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Chapter 14
Big Trouble in the Big Apple
“There!” exclaimed Angel as he and Buffy pushed through the hallway crowded with performers and well-wishers and hangers-on from the concert.Buffy looked in the indicated direction and saw a young blonde woman being hustled toward a steel fire door at the end of the corridor by two men in dark suits. It was her daughter, looking so much like a younger reflection of the Slayer that the young woman could have passed for one of Flynn’s alternate universe Buffies.
Buffy saw Angel out of the corner of her eye as he reached under his suit jacket for his handgun, and she reached out to stop him.
“Not here. Not yet. Too many civilians around, too many variables,” she said. “Just play it cool.”
Angel hesitated for an instant, then nodded.
“One of us needs to get around back and cut them off,” he said. “You can move faster and stealthier than I can. Do you think you can make it in time?”
“I don’t know the floor plan, but I can try. We’ll never get to them in time this way, and at least one of us needs to be in a position where we have some room to work in, which isn’t going to happen backstage here. I’ll go. You keep working toward them from this side,” said Buffy.
Buffy veered off and headed back the way she’d come as Angel continued down the hallway, pushing past crowds by turns indignant and utterly indifferent. She moved on instinct and dead reckoning, working toward what she hoped was a course that would place her in a position to intercept her daughter’s kidnappers.
She emerged from backstage into the loge section and cut across in front of the stage, weaving through loitering conversationalists and poseurs, making a straight line for door at the opposite side where a lighted exit sign glowed with a hellfire red.
Then she was at the door, pushing through it into the cool New York night. She took in the entire crowd outside in a single glance, her mind filtering through faces and physical builds and gaits and coming up empty. She started toward the point she expected the kidnappers to come from and saw Angel emerge from the backstage exit. After a few moments, she caught his attention and he shook his head across the distance, fear and frustration obvious on his face.
Something caught the Slayer’s attention and her gaze tracked to a commotion a dozen yards away in the direction of a black sedan.
It was Elisa and her kidnappers. Someone had caught sight of a gun and now pandemonium was quickly spreading among the departing concert goers and nearby pedestrian traffic.
“There!” Buffy shouted over the crowd noise to Angel. She forced her way through the crowd as fast as she could toward the center of the trouble.
From the street, a beat cop was heading toward the disruption, his one hand on his sidearm and the other clutching his radio to his mouth, calling the disturbance in, bringing in more uniforms.
Shit, thought Buffy. Just what I need. Another player who doesn’t know the rules.
And then she was through the crowd and there was nothing between her and her quarry, nothing but an endless ten feet of air and two professional killers who held her daughter at the point of a gun. An instant later, Angel was by her side, his own gun drawn, with the cop converging simultaneously and misreading the situation.
“Freeze!” yelled the beat cop, his hand going to his holster and coming up with his police-issue Glock 9mm. “Drop it!”
The crowd panicked, Angel hesitated, and Buffy made a split-second decision. The cop was too far away. Her daughter was too far away. Angel, however, was close enough. He was standing in a Weaver shooting stance, his weight was transferred to his front leg, and she took that support out from under him with a low, sweeping kick the sent him to the pavement.
The kidnappers seized the opportunity, one of them putting a bullet in the back of the cop as they hustled Elisa into the sedan. The vehicle sped off with a squeal of tires, rounded a corner, and was gone.
“What the Hell did you do?” snapped Angel as he regained his feet.
“He was going to shoot you,” said Buffy, gesturing toward the dead officer. “I had no time. I had to make a choice.”
Angel looked at her, and Buffy was taken aback by the cold anger in his eyes. “Well you made the wrong one, and now Elisa’s going to pay for it.”
Buffy swallowed hard as she watched her husband turn away from her and disappear into the crowd, his black overcoat billowing behind him in the chill Manhattan night. She suddenly felt alone in the universe, a stranger.
What have I done? she thought.
* * *
“The package is being delivered,” said the man on the other end of the encrypted satellite phone link.
“Excellent,” said Cade into the receiver.
“Any further instructions?”
“Just make certain the package arrives intact. Good work.”
Cade killed the connection and turned to a man in jungle fatigues standing beside him in the operations tent.
“The Key is on its way,” he said to the man. “Notify the wormhole team to begin preparations for the Symmetry Breaking and the Nexus event. I don’t want to put this thing off any longer than necessary. I’ve waited too long.”
* * *
Xander brought up a digital photo on his data pad and slid the device to Buffy across her motel room’s table. The picture was one of the photographs he’d taken of Pitts’ arrival at Teterboro airport.
She dialed a number on her phone and after a few seconds said, “Hi, Willow. Look, could you get somebody in whatever passes for the DH Group’s Electronic Intel department to expedite an aircraft N-number scan for me? I need to know where this thing’s been lately, and even better, where it’s going if they’ve filed a flight plan. Probably won’t get quite that lucky, but I’ll bet we can figure out where they’re going by where they’ve been. You got a pencil? Okay, it’s November Four Seven Two Six Uniform. Looks to me like some Falcon Jet model. Hard to tell. I’ve been away from this reality for way too long.”
“Hang on,” said Willow. “I’ve just got Zoot on the interoffice vidnet. Let me sic him on this. Shouldn’t take more that a minute.”
A minute passed, then three. Finally, Willow came back on the line.
“Okay, no current flight plans — violation of FAA Instrument Flight Rules, or so Zoot tells me — but we do have recent Flight Plan filings in the International Air Traffic Control database. Seems the originating airport for an awful lot of the trips is in Belize.”
Buffy turned to Xander. “Willow says Cade’s jet has been flying out of Belize a lot. That ring any bells?”
“Belize?” Xander reiterated.
“Yeah, does it mean anything to you?”
“It might. When I was in Central America there were rumors about an M-7 installation, a secret technology lab. Some of the rumors placed it in the mountains of Belize.”
“Bingo,” said Buffy. She turned back to the conversation with Willow on the phone. “Willow, can we still get satellite reconnaissance?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Great. I don’t care how you do it, but get me satellite coverage of Belize ASAP and have the analysts look for an underground facility somewhere in the mountains, an old M-7 complex. Run a full spectrum analysis on every square foot. If there’s something there, I want it found. Issue a Warning Order to applicable personnel. We’ll be moving very fast on this one,” said the Slayer. She was about to hang up when she added, “How’s Angel?”
“Worried. Upset. You want to talk to him?”
“I’m not sure that’s a real good idea right now,” said Buffy.
She heard Willow sigh over the phone. “That’s stupid talk, Buffy. You two need to be together right now.”
“I screwed up, Will. Big time.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t know that. And neither can Angel. Elisa’s still alive, Buffy, and as long as she is, there’s hope. But you and Angel have to deal with this together. You can’t do it apart,” said Willow.
Buffy hesitated, then said, “You’re right. I’m coming home, Will. Put a pot of coffee on for me.”