"Veil . . . ?" "It's all right. Nagle doesn't know we're here. You stay right where you are."
Reyna's voice was a croaking whisper. "Toby?"
"No sign of him, but a lot of men are pointing toward a building under construction. He must be in there someplace."
"Thank God he's still alive," Reyna said in a small voice. "Are there police?"
"Yes."
"Veil, maybe we should talk to them now. This is getting pretty hairy."
"Hang in there, sweetheart. Remember, if Toby is taken into custody, the odds are overwhelming that he'll die— and his tribe along with him."
"I just don't want him to die now."
"There's still time. Nobody's gone into the building yet, and Nagle's still in his car. I want to see what he's up to."
Veil waited, and after another minute Nagle began speaking into his microphone. Down the street, a uniformed officer leaned into his car, obviously listening to his radio. Nagle released the transmit button on his microphone, waited a few seconds, then pressed it and spoke again. The patrolman suddenly began shouting orders to the other police on the scene as he pointed to his left.
"Veil . . . ?"
"Nagle's working on his own, Reyna. He's feeding phony information to the police down the street now."
Even as Veil spoke, there was a flurry of activity among the group of policemen by the building; they ran to their cars, got in, and drove off. The crowd that had been milling in the street and on the sidewalk gradually began to disperse. One man reached down into a garbage bin and retrieved a shotgun from where he had hurriedly thrown it at the approach of the police. He and six other men walked halfway up the block, then disappeared into a bar.
"Veil . . . ?"
"Shhh. Just stay there."
Almost ten minutes passed. Then the door of the car across the street opened. Nagle stepped out and began walking casually down the middle of the street, toward the building skeleton. In one hand he carried a powerful flashlight, and in the other what appeared to be an Uzi submachine gun equipped with a custom-made silencer. He stepped up on the sidewalk and vanished through an opening in the fence surrounding the construction site.
"Nagle's gone into the building," Veil continued as he opened the door and got out. "You stay put. Lock the doors."
"Veil?" Reyna cried out as she sat up and reached for him. "What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to kill the son of a bitch," he replied evenly as he blew Reyna a kiss, then closed the door.
Veil, moving as silently as death, ran down the street and across the intersection to the construction site. He waited, pressed back against the fence next to the opening, listening. When he heard nothing, he darted through the opening, angling across to the opposite side. There he crouched low in the darkness, listening again. This time he heard the faint, shuffling sound of footsteps on wood scaffolding.
Suddenly a bright cone of light from Nagle's flashlight pierced the darkness on the second floor of the steel skeleton. There were more shuffling footsteps, then the clatter of loose boards. Veil thought he heard a faint, low rumble, as if Nagle were talking to himself.
Veil straightened up and moved off to his right. At the corner of the building he reached up and gripped a steel girder, then began to climb up the grid work. Suddenly he heard a can clatter, back near the entrance. He turned his head in time to see the unmistakable figure of Reyna—a master tracker undone and made careless by her terror of the monster that was Carl Nagle—trip and fall through the opening in the fence. A moment later she cried out in pain.
Veil immediately released his grip on the steel and dropped back to the ground. He landed, then sprinted through the rubble-strewn darkness toward where Reyna lay at the bottom of a wedge of dim light cast by street lamps. Without slowing his pace he ran through the light, reaching down as he did so and grabbing a handful of Reyna's jacket, jerking her off the ground and carrying her to the other side of the opening just as a burst of fire, sounding like nothing so much as a person spitting watermelon seeds at an impossibly fast clip, raked across the fence just above Veil's head. He fell on top of Reyna to shield her with his body, holding her head down with his hand, burying his own head in her thick hair and waiting as the pfft-pfft sound of bullets striking wood slowed in tempo—then stopped.
Veil got up on his hands and knees and, pulling Reyna along with him by her belt, scurried forward to the shelter of a wide support girder.
"Shh, shh," Veil intoned to the whimpering Reyna as he held her tight. Her eyes were wide with horror, and her breath came in short, panting gasps. "You have to control it, Reyna. Shh."
Finally Reyna was able to control her sobbing, although she continued to breathe in gasps. "Wh-what in—God's name?"
"It's called a submachine gun, sweetheart," Veil said, peering around the girder and looking up. Nagle's light was out. "Unfortunately, that particular model fires up to three hundred rounds a minute."
"He plans to use that on Toby?"
"Obviously, he'll use it on anyone who gets in his way— he'd use a cannon if he had one. There's no time now for details, but Nagle's on the outs with both the cops and the crooks. He's out of his head but not so crazy that he isn't thinking. He needs the heroin in the Nal-toon to finance an escape out of the country. I didn't tell you before because I didn't want you more frightened than you already were. Now—what the hell are you doing here?"
Reyna clung to Veil as she shook her head in fear and frustration. "I got to thinking that Nagle had a gun and you didn't."
"I don't need a gun to kill Nagle, Reyna."
"But there's also Toby to consider. I'm not sure you fully appreciate how dangerous he is. The man can almost literally see in the dark; to him you're probably just another enemy. If you passed him in the dark, he might kill you. It was just you against both of them."
"Didn't it occur to you that I'd considered that?" Veil whispered angrily. He swallowed his irritation, took a deep breath. "Thank you, Reyna. I know how you feel about Nagle. Coming in here took a lot of guts."
"I wanted to call out to Toby, explain to him what was happening."
"Who's there?" Nagle's voice was right above them.
Veil signaled with his hand for Reyna to crawl along the foundation to the next girder. "Somebody who's going to take that toy away from you, Nagle, and shove it up your ass. Just be patient. I'll be up there in a few minutes."
"Kendry?! Is that you, you fucker?"
"Get out of here, Nagle," Veil said in a casual tone, his voice carrying easily in the steel-amplified darkness. "Unless all your brains have run out your ears, you have to know this play is over. Somebody's bound to hear that thing, even with a silencer, and you must have sprayed at least a hundred rounds into the street. Your ex-colleagues on the force are probably on their way back here right now. My advice is to split and try again another day."
He could almost feel Nagle straining to hear in the darkness, and Veil listened with him. There was no wail of police sirens.
Nagle's answer now came—a burst of fire. But the angle was wrong, and the bullets plowed harmlessly into the dirt a few feet from where Veil was standing. Veil moved in a crouch along the foundation to where Reyna was waiting.
"Veil," Reyna whispered urgently, "I have to talk to Toby. He has to understand what's happening."
"You're not going to talk to anyone," Veil whispered back in a firm voice. "Nagle may think it was me who stumbled in through the entrance. We're going to take our time and work our way very carefully around the building, and then you're going to scoot your cute ass right back out the way you came in."