Chris held out his hand. “Your comu, please.”
They’d sprung for a High Speed compartment, figuring they’d want the extra privacy for discussing the case and making calls.
“What are you doing?” Livvy asked, watching him set their paired comus into visual communication mode.
“Yours goes into the corridor, hanging at one end of the car. I chose a center compartment for a reason. This way we can watch people coming into the car at either end, and we’ll have some warning,” Chris explained.
“I thought you said we’d be safe on the High Speed,” Livvy said when he’d gotten back to the car.
“I think I lied. It’s a death trap if someone finds us without warning,” Chris said. He sat opposite her in the small compartment, his eyes on the linked comu. “Bedford has been ahead of us the whole way. I suspect he still is. From now on we’re not safe, anywhere, anytime.”
“I understand that Bedford has gone into high gear: the bomb, Maas, Josephson and his notes, but I still can’t imagine why now?” Livvy asked.
A woman came down the corridor, moving steadily and ignoring the windows in the upper part of the doors into the compartments. Chris watched her traverse the length of the corridor and turn the corner that lead to the next vestibule.
“I don’t know why it’s happening now. Perhaps Josephson made some break-through discovery and his excitement overcame him. Or it’s something to do with Jesse. Something unexpected. I’m going to talk to Micaela next, to warn her. Perhaps she can tell us. Something has stressed Bedford’s timetable.
“In terms of getting leverage on Bedford, though, we need to know if Josephson has limits. Is Josephson’s cooperation with Bedford totally voluntary, or is there some coercion there? Either way, does he know enough at this point to give us some evidence on Bedford?” Chris asked.
“Paula didn’t need much time to figure it out. Once you started talking about Jesse, she knew,” Livvy said. “She didn’t even think about it that long, she just knew. Josephson knows. He’s been doing the research. He just doesn’t care. Maybe it’s too tantalizing an experiment for him, the creep. And of course, the money.”
Chris was watching a short, stocky man with a pleasant 21-year-old face turn the corner from the short corridor at the end of the car. The man advanced slowly down the corridor, glancing into each compartment or, if the blinds were closed, knocking and making an inquiry, all the while smiling apologetically as though he were looking for someone. There was a vaguely unnatural rigidity to his right arm and the angle of his right index finger.
Placing a finger on his lips briefly and then pointing towards the corridor, Chris took Livvy’s arm and guided her towards the compartment door. He crouched under the window that formed the upper half and then pulled her down in front of him, spoon-fashion, so that they were both pressed tightly against the door and jammed against each other in the narrow space. They hadn’t been so close since Livvy had almost landed in his lap during their encounter with the last gunman, and this time the contact was longer, but both of them were as tense as coiled springs.
Chris had had just enough space to pull his Stinger after they’d gotten into position, but Stinger darts didn’t cut all the way through doors. High caliber palm pistol bullets, if they were the right kind, might.
On the linked comu Chris held in front of them both, they watched the gunman advance to their compartment and stop to scan the interior. On the comu, it looked distant and unreal, but they detected a slight change in the light above them, then it was gone.
“As soon as he reaches the end of the car, I’ll be going out after him,” Chris said softly. He was still watching the man’s progress on the comu.
“Wait,” Livvy said quickly, trying to instill urgency while being as quiet as possible. “What if he’s smart enough to be suspicious of an empty compartment? He’ll be waiting in the next car, or turn back and catch you in the corridor.”
“I know,” Chris said. “But he’s a pro and we have to take him now. If we don’t, he’ll come back when we don’t expect him or catch us when we leave the train and he’ll control the situation.”
“Now,” he said, giving her a boost she didn’t need. “And wait here.”
She grimaced but didn’t protest. After checking the comu one last time, Chris dropped it onto one of the seats, opened the door, and stepped out into the corridor.
By the time Chris got into the small twin-doored vestibule occupying the space between their car and the next, the gunman was near the end of the corridor in the next car. It was Chris’ goal to catch up to him while he was still in the next vestibule. The timing was crucial and intolerant of hesitation. Chris ducked out of sight, counted to 5, then opened the vestibule door and sprinted down the length of the corridor. It had worked. The gunman stood alone in the vestibule, his back to Chris, reaching for the far door leading to the next car.
Chris touched the sensor to open the door in front of him. As it began to slide open, he aimed through the gap and fired twice. It was unavoidable that the gunman was alerted at the first sound of the door opening behind him and turned and fired as well, shattering the glass and hitting Chris twice in the chest. Chris fell back against the wall of the compartment immediately behind him and, breathless, started a slow slide to the floor.
The barbed darts from Chris’ Stinger sliced through the gunman’s clothing and found flesh. As the gunman was raising his arm to make a head shot, the darts advanced until they sensed the correct subdermal layer, then released their miniscule load of potent anesthetic. He was a pro, and aware of what was happening. As he lost strength in his arm, he barely had time to grimace, then he hit the floor and went out.
They were both on the floor in ungainly sprawls amid the shattered glass when Livvy ’s momentum carried her into the wall at the end of the corridor. She hit it with her side and successfully kept her Stinger aimed at the point where Chris had been standing just a few moments before.
“McGregor, oh my God,” she said when she saw the holes in his shirt, then registered the absence of blood simultaneously with Chris’ painful gasp as he drew breath.
“Get him cuffed,” Chris whispered. He drew another shallow breath. “He may have auto…reversal implant. I’m just going to… sit here a minute.”
“Got it,” Livvy said, pulling her cuffs out of her bag. She was a little bit breathless herself, but she took some satisfaction in securing their captive’s arms and legs as tightly as the cuffs allowed. She found two other small pistols, one at each ankle, when she searched him for backup weapons, and impatiently jammed them and the palm pistol into her bag. Then she sat down next to Chris.
“That was masterly, except for getting shot, McGregor. As soon as you left I started worrying that maybe you only had the one vest and had given it to me this morning. I was already coming after you when I heard the glass shatter. I am going to clock you, as soon as your ribs heal.”
Chris wasted a painful breath on a short, soft chuckle.
“I want to know where you got this ruthless streak,” Livvy said.
“These are… really bad guys. You have to be proactive.”
“No. I mean ruthless, as in how you treat your partner,” Livvy replied, making Chris laugh painfully again.
They heard the sound of converging footsteps.
“Got your credentials… handy?” Chris asked. “I don’t care to reach for mine… at the moment.”
Their prisoner awakened fully and glared at them as High Speed Security personnel moved cautiously in from both directions.
“Yeah,” Livvy said, searching her bag. “Wouldn’t want to be mistaken for the really bad guys.”
“What now?” Livvy asked.
There’d been a brief discussion with High Speed Security, which had converged on the scene heated and ready for a fight. After an exercise of some tact and matter-of-fact civility and charm, almost exclusively by Livvy, the LLE officers had handed their bound and disarmed prisoner over to the High Speed people. That seemed to mollify them more than a little. In fact, the security lugs actually seemed pleased to have a real-life professional assassin safely in custody. They had a nice little cell they didn’t get to use that often.
After Livvy and Chris moved out of the corridor and back into the relative comfort of their compartment, they’d called the Chief with a brief report, and he’d arranged to have uniforms collect their prisoner at the D.C. terminal. He’d also ordered them to come in and bring him up to date on everything they’d done to investigate Josephson’s disappearance, including why they’d gone to Manhattan that morning, and how it was related to the fact that someone was suddenly desperate to see them dead. They were going to have to tell him their theory about Bedford.
“And you’re both staying in WitSec rooms for the next few nights. You have to work the case, but at least you can get some sleep,” the Chief had added just before signing off.
“Now,” Chris said, “if I’m Bedford, and I’m a preemptory sort, and I’ve tried to have two LLE detectives killed this afternoon… if I’ve decided the time has come to aggressively search out… and destroy every possible bit of evidence I can find that links me… to a particularly horrible fraud I’m determined to perpetuate… and I especially want to figure out how LLE detectives… found out about the connection between me and my tame Frankenstein… what else would I be doing today?
“What I’d be doing,” Chris continued, “is arranging a search of the apartment of the LLE detective who’s been leading the investigation. The Chief is right, we need to go to WitSec for tonight and until this is over. But I need to go home now.”
“I’ll go,” Livvy said. “He may have failed to have us killed to a certain extent, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to get some medical attention for some probable broken ribs. I’ll get Louie and your notes.”
“Bedford is still ahead of us. We’ll both go. I need back up.”
“Nope,” Livvy said. Chris turned to her in surprise.
“Call it,” she said. She was holding an antique coin, a quarter. She flipped it into the air with a practiced toss, caught it out of the air and slapped it onto the back of her hand in a seamless sequence.
“Imagine for a moment an alternate universe in which we are actual partners. Heads or tails?”
If Chris did recognize the archaic exercise, he wasn’t in the mood.
“It’s my apartment.”
“Undoubtedly you’re senior and I absolutely respect that, especially when we’re dealing with LLE matters. In the squad room and interviews I listen and defer and learn. Just now, when you went after that gunman, there wasn’t time, so I let it go. But in a situation like this, in the field, we have to trust each other. That means sharing the risks, like real partners, even if only for the next week. If it was my apartment, and I had just had my ribs kicked in by a couple of 45s, I’d be saying the same. And a whole lot more quickly,” she added.
Chris hesitated, and then said, “All right. Heads.”
Livvy peeked at the back of her hand and slipped the coin back into her bag. “Beginner’s luck. This time I’m lead, you’re backup.” The fact that he didn’t call her on the cheat told Livvy he’d accepted her argument. Either that or he was just too painful or too worried to care.
They parked a block away on the quiet street. It was still only 3 PM and since the neighborhood supplied apartments for mainly middle-class singles and couples most people were still at work.
Livvy pulled out her Stinger and climbed out of the car. “You coming? I’ll go in first, but I want to stick together on this.”
Nursing his ribs, Chris followed more slowly.
“It must hurt to even breathe,” she said on their way up in the elevator.
“You don’t have to sound so pleased,” Chris said. “You’ve made your point.”
They stopped one floor up and then walked down, and Livvy went braced through the stairwell door into Chris’ hallway. She kept her position against the opposite wall, sighting down the hall towards Chris’ door, while Chris came through a second later and checked out the opposite end. For nothing; they were already too late. The first thing they saw in the hallway outside Chris’ apartment was a long rod that looked to Chris like part of the towel rack from his bathroom. It had been broken to produce a sharp angle at one end, and there was blood on it. There was no effort at concealment. There was more blood on Chris’ doorjamb and some drops on the hallway floor. The door to his apartment was closed.
The silence was complete. Chris looked at the broken rod and said very quietly, “Not much of a weapon. I guess they didn’t want to keep it.”
She gestured Chris to one side of the door and took the other, closest to the lock. When he nodded once, she pointed her Stinger at the ceiling and nodded. Chris reached across to deactivate the lock, the door swung open automatically, just as it was supposed to, and Livvy dashed through, sweeping the room with her Stinger and simultaneously moving to the side to allow Chris to enter behind her.
They heard a whimper and saw a lot of blood on both the walls and the floor, and then they saw Louie, standing in the middle of the efficiency and watching the door intently. He was wagging the whole rear of his body. The front half was scratched and gouged and bleeding, and one eye was almost swollen shut. At his feet there was a gun, and next to it, a finger.
Whimpering with excitement, Louie sat down and then quickly went down to a sternal position on the floor, then stood up and started wagging again.
“Good boy, Louie,” Livvy said, sparing Chris, who couldn’t have said anything if he’d tried. “Good boy.” At that, Louie bounded over, first to Chris and then to Livvy, still wagging his tail and occasionally whimpering.
“They’re long gone, aren’t they, boy?” Livvy said, closing and locking the door. At this point, that didn’t seem enough. It was a 20th century building with swing-open doors, and Livvy engaged the two additional interior locks. The external lock hadn’t kept them out the first time.
While Livvy wandered through the apartment, Chris got some warm water and towels and sat down stiffly on a low stool so he could clean away enough of the blood to determine the extent of Louie’s wounds.
“It’s an even bigger mess in here,” Livvy said, standing at the bathroom door. “The towel rack has been torn down, which we already knew, I guess. Someone lost a lot of blood before they found the medikit and the clotting powder. More blood than out there, even, if you can believe that. It’s all over the floor, with some piles of bloody bandages, and a saturated hand towel. It looks like it was a bit of an ordeal, putting on a bandage. I guess he isn’t ambidextrous. Too bad for him.”
Turning back towards the main room, she found Chris calling in a BOLO for a man with a traumatic finger amputation.
“Louie’ll do,” Chris said when he got off the comu. “Those gouges across his ribs are all superficial. Nothing penetrating. I want that eye looked at as soon as possible, though.”
“So the guy breaks in somehow, with his gun drawn and ready for a fight if necessary,” Livvy said, “but he probably knew you were gone. He came for your notes. Louie surprises him and… disarms him. Traumatically. Good boy, Louie. The guy dashes into the bathroom because it’s closer and anyway, he doesn’t have time to think. He maybe tries to wrap his hand in the towel, digs out whatever you had in there for treating wounds, improvises a weapon, and makes a dash for the door, with Louie harassing him the whole way,” she added, surveying the blood trail. “Probably not a professional or he would have had a back-up weapon, or maybe he just doesn’t think of it, with his injured hand and all.
“He makes it out, slamming the door to keep Louie inside, and discards the towel rack in disgust.” She’d found a very detailed footprint in blood and was getting a comu close-up of it, as well as close-ups of the finger and gun.
While she was talking, Chris had been scanning the apartment with his comu to create a video record. He went into the kitchen after he’d finished and found some plastene bags and tongs and held them out to Livvy. Although she made a face, she took them readily enough and used them to pick up and bag the bloody evidence: the finger, gun, and towel.
“Maybe you could sue the bastard,” Livvy said helpfully. “I guess we should take the weapon for fingerprints, and collect some of the blood, but do we really need it?” She picked up the bag with the finger, looked at it closely, and shook it in Chris’ direction.
“I think it’s an index finger. Makes sense. Louie got it when he took the gun,” she added.
Chris started walking purposefully around the room, checking to see if anything else had been disturbed and pulling out a few items and placing them on a chair at the table.
“Does there seem to be anything missing?” Livvy asked, standing over the table. “I don’t want to touch anything until you have a chance to check it.”
Chris gave the table top a cursory survey. “No, but that’s no surprise. There’s blood everywhere in the room but the area near the table.”
“Do you want to pack these?” she asked. “Even if we take everything, I don’t know if you’ll ever be able to find anything again if I shift your order.”
“No worry,” Chris said. “Just take them all.”
Livvy began piling memopads and CUs into a collapsible, and she looked up one more time. “I’m trying to maintain some sort of order, but…”
“There isn’t any, really,” Chris said after a beat.
“McGregor, what is it? You’re in white-knuckle mode and my guess is you don’t have as much experience with that as your age suggests.”
“I knew Bedford would be taking extreme measures to find out how we grew suspicious of him. This,” he said, making a dismissive gesture towards the bloody half of the room, “is my fault, but still not a big deal. Other than poor Louie… But it just means Bedford is still ahead of us. He’s winning.”
“Right. LLE. Proactive. All right, let’s figure out what we need to do,” Livvy said reasonably. “I would also like to point out that I was here last night too, and I didn’t think of it, and also, thanks to your foresight on the train, and Louie of course… thanks to Louie, Bedford hasn’t succeeded in anything he tried today.”
“The lab tech,” Chris said after a moment. “He may not like it, but I want him in WitSec as well. If Josephson has any reason to suspect this tech knows something, and they know we’ve talked to him, then he’s at risk.”
“OK. While you’re getting checked out at the Central clinic, I’ll talk to him, right after I take Louie in to the veterinarian. Brian, right? Will he come in?”
“Brian Clifford. Call him first, on your way to drop Louie off,” Chris said. “Tell him to make up a family emergency so he can take a few days off without attracting too much attention, and arrange to pick him up after he’s left work for the day, so his co-workers don’t see you. And tell him you’ll be in a WitSec room, too. He’ll come.
“I wish to hell we could bring Mickey and Jesse in, too. But we don’t have enough. They haven’t witnessed anything and I doubt if they’d come, and anyway I’m not sure they’d be safer there than in a villa in Italy.
“Are you going to be all right without a stop at your apartment?” Chris asked.
“Hotel room, remember? Sure, I can buy whatever I need,” Livvy said.
“I want to go and see Mickey and Jesse Bedford, today, to warn them about what they might be facing.”
“After you see a doctor,” Livvy said.
“No, now,” Chris said with a hint of impatience. Livvy opened her mouth for rebuttal, but Chris shook his head. “Look, I know I need my ribs taped, and I’ll take some pain meds if they’re offered, but I’m breathing fine now. What do you suppose would ease my conscience if Bedford gets to that boy before I warn them?”
“It needs to be done, and today, I agree, but I can do it,” Livvy said.
Chris picked up the carryall he’d filled with personal items for himself and Louie. “Bedford is still ahead of us, and we may be forcing him to speed up his schedule. When he tries to have two LLE detectives killed, it suggests that he is contemplating a significant move. He’s desperate.
“If we are going to get ahead of this man, we need to split up. I think I can manage to sit down with Mickey Bedford in her secure, comfortable home without risking further injury. I need you to take care of Louie and make sure Brian Clifford is safe. And then I need you to get them both into WitSec and yourself into the office to smooth things over with the Chief. At this point, I think that means a full verbal summary.”
“You’re kidding, right? The whole story?”
“You did say you had a knack, and I admit it, your version works.”
”But McGregor, I’m not sure the Chief likes me now, and after this…”
Chris shook his head. “So you pulled a few strings to get here. Let me know when you start raking in the big benefits of that manipulation. Meanwhile, you need to be very careful. And I’m trusting you with my dog and a witness.”
“You are ruthless. And you needn’t look like you think that’s a good thing,” Livvy said, picking up the box full of memotabs and CUs.