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  From the corridor outside came the cheery ding of the elevator. Heavy boots tramped down the corridor. It sounded as if they were being invaded by an army.

  Vee reached across the wide desk and snatched up a key from the base of the green-shaded lamp. Crossing to the rear of the room, she motioned to the private washroom and ushered the others inside. It had a white marble floor, countertops and backsplash. The walls were dark walnut paneling. There were no windows. There was no other exit. She pulled the door shut.

  “What in nukin’ hell are we doing in here?” J.B. asked as he took in the surroundings.

  “A reprise of Custer’s Last Stand, perhaps?” Doc suggested.

  Vee ran a fingertip along the edge of the wall until she found the latch. When she pressed it, the entire panel popped open on concealed hinges, revealing what looked like a very narrow gray metal elevator. The front spanned just six feet. She slipped the key in the doorframe’s lock. When she turned it, a motor whirred and the metal doors opened from the middle, revealing a car longer than it was wide, but just barely. The enclosure was lit by a bulb in an opaque circular housing in the ceiling.

  “Get in, hurry,” she urged.

  Seven bodies brushed past her and packed into the small space, toe-to-toe. She pulled the external panel closed as she backed in, then pushed a button on the brass console. The doors slid shut. Then the car began to drop.

  They were all pressed tightly against one another. There was hardly any air to breathe, and what there was smelled like unwashed bodies, gun oil and burned cordite. Doc stood behind her, young Ricky in front—the teenager was almost nose to nose with her. He had a serious but rapturous look in his brown eyes, as if he was trying to drink her in. Doc was trying to make conversation in her left ear. He wanted to know how she had learned about the secret elevator and where “by the Three Kennedys” it was going to take them.

  Meanwhile, something hard was poking her low in the back.

  She hoped to hell it was the silver lion head of his cane.

  “It’s a long story,” she said over her shoulder, trying to shift away from the prodding, verbal and otherwise.

  In fact it was more than a long story; it was the same story.

  It had come from the publisher’s Strike Force Thirteen covert-military-action series and a novel penned by none other than Kyle Arthur Levinson, the same author she’d had lunch with earlier—it was difficult for her to comprehend how radically her life had changed in just a few short hours. The writer had thought it would be hysterical if Strike Force Thirteen blew up his publisher’s offices, killing everyone and everything—down to the mail clerk and the potted plants. The company seemed to attract authors with adolescent senses of humor, so that in itself wasn’t a problem. The problem was Levinson had the Strike Force heroes base jumping twenty-two stories while the whole building exploded above them—this in full view of the NYPD, who had the building cordoned off with squad cars, ESU and sharpshooters. In Levinson’s novel the heroes managed to land without a scratch and then escape three hundred cops on foot, while trailing their chutes behind. There was no explanation for this remarkable feat. Not even an attempt at explanation.

  Chomping on the butt of his cigar, the publisher had glanced up from her synopsis of the absurd climactic scene and said, “Fire this fucking idiot, then fix it.”

  Easy for him to say.

  Levinson had numerous book contracts outstanding; he was one of the most prolific writers in the stable, so practically speaking, he couldn’t be fired, at least not in the short term.

  And Vee was the one who had to figure out and then write a new ending to the novel. Levinson couldn’t be trusted to do the revisions himself; that had been tried before, with disastrous results. The setting of the final action scene had to stand as written; the whole plot had been leading up to the building’s destruction. She had to find another way for the heroes to escape.

  And it had fallen into her lap.

  Enter Ivana, a stunning, leggy, blonde Russian woman in her early thirties, who the publisher said was an up and coming literary agent. In Vee’s experience, New York literary agents could almost always speak English and usually wore clothes under their knee-length sable coats. When the publisher introduced Ivana to her, the Russian had uncrossed, then recrossed her long legs while lounging in one of the executive suite’s leather armchairs—it was an indelible, Sharon Stone–Basic Instinct interrogation moment. Only there was no way to tell if Ivana was a natural—down there she was shaved as smooth as a baby’s bum.

  A week later, in the middle of a major publishing crisis, Vee had barged past the executive secretary before getting clear permission to breach the inner sanctum. As she’d entered, the door to the private washroom had been swinging shut. The publisher’s face a furious purple, he’d jumped to his size-seven feet from the leather couch. Before the shouting had begun and she’d been driven from the room, Vee was certain she’d seen a smear of red lipstick on the fly of his gray pinstripes.

  In her four-inch heels, the publisher’s presumed mistress had to be a foot and a half taller than him—hard to miss. Ivana had never entered the floor from the main elevators, but Vee could always tell from the lingering scent of her expensive perfume whenever Ivana paid a secret visit to the boss in his office.

  So she’d figured there had to be another way in and out.

  It had given her a quick fix for Levinson’s unbelievable ending—just add a hidden elevator and put Strike Force Thirteen in it—but by then, her curiosity had been piqued. She’d called the elevator company that serviced the building. And had gotten nowhere. They’d denied the existence of a fourth elevator. But after she’d circulated the question to friends on other floors, a woman who worked at an ad agency upstairs had pulled her aside and told her about the real private elevator. The ad execs used it to sneak call girls in and out, during and after business hours.

  The publisher never used it as an entrance or exit himself. He came and went via the main elevators along with everyone else. It was for special access only.

  Once Vee had started her after-hours search, it had taken her all of ten minutes to find the secret catch along a seam of the washroom’s wall. The spring-loaded panel had swung out, revealing the elevator doors and a conventional key lock. She’d already known where the key was. Her boss was, if anything, predictable. He kept the key in plain sight on the tooled brass base of his antique, bankers’ desk lamp. Since no one else knew about the elevator, there was no reason to go to the trouble of hiding it.

  Doc was still whispering in her ear when the car lurched to a stop. The panels opened silently—there was no telltale ding. Vee stepped out of the sardine can into a short, windowless corridor that ended in a heavy metal door and took a deep breath of fresh air.

  “Where does this lead?” Ryan asked as he moved past her to the barrier.

  “Not to the parking lot,” she said.

  She’d figured that out on her first trip down, long before she’d ever reached the bottom. If the entrance/exit door had opened onto the parking lot, call girls would be videoed driving in and out, and they’d need the key code to open the gate. No way would big-time execs give hookers that access. They would need to be in complete control, ride down in the car, take their entertainment back up with them, return them the same way—all without being seen.

  Vee moved to the metal door, inserted the same key and unlocked it. The door opened outward; the hinges were on the inside. It didn’t open far, a little more than a foot, then it hit something solid and stopped.

  Peering around the door’s edge, she saw the side of a white-and-red EMT truck, blocking the exit. It was parked very close to the wall, no doubt to allow other traffic to move past. Its idling engine made a steady low rumble.

  Without a word, she squeezed through the opening.

  Down the alley, a hundred feet to the right, was a squad car. Its light bar was flashing, but there was no one inside or standing nearby outside. She pushed t
he door back a little, creating a crack between it and the vehicle so she could look in the other direction.

  The main police presence seemed to be concentrated inside the building’s parking lot. Through the bars and wire of the security fence, she could see at least a half-dozen squad cars and that a black ESU van had pulled in past the gate. The EMT truck’s tall, boxy body and the open door completely blocked them from line of sight. It was a narrow window of opportunity. Their rear was totally exposed.

  “Come quickly,” she said to Ryan and the others. “The police can’t see us. Get into the back of the truck. There’s probably a driver sitting inside in the front. He or she needs to be prevented from raising an alarm.”

  Jak easily slipped through the gap between door and frame. Moving by her, he opened one of the rear doors and disappeared inside. Vee expected some evidence of a struggle, the truck rocking on its suspension, maybe a cry for help or a thud or two, but there was nothing. When she climbed into the back of the vehicle with Ryan and J.B., Jak was holding a short-bladed black throwing knife to a terrified young EMT’s jugular. The blue-uniformed man had his hands raised in surrender.

  “Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me,” he pleaded over and over.

  As the others jumped in and shut the back doors, Ryan and J.B. pulled the unresisting paramedic into the rear compartment and pushed him onto a seat on one of the two gurneys. Mildred found rolls of surgical tape in a medical kit, and they bound his hands, feet and mouth before strapping him down.

  “Don’t give yourself a heart attack,” Mildred told the EMT as she leaned over him. “Try to relax. As soon as we’re clear of the police, we’ll cut you loose unharmed, I promise.”

  “Who’s going to drive this wag?” J.B. said.

  The answer was obvious: Vee was the only one who knew the city. She shouldered him aside and got in behind the wheel. The statuesque redhead followed her into the front compartment, climbing onto the passenger seat.

  “Brace yourselves,” Vee said as she buckled her safety harness, then reached for a pair of switches on the dash. The truck’s siren screaming and its light bar flashing, she dropped the engine into gear and stomped the gas. As she barreled past the cordoned-off parking lot, the uniform cops standing around turned to look, but they didn’t jump in their cars and follow in pursuit. An EMT vehicle leaving a crime scene Code Three was not unexpected.

  At the mouth of the alley, Vee braked hard. “Hang on!” she shouted over her shoulder, then cut a right turn onto an empty street. The truck’s rear end fishtailed wildly. For a second she thought she was going to lose control and roll the damned thing. She heard her passengers slamming into the walls and floor as she powered out of the skid. Over the engine’s howl, her new friends were cursing her. In her headlight beams, at the end of the long block ahead, was a barricade of parked, white squad cars. She was doing fifty, sixty, then seventy, and the barrier was coming up fast. There was no choice—she couldn’t stop and chat. She aimed the truck between the front bumpers of facing vehicles in the middle of the row. If the heavy wagon hit with enough force, it was possible she could knock the lighter cars aside and plow through.

  Seeing her speed, seeing the flashing lights, hearing the siren, the uniform cops hopped into their vehicles and backed them out of the way, clearing a path for her just in time.

  She shot the gap, holding a steady seventy-five, roaring down the wide avenue’s center line. In front of her, for as far as she could see, was more empty nighttime Manhattan street, deserted sidewalks. When she checked her side mirrors, there was still no pursuit.

  They’d somehow managed a clean getaway, just like the one she’d written for High-Rise Hell, except for the exploding building, of course. It made her want to laugh, so she threw back her head and let fly.

  Krysty looked over at her as if she was stark, barking mad.

  As they approached the next corner, Vee slowed to a sedate thirty and turned left. After going another two blocks at moderate speed, she turned right, then shut off the siren and lights.

  They rolled along in silence. Even though they were now well away from the action, traffic was extremely light for the time of evening. A car here, a car there. No taxis, no city buses at all. She guessed people were keeping off the streets because of the terror attacks.

  “Hey, Vee,” Ricky said from the back. “How did you learn to drive this wag so good?”

  “Well,” Krysty corrected him automatically.

  “Research,” she said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Looking in the limo’s rearview was like touching the tip of his tongue to a rotten tooth; every time McCreedy did so it made him wince, but he couldn’t stop doing it. The dully gleaming metal eyes and the bizarre jaw contraption reflecting back at him were like a fatal highway accident.

  Magnetically horrifying.

  In a screeching, metal-on-metal voice that hurt his ears, the little one cranked out directions—the most monstrous backseat driver imaginable. It made his mother-in-law seem a rank amateur. The breath gusting through the open privacy window was a million times worse, too. It smelled as bad as a bloated, week-old dead dog in August. And unlike his mother-in-law, the little guy seemed to have a detailed street map of Manhattan etched inside its head. It knew exactly where it was going and the precise route it wanted to take to get there.

  McCreedy followed the directions as quickly as he could. He wasn’t thinking about where he was driving; his primary concern was obeying without question. He kept remembering what had happened at the hospital—it was an abject lesson in don’t-frustrate-the-little-one. He was almost certain he was going to die before the day was done. There didn’t seem to be any way around it, but he didn’t want the means to be having his head ripped off his neck.

  Ahead on the left, a spot-lit American flag flew from a stanchion on the front of a seven-story gray stone building. When he drove closer, he realized it was a police precinct station.

  The grating voice ordered him to stop in the middle of the street, opposite the arched, ground-floor entrance.

  A desperate ray of hope surfaced. Maybe they had decided to give up and turn themselves in, he thought.

  The limo’s side doors opened, and the creatures in the back started piling out. An exodus that made the vehicle rock on its springs. The little one didn’t seem to have much to say to the big creatures. There had been no command to get up and get out. It was as if they could communicate without words.

  If they were surrendering, he thought, as a claw hand gripped his shoulder and pulled him out of the driver’s seat, why were they taking along machine guns?

  The precinct house looked as if it had been built in the 1930s. Squat, square and stodgy. McCreedy was bum-rushed through the arched entrance. Beyond it was a long, windowless, marble-floored foyer lined on both sides with uncomfortable-looking, scarred oak benches—a kind of unofficial waiting room outside police confines and a way station for crime victims, their families, their lawyers and the lawyers and families of the recently arrested. The benches were full.

  As the purple entourage marched past, led by the limping, half-metal abomination, the assembled people froze in their seats, their chatting and squabbling ceased and the expressions on their faces shifted from sadness, pain and anger to horror.

  You ain’t seen nothing yet, McCreedy thought.

  The entryway ended in a set of modern, presumably bulletproof, double glass doors. In the brightly lit room on the far side, McCreedy could make out a large, raised wooden desk. It looked like the kind of thing a judge would pound a gavel on in a courtroom. A man in a black uniform sat behind it, preoccupied with shuffling the sheaf of papers in front of him. When the desk sergeant looked up from his work and saw the wall of purple hoodies staring back at him, his lantern jaw dropped. Then his face turned red. Rising to his feet, he slapped something on the side of the desk.

  A panic button, as it turned out.

  A piercing Klaxon alarm sounded at about the same ins
tant the creatures applied the soles of their bare feet to the doors. The tempered glass crunched, went opaque and buckled, held together by only thin layers of membrane. Not for long. Claw hands ripped open gaping holes, and the big boys poured into the station. McCreedy was dragged through the emptied doorframe, his shoes slipping on the fragments of glass. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the people on the benches running the other way as fast as they could, out the main doors.

  In front of him, the desk sergeant drew his sidearm and took aim from his elevated position. His mouth opened and he shouted something, but it was impossible to make out what with the Klaxon blaring.

  Seeing the gun pointed his way, McCreedy tried to duck, but a taloned hand caught him by the neck and lifted him upright, on tippy toes. It was like being clamped in a vise.

  McCreedy wanted the cop to kill them all; he really did.

  Until the shooting started and then all he wanted was for it to end.

  Bullets coming at close range from one direction were bad enough, roaring past his head like freight trains, but the freight trains didn’t stop. They made hard right and hard left turns; they veered up and down.

  The creature who held him fast wasn’t using him as a human shield; it didn’t need one. Nine-millimeter bullets from the Glock slapped into and zinged off its head, in the process cutting slashes in the satin hood.

  Stuff was blown off.

  Off the head, itself.

  Off the skin, hide, whatever.

  Bits of it peppered and stung the right side of his face. He wiped his cheek with his fingertips and felt hard fragments, but there was no blood.

  Though it seemed like much longer, the desk sergeant expended his fifteen rounds in as many seconds. By the time the slide on his weapon locked back, a double-wide had hold of him from behind. There would be no reloading.