Before the Dawn Page 4

  “The rope won't hold!” she called down, warning him.

  “Fuck you, little girl!”

  That limited vocabulary seemed suddenly ominous. . . .

  Feeling not so smug now, climbing even faster, she moved toward the rooftop, the guy now climbing the rope below her, chasing her toward the roof, heedless of the peril he was placing both of them in. As she looked up the last ten feet, she could see the rope straining against the twisted metal of the roof's distorted edge. Beyond that, the stars hung bright and glittering in the sky, as if lighting her way, until they were eclipsed by a face . . .

  . . . Kafelnikov's.

  Opening a switchblade with a nasty click, the Brood's leader said, “Stupid bitch . . . I told you I was going to kill you!”

  “I'm getting really tired of you boys calling me that,” she said. “Your manners suck. . . .”

  With no alternative, and that weight below her, she kept climbing, narrowing the distance between herself and the Brood members on the roof.

  Kafelnikov bent down, the knife starting to slice through the thin rope. “Just be a couple more seconds . . . and then nobody'll be calling you ‘bitch' again, rest assured, my dear. . . . Nobody'll call you anything but dead!”

  The Russian was carving at the rope, threads popping, his face a pale terrible thing just above her, closer, closer. . . .

  “Boss, no!” the skinny guy below her whined, but it was too late.

  Kafelnikov's blade cut the rope.

  Max let go, the rope and the skinny guy tumbling down out of sight, a screaming man riding a snake.

  But as she let go, Max launched herself upward, spearing the lapels of Kafelnikov's coat in either hand. Just as gravity took over and started to pull them both over the edge, two members of the Brood grabbed their leader and just managed, barely managed, to keep him—and Max—from pitching to the pavement far below.

  And so she hung there, holding on to his coat, Kafelnikov's face only inches from hers—they might have kissed, though she found his breath (what was that, sardines?) offensive—and the other two Broodsters strained to keep their fearless leader from falling, their grip on their superior's arms preventing him from doing anything to rid himself of Max.

  Inexorably, gravity tilted them farther over the edge. In his panic, Kafelnikov fought to tear himself from the grip of his own men so he could try to pry Max's hands from his coat; but his loyal boys were just too strong, and kept trying to pull him away.

  Just as it seemed the skinny Brood leader and the shapely cat burglar would tumble through the night together, Max looked up at the Russian and smiled.

  Kafelnikov's eyes went wide in wonderment and rage—he might have been thinking, If only she were one of mine!—then Max headbutted him, breaking his nose, and almost prying him loose from his goons.

  Blood sprayed and the Russian howled. Tearing one arm free, he swung wildly for Max's face; but she simply let go of him . . .

  . . . and his follow-through carried him back out of sight onto the roof with his two goons in tow.

  As Max fell through the night sky, a falling star, she grinned, enjoying the rush of air on her face. Not only did she have what she'd come for, she'd gotten to bloody the nose of the Brood's leader—not a bad evening's work, so far.

  As she passed the seventh floor again, she pulled the metal ring on her suit that deployed the chute and a tiny turbine blower that filled the chute with warm air and provided enough updraft to give her an easy descent and a relatively soft landing.

  She had hoped not to have to use the chute off the Cap, as she might land in the midst of the Brood members below who had been summoned by the explosions to the street. The plan had been to wait on the rooftop till the sidewalks were empty, as the Broodsters filed back into the building, to investigate the site of the burglary. And then she'd float to earth.

  But this would do in a pinch. No help would be waiting below, however—Moody and the Chinese Clan were nowhere to be seen as she drifted toward the street; that didn't surprise Max . . . their job, after all, had been to provide a diversion. They'd done as much, and split. She floated to the pavement, touched down, turned off the blower, and wrapped up the chute.

  Then she turned, to see Brood members swarming toward her, dangerous dimwits in tattered denim. The first one fell to a spinning roundhouse kick to the head, the second to a straight kick to the groin, the third to a right cross.

  And then Max was running, the gangsters in pursuit. Turning the corner, she found herself flying down Vine Street with half the Brood behind her. She raced down the middle of the street, her shoes pounding on the shiny wet pavement. Just as she passed a manhole cover, Max wondered idly why the street was damp—it hadn't rained today, hadn't rained for weeks. As she heard the manhole cover slide open, Max stopped, pivoted, and dropped into her fighting stance.

  Catching a glimpse of silver hair rising out of the manhole, the unmistakable nasty perfume of gasoline filling her flaring nostrils, Max suddenly knew why the street was wet. . . .

  She spun away and ran for all she was worth—which was plenty—even as she heard the whoosh of the gas igniting. Some of the Brood screamed, but she assumed it was more out of fear than pain. Moody wouldn't let them get close enough to be caught in the fire . . . probably.

  The idea was to stop the pursuit, not to incinerate the pursuers, though a few charred casualties wouldn't have Max or Moody losing much sleep. Looking over her shoulder as she ran, Max saw the wall of flame separating her from pursuers who were folding back into the night, scurrying home to their tower of broken dreams.

  And she saw that Moody had disappeared back down the manhole, as if he'd not even really been there, a ghost haunting what had once been Hollywood's most famous street.

  “Thanks,” she said to the night, and was gone.

  Less than an hour later, with the security plans to guide her, Max negotiated the electronic locks and first-floor laser guards of the former office building and current home of the Hollywood Heritage Museum. Her new goal lay at the far end of the second floor, in a locked room guarded by more lasers, mines, and a special alarm under the object itself.

  Only two guards patrolled the museum at night, and one of them was already napping at the security desk on the first floor.

  There wasn't supposed to be anything of real worth in the museum, strictly nostalgia on display; but Max—thanks to Moody—knew better. Many of the exhibits from the history of American filmmaking displayed objects of value only to wealthy collectors of pre-Pulse memorabilia. None of the kitschy artifacts could compare to the literal jewel that awaited her at the end of the hall.

  The first floor contained many remnants of the days that the placards posted next to exhibits referred to as the “Golden Age of Silents.” The cane, bowler, and black suit of a “comic” named Chaplin, some kind of Arab outfit a feminine-looking actor named Valentino had worn in a couple of “silent” movies, and even a train engine that the placard proudly stated came from a Buster Keaton movie called The General.

  Silently climbing the last few stairs to the second floor, Max found herself prowling a hallway whose placard boasted of material from the “Golden Age of Studios.” For a place with so many “Golden Ages,” Max thought, there seemed to be precious little actual gold around. Creeping along the hallway, keeping close to the wall, Max's cat eyes registered the facility's other guard, a heavyset fella heading for the far end of the hall, her enhanced hearing picking up his heels clicking on the tile floor.

  She kept moving, sliding past raincoat-clad figures from a “musical” called Singin' in the Rain, and a quartet of mannequins dressed as a lion, a crude robot, a scarecrow, and a pigtailed girl in a blue-and-white-checkered dress, holding a little dog; the latter grouping represented something called The Wizard of Oz, though Max couldn't see how these characters had anything mystical or magical about them, and the only wizards she knew about were Harry Potter and his friends.

  What waited in the room
beyond the hallway had nothing to do with the “Golden Age of Studios,” but it was the most secure room in the building . . . so this, of course, was where the most valuable exhibit was housed.

  Max watched from the shadows as the plump guard checked the door at the end of the hall, then disappeared into the stairwell, to continue his rounds on another floor. She waited to make her move, listening to the door click shut and the guard's footsteps—he was going down—on the metal stairs dissipate.

  Then she all but soundlessly sprinted (This is the Golden Age of silents, she thought) the last fifty feet to the exhibit's door, circumvented the alarm, picked the numeric push-button lock, and took a long deep breath.

  The lock and the alarm were the easy part. Mines, activated only when the museum was closed, lay beneath the floor, and lasers hooked to infrared beams crisscrossed the room with barely a foot between them. Taking one last look at the floor plan Kafelnikov had so thoughtfully provided, Max memorized it, tucked it away, and plotted her course of action.

  She opened the door, slipped inside, and eased it shut behind her. The chamber was windowless and silent, reminding her of the solitude of the barracks at Manticore after lights-out. Half a dozen glass cases stood around the room, each bearing props from a movie called Titanic.

  A tall display case in the corner contained a mannequin wearing an old-timey diaphanous white gown, while a similar glass case in the opposite corner held a mannequin of an attractive if baby-faced young man in a tuxedo.

  Three long, flat cases were arranged in a triangle in the center of the room. One held silverware, another a model of a ship, and the third one was an arrangement of still pictures from the motion picture.

  At the far end of the room, encased in a Plexiglas box, under a narrow spotlight, her prize caught her eyes: a gigantic blue diamond on a silver chain encrusted with smaller diamonds.

  Max knew little of the film, which apparently was famous. Television was limited and very controlled in the post-Pulse era, and, anyway, she didn't care for fiction . . . what was the point? Few people in made-up stories lived more interesting lives than she did.

  But she did know—thanks to Moody—that although everyone back in pre-Pulse days had thought the great blue diamond, the “Heart of the Ocean,” was merely a film prop, it had indeed been real, a ten-thousand-dollar necklace commissioned by the director who later donated it to the Hollywood Heritage Museum.

  “Its true value,” Moody had told her, “is known to few—why attract thieves . . . like us? And to the public . . . those who still care about silly ancient celluloid . . . the magic of the prop is enough to make it stand on its own as a tourist attraction.”

  Funny, Max thought. In this town where dreams once were manufactured, one of the most famous artifacts was a fraud of sorts . . . because it was real.

  Now the famed Heart of the Ocean lay only twenty-five feet across the room from her.

  And if she could retrieve it, and get out of here with her skin, the Chinese Clan could fence it for enough money to set them up for years to come.

  Her breathing slowed as she prepared for the final assault on her prize. She popped a huge wad of gum into her mouth and started chewing slowly, methodically. Withdrawing from fatigue pouches two good-sized suction cups with pressure-release handles, Max attached one to each hand with inch-wide nylon straps and looked up at the ceiling. She had less than two feet of open air between it and the topmost infrared beam.

  The young woman leapt straight up, arms outstretched, suction cups sticking to the ceiling with a sucking kiss. Taking in a deep breath, then letting it out, Max pulled herself up until her neck was bent to one side and she held herself up with her arms akimbo.

  Even for a soldier with her unique talents, the strain was severe.

  Next she slowly pulled up her legs and stretched them out in front of her, as if in a ballet exercise. She now sat, head cocked to one side, hanging from the ceiling above the beams by no more than six or maybe seven inches. Moving across the room folded up like this would be no small feat.

  Glancing down at the necklace, she formed half a smile. No guts, no glory, she thought, and that blue rock was serious, serious glory not only for her, but for her whole clan.

  Releasing one suction cup, she held herself up, eased it forward as far as she dared, and attached it again with its tiny puff of a kiss. She repeated the action with the second cup and found herself a foot nearer the prize. The muscles of her shoulders bunched and burned, but with her breathing, she compartmentalized the pain, putting it out of her mind.

  Few on earth could have done this. Max had had this ability since childhood.

  Sweat trickled down her face, dripping onto her shirt front as she single-mindedly made her way across the room, still casually chewing the gum as she went. She had completed her action with the cups nine times now and not only did her shoulders burn, but her biceps, triceps, quads, hamstrings, and glutes were each in the middle of a three-alarm blaze of their own.

  A voice in her head that sounded uncomfortably like Colonel Lydecker's reminded her that pain was the price of achievement.

  Shut up, she mentally replied, and kept moving the cups forward.

  Finally, after what seemed like forever but had only been six minutes, she found herself directly above—if barely able to cock her head enough to see—the Heart of the Ocean.

  She had maybe a foot and a half of clearance on each side of the Plexiglas box. As if the trip over here hadn't been enough, now the job would get really tricky. In that tight space, she would have to remove the cubic foot of plastic, snatch the necklace without setting off the alarm, then suction-cup her way back to the door.

  No problem.

  Taking one hand out of a suction cup, Max snugged her knees up, then slowly rolled backward, letting her feet come up toward the ceiling as her head lowered toward the box. About halfway home, her body tucked into a sphere only slightly larger than a beach ball, she slipped her shoe into the empty strap of one of the suction cups.

  Satisfied the strap had her securely, she let go with her other hand and swung her other leg up and into that strap. She now hung upside down, her head barely a foot above the necklace with its glimmering stone.

  Working quickly, Max picked the locks on each side of the case, lifted the Plexi box straight up, withdrew the gum from her mouth and affixed it to the top of the lid. Then she rotated the thing so its top was down . . . and eased it toward the floor.

  This was the part that worried her most.

  Her arms were not long enough to reach the floor. She would have to drop the box the last couple of feet or so, and hope to hell the wad of gum held it in place and kept it from bouncing into one of the infrared beams.

  Letting out her breath, Max released the box with as light a touch as possible. It dropped to the carpeting with a dull, barely audible thud, then rocked toward the beam . . .

  . . . but righted itself, and stopped.

  Step one accomplished.

  Pulling a utility knife from a pocket, Max leaned in close to the displayed jewelry. Only one wire connected the necklace to the alarm, but she would have to work gently not to set it off.

  Blood was rushing to her head, and she could feel her face growing hot, like a flush of terrible embarrassment . . . just a little longer and everything would be fine . . . fine. . . .

  Hanging there upside down, Max wished absently that a dash of bat DNA had been added to her genetic cocktail—then maybe this stunt wouldn't make her so dizzy. Carefully scraping back the plastic coating on the wire, she exposed about two inches of gleaming brass strands, put the knife away, and pulled out a wire of her own with alligator clips at either end. Attaching the clips at both ends of the section she'd cleared, Max took out her wire cutters, slowed her breathing again, and clipped the alarm wire in the middle of the cleared section.

  She held her breath for a few seconds . . . but no alarm sounded, no lasers blasted at her, and the mines didn't go off.


  Releasing the wire from the necklace, Max gazed fondly at the huge blue stone, and for the first time all evening, a true, wide smile creased her face. She lifted the necklace—feeling a real reverence for its value, if not its history—and gave it a quick kiss . . .

  . . . then, as if her lips had done it, the alarm sounded.

  And all hell broke loose.

  “Shit,” Max whispered, her vocabulary of “forbidden” words far greater now than she'd ever heard from Colonel Lydecker.

  The thief suddenly realized the necklace had also been resting on a pressure alarm—a security measure that had somehow not made its way into the Brood's stolen plans. The alarm siren squawked like a gaggle of angry geese, a grating, obnoxious sound Max decided she would have hated even under innocent circumstances.

  As opposed to these guilty ones. . . .

  The first laser drilled the stand the necklace had been on, and exploded it in a shower of wood and velvet, just as Max pulled herself up out of the way. Despite the mines in the floor, which were presumably now activated, choosing the lesser of bad options, she kicked her feet out of the suction cups, and dropped to the carpeting as lasers blasted holes in the room all around her.

  At least where she'd alighted, there hadn't been a mine. . . .

  Grabbing the Plexiglas shell of the exhibit, tucking it to her like a big square football, Max did a forward roll and popped to her feet just as a laser fired a blast at her face.

  She dodged left, reacting with the lightning inhuman speed bred into her, though she nonetheless felt the heat of the blast as it shot past her right cheek, and she could hear her hair sizzle as her nostrils filled with the burned smell of it.

  Leaping with all her considerable might, she flung herself onto one of the exhibit cases in the middle of the room just as another laser blast chewed the floor not far from where she'd been standing, setting off the small blast of one of the mines. They obviously weren't meant to kill, only to maim.