“Son of a bitch!” he cried. “It’s an arm!”
66
Gideon grabbed the tab tied to one finger, read off the patient data. MUKULSKI, ANNA, ST. LUKE’S DOWNTOWN 659346C-41. These bastards mixed up the body parts!” he cried.
“Keep looking!” Mindy yelled back.
She ducked as more bullets raked the lip of the trench, showering them both with mud.
Gideon surveyed the jumble of boxes, chose one at random, swung his pick at it and ripped off the lid, spilling out what appeared to be a diseased lung. Kicking it aside, he attacked another box, then another, ripping open the lids, ignoring all but the legs and reading the tags on those. Many of the boxes had broken open in the confusion and he sorted through the piles of body parts and less recognizable organs, checking the tags and putting the rejects aside. They had been days, even weeks, in the warm summer ground, and most of them were rotting, soft, bloated.
“He’s returning with the backhoe,” Mindy said.
“Keep him at bay!” Gideon pushed the discarded offal to one side of the trench and with his pick toppled another series of boxes, ripping off their lids. More arms and legs tumbled out, a veritable charnel pit.
“Sorry, guys,” he muttered under his breath.
“He’s coming! I can’t stop him — he’s got his loader up!”
“Find me time!” Frantically, Gideon sorted through the limbs, reading the tags, shoving the discards aside. And then, there they were: two legs, almost completely crushed, in the same box with a tag that read: WU, MARK. SINAI 659347A-44.
“Got it!” He hauled the left leg out of the box, laid it on a plank of wood. It was so rotten, it separated at the knee. But it was the thigh he needed. He yanked the box cutter out of his backpack and pulled out the X-rays. Laying his flashlight down, he held up the X-rays, compared them with the leg, identifying the place to cut.
“For God’s sake, hurry! He’s dropped his loader and he’s pushing a wall of dirt toward us! I can’t fire through it!”
Gideon drew a deep breath. Then he sank the cutter into the flesh and drew a long line; retracted the scalpel; drew another parallel line a centimeter away; then another. The wire was just beneath the surface, but the leg was so mangled, so rotten, and so full of debris from the accident that it was hard to identify the correct place to cut.
“Hurry!” Mindy screamed.
He could hear the roar of the backhoe approaching, the deep vibration in the ground.
Another long cut, this one at a ninety-degree angle.
“Oh my God!” She was firing almost continuously. The roar was almost on top of them.
The scalpel was deflected by something. Gideon reached in with his fingers, grasped it, drew it out: a heavy piece of wire, bent in a U shape, about a centimeter long.
“Got it!” He shoved it in his pocket.
But the roar was now on top of them. An enormous pile of dirt, mingled with bones, crashed down on them like a tidal wave, knocking Gideon to the ground and burying Mindy. Her scream was abruptly cut off as blackness rose to meet him…
Gideon swam back into consciousness buried almost up to his chest, pinned in a mess of muck and water. He could feel his broken ribs grinding against each other. He shook the dirt away from his head, sucked in air, tried to pull himself out.
A heavy boot came down slowly on his neck, pressing him into the mud. “Not so fast, my friend,” came the cool, accentless voice. “Give me the wire.”
Gideon lay there, breathing hard. “Help her. She’s buried—”
The boot jammed his neck and the voice said, “Don’t worry about her. Worry about yourself.”
“She’s suffocating!”
Nodding Crane dangled the tag from Wu’s leg in front of him. “I know you have the wire. Give it to me.” A hand searched his shirt pocket, pushing away dirt. Feeling through the dirt, the hand located the Beretta and the Taurus. The box cutter came next.
“Let me up, for God’s sake!”
The boot came off his neck and Nodding Crane stepped back, night-vision goggles swinging around his neck. “Get yourself out. Slowly.”
Gideon tried to crawl out from under the dirt. “The shovel,” he gasped.
Nodding Crane picked up Gideon’s shovel and tossed it over.
Frantically, Gideon shoveled away the dirt, wincing with pain. Finally he got enough of the weight from his lower body to allow himself the use of his legs. He shook off the dirt and dragged himself free. Rising to his feet, he took a shuddering breath, then immediately attacked the slide of dirt that had buried Mindy.
“The wire,” Nodding Crane said, jamming his gun—a TEC-9—against Gideon’s head.
“For God’s sake, we’ve got to dig her out!”
“You’re a fool.” Nodding Crane struck him a lashing blow across the head with the butt of his gun, wrenched the shovel from his hand, and screwed the barrel of the TEC-9 into his ear. “The wire.”
“Fuck you.”
“I will take it from your dead body, then.” He gave the warm muzzle of the pistol another screw into Gideon’s ear and whispered, “Good-bye.”
67
Manuel Garza, dressed in a frayed Department of Sanitation uniform he’d appropriated from the vast wardrobes of EES, walked along the bicycle path that circled the north end of Meadow Lake. In the distance, he could hear the hum of the Van Wyck Expressway. It was past eleven; the joggers, bikers, and mothers with strollers had gone home hours ago, and the sloops on the lake were tied in their berths.
With the retractable trash spear he held in one hand, he jabbed at a stray piece of rubbish and stuck it into the plastic bag hanging from his utility belt. Cover like this had been much easier back in the 1980s, when New York had been a filthy place. These days, with the city squeaky-clean, park sanitation crews weren’t nearly as invisible as they had once been. He considered that EES should brainstorm some new covers: commuters, maybe, or homeless persons, or marathon trainers.
He speared another piece of trash, his expression darkening. The thought of EES brought Eli Glinn back to his mind. No matter how long he worked for the guy, Garza had never understood him. Every time Garza thought that age had mellowed the man, or a particularly onerous op had reformed him, Eli Glinn went and proved him wrong. You could just never predict what he’d do — or wouldn’t do. Like that time in Lithuania, when he’d threatened to detonate the nuclear device because the client refused to make final payment. He hadn’t been kidding, either, he’d actually started the arming sequence before the client capitulated. Or that fateful expedition in Tierra del Fuego, when they were under pursuit and Glinn had blown up an iceberg to…
He shook that particular memory from his mind and turned away from the lake, heading back to the electric Parks Department cart that sat nearby. Just this morning, after the encounter on the subway train, Glinn had refused Garza’s request that they assign several teams to shadow Crew during the final stage of his mission. Glinn listened carefully, then simply shook his head. “We’re not doing that,” he’d said.
We’re not doing that. Garza rolled his eyes. A typical Glinn answer, containing no reasons, no explanation. Just fiat.
He eased himself into the cart, put the trash spear away, and unlocked a metal equipment locker bolted into one wall of the vehicle. He made a quick visual inventory of the contents: nine-millimeter Glock with silencer, sawed-off shotgun, taser, police radio, night-vision goggles, emergency paramedic kit, half a dozen federal, state, and local ID badges in assorted sizes. Satisfied, he closed the locker, then eased the cart north, toward the Queens Museum of Art.