This-unit knows of safe house uptown.
Sounds good.
The Pontiac pulled away from the curb. Shad headed north out of Jokertown on Fifth Avenue. At one point he had to swerve wildly to avoid a bright yellow six-legged joker that screamed as it raced across the street.
Shad thought seriously about his own safe houses and whether he could trust any of them. The places he trusted most were in Jokertown, and he wanted to avoid Jokertown for the moment. That's where the search for the escapees would be at its most intense.
Still, he could probably trust the Diamond house and the Gravemold house. Not but that his skin didn't crawl at the thought of disappearing into the Gravemold identity with its hideous chemical stench....
There was a horrible mental scream from Croyd, a cry so intense as to jangle pain through Shad's mind.
Your-mentality=Black Shadow=Neil Carton Langford=Mr. Gravemold!
Oh hell. Gravemold had once captured Croyd when he was in one of his psychotic fits. Shad had almost forgotten about it, but Croyd had just plucked the thought from his mind and wasn't about to forget.
Croyd lunged over Shad's shoulder for the wheel. Shad fought for control, felt wheels rebound from the curb ...
Your-mentality=Gravemold! Your-mentality redeflned=enemy!
"You were crazy, Croyd!" Shad shouted. "You were killing people left and right and - "
Die, enemy! Croyd's hands fumbled for Shad's throat.
The Pontiac crashed into a parked Thunderbird. Croyd's head drove into Shad's from behind, slamming into the mastoid. Shad blinked stars from his eyes.
"Dammit, Croyd!"
He turned around, blood boiling, ready to backhand Croyd out of the way, but the joker had crumpled into the back seat, limp as a ragdoll.
"Croyd?"
Shad could see Croyd's chest moving up and down. Maybe he'd been knocked unconscious when they banged heads.
Shad checked Croyd carefully and saw he wasn't bleeding or damaged in any obvious way. It looked as if he'd just gone to sleep - gone to sleep right in the middle of a fight, which had to be something new even for him - and if that was the case, Croyd could be gone anywhere from days to weeks.
Shad slid out of the car. He would just leave, eat photons and walk up a building and get away.
But that would leave Croyd in the hands of the authorities.
Your-mentality redefined=enemy!
Shad hesitated. He couldn't leave Croyd to the tender mercies of the Sharks.
He went back into the car, worked Croyd out, and carried the joker into the night.
He had a horrid feeling he was going to pay for this sooner or later.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Herzenhagen smoked a cigarette and pondered the news as he watched Peggy Durand draw on her clothes. All the wild cards on Governor's Island gone. None as yet recaptured. All the Sharks killed - though at least Shannon seemed to have wounded his attacker before his head was ripped off.
For a moment he was distracted by the vision of Peggy drawing on her Spandex bicycle shorts. Amazing, he thought, the things available for young people these days. He'd been raised on Long Island with wealth and privilege - his morphine-addicted Danish grandfather had married American money - and he'd thought himself lucky. But the eighteen-year-old Philip von Herzenhagen, he suspected would have thrown it all away for a chance to live in the Nineties and chase girls who wore Spandex.
He dragged his mind back to business. It couldn't be a coincidence, he thought, that of the five men killed during the escape, three were Sharks, and that two of these had been killed, not in the escape, but executed quite deliberately in their beds.
None of the Sharks killed were those named in the Hartmann accusations. Which meant that the killers had other sources of information.
A leak? Possibly. Perhaps one of the other guards had helped the escapees. Possibly the escape had been arranged from on high. The prison break bespoke organization. Someone in the facility, familiar with its procedures.
Perhaps there were counter-Sharks out there. Shark Hunters.
"Be careful," he said.
Peggy cocked an eyebrow at him as she arranged the feathers of dark hair that fell down her forehead. "What was that?"
"Something's going on, and I don't know what. But I don't think I want to trust the phones. If you need to call me, I'll be at the club every day from noon till two, and again at dinnertime."
She smiled at him, her eyes glowing with an intelligence beyond her apparent years. Peggy Durand had been Herzenhagen's mistress in Germany after the war. He had found her in the shambles of the Runstedt Offensive, a naive little girl from Idaho who sold Red Cross doughnuts to angry GI's at ten cents apiece and other favors - exclusively to officers - on a mattress in the back of her truck. He had shown her a better life. Peggy had been attentive and learned her business well; and when the CIA had been formed, Herzenhagen had recruited her as a courier. And after the CIA, she'd followed him into the Sharks. The last few decades she'd been living with Faneuil, but now things had changed.
After the fiasco in Guatemala, she'd been jumped into the luscious body of an eighteen-year-old runaway named Dolores Chacon, and it was thought too dangerous for her to associate directly with Faneuil, even though he was in another body as well. She was employed as den mother at Latchkey, the organization's jumper facility in Maryland, but Herzenhagen kept finding reasons to call her to New York. He found the combination irresistable - the juicy young breasts and flat belly, the round buttocks and smooth long legs, all inhabited by a sophisticated woman with a lifetime of experience. Better than any real teenager could ever be.
Peggy sat on his bed, took his cigarette from his fingers, drew on it.
"When you get back to Washington, you'll have to warn Rudo," Herzenhagen said. "That Croyd creature, for one, was swearing vengeance on him."
"Warn which Rudo?"
Herzenhagen looked up at her. "Both of them, of course."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Mr. Diamond peered owlishly through gold-rimmed spectacles and hefted a metal briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills. He searched in his pocket for keys, remembered he didn't have any, and uttered a mild reproach to himself.
Then he climbed up the wall and went in a window.
The ineffectual pleadings of his criminal attorney had drained Shad's cash supply, and he needed to increase his liquidity. A small packet of diamonds, retrieved from a safety deposit box in Brooklyn, then transported into Manhattan's diamond district, would do for a start.
Mr. Gregory Diamond was one of Shad's aliases. He lived atop a building in Jokertown owned by the Diamond Company, Ltd., a division of Diamond Transport, a company held by Diamante N.V., incorporated in Aruba. Diamond's apartment had its own entrance, a huge steel door with massive locks, and its own stair leading to the apartment door.
For both of which Shad had lost the keys.
The apartment itself was fairly modest - neat, inexpensive furniture, some throw rugs, and a steel-lined safe concealed behind sliding panels. Shad put the suitcase of cash in the safe, then put Coltrane's Black Pearls on the sound system, jacked up the volume, and took a long shower with the sound of the music wailing over the hissing water.
It was his first shower in three years. He made it last till the album ended, tried to wash Governor's Island out of his soul. Then he toweled himself off, put on clean clothes, and decided to catch up on the news.
He snapped on CNN.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Gregg Hartmann looked ill-at-ease, and had put on fifteen or twenty pounds since Shad had last seen him. Usually a fine off-the-cuff speaker, he now read from notes. His voice was either inaudible or a booming fortissimo.
It was the content that was riveting. Shad found himself leaning forward, elbows on knees, as he warred in spirit with what the voice was saying.