The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel

by Michael Yudov

  “All of your assets are being seized as we speak, by the way. All of your Swiss possessions, including the recently set up Numbered Account, and—what was the other one Colonel?—oh, yes. Your Bahamian Account.” Now he looked like he really was going to pass out. “Maybe now you’d like that drink you turned down earlier?”

  “I can’t. You know that I can’t.”

  “But Terry, that’s why I want you to! I’m not on your side. I don’t like you. You made me kill today. I don’t like that either. You hang out with bad people. I don’t like that. Not when you’re taking a paycheque from the Paymaster General of Canada, who, by the way, gets his money in part from what’s in my pocket at the end of each–and–every–year–of–my–working–life. Not when the life of my client is at risk. Not when you turn your back on the very men and women that work hard every day of the week so that you can remain free, Terry. No, I don’t like that at all.

  BUT!” I held my right hand index finger up, and reaching across the table I slowly tapped him three times on the centre of his forehead, hard. “If you think about it for a moment, I’m your only friend in the world right now. You have to talk to me, Terry.”

  “You don’t have a goddamned twig of evidence against me. On anything.”

  It was time to drop a few bombshells in his lap. I figured it was worth a try, anyway. “Listen to me Terry. Listen carefully to the words as I speak them.

  The Crassberg Group, AG. Heidi Meir. Murder most foul by the roadside. Blackmail and extortion. Operating within an organized crime group, while being in a position of authority with Her Majesty’s Government. Conspiracy to commit murder on a high-ranking member of the RCMP and Interpol. Are you seeing the big picture here yet? Terry. Wake up. Where did you park your brain?

  You’re screwed, Terry. At best you’ll never see the light of day again. At the worst, I’ll kill you. At the very worst, your new friends will kill you. In the ugliest possible scenario of all, you’ll live, but on the inside, and you’ll get raped daily by some huge psychopath who ‘takes a shine’ to you. You’ll get to be his ‘girlfriend’. After five or ten years of that, you might even get to the stage where you can tolerate it. Somehow, I doubt it, though.

  If I were you, I’d be squealing like a pig right now. Better now than later. The squeals that come later aren’t a metaphor, they mean just what it sounds like it means. Cops who go bad aren’t liked, Terry. Gang rape is an ‘institutional sport’ in these cases. Then there’s the dying young from AIDS, which will take maybe a few months to acquire. That’s being optimistic. It’s not pretty, I agree, but what else can we do?

  By the way,” I pulled out my analog cellular and laid it down on the table in front of him. “try the account in the Bahamas. Just for fun. Go ahead, my treat. They’re still open for about another twenty minutes. I’ll give you some privacy to think the whole thing over.

  I got up from the booth, and walked over to where Godsen was leaning against the pool table. The place was deserted, so I racked a set of balls, and challenged Godsen. She accepted, but instead of playing a game, we spoke in hushed tones about the breakthrough while knocking the balls about at random, sinking the odd one here or there.

  “Ronnie, you’re sure his accounts are frozen in the Bahamas?”

  “If the bank and numbers you gave me were correct, they are.”

  “That’s pretty well guaranteed. I got the info from Walter.”

  “The tie-in with Crassberg and this Meir woman can’t be dismissed. They have to be pulling the strings behind the scene.”

  “I agree. With reservations. Even Meir is working for someone else, I’m sure of it. Or, with someone else. Someone bigger than her. She doesn’t have the connections to pull this all off on her own. It took big money to start this whole operation in the first place. More than she had. But not more than she had knowledge of.

  Now I think that we have the start of the trail to the top. Also, he won’t be too pleased with losing all of his retirement cash. I think he’ll talk to us, try to cut a deal, which we should be open to, because after speaking with us openly he has only three options. Going to jail, where he’ll be killed fairly quickly, most likely in a nasty manner, or, trying to kill us, which will get him killed much more promptly. The third option is the one where we help him set up a new life after he cooperates to the full extent of his knowledge. Seems like a simple choice to you or I, right? It won’t be that simple for Terry. We’ve rocked his world here tonight. He may have already called the ‘suits’ he’s working for or with. We may have to call for backup which we can’t trust, or literally shoot our way out.”

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  “Neither had I. This whole thing just sort of fell into our laps.”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  “You give me too much credit. I came here looking for Ted. If he’d been seen recently, that sort of thing. Instead, I was handed one of our own gone bad.

  Only because he was hunting us, though, so he brought it down on his own head. Which reminds me I still haven’t asked Bob if he’s seen Ted recently. Considering the connection with our little traitor over there, if he had, and he’d passed it on…” I let that hang there, both of us knowing what that meant for our chances of coming back to Toronto with Ted Dawson in any condition at all. Alive or dead.

  I was through waiting, and I dropped my cue back into the rack and walked across the room, slipping into the booth where Terry sat. He was staring at his hands, folded on the table in front of him, just like I’d left him fifteen minutes ago.

  The look on his face told it all. He’d been beaten. My words had been all I’d needed to break him.

  “If you help us all the way Terry, we’ll help you. You can salvage something out of all this. It’s not every day that someone gets a chance to start over after what you’ve done, but today is one of those days. The Colonel has the authority to make it all happen. New name, new town, new life. But it comes with a price. You know the routine. Everything you know. Every detail, no matter how insignificant it may seem to you. We need it all. Are you in?”

  “Yes. I’m in.” The voice was small and quiet. Quite a change from a few minutes ago.

  “Good. We’ll get started tonight.”

  “We have a problem.”

  “There’s always a problem.”

  “After this morning, I was told not to take any chances. There’s five men with me.”

  “I see. Are these guys the ‘suits’?”

  “Yes. They do whatever the orders tell them. Tonight, they’re looking forward to killing you and the Colonel. Their training is good Jeffry. Very good.”

  “Where do the orders come from, Terry?”

  “Geneva.”

  “Heidi Meir?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s not the one who makes the orders though, is she?”

  “No. The orders come from Brazil.”

  That stopped me.

  “Brazil?”

  “That’s what this is all about. The big deal in Brazil. Heidi Meir is out to get her slice of the pie, and from the little I understand, it’s a big pie. She’s covering it for her company, but I don’t think anyone else at Crassberg knows exactly what she’s doing. Just that she’s getting results, and that keeps them happy.”

  “Do you know anything about a flyer named Ted Dawson?”

  “Flyer?”

  “Pilot.”

  “Umm, no.”

  “Have you ever heard the name before?”

  “No.”

  “Not even in passing? Take your time, think about it.”

  “I don’t have to, the answer is still no. I wouldn’t know him from Marilyn Monroe, Jeffry. Truthfully.” I looked him straight in the eye and he didn’t flinch. I knew then that we had him, and we had some serious progress to make on our case. We needed to get out of here and back to our safe haven. Preferably alive. Then we could make some progress, but I didn’t think It was goi
ng to be so easy to accomplish. There were five of those bastard killers out there waiting to take us out, according to Terry. I believed him. His fear of authoritative retribution had finally outweighed his greed, and now I think he was in too deep to pull out without doing it feet first.

  Godsen and I were the first life preserver he’d been offered since he’d jumped overboard. That and the fact that he knew me. I had no intention of leaving Big Bob’s joint any way but the way I’d come in. In one piece.

  “Okay. Let’s move on.” I pulled the clip for his nine mm out of my pocket and handed it back to him. “You might need this when your buddies realize that you’re not playing by their rules anymore.”

  Terry looked at me with an odd expression, not being able to figure out exactly where I was coming from. I put it to him in plain language, so even he could understand.

  “Terry, I gave you a choice, and you chose. That means you’re with us, not against us. I’m taking you at your word. This one time. There are no second chances. If you’re in, then you’re in. I’ll stand for you, but when the time comes, you’ll stand for us. That way, I can follow through on my word to you. You’ll be safe, and you’ll live happily ever after, even if you don’t deserve it. That’s what cutting a deal is all about. We make a fresh start together—as of this minute, so let’s get down to it, Okay?”

  He sat a bit straighter in his seat, and came back with a strong affirmative.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “The Colonel is in charge here, don’t forget that. I work for her too.”

  “Right.”

  “Now where are these five men?”

  “One is in the front of the bar. Two are in the back and two are in the front. Both of the two-man teams are driving grey Audi sedans. They’ll have one man at the wheel of each vehicle with the engine running, and the other man from each team will have taken the best position available to them. The one in the front of the bar is named Eduardo. He’ll have a dark sporting outfit on, like for mountain hiking. Lots of pockets. He’s in contact with the others via ear receiver and pin mic. If I don’t walk out of here with both of you in front of me, he’ll know something went wrong. So that’s the way we have to do it. These guys don’t care who gets in the way, and they’re heavily armed.”

  “What kind of weapons?”

  “Nine mm fold-up machine guns with muzzle flash suppression and silencers for the outside men. The drivers are normally carrying Uzi. They don’t usually get involved in the action. The guy in the front room has flash and concussion grenades, as well as an Uzi.”

  “You mean to say that they’re prepared to take out the whole bar?”

  “What can I say? They’re totally insane, the whole bunch of them. After this morning, they want you Dead. Period.” He took a deep breath and let us have the punchline. “They also have body armour.”

  “I noticed that this morning.”

  “No, you don’t understand. This armour is extremely advanced. So advanced that the very existence of it is classified even at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The President and about a half dozen physicists are the only non-military people who are aware of the potential of this stuff. We’ve never had anything like it before, and it’s not released yet, either. It’s not your average body armour. It’s just been recently developed for the U.S. Rapid Deployment Force, and ultimately the International Counter Terrorist Force, under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council. It’s supposed to be under a wrap so tight that the people involved in the testing themselves aren’t aware of its origins, purpose, or destination.

  Tonight they came prepared. They have neck wraps and head wraps as well. Even Eduardo is wearing a lot of the stuff, like one of those Foreign Legion style hats, with the sun flap in the back. It’s armour. The guys outside are fully outfitted, including armoured balaclavas.”

  I thought I’d heard it all before, but this was something right out of ‘Sword & Sorcery’. Whoever’s magic was the strongest would win.

  I knew that we’d have to find out how and where these people had gotten their hands on this technology before we returned from the mission. I had a strong feeling that the debriefing would be uncomfortable ‘in extremis’ otherwise.

  Godsen spoke up. “That’s why they were never hurt in the shoot-outs during the bank jobs. The local police wouldn’t have anything to compare with that, not even the tactical squads. It would be like taking candy from a baby.”

  Terry sighed before responding. “Exactly.”

  “Wait a minute, here. What about head shots? Even body armour that stops the slug still can’t defy the laws of physics. If you tap someone in the head with a heavy round, he’s going to go down just from the transfer of inertia. The sudden stop! E=MC squared, remember. ‘Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change form’. Remember that one?”

  Terry looked at me and put his hands up palms facing me.

  “I don’t know shit about the physics, Jeffry, I’ll be the first one to admit that. All I know is that a direct head shot won’t take these guys out when they’re ‘dressed’. I’ve had the dubious ‘pleasure’ of firsthand experience. It’s like getting shoved hard. It’ll knock you back a step, but there’s no pain. It’s… shit, I don’t know what it is, just that it works.”

  “Are you telling me that you’ve been shot in the head while wearing this stuff?” This was getting to be more incredulous every time Terry opened his mouth.

  “They put the balaclava on me and hit me at point blank range with a nine mm Glock.”

  “What was the point, if you don’t mind my asking?” I was beginning to wonder whether or not I believed any of this wild crap.

  “The point was, that without the armour my brains would have been… shall we say, released, from their normal place of residence. It was to show me that they meant what they said. They said they were ‘unstoppable’, quote, unquote. I could play their game, and retire with more than I’d ever be able to spend, or I could try a rerun without the armour. Guess which way I jumped?” He looked like a different person now than he had when he first got here. I could see the shame on him after that admission. I let up on him. Just a tad.

  “Okay, Terry. Don’t sweat it for now. Later, when we’re safe and sound we’ll talk about where all of this materiel came from, and how. Extensively. Right now let’s concentrate on getting out of here in one piece.” I turned to Godsen. “What kind of weapon are you carrying tonight Colonel, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  She smiled and said, “I have it covered, Major.”

  The smile she was smiling was a mean looking one despite the fact that her smile was normally very genteel, so I didn’t follow it up, I just nodded and let it lay. If she felt she had it covered, I’d accept that. We’d come a long way from our meeting on the tarmac at Pearson International just a day or so before. Life.

  “Okay. Make your move when it’s time, and when it’s time you’ll know.”

  ~

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  B

  ig Bob was still standing near the entrance to the back room, by the purple velvet rope. He casually turned and headed our way, and as soon as he was out of the entryway, and out of the line of sight from the other room, broke into a run, right up to our table.

  “He’s coming! The guy with the weird hat! Jeffry, what do we do man? Quick! I don’t want to die tonight, right?”

  “I agree Bob, sit down against the wall,” I pointed at the bricks right next to our table. “and put your face down, with your fingers locked together on top of your head. Do it!”

  “Terry, hold your gun on us.” I pulled my Colt out, dropped the clip on the table, and put the Colt down next to it. Then I did the same thing with the H&K. Terry was punching his own clip home into his nine mm, then he turned and covered us. “Colonel, your backup please.” Godsen reached behind her and pulled out a Glock .40 caliber pistol, released the clip onto the table the way I’d done, and carefully put the pistol down next to
my two. “Now everybody takes a deep breath and exhale slowly.” The Bobby Fuller Four was still singing the last strains of ‘I Fought The Law & The Law Won’, when Eduardo stepped over the purple velvet rope, and into our hands.

  Of course, that’s not the way he saw it, but that was the look we were all going for. What he saw when he entered the room was Terry holding us under his gun, and a fair bit of hardware on the table. I had my hands linked behind my head, and Godsen had hers on top of her head. I don’t know if he even looked at Bob. As he walked across the room to our table he spoke to Terry.

  “Why are they alive? You have no mind to think with? One of these people is very dangerous, we told you that.” As he talked, he walked, reaching under his full length sleeveless jacket, sort of like a photographer’s jacket, with pockets everywhere. I knew that he was going to pull out a weapon and just kill us where we sat. According to his intentions anyway, but he’d already come too close. Not for me, for him. At that same moment in time he noticed the hand painted silk tie lying on the floor. Sliced off at the top just like a razor cut. He started to pull up and go for his gun faster than he had been.

  He was about eight feet away from the table and in my direct line of sight, face to face. He’d just stepped inside my kill zone. Death was here, and waiting for his due. The Black Angel always got paid, and he wasn’t fussy about who, or how. This man I’d never seen before was about to die, and nothing could stop it except me, and I was already committed. I could feel the changes taking place in my body, in the world around me. It was too late for anything else, now.

  The body armour was great in a planned hit, kill, and run situation, I’m sure. But it would have been overly ridiculous to be in the pub, casually drinking, with a balaclava on. People would have clued in, even the dumb ones. They’re funny like that. People, I mean, not balaclavas.