Vigilante (13 page)

A
rjay, man the Cube!” shouted Branford, bursting from his caged work space and taking charge with a tone that left no room for argument. “Nolan’s glasses are still transmitting imagery of that building burning down around him, but he’s not moving and he won’t answer me. I’ve got to get down there.”

Arjay’s face drew taut. “What happened? Is he alive?”

“I don’t know!” Branford roared. “Just get in there!”

Arjay gave a nod and ducked inside the Cube.

Branford was at the subway station’s primary exit in seconds, his car keys in hand. He was tucking an earpiece into his ear when he realized someone was keeping pace with him from just behind as he entered the stairwell.

“You’re driving,” said Alice, her face hardened and grim as she climbed the stairs. She carried a plastic case holding first aid supplies.

At the top of the stairs he stopped. “You’re not going, and I don’t have time to argue!”

“He’s hurt,” she said, holding her ground. “No offense, Aaron, but I’ve seen your skills as a medic. You need me.”

Branford swore to himself. She was right, and he really didn’t have time to argue. The burning building wasn’t far, but he’d still be lucky to make it there before the fire department, which was almost certainly on its way already.

And Alice had called him by his first name. It made him blink. No one had called him Aaron in a very long time. When she’d said it, it felt like being slapped across the back of the head.

“There’ll be cops,” he pointed out, walking again, heading outside. “Aren’t they still looking for you?”

“You going to take him to the hospital?” she retorted.

“Fine,” he growled at her angrily. “But if you can’t keep up, I can’t wait for you.”

He led the way to his car, where it sat parallel parked on the street.

———

Branford’s car was a ’57 Hudson Hornet that drove with the finesse of a World War II tank—sluggish to gain speed, even harder to bring to a halt. Alice feared for her life every time Branford rounded a corner.

But much more than herself, she feared for Nolan.

“Don’t let him die, don’t let him die. . . .” was her whispered prayer as she white-knuckled her seat.

This couldn’t be happening.

God had a plan for Nolan. Of this she was utterly certain. After all that he’d suffered during the war—and survived—God wouldn’t let his life end now. Not like this. He couldn’t have made it through all of that for nothing. He was the hero that the people of New York had prayed and hoped for, and he still had so much good to do.

He couldn’t die. Not now.

Branford barreled through a left-hand turn onto a one-way street, and for a second she thought one side of the car had lifted up off the ground. She looked at Branford in alarm, but he ignored her, his attention focused on the road.

“Please, God, don’t let him die. . . .” she whispered.

Branford threw her an annoyed glance, but she never stopped praying.

———

Minutes later, they arrived at the scene of mass chaos. A pair of fire trucks and one police car were already there, but there would be more on the way. Pedestrians lined the sidewalks, watching the action unfold, and there were a half dozen people coming and going from inside the building.

The entire building belched black smoke that streamed into the sky—a sight that brought back unwelcome memories for many New Yorkers of one fateful historic day.

The fire trucks were spraying water into the first floor of the building, trying to get the fire under control before the building came down. Too many people now crowded the area, but the lone policeman on the scene couldn’t do much about it.

Making matters worse, the burning edifice was situated on a street corner and surrounded by much larger and taller buildings, giving it a claustrophobic, walled-in feeling. Most of the smoke was going straight up because there wasn’t much of anywhere else it could go.

It was a circus, and Branford couldn’t believe he was about to walk into it.

Hadn’t he left this sort of thing behind long ago?

Alice started directly toward the building, but he grabbed her by the arm and steered her around the back of the nearest building so they could come at it from the rear.

As promised, Branford didn’t wait for Alice to keep up, but she did fine on her own. They’d parked two blocks from the site and within just a few minutes they’d ducked around the burning building to an old alleyway that was too narrow to fit any vehicles. He was relieved to spot a window that looked big enough to squeeze through. He pushed past Alice and snatched a large steel trash can from the other side of the alley, pushing it under the window so he could climb atop it.

Looking away from the window, he reared back and threw his elbow into the glass. It shattered, but black smoke immediately began to pour out of the opening.

He was wondering if they would be able to breathe through the thick smoke long enough to get to Nolan up on the top floor, when Alice produced a pair of surgical masks from the first aid kit and handed one to him.

“It won’t last long against this,” she said, nodding at the smoke.

Branford nodded his thanks and began to climb inside. When he was halfway through, he reached out and helped Alice up onto the trash can so she could follow.

They slid down to the wet concrete floor inside the building, and Branford decided that maybe having Alice along was an okay idea after all.

———

Any concerns they had about reaching Nolan undetected were swiftly erased by the smoke making it all but impossible to see anything. The entire bottom floor lay drenched by the water the fire fighters had sprayed inside; the good news was that the ground floor was no longer burning. But the smoke waited everywhere, and it took a painfully long time for them to feel their way around the outer wall until they reached the stairs. Once they began to ascend, visibility worsened with every step. A fireman nearly ran Alice over coming down as they rounded one set of stairs, but his vision was no better.

“Chief’s ordered everybody out!” he shouted. “It’s going to collapse any minute!”

Branford cleared his throat. “The chief just sent us up to make sure no one else was inside!” he shouted, besting the fireman’s authoritative tone with his angriest drill sergeant bark.

Branford couldn’t see the fireman, so he had no way of reading him, of knowing if he was buying it or not.

“Call the chief on your radio if you want, to confirm, but we don’t have time to argue!” yelled Branford over the fire.

“Just hurry it up!” replied the fireman, and he was on his way.

They continued to climb, and after a moment, Alice complimented Branford on his ruse. “That was impressive.”

“Started my career in law enforcement,” Branford mentioned. “The mentality’s not that different from the military.” He wasn’t one for talking about the past—and his life hadn’t been nearly as interesting as Nolan’s—so he decided that that was all the explanation he’d offer.

At last they reached the top floor, and both of them were winded and starting to feel the effects of the smoke. Branford led them into the big central room with the broken skylight. He felt the crunch of glass and debris beneath his shoes, though he couldn’t hear it over the din of the burning building.

“
Nolan!
” Branford shouted.

The blaze all but encircled the entire room, and most of the furniture and the expensive rug on the floor were consumed as well. The man who’d attacked Nolan was nowhere to be found, and Branford saw no sign of the teenage girl either.

“Help me out here, Arjay,” he said. “I can barely see my own feet! Can you describe anything that Nolan’s close to?”

“
He’s behind a broken chair with, I believe, green upholstery,
” replied Arjay in his ear.

“Copy that.” Branford canvassed the area, peering carefully through the smoke and taking steps cautiously to avoid the spreading fire and any dangers they couldn’t see.

“There!” he shouted, pointing, and he and Alice ran to the spot.

It was indeed a carved wooden chair with dark green fabric. Branford knelt down to scan the ground up close. He found a gloved human hand sticking out from under a sofa, atop which was an enormous support beam that had collapsed diagonally from one corner of the room.

The top of the wooden beam, touching the ceiling, was on fire, and the flames were slowly moving down toward the floor. The giant thing looked like it weighed half a ton, but Branford never hesitated. He crawled underneath an open section between the beam and the floor. On all fours, he put his back up against it.

“When I heave,” he shouted to Alice, “you pull him out as fast as you can!”

Using the adrenaline coursing through his veins, he flexed and strained with all his strength pushing against the ground. It felt like the heavy beam moved less than an inch, but he held on as long as he could, grimacing and holding his breath. He tried counting the seconds to help him focus, but it didn’t work.

By the time he reached four, Branford was already feeling wobbly, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to do this more than another few seconds. The intense heat from the fire, the scarce oxygen . . . He couldn’t last—

“Got him!” shouted Alice, and Branford collapsed with a groan. The beam settled with a crack, and he crawled out from under it backward to see that the flames had nearly reached his back.

When he was out and could turn around, he found Alice already inspecting Nolan for damage.

“Good strong pulse,” she said, her voice loud enough to rise above the racket. “Looks like the bullet bounced off his hood without penetrating it, but it hit him like a hammer to the head. He’s out cold.”

“The shot was fired from point-blank range,” confirmed Branford, remembering the sight of it from watching through Nolan’s goggles. Seeing the crazed man with the gun point it directly at the camera was something he wouldn’t forget anytime soon. The man’s face had been blood red, his eyes filled with so much pain and hate . . .

Another thought occurred to him, and he glanced around at the floor. But there was no sign of the gun.

Another beam collapsed, this time on the other side of the room, sending wild embers scattering across the floor.

“I don’t think I can carry him,” said Branford wearily. “I’m weak and shaky now.”

Alice frowned, examining Nolan again. “His legs don’t look like they took any damage,” she muttered. She searched through the medical kit for a moment, retrieved a tiny vial, and held it under his nose.

The smelling salts did their work, forcing Nolan to twitch himself awake to escape from the powerful odor. When he fully came to, he started violently with wide eyes and looked up at Alice in shock.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. Then he spotted Branford standing above him.

“Can you walk?” asked Alice.

Nolan willed himself to his feet, swaying wildly but refusing to yield. “Take these, General. Use the night vision,” he said to Branford, handing the old man his goggles. “Lead the way.”

A
re you feeling all right?” asked Alice when Nolan awoke the next morning in his own bed. He was still wearing his clothes from last night, and Alice sat next to the bed, reading a book and watching over him.

No, he was not all right. From what he could feel, he knew he had a concussion from the two blows to the head, and he had a strong urge to cough, tasting the burnt tang of smoke in his throat. Smoke inhalation, no doubt.

But it was more than that. As his memories of the previous night came back in a rush, he suddenly felt a strong need to punch something. He would have preferred to pummel the face of the person who’d signed off on that botched operation. But since that wasn’t going to happen, he made a mental appointment with the professional-grade punching bag in his small training area off beyond his bunk as soon as he’d gotten some answers.

He stood up, and Alice immediately rushed to his side.

“Stop!” she cried. “Lie back down! You’ve got to take it easy for at least—”

“No, no way, I can’t,” he said, brushing off her words as if they were meaningless.

Alice continued to protest while Nolan massaged his aching temples and walked unsteadily toward the Cube. When Alice saw that he wasn’t going to listen, she came up beside him and offered herself as something he could lean on to steady himself.

“You are
the
most stubborn person . . .” she grumbled.

“Tell me what happened back there,” he said, walking inside the Cube. “Tell me what those people died for.”

Branford glanced up without expression, as if he’d been expecting Nolan to walk in at any moment. Alice remained at his side, while Arjay was in his corner working as usual, though when he saw Nolan, he put his tools down and came nearer.

“That
was
the OCI, right?” Nolan asked.

“Nobody’s saying,” replied Branford. “The major news networks have barely mentioned the fire; that’s not big news these days. Seems pretty clear-cut though.”

“Their actions were owed to poor intelligence?” suggested Arjay.

“That, or they just made a bad call,” Branford said.

“Could it have been an honest mistake?” asked Alice.

“No,” declared Nolan, thinking back on the woman he saw kneeling over the two female dead bodies. “They were arrogant. Thought they couldn’t make a wrong move.”

Branford was pensive. “Soon as word gets out, the OCI’s days are numbered. Unless they try to bury it.”

Nolan frowned. “Thor would never do that.”

The room fell silent as everyone was suddenly reminded of Nolan’s close friendship with Thornton Hastings, the president of the United States. The world leader who currently believed that Nolan was dead, just as everyone else did.

“Perhaps he is no longer the man you knew,” suggested Arjay.

Nolan considered this, but only for a moment. “The things that . . . when we were taken captive, we were put through, I mean we saw . . . atrocities. Brutality. We vowed that if we ever escaped from that hell, we would do whatever it took to make the world a place where things like that never happen. We were brothers, and we promised each other. He would never go back on that.”

“How can you be certain?” asked Arjay.

“Because
I
haven’t.”

The room was quiet again. Nolan knew that Branford especially was probably absorbing this little snippet about his time in captivity. No one knew the horrific things they’d seen and been subjected to back then—not the full extent of it. Much of it was just too awful to speak of or put into an official report. And until now, no one on earth knew that he and Hastings had made this vow to each other.

“All the same,” said Branford, breaking the silence at last, “I’d feel better if we put up something on the website, made a brief statement. Just to beat them to the punch, in case some zealous White House aide decides to shift the blame in our direction.”

Months ago, even before Times Square, Arjay had volunteered to build Nolan a website at thereisabetterway.com. It would be a place where Nolan could address public concerns without having to use his real voice, as well as a rallying point in cyberspace for all of Nolan’s activities. Arjay had gotten so into it that he was now maintaining a mailing list that he used to send out daily recommendations of things that anyone could do to help their fellow man and make New York City a better place—or really, any part of the world—on behalf of The Hand.

Nolan wasn’t pleased, but he conceded. “Fine. Just keep it brief and don’t point any fingers.”

“ ‘Grief fills the heart as condolences are sent out to the victims of the tragic events that took place last night in Manhattan, and their families. . . .’ ” mumbled Arjay to himself, composing out loud. He turned and left for his workspace, continuing to mutter.

“What about the man that attacked me?” asked Nolan, turning back to Branford.

Branford nodded gravely. “That’s probably the most troubling part of the whole thing.”