Tim turned up the volume, pressing the portable to his ear, but he couldn't hear anything except the applause. He rose, hovering over his seat and drawing an insistent shoulder tap from the reporter behind him.
"Come in. Come in. Someone tell me what happened."
Sounds of a scuffle. Thomas said, "Gimme a sec, Rack."
Up front Dolan cleared his throat. He glanced nervously at the door, then at the back of the room. Finally, off cue, the lights dimmed and a projector screen descended from the ceiling with a whir. Assisted by PowerPoint slides, Dolan began to walk the crowd through the science behind Xedral.
Stepping over people's knees, holding the portable to his ear, Tim tried to keep his voice down. "What's going on?"
"It's not him," Thomas barked. "Repeat: It is not Walker. Hang on. What? What's he saying?"
The radio crackled. "He says…"
Tim was out in the aisle now, heading for the front. "What?"
A number of sharp complaints peppered Tim from all sides.
Tim picked up a Frisbee-size circle of light, phasing into existence like a reverse eclipse on the carpet of the dais, just in front of the podium from which Dolan spoke. But the ceiling lights were uniformly dark for the slide show.
Tim jogged down the aisle to get a better look. Dolan broke midsentence, glancing at Tim, then resumed. Dean glared out from the darkness, his face tight with an implicit threat.
Bear's voice now, jockeying in on the primary channeclass="underline" "Suspect says a guy gave him the hat and paid him to hang out by the-"
Tim traced the beam to the darkly tinted casement window. A circle had been excised from the pane with a glass cutter. It completed a pivot out of its flush position on a remote-operated hinge the size of a matchbook.
"He's on the line," Tim said into the radio. "Lock down your buildings."
An event coordinator strode across the front of the auditorium, meeting Tim before the dais. "Sir, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to ask you to-"
Tim straight-armed him to the side. He was sprinting now, finally getting a good look through the circle cut into the high pane. Outside, contrasted against the dark wood of the apartment building across the street, a strip of red cloth fluttered from an overhead phone line. A strategically placed, makeshift wind sock.
Tim leapt onstage, hurling aside the podium and tackling Dolan. He felt a buffet of air across his back as a round sliced behind him.
Chapter 63
The glass sculpture behind the podium webbed instantly, thousands of cracks appearing as if thrown on at the instant of the bullet's impact. Dolan reeled back, falling from the dais into the arms of a waiting guard, who dragged him to the secured back exit. Attendees were on their feet, yelling and hastening for the main door, the contagious panic of the corralled. Dean stood frozen as the sculpture finally burst, fragments pattering on the thin carpet. Tim rolled from his stomach, sweeping Dean's legs and bringing him down as another bullet whined past, punching a hole through the projection screen behind the space Dean's head had occupied an instant prior. Tim raked Dean toward him by an ankle, gathering him in like a hockey goalie, and handed him off to three advancing guards. Dean disappeared in their midst, joining the current toward the back exit.
Tim looked up into the sudden warmth, realizing that his uptilted face perfectly captured the circle of light and-likely-Walker's crosshairs, too. As he threw himself off the dais, he registered the stab of a view he'd caught through the window's missing disk-a curtain flickering behind a slid-back door on a fourth-story balcony across the street.
He ran, cutting through the crowd, lips moving against the radio as he coordinated the task-force members to seal off the apartment building. Fleeing bankers had massed at the revolving doors, so Tim cut back up a side hall and kicked out an emergency exit, joining Thomas, Freed, Maybeck, and Bear. Haines and Zimmer, assigned the building from the start, had secured the main entrance from Tim's first lockdown command, swinging four LAPD units into perimeter position seconds later. The building, six stories of dilapidation, had somehow dodged the Westwood renovation. From the looks of the passing residents Miller had backed out of the lobby, the place provided shoddy housing to students and some elderly couples, likely hangers-on from when the building was new.
Zimmer waved Tim through, and the deputies fell instinctively into their ART entry stack up the stairwell. They wouldn't have time for bulletproof vests or MP5s-it would be an improvised raid. They hammered up to the fourth floor, the stairwell spitting them out onto a floating corridor on the east side.
Two units down, a door stood open. Tim barely slowed his momentum around the turn as they exploded into the cramped space, shouting, flooding the galley kitchen, living room, and bedroom, handguns trained at every corner. Bear's kicking into the bathroom took the door clean off its bottom hinge.
No one.
Slicing through the fluttering curtains, Tim caught himself against the balcony railing. He peered down across the street at the ground floor of the towering Beacon-Kagan Building. The excised circle of tinted window provided a narrow vantage into the Vector auditorium, exposing a spot of visible dais-podium, ring of carpet, scattered glass. A clean line of sight, the precise reverse of the one he'd had minutes before from his sprawl on the floor.
"Hey, Rack!" Filling the front jamb, Bear pointed to the triangular stop wedged into place, holding the door open. It had been nailed into the floor. His finger next indicated the pair of saloon doors at the mouth of the living room. Oddly, they'd been pressed flat to the walls and nailed into place.
Tim felt his insides go to ice.
He moved through the permanently open saloon doors and brushed past Bear onto the floating corridor. A sleek, modern high-rise crowded the east side of the apartment building. Two stories up was another balcony, another open slider, another fluttering curtain. Behind the thin cotton drapes stood the outline of a sniper rifle, abandoned on its tripod.
Walker had cleared a path for the bullet's trajectory and shot straight through the building in which the deputies were currently gathered. A trained sniper, he could easily hit his mark from two hundred yards-another building back-especially since he'd cleared all the glass between his muzzle and the target, removing the possibility of bullet deflection or fragmentation. He'd known that the deputies were waiting to storm the closer, more obvious location, buying him extra time for the getaway. He'd anticipated Tim's anticipating him and come out one move ahead.
Tim shouted at the deputies, and they sprinted out, legs aching as they attacked a set of stairs, a stretch of pavement, another set of stairs. Bear radioed in for the broadened perimeter, but Tim knew, even before he kicked through the next door and found himself two floors up and one building over, that Walker would be gone.
Breathing hard, Tim stood before the suspended. 300 Remington Mag. Bear, Freed, and Thomas milled behind him. The others had hit the street, helping LAPD canvass the area. Good luck there. The mini-stampede caused by the shooting had created a broad diversion-town cars, rental-car-ensconced New Yorkers, and masses of pedestrians still blocked the nearby intersections. Without touching the rifle, Tim lowered his right eye to the Leopold variable power scope, the same one he kept mounted on his match-grade M14.
The podium remained centered in the crosshairs.
Walker had seen Tim's face through this very scope, had watched him looking up through the hole in the tinted window from his sprawl across the glass-strewn dais. The magnified view of the site where he could well have lost his life was chilling. Tim wondered if he'd rolled away before Walker could squeeze off another round or if Walker had chosen to spare him. Neither scenario made him feel less incompetent.