“Don’t do that to yourself, Moses,” Steiger said. “This is a war. And the Network has a lot to answer for.”
“And they’re going to answer for it, believe me,” Forrester said grimly. “We were lucky this time, but the entire top part of this building will have to be evacuated. Christ, how many of them were there?”
“I don’t know,” said Steiger. “It seemed like hundreds. But we stopped ‘em. We stopped ‘em cold.”
“Yes, for now,” Forrester said. “But I can’t risk another attack like that. I can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous to the other patients and the hospital personnel.”
“But you haven’t been released for duty—”
“After this, I don’t think you’ll get any arguments from Dr. Hazen or any of the staff,” said Forrester. “Get me out of here, Creed. I’m going back to headquarters. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Chapter 10
Lucas materialized in the middle of Washington Street. For a moment, he did not know where he was; then a blast from a diesel truck’s air horn caused him to leap to one side, narrowly avoiding being run down.
“Get outta the road, asshole!” the trucker yelled out the open window as he rumbled by.
Lucas looked around. The area he stood in resembled a war zone. The street was pockmarked with pot holes. The sidewalks were cracked and buckling
. The warehouses all around him were shuttered and boarded up and covered with graffiti. An abandoned car was rusting on its wheel hubs, the wheels long since stolen. The rest of the car had been stripped. the windows shattered and an uprooted traffic sign had been hurled through the windshield, like a harpoon transfixing a whale—an eloquent commentary on the mindless fury and frustration of the scuttlefish who crawled these streets at night.
And it was getting dark.
“New York City,” Lucas said, realizing where he was. “Damn. I’ve done it again.”
He groaned and brought his hands up to his head, pressing them flat against his temples. His head felt as if it were about to burst. The pain rivaled the worst hangover he’d ever had. It kept fading in and out, as if someone were flickering a switch on and off.
He cursed Darkness and his damned telempathic chronocircuitry although without his interference, Lucas knew he wouldn’t even be alive. Still, it was a mixed blessing. Each time he thought he had a handle on it, he’d somehow lose control and flip through time and space like some sort of leaf blown on a temporal wind. And the more often he did it, the greater the strain seemed to be. Obviously, he required a period of recuperation after each translocation. Darkness had warned him about that.
Curiously, the amount of time and space he covered during each translocation seemed to make no difference. Whether he translocated from one side of a room to another or from Darkness’s secret laboratory headquarters all the way to Earth, it seemed to feel the same. The sensation upon arrival was not altogether unlike what most people felt upon making transition via the old chronoplates or the warp discs that superseded them, although the vertiginous feeling was minimized somewhat with the warp discs. The initial translocation—the departure—took place so fast that it was impossible to notice it happening. It occurred literally with the speed of thought. But immediately upon arrival, there was the unpleasant sensation of vertigo and a curious coldness, as if a chill mountain breeze were blowing through his body, whistling in between the bones and organs, making every single nerve fiber shiver. And he had noticed that the effects seemed to be increasing every time.
He often wondered if Darkness even had a clue to what he was doing. That the man was a genius on a level beyond anything that anyone had ever known was indisputable, but at the same time, and perhaps because of that, he was also utterly incomprehensible. He often agonized over the ethical implications of his work, yet the rights of individuals meant nothing to him. This was not the time to be concerned about such things, Lucas realized. He was in a dangerous neighborhood and it was getting dark. Somewhere nearby, Andre and Gulliver were being held prisoner by the Network. And Lucas had no weapons.
Where the hell was Darkness?
The shadows lengthened as night fell on the city. This wasn’t the kind of darkness that I had in mind, thought Lucas. Why hadn’t Darkness followed him? He looked up and down the street. . He had absolutely no idea where Andre and Gulliver were being held. There were warehouses and old factory buildings along both sides of the street. They could be in any one of them.
Then he saw a sleek black Cadillac, a stretch limousine, turning slowly into the street. It was definitely not the sort of vehicle one expected to encounter in this area of town. He quickly translocated behind the abandoned car. The limo pulled up in front of an old brick warehouse building with graffiti all over the door; and two men got out, dragging a third between them. The front door on the other side of the car opened and another man got out. Even at that distance, Lucas recognized the massive figure of Nikolai Drakov.
He watched Drakov and the others go into the building. The limousine waited at the curb, its motor running. Lucas gasped, slumping down behind the wrecked car as the pain washed over him again, coming and going, coming and going, like waves crashing on a shore. Everything started to spin around. He sagged against the car and slip down to the street.
“Hey, mah man.”
“He’s wasted.”
“Yo, got any money, my man?”
He felt hands on him, turning him around, patting down his pockets.
“Yo, man, check out the boss threads, man! I gotta get me them threads!”
“Fuck the threads, where the hell’s the money? Hey, dude, where the hell’s the money, dude?”
“Get away …” Lucas said, clumsily pushing at them, desperately trying to focus and ignore the pain.
Something went snik and he felt the sharp point of a switchblade pressed up beneath his chin.
“Awright, muthafucker, where’s the bread? I cut you, man. C’mon, where you got it stashed?”