Hardbingers rj-10 Page 11

  3

  The Oculus met them at the door to his office, smiling as he shook hands with Jack and fixed him with an inky stare.

  "I'm so glad you decided to join us."

  "Not quite yet. There's still a lot I want to know."

  He ushered Jack into the room.

  "Of course, of course. That's only right and sensible."

  The four of them situated themselves as before: The Oculus behind the desk, Jack in the chair, Davis and Miller on flank.

  "What do you want to know?" the Oculus said. "Simply ask and I'll tell you whatever I can."

  Jack leaned back. "Davis and I had a little talk yesterday and he told me about the Twins. Who were they, where'd they come from, where do they fit in all this?"

  The Oculus steepled his fingers. "I'm not sure."

  Here we go with the evasions.

  "I thought you were going to answer my questions."

  "I can tell you only what I know. No one knows much about the Twins—they weren't exactly forthcoming about their origins or their mission. But I'll tell you what I've pieced together over the years."

  "Fair enough."

  "As I told you, the yeniceri were started by the Sentinel back in the First Age, and he maintained them from prehistory through the Dark Ages. For some unknown reason he abandoned them in the sixteenth century. The Oculi stayed on watch, but for five hundred years they received virtually no Alarms. During that time the yeniceri ranks withered due to lack of need."

  Jack gestured left and right. "Looks like some folks didn't get the message."

  "That's where the Twins come in. They appeared seemingly from nowhere in nineteen-forty-two and restarted the yeniceri camps."

  "Why then?"

  "I wasn't an Oculus then, but my parents were, and they told me they'd both sensed something awakening in the world, something they'd never felt before in their lives."

  A disturbance in the Force? flashed through Jack's head, but he decided it might be impolitic to share it.

  "Can you be a little more specific?"

  The Oculus shook his head. "No, because they couldn't describe it. Neither could the other Oculi, but they all felt it on the same day: May third, 1941."

  "Obviously something happened that day… way too early for Pearl Harbor… doesn't anybody know what?"

  The Oculus shook his head. "For years we conducted detailed studies of that date, in all countries, all cultures, but have found nothing. It had something to do with the Otherness because, after centuries of dormancy, it became active again. Every Oculus sensed its renewed activity. Then, less than a year later, the Twins appeared and began gathering recruits for the yeniceri."

  "But that means there was no Militia Vigilum then. So who put out the fires?"

  "For decades after the Twins' appearance there were relatively few, but gradually increasing in number. While the yenigeri were growing and learning, the Twins did the firefighting themselves. They always wore sunglasses, white shirts, and black suits, ties, and fedoras. They'd show up, take care of business, then leave. They tried to be discreet but were spotted often enough to spawn the myth of the 'Men in Black.'"

  Jack smiled. "So, the Men in Black had no connection to UFOs or the CIA."

  "Not in the least. The first new generation of yeniceri was trained and ready when we—the Oculi and the Twins themselves—sensed a brief explosion of Otherness activity somewhere on Long Island. The date was recorded: February eleventh, 1968. The Twins and a squad of yenieeri from this Home fanned out through the island but the source faded quickly and was gone before they could locate it."

  An explosion of Otherness on Long Island… not the first time Jack had heard about that. He knew the location: the village of Monroe. He also knew that a cluster of deformed babies was born there nine months later. And Monroe was where the Twins had bought it last year.

  But he couldn't say so. They'd want to know how he knew, and no way he could tell them.

  "So," Jack said, trying to keep all this straight, "the Sentinel disbanded the yeniceri but the Oculi stayed on watch. Why is that?"

  A shrug. "Who is to say? Although we share a common goal, we Oculi operate independently of the Sentinel."

  "Who's been AWOL for five hundred years. Any chance he might be dead?"

  Jack heard a sharp intake of breath from Davis and a grunt from Miller.

  "If he is," Miller said, "then you're a fake, because the real Heir would have already taken his place."

  "He's not dead," the Oculus said. "I sense his presence… but so faintly. He's still with us, but I don't know where. And I don't know why, in this dark hour, he hasn't shown himself and given the Ally's disciples someone to rally around."

  "Morale's pretty bad, huh."

  "None of your business," Miller said.

  Jack glanced at him. "It wasn't a question."

  The Oculus shook his head. "We are losing by inches. I don't understand the Adversary's strategy. Killing off the Oculi limits the Ally's vision in this world, but in no way diminishes its power. But I sense it may be just a part of a multifaceted long-range plan."

  "Maybe killing you off is a bigger part than you think," Jack said. "As I understand it, he's also killing off the MV. The combination means fewer eyes to spot the fires, and fewer firemen to put them out."

  "That is why we live in the equivalent of an armed fortress. It used to be we could… could…"

  He wavered in his seat like a drunk.

  Davis stepped forward and leaned on the desk. "Is it an Alarm?"

  The Oculus covered his black eyes with a trembling hand. "Yes."

  "What's an Alarm?" Jack said.

  Davis turned to him. "A warning from the Ally."

  Right. The timing seemed just a bit too convenient. He knew the guy was trying to sell him on joining up, and Jack had been listening. But if he thought—

  With a cry the Oculus fell out of his chair and landed on the floor. He began to writhe, shake, and shudder.

  Jack jumped to his feet and started toward him, but Miller put out a restraining arm.

  "Leave him be."

  "Yeah," Davis said. "It's like this every time. We have to let it run its course."

  4

  The Alarms are always silent, yet they never come alone. Pain is their devoted companion. This is why he dreads them. Icy blades stab his brain as lights strobe behind his squeezed lids. He feels the world tip beneath him and, though he instinctively reaches for the edges of his desk, he knows he's going to fall.

  A scene leaps into view… an empty subway platform… smoke roiling from one of the tunnels… on the tiled wall: WEST 4th.

  That fades to gray…

  Then his inner vision lights with a street scene. He recognizes the New York Public Library in the background. A sudden burst of flame and flying debris obscures the building as a bus explodes.

  More gray…

  Then another subway with another smoking tunnel. He makes out 59TH ST on the wall.

  Yet more gray…

  Then a man standing in the center of the crowded main floor of Grand Central Station… the man explodes, the blast tearing those nearest to pieces, the ball bearings and nails and screws he embedded in his explosives dropping those farther away.

  Gray…

  And then a car midspan on the Brooklyn Bridge… it explodes…

  Gray again… much longer than before…

  And now half a dozen men in the front room of a shabby apartment… they are cramming bars of claylike material into the pockets of work vests… through the glass of the window behind them a bridge is visible over the roof of the building across the street.

  And then the pain fades along with the light and the visions… and all becomes dark again.

  5

  Jack listened with a growing sense of dread as the Oculus described his visions.

  When he'd stopped his seizure and come to, Miller had helped him back to his desk where he now sat, looking pale and shaken.

/>   "They're… they're going to paralyze the whole city," Davis said in a hushed tone.

  Jack agreed. Subway nexuses like West 4th and 59th Street, a bus, a railway center, a bridge… and those might be just a sampling. But even if they were the whole plot, these bombings would affect the entire city—much more so than the London bombs affected the Brits. Those hadn't played out against the backdrop of the fall of the Trade Towers or the LaGuardia Massacre. New Yorkers didn't have the history of terrorism the Brits had suffered from the IRA. Millions of people, afraid to step on a train or a bus, would stay home. The city would grind to a halt.

  Miller kicked a wall. "Where do we find these fucks?"

  "I… don't know."

  That set Jack back.

  "You don't know? Last time you told them Cailin's exact location."

  The Oculus had the heels of his palms pressed against his temples.

  "You have to understand, these Alarms are like short-wave radio. The reception isn't consistent. Sometimes it fluctuates and the images fade in and out. Reception last time was excellent: I saw the intersection, saw the front of the building, saw the cellar door. But this time…"

  "You said you saw a man in a room… anything about the room that'll give us a clue? Like, if maybe he belongs to Wrath of Allah?"

  The Oculus lifted his head. "Wrath of Allah? Why them, rather than Al Qaeda?"

  Jack didn't want to get into the personal score he had to settle with Wrath of Allah.

  "They did LaGuardia. It's the same kind of MO."

  The Oculus shook his head. "'No, no posters or anything. Just a room… bare walls… wait. Out the window, to the left, I saw a bridge—and not too faraway."

  "The Brooklyn?"

  "No, it was arched, two levels—"

  Davis and Jack spoke in unison: "The Verrazano."

  Jack said, "Day or night?"

  "Day. Bright sunlight outside."

  "Where was it angling from?"

  "From above and behind it, I think… no, I'm sure. The side toward me was in shadow."

  Jack said, "Could be Bay Ridge."

  "Yeah," Miller said softly, menace edging his voice. "Lots of mosques in Bay Ridge. And only a few miles from here."

  But something about this bothered Jack.

  "So am I to take it that the Ally is anti-Islam? Pro-U.S. and anti-Arab? When did it become politicized?"

  Miller laughed. "Yeah, that's right—the Ally is a Republican."

  The Oculus cleared his throat. "The Otherness feeds on anything that causes fear, pain, and discord. As does the Adversary. The Ally warned us about nine-eleven, but we weren't able to find the culprits in time."

  "You mean you didn't call it in?"

  "Of course we did—to the FBI, the CIA, the NYPD—but we didn't know who or when. So our warnings were ignored. Obviously."

  "Why did the Ally choose you? 'Cause you're in New York?"

  "For major conflagrations, all Oculi receive the same vision. For minor occurrences—like the girl—only I, being the nearest, would receive that Alarm. In the nine-eleven matter, a number of us in the Eastern states donated yeniceri to the search."

  Miller held up a thumb and forefinger, a quarter inch between them. "Missed the fuckers by this much."

  "Oh, what a feast that must have been for the Adversary," the Oculus said. "I was also shown the pain and fear caused by the terrorism in Iraq after the conquest, but there was nothing we could do to prevent that."

  As awful as 9/11 had been, the LaGuardia Massacre had had much more of an impact on Jack's life.

  "What about LaGuardia?" Jack said. "Were you warned about that?"

  The Oculus lowered his gaze to the desktop. "In a way."

  "But you couldn't prevent that either?"

  "Prevent it? No."

  "We can do something to prevent this," Davis said. He turned to Jack. "You with us?"

  This was all moving too fast. He'd come here to learn a little more about these folks, but now he was being pressured into joining them on an operation.

  He didn't like it, but how could he say no?

  These bombings would hurt the city more than 9/11 and LaGuardia combined. Unlike Jack, the city had already bounced back from LaGuardia. In both cases people could tell themselves that they worked in a bagel shop or a bookstore or a sweatshop and that no one was going to fly a plane into those places, or hose them with machine-gun fire. The average Joes and Janes could figure they were too small-time to be a target.

  But this tactic would have a wider effect: If the subways and buses and trains and bridges they rode on every day could be blown up, so could they.

  If the Oculus's visions were real and true—and Jack still needed convincing on that score—he couldn't walk away.

  "Let's just say I do tag along. What's the plan?"

  Miller's smile flickered on and off. "Simple. Find 'em, finish 'em, and forget 'em."

  "Like in that cellar the other night?"

  "Right."

  Davis said, "Except there's a lot more at stake here than a little girl."

  Jack saw the find em part as a major problem. He turned to the Oculus.

  "How much time do we have?"

  "I don't know. The visions have no time sequence. For instance, in the matter of the girl, I was shown her after they'd finished with her." He shuddered. "That was what would have happened had we not intervened."

  "So we may have a day, a week, a month?"

  "I wish I could say. The nine-eleven warning came on September second."

  Jack had a feeling this warning would be equally fruitless. Finding an Arab terrorist cell in Bay Ridge… good luck.

  But what did they know so far? The northern flank of the Verrazano Bridge was visible from the cell's window. That narrowed the area to Bay Ridge's western rim.

  Not narrow enough. Not nearly enough.

  "Are these Alarms ever repeated?"

  The Oculus shook his head. "Never."

  Swell.

  "Okay, can you remember seeing anything else through that window? Anything at all?"

  He closed his black eyes and leaned back. "Let me see if 1 can reconstruct it."

  For a while the only sound in the room was breathing, then the Oculus's eyes popped open as he stiffened in his chair.

  "The building across the street. I saw the bridge across its roof. It had a redbrick front."

  Jack suppressed a groan. Probably ninety percent of the buildings in Bay Ridge had redbrick facing.

  "Anything else? A funny chimney, a crazy antenna, a satellite dish—anything to make it stand out?"

  "No, just—wait. The cornice! The building had a faded yellow cornice carved with a drape flanked by two inverted hearts."

  Jack rubbed his vaguely itchy scars. "West Bay Ridge, in sight of the Ver-razano, across the street from a redbrick building with a pretty specific cornice design." He looked at Davis and Miller. "That sounds doable to me. How about you?"

  Davis and Miller nodded.

  Jack sighed. Looked like he'd just become a double secret temporary yeniceri in the Militia Vigilum.

  But no black suit. No way was he climbing into a black suit.

  6

  After they'd finished arguing the suit issue, after Davis and Miller had changed into their uniforms, and after Jack had his heat back in his holsters, they were ready to go.

  Davis held out a pair of sunglasses. "At least wear the shades."

  Jack had no problem with that. He took them and checked them out, turning them over in his hands. Sleek black frames, slight wraparound.

  "Okay. Sure."

  "Put them on."

  "I'll wait till I get outside."

  Davis grinned. "No, try them. They'll surprise you."

  Jack slipped them on and—

  "Whoa!"

  The room had barely darkened. He took them off and checked the lenses, but from the outside they looked impenetrably black. He'd seen photochromic lenses, even owned a pair once, but this was diff
erent.

  "How do they do that?"

  Davis shrugged. "Don't know. They're something the Twins came up with. Pretty cool, huh?"

  Jack put them back on and looked around. Almost like not wearing shades at all.

  "Hot."

  "The 0 is calling other Homes for reinforcements, but we can't wait."

  Jack spotted Zeklos standing off to the side, watching them. The longing look on his face tugged at Jack.

  He turned to Davis and jerked a thumb at the little guy.

  "What about Zeklos? Why not bring him along?"

  Miller overheard that.

  "No way. He's out for retraining. Besides, he's a menace."

  "But he's got two good eyes," Jack said, and left it at that, hoping Davis would pick up the ball.

  He did: "Yeah, Miller. Right now we can use all the eyeballs we can get."

  "I told you—"

  "Would you be saying that if the Twins were here?" Davis said, showing some heat. "You going to let your personal feelings pave the way for another nine-eleven? You want to win this one or not?"

  Miller stood silent a moment, staring at Davis, then Jack, then Zeklos, then back to Davis.

  "All right. He's another set of eyes, but that's all. He doesn't suit up and if we have to make a move, he stays put."

  Davis turned to Zeklos. "That okay with you?"

  Zeklos nodded, then glanced at Jack. Something like love glowed in his eyes.

  7

  After a lengthy, contentious discussion, with most of the heat coming from—of all people—Miller, they yielded to Jack's logic: A four-way split on foot would be the most thorough but would take the longest; pairing off in two cars would allow for only one dedicated observer per car, since the driver had to be watching the street. All four of them in one car would provide three sets of eyes to comb the cornices.

  So it came down to Davis driving the Suburban with Miller shotgun, leaving Jack and Zeklos in the back.

  Jack studied a Brooklyn map as they drove to Bay Ridge. He couldn't see how anyplace east of Sixth Avenue could have the view of the bridge the Oculus had described, so they started near the waterfront at Shore Road and Fourth—on the edge of John Paul Jones Park—and began working their way upriver and inland from there, snaking a winding course along the streets and avenues.