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  “What happens if I come to a dead end?” Nudelman asked. “What if the urine-battery process won’t achieve what you’re after? If I fail, can I come back here? Can I come back here if I succeed?”

  “You’re asking what’s in it for me? Oh, that’s rich.”

  The sound of Magus’s laughter made him recoil.

  “You’re never coming back here. I’ll find other things for you to do.”

  “What sort of other things?”

  “I can always use a talented whitecoat to dig latrines.”

  Magus smiled on one side of its face only, the human side. It was a smile divided. The metal side was an unmoving mask made of overlapping plates. In a way Nudelman identified with the creature’s deformity. They both had faces that shocked and drew unbelieving stares. The scale of Magus’s disfigurement made the stain of surface pigment he bore seem trivial, but under the circumstances that realization didn’t make him feel any better.

  At the back of the pack, one of the crocodilians had half turned to peek over its shoulder at the goings-on across the room. Amid a pulse of grinding racket, on the far side of the curtain of sparks, a new group of its fellow monsters, or maybe the same one, had entered and were stepping up to one of the occupied cages.

  So maybe it had curiosity after all.

  But it was curiosity without guile.

  Magus rounded on the offender immediately—a comical confrontation because of the disparity of size and weight.

  “What did I just tell you? You have to fight the pull of your natural impulses. You all do, or this is where and when we die. Focus on this side of the room and the brethren that are in it, or it will all end and you will never be with any of them again. Do you understand?”

  When Magus turned back, Nudelman said, “Natural impulses to do what?” The crocodilians looked perfectly capable of tearing an elephant apart with their bare hands and thumb hooks.

  “They are a species with strong group bonds and a primal need for group contact. They require a physical and emotional anchor. Without it they are lost. They can’t function. For example, they sleep in piles like cats. Big sweating piles.”

  “That’s hard to imagine.”

  “You don’t have to. You’re going to witness it firsthand.”

  “What’s so dangerous about the other side of the room?” Nudelman asked. “Are the creatures over there meaner or something? Are they from a different family group? They all look the same to me. I can’t tell them apart.”

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “I am a scientist. It’s what I do.”

  “Get him out of the cage,” Magus said.

  The door opened and a powerful hand reached in, grabbed him by the neck and hauled him out, into a heap on the floor at the feet of the little guy.

  He straightened slowly, for fear of straining something in his back. It felt really good to stand upright. Though not by any means a tall man himself, when he reached his full height, he looked down on the stooped, broken creature that was Magus.

  Over the top of the hooded head Nudelman saw Dr. Ransom sitting up in his cell, staring blankly at him.

  Nudelman waved both arms and yelled, “Hey!”

  Ransom did not respond.

  “Are you blind?” he shouted across the room, still wildly waving. “Are you deaf? Hey, asshole, I’m getting the fuck out of here. What are you doing?”

  The neurosurgeon showed no sign of having seen or heard him.

  Nudelman had had enough. Now that he was free, he could present his case for recognition more directly. Stepping nimbly around Magus and his retinue, he started across the room to confront the infuriating man, with the idea in mind of teasing and poking him through the bars. Let the asshole ignore me then!

  As he approached the putative barrier that divided the room lengthwise in two, the visual and aural symptoms he had experienced greatly intensified. Individual specks of light became meteor showers, and the blurring was like looking through a sheeting waterfall. The closer he got to Ransom, the less clearly he could see the man and the louder the grinding became—until he vibrated to it, head to foot, as if he was being dragged at high speed over broken ground. Or standing next to the roaring engine of a 747. The sensory overload nearly doubled him over with waves of nausea.

  Before he could take another step, Magus clapped a steel-clawed hand on his shoulder from behind and squeezed.

  Whatever combination of servo motors were powering those inhuman fingers, it produced enough pounds per square inch to crush igneous rock. In this case it was crushing something much less challenging—his nerves, tendons and bone. The pain that shot through his arm and back made him shriek and dropped him hard to his knees on the concrete.

  “No means no,” the metallic voice said into his ear.

  It was like something that might be said to a small, misbehaving child. Or a naughty pet.

  Nudelman slipped from knees to belly on the floor and groveled there. The excruciating, nonstop pain made him shameless. He slapped his free hand on the concrete like a wrestler saying “Uncle!” Apparently Magus was not a fan of the World Wrestling Federation, because the steel fingers did not relent. Tears ran down Nudelman’s face as he begged in vain to be released from the pressure.

  Any illusion that Magus was some kind of poor crippled and defenseless creature went out the window. Any illusion that he and Magus were in some kind of symbiotic, scientist-sponsor relationship was gone, as well. The real pecking order had been established.

  James Nudelman was neither more favored nor more valuable than the lizard boys decked out in purple satin; like them he was just another squirmy dog that when kicked failed to bite.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lieutenant Zach Nathaniel stared at the strange machine planted smack-dab in the middle of an utterly trashed Greenwich Village apartment. ESU leader, Thomas Holmes, stood by his side, in an all-black combat outfit, bristling with holstered and shoulder-slung weapons and communications gear.

  “That door looks like something off a fucking submarine,” Holmes said.

  It did. That was exactly what it looked like. It had the same kind of airtight and watertight, hermetic seal and locking wheel, and a six-inch-thick porthole window.

  The rest of it they had been denied access to.

  From the far side of the crime-scene tape, Nathaniel could see through the open door that the floor was made up of metal plates. They were smooth and looked shiny. He could also see the inside of a matching door at the other end of the chamber.

  NYPD bomb techs in their padded suits and helmets were the only ones who’d entered it. They could find no evidence of explosives, and there was residual radiation that had no apparent source of origin. They couldn’t figure out what the unit was or who had made it. Their guesses fell in line with Nathaniel’s, which were based on the obvious features.

  It was some kind of killing chamber. Like a gas chamber.

  Or a prison cell.

  According to the CSI techs who’d examined the outside surface, above and below the floor, it was a single unit, apparently one-piece. There were no joins or welds. The estimated weight was astronomical. It was far too large and too heavy to have been carried up the narrow stairs and deposited in the living room. Only a crane could have put it where it was. And the chamber would have needed to be lowered into position down through the roof. But that was impossible, as well, because there were levels above, which prohibited dropping it through those living room ceilings and floors. Using a crane to swing it in through the front of the apartment would have required taking out two of the front windows and an intervening section of the weight-bearing wall.

  Within an hour of the device’s discovery, federal authorities had ordered NYPD to seal it off and stand down. The department was waiting for a team of top scientists from DC to arrive on scene and suss it out, but that had been delayed. In the wake of the violent attacks around the city, all flights had been diverted from the two main airports
until further notice. At last word, the scientists were leaving shortly, by military helicopter from Langley.

  Holmes had screwed up, big time. Before their dynamic entry into the office building, his ESU crew should have identified the small, hidden elevator and its exit on the alley. But they hadn’t. An oversight in the heat of battle. Shit happened. There was no confirmation that the perps had used it, but it was the only way they could have gotten out.

  Unless he somehow made it right in the aftermath, Holmes’s career was toast. And his wasn’t the only head on the block. There had been random mass-murder attacks all over the city, and NYPD had no one in custody. Four well-defended precincts had been taken down with enormous casualties, their armories looted of automatic weapons and ammunition.

  In the wake of events the harried, out-of-his-depth mayor had been forced to give a second, far-less-rosy press conference to local and national media. The last thing he’d said to Nathaniel on the way to the podium was “Do something!”

  Apparently the mayor didn’t care what that something was. The operative term was do. Of course, if the something didn’t turn out to be a solution to the problem, all holy hell would come down.

  Nathaniel had already made a decision, and the pieces were quickly falling into place outside. His strategy would either end the crisis and be a rocket booster to One Police Plaza or his career in law enforcement would be just as dead and buried as that of the man standing next to him. The plan was based on an analysis of all the events, all the current information, and also on a gut feeling he had.

  Shortly after the scene had been locked down, he had interviewed the survivors of the first precinct attack, the few who weren’t immobilized by shock. They all told the same story: scary-strong men in hoods, immune to bullets, on a senseless murder-and-mayhem rampage, dishing out a level of violence unheard of.

  The CCTV footage of that precinct attack was unwatchable for more than twenty seconds; only the CSI analysts and pathologists could stomach the sight of it. Officers and civilians had been literally torn limb from limb while they were still alive. The crime scenes at that precinct house and the other three would be tied up for weeks while the experts sorted out what had happened and to whom.

  Nathaniel knew that what the video showed was not possible outside a CG movie special-effects lab. To pull off arms and legs and heads like that would take superhuman strength.

  They also had CCTV of the Plissken crew entering the Eighteenth Precinct after the attack was well underway, once again following in the footsteps of the purple gang. The video showed them stepping over body parts and doing a room-to-room search of the ground floor—for what wasn’t clear. But they hadn’t been targeting the officers and staff still alive in the rooms. They’d looked and moved on.

  In the armory, things had changed. The leggy redhead had tossed what Ballistics had identified as an M201A1 thermite grenade, which had resulted in a powerful explosion that had killed the last surviving officers and the purple hoodies who’d been trying to rip them apart. The armory camera had died in the fireball, as well.

  From the video Nathaniel couldn’t tell if the redhead’s target had been the cops or the purple hoodies. If one or the other was collateral damage. The shock wave from the blast had knocked out the building’s other cameras, too, so they didn’t know if the Plissken gang had survived, or if they had, what direction they had gone.

  The city was on total lockdown except for police and emergency vehicles. A twenty-four-hour curfew was in place. Anyone caught on street without proper credentials, day or night, would be arrested and/or shot. In other words, Manhattan was now under martial law. That was the news the beleaguered mayor had delivered to a national audience.

  Trying to make sense of what the perps had seized—first, medical and technical specialists taken prisoner, then full-auto guns and ammo looted—was an exercise in futility. So was trying to figure out why they didn’t drop when hit by bullets point-blank. In the end it didn’t matter what kind of body armor they were wearing or what the hell they had stolen; all that mattered was what they planned to do with it. After sifting through every scrap of evidence, that was the lieutenant’s conclusions.

  Obviously the small group of attackers had to have come from somewhere. Probably from outside the city and maybe from out of state. Given the number of individuals involved, they had to have an assembly point, although it didn’t have to be on Manhattan. They could have been assigned targets in advance.

  From the report of Mrs. Adela Blair, who lived three brownstones down, the initial firefight in the street outside didn’t seem to have been planned in the same way as the attacks on the hospitals and precincts. She described two opposing groups: the purple hoodies and the Plissken gang. Each was trying to kill the other; both were using automatic weapons, but the Plisskens had explosives, too. The civilian casualties of the gunfight were bystanders, not designated targets. If the Plisskens were chasing the purples to do them harm, they didn’t look like federal law enforcement or spy-agency types on a sanctioned mission. Quantico and Langley had no information on any of them, except for the concealed-carry handgun permit of the frozen and thawed Mildred Wyeth. Was he looking at rival murder and kidnap gangs fighting a turf war in the middle of his city?

  If the starting point of the crime spree, the first gunfight, wasn’t planned, if it was a consequence of or a reaction to a surprise attack by the Plisskens, then it was conceivable that the purples had originally intended to keep this site secret, do their dirty work elsewhere and return with the spoils to this block, to this apartment and to the machine of unknown function standing before him.

  More and more the device seemed to be central to the problem.

  What the device was or wasn’t was another point of futile speculation. It was a question that couldn’t be resolved until after the unit had been examined by government scientists, and even then, they might come up empty. What mattered was that this apartment was where it had all begun. No other apartment in the building was trashed. No other apartment had a strange device in the living room. No other building had a kazillion bullet holes in its facade. The logical assumption was that the purple hoodies had first appeared in the same room where he and Holmes stood.

  His career hung on a subsequent, less certain leap of logic: that the purple hoodies would eventually return here, either to reclaim the machine or use it in some way to remove themselves and their booty from the island before they could be captured or killed.

  Did he really expect them to come back? His gut said, “Yeah, but not with fifty armed police protecting the crime scene.”

  Because of the way the perps had avoided police patrols and pursuit, Nathaniel guessed they were listening to a police-band radio, and planning their routes of travel accordingly. His first move was to get authority to remove the police presence around the apartment and then to announce the destinations of the reassigned personnel over the radio. The order was a fake, intended to make the perps think the way back was at least temporarily clear. The helicopter surveillance had been called off, rerouted to overfly the other crime scenes. Bevies of squad cars blocking the street had peeled away with sirens blaring, but most of the officers were stationed in the buildings across the way. The ESU vans had hurriedly departed without their personnel. The SWAT units were positioned inside the target building.

  From the street it looked as if there was nothing left but the crime-scene tape crisscrossing the building’s bullet-pocked entrance. All units responding to crimes in progress.

  “Are your spotters in position?” he asked Holmes.

  “We have rooftops on all adjacent streets blanketed with snipers, but they’re holding positions low profile. Every way in is covered. No one is going to enter this building without our knowing about it well in advance. Once they’re in, we’re not letting them out, except in body bags.”

  “No gunfire until we have positively identified the suspects and they are in the kill zone,” Nathaniel said. “That
means let them get out of their vehicles, let them enter the building. I don’t need to tell you about the size of the spotlight on us. The only way to contain what we’re going to turn loose on them is within four heavy walls. We open the trap to admit the suspects, then close it with ESU inside. No negotiations. No surrender. At all costs deny them access to the machine in this apartment. It could still be a nuke for all we know.”

  That possibility seriously raised the stakes for ESU and for him, too. But they all knew what they’d be getting into, and why.

  This had ceased to be a murder investigation. This was personal. Brothers and sisters in uniform had died in unspeakable ways.

  Thomas Holmes made it clear he felt the same way. There was more than just his shield on the line. “My people are going to end this, Zach,” he said. “You can bet your ass on that.”

  “You’ve got to keep them reined in tight, even though they want blood,” Nathaniel said. “Cold and professional until this is finished. That’s how we make it come out the way we want.”

  Holmes never got a chance to confirm his understanding.

  Three things happened almost simultaneously. A bright flash burst through the windows facing the street, brighter than any light Nathaniel had ever seen. It stabbed into his retina like ice picks. The explosion that closely followed was so loud it seemed to be inside his head; he covered his ears, but it was too late. As he dropped to his knees, a rolling shock wave carrying a payload of scoured debris slammed the front of the 150-year-old building, the walls shimmied, the floor undulated and the windows that still held glass imploded. The flying fragments turned his face into a pin cushion.