Hardbingers

5

Jack listened with a growing sense of dread as the Oculus described his visions.

When he'd stopped his seizure and come to, Miller had helped him back to his desk where he now sat, looking pale and shaken.

"They're… they're going to paralyze the whole city," Davis said in a hushed tone.

Jack agreed. Subway nexuses like West 4th and 59th Street, a bus, a railway center, a bridge… and those might be just a sampling. But even if they were the whole plot, these bombings would affect the entire city—much more so than the London bombs affected the Brits. Those hadn't played out against the backdrop of the fall of the Trade Towers or the LaGuardia Massacre. New Yorkers didn't have the history of terrorism the Brits had suffered from the IRA. Millions of people, afraid to step on a train or a bus, would stay home. The city would grind to a halt.

Miller kicked a wall. "Where do we find these fucks?"

"I… don't know."

That set Jack back.

"You don't know? Last time you told them Cailin's exact location."

The Oculus had the heels of his palms pressed against his temples.

"You have to understand, these Alarms are like short-wave radio. The reception isn't consistent. Sometimes it fluctuates and the images fade in and out. Reception last time was excellent: I saw the intersection, saw the front of the building, saw the cellar door. But this time…"

"You said you saw a man in a room… anything about the room that'll give us a clue? Like, if maybe he belongs to Wrath of Allah?"

The Oculus lifted his head. "Wrath of Allah? Why them, rather than Al Qaeda?"

Jack didn't want to get into the personal score he had to settle with Wrath of Allah.

"They did LaGuardia. It's the same kind of MO."

The Oculus shook his head. "'No, no posters or anything. Just a room… bare walls… wait. Out the window, to the left, I saw a bridge—and not too faraway."

"The Brooklyn?"

"No, it was arched, two levels—"

Davis and Jack spoke in unison: "The Verrazano."

Jack said, "Day or night?"

"Day. Bright sunlight outside."

"Where was it angling from?"

"From above and behind it, I think… no, I'm sure. The side toward me was in shadow."

Jack said, "Could be Bay Ridge."

"Yeah," Miller said softly, menace edging his voice. "Lots of mosques in Bay Ridge. And only a few miles from here."

But something about this bothered Jack.

"So am I to take it that the Ally is anti-Islam? Pro-U.S. and anti-Arab? When did it become politicized?"

Miller laughed. "Yeah, that's right—the Ally is a Republican."

The Oculus cleared his throat. "The Otherness feeds on anything that causes fear, pain, and discord. As does the Adversary. The Ally warned us about nine-eleven, but we weren't able to find the culprits in time."

"You mean you didn't call it in?"

"Of course we did—to the FBI, the CIA, the NYPD—but we didn't know who or when. So our warnings were ignored. Obviously."

"Why did the Ally choose you? 'Cause you're in New York?"

"For major conflagrations, all Oculi receive the same vision. For minor occurrences—like the girl—only I, being the nearest, would receive that Alarm. In the nine-eleven matter, a number of us in the Eastern states donated yeniceri to the search."

Miller held up a thumb and forefinger, a quarter inch between them. "Missed the fuckers by this much."

"Oh, what a feast that must have been for the Adversary," the Oculus said. "I was also shown the pain and fear caused by the terrorism in Iraq after the conquest, but there was nothing we could do to prevent that."

As awful as 9/11 had been, the LaGuardia Massacre had had much more of an impact on Jack's life.

"What about LaGuardia?" Jack said. "Were you warned about that?"

The Oculus lowered his gaze to the desktop. "In a way."

"But you couldn't prevent that either?"

"Prevent it? No."

"We can do something to prevent this," Davis said. He turned to Jack. "You with us?"

This was all moving too fast. He'd come here to learn a little more about these folks, but now he was being pressured into joining them on an operation.

He didn't like it, but how could he say no?

These bombings would hurt the city more than 9/11 and LaGuardia combined. Unlike Jack, the city had already bounced back from LaGuardia. In both cases people could tell themselves that they worked in a bagel shop or a bookstore or a sweatshop and that no one was going to fly a plane into those places, or hose them with machine-gun fire. The average Joes and Janes could figure they were too small-time to be a target.

But this tactic would have a wider effect: If the subways and buses and trains and bridges they rode on every day could be blown up, so could they.

If the Oculus's visions were real and true—and Jack still needed convincing on that score—he couldn't walk away.

"Let's just say I do tag along. What's the plan?"

Miller's smile flickered on and off. "Simple. Find 'em, finish 'em, and forget 'em."

"Like in that cellar the other night?"

"Right."

Davis said, "Except there's a lot more at stake here than a little girl."

Jack saw the find em part as a major problem. He turned to the Oculus.

"How much time do we have?"

"I don't know. The visions have no time sequence. For instance, in the matter of the girl, I was shown her after they'd finished with her." He shuddered. "That was what would have happened had we not intervened."

"So we may have a day, a week, a month?"

"I wish I could say. The nine-eleven warning came on September second."

Jack had a feeling this warning would be equally fruitless. Finding an Arab terrorist cell in Bay Ridge… good luck.

But what did they know so far? The northern flank of the Verrazano Bridge was visible from the cell's window. That narrowed the area to Bay Ridge's western rim.

Not narrow enough. Not nearly enough.

"Are these Alarms ever repeated?"

The Oculus shook his head. "Never."

Swell.

"Okay, can you remember seeing anything else through that window? Anything at all?"

He closed his black eyes and leaned back. "Let me see if 1 can reconstruct it."

For a while the only sound in the room was breathing, then the Oculus's eyes popped open as he stiffened in his chair.

"The building across the street. I saw the bridge across its roof. It had a redbrick front."

Jack suppressed a groan. Probably ninety percent of the buildings in Bay Ridge had redbrick facing.

"Anything else? A funny chimney, a crazy antenna, a satellite dish—anything to make it stand out?"

"No, just—wait. The cornice! The building had a faded yellow cornice carved with a drape flanked by two inverted hearts."

Jack rubbed his vaguely itchy scars. "West Bay Ridge, in sight of the Ver-razano, across the street from a redbrick building with a pretty specific cornice design." He looked at Davis and Miller. "That sounds doable to me. How about you?"

Davis and Miller nodded.

Jack sighed. Looked like he'd just become a double secret temporary yeniceri in the Militia Vigilum.

But no black suit. No way was he climbing into a black suit.