“Good. Oh, and Doc wants you and the lady Donohue to use the faraway ramp whenever you leave the building.”
“Use the what?”
Fergus pointed to a shadowy far corner of the garage. There, a dimly lit concrete corner led away from the garage at a right angle to Harris’ line of sight. “That leads to a ramp that comes out one block over. Anyone waiting for you outside the Monarch Building will miss you. Come back in the same way.”
“Sure thing.” He looked around. “What’s a Hutchen?”
The Hutchen turned out to be an anonymously boxy dark green two-seater; it had a high clearance and looked a little like pictures of the Model T. Fergus had Harris wait a couple of minutes while he logged the car out on the records in his office, then showed him which button started the ignition. It took Harris a minute to reacquaint himself with the concept of the choke, but fortunately he’d learned to drive on his grandfather’s archaic pickup truck and not on a more modern vehicle. He groped around for the seatbelts for a long minute before realizing, dismayed, that there were none for him to find.
He managed to get the Hutchen into gear without embarrassing himself—the gearshift was an H-pattern, floor-mounted stick familiar to him—and carefully guided it into the opening Fergus had pointed out.
A long tunnel, four sides of concrete and bare lightbulbs overhead, it traveled at least a block. Halfway along, Harris was sure that he heard the rush of a subway train beneath him.
The ramp at the far end took him up to where the tunnel terminated in a large warehouse-type door. There had to be unseen operators at work; in the rearview mirror, he saw a similar door slide into place behind him before the exterior door slid open. Beyond, quick and noisy traffic zipped by in both directions. Streetlights gleamed atop Greek-style columns, moths fluttering their lives away around them.
At last, he was vehicular again. It felt pretty good. He eased the Hutchen forward; during a break in traffic, he turned left onto King’s Road, staying alert to the simple fact that traffic here ran on the wrong sides of the road. It felt like he was sixteen again, with a freshly minted driver’s license, trying to keep all the rules in mind at the same time.
Harris stuck his hand out the window and signaled, bicycle-style, the way the other motorists did it, for his right turn from King’s Road onto Damablanca. He passed the glowing green-and-gold sign over Banwite’s and threw a salute his one-time benefactor couldn’t see.
There was no parking space open in front of Brannach’s. Harris sighed and drove on past. Parking was better in Neckerdam than in New York, but he might have to go around the block once or twice before he found a spot for the Hutchen.
Still scanning for a place to park, he continued a block, then turned left onto the two-lane northbound-only avenue labelled Attorcoppe.
A horn blared behind him and he heard a sickening crunch, felt the Hutchen shudder as its right rear quarter slammed into something.
He cringed. He knew, without having to turn and look, what had happened. Coming off Damablanca, distracted, he’d gravitated like an idiot into the right lane. At least on this one-way street it hadn’t been a lane full of southbound traffic. He slowed and looked over his shoulder at the car he’d hit, preparing to mouth an apology to its driver, something to tide him over the few seconds it would take to pull the two cars to the side.
In the glare from the streetlights, he saw that the driver of the car was staring at him, cursing. No surprise. Two of the three men in the car with him were also glaring.
The last man, the rear-seat passenger on the left side of the car, was half out of the window, reaching down for something bouncing and teetering on the car’s running board. Harris glanced at it.
It was a Klapper autogun, the same sort of brassy submachine gun Alastair had used when the assassins struck at Doc’s lab.
The same sort of gun the other two men in the car were now bringing up to aim at Harris.
“Damn it!” Harris hunched down, mashed the accelerator, jerked the car to the left.
There was a roar from the other car, like the world’s loudest lawn mower starting, and Harris felt hail batter the side of the Hutchen. He flinched and ducked as low as he could. The shuddering went on and on.
He felt hot stings in his back and neck. It couldn’t be gunfire—that would hurt worse, stop him, wouldn’t it?
He wheeled left at the first cross-street, automatically slid into one of the lanes to the right of the median, and realized that all the traffic he could see was headed his way. Headlights ahead swerved and horns honked. There was a moment’s break in the gunfire from the other car. Then it started again, from directly behind; the back of the Hutchen shook under dozens of impacts.
Harris swore. The car pursuing him was a long, low-slung, fast-looking job like one of Doc’s. He wouldn’t be able to outrun it.
One of the oncoming autos roared past him in the other lane. A few hundred feet ahead, both lanes were occupied by oncoming headlights.
Harris yanked the wheel left, aiming for a gap between two trees in the median. He felt a tremendous bang as his front wheels hit the curb; the Hutchen bounced up, slowed as it plowed through a bush planted between the trees, and rocked as it came down the curb on the far side.
An oncoming car in his lane screeched as it braked; it swerved but managed to skid to a stop just feet away. Harris turned right, finally traveling with the traffic.
There was the sound of an impact behind him, followed by a metallic crunch. Harris looked in the rearview mirror—to no avail; it was shattered, pieces of glass still falling from the frame. He glanced over his shoulder.
The pursuing car straddled the median. It was motionless, pinned between the two trees Harris had cleared.
“And then you returned to the Monarch Building?” Doc persisted.
“No, I went back and got our blue jeans.”
“That would seem to be a foolish choice.”
“Damned right it was. But I was mad.” He shrugged. “After that I did come right back. You should have seen Fergus’ face when I drove in and he saw what had happened to the Hutchen.”
“And what about you, Harris?” Doc peered over Harris’ shoulder. “How is he, Alastair?”
Harris winced as he felt the doctor’s tweezers tug at his bare back again.
“Not bad,” Alastair said. “A few pieces of shrapnel that probably used to be car door. Nothing serious.”
Harris glanced again at the faces around him. Doc looked thoughtful. Jean-Pierre was frowning. Gaby was worried. Noriko’s expression was, as usual, serene, but Harris thought he saw tension in her pose. And Joseph, standing near the door, arms folded, looked just plain mad.
Harris’ attention was drawn to a jar on the nearest laboratory table. The jar held a brain and eye-stalks floating in what looked like red jelly, and he had the sudden disconcerting feeling that the eyes were looking at him. As soon as he glanced at them, the eyes looked away. He shuddered.
“Anyway,” Harris continued, “my guess is that they were just getting ready to shoot me when I accidentally sideswiped them. I figure that the impact made the first guy drop his gun. I think maybe I was saved by my bad driving.”
Jean-Pierre asked, “Did you ever return fire?”
“Nope.”
“Did you drive past the car once it was stopped to see what condition the gunmen were in?”
“No.”
“Did you contact the Novimagos Guard?”
Harris shook his head, impatient. “That’s what I’m doing now, right? What are you getting at?”