by Blake Banner
“But on this day, he was shown around the brand new television studios at Prado del Rey, in Madrid, and it was explained to him how every village would have a television in the church hall, and with time, every home in Spain would own a television. And naturally, the government, and ultimately Franco himself, would control the content of the programs.” His Excellency laughed out loud. “At the end of his tour, as they were leaving the studios, he turned to the leading advocate for reform in his government and said to him, ‘You can have your reforms, I have Television Española!’”
There was much laughter around the group, except that Gibbons did not laugh. He looked sour. “The man was a swine, but he was prophetic. Today, practically every brain in the western world is controlled by a screen. Not even Orwell foresaw that we would willingly carry the damned things around with us.”
Salman was nodding as he finished laughing. “As I say, politics is merely the practice of acquiring and retaining power, by whatever means. Franco was a past master at it, and he understood well the power of the screen in controlling people’s minds. And let’s be honest, ultimate power is the power to control people’s thinking.”
Gibbons scowled at him. “More than that, Salman, much more than that. The power of information technology, delivered via ubiquitous screens, is to mesh, by means of an information matrix, all minds into one single mind, controlled from one single source.”
Salman and His Excellency smiled at the floor. Salman muttered, “A little extreme, science fiction, surely, Professor Gibbons.”
Gibbons grunted ill-humoredly and I thought this was probably a good time to go. So I spoke up.
“Well, gentlemen, I think we’ll be pushing off.”
Gibbon’s head snapped around.
I smiled blandly and went on. “It has been fascinating. We must do it again.” I turned to the professor. “Gibbons, are you coming or are you going to stay?”
He opened his mouth, looked at Marni, and said, “I…um…”
Marni turned to me. “Just give me a moment to fix my hair, will you?”
I searched her eyes behind a smile. “Sure.” I grinned. “I think I’ll fix mine too.” I looked at the group. “Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure.”
We moved across the ballroom toward the exit. The entrance hall was empty, save for the doorman, who had now moved inside and watched us with incurious eyes. Marni glanced at me. “The restrooms are upstairs.” I followed her up a broad, mahogany staircase to the next floor, and then down a passage. She smiled, but there was an edge to her voice. “You going to come in with me?”
“No, but don’t do a disappearing act on me again, Marni.”
She stopped outside a door with a brass plaque that bore the legend Ladies on it in French script. She looked up into my eyes. “I won’t. Just wait for me a moment.”
I nodded and she pushed through the door. I strolled back to the landing and stood leaning on the banister, looking down into the entrance hall. After a moment, a man in a dinner jacket came into view and stopped to talk quietly to the doorman. I went cold inside. I knew him, but it couldn’t be.
I watched him pull out a silver case, extract a cigarette, and put it in his mouth. He lit it with a gold lighter, made a comment, laughed, and went to step outside. Then Gibbons came strutting into view and asked the doorman something. The doorman answered and jerked his head at the stairs. The guy with the cigarette turned to look at Gibbons and when he did, I saw his face. Hot rage welled up in my gut. It was him. It was Abdul Abbassi, nicknamed by his pals the Butcher of Helmand. It had been five years, but I would never forget that face as long as I lived. But the question that was burning inside me right then was, what the hell was he doing at this party?
I stepped back and watched Gibbons come stomping up the stairs. I moved down the passage and he followed after me with anger burning in his cheeks and his eyes. As he drew breath to give me one of his lectures I stepped close to him and drove my fist, not too hard—just enough to shut him up—into his solar plexus. He gasped and wheezed and I pulled him down the corridor toward the cans. There I slammed him against the wall and thrust my face close to his.
“Now you listen to me, Gibbons, and you listen carefully. There is a man at this party called Abdul Abbassi. His nickname is the Butcher. I have watched him murder an entire village and kill women and children with his own hands, just to make an example of them. If he is at this party, it is for one reason and one reason only, and that is to kill Marni.
“Marni is coming to my place, now, where I can protect her. You can come along if you want. But get in my way and I swear, Gibbons, I will gut you like a fish and I will not hesitate. Do you understand me?”
There was rage and contempt in his face, but no fear. He was too damned stupid to be afraid. “You damned fool!” he said. “You are going to ruin everything!”
I reached behind my back and slipped my Fairbairn & Sykes commando knife from my waistband. I held it to his throat.
“Your call, Professor.”
The door to the ladies’ room opened. Marni stood staring at me, a mixture of horror and disbelief on her face.
“What in the name of God…?”
I snapped. “I can’t explain now. Just trust me!”
“Trust you?”
I snarled, “Gibbons…?”
He spat the words at me, “You’re insane!” Then he turned his head toward Marni. “Get out of here! Go!”
And she was running along the passage toward the stairs. I shouted, “Marni! No! Don’t!” and made to go after her, but Gibbons was clinging to me, dragging me back, shouting after her, “Run! Run!”
I turned and gave him a savage back-hander with my left fist. His eyes rolled and his legs went to jell-O. He dropped to the floor and I slid the knife back into my belt as I ran after her. As I reached the top of the stairs she was running out onto the street. I took the steps three at a time and went to go out after her, but the doorman stepped in front of me, his left hand on my chest.
I didn’t think. I didn’t look at him. I took his wrist in my left hand and twisted. His arm locked. I jabbed my right savagely into his exposed floating ribs and stepped over him as he went down, wheezing. I wrenched open the door and ran into the night. She was there. Ten paces away, climbing into a yellow cab. I shouted, “Marni! Wait!” But the door slammed and she was away, moving down 79th Street and left onto Madison Avenue.
There was a dangerous rage inside me. I turned to go back, get Gibbons, and beat him until he told me where she had gone, but the doorman was staggering out with a purple face, pointing at me, gasping. “I call the cops! They are coming for you! You in big trouble!” Next to him, watching us, was Abbassi, with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a cigarette. I swore violently under my breath and ran across the road to the parking garage to get my car.
Two minutes later, I was struggling to stay within the speed limit as I cruised down Park Avenue toward Union Square and Broadway. As I drove, I dialed the number for the FBI.
“Federal Bureau of Investigation. How may I direct your call?”
“I need to talk to somebody in the Counter Terrorism Division.”
Four
I was in an interview room on the 23rd floor of number 26, Federal Plaza, the New York field office of the FBI. Special Agent Harrison Mclean was sitting across from me and observing me through slightly narrowed eyes, like he couldn’t make up his mind whether I was a clown or a jackass. His partner, Special Agent Daren Jones, had just left the room on a pretext, but I was pretty sure he was checking their database to see what, if anything, they had on me.
“I’m having some difficulty getting a handle on this, Mr. Walker. You say you were at a party thrown by…” He checked his notes. “Prince Mohamed bin Awad, at his house on 79th Street. The party was in honor of the speakers and the delegates at the UN conference on climate change. So...” He gave his head a little shake. “How did you come to be at this party?”
�
�That’s not important.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Walker, I’ll decide what’s important. How did you come to be there?”
I sighed. “I was accompanying Dr. Marni Gilbert, who will be talking at the conference. In fact, she’s one of the key speakers.”
He nodded and made a note. “You her boyfriend?”
I sighed. “No. We’re old friends. We grew up together.”
He nodded again, like my answer was confirming some suspicion he had. Then he went on, “So while you were there you saw…” He looked down at his pad. “Abdul Abbassi, ‘The Butcher of Helmand’, and you recognized him.”
I was struggling to hold on to my patience. “Yes.”
“And you recognized him…how?”
“I was stationed in Afghanistan for a while.”
His eyes narrowed further. “Who with?”
“The British SAS.”
A thin smile, a raised eyebrow. His eyes took in my evening suit. “Next you’ll be telling me your name is Bond, James Bond.”
I didn’t smile. “My name is Lacklan Walker.”
He nodded. “I know it is.” He eyed me a moment, still smiling. “Our Marines too tough for you?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re an American, how did you wind up in a British outfit?”
I took a deep breath. “I had personal reasons for leaving home. My mother is English. I joined the SAS. It’s not a soft option.”
“Personal reason?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t stomach my father. Look, Special Agent Mclean, I don’t mean to be rude or disrespectful, but I am trying to report the presence of a terrorist at a party that was exclusively for delegates to the UN Conference…”
“And their childhood friends…”
I frowned at him. “Are you not interested?”
He didn’t answer for a while. Finally, he sat forward and looked at his notepad again. “See, here’s my problem. Our Operational Branch has no Abdul Abbassi, Butcher of Helmand, on its wanted list.” He shrugged. “I think it’s a name you made up.” He smiled almost apologetically. “Let’s face it.” He gestured at my clothes with his open hand. “Your whole story, your costume… It’s fantastical.”
I sat forward and leaned my arms on the desk, mirroring his posture. “Listen to me, Mclean…”
“Special Agent Mclean, Mr. Walker.”
“Listen to me. I watched that man butcher an entire village. I saw it with my own eyes. There is only one reason why he would be at that party…”
He spread his hands. “Why would the Taliban want to bomb a United Nations conference on climate change, Mr. Walker?”
“I don’t know…”
The door opened and Special Agent Jones came in. He handed Mclean a couple of sheets of paper and sat down. “Mr. Walker, I can see you have no record, and I can see that you were a captain in the British Special Air Service. But we have nobody on our wanted list answering to the name Abdul Abbassi, and I’m afraid that even if you did recognize this man, and he has committed wartime atrocities in Afghanistan, that is not reason enough for our Operation Branch to start an investigation, or take any other action for that matter. He is not on a wanted list.”
I held his eye for a long moment. “That man is going to perpetrate a terror attack at that conference. Whatever your lists and databases tell you, I am telling you that he is going to strike at the conference.”
Mclean spread his hands. “Well, thank you for coming in, Mr. Walker. We’ve made a note of your observations and we will look into it.”
I couldn’t keep the irony from my voice. “You’ll look into it?”
Harrison matched my tone. “Sure, we have nothing better to do, have we, Special Agent Jones?”
Jones smiled. “Nothing that won’t keep.”
I stood. “Thanks for your time, gentlemen. I won’t waste any more of it. See you around.”
Back on Broadway, I stopped and pulled my pack of Camels from my jacket pocket and lit up. I drew the smoke down deep and blew it in a stream up at the starless sky. I stood thinking. I had a problem. I had lost Marni, in more senses than one. I needed to find her and make her understand about Abbassi, but what little chance I had of getting Gibbons to cooperate with me, I had shot to pieces when I threatened him with my knife. Now, as soon as Ben discovered that I had lost her, I’d have him gunning for me. He was running out of patience with me, and I knew it.
And if all that wasn’t enough on its own, now I also needed to find out what Abbassi was planning, why he was at that party.
I started walking toward my car. I couldn’t do all of it. There was only one of me. I needed to prioritize. I reached the Zombie and leaned on the roof, thinking and smoking, gazing at the sleepless, lamp lit street with its endless streams of people and traffic. The chances were that Marni and Gibbons had some kind of safe place, and that was where she’d gone. The way he’d told her to go, to run—it hadn’t been a cry of panic, telling her to get the hell out of there. It had conveyed more. It had conveyed that they both knew where she was going to go, somewhere prearranged. I had no precise reason for believing that, except a gut feeling based on my reading of their body language, and the tone of his voice.
So if she was safe, at least for now, then I should focus on Abbassi, because right then I was pretty sure he was the major threat to her. To her and maybe to hundreds of other people. I looked at my watch. An hour had passed since I’d left the party. Abbassi had been smoking a cigarette outside. He hadn’t had the look of a man who was about to leave. There was an at least even chance that he would still be there. I climbed into the Zombie and made my way back up Centre Street toward Union Square and Park Avenue.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but right then it was all I had. I’d wait for Abbassi to leave, tail him, and see where he went, who he saw, what he did. Sooner or later he would give me some clue as to his reason for being there. Meanwhile, I would think about how to deal with Marni and Gibbons when the time came. If I had to, I’d abduct her and force her to listen to me. And I might well have to. I needed time to think and plan, but time was one thing I had very little of.
I pulled into 79th Street and parked a hundred yards down the road from the house, across from the Serafina. It was almost eleven o’clock and there was a desultory flow of cars driving up to the door and collecting couples and small groups of people who were glittering a little less than when they had arrived, but laughing a little more.
I waited half an hour and saw a red Ferrari V12 Superfast pull up. A guy in a suit climbed out and spoke to the doorman, who was still holding his side. The doorman spoke into a radio and after ten minutes, Abbassi came out and had a word with the guy from the Ferrari, who handed him some keys. I fired up the Zombie. Abbassi climbed into the Ferrari, did a U-turn, and took off. I went after him. He turned left on Madison Avenue and kept going north.
I let him get well ahead. A bright red Ferrari is not easy to lose. He eventually crossed the Madison Avenue bridge into the Bronx. He kept going north, up 3rd Avenue and Boston Road toward the Bronx Park area. At 180th he turned right and crossed under the railway bridge.
You couldn’t get much further from East 79th Street. Everywhere you looked there was decay and graffiti, desolation, poverty and hopelessness. His Ferrari stood out like a strippergram at a wake. He moved up Morris Park Avenue, turned into Amethyst Street and pulled up outside an ugly, detached, white clapboard house with iron railings on the windows and the door. It was three stories and had a flat roof. I drove past like I knew where I was going and watched him get out, unlock the door and go inside. I parked at the end of the road, lit a Camel, and sat watching the house in my mirror.
A couple of things were clear to me by now. The first was that Abbassi was not worried about being spotted. You have to be either very confident or very stupid to bring a Ferrari 812 into an area like Van Nest. Or both. I could buy that he was both.
The other thing was, if he was hanging out with the pr
ince and driving a three-hundred grand Ferrari, clearly this shack wasn’t his house. So if he didn’t live here, what was this place? It had three stories and it wasn’t small, so it was reasonable to assume there were people inside it. If that was correct, then he was visiting. Whoever he was visiting, I was pretty sure it wasn’t another Arabian prince, or his in-laws. I needed to know who they were.
That led me to thinking I needed to look inside and bug the place. For that I needed to know how many of them there were, and when the house would be empty. To find that out I either needed to sit on the place for a week, or bug it. It was a vicious circle—and I didn’t have a week.
I waited another hour, mulling things over, and saw the lights go out in the windows. After that, I cruised around the neighborhood for a bit, thinking and smoking. That was when I discovered there was a small mosque, or mushalla, three or four hundred yards away on Rheinlander Avenue. If they were Muslims, the chances were pretty good they would go to the mosque on Friday. That was tomorrow. It didn’t give me much time, but it might just be enough. I tried to remember what I had in my kit bag in the trunk. I had replenished it after Burgundy.[3]
I had my Smith & Wesson 500, my two Sig Sauer p226s, the take down bow and six aluminum arrows. The night goggles were there and there were a couple of cakes of C4, and half a dozen detonators. And bugs. I’d gotten Kenny to send me some bugs and trackers. Since I’d been chasing Marni, I had come to realize how useful they could be.