All The Big Ones Are Dead

by Christopher A. Gray

  “Drink this,” he said, handing it over. “Drink it now. It will help take the edge off. It will help clear your breathing. Is there a first aid kit in the vehicle?”

  Dominican blinked tears out of his eyes and nodded, pointing and tapping on a drawer beneath the rear seat. Bishop found the kit, pulled out a packet of cotton-tipped swabs, leaned into Dominican to keep him immobile, then swabbed out his nose. He wadded up some gauze, and pressed it into Dominican’s nostrils.

  “Maintain a bit of pressure. Do not try to blow your nose,” Bishop said, leaning back slightly as Dominican stared at him. “Blowing your nose will jam blood up into your sinuses and then you’ll swell up, you won’t be able to see properly, and you'll become useless to me. If you need to, just sniff and swallow.” Bishop rooted around in the first aid kit and ripped open another paper pack of cotton swabs and a packet of clotting agent.

  “Hold still!” he said sharply, as he leaned on Dominican, snapped a swab in half, rolled each tip in the clotting agent and stuck each one in Dominican’s nostrils. He grabbed Dominican’s right hand and placed it on the man’s nose.

  “Squeeze now,” Bishop ordered. “Don’t stop squeezing until I say so.”

  Dominican nodded, still shocked.

  “In three minutes, you and I are going to exit this vehicle. We’re going to walk casually to a vehicle parked directly behind this one. You will enter the vehicle without a fuss. I will be meeting with you again later tonight. Do you understand what I just told you?”

  Dominican nodded after a second or two.

  “My conduct in that meeting will depend entirely on you. You can release the pressure on your nose and put your hands behind your back. Do it now.”

  Bishop leaned in, gently tugged the swabs free and watched for blood but the clotting agent had done its job.

  “Mr. Dominican,” Bishop said, staring into the man’s eyes, “do you understand what is happening here?”

  “I am being illegally detained.”

  “Not so much, actually. Patriot Act, title III. Financial Anti-Terrorism. The illegal ivory and horn thing will be held in abeyance until and if it’s needed. There aren’t any lawyers in your future Mr. Dominican. Those days are over. The people with whom you do business are funded by the worst kinds of terrorists. The poachers who supply you return big profits up and down the line to the terrorists who funded them in the first place. You are neck deep in the very worst kind of trouble there is these days.”

  “You’re a Customs agent? A Customs agent? You’re a bureaucrat with a badge and some street skills,” Dominican said, biting the words off. “Listen carefully, Mr. Whoever-you-are, I have people who will knock down buildings to make sure I’m safe and unhurt. You think this performance and this declaration of yours is going to hold up for more than a few hours? You’re not scaring me in the slightest!”

  “Mr. Dominican,” Bishop leaned forward, “everything you think you know is wrong. I am only who and what I want you to think I am. You do not yet fully understand what is happening to you. But this is the beginning of a very long road. Everything you think you can do, all of the people you think you can call, and all of the authority you think you can influence are all now out of your reach. Deliberately or not, you got into the terrorism financing business and the killing of endangered species. As of this moment in your life, I own you. You will shortly be given the opportunity to make some personal choices. But you must keep one thing in mind at all times. If you make the wrong choices, the person known as Marc Dominican will cease to exist. He will have mysteriously disappeared on a Manhattan street.”

  “Bullshit,” Dominican snorted. “CBP agent, or whatever you are. You’re the one who is shortly going to be suffering. Back off now and let me out of this goddamned vehicle!”

  “You’re not going anywhere for a long time, Mr. Dominican,” Bishop replied. “Not for a very long time. Not with your attitude.”

  Bishop was staring into Dominican’s eyes.

  “Freddy!” Dominican screamed suddenly to the driver. “Move it! Get us out of here!”

  “Stop yelling,” Bishop said, sharply. “I have a headache. Freddy is going to have to stay put for now. He’s barely even conscious. Besides that—” Bishop pointed at the passenger window. Two large, black, SUVs had quartered the vehicle front and rear, almost touching the sheet metal. “We’re not going anywhere until I say so.”

  “Noticing the passage of time, Mr. Dominican?” Bishop asked in a casual tone, leaning all the way back in the plush seat. “Noticing that there are no NYPD knocking on the windows to find out what’s going on? Noticing that there aren’t any more people walking by on the sidewalk?”

  Dominican was silent as he looked around.

  “You know, Mr. Dominican,” Bishop continued, “I actually enjoy my work because sometimes, like tonight for instance, the tangible results I’m predicting seem so—I don’t know—so rich.”

  Dominican managed a smile. He’d been fumbling in a coat pocket with his left hand. Bishop had noticed of course, but he’d been ignoring it.

  “You are smiling,” Bishop said, still speaking quietly, “because you have been repeatedly pressing an emergency pager and GPS tracker to call David Trask.” He looked placidly at Dominican to let the information sink in.

  “Unfortunately, Trask will not be answering the call tonight or any other night. We can stretch this all out if you want. You can keep pressing the page button. I can keep my teams waiting. But Trask won’t answer the page. He can’t, because he’s dead.”

  Bishop loved telling the truth. The truth was easy to sell. It did not involve second thoughts. No inadvertent pauses. The truth was plain and simple, and Marc Dominican had spent most of his adult life studying people who tried to lie to him. Besides that, there’d been no answering blip or buzz in response to his repeated pages.

  “What do you want from me?” Dominican said frankly, calming his voice and changing his strategy. “What do I have to do, for you personally, to get me out of this vehicle with a one hour head start on your people? I’ll pay anything you want. I can do it from this vehicle. I’ve done it before for others like you. I can access accounts, transfer funds, have funds held for you in a bank and country of your choice. I can do it all from this vehicle. Name the amount.”

  “Really, Mr. Dominican,” Bishop said, smiling slightly, “and you think I’d like to live life in your pocket after all that? You think I’d like to live with the knowledge that after all that I’d done, I ended our little set piece by letting you continue to fund terrorists? For shame, Mr. Dominican.”

  “You’re mocking me,” Marc said, balefully, his voice rising. “I’m sitting here, bleeding, incapacitated, fighting for my life, and you’re mocking me?”

  In response, Bishop only tapped his phone. “We’re good to go,” he said when Alexei picked up.

  The curbside door opened and Bishop got out. A masked operator in black and wearing light body armor immediately reached in and dragged Dominican out of the back seat. He was unceremoniously and thoroughly frisked standing spread-eagled beside the car, his wrists were zip-tied, and then he was placed in the back of a blacked out DTRA SUV that had pulled up a minute earlier behind the Escalade.

  “Orders for this one?” another operator who’d opened the driver’s door asked Bishop while pointing at the semi-unconscious driver.

  “Probably needs a medic,” Bishop said. “Try straightening him out a bit first though to see if he’s got access codes to enter his boss’s office and main residence in Manhattan. Medic after that. FBI will pick him up once he’s cleared by a doctor. I hit him hard enough to crack something, so get what you can ASAP.”

  The last thing Bishop did before exiting the vehicle was to dig out some wet wipes from the vanity kit in the back seat, use a fold-down mirror mounted in the headliner to clean off the blood streak, touch up his appearance a bit and run Dominican’s comb through his hair.

  ***

  The apartmen
t was more like a luxurious house within the larger building. Apartment 1102 was a 7,500, two-story, marble tiled, slate tiled, art deco extravagance filled with several million dollars’ worth of exotic art work, several millions more worth of custom designed furniture, two kitchens, five bedrooms, a staff suite, a private office, a library, seven bathrooms, a theater, a banquet room, a lot of locked doors, and a family room for anyone in the place who occasionally yearned for something that vaguely resembled a bit of normalcy.

  The group of three men standing in the library of 1102 were talking quietly. They each had a bodyguard in the room with them, but the bodyguards were positioned well away in the corners of the room. The men in the library stood close together, speaking in tones too quiet for anyone but themselves to hear.

  “Tudor is on his way?” One of them asked the owner of the apartment.

  “He is. He called as soon as he hit Madison Avenue. He’s ten minutes away, Not more than that, I think.”

  “You’ll be adding something spectacular to your collection, I gather.”

  “Yes. The carver is superb. Emotion, technique, more emotion. I’ve never seen work like hers. There is no doubt she’ll be renowned one day. Perhaps not for her ivory work, mind you.”

  “You been resisting my interest in your collection. How do I persuade you to sell me a piece or two?”

  “I’d say it’s a matter of money, but it’s not. You’ve seen her work. It is outstanding. She’s superb. A true artist. A great sculptor in every sense of the word.”

  “So the price just went up? Is that what I’m hearing?”

  “Her work,” the collector intoned, smiling placidly, “is priceless for now.”

  “I will have to see the next group of pieces.” He received a nod in return.

  “And your Asian connection?” The owner turned to ask of the other man.

  “He is unusually excited. Real rhino horn is becoming so scarce. He claims not to have seen the real thing in almost six months.”

  “Folk medicines? Potions? Can you really believe it?”

  “Whether I believe it or not, the buyers believe it and pay spectacularly well. The price I’m paying tonight is enormous, but it pales beside the return.”

  They nodded in agreement, but were interrupted by a knock at the library door. The apartment owner walked over, opened it, and spoke briefly to the staff member.

  “Tudor is here now,” he whispered to the others when he returned to the group. “He’ll be up with the shipment in a moment. He’s clearing security. They’ll wheel it in through the back doors as usual.” They all spared a glance at the double-door at the back of the library. There was little else to say until Tudor arrived. They never talked business at these meetings, only about their special passions. They waited only a few more minutes before an apartment security guard opened the back doors of the library. The open door of one of the building’s freight elevators could be seen in the background across the service hall.

  Tudor pushed the dolly into the library as the security guard closed and locked the doors. All three men then turned to their bodyguards and dismissed them. They did not turn back to Jorge until the library doors closed again.

  “Good evening, Jorge,” the apartment owner said. “You’re well?”

  “I am, Senator Keaton,” Jorge replied. “And you? You look prosperous this evening. I take it the campaign is riding high in the polls.”

  The five-term senator was holding a crystal glass containing a couple of drams of Glendronach Recherche, a heart-stoppingly expensive Scotch vintage originally casked in the late 1960s. He raised the glass in assent.

  “As you say, Jorge,” the senator agreed. “We’ve been waiting with great anticipation. It’s good to see you.”

  In reply, Jorge set about loosening the ten retaining bolts on the front panel of the crate. Once it was loose, he set the bolts on top of the crate and then placed the front panel and its attached Customs pre-clearance package to one side, facing the group of men.

  “General Kaminski,” Tudor said, turning to the two-star standing to Keaton’s right, “I thought Mr. Dominican was scheduled to be here?”

  “He’s on his way. Should be here any moment. He certainly loves to preside over a successful transaction.” They were innocuous words uttered by a man who’d never say any such thing in front of Dominican.

  General of Army, Peter Kaminski, was a man with a problem. The main issue was that his loyalty to Marc Dominican was sickening. Kaminski was a violent pervert. Dominican had footage of him beating a prostitute, a girl still in her teens, near to death in a brothel just outside of Manila. Kaminski still loved beating up hookers. Dominican made sure he had a regular supply and that none of them knew Kaminski’s identity. The medical care and counseling and education they received through Dominican’s auspices afterward was insanely expensive, but the back end for Marc was a highly placed general in his pocket. And Kaminski was not just any old general. His influence in the procurement group he commanded had for years made a series of acquisition recommendations that had helped Marc’s partnerships in military supply companies profit literally in the hundreds of millions. General Kaminski’s career was rising too. He’d be a three-star in another year or two, without a doubt.

  Keaton had flinched, ever so slightly, at the mention of Dominican’s name. The senator was another man who had poor judgment around women. The good senator’s proclivities extended to sexual fantasies with unconscious bodies. It even made Dominican slightly uncomfortable, but hay, as they say, should be made while the sun shone. Keaton truly believed that Dominican could shield him forever. As long as Keaton kept getting elected, he kept getting more senior and he kept getting more influential and more connected. Marc would hide Keaton’s identity, supply the women and have them sorted out afterward as long as Keaton kept building his power base. The Customs contact Keaton had developed had worked out quite well. The malware that the contact had been given to insert into the Treasury computer systems for them worked flawlessly. Dominican had many more plans for Senator Keaton.

  “It’s like unwrapping an exotic gift,” Cormac McKellar intoned in his soft baritone as he gazed at the wrapped contents with anticipation. Keaton took his empty glass and poured a fresh dram into it at a trolley next to the massive rosewood desk that sat imposingly in front of one of the eight-foot high windows. Very little natural light penetrated the blurry security coating on the inside of the glass.

  McKellar was the youngest of the three. He’d graduated from a nondescript Midwest college with degrees in chemistry and microbiology. Neither degree had done him much good. He couldn’t get arrested in either pursuit much less land a decent position. He’d been quite accomplished in school, but he had no connections. His family had little money, and most of what his father had managed to save had been spent to educate Cormac. All Cormac’s parents had ever wanted for their son was a simple break in life, something neither of them had ever gotten. Marc Dominican’s sweeping searches for ripe candidates had turned up McKellar at a time when he was deep into desperation and committing felony after felony in the act of manufacturing illegal drugs. LSD, mescaline, meth, crack and basically anything the street wanted. Instead of simply offering Cormac a job in one of his companies, Dominican used one of his people who had street-level contacts to spend almost three months gradually convincing Cormac that if he didn’t use his skills to make heavy money in the drug trade, he might well end up on the short end of an industry that had long ago off-shored all of Cormac’s career aspirations and dreams. It was a credit to McKellar’s solid, Midwestern upbringing that three full months of relentless persuasion and entreaties were needed for Dominican’s influence to finally work its magic. Another six months of drug manufacturing in a basement lab in Joliet just outside of Chicago, and Dominican had enough on young Cormac to keep him on the arm for a very long time.

  Dominican had allowed Cormac to keep several million he’d stashed, then set the scientist up in a very senior po
sition in a generic drug R&D facility based in India and drawing a huge salary plus bonuses and stock. Three years had passed, during which time Cormac had been spending several months every year at the Indian operation producing substandard but highly profitable drugs for third-world markets, Web dealers and plenty of legitimate players who had markets in the Eastern Bloc where a few high margin, substandard product lines could make serious money for them. McKellar had early on endured a few sleepless nights, feeling a vague, almost remote sort of guilt. Random thoughts of conscience—what would his parents think of his choices—drifted in and out. Days and weeks turned into months, and then he began sleeping quite soundly every night. His substantial and growing wealth, and the influential network enjoyed developing, overrode every faint conscientious objection. None of his second thoughts bothered him enough to keep him from fully enjoying his ill-gotten gains.

  Jorge had finished unwrapping the shipment and releasing the rubber bands that prevented the tusk pieces from rattling around. Without moving anything out of the crate, he shifted five large pieces so they could be examined. The three men stepped forward and began their inspection.

  “I was tied up in traffic this morning by a conservationist protest group on Broadway,” McKellar said. “Seems like one group or another is tying up traffic every other week. Tell me Jorge, do you ever think about the extinction problem? The source of supply is finite.”

  “It is, Mr. McKellar,” Jorge said, looking around. He’d seen no sign at all of the surveillance or the tactical team since parting company with Inspector Linders almost forty minutes earlier. The meeting seemed uncomfortably normal, identical to previous ones, in any event. Jorge’s thoughts were unfocused. The stark fear he’d experienced a scant few hours earlier had evaporated, leaving a knot in his gut that just would not let up. He wasn’t wired either. He didn’t even have to bring that up. Diane knew that this particular place had to have advanced security. No wire. It was that fact, more than anything else, that allowed Jorge to act normally.