For a few seconds we all sat there in silence. Finally I licked my cracked lips. “Mr. Bendix, do you have a point?”
He nodded, opening his mouth as he did so and waggling his eyebrows under the blindfold. “Oh, yes, Mr. Cates. Three days ago our last official report on Gatz had his group seizing Bellevue Hospital Center with little resistance, the complex having been abandoned and occupied by itinerants of deteriorating health. You would have heard the report, officers, except you’d been burned off the force by then, of course.”
“Well, hell,” I said. “We get a fix on Kieth’s signal like before, you can call in a fucking missile strike or whatever. Kieth’s dead, this whole mess goes away.” A thin kernel of hope bloomed inside me, and I almost welcomed the idea of having to worry about getting away from Hense and Happling or whichever System Pigs stepped in to take their place.
I felt Marko looking at me, and I knew he’d heard me make my promise to Ty. I kept my eyes off him, but I still felt his scrutiny.
Bendix nodded. “Certainly. But you would have to put me in touch with my office.”
“Uh,” Marko said slowly, raising his hand, “there is one problem with that. When I got the hover going I tried a scan for Mr. Kieth. I can’t find him anymore.” He shrugged, an incredibly slow, lazy movement. “I think they’re shielding him.”
I closed my eyes. The Kev Gatz I’d known had been a burnout, a man who could make you dance and sing if he bent his mind to it but who sometimes didn’t seem capable of forming sentences. Now he was a goddamn cyborg mastermind. “All right, but I think Mr. Bendix is saying we know where they’re headed-Bellevue. Just take the shot. We’ll know soon enough if we hit the mark.”
We all looked at Bendix. His smile got even twistier, but he shook his head. “No.”
I almost jumped to my feet. This was it, this was a solution. This was burning out an infection. This was easy, and I wanted to squeeze an answer out of the goddamn assistant to the Undersecretary. Before I could find my voice, Hense spoke up.
“Why the fuck not?”
“Ms. Hense,” Bendix said, shaking his head. “The whole eastern seaboard is in turmoil as this spreads, and we’re starting to see flare-ups of the infection elsewhere in the System, probably spread by System Security Force personnel moving from place to place. We’ve lost huge numbers of assets and resources, and we’re struggling simply to maintain control in North America right now. Intact assets in the rest of the world must be preserved to guard against what is at the moment an inevitable spread of chaos and loss of life.” His smile faded a little. “We’re stretched thin as it is. You expect me to arrange for military assets to be transported to New York and expended for the chance?” He shook his head again. “No. Show me where Mr. Kieth is, and I will issue such an order. Not before.”
“Motherfucker,” I hissed, looking up at Hense. “Call the cops. Call your people.” The cops didn’t hesitate. The cops killed everything first and asking fucking questions later.
Hense didn’t look at me. “No, Mr. Cates,” she said quietly, looking at the Stormers around us. “We’re burned. No one will talk to us. We won’t get through to anyone.”
I stared at her, then at Happling, who looked like he was chewing his own tongue. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand. You’re not police.”
I stood up, the action intended as dramatic but ending up slow and pathetic. “I’m not insane,” I said, turning to Marko. I hated him because he knew what I’d said to Kieth. “New York. We find Kieth and then Mr. Bendix will wave his hands in the air and rain death from the sky.” I looked around. Hense, Happling, Marko, and the Stormers were all focused on me. Except for Marko, they’d all wanted me dead not so long ago, but they were looking at me calmly, expectantly, as if I knew what our best move was.
“Fuck it,” I said, turning for the cockpit. “We do it the hard way. As fucking usual.”
XXIX
Day Ten: Send the Vip on Down
Zooming toward the coast, the hover rattled and shook violently, but I barely noticed. It had been shuddering and lurching through the air, the displacers roaring with a sour, off-center noise that was painful to the ears, ever since we lifted off. Marko handled the brick like he was riding a dead elephant, and by the time we were halfway across the ocean he’d made four of the surviving fifteen Stormers puke into the safety netting.
I was sitting in the copilot’s seat. Wires snaked from the maintenance duct on the floor between us directly into the dashboard, which made me nervous. Any sudden, unplanned move by Marko would more than likely result in some disconnections, and I had a vague but heavy certainty disconnections would result in us smashing into the Atlantic.
“Things must be bad,” I said to Hense in a low, careful voice. She crouched on one side of me, awkwardly folded into the space between the copilot’s seat and the dashboard. Happling was behind us, grim and silent, all his crazy cheer gone for a change. I’d liked him better laughing. “You hear Bendix? Assets, resources: translation is, they’ve lost the fucking East Coast and have nothing to throw at it.”
Hense nodded. We’d all been out of touch for too many days; we were working from hints. “That explains a fucking civilian Spook leading a team of cops,” she said. “A week ago that would never have happened.”
I’d sketched out a primitive map of Bellevue Hospital Complex in a mixture of blood and grease on a piece of cloth torn from one of the Stormers’ underuniforms. It wasn’t pretty but it gave the general idea. I’d been there only once, eight or nine years before, on a job. Three doctors, all rich and under guard, all had to be dead on the same day. I remembered the job well: a challenge. I’d been forced to take some pains with the grounds; next to The Rock, the hospital was one of the most heavily guarded areas of the city. After all, they couldn’t let in the assholes without medical chips.
Nine years was a long time. Buildings went up or down, security configurations changed, floors were abandoned or populated. Still, my hazy memory was all we had to go on until Marko dug up something more useful.
“We’re on a schedule, too,” I said. “From what Kev said, they’re just waiting for enough people to die off, and then they won’t need Kieth or me anymore.”
“And they shut you down,” she said, giving me that steady stare.
“Shut us all down,” I reminded her. “I don’t know when that moment is going to be. But if the whole East Coast is gone in a week, it can’t be long. Give me a cigarette,” I said. She didn’t hesitate, snapping open her little case and offering it to me, then adroitly manipulating case and lighter with one hand, managing to snap the case closed and the lighter open without dropping either. Admiring her tidy movements and enjoying the feel of her leg against mine, I sucked the bitter smoke in and stared down at my crude little map. “The hospital complex is like a goddamn fortress to keep out folks like me who don’t have a med chip. But it’s nothing complicated-it’s walls and electronic gates and motion sensors and a lot of private guards. Okay, let’s assume the private guards are all dead. Let’s also assume they’ve been replaced by Monks. That’s an upgrade. Is the power grid still up?”
Hense shook her head. “According to Bendix it went down two days ago. Apparently a large part of Long Island isn’t there anymore.”
I nodded. “Okay. So the electronic perimeter can be discounted. So what we’ve got is a few dozen Monks guarding roughly a mile of concrete and barbed wire. But it’s a hospital, right? So it’s designed to let people in and out.”
Happling’s huge arm moved past my face, a thick finger pointing at my diagram. “Your map’s a little out of date. I pulled bodyguard duty on some asshole doctor there three years ago. Fucking prick. Acted like I wasn’t even there, wouldn’t even say fucking hello in the morning. I must have walked all over that place. It’s a goddamn maze. Every corridor looks exactly the same. They’ve got these colored lines painted on the walls that are supposed to show you where everything is, but I’d swear they just loop around.”