What Came After (11 page)

Weller stood holding Penny tight. Thinking they wanted him to witness this.

The line of trucks kept on passing. Not one of the drivers even looked.

One of the security men lifted his visor and took Penny’s chin in a gloved hand and tilted her face away from her father’s chest and told her not to worry about a thing. She was going to take a trip to the big city. See the sights. Penny howled, snatched her face away and buried it again, and not one of the men who were gathered around the driver so much as turned to see what the trouble was. Not one of them even flinched at the howling of that child. It was their training. Some of them were old Black Rose and some of them were from other private military outfits, outfits that had specialized in work that Black Rose had found unprofitable. Either way they were all cashed-out with their immunity intact, immunity from prosecution that went all the way back to the Iraq war when things had gotten simpler. When you could run an army like a business for a change. Immunity was a retirement benefit that didn’t cost anybody anything. Not like a pension. A pension cost money. And who needed a pension anyhow, when you could always find work.

Weller turned away from the hard man. Just a few degrees. Still almost flat against the wall but keeping himself between the man and his daughter as best he could or at least suggesting that that was his intent. Drawing a line. The man gave him that inch or two and then he leaned over and whispered in his ear. Saying, “That sonofabitch driver works for the same company I do. And you see how much he’s worth.”

Two of the men raised the driver to his feet. He hung between them, defeated and limp. Not even looking up. They sat him on a curb and one of them knelt beside him and drew a knife from a holster at his ankle. Raised it to the driver’s neck. The other not even holding him down. Not restraining him in any way. Not having to. Just standing with his arms crossed, watching. The one with the knife raised it to the driver’s neck and held it there and the tiny pressure of the point of it was enough to keep the driver settled as he felt around the flesh of his neck with two fingers of his other hand. He decided on a spot. Took hold. Pushed the tip of the blade against the driver’s windpipe and turned it a quarter turn. levering it. Blood and gristle popping out and behind that something silver. His one hand was busy holding the driver’s neck and his other hand was busy with the knife so he jerked his head to lift his visor and bent forward and took the brand in his teeth. Leaned back and grinned around it for his buddy and let the driver go. The driver slumped over and he rose up. Sucked the little piece of silver metal clean and spat it into his free hand.

He wiped both sides of the knife blade on the driver’s overalls and checked the knife all over and wiped one side again and put it away. Fastidious. “This’ll do,” he said. Checking the brand. Shaking his head disgusted. “You’re free to go.”

It didn’t even register with the driver. The loss of everything. The loss of himself.

The man at Weller’s shoulder said, “Be glad you’re not one of ours. Be glad PharmAgra’s got that bounty on runners. All of a sudden you’re worth something.”

FIVE
One Police Plaza

They plunged down into the city as into a canyon. Weller and Penny in the back seat behind thick glass scratched opaque. Holes drilled through it for ventilation. They could hear the men talking up front and bolts of radio traffic like electricity made audible. One man wondering what caused that sonofabitch to change his mind anyhow. To come all the way from Connecticut and just about get through the toughest checkpoint there is and change his mind at the last minute. Give up this runner and his load of tobacco and have the nerve to ask for the reward. The chutzpah. The other one saying maybe they’d had a fight. There’s no honor among thieves is there. More bolts of radio noise coming and going. The first one saying it’ll serve that sonofabitch right anyhow. That’s the last time he’ll ferry a runner. Those radio noises again, hurting Penny’s ears.

The car bounded down the devastated street. Deep potholes in Washington Heights and Harlem and the suspension shot a long time ago. An armored Crown Vic, two tons of reinforced steel and bulletproof glass and hard-muscled men lurching toward Central National Park.

“Look,” said Weller. Above the engine roar and the complaint of the springs and the hard noise from the radio. Pointing out the window. “Look up.”

She did.

A high framework of rusted steel draped with wire mesh netting. Above the trees. Above everything. The ghost of some circus big top with birds fluttering against it. “Pigeons,” he said. They looked like gray scraps of newspaper torn and rainsoaked and dried out again by such sun as could reach this deep. Floating skyward on wind. Weller asked himself how long it would take before they quit trying. How long it had been and how long it would take. Generations. Forever, maybe. Not just one bird but the whole species.

Penny just marveled, twisting in her seat and craning her neck. What it looked like to her he didn’t know. Just shapes moving. Just shapes moving in the sky. That alone was miracle enough.

They kept going south and the neighborhoods got better and the street smoothed out. Brownstones fronting the park. Management doormen standing on sidewalks in the dappled sun and cars coming and going, small cars and large cars and great long legendary limousines piloted by Management drivers in snap-brim hats. Now and then an old bus of the same vintage, hard used, roaring away from the curb blowing diesel smoke and coughing. It went on for block after block after block with the park opposite, sealed off tight behind wire fences and steel beams and iron bars upright in a line. Razor wire in coils stretched out.

There was a gate near the southernmost end, with a big brushed steel circle suspended over it. So big that Penny pointed it out and said, “O. Does that mean Open?” The car waiting at a light.

Her father hadn’t even seen it as a letter. Just a huge circle of steel. Some kind of municipal sculpture. There were people passing beneath it, though, a thin line of people moving through a tall marble archway carved with the likenesses of wild animals in high relief. Bears and beavers and moose. Salmon leaping from cascades of water. There must have been a scanner concealed among the carvings, because each person in the line assumed a certain head-up stance as he drew near. Almost unconscious but not quite. A cheerful man dressed in camouflage greeted them as they came, welcoming them to the park, handing out printed maps. The black pistol at his hip conspicuous but untouched. No need for it. The park was Ownership only, and everybody knew it.

“O is for Open,”
said one of the men in the front seat. “That’s a good one.”

“Goddamn generics,” said the other. The one driving. “You never know what you’ll hear.” The light changed and a cloud of messengers on bicycles ran it from the right and he hit the gas.

*

One Police Plaza was still One Police Plaza even though the police were long gone. It had become a kind of neutral ground for competing security forces. The place where exchanges got made and information got shared if it got shared at all. Shared or sold or bartered, depending.

The building itself was a great brutal square of raw concrete jutting up near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. As complex and varied within as it was plain without. A claustrophobic tangle of hallways and offices and conference rooms. Laboratories and closets and narrow chambers whose uses remained unknown or at least unstated. Long rooms doubled by one-way glass and secret rooms kept dark.

Black Rose had the first five floors and they ran the parking garage and the helipad and the security all around. Nobody came or went without their approval. AmeriBank security had the top floor and the one below that, New York being their city. PharmAgra had the better part of a floor all to themselves, and National Motors shared one with Family Health Partnership if you could call it sharing. A wall of concrete and glass block dividing the two, and scanners mounted on either side. Not even using the same scanner. Not even that much trust between them.

Weller and his daughter sat in a locked room. One table three feet on a side bolted to the floor and a chair bolted down on each side of it. Weller sitting in one chair and Penny sitting on his lap. The afternoon draining away.

She said, “Will that bad man come here?”

“What bad man is that?”

“The man from the school.”

“No. He won’t come here.”

“I didn’t like him.”

“Neither did I. But he’s not coming here. There’ll be some other men we probably won’t like much either, but he won’t be one of them.”

She said, “Are those other two coming back?”

“Probably. Maybe.”

“What do they want?”

“I was carrying something I shouldn’t have been carrying.”

“Tobacco,” she nodded.

“Right.”

“Tobacco is bad for you.” Still nodding.

“I know. They think I was smuggling it. Do you know what that means?”

“I do. But you were only carrying it.”

“They don’t see the difference as plainly as you do, I’m afraid.”

“Tell them.”

“I will.”

“Tell them why we’re here.”

“I will.”

“Tell them why we left home.”

“I’ll do my best. I promise.”

“I know.”

They waited. Lights burned yellow in the hallway, visible through steel mesh embedded in a square glass window. They heard footsteps come and go but they didn’t see anyone.

After a while the two men came back and a third man with them. The third one was older and impatient. Broad-shouldered in spite of his age and narrow at the waist and disdainful of them all. Not just of Weller and Penny but of the other men too. He was taller than either of them by a head and his uniform was different. The same design but not made in the same way. It was custom and it fit him like the skin of a horse fits a horse and he looked as if he had been born for the purpose of wearing it.

The one who’d done the driving lifted Penny from her father’s lap while the other one bound Weller’s hands behind his back. As if he might try something right here in One Police Plaza of all places. The tall man shook his head at the idiocy of bothering. Told them to come.

Down the hall and down other halls. Through checkpoints and turnstiles and tight clusters of armed men. The tall man led the way and he said just the bare minimum to anyone they met if he spoke at all. At the end of one hallway he unlocked a steel door and threw it open to a set of concrete stairs going down and they passed through one at a time. First the tall man and then Penny and then the one who’d done the driving and then Weller. The first three passed all right but a klaxon sounded when Weller’s turn came. Not on Penny’s turn. The scanner was mounted at neck height and she undershot it, and if there was a scale in the floor she was too small to register. As if she were a mail cart or something. But a klaxon sounded when her father came through and red lights they hadn’t even noticed high on the walls began strobing like it was the end of the world. Like everybody had better get out while the getting was good.

The tall man snarled at the driver and backed up. Pushed Weller aside and got in front of the scanner and waited there showing himself to it until the pattern of the alarm slowed and the flashing of the lights slowed and a little metallic square mounted alongside the door began to glow green. His presence calming the circuitry. He put his thumb on the little green square and held it there until the lights quit flashing and the alarm died, and then he kept it there while Weller and the other man went through. Looking like he wanted to push both of them down the stairs or raise his pistol and shoot them dead and let them fall because it would require less effort,.

The door at the bottom of the stairs was painted with the wheat-stalk logo. The stylized suggestion of amber waves. Behind it was a figure in full camouflage, a patch of that PharmAgra brown and green visible through a reinforced glass window. The well-known brown and green that drew a snicker from the man behind Weller. Like what kind of bumpkin wore an outfit like that. And even when the door swung open and the man behind it turned out to be bigger than any two ordinary men and armed with sufficient firepower to level One Police Plaza and the camouflage he was wearing wasn’t a regular uniform at all but a hazmat suit with dual air tanks on the back and a helmet like a diving bell, the last man kept that amused look on his face. Like he was born to it the way the tall man was born to wear his uniform.

They handed them over. The one man removing Weller’s handcuffs as roughly as he possibly could. Making a show of it. The tall man taking a manila envelope from the man in the hazmat suit and unsealing it and signing three copies of something. Keeping two and handing one over. Then they went back up the stairs toward the locked door. The door with the big red National Motors star on it. The tall man unlocked it and another one drew it open and they all passed on through.

*

The man in the hazmat suit didn’t say a word from inside his diving bell. He probably couldn’t have made himself heard if he’d tried, but they were at the end of a long corridor and the door was sealed behind them so there was only one way to go. They went. Warnings on the walls about contamination and a red stripe down the middle of the floor and that individual in the hazmat suit breathing air that hissed in and out.