“Rothchild has much more interesting things he can tell you.”
Art looked at his watch again. Nine o’clock sharp. And as if on cue, emerging from the sea of mist as a dragonfly might broach murky water, a helicopter appeared and gained altitude as it neared the Tower.
They’re here, Art thought, his hand sliding from Simon’s shoulder to his back, where it rubbed soft circles.
Simon caught sight of the helicopter also, and tried to point at it but stubbed his finger into the glass. “It’s coming up.”
“It’s coming,” Art said, knowing what he had to say next. “Those are friends, Simon.”
Friends? How could that be friends? Friends were not that. That was Up. Friends were like Art and Doctor Anne and Doctor Chazzz.
“Come on,” Art said, turning Simon from the window and guiding him back toward the exit from the Skydeck.
The thrump-thrump-thrump of the helicopter penetrated the windows as it passed and circled to the north, turning to head back for a landing on the roof. It was a sound that fascinated Simon, requiring Art to keep a firm hand on his back as they weaved between the stacks of construction materials nearer the room’s center.
Another sound drew Art’s attention, though: the soft squeak of a door opening and sliding back on its hinges. He slowed as they neared the turn around the elevator core, which had let them out directly into the Skydeck. He slowed and kept one hand on Simon’s back but let his other lift the side of his sweater, and he could feel the cool grip of his Smith & Wesson on his palm as Keiko Kimura came around the corner with a gun in each hand.
Chapter Twenty Five
One on One on One
Art did two things at once, three if it mattered that he was cursing at the top of his lungs. He gathered Simon’s sweatshirt in his fist and heaved him to the floor several feet away behind a pallet of dwarf I beams, and with his other hand he drew his weapon.
He might have fired if Kimura hadn’t had the same idea, and as the first muzzle flash spurted from her weapons, he dropped to the floor and rolled toward Simon.
Bullets were not her concern. She had plenty, and therefore Keiko had set both compact submachine guns on full automatic. As she squeezed the triggers, she swung one left and the other right, driving sixty rounds into tools, and materials, and fixtures, and the ceiling, and the bare floor. But the greatest result of her wild firing came when stray bullets, of which almost half of them were, peppered the large window panels on the east side of the Skydeck. At fourteen hundred plus feet in the air, with the tail of a Canadian low driving fog in from Lake Michigan, the wind load on the exterior of the tower was enormous. And on the window panels in particular. They were designed to accept the load, but not when being punctured by dozens of hollow point rounds that sent spiderweb cracks in all directions from each point of impact. They were strong, but not that strong.
The winds, gusting upward of fifty miles an hour, slammed into the suddenly pulverized panels, which exploded inward, showering the unfinished room with hundreds of thousands of tiny, crystalline blocks. Keiko Kimura fell back as the shower swept over her. Art, in covering Simon, felt the sting of hundreds of the tiny particles pecking at his skin.
And then there was the wind.
Art got to his knees and was almost pushed over by the gusts now invading the east side of the 103rd floor. The howl caught his sweater and lifted it over his head, and he was forced to pull it off entirely and discard it. He grabbed Simon and pulled him along the floor by his sweatshirt, toward the elevator core, keeping behind pallets until he reached a spot of open floor where it seemed a million tiny sparklers danced on the floor in the little light there was.
The elevators were across the open space. The elevators were a way out. Kimura had come in the door.
The elevators it would have to be.
Keiko, huddled behind a stack of boxes containing heavy ceramic tiles, reloaded her weapons, and shook as much of the glass as she could from her hair.
She peered over the boxes and went to her stomach, covering the major part of the room from just south of the door. She could hear nothing but the cry of the wind and the crackle of glass still being torn from the window frames.
This was not a good position, Keiko knew. The stacks and pallets of construction materials ran north to south in rows, cutting the room off every ten feet or so. She needed a field of fire down the rows. Down each if she could clear them. One at a time. Make her targets’ safe zone smaller and smaller.
With a plan, now, she came to a crouch and duck-walked south, toward the beginning of the rows.
Art helped Simon to his knees, and tried to tell him something, but the noise was just too intense. Simon’s hands were pressed to his ears, his eyes flitting open only sporadically. He would have to lead him to the elevators. No, carry him. Or at least drag.
Son of a bitch! Where did she come from?! Art allowed himself that brief venting, then took Simon’s shirt in hand once again, and, keeping his weapon in the direction he had last seen Kimura, made a low dash for the T shaped elevator core.
He moved as fast as possible, his eyes moving, looking up the rows between the pallets, and then taking a quick check of the space between the two elevators, the doors of which opened into the vertical base of the T. Beyond the elevators, two small alcoves that would soon be walled in formed the cross of the T, and looking back to the room from just outside the elevators, Art could see nothing but debris being swirled in mini cyclones.
He could not see Kimura, and considered that a possible break in his luck, until he pressed the elevator button and saw that there was no light behind it. Nor above in the readout of its location.
The elevators were not working.
“Shit!” he said aloud, losing the word to the wind.
The only choice now was the door to the hallway, and then to the stairs. Art pulled Simon up again and eased back toward the spot where the T let into the room, his weapon sweeping the path ahead, his eyes moving, moving, looking for anything that migh—
BRRRRRR-RRRRRRR-RRRRRR-RRRRR.
The bursts of fire caught Art completely by surprise, coming up the row that looked directly down the base of the T, driving hot spikes into his arms, and sending him backpedaling, still holding Simon’s shirt through pain that seemed to course through him from fingers to shoulders on both sides, and sending him into one of the alcoves at the top of the T, where he collapsed against a pile of cardboard refuse, Simon at his side.
Keiko came up to a half crouch and set one of the Mini-Uzis on a stack of boxes. She’d emptied it, saving the other, and now wanted to have a hand free. She moved down the row and, even in the low light, could see the spray of red on the floor and the bare gypsum wallboards.
She had made contact. Removing the straight razor from her pocket with her free hand, opening it with a snap of the wrist, she hoped, actually prayed, that she hadn’t killed him. Not yet.
Art looked down at his arms and saw immediately two neat punctures in the skin over each bicep. His weapon was still in his hand, loosely, and when he tried to squeezed his fingers around the grip the reply was a buzz of hot sparkles that dazzled his senses and forced a scream from his lungs.
Unfortunately, in the windbreak of the alcove he could hear himself perfectly.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Now what? Now fucking what? Art would have liked to wait for an answer to present itself, but he knew there wasn’t time. Either Kimura would make her way to him, or he’d bleed to death. He had to do something, something to save Simon. But what? He was alone and wounded.