“Of course, Bob. One hundred percent.”
“But do we really want our sons—and increasingly our daughters—out there? Let me ask you a question, Jim. Would you send your kids off to catch a burglar or put out a fire in the neighborhood?”
“No way, Bob. That’s crazy. I’d call the police. Or the fire department.”
“Exactly, Jim. That makes good common sense. Call the professionals. Well all I’m saying is, it’s time for us to leave war to the professionals. By outsourcing operations to an organization like Wildwater, our nation will be safer, while also saving lives and money long-term.”
“Sounds great to me, Bob? What do you folks think?”
The front half of the audience, full of employees who’d been shepherded down from the offices upstairs, cheered on cue. The rest clapped half-heartedly. A few continued eating sandwiches and looking at their phones. As reporters started calling out questions, the less-invested audience members began to disperse, and Joe stood as well. He wandered the lobby, taking photos: there was no reason to hide it here, though he was more interested in the security cameras and elevator banks than most tourists.
The press conference ended and there was applause, though less than at the opening, as people were eager to make their way out, and Joe joined the flow, chewing gum and following the line to the revolving doors. That’s when he found Yelena.
She too was in disguise, and, considering how hard it had been for him to spot her ponytail among the others, she’d done an excellent job of camouflage. She wore an oversized pink sweatshirt that said PINK on it (which he thought was just naming the color until she explained it was a brand), black running shorts, pink running shoes, gigantic dark sunglasses, and a black wig under a Mets cap. They’d arrived separately, and had agreed to rendezvous in the park, so he just walked by without a second glance. Then he got her text: Saw someone. Following. Tell you later.
Upstairs, in the executive conference room, Mike Powell sat staring at a row of screens.
As a career government employee, he wasn’t sure how he felt about Richards’s speech as it played on one, but he was certainly impressed with the technology deployed on the others, particularly the facial recognition software.
“Freeze four,” he told the tech, who hit a key. “Close in on that guy, the one in the ball cap. No, the other one in the other ball cap. There . . .” he turned to Jensen, Richards’s right hand, who was overseeing operations from here while the boss was on stage. “That’s Joe Brody.”
“Track him,” Jensen told the tech, and the camera zoomed in tight, following Brody as he took photos of the building. Jensen turned to Powell. “I take it he’s not an architecture buff.”
“Nope. He’s casing the joint.” He watched as Brody, smiling innocuously, flowed with the crowd, through the revolving door, out of the building and off camera.
The door opened and Richards came in, without his sidekick and media handlers, but still with makeup on his face. Jensen jumped up.
“Terrific job, sir.”
“Thanks. Damn those hot lights.” He grabbed a water from the table and sat in the biggest, best seat at the table. “I think it went well. Crowd could have been bigger but Fox and CNN both said they’d cover it. The Times asked a question. What did you think?” he asked Powell.
“About the Times, I have no opinion. But I am interested in why Brody was there.” He pointed at the frozen image of Joe on the screen. “This means he’s connected Zahir to Wildwater.”
“Because of the office? There was no evidence there for him to find. It’s a dead end. The question is what led him there in the first place.”
“And what he is looking for here,” Powell told him. “Money? Dope?”
Richards laughed. “Not in this building. We piss test the janitors for Chrissakes.” He finished his water. “Zahir’s business is conducted completely outside of Wildwater. By very capable professionals.”
“Toomey,” Powell said.
“And as we speak he is moving to make that operation more secure, and more profitable, than it has ever been. As for unwanted guests like your friend Brody . . .” He shrugged. “We have a professional to handle that too.”
Vicky, Powell thought, but did not say the name, as if it were a curse word. He just nodded.
“I will retest all our security, sir, but I don’t see us as vulnerable to intrusion,” Jensen said.
“Don’t worry,” Richards said, wiping his forehead with a hankie and taking off a swatch of orange. “We run a tight ship here, Powell. And a clean one.”
“I hope so,” Powell said, still dwelling on Brody in his getup. “Just remember, Joe Brody is a thief first and foremost. So ask yourself, what did he come to steal?”
“Zahir is coming, America. You have been warned.” Donna paused, letting the ominous email sink in. She was in the office of her boss, Tom, reading him a printout while Andy and Janet listened.
“That it?” Tom asked, taking a big bite of his sandwich. It was ham and Swiss on rye, with mustard and a pickle, as Andy and Janet both noted. They were hungry.
“The dots connect,” Donna said.
“What dots?” he asked, mouth full.
“Thanks to Janet’s tests and the info we have from NYPD, we now know that Zahir has moved from smuggling heroin to distribution at the street level. We also know that the funds are flowing back to terror operations overseas. And now we have a threat, their first operation on US soil.”
“Goddamn it, I got mustard on my tie,” Tom said. He grabbed a napkin and wiped while he talked. “You’re right, Donna. It could be terrorists slinging dope in Brooklyn. It could also just be a crew of normal, patriotic All-American heroin dealers who scored some Afghani dope. And that money could be going to terror . . . according to a CIA snitch who promptly disappeared and an old Irish mobster who ended up in a Jersey swamp. You think Zahir did him too?”
“No, sir.”
“Me neither. And as for this threat.” He crumpled his napkin up and tossed it toward the trash. “Add it to my pile. You know how many we get a day?”
“Yes, sir. I read them all. We get a lot.”
“Exactly. Plus there’s what Homeland gets. And the CIA.” He lifted his pickle. “Here’s what I think. So far this still smells local to me. So give it to the locals. Andy, who’s the detective who sent the sample?”
“Fusco.”
“Give it to Fusco. Let him chase the shadow if he wants. Now then, can I finish my lunch?”
On the way out, Andy checked his watch. “So much for chicken and jazz,” he told Donna. “You owe us.”
19
THAT NIGHT, THEY HIT Alonzo first. Along a quiet street, in a sleepy part of Flatbush, a van pulled up to a plain two-bedroom house on a block of plain houses. Perhaps a sharp-eyed neighbor had noticed the security cameras or that the weedy lawn was a bit overgrown. Or maybe the mailman had realized that, aside from junk addressed to Our Neighbor and the electric bill, there was no mail. Black SUVs slid in and out of the automatic garage, lights burned dimly behind the always-drawn shades, but there was no trouble, and no noise, aside from faint music, if anyone had bothered to listen. Though he had never set foot in it, and his name appeared nowhere on any paperwork, this house belonged to Alonzo.
Alonzo controlled a big piece of the organized crime in the African-American neighborhoods of Brooklyn, a managerial feat that involved overseeing and disciplining his own unruly troops and protecting his territory and assets from others while also building his legitimate business profile, which included restaurants, clubs, car services, janitorial and landscaping companies, as well as a music label and a boxing gym.
This house was special though: it was the main stash. This was the central warehouse for Alonzo’s dope and coke operation, though it had been years since he himself was in the same room with the drugs, or any mind-altering substance, beyond a cigar or a cognac. Or the edibles and vapes that his younger brother, Reggie, insisted were the future but
that sounded like some silly bougie shit to Alonzo.
The dope came from Little Maria, a Dominican drug overlord—or was it overlady?—who had maintained and expanded her late husband’s empire, mainly in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx. His coke came from Colombians and Mexicans in Queens. The product was brought to this stash house, where it was cut, bagged up, and then sent out to the network of lieutenants who in turn ran the crews that sold the drugs from corners and alleys, storefronts, project courtyards, and tenement buildings all over Brooklyn. Of course there were always other players, independent crews who set up shop on an unclaimed corner or vacant lot, smalltime dealers who peddled drugs from their apartments via word of mouth or in the back rooms at clubs (not his clubs of course), and even established figures who held their own small patch of territory; but none of that really bothered Alonzo. As long as he had the best real estate and the best product, he sold all the shit he could possibly get his hands on and made more money than he could count. And it was his supply connections as well as his relationships with Anton the Russian, Rebbe, Gio, Uncle Chen from Flushing, and others, that allowed day-to-day business to proceed smoothly and with minimal friction. Until now.
Now a dirty gray van was cruising up to his stash house and parking in front of the house next door, under a tree, out of range of the cameras. Inside the van were four men, all in black fatigues and wool caps that pulled down to ski-masks. Silently, in the darkness, two slipped out and crept, crouched low, across the neighbor’s lawn and through a missing board in their fence to take cover against the aluminum-siding-covered wall of the house. Lights glowed in the windows and hip-hop played within the walls. One man quickly jimmied the dark basement window while the other kept watch, then slid in. Except for some crap left by the previous tenant, it was empty. He waved his partner in.
They put on their night vision goggles and drew their AR-15 rifles. Then they proceeded carefully up the stairs. The basement door was only locked with the doorknob mechanism, which the first man easily popped with the jimmy. They could hear the music and voices inside. The second man whispered into his headset.
“Set.”
The answer from the van came: “Stand by.”
Another man got out of the van, also armed but carrying a small hatchet as well. He jogged across the lawn, keeping low in the shadows, but less worried about the cameras now, because as soon as he reached the main power cable that ran up the wall of the house, he swung the hatchet hard, twice, and the cameras died, along with the lights and music. He then dropped the hatchet, which was tied to his belt, and raised his own rifle while moving to guard the door. The van now rolled forward, to stop right in front of the house and block the view.
“Go,” the voice said over the earpiece. “Proceed right about three meters to the kitchen. Three persons.”
The two men in the basement went through the door, into the main house.
“What the fuck? This a blackout?” they heard a rough male voice bark, though the gunmen saw a hallway in the underwater green of their goggles.
“You got any candles?” another voice asked.
“Why would I have candles, motherfucker? You got a birthday cake?”
The gunmen entered the kitchen, where they saw three men sitting around the kitchen table, weighing dope on a digital scale and bagging it up for sale. They opened fire.
“Two more in the room to your right,” the voice from the van said. The driver was watching the feed from an infrared camera, mounted on top of the van, that registered the body heat in the house. Two other men had been on the couch, watching TV. Both drew their own weapons when they heard the gunfire, but in the darkness, one ran right into the gunmen coming from the kitchen and was shot dead. The other, a local kid named Reverb, ran for the door. He opened it to find a black-clad man in a black mask pointing a rifle at him.
“Oh shit,” he said, raising his hands.
The man pushed him in as the two other gunmen joined him, having cleared the house. They lowered their goggles and flicked on their headlamps as the third man shut the door.
“Don’t shoot, officer,” Reverb said, dropping his pistol. “I’m unarmed.”
“I am not officer, not anymore,” the gunman told him, speaking in some kind of accent, German or Russian or French or something.
“You ain’t? I thought you all were SWAT or some shit. With those outfits.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “Well then the stash is in there. Take it.”
“We don’t want your crap shit,” the guy said in his awkward English. He waved his gun at Reverb and the flashlights bounced off his face. “Your phone. Quick.”
“Y’all want my phone?” Reverb shrugged. It was a new iPhone, but he’d bought it stolen anyway. He held it out. “Here.”
“Call your boss. Tell him what happened here.”
Now Reverb was really confused. “You want me to call my boss and tell him you just boosted his stash, is that right?”
They nodded, headlamps bobbing. Reverb shrugged. “All right, it’s your funeral.”
He called. “Hey it’s Reverb,” he told whomever answered. “I need to get word to the big man. We just been hit . . . just now, motherfucker! They still here, like chilling in the living room . . .” He was about to go on, but his call was cut short, with a bullet through the chest. He fell dead. The gunman stepped on the phone, crushing it under his boot, then set a small incendiary device while the other two moved quickly through the house, dousing the sparse furnishings with accelerant. They left the dope on the table.
“Ready,” the gunman said over his mic to the van driver, who responded: “Clear. Come on out.” He slid the door of the van open and put it in drive, watching the still-quiet street.
They left, shutting the door behind them and hurrying to the van. The fire started immediately but they were long gone before the neighbors noticed that the house was engulfed in flames.
Alonzo was watching a western. It was Tombstone, one of his favorites, and he was in his recliner, sharing a bowl of gourmet salted caramel popcorn with Barry, his bodyguard and go-to man, since his kids preferred Star Wars movies and what they now called the Marvel Universe—it was just regular superhero comics in his day—and his wife didn’t like movies with violence. So they were all upstairs. He was in his family room, in his house, in a leafy, calm, prosperous, and very safe suburban New Jersey town. He had a dentist for his left-side neighbor, and a tax attorney across the street, though with his corner lot on high ground, his house was nicer than either. They were just getting to the best part of the movie, the famous shoot out at the OK Corral, when the phone rang. The work cell.
“Fuck. Hit pause, will you?” Alonzo asked Barry, who had a handful of popcorn. Frowning, he stuffed it in his mouth and chewed while he searched for the remote among the cushions on the couch. “Yeah?” Alonzo said into the phone, and then barked at Barry, “Pause, I said! We’re missing it.”
“Immooking . . .” Barry mumbled with his mouth full, checking on the floor.
Then, as the voice on the phone spoke, Alonzo held a hand up for silence. “You fucking with me? Really? All right you better get down there and see. I’m rolling now.”
He closed the phone and turned to Barry. It was his brother, Reggie, on the phone. The guy who ran their dope operation had called to say that a kid named Reverb had called him and said the main stash got hit.
“Who would rob you LZ?” Barry asked, finally swallowing. “What are they, crazy or stupid?”
“I don’t know,” Alonzo said, standing up. He was in track pants, T-shirt, and slippers. “I plan to ask them that just before I kill them.” He found his car keys on the coffee table and tossed them to Barry. “Get the car out. I gotta tell my wife I’m leaving and find my shoes.”
So Barry wiped his hands, pulled on his sneakers, and headed out to the driveway, where Alonzo’s BMW was sleeping, absently picking popcorn from his teeth. Alonzo ran upstairs, rapped on the bedroom door, and called to his wife, who was readi
ng in bed. She nodded, used to this, the way a doctor’s wife is. He kicked off his slippers and stepped into sandals, then came back downstairs. No one paid any more attention to the gunfight that was now raging on screen. He was out the door and halfway down the drive when Barry started the engine and the bomb went off.
Next they hit Little Maria’s stop and cop spot. She was the Queen of Washington Heights and this operation was the jewel in her crown, a smooth-running operation catering to the commuters and the suburban trade who rolled back and forth across the George Washington Bridge, as well as cars coming down from the Bronx or up the West Side Highway. Basically it was like a drive-thru. You cruised slow down the block and a kid ran out to your car window, checking you out and asking what you wanted. You told him and he took your money and signaled to his boss. Then another kid ran up with your product and dashed off. You drove away happy. Meantime the runner was at the next car in line. It ran like this, 24/7, with a major rush before and after work, at lunchtime, and all night long on the weekends, except for when the cops came by. Every so often, they’d set up a checkpoint and start pulling over cars, especially those with Jersey plates. This scared the customers but they always flocked back soon enough—like pigeons that had been scattered from the roof. Other times, the cops tried to seal off the street, pulling up and blocking the corners, then sweeping up everyone in between. But the only ones holding drugs or money on the street were a few juveniles with a few bags each—the runners, who knew nothing useful anyway, except that if they just kept their mouths shut they’d be sprung in no time. The crew bosses, who sent them back and forth, were clean and the guards who watched over everything would ditch their pieces in the sewer drain and bolt. The stash and the cash were held in one of the buildings and moved periodically—a basement, a hallway, an apartment where they paid the tenant for use of a window—but the cops never made it that far before all valuables were removed. The small amount Maria lost to the law was just a cost of business, like spillage.
Against the Law Page 11