going to a throat that had suddenly locked tight against his efforts to draw breath.

Then the city spun around him and he was on his back looking into the cold blue winter sky without air, a jetliner flying high overhead, people’s faces looking down at him, one man’s closer than the rest. The man was shouting something to them about an ambulance… about calling an ambulance…

Avram grabbed his wrist, or thought he did, he wasn’t sure, his confusion was too great. He was becoming distanced from himself, Avram and not Avram, two-dimensional, almost without substance, whatever sliver was left of him pressed between constrictive walls of pain.

He tried to remember something, couldn’t, and tried to ask the man whose face had come so close to his own whether he might know the answer.

But then the face was wiped away. In Avram’s eyes the blue sky above it momentarily turned a burning, searing red, then sheeted over with a bright blank flash of white.

And in the end, there was nothing but darkness.

* * *

At the northeast corner of Sixth and 23rd, waiting for his light to turn green so he could cross to the west side of the avenue, Malisse saw his quarry crumple to the pavement almost a full block up ahead.

His face a mask of dismay, he glanced over his shoulder at an approaching onslaught of headlamps, bumpers, and grilles, took a shaved moment to time his lunge, and then dashed forward across the stream of uptown traffic with a prayer to wing-footed Mercury… ignoring the Roman god’s alternate reputation as a guiding messenger of thieves.

Horns blared, tires skidded, profanities slapped against his ears.

“Gratuitous!” a young woman shouted from the curb behind him, offended by a bus driver’s particularly vile oath. But Malisse was already three-quarters of the way to the other side and feeling appreciative.

He took the corner with a bound and continued to race toward the fallen Hoffman, around whom a small crowd of pedestrians had begun to gather. Then he was pushing through them, scooping them aside with both arms to kneel over the broker’s prostrate form.

Malisse saw the blue-tinged lips and fingertips and livid cheeks, heard the tortured wheezing for breath, and immediately thought heart attack.

“Ambulance!” he shouted, looking around at the confusion frozen onlookers. “Someone here call an ambulance!”

And then Hoffman’s cyanotic fingers grabbed hold of his wrist, pulling, pulling him down.

Malisse saw his lips move, heard nothing but the surrounding barrage of street noises, leaned close, close, closer.

“My father’s name?” Hoffman rattled. His eyes widened, their pupils enormous. “My… father’s name?”

Malisse looked down at him with a sudden pang of sorrow, wishing he could answer Hoffman’s question as the eyes rolled back in their sockets and the hand slid limply from his arm.

Then he heard the sirens… and knowing he had done what he could as a man, remembered that he was also an investigator and glanced around for the dropped briefcase.

Unnoticed in the confusion, it lay on the ground almost against his ankle.

Malisse grabbed its handle and got to his feet. Would anyone know it wasn’t his?

A look from a man in the crowd told him at least one among them did.

Malisse met his gaze for just an instant. Dark-haired, wearing a long, cloaklike outback coat, he prompted a sudden jolt of recognition… and Malisse thought he saw a similar awareness in the pair of eyes that had become locked with his own. Where else besides this place had Malisse seen him? Where and when had they seen each other?

The man was gone, vanished into the growing crowd, before he could begin to remember.

And then, aware he too must move quickly, Malisse turned and hurried off down the street with the briefcase.

* * *

Ted Bristow swore under his breath, trying to figure out what to do about the long Ford trailer truck — the words OAK LEDGE TRANSPORT written on its side, for whatever it was worth — that had jockeyed into the Super 8’s parking court about four minutes earlier, stopping lengthwise across his line of sight with its engine rumbling, completely blocking his view of the U-Haul and motel room he was supposed to keep under constant watch.

It would be way too easy for the man with the van to mark him as a spotter if he shifted his car around the McDonald’s lot and shot for an angle that would let him see behind the truck. Easier yet to mark him if he actually got out of the car and started nosing around. Which Bristow supposed left him caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

He didn’t like it one bit, and Noriko Cousins would like it a whole lot less. Because anything could happen while he was stuck blind… any damned thing at all.

A frown wrinkled Bristow’s forehead. He’d been on lookout in the parking lot for about three hours when Earl came across the road to buy himself breakfast, passing Bristow’s Grand Prix once as he’d approached the restaurant’s entrance, and then again as he’d carried his bagged Egg Mc-Something back to the motel room.

At the time Bristow hadn’t thought he’d been made, but you never knew for an absolute certainty. Almost three years with Sword, a six-spot with the FBI prior to that, he had plenty of experience with surveillance gigs. The thing was, your evil counterparts often as not had comparable experience from their side of a stakeout, and the smart and competent ones wouldn’t let on for an instant that they’d had their suspicions alerted.

In fact, Bristow thought, the really competent ones might just roll a truck up in front of their opposite numbers as convenient cover when they were going to pull a move. There were front and back exits to the motel court, and right now he couldn’t see either of them.

Bristow’s frown deepened. What the hell was he supposed to do here? The