EMPERORS OF THE TWILIGHT
Chapter 1
At four-thirty in the morning on a snowless New Year’s Eve, Evi Isham was naked on a penthouse balcony overlooking Manhattan. She was doing her best to beat the crap out of her weight machine, and the machine was winning. Even after gearing the bench press down to 250 kilos, the reps were still eating into her shoulders. She had just come back from Havana, her first vacation from the Agency, and her muscles had turned to mush.
Great thing to realize first thing on your birthday, she thought to herself. She was thirty-three, allegedly. She could be twenty-nine or thirty-six. She had picked December 31, 2025, as her birthday for simplicity’s sake. No one actually knew her real birth date, but the INS didn’t like blank spots in their forms.
However old she was, she couldn’t slack off on the workouts like a teenager. At least she had three days to catch up before the Agency wanted her back.
She stopped at rep number twenty and grabbed a towel. She was damp with a light mist of perspiration and her breath fogged, leaving little trails of infrared on the air.
Evi walked to the corner of the balcony and looked at her adopted home. The Manhattan skyline cut a glowing hole in the night. The buildings accumulated toward the chrome-blue spine of the Nyogi tower. Red lights from the constant aircar traffic enveloped the city like hot embers. To her right, through the gap between two neighboring condominiums, she could see a forest-green light from the misnamed Central Park Dome. Beyond the luminescent city, the sky was a dead black.
A cold wind drew across Evi’s skin, causing an involuntary shiver that seemed to shake open every pore in her body.
Thirty-three, she thought. She was settling down. She had a permanent address for the first time since the war. Even though she’d kept in top condition, it’d been over five years since the Agency had put her in a dangerous field mission. The only running she did was running the computer at the think tank. The only thing she chased now was lost page work and obscure reference texts.
She’d been here long enough that she already had one male resident hitting on her. Chuck Dwyer on the seventeenth floor had given her his apartment number and a raincheck in her second week here.
She’d even had a coworker invite her over for dinner. Dave Price wasn’t quite in her department, but they kept bumping into each other. She’d been to his house in Queens and met about a dozen cats. If David hadn’t been aware Evi wasn’t human, it might have gone beyond dinner.
She was definitely settling down.
Some people would miss the action.
Such people were nuts.
Even though she had been bioengineered for combat, flying a desk was fine with her. Back in ’54, when the Supreme Court finally gave the products of human genetic engineering the same rights the 29th amendment gave the moreaus, Evi had even considered quitting the Agency.
But, by then, she didn’t have terrorists shooting at her anymore. One shitfire case in Cleveland and she was transferred to an advisory capacity. More than once she’d supposed that dropping her out of the field was someone’s idea of punishing her for unearthing that mess.
As far as she was concerned, it was a promotion. For close to six years she’d been working in that think tank. The closest she ever got to “action” nowadays was writing reports about hypothetical alien invasions and less hypothetical projections on possible moreau violence.
She sometimes felt out of place as the token nonhuman expert in the midst of the academics, economists, and political scientists. But the job provided her with a decent living and a human identity. With a pair of contact lenses she could pass for a compact, muscular human, and the Agency helped her maintain that fiction.
Evi padded back to the weight machine and started to reconfigure it for a leg press. She flipped the cover off the keypad and punched in the resistance at 600 kilos. There was a long pause as she listened to the hydraulics of the machine adjust.
She straddled the bench, leaned back, and put her feet in the grips.
The weight machine was at the end of one arm of the L-shaped balcony. It was pointed toward the corner of the balcony and, beyond, toward one of a twinned set of condominiums that bordered the park. The condo she faced was a dozen stories taller, fifty years younger, and about five grand cheaper than the place Evi lived in.
She watched the front of the neighboring building.
No matter how early she got up for her workout, her penchant for exercising in the nude always drew a few spectators. She hadn’t yet decided if she was bothered by it or not.
And, even though she had started her workout a half-hour early, apparently this morning was no different.
Four windows up and three to the left there was a peeper. He gave himself away with the high-spectrum glow from his binocs. She strained to focus on the guy. The peeper’s blurred window shot into focus and the rest of Manhattan quashed itself into her peripheral vision. She saw his face, monochrome and sliced into strips by the Venetian blinds in his window. She guessed mid-twenties with mixed Anglo heritage. She couldn’t see anything of the darkened apartment behind him. He had supplied himself with a pair of military binocs, a pair of British Long-Eighties with night-vision attachments.
Evi’s eyes watered and she closed them.
She did a few presses and opened her eyes and refocused on the peeper. December, and the guy was sweating. She could see the stains under his armpits, and light was reflecting off his forehead. There was something wrong about the guy, and not a standard New York wrongness.
She was working up an irritating sweat herself. Her ass was beginning to slide all over the plastic seat. That usually wasn’t a problem, but apparently she’d slacked off a lot. She did three more leg presses and stopped to get a towel to lay on the seat.
When she stopped, she strained at her maximum to get a look at the peeper. That’s when she noticed that the peeper had an earplug and a throat-mike. She’d missed it at first, because of the blinds and the shadows they were casting. The peeper was also talking to himself.
And while in Manhattan you expect all the pervs and scuzzballs to talk to themselves, this peeper was talking to someone else.
He wasn’t subvocalizing, so Evi could watch his lips move. At a hundred meters plus it hurt to make out, but the old Japanese gene-techs had designed good eyes.
Evi didn’t make the mistake of staring at the guy. That would have been a tip that she could see him, and the guy would clam up and dive for cover. Even her brief pause in the leg presses might have alerted him. She resumed pumping.
Fortunately the peeper seemed not to have noticed her pause. So, while the peeper was getting an eyeful down her leg press, she tried to read the peeper’s lips.
The fact that he wasn’t speaking English threw her for a second. It took her a moment to recognize the syllabication as Japanese. Damn it. Trying to lip-read a language that relied so much on inflection was close to hopeless. Then he nodded a little and slipped into Arabic. Evi was much more fluent in Arabic than she was in Japanese.
What the peeper was mouthing looked like, “Word is go. The package is on southwest balcony. Team one is the pickup. Two and three, stairs.”
It didn’t take a tactical genius to figure out what “the package” might be. And, while being raised within the Israeli intelligence community might have prejudiced her against anyone who spoke Arabic, it wasn’t too far a leap to decide that the “pickup” wasn’t anything pleasant.
She was on rep number twenty, and she had to blink a few times to clear her vision. Once she refocused and had a wider field of view, something glinted in her peripheral vision. At the same time, she heard a whirring chunk. The glint belonged to an open window on the top floor of the building next to the peeper’s. The chunk, and the whir she was now hearing, belonged to the penthouse’s express elevator.
No one but her was supposed to be able to use the elevator. The other penthouse was unoccupied.
Colonel Abdel, her first instructor and surrogate father, had given her a number of maxims, and near the top was “know your territory.” She knew her building, knew its occupants, knew the sounds it made, and she knew that the elevator would get to the top floor in forty-seven seconds.
The French doors were around the corner of the balcony from her. Only fifteen meters separated her from her weapon.
The open window across the street glinted again, and something visceral made her vacate the weight machine and vault to the roof of the penthouse. Behind her something slammed into the bench she’d just left. She heard the crash of tearing metal and the siren wheeze of escaping hydraulic fluid.
“SHIT!” Evi screamed into the darkness. A sniper was firing at her, with something fifty-cal or better. She ran at top speed across the slick solar-collecting surface roofing the penthouse complex. She felt the wind of the second shot breeze by the small of her back before it shattered into the roof behind her. An explosion of ceramic powder dusted her legs as she dived behind the cover offered by the rectangular brick shack that housed the motors for the elevators and the central-air for the building.
She hunched up, shivering, against the brick wall. She could feel the wall vibrate as a third shot slammed into the other side of the shack.
“What the fuck is going on?”
She could hear Abdel telling her to ask questions later. When people weren’t shooting at her.
The sniper let up, apparently waiting for a clean shot. She had been damn lucky she saw that glint. If the sight of the peeper hadn’t primed her for trouble, she never would have paid attention to it.
That scared her.
What could she do now? The peeper was talking to a pickup team that must be in the elevator now. The team would be there in less than half a minute. The sniper had her pinned back here, and the peeper was spotter on the high ground, broadcasting her movements.
She forced the panic back and tried to think clearly.
In the elevator their radio would be blacked out for the duration. She looked up at the wall she was huddled against. The door to the shack was facing the sniper, but here, on this side, was a small window. She forced it open. There was a screech of twisting metal, but she was unconcerned by the noise. The pickup team in the elevator wouldn’t hear it. The elevators in this place were plush, luxurious, and soundproof.
Inside the room, the only noise was the motor raising the elevator. The place smelled of grease and electricity. She stuck her head under the blackened girders that held up the whirring motor and looked down the shaft at the elevator. If their radios had been working, the emergency exit on top of the elevator would have been open.
The elevator was halfway up the shaft and the trapdoor was still closed. The radio blackout prevented the peeper from telling the team that she was about to land on them.
Whoever they were.
Evi looked at the cables stringing between the motor and the elevator. She didn’t want to do this, but taking the offense was the only way she could gain control of the situation. She grabbed a cable and started lowering herself, hand over hand. Dangerous as hell if her grip slipped, but that was only par for the course.
She and the elevator met on the fifteenth floor of the twenty-story building. Her feet squished in the black filth coating the top of the elevator. Her skin was now covered in brown grease, making her wish for some clothes.
She crouched over the trapdoor and listened. She couldn’t hear them, but she could smell them. Two of them, and they weren’t human. She could identify the smell, canine, both of them. They were most likely Afghani-engineered dogs. Plenty of combat experience during the Pan-Asian war, would have gone merc when the Kabul government discontinued the strain.
She was glad the Japanese gene-techs had avoiding moreaus in mind when they designed her odor profile. Had she been human, it would have been them smelling her. But they hadn’t smelled her or heard her. If she did her job right, they never would.
The trapdoor was just a panel resting in the roof of the elevator. When the sixteenth floor was passing by, she silently lifted it. She looked down, and her guess was right. Two Afghanis. Their shaggy gray fur was the tip-off. Both faced forward, pointing a pair of silenced submachine guns at the chromed door.
Their black noses began to twitch in unison and the one nearest her began to turn. Noise and stale air from the shaft were blowing in.
She straddled the trapdoor and grabbed the sides of the opening with both hands. She heard the metal crunch in her grip, and so did the canines.
The elevator reached floor number seventeen, and both dogs were turning around. Too slow, she thought. She shot her legs through the opening and wrapped them around one dog’s neck. She hauled the dog upward, pulling with her arms. The other one wanted to shoot, Evi knew, but his partner was in the way.
She yanked the dog halfway through the trapdoor, giving herself some cover from dog number two. She ended up on her back on top of the elevator, the dog still thrashing. He faced her, sputtering white foam on her stomach as he whipped his head back and forth. She grabbed the dog’s muzzle and snapped it shut with her right hand. Blood and a piece of tongue splattered warmly on her thigh.
She used the dog’s muzzle as a lever-arm to break his neck.
She unscissored her legs and rolled to the side of the elevator. The elevator passed floor eighteen. The corpse lay folded over the lip of the trapdoor. Its head looked back over the right shoulder as if it saw something interesting at the top of the shaft. Evi spared a look to her right, down the adjoining shaft. The neighboring elevator was down by the lobby, unmoving. She swung down and dangled by the side of the elevator.
She’d just cleared the top of the elevator when the second dog started spraying the roof with gunfire. The corpse shook like it was having a seizure, and the shaft rang with the sound of bullets ricocheting. She worried about the cables and the motor.
The dog ceased firing, managing not to hit anything vital. Evi stationed herself across from the trapdoor, bracing her feet in the metal strut halfway up the side of the elevator’s exterior. She ducked low and listened. She heard the corpse thud back into the elevator, and suddenly the shaft was filled with the odor of gunfire. She listened. Soon she heard the canine pull himself out of the hole.
Nineteenth floor.
She waited a heartbeat and popped her torso over the edge. The canine was standing on top of the elevator and, predictably, looking up. She sank her right hand into the dog’s crotch and lifted him up and off balance. She held on to the roof of the elevator with her left hand as she leaned her body back into the adjoining shaft. The canine had both hands on his gun, so he didn’t have a chance. Evi felt the cables brush her hair as she flipped the dog over her. The dog tumbled headfirst down the neighboring shaft.
Inside the elevator, she heard the doors ding open: twentieth floor.
Below her, she heard the dog hit.
She vaulted to the top of the elevator and dropped through the hole. Her feet squished into the blood-soaked carpet. The canine that took the header had done quite a number on his partner. The inside of the elevator was ripe with the smell of wasted canine. She hit the emergency stop before the doors could close.
Evi gave herself fifteen seconds to examine the body.
The dog looked a little too healthy to be from the Indian frontier, so she guessed that he had originally been involved in Persia or Turkmen. Long time since the war, and the canine had since gone independent. The vest was vintage Afghani special forces, as was most of the dog’s outfit . . .
The gun was a different story.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
