City of Shadows Page 2

  Pearson’s smile grew, knowing. “You mean the scent of evil so bad you want to cut your nose off? We know. Some of our people here have noticed the same thing. It’s so bad for some of them that they’ve taken to visiting friends in the country just to get away from the stench. Funny enough, once they cross the line for Greater London, the smell goes away.” He snapped his fingers. “Instantly.”

  I frowned. It wasn’t unusual for the smell to be bound by a threshold. I always knew it had some limits. “In my experience, it’s usually dispelled in the open air. I can’t imagine how bad it is that it’s reaching me at twenty thousand feet. What’s going on here?”

  Pearson shook his head. “More than you can imagine. How much do you know about our situation in London?”

  I shrugged. “I hear things.”

  “Knife attacks are up. Violent crime is up. The mayor wants to ban any and all knives in the city, but carry acid? That’s a-okay!” His bright, cheery tone faded and grew cynical. “But carrying around containers of acid? That’s just ducky. Nearly five hundred acid attacks a year, but why not?”

  I cringed. New York City, the most anti-gun city in the United States outside of California, wasn’t that idiotic. Single-edged knives were perfectly legal. “What the Hell is wrong with your mayor? Worse, what’s wrong with your cops that they’re putting up with his crap?”

  Pearson sighed, obviously wearied by even thinking about it. “The nanny state, or what we call our government, long ago decided that if national service can’t give it to you, you don’t require it. This is why there’s gun confiscation. Violent crimes are up, mind you, but why let reason enter into it. It doesn’t help that our mayor is a Muslim communist and most of the rising crime rates are attributed to our ‘refugees.’ We’re told that they ‘just can’t understand our culture,’ given a smack on the bum, and sent on their merry way. Sadly, you can’t talk to him as part of this investigation. Maybe you’d be able to talk sense into him.”

  The laugh came unbidden from my throat. “The last two times I had direct contact with public officials, I sent them straight to Hell. Literally.”

  Pearson’s grin flickered on and off. He knew he shouldn’t smile at the thought, but it was obviously coming through. “I had heard something about that.”

  I looked out the window and watched the city go by. Much of it still looked like it could have easily featured in a Sherlock Holmes movie. Despite the amount of damage during two World Wars, late Victorian buildings were still de rigeur. There were the occasional LED or neon lights added, but it was like trying to dress up a concrete bunker with Christmas lights—they were colorful, but it didn’t change the nature of the structure. As we went deeper and deeper into the city, certain blocks had statues every twelve feet. There was the stupid giant Ferris wheel, tall spires of London Bridge and Big Ben, giant black taxis, huge, double-decker red buses. Also, I had no idea why they decide to drive in the wrong lane.

  “A thousand monuments to past glories,” Pearson stated casually. “Most of whom the average man on the street couldn’t identify if you gave them a history book, in places they couldn’t find on a map if you stuck a pin in it.”

  I restrained myself from rolling my eyes. New York had its skyline radically altered in 2001, and it felt like half the population had forgotten about it within five years. Almost everyone else had forgotten within ten. Being disappointed that the populace couldn’t remember things that happened two centuries ago was laughable.

  “I’m almost surprised that there’s been little backlash against the stupid policies,” I said, getting back on track.

  Pearson rolled his eyes. “Our esteemed mayor seems to think that there’s a racist backlash coming against the poor innocent refugees … the ones who are doing it. We won’t even discuss Rotherham.”

  I winced. I knew about Rotherham. It had nothing to do with the recent wave of Middle Eastern refugees. It was far, far worse than that. Rotherham was a place in Northern England that had an entire sex trafficking ring operating there for nearly thirty years without anyone stopping it, despite plenty of evidence. Girls would be kidnapped, disappear into the headquarters, and turned into sex slaves. Fathers of kidnapped children who protested had been arrested. Complaints were dismissed as racist. Cops either ignored reports because they were too lazy to care or on the take from the rapists. I couldn’t tell if it was political correctness gone amuck or organized crime to make Al Capone jealous.

  The city continued to rush by. The streets seemed darker and shadier. The monuments seemed disapproving of the conversation, scandalized that it would be allowed to happen … or that people would talk about it.

  “Do you think that the smell of evil has to do with the crime rate spiking?” I asked.

  Pearson hesitated before speaking. “Only partially. We think it’s more the museum than anything else.”

  “What makes you think that there’s a connection between the museum heist and the smell?”

  “Because no one really complained about it until the heist two weeks ago. And since the heist, crime has gone up.” Pearson frowned. “We are a city of converts, Detective Nolan.” He spread his hands in admission. “In fact, I’m one of them. I used to be an Anglican priest. I got better. And when half a million of my flock wanted to come home to Rome, I brought my entire parish over. But like many converts, they’re more intense than those born into the faith. Therefore, we have a lot of mystics. I won’t say that they’re on par with you. We don’t have many showing your level of ability. But they’re sensitive to things shifting below the surface of the world we can see. And ever since the British museum heist, there were a lot of people in London right now who have A Very Bad Feeling About This.”

  3

  THE Museum

  “The museum will be on the left,” Pearson told me. I looked over and saw only rows upon rows of late forties apartment buildings. “Behind the apartment buildings.”

  “You mean it’s the next block over?”

  “No. Same block, just on the other side of the apartments.”

  I considered asking why the heck it was going to be behind a series of apartment buildings. Almost every large museum I’d ever seen was its own block.

  Then again, as the cabbie slowly worked his way through traffic in the narrow, one-way lane, I thought, Maybe they need the room.

  I was about the make the comment. Then, motion in the corner of my eye caught my attention. I rolled down the window and leaned out to get a better look. It was a collection of at least six young men gathered around a couple. Four of the men were shoving the man between them. The remaining two had cornered the girl against a wall of an apartment building.

  The car slowed to a stop because of the gridlock. I grabbed the door handle and popped the door open. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  I slipped out onto the sidewalk and strode up to them. “Excuse me!” I barked in my sergeant's voice. “What are you doing?”

  The male victim was given a hard shove, into a wall next to the girl. Three of the men peeled off to confront me. Two stayed with the girl, and a third stayed with the male.

  I must not have looked like much. I wore a button down shirt, navy blue blazer, and a light overcoat. It was technically summer, but it was still England. They were a half-dozen young, strong … Middle Eastern men.

  When Pearson said that there were a lot of these attacks, he wasn’t kidding. “You pricks deaf?” I barked when I was only twenty feet away and closing. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The one in the middle said, “Oi. I think you’re in the wrong neighborhood, mate. Shouldn’t you be somewhere posh?”

  Even though the one in the middle spoke, my eyes were on the one on the right, trying to circle out to the curb. He had a white plastic bottle in his hand, held low and almost entirely behind his thigh.

  Acid attacks. Nearly five hundred a year.

  I didn’t even wait for an attack. I took three large, quick strides. The o
ne with the acid had no time to adjust to my new speed as I drew my knee up, then drove the sole of my shoe into the center of his chest. It was the type of kick to knock down a door. I drove a hammer fist forward into his right clavicle, then drove three fingers above and around his collar bone. Once I had hooked it, I dropped my weight, dislocating the collar bone with a crack. Acid Boy screamed, and his grip on the bottle slackened. I held him with my right hand and grabbed the bottle with my left. I didn’t even think about it and splashed the contents on the shirts of the other two. As tempting as it was to splash them in the face, permanently marking them, it felt too vindictive.

  The other two screamed and ripped their shirts off as they ran down the street, against traffic. Their buddies remained, but not for long. The one on the man tossed him to the ground and bolted to join his friends. However, I grabbed Acid boy and threw him in front of his escape route, crashing the two together. They went down in a pile of arms and legs.

  The two men on the girl pulled her away from the wall and dragged her along with them, running away from me.

  They might have escaped me if it weren’t for Father Pearson, who appeared along their escape route. The good father drove his fist into the face of the first escaping thug. His feet flew off the ground as he fell back, landing in a rumpled heap against the wall.

  The last one standing was stunned long enough for me to grab him with a flying tackle. The thug, the girl, and I all went down in a tangle. We crashed to the sidewalk together. The girl screamed and yanked her arm away, scrambling to her feet and up against a wall.

  The thug wanted to fight back. I straddled his chest, pinning his arms with my knees. I grabbed his face in both hands and positioned my thumbnails just below his eyes. Since he didn’t want me to gouge his eyes out, he stayed perfectly still.

  “Hi,” I said calmly, only a little out of breath. “I’m new here. Let me introduce myself. I’m Tom Nolan. NYPD. That means I have no authority to actually arrest you guys. However, I’m going to be around for the near future. If I ever, and I mean ever, find or see any of you six, ever again, I will stop you. Since I can’t arrest you, I’ll have to find some other way to do exactly that. Am I clear?”

  He scoffed. “You’d be arrested,” he spat. “You would go to jail. Not me.”

  I didn’t think about my next action. For all I know, I wasn’t the one who guided my hand when I reached over and broke his index finger. He gasped. I broke his middle finger and he screamed.

  I leaned in and smiled, as though I had meant to do that. “Then report me.”

  I pushed off of his chest and rose to my feet, dragging him up and hurling him away. All of his friends had long since disappeared.

  I turned to the two we had saved and smiled as confidently as I could. I didn’t know what had come over me. I hoped I was justified. I generally avoided being brutal with criminals, but something here had set me off. I think I would have felt better had I been aware of breaking the fingers as I did them.

  “Thank you,” the man said. “I’m Robert.”

  The brunette offered a hand. “I’m Jillian.”

  I shook hands with both of them. “Tommy.”

  Robert nodded. “I can’t thank you enough. I didn’t want an acid bath and Jill…”

  It clicked. The back of my brain had put the pieces together faster than I did. The bottle of acid was to scar Robert. Two men were going to drag Jillian away for what was euphemistically referred to as “a fate worse than death”—though in a post-Rotherham UK, that could have meant one night, or a lifetime. That’s why … something in me figured I had to break some fingers to get the point across.

  “You might want to head on home? Get off the street?”

  Robert smiled, amused. “Working on it.” He nodded at me. “Take care of yourself, Tommy.”

  Jillian and Robert drifted away, walking a different direction from the thugs. I blinked, confused. I looked at Pearson. “I missed a reference, didn’t I?”

  “They’re homeless.” Pearson shrugged. “The homeless are more common than you’d imagine.” He sighed and walked down the street, picking up my suitcase from the curb. “We have a welfare state second to none, and we have more homeless than anywhere else in the country. Don’t ask me.”

  I sighed. I knew the feeling. New York was much the same, only our homeless were more obviously … homeless. “How did you get the suitcase out?”

  “I paid the cabbie and got the luggage while the traffic was stopped.”

  We turned the corner… and there was The Museum.

  If you've seen a museum of natural history in New York or Chicago in America, you’ve seen the front of the British Museum. It has massive columns at the top of stone steps. Makes it look more like a Greek temple of worship, and you have it pegged. The only difference in this case was the patches of grass leading up to the front steps and the fact that this museum was as big as a college campus at 800,000 square feet. It’s dedicated to history, art, and culture, with a collection of eight million pieces gathered during the entire span of the British Empire.

  I looked up… and up…and up at it.

  “Nice place,” I said casually.

  New Yorkers abroad did not gawk at anything shorter than a skyscraper, and even then, it had to be an awesome skyscraper.

  “We like to think so,” Pearson said pleasantly. “Come along.”

  Even though the design and layout of the museum grounds were awesome, there was damage all over the place. Two of the patches of lawn had gaping holes gouged out of them. There was a chunk of rock blown out of a column that looked like an ice cream scoop had dug out part of it. Crime scene tape had been put up around several areas. Some parts had not yet been marked. Bullet casings were still scattered all over the place. Clusters of concrete rubble were swept off to one side. The back of an apartment building had a massive hole in it. There was a hole where the curb used to be, causing damage to both the sidewalk and the street.

  And yet, despite all of the damage, it was still open to the public. The hole in the apartment building was tarped over and strung with crime scene tape. In fact, there was liberal use of crime scene tape everywhere.

  Hole in the sidewalk? Crime scene tape. Gouged out patch of lawn? Crime scene tape. Dodgy column? More tape.

  “And it’s open for business?” I asked.

  Pearson waved at the damage, then at the cordoned off perimeters. “We still have some measure of ‘stiff upper lip’ here. Unfortunately, it typically takes the form of bureaucracy, and the tape is usually red.”

  “Uh huh… Who went in packing the grenade launcher?”

  Pearson shrugged. “Don’t ask me. We haven’t figured that part out yet. Though what I’ve seen of the SOCO photos, it wasn’t a grenade launcher. They haven’t found any fragments or traces of any explosive devices whatsoever.”

  I walked along the path to the main steps, frowning. Whoever had led the heist had no problem throwing around explosions like candy. If the Scene of the Crime Officers hadn’t found anything like an explosive, or fragments thereof, who knew what these guys were working with.

  Pearson walked me through the long marble hallways of the British Museum. It’s quite obvious that they were trying to split the difference between a museum and a palace.

  But the museum exhibits weren’t what interested me. The bullet casings, the holes in the walls caused by strafed automatic fire, did.

  We were in the Egyptian exhibit when the shootout got really interesting. One central case in the middle of the floor was shattered. The surrounding hall was shot to pieces—instead of the occasional lines of bullets, entire areas were machine-gunned, with the occasional artistic spots of blood.

  I frowned, looking around. “What the heck? Seriously, Pearson, what was stolen?”

  A new, imperious voice from behind me answered the question. “Only the most important pre-historical artifact anywhere.”

  The newcomer speaker was a late-middle-aged man, with blonde h
air that was starting to go gray. His eyes were half-closed as if he were so bored he might well fall asleep in the middle of the marble hallway. He was tall and thin, and his small smile looked mildly amused at … something.

  Next to him was a brunette with dark curly hair. She was shorter and squatter than he, but seemingly more awake. However, I wasn’t going to put anything past anyone. Welcome to London.

  I offered my hand. “Thomas Nolan. And you are?”

  His smiled flickered. “I am Lord Newby Fowler,” he said imperiously, as though his name and title were the most precious things he had. He gave a little bow and gestured to the woman. “And this is my wife, Dame Polly Toynbee.”

  Toynbee nodded at me simply and curtly. Neither one shook my hand, and I merely let it drop.

  “So, what makes it so important?”

  Fowler’s smile lengthened a little, a lazy cat who already had his prey. “Obviously, you didn’t read the card.”

  I glanced at the plaque underneath the shattered case. It had also been strafed. The description was mangled, though the photograph was intact.

  Instead of pointing that out, I said, “I just got here.”

  Toynbee smiled, also tolerant. “Before we answer any of your questions, perhaps you would like to explain how you got in here, what you’re doing here, and why a priest is carrying your luggage?”

  Since I didn’t know how Pearson had gotten us through the crime scene without being stopped once, I decided to answer the questions I knew. I drew out my shield case and flashed both my badge and ID card. “Detective Nolan, NYPD intelligence division. There are concerns about your missing artifact being at the core of an upcoming terrorist attack. Father Pearson here is a specialist in the fields of Egyptology and archaeology and has been volunteered to be my assistant in this case.”