Flashback

2.01 The 10 and La Cienega, Los Angeles—Saturday, Sept. 11

Billy Coyne and Val were leading the other boys up the lashed-bamboo scaffolding to the Saturday Open Air Market on the collapsed section of the 10 when suddenly from the slab above and from the city below there came the unmistakable sound of hundreds of AK-47s firing into the air, amplified cries from muezzin calling out to the faithful from scores of L.A.’s minarets, church bells in the city ringing, and shouts from the Open Air Market they were heading for, as well as from the shaded surface streets below, of “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

All of the boys froze in their climbing, thinking that it was a hajji attack or suicide bomber.

Then Val realized that this was Los Angeles celebrating the events of that old holiday called 9-11, September 11, 2001, the date—as Val had been taught in school—of the beginning of successful resistance to the old imperialist American hegemony and a turning point in the creation of the New Caliphate and other hopeful signs of the New World Order. He knew that the Christian churches were ringing their bells in their annual attempt to join in the celebrations of hajjis at scores of Los Angeles’s mosques and to show their solidarity, understanding, and forgiveness.

Behind the climbing boys, in the direction of L.A.’s downtown, someone was sending red and orange rockets to crash and explode against the glass sides of the old city towers in an effort to enhance the citywide celebration. All eight boys climbed off the scaffolding onto the I-10 slab and watched the downtown show for a moment. Toohey, Cruncher, and Dinjin were cheering until they noticed that the older guys in the group weren’t. Then they shut up, but still pumped their fists whenever a new rocket exploded against the side of a stumpy skyscraper.

As they turned back toward the market stalls, Val was reminded why there’d been so much shooting from the slab; a majority of the so-called gypsy vendors here were hajji—or at least of Mideastern descent—and most of the high-end stuff they were selling came into the country with the hajjis during their flights back from their homes in Pakistan or Indonesia or the Euro-Caliphates or that mother of all Caliphate nations, the Greater Islamic Republic, which curved across the former countries of the Mideast—Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Sudan—like a scimitar’s blade. Unlike all the other kids he knew, Val had enjoyed geography in school and sometimes brought up maps on his phone’s virtual screen so he could study them. They changed so quickly.

He also liked learning about history, but he blamed that on his grandfather. Leonard just gabbled on about it so much that some of it had to rub off on Val when he was younger.

Val did wonder how—at a time when even domestic flights within what was left of the U.S.A. cost millions of new bucks—these towelheads could afford to fly across the oceans so frequently. Probably ’cause of the profit on the chillshit crap they’re selling right here in front of you, stupid, thought Val.

He had to admit that most of it was good chillshit crap.

The double line of market stalls ran about a hundred yards and the long space between the brightly canopied tables was already filled with early shoppers. Coyne nudged Val and nodded in each direction and Val understood that the older boy was pointing out the two pairs of LAPD cops in full black body armor at each end of the market and the mini-drones buzzing and hovering overhead. The cops’ blunt, black automatic weapons reminded Val of why they were there.

But first they followed Toohey and Monk and the other younger boys to some of the fun stalls.

A few of the tables had women behind them and most of them wore just hijabs, although others, sitting behind the bearded men at the tables, were in full burkas. Val noticed the bright blue eyes of one young woman in a burka and could swear that she was Cindy from his Wednesday Social Responsibility class. He’d watched her eyes in class often enough.

“Chillshit stuff!” cried Sully. “Double chillshit stuff!”

The boys were clustered around the interactive-T-shirt tables. This was serious clothing, most of it costing $500,000 new bucks and up, but Coyne always seemed to have money on his card, so everyone in the gang looked.

An old, black-bearded hajji was holding up one of the longer and more expensive black T-shirts. The 3D image of Jeffrey Dahmer (an old serial killer who’d been having quite a resurgence of public and scholarly interest since the HBO series starring Gillie Gibson had started streaming) ran full length down the back of the black T-shirt. The cannibal (the real Dahmer, not the actor) was in the act of fucking one of the empty eye sockets in the skull of one of his victims. As Gene D. approached the offered shirt, Dahmer stopped his frenzied motion and, still holding the skull against his crotch, looked back over his shoulder at Gene D., Dahmer’s head seeming to emerge from the black cloth like a face rising out of a lake of oil, while the AI in the fabric said in a voice from hell, “You… yeah, you, the kid with the pimples in the red shirt… I got an eyehole free here. You want to join me?”

Gene D. jumped backward and the seven other boys and twenty or thirty nearby shoppers roared with laughter. The old women in burkas chuckled and turned away modestly while lifting their veils higher. The hajji holding the shirt showed missing teeth through the black barbed wire of his beard.

“This is the one I’m interested in,” said Coyne and pointed to a T-shirt in the back. One of the hajji’s teenaged assistants, a kid no older than Val with wispy attempts at a beard and wearing a coolshit hajji hat and bandolier over his vest and khaki shirt, held up the shirt Coyne wanted to see.

There was just a speck in the center of this T-shirt. But the speck grew larger—became a shirtless man walking toward the viewer—and pretty soon you could see the rapidly approaching man’s face. Vladimir Putin.

“Oh, chillshit sweet,” hummed Sully.

“Shut up, Sully,” said Coyne.

Putin continued walking toward Coyne until just Czar Vladimir’s powerful bare upper body and muscled arms and head filled the back of the shirt. Then just Putin’s face. Then just Putin’s narrowed eyes.

“God, he must be about a hundred and fifty years old,” said Monk, his voice hushed in the presence of the world’s longest-reigning strongman. And “strongman,” with Putin, could be interpreted literally as well.

“Just eighty,” said Val without thinking about it. “He was born in nineteen fifty-two… six years before my grandfather.”

“Shut up,” said Coyne. “Listen.”

Turning its head to squint more directly at Coyne, the Putin image said, “Moio sudno na vozdušnoy poduške polno ugrey.” Each syllable cracked like a bullet.

Coyne laughed wildly.

Val’s head snapped around. Does Coyne really understand that Russian shit? Was Billy the C’s mother Russian? Val couldn’t remember.

“What’s it mean, Coyne, huh?” asked Monk. “What’d he say?”

Coyne waved the question away. To the Putin eyes, he said, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, skol’ko eto stoit? Footbalka?”

Putin’s head and powerful shoulders suddenly came up and out of the shirt. Val jerked back a step. In some weird way, this was scarier than the Dahmer cannibal.

“Eight hundred thousand bucks,” said Putin in thickly accented English, smiling thinly at Coyne while shooting glances at the other boys. Toohey, Cruncher, Dinjin, Sully, Monk, and Gene D. stepped back with Val.

“New bucks,” added Putin. Then smiling even more thinly, he asked Coyne, “Are you trying to hang noodle soup on my ears, droog?”

“Nyet,” said Coyne with another manic laugh. “Davajte perejdjom na ‘ty,’ Vladimir Vladimirovich.”

“Poshjoi ty!” snapped the Putin AI, laughing nastily.

Risking a brush-off from Coyne, Val said, “What’s that mean?”

“It means Fuck you,” said Coyne. His laughter was strangely like the Putin AI’s.

“What did you say to him?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Coyne turned to the bearded hajji. “I’ll take the Putin shirt.”

The hajji scanned Coyne’s NICC and looked at the boy with something like respect. The teenager with the bandolier folded the T-shirt and was getting out a paper bag to put it in.

“No, I’ll wear it,” said Coyne. Unbuttoning the blue flannel shirt he was wearing and tossing it toward the trash, the tall boy tugged on the new black T-shirt. Val noticed the 9mm Beretta tucked into the back of Coyne’s jeans, but he wasn’t sure if anyone else did. Coyne didn’t seem to care.

“Some krutoj paren’,” said the Putin face that now filled the front of the shirt.

“What’s that mean?” whined Monk.

“Tough guy,” answered Coyne. Pulling the fabric of the shirt up a bit so he could look down at the face, Coyne said to Putin, “You’re kljovyj blin, old dude. Real coolshit. And a real shishka. Now shut up while we finish our shopping.”

The gang of eight guys spread out so as not to be so conspicuous. Also, they were interested in different things.

Toohey, Cruncher, Dinjin, and Sully went off to see the new games pirated in from Japan, Russia, Consolidated Korea, India, and the other high-tech countries. Gene D., still blushing fiercely at being called pimply by the Dahmer AI, stalked off by himself. Monk followed Coyne when the leader walked down the row of stalls to browse expensive—nothing under a million bucks—new VR and other optics. Alone, Val slumped along the stalls, ignoring the cries from the vendors and the shoves from the crowd—not worrying that his pocket might be picked since he had no cash today anyway and had left his NICC at home.

One long table presided over by two hajji Afghans wearing Taliban government clothing was heaped high with fatigue jackets, combat boots, and cheap body armor from American soldiers. Dinjin and the other younger kids, who still liked to wear such crap, loved to say that this surplus stuff was all taken from dead U.S. soldiers in China and South America—and usually there was at least one blasted and bloodstained piece of dragonarmor to support such a theory—but Val was old enough to know that most of it was just stolen from the U.S. Army fighting as mercenaries for Japan and India during the long and corrupt logistics trip to the shifting front lines.

For a guy now sixteen and staring at conscription just eleven months and a few days away, Val wasn’t in the least tempted to wear castoff U.S. Army or marine clothing. He’d get his real boots and uniform and fatigues and subdural bar code soon enough.

Billy Coyne’s older brother, Brad, had his parents buy him out of the draft. Then Brad had gone on to join the Aryan Brotherhood and ended up in a sort of uniform anyway. Plus a lot more efficient body armor and with cooler guns than the poorly equipped U.S. soldiers were using to fight warlords and Hugonistas. (It was Brad’s story that made Coyne even more respected and accepted as a leader of this pathetic little white-boy flashgang, Val knew.)

When Val had told his grandfather about Brad—at least the part about Brad and Billy’s folks buying his way out of the draft—and then asked whether his grandfather could do that for him, Leonard had just stared at him as if he’d gone insane.

Sometimes Val felt sorry that he’d first thought of killing his grandfather when Coyne showed him the Beretta. After all, Val knew that the old man didn’t mean to be a total asshole. He was just trained that way as an academic.

Val had just come to an expensive table where different types of roll-up and fold-up and other flexible and micro-thin 3D-high-def displays were being shown off. Since this table was also being run by hajji “importers”—Val had long since realized that the Open Air Market was the safest place in Los Angeles to be today since there was zero chance of a suicide bomber setting his vest and himself or herself off here—they had the displays tuned to the inevitable English-language Al Jazeera stoning and beheading death channels, but they were also showing various 9-11 ceremonies around the country and around the world.

Several of the feeds were from the relatively new Shahid al-Haram Mosque which had been built on the so-called Ground Zero or World Trade Center site in New York. Val thought that the mosque was beautiful, a sort of taller, more elegant and jet-black Taj Mahal. Right now New York’s mayor, the U.S. vice president, and New York’s chief imam were taking turns saying hopeful things near the hole where that stupid World Trade Center had once risen and then the 9-11 Memorial and a new Freedom Tower had been attempted before both had been destroyed in turn.

It made sense to Val that the site should be the place for North America’s largest mosque to rise. No one’s going to attack a mosque. (Although the Greater Islamic Republic, which was Shi’ite, Leonard had explained to Val, might do so, since the Shahid al-Haram Mosque was Sunni.) Leonard had also explained to Val that Shahid al-Haram meant something like Martyrs of the Holy Place, which evidently had irritated some old-think right-wingers and die-hard American hegemonists.

But some weeks ago, Val had come into the tiny TV room in their basement apartment to find his grandfather watching some show praising the Shahid al-Haram Mosque—and two hundred other huge, new mosques currently being built or just completed in the United States (not counting the Republic of Texas, of course, which was not part of the U.S. and was not mosque-friendly)—and damned if old Leonard wasn’t blubbering silently. What the fuck was that about?

His grandfather had been embarrassed, telling the shocked and equally embarrassed Val that he only had a head cold, but it had started Val thinking—What if Leonard goes Alzheimer’s on me? What do I do then?

But a day later, over a rare shared microwave-zapped dinner, Leonard had gone all teachy and preachy on Val, trying to tell him all about what it had been like on the real 9-11, and all about himself—he’d been teaching The Etymology of John Keats’s Ass or some such crap at the University of Colorado in Boulder and had been between wives and raising Val’s three-year-old mom at the time, going to school and joining other instructors in the faculty lounge as they watched the aftermath of the martyrs’ planes crashing into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and…

Val had cut him off. Who gave the slightest sparrowfart about such ancient history? What was he, Val, supposed to do next—get all emotionally worked up about Stonewall Jackson getting killed at Gettysburg? It was all old and done and dead, man.

Stonewall Jackson died before the Battle of Gettysburg was Leonard’s pedantic response.

Well, had been Val’s withering riposte, this right-wing anti-Caliphate crap died before Leonard had gotten senile. Like all American kids, Val had studied the Q’uran since kindergarten and Islam was the Religion of Peace—any dickshit knew that. Why would Leonard get all blubbery about the beautiful Mosque of the Martyrs of the Holy Place in New York? What did he want? demanded Val. For them to move warmonger Greg Dubbya Bush’s bones to New York and build a crypt for them there?

“George W. Bush” had been Leonard’s sad response.

Then Val had gone out to be with the flashgang all that night and the next morning and the conversation was never picked up again.

But now, looking at the New York mayor and vice president slobbering all over the scowling, bearded New York chief imam on the TV images, Val felt uneasy for reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Maybe it had to do with all the hajjis here at the open market ripping everyone off. Or maybe it was as stupid as all those American boots and uniforms being piled up and sold as if they really had just been stripped off dead American soldiers on some unpronounceable Chinese battlefield.

Val shook his head to chase away stupid thoughts and sidled over to the gun table—the reason they’d come here this morning—to watch from a distance as Coyne tried to make his purchase.

Coyne was the oldest and tallest and darkest of the eight of them—his attempt to grow a beard wasn’t completely successful, but at least he’d achieved some good, dark stubble—and although he couldn’t tamper with his NICC, he had a separate military-exemption card, originally Brad’s and then fucked around with by Brad’s AB buddies, that said he was over eighteen. Obviously, if Coyne scored with the guns he wanted, he’d have to pay cash… but he seemed to have the cash.

The hajji in charge of the gun table had shooed Toohey and the other boys away—the cop and DHS mini-drones were buzzing and hovering just a few hundred feet overhead—and now the bearded Iranian glowered suspiciously at Coyne. But the military-exemption card seemed to pass his scanner’s inspection. When the scowling hajji demanded Coyne’s NICC, Coyne smiled, shrugged, and said he hadn’t brought it—just his army-out card and a lot of cash. He was a hunter, you see, and wanted to stock up on some new weapons before deer season was over in Idaho.

That last line was such Coyne-ish bullshit that Val had to turn his face away at the nearby table where he was pretending to inspect some VRI glasses from Brazil. It was either turn away or laugh.

The hajji wasn’t laughing, Val could see in the mirror provided for those trying on the glasses, but neither did he appear to be buying Coyne’s bullshit. Still, the bearded men in the stall didn’t chase Coyne away from the table. They were letting him inspect the guns.

Coyne had been able to buy two more guns for the gang at the Old Plaza but the weapons were crap: a .38 revolver that went back to Raymond Chandler days—Val did love to read, despite himself—and a new, plastic, folding frame-grip Indonesian pistol that fired toy biodegradable .228 cartridges, the whole thing designed to sneak aboard an airliner sometime in the happy hajji past. Gene D. was carrying the .38 belly gun—it had a two-inch barrel—and Monk had been placated with the Indonesian toy.

Coyne hadn’t yet told the gang where or how they were supposed to do this endlessly flashable hit on an important Jap, but he was insisting that they all needed weapons and that he needed at least one serious auto-flechette mini-gun. To Val, he’d whispered that he’d give him the 9mm Beretta, which pleased Val. He’d liked the heft and feel of the gun in his hand and he was still having images of shooting his old man in the belly with one of those big dum-dummed bullets.

Coyne was lifting and checking the balance of a modern black, blocky OAO Izhmash flechette-spewer. It seemed to be what the flashgang leader wanted and he’d started dickering with the hajji when the glowering carpet-bumper, with a quick glance at the mini-drones overhead and the four LAPD black knights now walking the length of the stalls, suddenly and angrily waved Coyne away from the table.

Coyne shrugged and slouched away. But he was grinning when Val caught up to him at the games table.

“The nasty old fudge-packer slipped me this, Val.” Coyne showed him a tiny green card with the address of a street Val knew to be under another condemned slab and a pencil-scribbled 2400 on the card. “Midnight market,” whispered Coyne. “Tomorrow night. Towelhead’ll sell me three of those beautiful OAO fuckers—more if I have the money—and by Monday we’ll be set. You sure you don’t want a mini-gun?”

Val shook his head. “I like the Beretta.”

Coyne grinned and punched him on the arm just as the other guys showed up.

“Hey, B.C., saw you get chased away by the hajji stud,” shouted Cruncher. “When we gonna hear about when we get to zip the Nip, zap the… ooof!”

This last noise was as the air went out of the big, slobby boy after Coyne had punched him—not at all in a friendly way—deep in the gut. Coyne hit him again and Cruncher went down like a bag of laundry. As the other boys stepped back, Coyne flicked a fast finger up at the drones.

One of the LAPD black-armored wraiths swiveled at the sound of Cruncher hitting the pavement and spoke into his helmet mike. The three other cops also then swiveled Coyne’s way, their movements smooth and oily as those of robots in a sci-fi movie, and visors snicked down as the cops magnified the scene.

Grinning broadly, Coyne showed empty palms in the cops’ direction and then offered his hand to help Cruncher up. Val started laughing stupidly as if it were all just play and a few of the smarter guys in the gang followed suit. Cruncher got up, scowling, his lower lip thrust out like a sulking four-year-old’s, and Coyne led the way to the nearest down-ladder, his arm around the fat boy. Just a bunch of dumbshit homies on their early-morning adventure out to the grown-ups’ market.

Three blocks away and in the musty-smelling darkness under an angled, low-hanging, block-long tumbled slab of the 10 and safely out of sight or mike-range of any interested thing aerial or on foot, Coyne hit Cruncher again, this time full in the mouth.

Val heard teeth snap off and watched coldly as the heavy, stupid fat boy went down again.

“You stupid fuck,” snarled Coyne, standing astride the fallen Cruncher. “You fucking stupid cunt-stupid fuck. Do you think this is a fucking game? Don’t you know that you can get us all killed? Dropped in the ass-fucking Dodger Stadium DHSDC hole for the rest of our fucking lives? Do you want to be manpussy for spanic and nigger humpbugger killers for the rest of your fucking life?”

Coyne twirled, fists still clenched and face still distorted into a snarling mask, to face the others—to face everyone, Val knew, except Val—and screamed, “Do you, you pansyassed motherfuckers? You want to get yourself picked up by DHS and tortured or just offed, fucking do it! But don’t do it to me, goddamn you, or I’ll do it to you first, you fuckheads!”

Suddenly the Beretta was in Coyne’s right hand. Thinking about it later, Val still couldn’t see him reaching back for it, making the motion toward it. One second Coyne’s hand was a fist and in the next second—the black muzzle-circle of death was moving, aiming at all of them one after the other.

Everybody except Val was babbling an apology, was swearing he wouldn’t fuck up, was saying he’d never say anything where anyone could hear it. Even Cruncher was spewing apologies along with shards of his broken teeth and gobbets of blood from his pulped lips.

Everyone was talking except Val.

Coyne aimed the Beretta—Val’s Beretta it was supposed to be—straight at Val’s face. “Do you understand, shitstain? Are you going to keep your mouth shut?”

Hurt, Val could only blink and nod. He felt a strange sensation with the gun aimed at him—a crawling around his scrotum, as if his testicles wanted to crawl back up inside his body, and a sudden urge to hide behind someone, anyone, even himself.

Val heard himself say, “You haven’t told us how and where we can kill a Jap yet.”

Coyne smiled, slid the gun under his now attentive and grimly smiling Putin shirt, and nodded in return. He gestured everyone into a crouching circle. Even Cruncher struggled to his knees to join.

“Not a Jap,” whispered Coyne. “The Jap. Daichi Omura himself. The California Advisor.”

Some of the boys whistled. Cruncher tried to but just winced and touched his ruined lips and broken teeth with tentative fingers.

“Shut up,” Coyne said. Everyone shut up.

“This Friday evening, they’re having a big city thing rededicating the Disney Performing Arts Center down on Grand Avenue in the city center. The spanic mayor and everyone’ll be there, but no one but the top guys and us knows that Advisor Omura’s showing up, coming down from the Green Zone and Getty Castle in a motorcade. I know right when he’ll arrive—to the second—and where the armored limo will pull up and which side Omura will get out of the car on and where the bodyguards will be.”

“But how could…,” squeaked Dinjin and was slapped into silence by Toohey or one of the others.

Val, still blushing with anger and embarrassment, understood. Coyne had so much money because his divorced mother worked for the city—worked as liaison for the Advisor’s office and the city. Worked in the transportation department.

“And we’ll be there waiting,” said Coyne. Looking from face to face.

Gene D. was shaking his head. “I’ve seen that sorta thing on TV, B.C. And no disrespect or nothing, but… I mean… like… we ain’t going to get within ten blocks of that Performing Arts place and whatever’s goin’ on inside. Especially if the Advisor’s going to be there. It’d be like a pope visiting and…”

“They killed a pope not long ago,” interrupted Coyne.

Gene D. nodded, shook his head, found his strand again. “No, I mean… you know… there’s going to be state troopers and whatchamacallims… the federal guys…”

“Homeland,” said a sullen Sully.

“Yeah, but no,” said Gene D., “that’s not who I mean. Those other federal guys…”

“The State Department Office of Security,” said Coyne, showing everyone how patient he was being.

“Yeah. And not only them but the Jap protection guys as well…,” said Gene D. and sort of wound down. It was a pretty impressive showing by a not very impressive kid, thought Val.

When Val spoke, he was amazed how normal—even solid—his voice sounded, given that he’d almost pissed himself a minute or so earlier when Coyne had pointed the Beretta at him.

“What Gene D.’s saying,” said Val, “is that we couldn’t get close, and even if we did get close, we couldn’t kill Omura without getting gunned down by his security, and even if we did somehow get close and kill the Advisor and not get killed ourselves, we’d never get away. The whole city would go apeshit. They’d have our faces on every sat channel before we got half a block away… which we wouldn’t get anyway.”

Val heard how lame that finish had been, but he left it that way and crossed his arms.

Coyne smiled. “You’re absolutely right, my man. Except for one thing. Sewers. I know the sewers and how to get there and where to wait and which one to shoot from and which ones to get away in.”

Toohey made a scrunchy face. “Forget it, man. I ain’t crawling through shit to kill no one.”

Coyne rolled his eyes. “Not shit-sewers, stupid. Storm sewers. Rain runoff sewers. The city’s riddled with them.”

Val again remembered the 1954 movie Them about the giant ants and the finale where FBI guy James Arness and his sidekick, whatshisname, chased down the ants in the storm sewers that ran into the usually dry Los Angeles River with army Jeeps and big trucks roaring down the echoing underground corridors. Val’s old man had loved that movie for some stupid reason—probably because Val’s mother also loved it—and when Val was little, he’d loved watching the idiot black-and-white flatfilm with both his parents, the little room in the little house smelling of popcorn and the sprung old couch crowded…

He came up out of it—the memory had been almost as compelling as a flash, but only because he had flashed on those experiences so many times with the drug—and said, “No, Coyne. No. It’s not like the city and Jap security people don’t also know about those sewers. When someone like the Advisor goes somewhere public, I’ve read where they weld the sewer openings closed for a mile or so around…” Val could see Coyne grinning but he went ahead anyway. “Not just the round manhole-type sewer-sewers that Toohey was talking about, but storm sewer openings, too. Weld them shut or seal them up somehow.”

The grin stayed on Coyne’s smug face so Val shut up. He realized that his arms were still crossed. He wasn’t buying any of Coyne’s bullshit. And he hadn’t liked having the muzzle of a loaded gun aimed at him. He wasn’t going to forget that.

As if sensing Val’s hostility, the flashgang’s leader set his hand on Val’s shoulder. His voice was soft, reasonable. “You’re absolutely right, Valerino. City security and State Department Security and DHS security and Omura’s own ninja guys will all make sure that all windows in nearby buildings will be sealed against snipers, all rooftops checked, all unauthorized vehicles hauled away, and all sewers—those carrying Toohey’s shit and those for storms—will be sealed up…”

Coyne waited several beats like the son of a movie actor he was, his gaze moving from face to face—even to Cruncher’s ruined face—and then he said, “But this storm sewer opening outside the Disney Pavilion is already sealed up. Has been for years and years. All the computer files say it’s a permanent weld-job, but it ain’t. It’s an old rusty iron door made out of panels with a steel grate inside. We can cut through the grate ahead of time. And…”

Coyne looked around the faces again, drawing it out.

“… and I’ve got the fucking key for the iron panels.”

Six of the seven other boys started babbling and jostling one another.

“They’ll never see us,” said Coyne. “We’ll shoot the Jap VIP from the sewer opening, just cut him down like a weed, and be gone before his security can turn around. We lock the iron panels behind us. By the time they get down into the sewers, we’re a mile away through the whatchamacallit—labyrinth—of those old storm sewers, already out on the streets and blending with the crowds. I even know where to dump the guns on the way so they’ll never be found.”

The babbling and jostling stopped and all eight boys just looked at one another. Even Cruncher quit mopping his bleeding mouth.

“Holy shit,” Val whispered at last. “It might work. Holy shit.”

“We’ll flash on this for years,” said Coyne.

“Holy shit,” repeated Val.

“Holy shit and amen,” Coyne said, blessing everyone with his fingers like he was the new pope who’d taken over for the dead one.

“Yurodivy!” said the thinly smiling, smirking, full-face T-shirt image of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. “You are all… holy fools.”