The Time of The Cat 2
Chapter 2
TWO
DOORS?
I work in many cities and under many names as a rather highly paid and respected, if I do say it myself, counter-terrorism expert. I’m not above active intervention if the situation requires it, but I prefer to simply observe and report developing situations to whoever hired me or to the local authorities at the appropriate time.
My background is, well, not something that I speak about, but in addition to being a moderately attractive, brown-haired guy of above average height and being muscular without looking steroidal, I’m an expert at both armed and unarmed combat and a highly trained investigator.
I’d been assigned by a multinational corporation to watch a particular group of Middle Easterners who seemed to be loosely associated with another group that had taken their jihad a little too enthusiastically and had, in the process, previously blown up one of the corporation’s local headquarters in the Middle East.
The current group was trying to act professionally, but it was apparent that they’d been poorly trained. The real key to the matter was that I was slowly moving in on their source of funds. They seemed to be well paid. Mercedes and the like, and better than the average religious fanatic’s clothing. They also seemed to be tied in with a lot of illegal drugs that had recently been coming into the country.
My working hypothesis was that a competitor of the corporation had an “in” with some Imam who had recruited the cell I was watching under the guise of a religious fatwa. The cell members seemed to sincerely believe they were working under the command of Allah and were apparently dedicated to bringing down the infidel, as represented by my client.
The financial issue was complex. Funding moved through the Cayman Islands and possibly Mexico, but it seemed to come from multiple accounts in Switzerland. I hadn’t yet worked out the location where the Swiss accounts funds were sourced.
This wasn’t my first soiree in the seedy underworld of international terrorism. I thought I’d seen it all – black market explosive devices in Ghana, perverted so-called “holy men” laundering money for priceless treasures, warlords bartering human flesh and trampling on the rights of their fellow man, and New Haven, Connecticut – but the simple act of my curious observation of a homeless man that day involved me in weirdness that I could never have imagined.
What had started as an act of simple curiosity had now become far more interesting. I figured I owed it to myself to investigate a little further. Tracking amateur terrorists through New York sometimes gets a little boring. I was ready for some additional intellectual complexity, so I opened the door and entered the lobby.
The second elevator door on the sidewall was still missing. New York is a strange city, and Astoria is even stranger, but it wasn’t usual to have elevators appear and disappear. I spent some time feeling the wainscoting, but nothing out of the ordinary appeared. As far as my inspection went, it was a perfectly ordinary wall; it was true that it was painted an ugly shade of institutional green, but there was definitely no sign of a second elevator door.
Half expecting to see the original elevator missing, I turned to the back wall, but it was still there. It was enough to make me pause a moment at the thought of pushing the elevator button, but I went ahead and pushed it. The door opened immediately.
At first glance, the inside of the elevator looked normal. It was decorated with pale blue walls that roughly matched the lobby decor. As I entered, I looked at the control panel, which I thought should have three floors on it. I was holding the door with one hand, but when I saw the panel, I dropped my hand in astonishment. There were two buttons there, arranged side-by-side rather than in an up-and-down pattern. It was going to be hard to get upstairs with that button arrangement. Neither of the buttons had any recognizable numbers. There were some odd symbols, but nothing I could read. There was also a much smaller blue button located immediately over the other two. It might or might not be necessary to activate the elevator, but the other two looked slightly worn, as if they were the most important ones.
Suddenly, the nerves attached to the small hairs on the back of my neck tingled, my version of a premonition of danger. It has saved me more than once. This time, I had sensed a change in the system because the door snapped shut before I could move.
The light flickered. Reflexively, I pulled my carry piece – a Sig Sauer P220. It’s a little large for a concealed weapon, but I’m pretty big-boned, and I really like the knockdown power of a forty-five.
The thought came to me that I wasn’t really in an elevator but some form of matter transmitter. I’ve watched sci-fi movies and figured I had an idea about how that was supposed to work. What I was experiencing was a lot less dramatic than the things that Hollywood seemed to favor, but it had an effect that I sensed physically. It seemed to be like speeding down a roller coaster. The physical sensations of movement were so bewildering and so disorienting that I might as well have been unconscious for all the details I could give – then or later – about what happens during such a journey.
For a brief moment, the walls shimmered around me, and gravity seemed to let go abruptly inside my body so that I felt like my attention had wandered for a moment. The walls suddenly steadied and were not pale blue any longer. Now they were a hard, dull steel with rivets showing where plates overlapped and, here and there, a streak of rust. The inside of the elevator seemed somewhat smaller than before, and the lighting was much dimmer and redder. Suddenly the door snapped open, and I was somewhere else. The potted palm had disappeared.
Rather than seeing a flustered Scottish engineer or a humanoid with pointy ears desperately trying to beam me in, my first view was of a lovely face. She was probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Her hair was about shoulder length and blond, and she had an unusually well-proportioned face with high cheekbones, and yet, she didn’t look at all like some magazine model. She had a wholesome, girl-next-door appeal. Her face was perfectly proportioned, and her body was incredible.
Her hands were handcuffed behind her back, and she was being escorted by what I initially thought was a really ugly man. I supposed that he’d summoned the elevator. For a moment, Mr. Ugly looked surprised at seeing me but then went for the weapon that was strapped to his belt. Not fast enough. I shot him high and off-center with the idea of asking some questions. The woman’s mouth fell open in shock, but she didn’t make any sound.
Ugly went down and then came back up with his gun in his other hand, pointing directly at me. A standard double tap followed by a round to the head dropped him again. He didn’t get up this time.
“Oh, oh, I knew that I wasn’t going to make it out of this alive! Are you going to kill me too?” Her eyes were wide with fear and so dark blue that they were almost purple.
I smiled at her, still in awe of her looks, gathered my courage, and said, “Probably not. I’m Declan, and you might be..?”
I realized after I’d said it that I sounded like an idiot, considering the circumstances, but she was so beautiful that it seemed to shut down my brain.
She answered with a brief hesitation, “Elizabeth, but you can call me ‘Betty’ or what I really prefer, ‘Liz’, but I’m babbling, and we really need to get out of here. Fast!”
While she was talking, I took a quick look up and down the hall. Lucky for us, it was empty in both directions. There was a door at one end of the hall with an odd red light beside it. Shortly beyond the door, the hall made a right turn. The other end of the hall was only a few feet away and revealed nothing but a surprisingly ordinary Colonial-styled chest of drawers with a vase holding a silk plant on top.
She continued talking at a high rate of adrenaline-induced speed and eventually told me she had been captured in what I thought sounded like somewhere in Greece, along with some other stuff about aliens and invasions that I didn’t quite get. It was apparent to me that her accent wasn’t Greek but rather more mid-western American. I put the problem of her place of origin in the back of my mind until later, while I admired her looks.
While she spoke, I figured I had a few seconds at most to learn what I could about “Mr. Ugly” before someone else showed up. The first thing I did was to insert a fresh clip into my Sig.
The second thing was to check Ugly’s body for any wallet, keys, and other items of interest. He had a wallet, which I opened. There was nothing in it except for several crisp and new hundred-dollar bills along with a discount coupon for tire service. I took the money and left the coupon. I wasn’t in the market for new tires at the moment, but the hundreds might come in handy. He wasn’t going to need them in his current state.
He also had a door key with no key chain. I took it, but there was no way of knowing what, if anything, it unlocked. Then I took some pictures with my phone before I picked up his pistol – and here my jaw dropped. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.
It looked similar to a cheap automatic pistol, but the caliber was tiny; it was smaller than a BB gun, perhaps about a millimeter. I moved the plastic bolt carrier mechanism back and was rewarded with a view of a needle-like projectile that might have been made of glass. It had a small amount of yellowish fluid inside the tip. The source of the projectile seemed to be a more or less conventionally styled magazine. I pushed the release button, and the magazine dropped out in my hand. None of the needles in it had any fluid in their tips. There was another tubular knob on the bottom of the grip that I thought could be its source.
I stuck the weapon into my belt holster for later investigation and was pleased to see that it fit reasonably well. As I finished stowing it away, I was reminded that I’d been ignoring my rescuee. She abruptly stopped talking and stomped firmly on my foot and then turned, holding out her cuffed hands. I guess I hadn’t been paying close enough attention to her, so it was my fault, in a way.
Fortunately, I carry lock-picking equipment in a neat little package that also holds a standard handcuff key. She really unloaded with that stomp, and I wondered if I’d be able to walk normally as I worked on the cuffs. When they came off, I tossed them onto Mr. Ugly, figuring I had no more use for them than he did, and then looked around the narrow hallway. There was nowhere to conceal the body except in the elevator, so I dragged it in there and let the door go shut.
We moved down the short hall; she walked rapidly as I limped along, trying to keep up. When I stopped to look at the door with the red light, she said, “You don’t want to go in there! There’s likely to be a lot more of them in that area.”
Shrugging, I turned to the right. We went around the corner and found a door that led outside. It had a conventional “Exit” sign overhead. After going through the door and out, I stopped for a moment in astonishment while she kept walking down the street. We were somewhere on the Upper West Side. Central Park was directly in front of us.
I was still assimilating this change when I realized that she was getting away from me. Despite the pain in my foot, I took off after her and caught up about halfway down the block. We headed south as fast as possible. In my experience, it doesn’t do to hang around a recently deceased body, especially when you are responsible for the state of the corpse.
We hadn’t gone more than another block when she started up the steps of a small, rather dilapidated brownstone. I said, “Whoa! Where are you headed?”
“There’s another transporter in here, and we can use it to get away from this area,” she answered.
I asked, “You know about these things?”
“I’ve been through several, yes. The one here isn’t used often, and it can place us in Durban, South Africa, and then we can move from there to, I think, Florida. They don’t all connect,” she said, anticipating my next question as she pulled on the solid front door with both hands.
It seemed to be unlocked, to my surprise, but then I realized that she’d pulled the door handle down while lifting the thumb tab upwards.
“The locks are coded for an unusual opening action,” she explained, noticing my interest.
We went through the door and found ourselves in another matter transporter thing. There were two buttons on a metal panel in what seemed to be the standard side-by-side pattern. Looking over her shoulder at me with an unreadable expression, Elizabeth pressed one.