After a quiet 2 weeks, during which I mostly worked out, worried about the heist and occasionally set up my tap into the apartment's phone boxes to peruse the BBS. Haven was interesting. Once I got over the sheer surreal nature of dialing into a Bulletin board system, it was nice to be able to access a forum.
The quiet was broken midweek by riots somewhere in the city. I'd been in the bunker most of the week, but when I went outside Thursday afternoon I saw the headlines at the newsstand. Violence across Manhattan, property damage, multiple arrests. The details were sparse. The Post mentioned anti-mutant sentiment, which tracked with what I knew about this era. Things seemed to have calmed down by Friday.
I'd stayed underground during the worst of it, which suited me fine. I had no interest in getting caught up in mob violence. I had checked the answering service the week before and no messages were in evidence. I decided to check the answering service for anything from Catherine's direction again on Saturday morning. I took my time, enjoying the morning air as I walked to the payphone.
After entering the phone booth, I dialed the number and waited through three rings before someone picked up.
"Messages," a woman's voice said. Bored, professional. There was a degree of background noise from the woman's locale, but I couldn't tell where she was.
"Good afternoon. I'm asking for messages from Althea for Quince."
A pause. The sound of pages turning. "Althea left a message for you yesterday evening. Said to call back as soon as possible." She rattled off a number. I scribbled it on my palm with a pen.
I fed more coins into the slot and dialed. Catherine picked up after a few rings.
"I'll be in Hell's Kitchen in twenty minutes. I have a technical problem you'd be of help with."
The line went dead.
I stood in the phone booth for a moment, receiver still in hand. She was more brusque than usual. Must be in a rush.
Approximately eighteen minutes later, a van came to a halt in front of the residential building I was lingering in front of. "Manhattan HVAC Repair" was emblazoned on the side in faded lettering. Catherine lowered the window and gestured at me to get in.
As we pulled back out into traffic, I stretched. "Where are we going?"
Catherine kept her eyes on the road. "Stakeout. Are you familiar with laser microphones?"
I shook my head. "Not really."
Catherine's expression didn't change. "They're not complex. We have about six hours before the meeting. You'll operate the receiver while I monitor the conversation. The laser's already positioned in another building, hitting the target window at ninety degrees. We intercept the reflected beam, extract the audio. Digital filtering handles most street noise."
Interesting. That type of on-the-fly signal processing would have been well beyond the technological capacities of my world's 1980s. "Where are we setting up?"
"Park Avenue South. We'll be set up on East 28th, corner office. Good angle to catch the reflection." She changed lanes. "I positioned the transmitter south of the target building and it's remotely activated. We'll tear it down on the way out."
I nodded. "I assume we're HVAC repairmen today?"
Catherine glanced at the van's logo in the side mirror, one eyebrow rising fractionally. "It's a weekend. Nobody's going to ask too many questions."
Catherine navigated through the (relatively) sparse Saturday morning ebb and flow of traffic with practiced efficiency, taking 9th Avenue down to 34th before cutting east.
We came to a halt in front of an office building on East 28th. Catherine killed the engine and gestured toward the back of the van. "Change into the boiler suit then grab the equipment case. Look like you've done this before."
After tossing the boiler suit over my clothes and doffing my jacket, I hauled out a battered red toolbox and a larger aluminum case that was heavier than it looked. Catherine took a clipboard and a smaller duffel, then led the way to the service entrance around the side of the building.
She pressed the intercom. After a moment, a crackle of static, then a man's voice. "Yeah?"
"HVAC. Got a call about the cooling system on eight."
The door buzzed. We pushed through into a concrete stairwell that smelled strongly of cleaning solution. The janitors must have just been through.
The building manager met us in the ground floor lobby. Fiftyish,white, balding, wearing a maintenance jumpsuit with coffee stains down the front. He had a styrofoam cup in one hand and barely looked up from his clipboard. "The eight floor's been running hot since Friday. Got three tenants complaining."
"We'll take a look," Catherine said.
The manager nodded. "Good. I'll be around if ya need anything." With that, he walked down the stairwell.
As we walked to the elevator bank, I noticed there were three elevators in the room. Two were standard passenger elevators at the bank, but one was a cargo elevator at the very end of the room. Catherine noticed my quizzical expression. "One of the tenants needs to move heavy equipment in and out. That cargo elevator's been soundproofed after other tenants complained."
I quirked an eyebrow. "And you know that how?"
Catherine pressed the call button. "I was here last night."
We waited for the elevator in silence and after a brief and smooth trip, we arrived on the seventh floor.
Corner office. Frosted glass door, no name plate. Catherine pulled a slim leather case from her jacket and selected two picks. Thirty seconds later, the lock clicked. She pocketed the picks and pushed the door open.
"After you," she said.
I stepped inside. The office was small, dusty, and clearly unused. Two desks, filing cabinets, and a window overlooking East 28th Street with a direct sightline toward Park Avenue South.
Catherine pulled two pairs of work gloves from her bag and handed me one. "Put these on. Don't touch anything without them."
I pulled on the gloves and opened the bag. The receiver was a bulky apparatus of black metal and exposed wiring, mounted on a small tripod. I set it up near the window, adjusting the legs until it sat level. The main unit looked like a telescope mated to a parabolic dish, all precision optics and machined aluminum.
Next came the frequency analyzer. The analyzer was a boxy unit with a small CRT screen, green phosphor, currently dark. I placed it on the desk where I could see both the screen and the window. The tape recorder was last. It was a compact cassette deck, with a single input jack, and a very basic level indicator.
Catherine watched me work, checking her watch occasionally but not interfering.
The bag held a tangle of cables. I sorted through them, finding the thick coaxial cable first. One end connected to the receiver's output port with a satisfying click. The other end went to the frequency analyzer's input. A second cable (standard audio, quarter-inch jack) ran from the receiver to the tape recorder's line input.
"Headphones plug in here," Catherine said, tapping a port on the receiver's side panel. "I'l monitor the audio directly while you manage the microphone."
I connected the headphones and plugged the receiver, recorder and analyzer into a power strip. The CRT hummed to life, displaying a flat green line across the phosphor screen. The tape deck's reels sat motionless, waiting.
Catherine adjusted the receiver. "There," she said. "Window's centered. The laser transmitter is already active."
She gestured at the analyzer. "This shows the waveform. Keep it between these markers." She pointed at two green lines bracketing the display. "If the signal gets weak or distorted, adjust the gain here." She indicated a dial on the receiver. "The digital filtering handles most background noise, but you'll need to compensate for volume changes manually."
I settled the headphones over my ears. Nothing yet but a faint hiss of ambient static.
"How long until the meeting?" I asked.
Catherine checked her watch. "Five and a half hours. Get comfortable."
The wait was interminable. I borrowed Catherine's binoculars, wanting to get a better sense of the neighborhood. Good old Park Avenue South, much like it had been in my time. Foot traffic was lighter since it was Saturday, but lighter was a relative term in NYC. I vaguely recalled that the Heroes for Hire office should be around here somewhere. There had been a city-wide riot about 2 days back, and it was nice to see that things were quiet. Something about that niggled at me
Traffic flowed past below, a steady stream of yellow cabs and sedans moving through the intersection. Utterly normal for a weekend in the city. The contradiction between what I was doing and the banality outside wasn't lost on me.
The background noise of the city filtered through the window. Car horns, distant conversation, the rumble of a bus passing. Combined with the stifling heat from the broken AC, it made me drowsy. The sun climbed higher, turning the office into an oven.
I checked the analyzer display periodically. Flat green line. No signal yet.
Suddenly, the AC kicked back on with a mechanical groan. Cool air began filtering into the room. I nearly sighed with relief.
Catherine re-entered from the hallway, wiping her hands on a rag.
"Didn't know HVAC repair was part of your skillset," I said.
She tossed the rag aside. "It isn't. I broke the system when I was conducting reconnaissance."
On that bombshell, I settled in for the wait.
This period of utter tedium was only interrupted by cleaning staff entering the target building around noon. Through the binoculars, I watched them move into the conference room, pushing a cart. I put on the headphones and listened in. Static at first, then voices—faint, distorted. I adjusted the gain dial carefully, bringing the levels up between the markers on the analyzer.
"—have to haul out here every weekend—"
"—least it's overtime—"
The voices came through clearly enough. The filtering worked. Background traffic noise was muffled, leaving just the conversation.
Catherine tapped my shoulder. I pulled off the headphones and handed them to her. She listened for a moment, then gestured at the gain dial. "Bring it down slightly. It's clipping."
I adjusted it. She listened again, nodded, and handed the headphones back. "Keep it there. When the meeting starts, they'll likely speak more quietly. You'll need to compensate."
The cleaning crew finished and left. The target office went dark again. The green line on the analyzer flattened back to baseline. I settled in to wait.
What felt like decades later, the analyzer spiked. I grabbed the binoculars. Three men in suits entered the target office. Two white, one Asian, all middle-aged. They settled around the conference table.
Catherine held out her hand without looking away from the window. I passed her the headphones. She put them on, then took the binoculars from me. Her attention shifted between watching and listening.
I pressed the record button on the tape deck. The reels began to turn.
I kept my eye on the levels. A car honked on the street, and I struggled to compensate for a second. The waveform spiked and settled.
Minutes ticked by. Catherine remained motionless except for small adjustments to the binoculars, watching, listening. I monitored the analyzer, making small corrections when the signal wavered.
I shot a look at my watch. It had been around ten minutes since the men had walked into the room. I refocused on the monitor. Time continued to roll by. Spy media never told me how surveillance work was incredibly boring and incredibly mundane.
Another indeterminate span of time passed, and I resisted from checking my watch. My almost trancelike state was interrupted by Catherine hastily stuffing the binoculars back into the bag in a blur of motion
"We're blown. They made us. Pack everything, we're leaving."
I froze for half a second. "What? How—"
"NOW." She was already disconnecting the tape recorder and pocketing the tape. "Talk later. Move."
I unplugged the analyzer and the receiver for the laser mic, hurriedly lifting them and stuffing them back in the bag. Time seemed to move by like molasses as I hurriedly began to wrap the cables and shove them back in the smaller cardboard box where they were kept. Catherine helped.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, we were packed. Catherine moved to the door, checked the hallway, then gestured for me to follow.
We moved at a fast walk. Down the hall toward the stairwell. Catherine kept her hand close to her boiler suit. I carried the heavy equipment bag, trying to project as much of a casual air as I could.
The stairwell door was twenty feet away. Fifteen. Ten.
Behind us, I heard the cargo elevator ding. It could be the building manager checking up on us, but I instantly shot down that excuse. My heart sank. Catherine picked up her pace, breaking into an outright sprint. I heard the sound of the doors opening, and the sound of a motorcycle revving trickled into the hallway. That was one of the last things I expected.
It wasn't going to be Ghost Rider, but who else could-
The sound of the idling motorcycle engine was briefly overridden by the distinctive THUNK of a grenade launcher firing.
Catherine swerved and shoulder-checked the nearest door. I heard a distinctive crack as the lock gave way. I stumbled in after her-
The grenade exploded. The pressure wave slammed into the door, rattling it in its frame. My ears rang.
The area we'd entered was an office with a few desks pushed against the walls. Catherine pulled out her sidearm and covered the door. I did the same with my gyrojet pistol, heart hammering. My mind spun, furiously trying to think who the fuck this could possibly be.
Shaking me out of my thoughts, a burst of machine gun fire punched through the door, thankfully going wild. The motorcyclist was evidently content to wait for us and occasionally rattle our cage. He had us very effectively bottled in.
A muffled voice interjected from outside. "Hope you're comfortable there! Got all day to wait you out. And when you decide to man up..." The motorcycle's engine revved, then settled back down to a idle.
Definitely a supervillain.
Catherine rolled her eyes. I found it oddly reassuring. Keeping my eye on the door, I felt a small spherical object in my pants pocket, specifically under the boiler suit. I had been carrying around that (probable) SHIELD smoke bomb for a while now, and now seemed like one of the best times to use it. I looked to Catherine.
"I have a smoke grenade on me."
Catherine held out her hand. "Excellent. If you don't mind?" I passed the small explosive to her. She looked at it, frowning.
"It's a SHIELD explosive, but the serials were filed off. Haven't the foggiest what it is, but it's better than nothing."
She turned the explosive over in her hand. "Right. We open the door, throw the charge, and sprint to the stairwell. He can't follow us down the stairs unless he's willing to abandon his bike. We take the stairwell, get to the van, and leave the area."
She looked at the heavy duffel bag, which I had dropped under one of the desks.
"Leave it. I have the tape."
I nodded.
"Stack up." Catherine positioned herself against the wall beside the door, pistol raised.
Another burst of machine gun fire chewed through the door itself, wood splinters flying.
"I'm gonna get ya!" the motorcyclist sneered from the hallway.
Catherine held up three fingers. Two. One.
In one smooth motion, she yanked the door open, pitched the charge into the hallway, and slammed it shut. She grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back from the door.
The crack of the flashbang was deafening. Light blazed through the bullet holes in the much abused door, actinic white, and utterly searing.
There was a heavy crash of metal on tile. The motorcycle going down. The engine coughed once and cut out.
Catherine didn't hesitate. She kicked the door open and sprinted into the hallway. I followed at a similar pace.
The motorcyclist was on the ground next to his fallen bike, helmet visor dark, movements sluggish. We didn't stop, and I didn't get a good look at him. Catherine made for the far stairwell, and I was hard on her heels.
Behind us, I heard him ranting.
"WHEN I CATCH YOU CLOWNS-"
This threat was mercifully cut short as we hit the stairwell, and I slammed the door shut behind us. Catherine didn't slow down and was cannoning down the stairs. Two months back, this type of run would have been a lot harder on me, and I was grateful for my exercise.
Seven floors at a full sprint left me gasping and drenched in sweat. We burst into the lobby. The building manager was nowhere in evidence, and I found myself thankful for small blessings as we hit the crash bar and sprinted out the door.
The light pedestrian traffic didn't halt. Nobody really stared. Marvel New Yorkers were probably inured to a much wider range of out out of the ordinary activity then the New Yorkers of my home universe. The van was parked a hundred feet down the street. I allowed myself to relax. There was no way that he'd recover, and even then, the cargo elevator would-
That hope died as I heard the distinctive roar of an motorcycle engine from inside the building, followed by the crash of breaking glass. A burst of machine gun fire cracked overhead, wild and high.
At least he was still suffering from the flashbang's aftereffects.
The bystanders finally reacted, scattering in every direction. Someone shouted, "CALL THE COPS!"
We continued to run. Twenty feet from the van. Fifteen.
The motorcycle rocketed past us, engine screaming. Another desultory burst of gunfire whizzed past us. It was still off, but not by the same amount. His vision was evidently returning rapidly. The rider spun the bike around at the end of the block, and came HOWLING back down like a dammed spirit, weaving in and out of the cars.
I dived behind a car and Catherine did the same, evidently figuring we weren't making it to the van. She unholstered her pistol and I did the same.
The rider raised his arm-mounted gun as he rode, clearly sighting on us-
I finally realized who he was. The weird arm-mounted gun assembly jogged my memory. It was Bullet Biker. This guy was a D-lister (and that was being generous).
The bike's engine note changed. The rider leaned hard, rear tire smoking as he executed a violent spin, the whole machine pivoting 180 degrees in the middle of the street. Then he was gone, throttle wide open, tearing away in the opposite direction and disappearing around the corner onto Lexington. The smell of burned rubber hung in the air.
I stood up, breathing hard. I turned at around the same time as Catherine to see what could have possibly provoked that reaction from our interlocutor.
Down Park Avenue South, maybe three blocks away, a building gleamed in the afternoon sun. Plenty of buildings gleamed, but I didn't think that any building, anywhere had gleamed quite like this. Gold. Solid gold. The entire structure had been, for lack of a better word, transmuted into gold. The building caught the afternoon light.
FUCK. This was Secret Wars 2. That meant my perception of time was-. I pushed down the wave of utter panic. I could do that later. Right now was the time to effect a rapid exit before people started asking us inconvenient questions. I turned to Catherine.
She was frozen. She was staring at the building, face pale, utterly still.
"Catherine."
She didn't respond. She stayed fixated on the building. Bystanders began to poke their heads back up, and I could hear the doppler effect of a distant siren.
I touched her arm. "Catherine, we have to move."
She finally turned away from the building, showing the most emotion I'd ever seen. She looked completely shaken.
"Let's go."