CHAPTER 2

Hours passed, and light fled from the city.

Muted sounds of late-night Atlanta traffic drifted over the theatre’s wrecked walls as two men stood silently, waiting: one very tall, milk-pale, and pitifully skinny, the other shorter, black, and nearly twice as broad as his companion. Standing side by side, they looked a little like the number 10. A mingled stench of garbage and urine drifted around them.

The taller of the men held a battered briefcase, and they both sweated despite the August night’s uncharacteristic chill. They stood among piles of rubble, bits of the past cast off among broken beer bottles and discarded syringes. A light rain had fallen earlier in the night, and now the men stood, motionless and gray, as water collected sluggishly in foul puddles at their feet.

The tall man, a near-skeletonized junkie named Chooley, grunted and closed his eyes. “Steady,” warned the shorter one, and for the fortieth time glanced around, examining the place where they stood.

The Hargett Theatre shut down in 1978, slated for demolition less than a month later. Halfway through the wrecking job, the same absence of money that closed the theatre also canceled the demolition team’s contract. So through the next two decades the theatre lay, half-destroyed, its ragged brick teeth and rusted skeleton bared to the sky. Part of the stage still stood. A catwalk hung from a twisted girder thirty feet off the ground, chopped off like a mangled limb.

The two men waited in the center of the theatre’s dead body while the minutes scraped past.

Another small, icy breath of air moved over them, the latest of several, and Chooley the junkie shuddered and stuck his free hand in his pants pocket. “Shit,” he mumbled. “Thought this was August.”

The other man, Zach Feygen, didn’t respond. Feygen was burly, quiet, in his mid-thirties, with a shaved head and skin the color of dark chocolate. His voice, when he chose to talk, came out slowly, deep and rough and rich.

After the better part of a year and a series of low-level buys, starting with ten bucks and working up to fifteen hundred, Feygen had finally set up this deal. Chooley, a regular customer of tonight’s target, played an integral part in the proceedings, which led to Feygen’s putting him on the list of departmentally protected informants. As near as anyone could tell, Chooley felt suitably grateful. Though he was articulate enough, for the most part, Chooley frequently lapsed into a kind detached mumbling.

Over the long months, Feygen heard each link of the necessary chain slowly clink together. For the days leading up to the final deal he hadn’t slept more than three or four hours a night, but damn, he felt good. Along with all the condemning evidence he’d gathered from users and street pushers, this buy would, at the very least, take Maurice Tell off the streets permanently. At most, it would get rid of half a dozen of Tell’s major contacts as well.

Almost certainly it would make Feygen’s career. He’d caught himself breaking out in a big stupid grin a couple of times just thinking about it.

Feygen heard the car first, at ten minutes after midnight. Its engine died outside the walls, then four doors opened and closed. Footsteps crunched through the brick and concrete debris, and five long shadows slid up onto a graffiti-covered wall.

Chooley said, “Here they come.”

Maurice Tell led the group of men rounding the corner. Tell stood well over six feet, always wore sunglasses, and had at one time called himself “Breaker.” Now, at thirty-four, most of the people he dealt with called him “Mr. Tell.” The other men with him clearly deferred to him, and hung back like geese in a V formation. All of them were armed. Two carried shotguns.

Tell jerked a thumb at Feygen, but spoke to Chooley. “This the nigger you told me about?”

A muscle in Feygen’s jaw clenched. Chooley hesitated, then nodded mutely.

Tell adjusted his Ray-Bans. “You’re alone?”

This time Feygen nodded. The microphone taped to his chest itched like a poison oak rash.

“And you brought the cash.”

Chooley held up the briefcase. His palm was slick with sweat, but his hand stayed steady.

Feygen tried not to eye the case more than necessary. The money it contained was coated with a fluorescent powder, so that anyone who handled it, or even came close to it while it was being handled, would shine like a Christmas tree under UV light.

“It’s here,” Chooley said. “Want to count it?”

Tell smiled—

— like a carnivore—

— and as Feygen murmured, “Oh...shit,” Tell made a decisive gesture with one hand.

Both the shotguns came up and leveled at them, and Feygen screamed, “Wait, wait, wait a minute!” but the gunmen already had their feet planted, and the adrenaline saturating Feygen’s blood didn’t seem to work on his suddenly jellied legs. Wide open, away from any decent cover, Feygen knew he and Chooley wouldn’t make it, couldn’t possibly get out of the line of fire, but he tried, turned and lunged to one side, and even as he moved he heard Tell say, “Now,” and gunfire exploded against the theatre’s crumbling walls.

Feygen landed face down in scraping bits of broken concrete and pulled himself halfway behind a shattered brick column. He thought, That wasn’t a shotgun, and peered around the edge of the column. He saw one of the shotgun men, a pale guy with curly red hair, stagger backward and hold up empty, bleeding hands.

Another gunshot struck out. Feygen saw the muzzle flash, a flower of fire in the shadows of an empty doorway, and the second man’s shotgun splintered and tore away.

Curly started screaming, and Feygen realized there was someone in the theatre besides himself, Chooley, and Tell’s gang.

Then something touched the ground, something black in the middle of Tell and his men, and things happened quickly.

Tell’s hand had only brushed the .357 in his shoulder holster when a heavy wooden rod struck him squarely between the eyes like a narrow battering ram. His Ray-Bans shattered, bits of sharp-edged plastic sliced into the skin of his forehead, and his knees turned to water, but the dark thing swept past him before he could fall.

The second shotgun man, an overgrown boy named Bryan Krago, stared at his bloody hands and hissed out a litany of obscenities. He tipped sideways into the rubble and drew his knees up to his chest.

The two untouched members of Tell’s entourage had by now pulled their own guns, but they couldn’t tell at what to fire; one of them began blazing randomly into the shadows, and Feygen felt a whap near one of his ears as a bullet sped past him. He tried to focus on the whirling black thing across the theatre’s floor, but only got more confused.

A piece of darkness moved among Tell’s thugs. Feygen thought it was man-shaped, but as he watched it seemed to flicker and dance, first in front of someone, then behind. A stray beam of light glistened off a wooden staff, long and polished, and a series of fast hard sounds echoed through the demolished theatre, a machine-gun spatter of wood crunching into bone.

“Clarke...” Feygen murmured, unsure of his voice. He touched the wire, fumbled for it. “Clarke, there’s something here! Something’s in here with us!”

As Tell’s last two men fell bonelessly, one swiftly followed by the other, Bryan Krago rose to his knees, a .44 Magnum the size of his forearm clenched in one mangled hand. To his left, Curly’s screams grew even louder, filled the night air, made it into a thick, tangible thing, and Feygen choked on the stink of garbage and cordite.

“Fuck you!” Krago screamed, and leveled his gun, and the mass of darkness turned and looked down the barrel.

Feygen saw in an instant of clarity what had torn through Maurice Tell and his helpers: a tall, lean man dressed from head to foot in a black, form-fitting jumpsuit. A tight black mask clung to his head, and what looked like white mesh covered the eyes; the stranger held a long wooden staff in his hands, and a square-edged Glock 17 rested in a holster on his right thigh.

Bryan Krago had the man dead to rights, point-blank, and opened fire after only half a second’s pause. The muzzle blasts lit the ruined theatre with a hellish strobe and the stink grew stronger, overpowering, and the weapon’s report harmonized with Curly’s screams...

...and Feygen saw something happen.

He blinked and whispered, “Holy God.”

Krago’s .44 would have required solid control under the best of circumstances, but with his hands damaged he had no hope of shooting accurately. The stranger in the mask twisted backward into the thickest of the shadows as the gunfire roared around him, and then—between one flash and the next—stood behind Krago.

Feygen’s mind latched onto the image: Krago, on his knees, the stranger behind him with the wooden staff raised high like a dishonored samurai’s second, set to deliver the final blow of hara-kiri.

Yet another burst of freezing air made Feygen gasp.

The staff came down on Krago’s right elbow like a hammer, and for an instant the sickening crack of breaking bones overwhelmed Curly’s screams. The gun flew from Krago’s hand and clattered to rest on the far side of a pile of weedgrown bricks.

The stranger hoisted Krago off his feet, paused half a second to glance at Feygen, and hauled Krago out of sight into the shadows.

The force of the stranger’s stare, brief as it was, settled onto Feygen’s skin. For just that half a second he felt like a bug under a microscope.

Curly finally ran short of breath and dissolved into sobs.

Feygen stumbled forward, ears ringing, and stared into the darkness where Krago and the stranger disappeared. He saw nothing—and then the entirety of the theatre flooded with light as Clarke and everyone else arrived. Powerful flashlight beams washed the alcove where the two men had vanished, but they illuminated nothing but spider webs and dust.

Feygen glanced down, and the cold sank deeper than physical sensation.

The ground where the fight had taken place, as well as patches on the unconscious men themselves, were covered over with a thin film of ice.

Feygen snapped out of his sudden daze at the sound of Chooley’s cries. He rushed over and found Chooley flat on his back, bleeding from a graze in his forehead. Chooley groaned again, and Feygen screamed for an ambulance.

# # #

Bryan Krago came to himself in a dark place, frozen and hurting and trembling violently. He lay on what felt like a smooth concrete floor. Krago gritted his teeth and strained to stop the shaking.

He blinked and attempted to focus into the black, but his eyes had no adjusting to do; they stared into total darkness. Krago moved to sit up, and a flash of pain ripped up and down his arm, jangled into his neck and down to his feet—and from out of the blackness, rough hands grabbed the front of his shirt, yanked him to a standing position and pinned him to a rough brick wall.

A match hissed into life near his eyes, making him flinch and squint. The stranger’s masked face floated inches from his own, alien and featureless, and alongside the pain and the cold Krago still found room for fear.

Trying not to vomit from the agony in his arm, Krago thought he could make out eyes through the white mesh in the mask. He tried to talk, but as soon as he unclenched his jaw his teeth started clacking together, so he clamped down again and tried to salvage a few scraps of self-control.

Christ, his elbow, he didn’t know there could be pain like that.

The stranger held him pressed against the wall for several more seconds and let the match burn down. When the small gold flame drew near the gloved fingers, the stranger spoke in a voice like skittering autumn leaves.

“Next time I catch you, I break more bones.”

The stranger waved the match out and, as the darkness returned, he pushed Krago backward. Instead of grinding into abrasive brick, Krago felt himself fall into an intensely cold space, and for one shattered instant knew the air around him had frozen solid, encased him in thick black ice.

Consciousness lost him.

# # #

Feygen and Chooley stood near what had once been the back entrance of the Hargett Theatre, lit alternately in red and white as the EMTs hauled away Maurice Tell and the three hired guns they could find. Eleven other police officers were on the scene now, and one of them, a thickset man with a large, square head and dark eyes, talked to Feygen in quick, brittle tones. Chooley sat down heavily, a thick gauze pad pressed to his head. He’d be leaving in an ambulance soon.

“So you’re saying Tell’s guys had you cold?”

Chooley scratched his nose, darted his eyes around like a rabbit. Feygen couldn’t tell if he felt the pain from the graze or not.

Chooley said, “As soon as they pulled their guns, man, the guy was right there. Right there.” Chooley squinted into the shadows and trembled. “We might’ve walked away from here, and we might not, but that wasn’t even an issue once this guy showed up. He just waltzed through those assholes like...I dunno...like they were just standing there.”

Clarke swept his eyes around the theatre’s decayed interior. “And what did you say happened to the fifth guy?”

Chooley turned to Feygen and said, “You tell him. You tell him. What happened, you tell him.”

Feygen shook his head. “I don’t know. This guy, this guy dressed up like a fucking ninja, he carried the last one off. I don’t know where they went.” He knew what he’d seen, but he still couldn’t believe it. Chooley’s corroboration wasn’t very comforting.

Clarke turned and started to say something when a heavy thud sounded behind them. Spinning around, they saw Bryan Krago lying sprawled across the hood of one of the ambulances.

Krago slid slowly off and crumpled to the ground, where the EMTs swarmed over him.

“Where the fuck did he come from?” Clarke shouted. “Get me lights! Lights, you shitheads, get me lights over here!”

The area around the ambulance, which had parked near enough to a wall for the shadows to be deep along its side, immediately lit up with high-intensity beams. Feygen wasn’t very surprised when the only thing they illuminated was a patch of thin ice on the passenger-side door.

A frigid breeze touched his cheek, and he flinched.

# # #

A short while later, in a place with no windows and no doors, Matt Sinclair concentrated.

Not bad for the first night. Not bad at all.

A pair of Olympic rings hung from one of the steel girders crisscrossed over his head, and he gripped them, his body suspended between them, arms straight out from his shoulders in a position called the “Iron Cross.”

Matt replayed the scene in his mind for the fortieth time. Gauged his reactions. Analyzed his judgments. He’d saved two lives: an undercover cop and, near as he could tell, a cooperating junkie. Not bad.

A leather gauntlet encircled his left forearm, seven slim throwing spikes nestled beneath thin straps. A Glock 17 rested in the holster on his right thigh. He breathed slowly. Camouflaged beneath the Vylar suit, Matt’s muscles stood out in forced tension, perfectly steady, each one burning and hard as steel. Matt brought his eyes into focus and willed the night vision on.

He looked across a large chamber, a cavernous space composed of smooth concrete floors, unadorned cinder block walls, and pure, smooth darkness. No light burned—no lamps, no flashlights, no silver streaks of moonlight allowed entry by high-placed windows or ill-fitting doors. Matt’s space—he thought of it as his basement—dark and seamless, with no entrance or exit save for a few narrow ventilation shafts.

Matt questioned his own decision to bring one of the thugs here. He was confident the basement was inviolate, and he’d terrified the poor bastard even more thoroughly than he’d hoped to, but it bothered him. An unnecessary risk.

Thirty feet away stood a stack of hay bales supporting a shooting range target: a man’s head and torso in black. Concentric outlines radiated from the heart.

Through the darkness, Matt’s eyes ignored their need for light and saw the target with perfect clarity. He hung, arms parallel to the floor, teeth gritted, and began reciting the alphabet backward. Z, Y, X, W...

If he had turned his head, he would have found himself looking at one of a series of oil paintings that lined the basement, propped against the cinder blocks. All unframed, they were simple canvases expertly stretched over hand-built wooden racks.

Every one was a masterpiece.

No one would ever see them.

When he sent his bio and sample packet of slides to Ben Gault at the Slade Gallery, against his better judgment he included one of what he thought of as his “pissed off” paintings, more to see what would happen than in hopes of displaying or selling it. It was a piece called “Consumption.” He thought the effect might be lessened, since it was just a slide rather than the real thing.

Ben Gault called Matt the next day and asked if he could come and see Matt’s work in person. Matt readily agreed, but Gault sounded strange, and Matt asked him if anything was wrong.

“No...no, not exactly,” Gault said. “I think, though, I can safely ask you to leave ‘Consumption’ out of the works I see today.”

“Okay. Why?”

Matt knew why, but this was the first time anyone had seen any of the paintings “Consumption” belonged with, and he wanted to hear the official response.

“Well...my wife and I both had nightmares last night after we saw the slide. I don’t think that particular piece fits in too well with the Slade Gallery’s image. That’s, of course, not to say I don’t want to see the other ones.”

Gault sounded stuck somewhere between fear and admiration, with a healthy dose of capitalism thrown in. The paintings could make the gallery a tidy sum, and both he and Matt fully realized it. Matt gave Gault a time to come over.

Counting the one finished that morning, Matt had completed one hundred seventy-three paintings that he felt accurately represented his mood at the time of their execution. Ninety-four of those, like “Consumption,” had turned out unsuitable for public viewing. So they wound up here. In his basement.

S, R, Q, P...

Of the paintings which actually had been displayed, much was said. Critics drew comparisons with Friedrich, with Goya; his work, according to the Journal-Constitution’s reviewer, “made occasional use of Dalí’s talent for the photorealistically surreal.” Matt had no comment, and attended the initial showing only reluctantly. His first sale, a four-by-six oil titled “Original Virtue,” moved at the show for thirty-nine hundred, an unprecedented price for a new artist. Matt graciously thanked the buyer, declined invitations to several parties, excused himself from the advances of a slender blonde in a push-up bra, and went home as soon as he could.

That was months ago, and since then his paintings had sold with astonishing regularity. Ben Gault had politely suggested on a couple of occasions that Matt sign on with the Slade Gallery exclusively, but Matt hadn’t given him an answer yet. He’d probably say yes.

K, J, I, H...

Sometimes he wondered what Glory would have thought if she could have seen him like this. She used to comment on his body—usually alternated between teasing and seductive appreciation. If she could see him now...

He grimaced. If Glory could see him now, he wouldn’t be trying so hard not think about Diedra Shikari.

If Glory could see him now, well, that would change a great number of things, wouldn’t it?

D, C, B, A.

Still hanging, still in the perfect Iron Cross position, Matt took one breath slightly deeper than normal. With a grunt, he flipped around and launched himself off the rings, circled high and forward into the air. Spikes whistled out in a pointed whirring rain and made small tapping sounds as they punched through the paper of the target and into the densely packed hay behind it. Matt landed, rolled, and came up to a crouch, the Glock ready in his hands.

He held that position for a moment, finger tight on the trigger, depressing the small center unlocking lever. Then he released the trigger, slowly stood and approached the target. One spike protruded from the center of the target’s chest. Another had planted itself squarely in the target’s right eye. Matt stretched, pulled off the Vylar mask, holstered the Glock and plucked out the spikes.

The paintings lined up around the walls of the enormous room broke their chain at one point to make space for a nineteen-foot-long segment of pegboard festooned with hooks and metal clips. Each of them held a weapon. Matt walked slowly over to the board, replacing the spikes in the gauntlet as he went, then unbuckled both the gauntlet and the gun belt. Each item went on a separate hook; the Glock he took to a small work table, in front of which sat a three-legged stool. He opened a gray metal box on the table, took out the various necessary items and began to disassemble and clean the pistol.

All of this he did in perfect darkness.

On the wall above the work table Matt had tacked a poster. Old and slightly wrinkled, it was a promotional bill for a Las Vegas-style lounge-act magician called The Astounding Alexander. Alexander appeared in the poster as a tall, thin, graying man in his forties, clad in a red tuxedo with a black cape. An assortment of objects seemed to float in the air around his head and his grandly gesturing hand. Matt ignored the poster as he worked.

Throughout the vast chamber, the only sounds were those made by Matt’s tools, metal ticking lightly against metal.

When he finished, he stood and began pulling off the Vylar suit. He paused for a moment to run his fingers over its unique texture. Matt never quite tired of the sensation. Vylar, he remembered, was “composed of millions of tiny octagons, woven into a cloth with monofilament wire threaded through holes drilled by a precision machine press.” The suit gave him peace of mind to a degree, though it had a tendency to chafe under the armored, segmented chest and back pads. He occasionally wondered if the military ever noticed it missing from its vault—or what they’d do to him if they ever caught him with it.

Not that they ever would, of course.

“Got to buy some longjohns,” he said aloud. The nights’ temperatures would drop soon enough, and the last thing he needed was a cold. Particularly after tonight. After success.

Matt sat on the floor to unbuckle the steel-toed, leather-and-Vylar boots, and with a sort of rush realized how good it had felt, how good it still felt, saving those men from being killed. Feygen and his informant, “Chooley,” whose names he had overheard while listening from the shadows, could go home to their lives now. To their wives and children if they had them. And they could do it because of him. Matt wrapped his arms around his knees and rocked back and forth for a moment.

He stood, now wearing only athletic socks, undershorts, a supporter, and a Porky Pig T-shirt. He folded the suit, tucked it under one arm, and picked up the boots. Concentrating briefly, he flickered once and vanished.

The basement stood empty, dark and silent, suddenly colder with his passing.


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