She planted her hands on her hips and looked drunkenly belligerent. There was a flower painted on her right cheek. "It don't cost nothing to be polite."
The car was close. The headlights were just two blocks away.
"Will you get out of here!"
Still she did not move.
"Who in hell do you think you are?"
The car went straight past. It was the wrong one. The prostitute was on a roll, her voice rising in pitch and volume.
"Think you own the street or something? What gives you the right to tell me what to do?"
A couple of vagrants were peering from their boxes. Winters wanted to tell the whore that if she did not shut up, he would arrest her. Of course he could not do that. He considered pulling out his gun and shooting her, but that would create its own set of problems. With the Magicians due at any minute, he had to content himself with vague threats.
"If you don't get away from me, you'll regret it."
"Oh, yeah? Who's gonna make me? You some kind of big shot, or do you just have fun threatening women?"
"I'm warning you…"
"Don't be warning me, Jack. If you're so fucking righteous, how come you're out here at five o'clock in the morning?"
"You tell the bastard, Bernice."
Now the vagrants were joining in. Winters took a step toward the woman. At precisely that moment a black van came wheeling into Broadway out of Twenty-eighth Street, running the lights in a shriek of tires. It came straight at the corner where Winters was waiting and squealed to a stop. The side rear door slid open and an electronically distorted voice echoed from the dark interior.
"Get in."
The face of Bernice took on a look of horror. "It's fucking Dracula."
Winters scrambled inside. The door slammed, and the van accelerated away.
"What were you doing, Winters? Hiring on a little entertainment while you were waiting?"
The distorted electronic laughter was reminiscent of the sounds in an old-time video parlor. There were four other men in the back of the van, sitting on bench seats. They were dressed pretty much like him, except their heads were encased in the same visored helmets that had been worn at the first meeting. Their voices came through the same distorters. They all had.60 Mossbergs cradled in their laps. The nearest man indicated that Winters should sit down on an empty stretch of bench. Another Mossberg and a helmet were passed down to him.
"Take these, Winters."
The helmet was identical to the others except that it was a dull gray. He was clearly the novice on this job. He put on the helmet and dropped the visor.
"Test the distorter."
"One, two, test."
He sounded like the others. With the visor closed and the heavy Mossberg gripped in his fists, he experienced a sense of power greater than anything he had ever known. This was why he had joined the service. He was an anonymous and vengeful angel dispensing justice and death. These really were the final days.
There were no introductions. "Okay, Winters, listen up. I'm only going to say this once. This is your first mission, so you keep quiet and strictly run backup. You understand?"
"I understand."
He was cut down to a very junior avenging angel. The Magician went on.
"We are going to park outside an apartment building on Thirty-eighth Street. The woman Kline lives there. In ten to fifteen minutes, Carlisle will come out and we will take him. Alive. We want him alive. That is crucial."
"What about Kline?"
"We leave her alone, for the moment."
The driver was in a separate, partitioned front section. The partition was also used for racking a redscope and a heat surveillance scanner. The Magicians seemed to be able to get the best and most advanced hardware. After driving for about ten minutes, the van pulled over to the curb and stopped. The Magician in the blue helmet turned on the redscope. It showed a wide-angle view of a deserted street. "Now we wait."
Carlisle
Harry Carlisle let himself out of the front door of Cynthia Kline's building, wondering about his chances of getting a cab so early in the morning. He had left before Cynthia, giving her a few minutes alone to get ready for work. He could not imagine what they were up to at Astor Place, calling her in at this hour. At first, he did not notice the black van. There was no reason why he should – it was just one more in the line of parked cars at the curb. It was only the sound of the rear door being wrenched open that made him turn and look at it. When the five armed men jumped out, his first thought was that it was a particularly elaborate mugging. Then he saw the visored helmets and the weapons that they carried, and he realized that it was something much more sinister and much more exclusively directed at him. He was still warm from Cynthia's bed and a little sleepy. He clawed for the.357 under his arm, but his reactions were slow. His fingers touched it, but suddenly there were five Mossbergs pointed at him. The voice was like that of a robot.
"Take your hand away from the gun, Carlisle, or we'll blast you where you stand."
The fact that they knew his name confirmed his worst suspicions. It was a deacon death squad. Pure terror clutched at his guts as he raised his hands.
They were all around him. The Magnum was removed from its holster. Hands grabbed him and threw him headfirst onto the hood of a parked car. His hands were pulled roughly behind him and a pair of old-style steel handcuffs were clamped onto his wrists. They were locked too tight, and the metal cut painfully into his wrists. With his arms immobilized, he was carried to the black van and thrown inside. He finished up on his knees on the floor of the van. The interior was loaded with high-tech snooper equipment, but he was given no time to look at it. They were far from finished with him. One of his captors grabbed the chain that linked the cuffs and pulled his arms hard up behind his back. The chain was clipped to hook into the roof of the van, and he was left hanging, knees bent and head thrust forward. The pain was excruciating. His hands were going numb, and his shoulders felt as if they were being dislocated.
The pain became even worse as the van started to move. He had no way of stopping himself from swinging from his wrists each time the van braked or made a turn. Five blank black visors looked down at him, masking the wearers' expressions. All he could see was his own reflection, made grotesque by the curve of the visor. He could not even tell from which of them the robot voice was coming.
"We're going to mess you up, Carlisle. You've caused a lot of trouble, but now we're going to mess you up. There's no one to help you, and no way that you're going to crawl out of this."
One of them pushed him with a booted foot to set him swinging even more. His arms felt as if they were on fire.
"Yes, Carlisle. We are going to mess you up very profoundly."
Winters
Since no one had told him, Winters had no idea where he was or where he was going. At one point the sound of the tires had changed briefly. He had assumed that they were going over a bridge, probably to Queens or Brooklyn. They had taken Carlisle very easily, and now Winters' hated enemy was hanging in front of them, handcuffed and helpless. There would be no more of his smart mouth and subversive attitudes. All the small humiliations that Winters had suffered at his hands would be paid for a hundred times over. The best part was that Carlisle did not have a clue as to who was doing it to him. Winters laughed silently behind his visor. I'm going to watch you die, you bastard, he thought. I'm actually going to watch you die.
They drove for just over a half hour, then made a turn and started bouncing on an uneven surface, probably a dirt road or a parking lot. Sweat stood out on Carlisle's face. The idea that the man was in pain and no doubt terrified out of his mind filled Winters with a deep satisfaction that was almost a sense of freedom. He was free to go all the way with his hate. Previously there had always been limitations. He had only been a small component in the machine that dispensed justice. Here it was an angry, face-to-face justice, a cruel ancient justice where a righteous man could relish the hurt and the death of his enemy. There was a power growing inside him. Jesus Christ, he was looking forward to this.