Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (42 page)

“Just waiting on you,” Lee
said.

“Then your wait is over,” she said.
She turned and headed for the hall to the basement. We
followed.

Five twenty-three a.m.

“How many people you leaving behind
here?” I asked as we started down the basement stairs. I was breathing
through my mouth, but it didn’t help much. The stench was so heavy, I could
almost see it.

“Half a dozen sentries, a few
others, the comfort women,” she said. “Maybe fifteen total.” She paused.
“Why?”

“Just seems like you’ve leaving
home base kind of vulnerable,” I said. “Hate to come back from a successful
job and find somebody else sleeping in my bed.”

“Nobody knows how light we are on
the ground here but us,” she said. “From the outside, it’s sentries and
business as usual. I didn’t think it made sense to shortchange the strike
team. I wanted everybody I could get out there, where they’d do the most
good.”

I nodded as we ducked and went
through the low doorway in the back wall. Schleu clicked on a
flashlight.

“Anyway, the action will be in
midtown and uptown,” she said. “Nobody is going to be thinking about the
Floresta today.”

She started to walk.

Schleu’s steps were quick and firm.
Whatever concerns she might have about the final success of the operation,
she’d either dismissed them or buried them. In her apartment, Schleu could
have doubts. Out here, she was the commander and doubts weren’t on the
agenda.

In the basement of the unfinished
building, one of her men stood at the top of the metal staircase against
the wall. He glanced down as we came through the doorway.

“How’s it look up there?” Schleu
called.

“Good, commander,” he said. “Snow’s
keeping people off the street. Been moving people out all night without a
hitch.”

“You’ve been doing this all night?”
I asked as she started up the stairs.

“Started moving the strike team to
midtown at midnight, two or three at a time,” she said over her shoulder.
“Had a van waiting on Walton.”

“No problem with cops?”

She pushed past the guy at the top
of the stairs and pulled herself up through the hole in the ceiling. “Not
so far.”

That changed after we crossed
58
^th
Street.

Five thirty-two a.m.

We were on the sidewalk on the
south side of Walton, a couple of blocks from The Hole, when a Metro police
car pulled up to the intersection at 51
^st
. The car sat there for
a moment, and I could see the cop inside looking at us. Then it came out of
the intersection and turned in our direction.

“If he stops, I’ll do the talking,”
Schleu said calmly.

The police car rolled to the curb
about twenty feet ahead of us and a uniformed officer climbed out. He
wasn’t wearing a coat against the bitter cold. Which meant he was a
Vee.

The cop came around the front of
the police car and stepped up on the sidewalk. “Out kind of early this
morning,” he called.

Schleu kept walking toward him.
“Yeah,” she said. “Gotta get to work. You know how it is.”

When she was about ten feet from
him, he held up his hand. “That’s close enough,” he said. “So where are you
headed?”

Schleu stopped. Lee and I came up
behind her.

“California Café on Second,” she
said. She turned and pointed at me and Lee in turn. “Cook. Counterman,” she
said. Then she tapped herself on the chest. “Waitress.”

“Long walk to midtown,” the cop
said.

“That’s why we’re out here so damn
early,” Schleu said. “With all this snow, figured we’d give it an extra
half hour so we’d be there on time.” She paused. “Aren’t you
cold?”

“No,” he said. “Okay, let’s see
some ID.”

“Sure,” she said, digging in her
pocket.

“All of you,” he said, looking past
her at me and Lee.

“Yes sir,” Lee said. I didn’t say
anything. I was watching the dark shape of a man moving quickly across the
street behind the police car. The man had something in his hand.

Schleu shook her head. “Sorry,
wrong pocket.” Her hand went into her other pocket as the man eased around
the back of the police car.

He was ten feet from the cop when
Schleu’s hand came out of her pocket holding an automatic pistol. The cop
froze for a moment. Then his hand slowly went to the holster on his belt.
“Just take it easy,” he said slowly.

She wasn’t going to use the gun.
The sound of a shot at this time of the morning would carry a long way,
bring more cops. It was just a distraction, something for the cop to focus
on so he would miss the sound of quick footsteps coming up behind
him.

It was a solid swing, as good as
any I’d seen Miss Takeda of the Security Force make with the Japanese short
sword she carried. Plenty of power, smooth, just the right angle. The
machete cut through the cops neck cleanly, from one side to the
other.

The body had barely hit the ground
before the guy with the machete grabbed it by the heels and dragged it to
the police car. Schleu stared down at the head that lay in the snow. “First
of the day,” she said with a thin smile. “First of many.”

The guy shoved the body of the cop
into the backseat of the car and came back to us. “Nice work, Ernie,” she
said.

Ernie was an older guy, maybe my
age, maybe older. The shaggy white hair that peeked out from under his knit
cap made him seem old, but his tanned face was smooth and unlined. “Thanks,
boss,” he said.

He squatted and picked up the head.
“What do you want me to do with the car?”

“Take it over to Fowler and dump
it,” she said. “Nothing fancy. Put it in a parking lot or something. Leave
the lights on, and the keys in it. Then get your ass back to The Hole as
fast as you can.”

“Got it,” Ernie said. He tossed the
head from hand to hand as he returned to the police car, then opened the
door, threw the head inside, and climbed behind the wheel. As he pulled
away, he gave us a little wave and a smile.

“Let’s get going,” she
said.

Five forty
a.m.
 

There was a man waiting for us at
the break in the chainlink fence around The Hole. As he pulled back the
fence to let us go through, Schleu asked, “Any problems this
morning?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. Been
quiet as a cemetary.”

She nodded and pushed through the
hole. We followed. So did he.

I was starting to get a little
worried. Best case was that I could kill Schleu and survive. I was also
willing to accept the possibility that I might kill her and die. What I
wasn’t willing to accept was being gunned down before I could kill
her.

I’d been thinking that when we were
at the bottom of The Hole, I might have my chance. It was wide and dark. If
I could keep it quiet, I might be able to take both of them out, Schleu and
Lee. Getting out of The Hole afterward might be a little dicey, but Schleu
had a gun. Worst case, I could shoot my way out and hope for the
best.

But now we had a fourth in our
little party, the guy following with the AK-47. As we got closer to the
tunnel opening on the far side of the pit, I saw another armed man waiting.
He, too, fell in behind us as we entered the mouth of the
tunnel.

Six fourteen a.m.

The Jenkins Avenue subway station
was chaos. Every one of the six hundred recruits seemed to be talking at
the same time as they waved slips of yellow paper in the air.

Schleu shook her head, pulled the
pistol from her pocket, and fired a shot into the ceiling. The shot was
very loud in the enclosed station, and as the echo died away, was followed
by absolute silence.

“I want some order here,” she said.
“You’re not a rabble. You’re soldiers.”

She paused and looked around.
“You’ve all prepared for this moment. In ten minutes, you’ll begin to move
into the tunnel. In an hour...” She smiled. “You’ll be killing
skeeters.”

That got some smiles and a little
laughter.

“You should have no questions, but
if you do, talk to your group leaders.”

Schleu paused and looked along the
platforms at the faces staring down at her. “I want you all to know that
I’m proud of you. Your courage and your determination are about to change
the course of human history.” She paused again. “I’ll see you at Ryer
Avenue.”

A cheer began in the back and in
seconds, all the recruits were hollering and waving their fists in the air.
It was almost as loud as the gunshot.

She smiled.

Six twenty-two a.m.

There were guards every hundred
feet or so in the tunnel between the Jenkins Avenue station and the Second
Street subway line. Our two escorts from the first part of the tunnel had
stayed in the station.

“Why all these guys?” I asked as we
passed another guard.

“They’ll keep the recruits in line
as they move up the tunnel,” Schleu said. “Once the operation begins,
they’ll be stationed on the street, hidden of course, to deal with any
unexpected threats.”

“That was a good performance back
there, Kat,” Lee said. “The shot was a nice touch. Straightened them right
up.”

“They’re nervous,” she said. “Maybe
even a little frightened. They just needed to see somebody in
charge.”

She stopped suddenly. “Which
reminds me.” Her hand went inside her coat and came out with a holstered
pistol. My holstered pistol. The Glock that I’d left in my apartment
downtown.

“Look what we found,” she said.
“That pistol you said you ditched.”

Schleu seemed pleasant enough, not
angry about my lie, but she’d shown the ability to think one thing and do
something else.

She held out the pistol. “Everybody
else going out there is armed,” she said. “Can’t have my uptown commander
empty-handed.”

I took the holstered pistol and
grinned. “Sorry about the little lie,” I said. “I didn’t want to carry it
when I came over to the east side. If I ran into a hassle with district
cops, I needed something I could toss like that little .38.” I paused.
“Then in your office...” I shrugged. “I like this pistol. Didn’t want to
lose it. I didn’t know you and I don’t trust people I don’t know. I was
afraid if I mentioned it, you might send somebody to my apartment to get
it.” I paused. “Which you apparently did.”

“Part of the vetting process,” she
said. “I don’t trust people I don’t know either.”

“You take anything
else?”

She shook her head. “They weren’t
there to take things,” she said. “Just look around. They happened to spot
the pistol, so they brought it back.”

I nodded and pulled the Glock from
the holster. A few yards down the tunnel, one of the guards brought his
rifle up. I ignored him and released the clip.

It was full. I pulled out the
bullet at the top, looked at it, then held it to my ear and shook it a
couple of times. The sound was faint, but I could hear the powder shifting
in the cartridge.

Schleu laughed. “You think I’d give
you a gun that doesn’t fire?”

I put the bullet back in the clip
and slapped it into the butt of the pistol. “Habit,” I said. “Always better
to check when other people have handled your weapons.”

“I’d let you field strip it, but
maybe you can do that later,” she said. “We need to go.”

I nodded and stuck the pistol in my
right jacket pocket. I put the holster in the other pocket.

Six forty-six a.m.

Second Street. Two minutes to
sunrise.

There’d been a couple of men
standing at different spots on the subway platform at Ryer Avenue. Schleu’s
guys, waiting to kill any human that got off the seven o’clock train.
Before we’d gone through the open iron gate at Second Street, the recruits
had begun to fill the tunnel behind us.

Schleu spoke to one of the men on
the platform, then came back to where Lee and I stood. “Okay, everything is
coming together,” she said. “Let’s go take a look.”

She started up the stairs and we
followed. The token booth was empty as we crossed to the steps up to the
street.

The snow around the subway entrance
was pristine. As we walked across Ryer Avenue, I asked, “Aren’t the tracks
going back and forth going to lead the cops right to the subway station and
eventually to Jenkins Avenue?”

“Nah,” Lee said. “Supposed to warm
up later this morning. Won’t be anything but a slushy mess by the time
we’re done here.”

Schleu stopped on the other side of
Ryer and looked up Second Avenue. She stared out over the empty,
snow-covered street for a few moments, then said, “It’s beautiful. Like a
Christmas card.” She pointed at the sky. “You can even see the full
moon.”

She turned to me and smiled. “You
ready to make history, Charlie?”