Premonitions (11 page)

Anna dropped her chopsticks and flicked them away with the backs of her fingers. “Why is everybody around me a ticking bomb?”

“Everybody’s a ticking bomb, sweetheart.”

“Might as well lighten up, then—isn’t that right?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on, then. Let’s get out of here.” She threw a couple of twenties on the table, took Genevieve’s hand, and headed toward the door.

As the door swung shut behind them, Anna felt a tug on her hand. She turned, and Genevieve was inches away, standing below the silly plastic awning. She wasn’t sure if she moved first or Genevieve did, but the space between them was suddenly gone, her lips pressed against Genevieve’s, and for a breathless span of moments, everything was all better.

“Anybody else worried
about the essential insanity of this?” Tommy asked as they prepared to leave their makeshift base of operations. He always asked some variant of this question just prior to the moment where turning back would become impossible.
Everybody feel good about this? Anybody want to back out?
It had become tradition.

Karyn didn’t look at him. Barely had for days. Mostly he appeared normal, but two more times she’d seen something awful—once his eyes had been burned from his head, and another time his throat had been cut, his tongue lolling obscenely from slack lips. There was never any direct threat in evidence, and each time the gruesome vision had vanished as quickly as it had come. The closest she’d come to saying anything about it was to categorically ban anyone from the basement of Mendelsohn’s place. If everything went well, they shouldn’t have to go in the house at all, let alone go anywhere near the basement, but based on Tommy’s vision and Genevieve’s intelligence, it was better to ditch the job than risk a trip downstairs. Since delivering that edict, she hadn’t seen anything else—but she hadn’t looked all that carefully, either.

Her other visions had gotten more numerous, too, and only a worryingly high dose of blind
made them manageable. She was taking so much now that she had real concerns about whether she was crippling herself for this
job. What the hell good was a seer who couldn’t see? And besides that, she was going to need to visit Adelaide
again
, right after the job was done.

“I’m good,” Nail said.

“I can’t even tell what’s insane or not anymore,” Genevieve said.

Anna merely shrugged.

“Just checking,” Tommy said. He turned anxiously to Karyn. “We good?”

I don’t know.
Other than the visions of Tommy, she’d seen nothing useful, but she was at a complete loss to know what that might mean.
And they’re tough to interpret anyway. Half the time they don’t mean what I think they do.
Maybe Tommy was in danger, but maybe not. In the past, real mortal danger had always revealed itself in the moments before it struck, and she’d always been able to head it off or escape. Even if Tommy was threatened, she could probably make sure he was protected. It would be stupid to abandon a job of this scale, with this much planning and this much payoff, without being sure.

She nodded. “Yeah. We’re good. Let’s hit it.”

Down the stairs and out to the van, and Karyn felt Anna’s eyes like a laser beam drilling a hole between her shoulder blades. That felt more wrong than the thing with Tommy. Up to this point, there should have been jokes and late-night bullshit sessions about how they were going to spend the money, and that should have gone double for this much money. They could make some long-term plans for a change. But that had all pretty much gone to shit since the argument. Karyn didn’t sleep much now, and Anna didn’t sleep at home, and when they spoke it was about precise tactical details of the job at hand and nothing else.

I’ll patch it up after the job. One night of work, and we can make this all better.
Money, after all, fixed a lot of things. A shitload of money should fix everything, shouldn’t it?

Karyn got into her customary seat in the van, right up front where she could see everything. The trip gave her little time to do anything but fidget, and in any case there
were no items left to attend to. Nail had planned the assault, as it were, in painstaking detail. Genevieve and Tommy had scoured the surveillance photos and done some scouting besides, and they’d put together a plan to breach the perimeter without triggering any magical defenses or alarms. Tommy had also prepared a box for the bone that ought to keep anything from leaking out or working the kind of mischief that these things sometimes did. Anna and Karyn had little to worry about at this point, other than just making the grab.

They left the close confines of apartment buildings and headed up toward Topanga Canyon. Tenements turned into houses turned into miles of low scrub and dry grass. This was as close to the middle of nowhere as Karyn had been in ages—a very good thing, since they were about to make a whole lot of noise, and the last thing they needed was a premature visit from the neighbors. Or the cops.

Nail parked the van on a side road a short walk from Mendelsohn’s estate. The night sky was dark, absent the moon, and Karyn could barely make out the curve of the estate wall a few hundred yards away.

“Ready?” she asked. A chorus of “yeah”s answered her. Anna met her eyes and gave a single authoritative nod.

The five of them poured out of the van. Nail pulled a heavy green canvas duffel bag from the back, and the others came in around him and grabbed small packs containing their equipment.

Tommy grinned. Smoke wafted up from his blackened eye sockets, and blood burbled from his mouth. “This is crazy. It’s gonna be
awesome
.”

Karyn shouldered her backpack and started walking.

* * *

“Are your men ready, Mr. Pullman?” Enoch Sobell stood inside Nathan Mendelsohn’s rambling estate, just the other side of one low hill from the house itself. He was surrounded by a half dozen figures clad thoroughly in black. Balaclavas covered their heads, night-vision goggles masked their eyes, and they sported enough hardware to outfit a Central American army. Sobell wasn’t
sure what all that stuff was, but it certainly looked impressive, and if this whole thing went pear-shaped and it became a question of armament rather than stealth, he felt fairly secure in the outcome.

He felt for a moment, perhaps, a trifle out of place. He’d doffed his jacket for the occasion—and the necktie, sadly—and even rolled up the sleeves of his Burberry London dress shirt, but amid all this gun-toting machismo it was difficult not to feel at something of a manliness disadvantage. He reflected on the fact that he could torch the whole lot of them with a few words and gestures, incinerate them so thoroughly that it would be like they’d never been there, and that cheered him up somewhat.

Of course, that’s what got me into this mess in the first place,
he thought, and the cheer dissipated.

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well, then. Just wait for the screaming to start.”

* * *

Tommy stopped twenty yards back from the wall. He recited a few words, pricked his thumb with a needle, and pointed his finger. The camera located near the top of the wall, neatly hidden beneath a phony downspout, turned a few degrees to the left.

Nail moved forward quickly, and the others followed in his footsteps as closely as possible.

It’s on,
Karyn thought. Any moment now, the cry could go up. Maybe nobody’d notice that one camera among dozens had shifted its viewpoint a tiny bit, but maybe somebody would. The clock was officially ticking.

Nail stopped just short of the wall, and Genevieve drew up next to him. She produced a square scrap of paper, presumably the same one she’d spent all afternoon drawing an intricate web of patterns on. She tossed it into the air ahead of her. It caught fire, flared up, and disappeared.

Genevieve stepped to one side and, grinning, made an
after you
bow. Anna came forward, and Nail boosted her up. She stood on his shoulders and leaned against the outside of the wall without actually climbing atop it. She
got out some tools, fiddled with something at the top—disabling the pressure sensor, according to the plan—and cut through the razor wire. It coiled up like an angry serpent, and she jerked her head back. Then she hauled herself up.

A quick look around, and she made a
come on
gesture to Nail. He hefted the big duffel bag up to her, and she dragged it to the top. The scrape of canvas against the rough stucco of the wall seemed louder than aircraft taking off, but then the bag was up, and Anna dropped it down the other side. She then dropped a short rope ladder, secured with hooks to the top of the wall.

Nail went up first, then Genevieve, then Tommy. Karyn came last, pausing at the top. She couldn’t see the house from here, but a line of parked cars filled the road around the low hill ahead and extended nearly to the front gate. Looked like the party was every bit as big as Drew had said.

She pulled up the ladder, dropped it down the inside of the wall, and climbed down.

From there, if the maps and Google Earth were to be believed, it was a half-mile run to the copse of carefully cultivated palm trees that would provide cover while they regrouped for the main event. This would be the worst part. Nail was pretty sure that, given all the people here tonight, perimeter security would get the most attention, and internal motion sensors and whatnot would likely be down. Genevieve agreed, but there was really no way to be sure. If they got spotted now, the clock would run down a whole lot faster than planned.

Before Karyn could get her thoughts in order, Nail took off. If the sixty pounds of hardware in the duffel bag slowed him down any, it sure didn’t show. The others lit out after him, and Karyn ran behind.

Her heart pounded in her ears, and her breath came loud and fast. She saw nothing threatening ahead, real or otherwise, but every hair on her body trembled in anticipation of a shout or a shot, and the faint crunch of footfalls on the trimmed golf course grass seemed a Klaxon blaring for Security’s attention.

The crew strung out in a long line. Fifty yards ahead, Nail dropped into a crouch and slipped into the shadows beneath the trees. A low murmur built in Karyn’s ears—the rushing sound of blood, she thought, until it took voice.
That’s more than sixty,
she thought.

Ahead, Genevieve and Tommy ducked in next to Nail. Karyn joined them moments later as the chorus of voices rose in some perverted variant of “Hallelujah!”

In the time that it had taken Karyn to catch up, Nail had already assembled two mortars and had moved on to the M60, a ridiculously large, tripod-mounted machine gun that he’d acquired from who knew what dubious sources. She knew she must be imagining it, but Nail seemed to be humming with joy as he set up the weapon.

Ahead of her, a truly surreal scene had been assembled. Mendelsohn’s house, a sprawling multilevel mess of twenty thousand square feet enclosed by glass panes and the occasional stone wall, choked the space between two shoulderlike hills. The hills narrowed, forming a sort of natural cul-de-sac a couple of hundred yards back in which stood a little guest house. It was surrounded by a wide patio: flagged in stone, encircled by a six-foot retaining wall, and large enough to play soccer on. At one end was an auxiliary swimming pool—evidently, the one nearer the house was wholly inadequate for Mr. Mendelsohn’s guests. All the pool furniture—and, if Karyn wasn’t mistaken, a large gas grill—had been pushed to one side, clearing most of the patio space. The lights from both the guest house and the main house had been shut off, as well as most of the patio lights, except for the few that cast blue rays up through the swimming pool. Instead of regular illumination, torches lined the retaining wall at intervals of maybe twenty feet.

Over a hundred robed figures crowded around the center of the patio. There were more torches here, enough that Karyn could see what was going on in the middle of the chanting throng.

Goddammit,
she thought.
They
are
gonna kill someone.

Mendelsohn had spared no expense on the altar. It looked to be a seven-foot-long slab of marble, inlaid with all kinds of vaguely threatening, darkly glittering symbols. A person—a man, Karyn thought, though it was hard to be sure—had been swaddled in white bandages and secured to the slab by chains hooked through eyebolts.

On the slab near the man’s head was a grinning crescent shape: the bone.

Eight guards stood at various points around the edges of the ceremony, small submachine guns in full view. They faced inward, not out, and Karyn realized that they were there not to keep intruders from crashing the party, but in case one of the faithful had a sudden change of heart.

At one end of the altar, a hooded figure raised a wavy-bladed knife to the sky. The chanting picked up in speed, the rising pitch lifting the hairs on the back of Karyn’s neck. The figure chained to the altar squirmed.

“Hurry up,” she whispered.

“We’re go!” Nail whispered back. “Get ready!”

Each of them took a moment to put on a respirator and thermal vision goggles, and readied their weapons. Karyn caught a glimpse of Anna’s face, cocked in her direction, and gave her a reassuring nod.

“Go!” Nail said.

Anna and Genevieve cut right as Karyn followed Tommy toward the house to the left. Seconds later, Nail fired the first grenade launcher. A loud, heavy
whump
split the air, and a canister of tear gas arced out above the assembled cult members and detonated. Two more followed, then a smoke grenade. White fog choked torches and cultists alike, and the air filled with the sounds of coughing and retching. Ahead of her, Tommy tossed a couple of stun grenades into the fog. The resulting bang nearly deafened Karyn—and, unlike the people below, she’d known it was coming.

Shock and awe,
she thought with disgust. And then Nail opened up with the M60. If the night had been loud and frightening before, it must have seemed like
Armageddon to the robed figures down there now. Hell, it seemed like the end of the world to Karyn, like she’d been dropped into Baghdad or Darfur with no warning, and even though she knew Nail was firing over their heads, the rounds doing nothing but churning dirt on the opposite hillside, terror squeezed her heart.

She and Tommy reached the spot where the wall tapered down to the patio. He hopped down, and she followed a second later. They stood between the crowd and the main house, where hopefully they’d be able to cut off anybody trying to escape with the bone. Karyn felt irritating drops of tear gas on her exposed skin, but the cloud was invisible through the goggles, the people exposed and clear as if it were midday. A figure emerged from the mob in front of her, and she almost fired, but she held off as she realized it was just a terrified cult member running for safety. The man ran past her and clambered up the wall. Two more followed. Then she saw a fourth figure, a man moving steadily toward her rather than fleeing, and before she even confirmed the presence of his weapon, she pulled the trigger.