but Nimec rushed over and got an arm around him an instant before he would have fallen to the floor.
The thug’s gun, meanwhile, continued to jolt and rattle. Nori whipped her head back around, leveled her rifle downward, and hit him dead-center in the chest with another gust of fire. A scream ripped from his throat and he thrashed on the floor as though suffused with voltage. After a moment he passed out, the Uzi dropping from his fingers with a metallic clatter.
“How bad is it?” Nimec said, helping Barnhart to his feet. He nodded his chin at the blood-saturated middle of his coveralls.
“Don’t know exactly.” Barnhart winced. “Hurts like all hell, though.”
Nimec regarded him steadily, his lips clamped together.
“We’ll try and get out of here the way we came in,” he said after a moment. “With any luck the rest of those guys will still be out front.”
Barnhart shook his head vehemently. “I’m not sure I can make the stairs. Head on down without me… I can hold my own if any more come up here… I’ll use that mope’s Uzi—”
“Do us a favor, Tony, okay?”
Barnhart looked at him.
“Shut up and cooperate,” Nimec said.
Barnhart shook his head again, but this time didn’t voice any protest.
Noriko hustled over to Barnhart’s left side, lifted his arm, and slung it around her shoulders. At the same time, Nimec continued bracing him on the right. He had drawn his Beretta from its holster with his left hand.
He swapped glances with Noriko, then nodded.
Half-carrying Barnhart between them, they started toward the entrance to the stairwell.
They had no sooner reached the steps than a third thug appeared on the landing below. He had a Glock nine in both hands and was raising it in a shooter’s stance.
His eyes slitted with concentration, Nimec got off two shots with his own pistol before the bodyguard managed to fire a single round. The first caught him in the right kneecap, the second in the left. He crumpled to the base of the stairs and rolled around there in spastic agony, howling at the top of his lungs.
“Shut him up,” Barnhart rasped. He unclipped a DMSO canister from his utility harness, passed it to Noriko. She noticed that its tubular surface was slick with blood, but said nothing.
Slipping out from under Barnhart’s arm, she sprinted down the stairs, held the canister over the screaming man’s pain-knotted face, and depressed the nozzle. A fine, nearly invisible mist hissed out of it. The thug raised his hands in front of his face in a warding-off gesture, his eyes wide, white, and bulging. Then his arms dropped like deflated balloons and his features went slack and he fell off into sedated unconsciousness.
Nori turned back toward her companions. They had almost reached the bottom landing, Nimec gripping the rail with one hand, supporting Barnhart with the other. Barnhart’s face was blanched of color and she could see a greasy patina of sweat on his cheeks. He was biting his lower lip, gasping a little with each descending step.
She hurried over to help him the rest of the way down, got his arm back around her neck. Together the three of them pressed through the rear door to the alley.
Cold air and snow blasted them the moment they got outside. Thunder was still skipping across the sky. They moved awkwardly toward the mouth of the alleyway, Barnhart stagger-stepping forward, a tortured grimace on his face, blood dripping from his midsection to the snow.
A fourth bodyguard appeared in the alley entrance, directly in front of them, sweeping an outthrust carbine back and forth like a divining rod. Slugs churned from the gun and whapped into the snowpack at their feet, kicking up powdery spurts of whiteness. Nimec hauled Barnhart sideways out of the line of fire, then jostled him against the diamond-mesh fence dividing the alley from the adjacent property. More rounds shivered from the bodyguard’s weapon, pecking at the brick outer wall of the building, striking a shower of sparks off a fire escape somewhere overhead.
Nimec extended his gun toward their attacker, triggered two rounds. But he was off balance, unable to take decent aim, and they went sheering ineffectually into the darkness.
The killer prepared to fire again. He seemed to have realized that one of his prey was wounded and swung his gun in their direction with a kind of slow, deliberate confidence, like someone about to take out a crippled fowl.
Nimec huddled against the fence, shielding Barnhart with his own body.
Nori fired her webgun a beat before Roma’s thug would have pulled the trigger. A hollow
Nori dashed over to him as he lay there thrashing, and sprayed him full in the face with the DMSO. An instant later he ceased to move.
The webgun still in her hand, Nori ran past him to the alley mouth, peered up and down the sidewalk through blowing sheets of snow. Lights were flickering on in the apartment buildings along the street — obviously the sounds of the firefight had drawn some attention — but there was no one in sight.
She turned and padded back down the alley to her companions.
“You all right?” she asked Nimec.
“Yeah,” he said.
She looked at Barnhart. The perspiration was streaming down his face now, and the glazed, somewhat abstracted cast of his eyes gave her cause to fear he might be slipping into shock.
“Coast’s clear, as far as I can see,” she said, gripping Barnhart’s arm. “We have to get back to the wagon before somebody calls the cops, though. Think you can make it?”
He looked at her a moment and somehow managed a wan, grim smile.
“Race you,” he said.
THIRTY
The sex was quick and dirty. So was the conversation that preceded it—“dirty,” in this instance, meaning distorted and semiaudible on playback.
It wasn’t the fault of the recording equipment. Nick Roma had simply been speaking in a low voice when the woman in the black leather coat entered his office.
“Let’s see that part again,” Barnhart said.
“You mean when he’s behind her, or on top?”
“Don’t get smart.”
“I’ll cue it up from where it’s still rated PG, and just about to segue into triple-X,” the thin, long-haired man at the audio-video processor said with a mock frown. He pushed a button on his console, and Barnhart heard the faint whir of the hard disk spinning in the silence.
They were in a sound studio in the basement of the Sword headquarters in downtown Manhattan, Barnhart and the techie seated shoulder-to-shoulder at the workstation, Pete Nimec and Noriko Cousins standing behind them.
Barnhart leaned stiffly forward in his chair, feeling his stitches pull under the bandages around his midsection. His wound still gave him a lot of discomfort, but the bleeding had made it look more critical than it actually turned out to be. Though a long, shallow furrow had been plowed into his right side, the slug had been deflected from his internal organs by a ridge of hard muscle before exiting. According to the emergency room physician his superb physical condition was what saved him.
“You think you can get us to what he’s saying?” Nimec asked.
“If I hadn’t been reasonably certain the audio streams could be cleaned up to your exacting demands, I wouldn’t have bothered committing this blue romp into digital form,” the man at the workstation said. “After all, the
