Necropolis (43 page)

He was looking pretty overwhelmed, so she decided to interrupt the avionics lesson.

“Would it be too much to ask why we’re going to Queens?”
 

Struldbrug swiveled. The tinted glass of the VR display magnified his already-large eyes and Maggie had the sudden flash of a praying mantis. He hit a switch, globalizing his intercom.

“For her plan to work, Nicole needs to be outside the Blister, but still close by. So I monitored all Surazal’s former property holdings in the Heath.”

“Property?” said Max. “There’s still property?”

“Only the outermost western and northern parts were razed. Anyone who might escape the Blister and flee east into Queens and Long Island has nowhere to go—they’re surrounded by water. The shorelines are mined and patrolled. Even harder to cross than the western desert.”

Maggie remembered the blasting. The obliterating of cities and roads and schools and factories. Scarsdale, Mt. Vernon, Jersey City, Staten Island… Endless bombing runs, the night banished by fireballs, the new rhythm of life become the muted thump of impacts. The generals couldn’t quite mask their glee. They were allowed to use everything except nukes. It didn’t matter that it was their own country. They were kids told they could smash all of mom’s fine china and still have dessert, and that’s exactly what they did.

“There was activity in only one place,” said Struldbrug. “This mansion in Kew Gardens.”

He flashed a holo map from a pen-like emitter.

Maggie startled. “That’s right across the street from Maple Grove Cemetery.”

“So?” asked Max.

“So Donner was buried there.”

“Across the street from Nicole’s property?” said Max. “That couldn’t be a coincidence.”
 

Struldbrug turned back to his displays, saying nothing.

Great. More cloak-and-dagger. “What’s at this mansion?”

“Nicole has constructed a computer center there, transferred her command structure. The only possible reason is that she will conduct the attack from that location.”

“The wasps will be controlled from there?” asked Max.

“Yes.”

“So, destroy the computer, stop the attack.”

“It’s not that simple. This isn’t an ordinary mansion.”

“Of course not,” said Maggie.

Struldbrug ignored her sarcasm. “During the Cold War, it was transported from Baltimore, much as the Cloisters were, stone by stone, by a munitions manufacturer. It is much older than the town. The residents thought it was a vanity project for a millionaire, but actually the relocation effort masked the construction of a secret military communications center. It’s got an underground bunker hardened against nuclear attack. If New York Command thought the city was about to be hit, this was one of the places they could evacuate their top brass to and ride out the attack.”

“Lovely,” Maggie sighed. “So do we have any mansion-bunker-busters on this crate?”

“Negative,” said the Lifetaker, from his ball.
 

“Jesus!” cried Max, startled at the disembodied voice.

The Lifetaker’s voice floated up from its orb. “The RAH-99 carries seven Hellfire anti-tank missiles, fourteen Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, twenty-three Hydra air-to-ground rockets, and an XM301 twenty-millimeter cannon.”

Struldbrug said, “No, we can’t penetrate the bunker. Our purpose is to get Donner as close as possible to Nicole’s position, and that’s it.”

Maggie wanted to say,
but that’s insane!
but she bit her tongue. Donner had signed off on the plan, even if he was now brooding out the window. “How?” she finally managed. “Nicole’s going to have the place defended.”

“Yes,” said Struldbrug. He gestured to the helo’s interior with a gloved hand. “Hence the Comanche.”

“RAH-99 Comanche Reconnaissance/Attack Helicopter,” said the Lifetaker.

“A second-stage prototype of the RAH-66,” said Struldbrug, “developed by Boeing and Sikorsky for the US Army. The order for the helicopters was discontinued in 2004, reinstated in 2009, and cancelled again a year later.”

“They couldn’t decide whether they wanted it or not?”

“They wanted it, alright,” said Struldbrug. “They couldn’t afford it after invading Iraq broke the bank.”

“We’re in a forty-year old helicopter?” asked Max, glancing around the cockpit.
 

“Its age is precisely why we’ll get in undetected. McDermott’s defense grid is set to detect modern stealth craft, which are based on an entirely different technology.”

“So it’ll get us close without being detected.”

“Close enough.”

“Then Donner goes in and blows the computer mainframe.”

“No,” said Struldbrug. “He has no chance of doing that.”

“Then what the fuck!” said Max.
 

Struldbrug clicked his holo pen and beamed another image into the air in front of them. The image was of a simple aluminum tube with a cap. “Nicole has a remote control on her person.” In the animation, the cap swung back, revealing a single red button. “It’s the only way the wasps can be activated.”

“Wait a minute. That little button is the only possible way to launch the Retrozine-C? That’s so…James Bond.”

He looked grim. “She always did have a sense of the dramatic. Along with a healthy dose of paranoia.”

“No one else can do it in case she’s taken out?”

“No.”

“So destroy the remote, and you stop the attack.”

“No. Nicole may be a control freak, but she’s not stupid. Should the remote be destroyed or its signal interrupted, the attack will be triggered automatically. Donner must separate the remote from Nicole so that she cannot press the button.”

“And exactly how is he going to do that?”

“Ask him.” Struldbrug nodded toward Donner, then swiveled and took the craft back to manual.

Ask him.
 

But she couldn’t ask him. Because things had changed.
He
had changed, in that room. All illusion had been burned out of Donner. He had a job to do. It didn’t matter to him if he got killed doing it. He was beyond self-preservation now, beyond revenge, even beyond his own heartbreak. Her job was to help him.

She’d grieve later.

54

DONNER

W
e came in low and quiet. Struldbrug was remarkably agile with the helo. He hovered over a fire-destroyed house, and we rappelled from its belly through a carbonized crosshatch of timber into the open foundations of the basement. Then he was arcing off back to Necropolis for his part of the mission.
 

In the cellar, water nipped at our ankles, swamp-thick with rot and debris. It was so foul I had to will myself not to retch.
 

I tapped my headset and the three of us brought our VR online. The setup was much cruder than the wetwiring in our opposition. Nicole’s soldiers didn’t need cyberwear, not with their Nike corneas and the quantum nanolace spiderwebbed through their brains. Their combat programming and cybernetic enhancement could almost double their speed, agility and reaction time.

Maggie and the Lifetaker could match their abilities naturally. Max and I, on the other hand, were running on Workahol. Jazz juice, as it was known on the street. It wasn’t popular with the junkies or steroiders because the downside was too steep, even for them. It boosted adrenaline and endorphin production to an insane level. We’d be fast, clearheaded and pain-resistant for hours. After that came the crash and complete agony for days.

I hoped we lived long enough to experience it.

Struldbrug had been reluctant to give me the drug. My reborn metabolism might process it differently, he said. But after the firefight in the church and the trek here, I was already on my last legs. No way I could go into this without major help. So far, it worked fine.

“Keep an eye out for rats,” I said.

We waded through the muck to a set of cement steps that were crumbling around their rebar skeleton.

***

Kew Gardens. Maybe half the buildings were intact. Many had been looted and burned during the forced resettlement. Others had simply caved in under time’s weight.
 

Maggie had been right about permanence. It was an illusion—a psychic bulwark against the entropy that was always behind the scenes, patiently pressing, probing, working new cracks, bleeding through as relentlessly as a cockroach.

We had three blocks to cover on foot.

We stayed tight against the sides of buildings. Our smartskins adjusted their camo scheme every millisecond to match our surroundings. They were pretty astonishing in their accuracy. Had Max’s GPS blip not been flashing in my VR, I might not have even known he was there.
 

Getting in undetected would be the easy part, though.

We were betting everything on how I’d perform.

***

These weren’t the snow-shrouded December streets I’d grown up with. The temperature was above freezing, even this late. If those clouds overhead congealed, we’d be treated to nasty cold rain.

We moved single file through Kew Gardens’ commercial district. The faux-Tudor buildings would’ve been quaint if not for the rusted fire escapes plastered across their faces. Add the garish, primary-colored awnings that crested the nail emporiums, chicken shacks and bail bondsmen, and this community neatly homogenized itself into the rest of Queens.

The Gardens had started in the 1900s as a Greenwich Village wannabe, attracting artists like George Gershwin, Dorothy Parker and Charlie Chaplin. But it didn’t lived up to its bohemian infancy. In the 1960s it had been home to Kitty Genovese, the murder victim whose cries for help went unanswered by over twenty witnesses. Whose name became the symbol of a nation’s slide from Mayberry to mayhem.

Now the Kew Convenience Mart was a fire-gutted tomb and the washers and dryers of the Super Size Laundromat were trash-buried monoliths for future archeologists to puzzle over. Our clothing briefly held their images as we moved silently past.

I held up my fist when we reached the end of Lefferts Boulevard. Struldbrug blinked into my periphery via the uplink.

“Take a right at the intersection onto Kew Gardens Road. The mansion is two blocks down on your side of the street.”

Across the road, the cemetery took up the next eight blocks to our right. A stanchioned metal plaque held the cemetery’s name. The stems of the M, P and Y were elongated by rust drippings, nature’s own creepy Halloween font. Weeds had claimed the spaces between the gate and fencing before they’d died.
 

Home sweet home
.
 

In the city, selling “pre-owned” burial plots had become a needed source of revenue for mortuary owners, ever since they’d gone from landscapers to landlords. Hence, used graves. The open plots awaiting resale were covered with holograms of lawn. It was cheaper than moving dirt.

But not in this place. Whatever holes had been empty at the time of the Shift would never be filled, except by nature.
 

Maybe.

Back at the citadel, when Struldbrug told me where we were going—and its significance to me—I did a Conch search. Now I pulled out a piece of paper from a pocket and dialed up my optics to read what I’d copied down.

“Something wrong?” asked Maggie.

I folded the paper away. “Not a thing.”

***

Another half-block down the street, the brick wall at our sides became the Lifetaker.

“Our advance man,” said Max with revulsion.

“Well?” I said.

“They have a slaved AI working their antiviral security.”

“Slaved?” Even through her camo routine I saw Maggie whiten.

“I couldn’t get past the firewalls.”
 

“Pretty much what we thought,” said Struldbrug in my ear. “What about security?”

“Two guards on the lot, both out front. In the mansion: three downstairs, two upstairs with McDermott. Only one is out back in the carriage house, with our target.”

“What about the bunker?” I asked.

“Couldn’t risk getting in to see. The AI would’ve caught my scent. But by process of elimination, that’s where Nicole is. The bunker.”

“Wait a sec. You said Nicole was in the carriage house,” said Maggie.

“I said the
target
was in the carriage house,” said the Lifetaker.

She blinked. “Nicole’s not the target?”

I gave her a “hold all questions” look. She didn’t like it.

“Why doesn’t she have a whole platoon guarding the place?” I asked Struldbrug.

“It won’t mesh with her story after the attack. Besides, she has faith in McDermott’s tech,” said the Lifetaker.

“So what,” said Maggie. “If
you
can’t get in there, we sure as hell won’t be able to.”

“Nicole will come to us,” I said.

Maggie looked again but said nothing.
 

“Did you divert the sensors?” asked Struldbrug.