Masked Read online

  “Okay, Rizzo,” I allowed. “So you’re doing nobody any harm. But fuck, you’re not doing a damn bit of good to anyone, either. You’re barely living. You’ve got all that power stored up inside you, enough to bring a whole city to a standstill, and you’re living like a cockroach under a brick. You don’t think you deserve a little better, maybe? I mean, who dares wins, man. Specifically, who dares wins a ticket out of this shithole into a nicer shithole, with hot water and clean towels, and a well-stocked liquor cabinet.”

  I mentioned that last point because Gallo used to put it away like a sailor on shore leave, and because despite being pathetically happy to see me he hadn’t offered me one of the three cans of lager staying semicool in a red plastic bucket full of water on the floor next to his chair: husbanding his resources, I figured.

  Gallo rubbed the bridge of his nose, where he used to wear big bottle-glass spectacles before he gave up the unequal race against his birth defects. He made a noncommittal sound. “I thought you didn’t do this stuff anymore,” he hedged. “Since… you know… what happened to Kim.”

  It was a low blow, in a way: Gallo breaking the established ground rules to fend me off. I don’t talk about my kid, and what happened to her when she lost control of her phasing powers. I’d even trained myself out of thinking about it. That turned out to be a dumb move, though: one time when I opened the wrong drawer and got hit by a photo of her, aged 9, blowing out her birthday candles, it took me a second even to remember who she was. I’d gotten that good at editing out my own memories, my own feelings. I’d cauterized Kim right out of my fucking mind.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for bringing that up, Gallo. You’re right. I got out of the blagging habit for a while. Then I got back in again. What the hell, you know? It passes the time.” By which I meant it’s better than sitting at home with two bottles of whiskey and seeing how far you make it into the second one before you pass out.

  “I don’t know,” Gallo said again.

  “You don’t know what?” I demanded, a little testy now.

  “Well, I might let you down, is one thing. I’m not… you know…” He shrugged again. “I can’t control it. When it happens, it happens. But I can’t make it happen.”

  Part of me wanted to walk away from this, but the other part—the part that had swallowed Vessell’s line and was already figuring out how to spend all that money—was bigger and stronger and a whole lot more devious.

  “Rizzo,” I said, “your powers kick in whenever you get upset or scared or nervous or even just surprised. I think I can guarantee that if you go into that bank next Tuesday, one or more or possibly all of those things is going to happen. You don’t need to do a thing except turn up. And the beauty of it is, even if they nail the rest of us you’re in the clear. Nobody will ever be able to prove you had a thing to do with it.”

  Gallo seemed to like that part. “They won’t clock me for the inside man?” he asked, wanting to hear me say it again.

  “No reason why they should,” I said. “Psi-screening is illegal in the EU, so the only people who can finger you are you and us. We’ll be in Jamaica, where extradition is just a bunch of sounds you can limbo to, and you’ll get a big, fat, freshly laundered check in the post three days later. Or more likely, the key to a safe deposit box in Switzerland where your share will be waiting for you to claim it whenever you want to.”

  Gallo’s eyes misted up. He was thinking of colonnades of cheap beer, enchanted caverns of porn—his usual low-rent pursuits writ large and glorious. I felt like a shit pulling this number on him, but in my own defense I meant every word. I really didn’t have the slightest inkling of how things were going to go.

  I had to hang around a while longer, but I didn’t really have to work at it anymore: Gallo was talking himself around now, without any help from me. I let him do it, shook his unpleasantly moist hand, and hit the road.

  Three days to make it happen. Then the rest of my life to lie back at my ease in some place where rain never falls, and tell the story to eager, admiring women with California tans and Garden of Eden wardrobes.

  Three days wasn’t long enough, as it turned out. As soon as he heard that Gallo was on board, Vessell got retrospectively serious about the reconnaissance. He decided he wanted to know which supernormal security firms DeJong’s had on retainer, as well as the shift rotas at New Scotland Yard. It was good to know who might be coming to the party, and how long it might take them to get there. He wanted to leave as little as possible to chance—a sentiment I could very much get behind.

  So we ended up switching the target date from Tuesday to Wednesday, which sounds like nothing much but actually contributed significantly to our downfall. Am I talking too fast for you, flatfoot? I said “contributed significantly”—the word you wrote there looks like it has at most six letters. I’m not signing a précis, you understand me?

  The other change, which made a whole lot of sense in the context of Vessell’s master plan, was that we were going to do the job right in the middle of the day, rather than at night. That felt weird, I have to admit. As Lockjaw, I usually prefer to have my conversations with deadlocks, bolts, and security systems in the peace and quiet of 2:00 a.m., when you’re generally guaranteed a little privacy. This was going to be a different kind of operation, but I felt like I could handle it. We all felt like we could handle it.

  Naseem went in at 10:00 a.m. She’d already opened an account the day before, and paid the first quarter’s rental on a safe deposit box. She went to the desk now and asked if she could get access to the box and drop off a few items. She held up a little lead-lined case that looked as though it might contain jewelry.

  They took her down to the vault, where a superpowered security guard (it was Tom Tiptree—Telltale) scanned her for weapons or suspicious items, finding nothing at all. The little case was full of necklaces and trinkets: maybe a little cheap for this place, but what does a cop know about jewelry? They let her through. Telltale and another guard, the Iron Maiden, went in with her and stood at a discreet distance while she went to her safe deposit box and opened it.

  There was nothing inside the safe deposit box except the documents Naseem had left there the day before. One of them was a legal-looking letter signed by one Peter H. Vessell.

  There was a blinding flash and a whiff of ozone as Hyperlink—right on cue—zeroed in on his name and teleported in. He had a bulky rucksack on his back, and his hands were open in front of him as though he was making an offering: Tin and me were sitting on his right and left palms respectively, having been shrunk by Perspective an hour before to about half an inch in height. She restored us to normal size in front of the astonished faces of the guards, and I punched Telltale out before he’d even got done saying “What the fuck?” Tin had a harder time of it with Iron Maiden, who quite frankly outclassed him in the smarts department and fought like a gleaming, rust-free ninja. In the end he won on mass, ramping up the density of his metal body until his feet were sinking into the concrete when he moved and his punch was like a slap in the head from a wrecking ball. The Maiden went down with serious dents in her chassis.

  We checked our watches. 10:07, which meant we were well within the margin of error. Vessell got to work, hauling out the other safe deposit boxes and piling them up in front of Naseem. She shrank them in batches of a dozen or so, turning each big, heavy steel container into a dinky little thing about the size of a thumbnail. Into her jewel case they went, in clattering handfuls.

  Meanwhile I sweet-talked the door to the secondary vault, which Vessell’s sources said was full of bullion. My power is a little weird, if the truth be told: a little… well, analogue. Soft around the edges. I talk to locks, and they instinctively like and trust me. I can’t give them orders, but I can usually persuade them. A little bit of flattery goes a long way, and tone of voice is just as important as what I say.

  It took me three minutes to coax the vault door to open. It was a time lock, so it had a lot of inhibitions
about opening up in the middle of the day, so far off the normal schedule. I reassured it that I’d still respect it in the morning, told it all the usual things a lock likes to hear about the quality of its build and the fine balance of its tumblers, and finally there was a slo-mo click-cluck sound as it opened up for me.

  By this time, Naseem had finished with the deposit boxes. She zapped the bullion bags, of which there were fewer, and piled them in on top until the case was brimming. Then she miniaturized the contents by another fifty percent or so and piled in some more. Finally she closed the case, locked it, checked the seal—which had to be perfect—and gave us the nod.

  “Okay,” Vessell said tersely. “Ten-fifteen. Let’s go.”

  In a perfect world, of course, we could all have gone back the way we’d come, by means of Vessell’s Hyperlink powers. But there’s that half-hour downtime to factor in, and the near-certainty that we’d be followed all the way to Hell and back by whatever supergoons the bank and the Met put on our tails.

  But the plan had allowed for all this.

  I chatted up the main door of the vault and it sprung very readily: in my opinion, it had probably been sprung before. We stepped out and headed on up the stairs. There was another guard at the top, but he had a brute force power of some kind and Tin walked right over him just as he was starting to Hulk up.

  A clatter from behind us made us all spin around, Tin already pulling back his fist for another juggernaut punch: but it was only Perspective. She’d tripped over a mop and bucket that were just lying there on the stairs, dropping the jewel case, which made a deafening clatter as it bounced back down two or three steps. She retrieved it, gave it a cursory check, and hurried back up to join us.

  Wednesday. The cleaner was halfway through her shift, and she left that stuff right where she was going to need it again after her break. That was all it took. Funny, huh? How you can be dead and buried and still keep right on walking, not knowing you took the hit.

  We walked into the bank proper, where the ultrarich citizenry were conducting their everyday transactions—taking out another million in small change to see them through the weekend, making a down payment on a Caribbean island, stuff like that.

  “This is a robbery,” Vessell said commandingly. “Nobody move.”

  A mother with two twin girls shrieked and clutched them to her bosom. A fat man gave a strangled sob of terror. An A-list celebrity forgot for a moment that this was real life and stepped out of line to confront us, then caught a warning glance from Tin and stepped right back again.

  Of course, there were digital sound pickups all over the room that would respond immediately to the word robbery : also, despite the stern tone, we weren’t doing anything to stop the tellers from punching their panic buttons, so there were silent alarms going off all around us. Obligingly, we walked out into the center of the room, well away from the innocent bystanders. All except for Vessell. He went right up to the nearest line of people, unshipped his rucksack, and took a machine rifle out of it. It was, to be honest, the scariest thing I’d ever seen. It looked like it had been drawn by Rob Liefeld.

  By the miracle of superspeed, teleportation, time manipulation, and dimension-jumping, we were suddenly surrounded by heroes. We were expecting them, of course, but Altered State, Beast Man, Telstar, Green Glow and Razor Wire, Cy-Bug and the Zen-tity make a pretty impressive entrance. If the truth be told, I pissed my pants. Only slightly, but credit where it’s due: these guys were ready to kick our arses all the way to Land’s End, and they looked like they could do it without even getting an elevated heart rate.

  Vessell took them in his stride, though. He just jabbed backward with the butt of the gun and broke Gallo’s elbow with it.

  That part wasn’t in the plan, and it probably wasn’t even necessary. Gallo had been standing in line since 10:10 a.m., waiting for us to come up the stairs and the whole thing to kick off. He’d probably been fighting off panic for much of that time, so the likelihood is that his powers would have manifested as soon as he got a good look at the opposition. But Vessell wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

  Gallo howled and crashed to his knees, clutching his injured arm. Then the howl modulated into something else: something that wasn’t sound or sight or fish or fowl or anything human beings have a name for—an invisible energy that curdled the air and rippled outward from Gallo (if invisible things can do that) to saturate the room in an instant and permeate through its walls into the wider world.

  For a mile or more on all sides of us, things stopped happening. Car engines misfired. Phone calls got disconnected. Card readers on ATM machines became dyslexic. BIC lighters refused to spark. Even the wind died.

  But these were just side effects. The full brunt of the Non-Event’s terrible power was felt by those of us belonging to the supernormal persuasion. Tin lost two-thirds of his body mass between one moment and the next: he staggered and almost fell as he changed back into flesh, screaming out a breath that was now too big for his altered lungs. The Zen-tity crashed even more painfully into reality, his liminal forms coalescing into one with a sound like a flag cracking in the wind. He groaned and crumpled to the ground in a heap. Green Glow’s flames guttered and died; Beast Man shed all his fur in a second and stood before us stark naked, conclusively answering that question about his sexual equipment; Altered State turned from cobalt blue to ordinary flesh tones, made a sound like a hamster being stepped on, and fell neatly on top of the Zen-tity.

  All of which left Pete Vessell holding the only gun in the room, and facing a clutch of heroes who were suddenly powerless.

  This is how it should have gone, then. We should have corralled the impotent fuckers into a corner of the room, backed out through the door where Guesswork was waiting with a van, and vanished into the sunset to the tune of a humorously twanging banjo.

  What we’d lost sight of in all this, of course, was Perspective. Gallo’s ripple wave went through her, too, and while we were all watching the heroes dropping like autumn leaves, she lost control of the contents of the jewel case. Sure, it was lead-lined, and therefore impermeable to Gallo’s null-wave; but the lining had broken open in one corner when she dropped it on the stairs: just a tiny crack, but it was enough.

  Fifty bags of bullion and close to four hundred steel deposit boxes expanded to full size in half a heartbeat. It was like a fountain—except that a fountain doesn’t weigh two and a half tons, and it doesn’t explode outward at mach two in big, hard, sharp-edged pieces.

  Naseem caught one of the boxes in the face as it sprang back to full size: it punched her off her feet and she hit the floor hard, her head hitting the tiles with a sickening crack.

  The mother with the twins went down under the bullion bags, still trying to shield them with her own body. It was impossible to tell how much weight landed on top of them: they just disappeared from sight in an avalanche of glittering gold.

  The fat man got a deposit box slammed into his chest, and fell backward, pole-axed. The movie star was pulped by a cascade of the damn things, and got a death scene more visually impressive than anything he’d ever managed onscreen.

  It was all over in a second, and we were left staring open-mouthed at the carnage. There was an appalled silence that was absolute except for a patter of blood on stone from away to my left: I resolutely didn’t turn my head to look. Then the screams and the sobs started up from all around.

  “Okay,” Vessell said, in a strangled voice. “Nobody make a—”

  Razor Wire gave a wordless yell and threw himself at Vessell. More by instinct than anything else, Vessell pressed down on the trigger and the gun spat staccato fire. Razor Wire was chopped to pieces in midair.

  “Nobody move!” Vessell bellowed, more authoritatively. “Nobody fucking move!” He looked around at us wildly, desperately. “Davey, Naseem, Gruber, pick up those bags and drag them out to the car.”

  None of us made a move: Naseem because she was unconscious on the floor with blood pooling un
derneath her fractured skull, George and me because we couldn’t have made our legs work right then if God himself had leaned down out of heaven and given us the order to quick-march.

  “Vessell,” George said inanely. “Oh my God, Vessell. Look what happened!” He was staring at Naseem, and I saw tears running down his cheeks.

  “The job’s not finished yet,” Vessell spat. “Let’s go, let’s go!”

  There was a distant wail of sirens.

  “I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” I said. A great weight of exhaustion and misery hit me like a bag of bullion to the back of the head. It was the kids: I think it was, anyway. On Tuesday they wouldn’t have been there, and I wouldn’t have seen them get buried. Something inside me wouldn’t let go of that image, as much as I wanted to. “I don’t think we’re going anywhere, Vessell.”

  “Drop the gun,” said Telstar, grimly, “and give yourselves up. One of Zen-tity’s other selves has healing powers. You have to let him work.”

  She had a point, as far as that went. But it was going to take a lot more than throwing our hands in the air and saying “Kamarade!” I held out my hand to Vessell.

  “Give me the gun, Pete,” I said.

  He pointed it at me instead. “The job’s not over,” he repeated, his eyes wild and his teeth bared in a snarl. “We’re walking out that door, with as many bags as we can—”

  Tin slammed a deposit box into the side of Vessell’s head and dropped him. Telstar went for the gun at the same time as I did, but I got to it first and she skidded to a dead stop as I swung it up to cover the heroes.

  “Easy,” I said. “You just stay back there. There’s something I’ve got to do.”