Chapter05

 

 

“We need a fix on that building,” the voice said, rising out of the headset so unexpectedly, he jumped.

“I can give you that, sir,” he said, and swiped his finger across the screen activating a grid, which was superimposed over the grid of streets the drone camera showed, the brownstone and the cab that was steering away from it, the Pac Man making its way back downtown, while a smaller, yet still visible figure stood at the curb.

The voice on the other end had stopped, but the line remained open so that he could hear chatter, other operators manipulating other parts of the operation from other vantage points, some apparently dealing with ground operations.

It took a moment for him to locate the other figures, the shapes moving across the roofs of other buildings, converging on the building he had as the central image on his screen.

He saw the flashes first, then heard the chatter change, a note of alarm rising up in distance voices that he could barely make out, although he heard someone say “Russians?” and another ask, “Chinese” as the flashes increased, coming from odd corners of various roofs, around the target building, and with each flash, one of the approaching figures stopped and fell, and did not move again – all part of some silent movie he knew was as silent on the scene as it was where he sat viewing it all from the drone.

Something had gone very wrong, and his gripped the edge of his consol, waiting for the command that would require coordinates for a strike.

How many people lived in a building that size? They were not rich, but very clearly bystanders. The flashes stop. The command did not come. But he waited, knowing sooner or later it must.

 

*********************

 

 

Ponci shifted the briefcase in his strangely moist palms, strange because he rarely sweated even in Miami, and here, with the chill chiseling into his bones, his palm did. He looked down at his hand, which seemed to shake.

“Not a good sign,” he thought, and then paying too much attention to a part of his anatomy he didn’t particularly need at the moment, the sharp tip of his polished shoe struck the end of an empty wine bottle, sending it rattling across the sidewalk until it came to a stop against the side of a stair.

The sound of it echoed down the cavern-like block as loud a pistol shot.

But the street for the most part remained utterly vacant, a dilapidated part of a city that had not yet become fashionable enough for young professionals to desire and so was left to those the rift raft that were finding fewer and fewer spaces in which to take refuge.

The sound of the bottle, however, did stir up other, softer sounds, the sound of movement, fabric against fabric, and a harsh in and out of breath, sounds of rats – but of a more human variety, whose shadow shapes appeared only vaguely in the deeper shadows of door ways to basements or in the deep doorways of closed up stores, faces only barely illuminated by those few street lights unbroken, human forms that really did not take shape, evaporating back into the dark the moment Ponci took notice of them – which he did only briefly before turning his full attention to the brownstone’s stairs.

 

 

Whole lives had lived in the space between the street and the rising cracked stairs to the front door, and in better light, Ponci might have read the tragic tales left in these remains, the once-wet and now frozen blanket that clutching the corner of the stone handrail, looking almost like a starved body stretched out up each painful step. Wine bottles, unfolded and deteriorating cellophane wrap with residue of powder, snorted or melted, now part of someone’s long nightmare elsewhere. Fast food wrappers testified to the more human side of the equation, hinting of the need to pause for sustenance even in a fit of despair.

Ponci left his own marks as he rose, a few drips of red from a bandage no longer able to keep his wound sealed, not a lot of blood, not so much bleeding he felt weak yet, just an annoying reminder that had been careless, and how he needed to avoid making the same mistake twice.

He tightened his sweaty grip on the handle of the briefcase and used his free hand to feel for the door handle of a door that already stood slightly open, and in fact could not have been closed or locked.

 

 

The metal of what had once served as locks hung out twisted from splintered wood, barring the door from even closing. Beyond it, a dim light illumined a tiled vestibule, the address number of the building configured out of red-tiles on an otherwise white floor, although some of the squares from both white and black were missing, like vacant teeth. The floor to the right was littered with circulars and other commercial mail, suggesting that someone still resided in the building despite it’s appearance from the outside, slowing Ponci’s step and making him just a little more wary as he crossed to the inner door, his free hand feeling for the pistol stuffed in his belt.

The dim light above made it impossible to make out anything in the darkness beyond the inner door – the lock of which sagged in the same way as the front door’s.

 

 

But the darkness beyond the inner door was not total, and as his eyes adjusted, Ponci made out a dimmer glow from somewhere above, too dim to make out much except where the stairs and banister was – though the light made the shadow along side the stairs more intense, and though Ponci knew several doors existed there, he could not see them, and thus felt a growing threat from them as he slipped through the inner door and made his way up the stairs, his feet as close to the wall as possible as to keep down the squeak of wood they might emit.

But it was the pain each step and his inability to keep from gasping that he regretted most, abandoning the hilt of his pistol to press more deeply onto his wounded side, hoping to lessen the pain – which it did after a fashion, though his fingers became sticky with warm blood.

He glanced back and saw the glint of the light from the vestibule on the drips of blood he had left on the tiles, and saw the dark splotch growing even through the thick fabric of the army field jacket.

He felt faint when he reached the first landing, and breathless, and needed to pause before he made his way up the next set of stairs.

“How many more?” he wondered, but knew that he had yet another flight to rise before he came to the apartment he wanted, and dreaded the effort, stopping after way up the second flight for so long he thought he might faint there and fall, and then, with more effort that he’d expended in recent memory, he forced himself up to the next landing, where he rested again, and then again moved on, finally mounting the last set of stairs, refusing to stop even when he felt his balance wavering, and finally, his hand covered with blood from his wound, he reached the landing he wanted, where he stopped again.

 

 

Something – a faint sound of metal – clicked below, a vague echo that seemed so petty, it didn’t seem important, and yet for some reason, some matter of instinct, it raised the hair on Ponci’s neck.

His bloody fingers felt down to the hilt of his pistol, more by habit than thought. But he did not draw the weapon. Instead, he leaned slightly over the rail and stared down into the darkness below, catching the tiny glint of reflected light from the vestibule on the winding wooden handrail.

He had expected to see a hand on the rail, but nothing showed, and no other sound came, though in his head he imagined figures rising up the stair the way he had, their feet keeping close to the wall side of each step as to keep from making a sound.

“It’s the cold and the wound,” he thought. “I’m imagining things.”

But somewhere in the back of his head, somewhere in that part of his thinking not fogged by the pain, he remained suspicious, and so moved along the rail and hall, with even greater care, his gaze focused now on the door numbers until he found the one he wanted.

He paused again, and tapped very gently, perhaps too gently, but received a response anyway.

 

 

A heavy voice, muffled by the closed door, said, “Come in.”

The door, despite its lock assembly still intact, had not closed properly, leaving the door about an inch ajar so that Ponci could push it open with the tips of his blood-stained fingers.

It did not groan, but carried with it a silence more eerie that made Ponci ache for some sound to cover his rough breathing.

The interior was as dark as the hall, except for a single lamp that hung over a single wooden table in the middle of the room. The shade of the light – like one of those that hung over pool tables Ponci used to play on as a kid – cast the majority of light down onto the table and seemed to create darkness in the corners of the room rather than illuminating anything else.

The light glinted off the sunglasses the man seated at the table still wore, as if he had stepped into the room straight from their last meeting in Miami, although Ponci noticed a change of clothing, a darker, warmer set of clothing similar to the military garb back in the soldier’s closet, but without any insignia of rank or unit. His close cut hair suggested he still had some tie to the military. But his shoulders were as broad as a football player’s, and his hands were large. He lifted one up and motioned towards the chair directly across the table from where he sat – a chair with its back to the door in through which Ponci staggered.

The door closed behind him, this time with a click. Ponci just made out some of the other features of what was clearly a bleak room. To the right protruded the edge of an old fashioned sink, of 1920s vintage with a ribbed surface for draining dishes and goose neck water spout. To either side of the sink, wooden cupboards like spread wings along the walls to either side. The hum testified to a still working refrigerator, although it was also of a very early vintage, small, and probably packed with ice from lack of defrosting.

Ponci reached the chair, and with his free hand, pulled it back so he could seat, wooden legs scrapping over linoleum with an odd moan. But the chair moaned louder and gave out a protesting creak as Ponci lowered himself into it. His breath came hard, but he could not be sure of whether it was fear, the climb up the stairs or his wound that caused it.

The other man leaned closer and over his side of the table and removed the sunglasses, the light revealing the angular face Ponci had recalled from the previous meeting, near or over 50, with harsh blue eyes that looked dark now, and a twist of a mouth that announced how cruel this man could be if he wanted to be, and implied he would be if he had to.

“Did you kill Billman?” the man asked in husky voice barely above a whisper.

“Yes, he’s dead.”

“Are you sure?”

“I put an extra slug in his face. He’s dead.”

“And the other matter?”

“I have the briefcase,” Ponci said, lifting it up and sliding it carefully onto the table.

Ponci noticed the other man’s large hand was not visible, and he envisioned the fist holding a pistol under the table, a pistol pointed in his direction.

“Open it,” the other man said.

“There’s no need,” Ponci said. “I already did. It’s empty.”

 

“Empty?” the broad-shouldered man said, his voice made even more gravely by the shock. His gaze glanced down at the case and then up at Ponci’s face, the shock evolving into rage. “What have you done?”

“It couldn’t be helped,” Ponci said, imagining the hand under the table gripping the weapon even tighter, but hesitating, needing the brain to sort through this before the finger could pull the trigger.

“Explain,” the angry man growled.

“Things didn’t go as I planned. The soldier ran, and I had to chase him. I didn’t have time to grab the briefcase until I came back.”

“Which someone took out the contents while you were away.”

“Someone with a key,” Ponci said. “The thing was locked tight when I got it. I would have checked in the hotel, but there were cops around.”

“But I need what was in that briefcase,” the man said, staring straight into Ponci’s eyes. Neither man flinched.

“It’s not my problem,” Ponci said, his hand shifting down towards his belt and the hilt of his mauser. “I was told to kill the man and bring you the brief case. I did both. Pay me the rest of the money you owe me.”

“Not for an empty briefcase,” the other man said “If you want your money, you have to bring me the contents of the briefcase.”

“That wasn’t our deal.”

“It is now.”

“Like hell it is,” Ponci said, and struggled to his feet, swaying a little as his hand felt for his pistol.

 

 

The click of the safety of the other man’s weapon sounded first, overly loud in the utter quiet.

Ponci leaped away from the table and towards the sinks and cupboards just as the automatic weapon ripped open the top of the table from underneath in a frenzy of splinters and lead, and drove through the space Ponci had vacated and into the wall and ceiling.

Ponci fell and rolled onto the floor bounding against the base of the sink, and managed finally to yank his pistol out.

But the door on the far side of the one he had entered opened and with a brief spray of brighter light closed again, leaving Ponci alone in the room with the echo of retreating footsteps beyond the door – down, apparently, another set of stairs.

Ponci, with a new ache in his shoulder from the fall, lifted himself up onto his hands and knees. His side ached more than before, and the warm stickiness he felt oozing through the shirt told him that he had reopened his wound. His hand felt his side and came away with a palm covered in blood.

He felt much weaker as he struggled to his feet, and his head swam more than a little with dizziness that suggested he might faint at any moment. He took a deep breath, but even that hurt. He staggered towards the door the other man had gone through, yanked it open, pushing his pistol out into the gap.

The dim light beyond after the relative darkness of the room seemed unbearably bright, and he squinted to make out the hall and the rail of the stairs, and the flights of steps that led back down – apparently part of the building next door to the one he had entered from the street.

Far down below, he heard the sound of footsteps, which ended with the slamming of another door.

 

 

“This is bullshit,” Ponci said, his voice hoarse from the pain. He looked down at the bloody hand that held the mauser. It was as if it wasn’t his hand at all, shaking slightly in a way his hand would not have done.

He took a deep breath.

“I suppose this means I’m going to have to go back to that damned hotel and find whatever it was that was in the brief case,” he mumbled, and then stretched out his thoughts to the ghost of Billman who he knew still resided somewhere in the back of his head, not yet vanquished to the limbo where those older dead usually went after their time had passed.

“Why are you doing this to me, Billman?” Ponci asked. “Why did you have to run? Surely you knew you would die sooner or later? If not me, then someone like me would have come after you. Those people wouldn’t let you get away with whatever it is you got away with.”

But if Billman heard him, the dead man remained silent as all dead men usually did.

Ponci’s thoughts instead moved on to the man who had just tried to kill – a knee jerk reaction, not calculated, the sign of the armature.

A man should get what he wants before he kills off the messenger. Ponci’s failure had been a mistake. This man had pulled the trigger without thinking.

But he would soon recalibrate and come to the same conclusion Ponci had already come to: if the contents of the briefcase were not in the briefcase, then they were still in the hotel room somewhere. Sooner or later, this brute would go there and try to get the stuff himself, cutting Ponci entirely out of the deal.

“He’s also going to think I’m too dangerous to have around,” Ponci thought. “He might even think I have the stuff stashed somewhere and I’m trying to hold out for more money. Which means sooner or later, he’s going to hire someone to do to me what I was supposed to do to Billman.”

Then Ponci thought: “My only chance now is to get the stuff and somehow let him know I have it and that I’m willing to deal.”

Ponci still had the Miami number and was pretty sure that line wouldn’t go dead until the deal was done.

“Once I have the stuff, I’ll call and set up another meeting,” he mumbled. “But I better get it before he does.”

 

 

Ponci did not descend the same set of stairs at the man with the sunglasses had. He didn’t trust it.

He had seen something in the darkness below, a glint of something, and heard some sound that did not come as the result of a cool draught.

Someone was down there, waiting, watching, and his old instincts told him that this was no something he could handle at the moment, not some mugger or some pathetic junkie, but rather something infinitely more professional, a deadly force that wanted something, and expected him to come down to them.

He crossed the bullet-riddled room, pausing at the table to look once more over the devastation. He eyed the brief case which had landed on the floor and wondered if he should retrieve it, and decided there was no point.

Then, he doused the light, and felt his way across the room to the door he had come initially, and with great care, edged it open a crack.

Dim as it was out in the hall, the darkness of the room made it seem bright and he could see clearly in both directions. He did not sense the same presence here, or at least, nothing yet lurking, and when satisfied, he pulled open the door just wide enough for him to slip through.

He paused again at the rail and glanced over.

Again, he felt nothing, and heard no sound except his own harsh breath.

Slowly, he made his way down the first flight of stairs, keeping his feet near the wall so as to not make any step groan.

He paused at each flight and when he felt safe, he made his way down it, until finally, he reached the bottom door and the vestibule, and here, he had no choice but to move outside, exposing himself to the still dim, but brighter illumination of the street.

Again, he sensed something in the night, some presence he could not make out except as a feeling. But again, he had no option except to make his way down the stoop to the sidewalk, where in a moment of heart-stopping panic, he accidentally kicked one of the empty bottles, sending in rattling into the middle of the street.

 

 

*************

 

Something like hysteria filled the chatter over the headset, something akin to the madness that had transpired back in Afghanistan when the Taliban had managed to murder so many of his kind during a surprise attack.

He knew the field people were different, soldiers of a kind sent into danger with the risk of death. But few truly expected it to come about.

And this was worse than other times because no one had anticipated the attack.

“Someone is watching us watching,” he thought. Whether it was China or Russia or some elite terrorist group, he could not tell, but one thing was clear, they knew that the package was out in the open, and available, and that they wanted to get it first.

“Can you see anything?” the voice in the headset said, refocusing him, making him look back at the screen with less panicked perspective. Shapes swept across the roof tops that were not friendly shapes.

The chatter claimed that gunfire had been heard inside the apartment where the meeting had taken place.

He saw a shape that was not like the shape on the room exist a side door to the target brownstone, a figure that fled and entered an SUV up the street. Then he saw the second figure coming out the way he had gone in.

“Two men on the street, one gone, the other looking around,” he reported. “The second figure is our target figure. But he doesn’t have the brief case.”

There was a pause and more chatter, out of which a report came that the package had been delivered empty, listening devices detected a dispute between the two men, and apparently, the target figure had escaped execution.

“Watch the primary target,” the voice said. “We need to know where the materials went.”

He gave a nod that he knew no one could see. He saw the shapes on the roof working their way towards the front of the building, looking as if they were as surprised at what had transpired in the apartment as his own team was. He kept the drone camera focused on the primary target, who seemed to stumble and start away.