"That'll teach you to go up against a professional. Think you were taking on a bimbo, did you?"
There was a shout from somewhere nearby.
"Winters? What's happening?"
Cynthia screamed loudly and knelt down by Winters' body. The Browning was concealed in her palm. She heard the sound of running feet. A second deacon, also carrying a Mossberg, swung through the open doorway to C70. He took in the scene in one stony glance and formed the understandable conclusion that Cynthia was nothing more than an innocent bystander.
"What happened?"
Cynthia had no trouble with sounding choked by terror. "PDs – they shot him."
"Where did they go?"
"Down the corridor."
As he turned his back on her to look out of the door, she calmly shot him. He staggered, and she fired again. Some spasm caused his fingers to close around the trigger of his weapon. The gun went off with a deafening roar, the blast chewing a large bite out of the door frame. Cynthia knew that she had to get out of there right away, before anyone else showed up. She could not turn the same trick twice. She was on her feet and moving. She stepped over the body of the second deacon, ran through the door, and hurried down the corridor, making for the elevators. Just as she turned the corner that led to the elevator banks, the doors were opening. She was in luck. She was about to step into the car when figures suddenly appeared around a corner on the opposite side of the elevator banks. They were running men in windbreakers and blue jeans. From the way that they brandished machine pistols and riot guns, they had to be plainclothes PD.
"Hold it right there, lady!"
There were too many of them, and they had too much firepower. If she simply jumped into the elevator, they could easily blast through the doors. She let the Browning drop into her shoulder bag, hoping that they were too far away to notice the move. They would not expect a woman to be armed. She raised her hands.
"Don't shoot!"
They were all around her barking questions. There were five of them, young and tightly wrapped.
"We heard shots."
Cynthia nodded. "There are two deacons back in C70. They're dead. They've been shot."
One of the five detached himself; a second followed.
"We'll go take a look."
They hurried back the way Cynthia had come.
"Did you see who shot them?"
"It was me. I shot them."
The remaining three looked at her disbelievingly as she took the Browning from her bag and held it out to them.
"You shot them?"
"What did you do that for?"
Cynthia had always had the gift of instant tears on demand. She began to cry. "They were going to kill me. It was some kind of revenge on Harry."
"Harry?"
One of the others looked at the speaker impatiently. "Don't you recognize her, dummy? It's Kline. It's the lieutenant's girlfriend."
"Of course it is."
The other two were coming back. The one who had recognized her first called out to them. "We got Carlisle's girl, and she says she shot them."
"We definitely got two stiffs back there, with expander slugs in them, bleeding all over the place. One of them is that little prick Winters."
Cynthia made her play before they could ask too many more questions. "Can you take me to Harry? Do you know where he is?"
The PDs looked at each other.
"So what do you think? Do we take her down to the lieutenant or what?"
The agreement was fast.
"Yeah, take her to him. Then it's out of our hands."
Carlisle
The clatter of gunfire was amplified over the communications center audio system. The audio override on their tracys was the only contact they could trust. Everything else was going crazy as the multiple and constantly mutating viruses took over.
"They've got us pinned down in the entrance to the roof." Donahue sounded desperate. "There's a bunch of them. All got Mossbergs. We're safe in the stairwell for the moment but we need help up here."
Carlisle spoke in the bead mike of his headset. "I'll get more people up there."
"We need a grenade launcher or a couple of small AP missiles."
Carlisle looked around. "Can we get anything like that?"
"Not while the deacons are holding the arsenal."
A detective called Murphy spoke up. "There's a Cucaracha locked up in evidence. We took it off those greasers, the ones that were calling themselves the Screaming Fist. It hasn't gone to weapons disposal yet."
"Get it and go."
Another man pushed his way through to the front. "I got a Parsons and a clip of grenades in my locker."
Carlisle looked at him in amazement. "You keep a grenade launcher in your locker?"
The man shrugged. "You never know when it might come in handy. I got it back when – "
Carlisle cut off the explanation. "I don't give a damn right now. Just get it and get up there. I want the helipad secured."
He spoke into the bead mike. "Donahue, did you hear all that?"
"I heard it. Just tell them to hurry."
Taking the communications center had been easy. Running it was a great deal more difficult. When Carlisle and his men had stormed in there, the deacon operators had already been confused by the increasingly erratic behavior of their equipment. Only two had tried to put up a fight, and they had been shot out of hand. At the sight of the bodies bleeding on the floor, the others had become immediately cooperative – not that there was much with which they could cooperate. The communications center was the brain of the CCC complex, and that brain seemed to be going into some electronic grand mal seizure as the final wave of Dreisler's viruses took hold. In normal times the com center was, for all practical purposes, the Astor Place war room, the mission control for all law enforcement in the city of New York. Banks of monitors displayed the ongoing status of various operations and investigations; they showed manpower figures and deployment reports. The computers answered, channeled, filed, and recorded the thousands of calls that came into the complex during each twenty-four-hour period. They coordinated vehicle dispatch and all the mobile message systems available to the officers. They oversaw the massive electronic eavesdropping network, maintained the links with Virginia Beach, and even integrated the internal surveillance system.
The centerpiece of the large, circular, and dimly lit room was the complex situation board that gave visual breakdowns of what was happening in various parts of the area. On any other day its cold electronic glow, moving lights, and the mathematical tracery of its grids were the products of a cold logic. A signal was sent, a car was dispatched, and every detail appeared on the situation board. A visitor could easily be convinced that it was the graphic representation of the implacable majesty of the law in action.
On that day, however, it would have been hard to convince a visitor that the entire communications center was anything but an extension of some insane pinball machine that was about to hit tilt. Some monitors simply rolled and strobed, while others exploded into riots of color. Whole banks remained stubbornly down, their screens blank, like dead, catatonic eyes. Every now and then, a cartoon vulture would appear at random on a monitor and flap its wings. Carlisle knew that the vulture had to be a product of Dreisler's warped sense of humor. The situation board itself danced with lights like a hyperkinetic Christmas tree. Even the sections that appeared to be responding normally could not be trusted. Much of the displayed data that, at first glance seemed plausible and organized, turned out, on closer examination, to be total nonsense. Even when logic was theoretically holding up, there was no guarantee that the information bore any relationship to reality. The deacon operators, under the watchful eyes of armed PD officers, sat and stared dumbly at the induced lunacy. They had the look of men in the grip of a nightmare.