She hurried over to help him the rest of the way down, got his arm back around her neck. Together the three of them pressed through the rear door to the alley.
Cold air and snow blasted them the moment they got outside. Thunder was still skipping across the sky. They moved awkwardly toward the mouth of the alleyway, Barnhart stagger-stepping forward, a tortured grimace on his face, blood dripping from his midsection to the snow.
A fourth bodyguard appeared in the alley entrance, directly in front of them, sweeping an outthrust carbine back and forth like a divining rod. Slugs churned from the gun and whapped into the snowpack at their feet, kicking up powdery spurts of whiteness. Nimec hauled Barnhart sideways out of the line of fire, then jostled him against the diamond-mesh fence dividing the alley from the adjacent property. More rounds shivered from the bodyguard’s weapon, pecking at the brick outer wall of the building, striking a shower of sparks off a fire escape somewhere overhead.
Nimec extended his gun toward their attacker, triggered two rounds. But he was off balance, unable to take decent aim, and they went sheering ineffectually into the darkness.
The killer prepared to fire again. He seemed to have realized that one of his prey was wounded and swung his gun in their direction with a kind of slow, deliberate confidence, like someone about to take out a crippled fowl.
Nimec huddled against the fence, shielding Barnhart with his own body.
Nori fired her webgun a beat before Roma’s thug would have pulled the trigger. A hollow pop! issued from its barrel, and then the sticky webbing bloomed over him, ensnaring him from head to foot in a cocoon of microthin filaments. Stunned, he tried to tear free, but only became more tangled up in the cottony shroud, skidded on the snow, and took a pratfall that might have been comical under far different circumstances.
Nori dashed over to him as he lay there thrashing, and sprayed him full in the face with the DMSO. An instant later he ceased to move.
The webgun still in her hand, Nori ran past him to the alley mouth, peered up and down the sidewalk through blowing sheets of snow. Lights were flickering on in the apartment buildings along the street — obviously the sounds of the firefight had drawn some attention — but there was no one in sight.
She turned and padded back down the alley to her companions.
“You all right?” she asked Nimec.
“Yeah,” he said.
She looked at Barnhart. The perspiration was streaming down his face now, and the glazed, somewhat abstracted cast of his eyes gave her cause to fear he might be slipping into shock.
“Coast’s clear, as far as I can see,” she said, gripping Barnhart’s arm. “We have to get back to the wagon before somebody calls the cops, though. Think you can make it?”
He looked at her a moment and somehow managed a wan, grim smile.
“Race you,” he said.
THIRTY
The sex was quick and dirty. So was the conversation that preceded it—“dirty,” in this instance, meaning distorted and semiaudible on playback.
It wasn’t the fault of the recording equipment. Nick Roma had simply been speaking in a low voice when the woman in the black leather coat entered his office.
“Let’s see that part again,” Barnhart said.
“You mean when he’s behind her, or on top?”
“Don’t get smart.”
“I’ll cue it up from where it’s still rated PG, and just about to segue into triple-X,” the thin, long-haired man at the audio-video processor said with a mock frown. He pushed a button on his console, and Barnhart heard the faint whir of the hard disk spinning in the silence.
They were in a sound studio in the basement of the Sword headquarters in downtown Manhattan, Barnhart and the techie seated shoulder-to-shoulder at the workstation, Pete Nimec and Noriko Cousins standing behind them.
Barnhart leaned stiffly forward in his chair, feeling his stitches pull under the bandages around his midsection. His wound still gave him a lot of discomfort, but the bleeding had made it look more critical than it actually turned out to be. Though a long, shallow furrow had been plowed into his right side, the slug had been deflected from his internal organs by a ridge of hard muscle before exiting. According to the emergency room physician his superb physical condition was what saved him.
“You think you can get us to what he’s saying?” Nimec asked.
“If I hadn’t been reasonably certain the audio streams could be cleaned up to your exacting demands, I wouldn’t have bothered committing this blue romp into digital form,” the man at the workstation said. “After all, the moans of ecstasy were already loud and clear enough to get my motor running.”
Nimec and Noriko exchanged looks of pained commiseration. Jeff Grolin was one of the most skilled forensic A/V specialists in the country — Megan wouldn’t have snagged him for their organization if he wasn’t — but he was also a vexingly juvenile pain in the buttocks. Was social maladjustment something that people in his field acquired, a sort of professional hazard, Nimec wondered, or some intrinsic characteristic of those with a high degree of technical aptitude?
“Okay, guys and gal, hold onto your cookies,” Grolin said, fiddling with a dial. “It’s Nick Roma’s Big Adventure, alternately titled Badguy Lust. Scene one, take two.”
Their eyes turned toward the workstation’s twenty-one-inch monitor.
On the screen, a door opened into Roma’s office and the woman came in, then stepped toward the lens of the stationary surveillance camera. Her dark hair was pulled back, her lips were parted, and she moved with an apparent awareness of her body and the reaction it elicited from the man she was approaching.
The date/time stamp on the lower left-hand corner of the image read: “01.01.2000 1:00 A.M.”
Nimec studied the woman intently. Though the room’s fluorescents were dimmed, there was sufficient ambient light coming in from the windows to reveal her features without any sort of computer enhancements. In fact, a still image had already been extracted from the video footage and was being cross-indexed with Sword’s file of known and suspected international terrorists.
“You could have knocked,” Roma said through compact Audix speakers. At this point only the back of his head was visible.
“Yes. 1 could have.” Shutting the door.
“There’s a light switch on the wall…”
“Bounce it to where it’s been giving us trouble,” Barnhart said, watching.
“Sure,” Jeff said. His finger stabbed a button with the double-arrow fast-forward symbol on it. “Though I personally get a charge out of the suggestive dialogue during the buildup — clichéd as it may be.”
The video zipped ahead.
Grolin hit Play again.
Now the woman was much closer to the desk, her coat partially unbuttoned, unmistakable desire in her expression.
“Why are you here?” Roma said, and then paused. His voice had become husky, dropping to a near whisper.
“Right. Like he’s really that clueless,” Grolin commented. “The guy’s choking on his own drool—”
“Shhh, this is it,” Noriko said.
“Yno… zrrywn’t… hvyrrpstl… mrrow… pssed… syight.”
“It’s still nothing but gobbledygook,” Barnhart said.
“That’s because I haven’t worked my electronic wizardry yet.” Grolin froze the image, then shifted his hands to a smaller console which consisted of more dials and pitch slides, as well as a dozen or so keys the size of the Tab button on a standard computer keyboard.