Dark River by John Twelve Hawks Read Free Book Online Page A

was when he knew that Michael was also searching, but his brother had the cameras and the scanners and all the other devices of the Vast Machine. It was like a race— a terrible competition between them— and there was no way he could win.
    ** CHAPTER 5
    Although Harlequins sometimes saw themselves as the last defenders of history, their historical knowledge was based more on tradition than on the facts found in textbooks. Growing up in London, Maya had memorized the location of the traditional execution sites scattered around the city. Her father had shown her each place during their daily lessons on weapons and street fighting. Tyburn was for felons, the Tower of London was for traitors, the shriveled bodies of dead pirates hung for years from the Execution Dock at Wapping. At various times, the authorities had killed Jews, Catholics, and a long list of dissenters who worshipped a different god or preached a different vision of the world. A certain spot in West Smithfield was used for the execution of heretics, witches, and women who had killed their husbands— as well as the anonymous Harlequins who had died protecting Travelers.
    Maya felt the same sense of accumulated misery the moment she entered the Criminal Court building in lower Manhattan. Standing just inside the main entrance, she gazed upward at the clock that hung from the two-story ceiling. The building’s white marble walls, the Art Deco lighting fixtures, and the ornate railing on the stairways suggested the grand sensibility of an earlier era. Then she lowered her eyes and studied the world that surrounded her: the police and the criminals, the bailiffs and lawyers, the victims and witnesses— everyone shuffling across the dirty floor to the gateway metal detector that awaited them.
    Dimitri Aronov was a plump older man with three strands of greasy black hair plastered across the top of his bald head. Carrying a battered leather briefcase, the Russian émigré approached the metal detector. When he entered the gateway, he stopped for a second and glanced over his shoulder at Maya.
    “What’s the problem?” the guard asked. “Keep moving….”
    “Of course, Officer. Of course.”
    Aronov stepped through the gateway, then sighed and rolled his eyes as if he just remembered that he left an important file in his car. He passed back through the checkpoint and followed Maya out the revolving door. For a moment, they stood at the top of the broad stairway and looked out at the skyline of lower Manhattan. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. Thick gray clouds hung over the city, and the sun was a blurred patch of light on the western horizon.
    “So? What do you think, Miss Strand?”
    “I don’t think anything— yet.”
    “You saw it yourself. No alarm. No arrest.”
    “Let’s take a look at your product.”
    Together, they came down the steps, zigzagged through the sluggish traffic clogging Centre Street, and walked into the small park at the middle of the square. The Collect Pond Park had once been the site of a massive pool of raw sewage during the early days of New York. It was still a dark place, overshadowed by the tall buildings that surrounded the patch of ground. While several signs commanded New Yorkers not to feed pigeons, a flock of the birds fluttered back and forth and pecked at the dirt.
    They sat down on a wooden bench just beyond the range of the park’s two surveillance cameras. Aronov placed the briefcase on the bench and wiggled his fingers. “Please inspect the merchandise.”
    Maya snapped open the top of the briefcase. She peered inside and found a handgun that looked like a 9mm automatic. The weapon had over-and-under barrels and a textured grip. When she picked it up, she discovered that it was very light— almost like a child’s toy.
    Aronov began to speak in the cadence of a salesman. “The frame, the grip, and the trigger are high-density plastic. The barrels, the slides, and firing pin are superhard