City of Ice (54 page)

They crossed a catwalk.

The three men moved from light into shadow, the ship’s pulse reverberating through their shoes. At a corridor they conferred. Mathers was the most positive of their position, insisting that he possessed a good memory of the plan, and they followed his suggestion. This deep, it was hard to know which direction was forward, which aft. They moved on.

Mathers had chosen well. The corridor that ran across the beam of the boat would lead to a network of staterooms, supply rooms, gear rooms, and repair facilities. Down one of these the young woman, supposedly, was being held.

They listened, but nothing was to be heard save the racket of generators and the hollow thrum of hot-air ducts. Cinq-Mars continued forward, Mathers behind, Déguire trailing.

They moved on, and Cinq-Mars signaled for a huddle. “I’m going up on the run. Hang back. Start creating space between us.”

He jogged ahead, and the younger cops covered him. They watched him stop at a corridor, check it, then cross and wait for them. Mathers came up next, then Déguire. Each took a peek, and no one had to mention that once in the narrow corridor they would have less visual range, and less room to maneuver. No tributary corridors were available for them to flee to in case of an ambush. They’d be sitting ducks.

“Bill, take the point,” Cinq-Mars ordered. “Alain—”

“—the rear,” Déguire concluded, the crease in his brow tightly knit.

“Each room gets checked.”

Slowly they worked their way down. Cinq-Mars swung every door open and investigated the cavity within. Halfway down, Mathers tapped his shoulder.
The blank edge of a newspaper had been torn away and stuck to the door. On it was written,
“Welcome, M5.”

Cinq-Mars signaled both men to guard the corridor in opposite directions. He backed them farther away from the door in case it blew. He believed the steel door would provide him with adequate protection, but to open it, he squatted low. His two colleagues alternated between glancing at him and protecting their flank. Cinq-Mars reached for the door lever. Tugged it down. It yielded without igniting a blast. He opened the door a fraction. Felt no trigger, no line. Then he shoved it open so hard and fast that it banged against a wall inside and he held out his free hand to keep it from bouncing back. Cinq-Mars aimed his pistol and his shoulders recoiled, then he appeared to slump forward and he landed on his knees. Mathers cried, “Émile!” and turned toward him and Déguire shouted,
“Bill! Down!”
and fired and Mathers, on his belly, looked back and saw behind him a huge Hell’s Angel fall with a shotgun in his hands.

“Run it down!” Cinq-Mars instructed them, bent way forward. They didn’t know what had happened to him. The two young cops jogged swiftly to opposite ends of the corridor and checked their situation. Both signaled all clear. Déguire checked on his victim and found no pulse. The pistol had fired more quickly than anything he’d ever handled. He’d hit him four times, minimum. The man bled through the mouth, and through exit wounds in his back. “Walk it up!” Cinq-Mars called to them. The cops returned to him, stepping backwards all the way, pistols at the ready. Cinq-Mars had recovered to his knees, and they looked to see what had made him fall.

Sergeant-Detective André LaPierre hung in the doorway, his head no higher than a man’s chest. The beanpole of a man had been cut low, his legs sheered
off above the knees by the bloodied chain saw on the floor behind him.

“Get him down,” Cinq-Mars ordered. “He’s still alive.” He guarded the corridor while the men unwrapped chain and lowered the unconscious man to the blood-soaked floor. Both men were managing, but the moment he saw the sawed-off portions of legs in a corner Mathers puked his guts. Cinq-Mars was on the phone, urgent and whispering. “Medics. Seventeenth level belowdecks, the stern. Find the captain or anybody else to guide you down. Bring them on the run, full body protection. Otherwise, stay out. I want surround sound. I want full SWAT support on the perimeter. Get it now. Out.

“Bill,” Cinq-Mars said in part to chase him out of there, “get blankets. Back the way we came. There’re bunks in some of the rooms.”

Mathers followed orders, although in the first cabin the memory made him heave again. He wiped his mouth and face on one sheet and snatched the blankets off the other beds. He came back on the double, with Cinq-Mars and Déguire providing cover.

“Wrap him. Keep him warm.” Cinq-Mars tore off his own belt, slung it around one bloody stump, and pulled with all his strength. He knotted the belt, then used a screwdriver off the workbench there to twist the tourniquet until the wound did not bleed so much, and he lodged the screwdriver in back of the belt. LaPierre had lost quarts. He wasn’t giving him much of a chance. Déguire had his belt off by the time Cinq-Mars finished, and they did the same for the other stump. Mathers stood guard, waiting for a Hell’s Angel to show, wanting one to show, longing to drop a few before the day was done. “All right,” Cinq-Mars decided, “we leave him. Help’s on the way. We can’t do anything more.”

“Come on, Émile, we can’t just leave him,” Mathers objected.

“That’s what they want. To stall us and divide us. Bill, I don’t want this happening to the woman. She’s only a kid.”

Mathers considered that aspect and changed his mind.

“Understand, this is a diversion. They want to slow us down and separate me out. They have one of two objectives, maybe both. One, they want to escape. Two, they want me dead. I expect them to take another shot at me before making their break. I don’t intend to let them be successful.”

“Where do we look first, Émile?”

“Follow me.” He had his own memory of the ship’s plan. This time they walked quickly, moving targets, unpredictable and quick. He led them down a flight to the level of the engine room, and they huddled there behind a bulkhead. Cinq-Mars made another phone call. “Make contact with the ship’s captain. Shut the vessel down for two hundred seconds. All electricity. All air. Lights, everything. For exactly two hundred seconds I want perfect quiet. Got that? Over.”

He looked into the faces of his young colleagues. “Load up, Alain, you’re short.”

Jacking another mag settled Déguire down, although his fingers quavered. He was scared, but he looked like the Grim Reaper, while Mathers’s big brown eyes had bulged to the size of pucks. “What’s up, Émile?”

“For all we know they’re off the ship already. The leader’s meticulous, we’ve seen how he’s cleaned up a crime scene. He probably has a way out we don’t know about, that nobody knows about, not even that captain. He’s old KGB, remember, not some doofus choirboy with the Hell’s Angels.”

“So?”

“I think he might want another shot at me. I think he wants me down. I could be wrong. But he needed to buy time and he’s bought it. All we can do now is
assume he’s still aboard and interfere with his plans.” Cinq-Mars punched a number on his phone but didn’t send the call. “He asked me to call him back. When the lights go out, I will. When the lights shut down, we enter the engine room. Why’d he bring us down this far if not to pull us down farther? We work our way through the engine room in the darkness and quiet. Keep an ear for André’s cellular to ring. That’ll clue us if the guy’s aboard, maybe where. I’ll talk to him. I’ll call him back. You move on the sound. When the lights snap back, go. Keep one eye high, always. They like snipers. Remember, Julia comes out alive.”

The shutdown did not occur as automatically as he had expected. First they heard the ventilation system expire, then various generators that warmed the giant holds. Finally the electricity was cut and the ship lay in darkness and utter silence.

“Hand on the shoulder of the man in front. Let’s move.”

He had memorized the way and made it across to the door without a fumble. Cinq-Mars opened the door. They entered the mammoth engine room, and what they hadn’t counted on were the backup emergency lamps aglow here and there. The gloomy lights cast strange and ominous shadows. He did not know if the light would help or hinder, but for now the lamps guided them through the dark and they moved across to the protection of a scaffold of pipes. Cinq-Mars pressed the Send button on his cellular.

Away in the distance a cell phone twittered.

Cinq-Mars discerned the shapes of his two young officers moving up.

“Mr. Cinq-Mars?” the phone voice answered.

“What do you want?” he asked, hushed.

“You’ll die here today,” the man whispered, “or you’ll deal.”

“What deal is that?”

“The identity of the third party LaPierre was raving about. I want the foreign agent, M-Five, his name, rank, outfit, and address. What do you want?”

“The woman.”

“Yes, she insists she works for you. I fucked her mouth. You still want her?”

Cinq-Mars waited.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Even up. The woman for the foreign agent. Keep your phone turned on. I’ll be in touch.”

He terminated their connection.

In a crouch, Cinq-Mars moved swiftly through the dark. He was out of time. Above and alongside them rose the silent machines, as though this room was a mortuary for pistons and power. Someone caught his coat and he gasped. It was Bill Mathers.

Cinq-Mars punched the Redial button for LaPierre’s phone again, but this time the call did not go through. His prey had not fallen for that ruse twice.

Mathers and Déguire had maintained visual contact with each other, and Déguire signaled that he was moving up. Hunched over, Mathers and Cinq-Mars chose a different slant toward the same general area. In the faint gloaming they spotted other forms, other men crouched and waiting, scanning the black universe for signs of life. The cops had so far remained invisible to them. Next to Cinq-Mars, Mathers indicated that he would cross a space to gain a third advantage on the viper’s nest. Cinq-Mars agreed with a nod.

Despite the open space, the darkness here was sufficient cover, but he was only three-quarters of the way over when the lights flickered on and Bill Mathers was hit by sniper fire erupting from the steel rafters. Déguire and Cinq-Mars concentrated their fire aloft and brought down the shooter, his body wrenching
backwards, then slumping forward and contorting grotesquely on a rail. The rifle fell, clanging in the brightened works and echoing like bullets ricocheting.

“Cover me!” Cinq-Mars yelled. He already saw the retreat of the tall, dark-haired man, and others, including Julia, backwards out of the room. He had foiled their ambush. Similarly, the gang had withstood his own attack. He changed clips on the go.

A burst of gunfire caused Cinq-Mars to slump to the floor of the ship, and Déguire silenced that volley with a burst of his own. That shooter ran, passing through the same exit as his friends.

“Bill!”

Cinq-Mars turned him over.

Mathers was breathless with fright and pain, his only wounds to his vest. “Holy. That hurts.”

“Can you stand? Let’s get out of the open.”

He needed help but managed to shuffle to a sheltered abutment.

“What happened?” Mathers begged to know. He was holding the burning points on his chest.

“She’s alive, Bill. She’s still alive. Her hands are tied behind her back, they’ve got her with them, but she’s alive. Did you see her, Alain?”

Déguire had run over and was shaking as he drew a hand across his lips. “Her mouth is taped.”

“Go!” Mathers urged them. “Go! I’ll follow if I can.”

Cinq-Mars and Déguire ran in pursuit, and Mathers hobbled behind them. They took the door with extreme caution, knowing that each delay gave advantage to the Czar. The door opened onto a stairwell. The only direction was up, but they couldn’t spot anyone through the grillwork above them. The stairs exited at many levels, and each had to be checked. Cinq-Mars had the sinking feeling that he had lost them. Higher up—he’d lost track of the floors—he
found the hatch used to depart the ship, riding a basket pulley, now cut, to a platform under the pier. In the darkness, in a labyrinth unknown to him, where the pursued had all the keys and the hunters would encounter only locks, Cinq-Mars knew that he’d lost them for good this time.

He breathed heavily, Déguire at his side. Stared at the abyss. Mathers came alongside eventually, panting, hurting. “What now?” he demanded. He feared that his partner had quit.

“He wants to trade Julia for the CIA guy,” Cinq-Mars told him. “That should keep her alive for a while. As long as she doesn’t give up Norris herself.”

Mathers slumped against a wall to nurse his pain. “What do we do?”

“We wait.”

Mathers was half-laughing, half-weeping, shaking his head and muttering.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I nearly got blown up today. I did somersaults in a car. I seen some things—André’s cut-off legs. I got shot—vest or no vest, it hurts like
fucking
hell. Now you’re telling me that all we can do is sit on our asses and wait?”

“It’s called police work, Bill.” Neither Mathers nor Déguire could tell if he was being serious, bitter, or wry.

Cinq-Mars put his pistol in his pocket and confirmed that his cell phone was open to receive. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s check out life on deck. Prepare yourselves. There’ll be shit to pay for this.”

Mathers was given a hand up, and the weary men mounted a gangway topside.

The survivors, and other detectives, hung around in the common area outside Cinq-Mars’s cubicle, putting their feet up on chairs and desks to give their bones a
rest. Tremblay had finally been released from the hospital—in the initial blast he’d suffered cracked ribs and a concussion, had been ordered held for observation, and unlike Cinq-Mars, had acquiesced. Only Déguire had not been roughed up during the day, but he was mentally whipped. He’d killed a shotgun-toting Hell’s Angel and contributed, along with Cinq-Mars, to the death of another, the sniper. Déguire had never deployed his weapon in the line of duty before, and periodically he shook. He was pale, knotted up. Occasionally he’d flash on LaPierre’s legs, shunted to a corner, blood soaking through the cloth of the trousers. Nobody was letting him go home alone.