“Are you up to it? You made it sound like it wore people out. You’re already wiped out.”
“I can do it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Doc looked at him wearily. “Harris, it does not matter. We can’t protect her here. We have to get her back to the fair world.”
The phone jarred Phipps out of his sleep; he answered it out of reflex. “Six one two. No, wait—”
“You’re not at your extension now,” the old man chided him. “But you will be. Fast. I have one of them again, William.”
“Don’t you ever sleep? Never mind. I’ll be right there.” Phipps hung up. The old man’s office was only an elevator ride away from his bedroom, an arrangement that the old man found convenient. Groggy with lack of sleep, Phipps staggered to his feet.
It wasn’t dawn yet, but the traffic of men and women through the subway system had started to pick up when Harris spotted her coming off the uptown number six. He waved and she ran to him.
She wrapped herself around him, held him close. For a moment, he floated around in the suburbs of heaven.
She pushed him back to look at him. “You’re really okay.”
“Yeah.”
“That suit sucks.”
“You romantic thing, you.”
She looked uncomfortable. He knew her too well, knew she’d just remembered yesterday’s dinner. He let her step away from him.
He turned and gestured. “Gaby, this is my friend Doc.”
Doc made the effort to stand and gave her a little bow.
She gave him a searching glance. “Doc what?”
“MaqqRee,” Doc said. “You may call me Desmond if you prefer.”
“Desmond,” she repeated. Harris saw her struggle not to wince. “Doc is fine,” she said, then looked at Harris. “Okay. You think you can tell me what’s going on?”
“We need to go over to the conjurer’s circle in Central Park. I mean, the circle of white stones.”
“But if what you said was true, as soon as we go up, their tracer thing will show where I am. If it really exists.”
Harris pulled the tracer out of his jacket pocket and turned it on. Doc’s glow at the center of the screen had completely absorbed Gaby’s.
“That doesn’t show anything.”
“It will when we reach the surface,” Doc said. “And it will let us know how much time we have.”
The three of them reached the circle of stones and Doc immediately began setting right those that had fallen over or been moved.
“So where were you all day?” Gaby asked, maddeningly persistent.
“You won’t believe me. Not until Doc shows you this trick,” Harris added. “I’ve got a question for you. Gaby, have you ever heard of anybody who looked like you, had sort of the same name? I’ve seen a woman called Gabrielle. Your spitting image. Nobody knows much of anything about her.”
Even in the moonlight he could see her swallow. “No.”
“Did you just accidentally say no when you meant yes? You always said women don’t really do that.”
“You bastard.” The heat in her voice surprised him. “Don’t make a joke out of this.”
“Then don’t lie.”
She tried to glare at him, but she looked guilty instead. She stared down at the grass. “Harris, don’t laugh, okay? But I’ve always felt connected to somebody else. I mean, I’ve always had these dreams about meeting a sister I never met. When I was a kid I used to drive my parents crazy—‘Are you sure I wasn’t twins? Did you leave another baby at the hospital?’ That sort of thing.”
“What did they say?”
“They said that reading too much was rotting my brain.” She looked up again and tried to gauge his expression.
“Oh, yeah. Hell, they said that the last time I saw them.” Harris turned the tracer on again. The bright glow was still distant—but now it was moving slowly. “Doc, I think they’re onto us.”
Doc nodded. His circuit done, he knelt in the circle’s center and began unloading things from his pockets—gold coins, a small gold cylinder with an opening at one end, tiny statuettes carved of stone.
“Give me that thing.” Gaby took the tracer from Harris’ hand and trotted off a few dozen yards, looking intently at the screen. She wandered back and forth out on the grass for a minute, long enough for Doc to start chanting, before she returned.
She handed it back to him. “Okay. It picks him up. It picks up this other signal. I’ll take your word for it that the glow in the middle is me. What’s he doing?”
“I know it sounds like he’s trying to cough up a hairball, but it’s all part of the ceremony.” Harris eyed the tracer screen with concern. The incoming signal, still northeast, was getting closer, faster than he liked. “Doc, can you snap it up?”
Doc shook his head, not interrupting the flow of foreign syllables.
Gaby eyed the distance to the nearest stand of trees. “Look, if that really is them, we ought to get back into the subway.”
“We’ll be fine.” Harris spoke with confidence he didn’t feel. “When Doc finishes, they won’t be able to get at us. You need to trust me about this.”
She gave him a hard look. “You’re making it hard. Not telling me what this is all about.”
“You really won’t believe it until you see it.”
“Try me.”
Doc interrupted his recital. “Harris.” His voice was rough and weak, and Harris could see sweat pouring down his face. “Almost done. Are you staying?”
“Hell, no.” Leave Gaby to go back to the fair world alone?
Harris took a last look at the device. The incoming patch of light was very close now; its edges nearly touched the edges of Doc’s glow.
Doc began his chant again.
Gaby looked suspiciously at the two men, then her eye tracked something behind Harris. He turned to look . . . and saw the park grass writhing, curling and dying in a wave front spreading out from the circle of stones.
“See?” he told her. “It’s real.”
“This is your trick?”
There was a sharp crack from the east, and a little spray of dust kicked up two inches from Doc’s knee.
Doc flinched and bent to be lower to the ground, but he kept chanting. Harris swore and looked toward the source of the noise—where a half-dozen men, bobbing pale faces out in the darkness, were running at them from the direction of the Met.
Gaby grabbed Harris’ jacket. “God, Harris, we’ve got to get out of here.” She dragged him half off the circle.
He grabbed her around the waist, spun her down to the ground as gently as he could. “Not yet.”
She looked at him, her eyes wide, as if he’d pulled off a Harris mask to reveal the face of Adonis beneath it. She hit his shoulder. “What the hell are you doing? We have to go.”
“Not yet. Trust me.”
Another crack, another section of ground twitched as if hurt.
Dammit, dammit, dammit! Harris bore Gaby down, flattening her by sheer weight, covering her as much as he could. He pulled one of the fake policemen’s pistols out of his pocket, saw her eyes get even wider.
He aimed it in the direction of the oncoming men.
No. If he missed, he might start raining bullets down on the museum. There could be people over there. It would be enough just to make them duck for cover. He lowered his arm a bit, aiming into the ground thirty or forty yards away, and pulled the trigger. He was startled by the way the gun kicked in his hand, by the painful loudness of the shot, but he brought the gun back in line and kept firing.
The three closest faces disappeared. He marveled that he might have hit them anyway. Then the three men returned fire from prone positions. Dust kicked up around Doc, and something high-pitched whistled inches over Harris’ head.
His gun clicked on empty and he dropped it. He began groping around in his pocket for another revolver.
Gaby hit him again, ineffectually. “Get off me.” There was fear in her voice. He felt a moment of pain as he realized it was him she feared.
He got out the second captured revolver and aimed it.
“Harris, you’re crazy.”