I slipped the thrust, said: “They’re both W-2s. Her father works in a restaurant; her mother is a social worker. Max’s prints are in the system, but only for arrests, no convictions. And Flower’s on scholarship, anyway. Merit scholarship.”
“The—”
“Save it,” I cut him short. “What’s with all this paper promising? The Prof hasn’t worked for years. Neither has Michelle. And if the federales could have touched Mama, they would have done it a century ago. How do I know you’re not just trolling, trying to find out who else is with us? I already said I’d do whatever you want done. I could be out there doing that, instead of sitting here listening to you talk about stuff I don’t give a fuck about. And you know what my word is worth; you’ve cashed that IOU before.”
“He’s already in transit.”
“The Prof?”
He glanced at his watch. “Another two hours, he’ll be inside one of the finest facilities in the country. In a sealed-off wing. Same level of care they’d give the President if he caught a bullet.”
I could feel the temperature in the room drop. Clarence wasn’t angry anymore—he was merging with his weapon, controlling his body with his mind so he could take his shot between heartbeats. Waiting only for me to signal whether I preferred Pryce disabled or dead.
“And that’s the card you’re holding?” I said, my voice very measured, hands not moving. “You’ve got the Prof. And he’s not in Walter Reed.”
“I don’t work like that,” Pryce said. “And you know it. I’m just explaining why you should sit and listen. Nothing you want is being held up.”
He was telling the truth. “Go,” I said, putting both hands flat on the table.
Clarence stepped into the room. I shot him a look. Pryce intercepted it, said, “Don’t blame the young man. And don’t think he’s just told me something I didn’t know.”
“My father—”
“Is getting the best care there is,” Pryce told Clarence. Not the way a salesman makes a pitch; the way a scientist states a fact. He wasn’t being reassuring, just reading a chart.
“Whatever Burke says he will do, I—”
“Yes. I know.”
Clarence looked at me, eyes glistening.
I ignored him. “You going to get to it now?” I said to Pryce.
“Terry?”
“What about him?”
“He’s the one who needs my magic tricks.”
I waited, thanking Satan that Michelle wasn’t there that day. If she ever heard her child’s name come out of this man’s mouth, even Max couldn’t have stopped her.
“Terry’s a piece of paper,” Pryce said. “A lot of pieces of paper, every single one of them a three-dollar bill. And they’re all stacked like dominos on an earthquake fault line. One little tremor and . . .”
“Too late. He’s already in—”
“College? I know. But that was an easy enough slide. He might even go all the way through grad school without a ripple. Of course, he’d be the first person to have his tuition paid in cash. Cash over the table, that is,” he said, nasty-chuckling at the idea that his last paymaster had gotten into Yale on his SAT scores.
Dealing with Pryce was like juggling spun-glass balls, each one filled with sulfuric acid. I knew he had a calling of his own. Whatever that was, it was strong enough to make him overcome his loathing for whoever paid him.
“You think we can’t put together a legit checking account?” I said, tossing chum into the water.
“Here’s what you can’t do,” he said, showing his quads to my full house as he ticked off the poison-tipped arrows on his webbed fingers. “You can’t come up with an authentic marriage license for Michelle and the Mole. And even if you could, you could never create a birth certificate for any child born of that marriage. You can’t—”
“What’s ‘real’?” I shot back. “The morons you work for had as much chance of finding ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq as I would of catching the Colombian drug lords who murdered O.J.’s wife.”
“Terry’s going to be famous, Burke,” he said, utterly self-possessed. “That young man’s IQ is immeasurable. His science teacher is afraid of him. There’s no limit to what he could achieve. And you, you want to keep him out of anything that wouldn’t survive a deep-background check? I can change all that. I can let him live in the light. Blazing light. I can make it all go away: where he came from, how he ended up where he is, all that.”
“DNA.”
“I can fix that, too, if I move now. But I see what you mean. Who knows how long any one of us is going to be around? It’s easier if I paper it so he was adopted. At birth. His biological mother died during childbirth, father unknown. For at least a few more months, I’ve got the key to the Records Room. Write your own story; I can turn it into non-fiction.”
“Maybe,” I conceded. “But why would you?”
“Why would you care?”
“Because I know you, Pryce. And I know there has to be a reason for you to be sweetening a deal I already took. There’s a piece missing, somewhere. And it’s not some green card,” I said, glancing at Clarence.
He nodded a silent agreement, then said: “It’s not a piece that’s missing; it’s a person.”
“So call out the—”
“And get what? A ‘profile’?” He dry-laughed. “I’m already dealing with cops who’d Taser a drunk lying in a puddle of water, and I don’t have time for them to grow a brain. This is tight. Most of the sand’s already out of the hourglass.”
“No ‘national security’ pitch this time, huh?”
“I’m a freelancer,” he said tonelessly. Underground-speak for “unattached.” Pryce would take money from anywhere, but he wouldn’t take orders from anyone.
I shook my head. Not refusing, showing I was confused.
“Your old friend Morales died a hero,” Pryce said, almost formally. “Charged the Towers while they were still coming down. He’s not talking—not that he ever would. But that plant of his didn’t make you disappear, just moved you to the ‘missing and presumed’ category. There’s no wants or warrants; you’re not on parole. But your past is on paper. Which means your future . . .”
“I’m living on my residuals.”
He put a disgusted expression on his reconstructed face, but his eyes never changed. If you shine a bright light into a bayou at night, you see a bunch of paired orange dots out there. Alligators have reflectors in the back of their eyes, so they can pick up even the tiniest flicker of movement. Part of their predator’s arsenal. Even if Pryce lost those webbed fingers, I’d always recognize him. He came on like he was money-only, but I knew that was just a piece of the truth. A long time ago, Wolfe had shown me the other side of the two-headed coin Pryce was always flipping.
“They’re so lucky,” Wolfe said, looking out at a tanker going up the Hudson.
“People with jobs?”
“No.” She laughed. “People who get to be on the water all the time.”
“You like that stuff?”
“I love it,” she said quietly. “If I had my way, I think I’d live on a boat.”
“Like a cruise ship?”
“No, a sailboat. A nice three-master that I could sail with a small crew.”
“You could sail it?”
“Sure.” She grinned. “I captained a ship from Bermuda all the way back to Cape Cod once.”
“By yourself?”
“There were other people on board, but I was in charge.”
“Where’d you learn to do that?”
“I was a Sea Scout.”
“A what?”
“A Sea Scout. Like a Girl Scout, only we went out on boats instead of camping.”
“I’d be scared to death,” I told her. “The water . . .”
“You don’t know how to swim?”
“No. I mean, I guess I wouldn’t sink—we used to dive off piers when I was a kid. But it’s so, I don’t know . . . I mean, you don’t know what’s
down there.”
“There’s worse things on land,” she said.
I knew she was right, but it didn’t comfort me. Once, when I was small, I went down to the river to see what I could hustle up. It was night—I always felt safer at night. A boat was there. Not a big one, some kind of sport-fishing rig. They had a shark up on a hoist. It was twitching wildly, like it was going to break loose. The men were laughing, drunk, celebrating their conquest. I looked out at the black water. I thought about more sharks being down there. Men hunt them for fun. I wondered if the sharks knew.
“Sure,” I said, getting back to it. “This Pryce, is he one of them?”
“Those worse things? I’ve run across his trail a few times over the years, but I only met him face-to-face once. He said he was with Justice, but when I tried a trace, it got lost in the maze they call ‘cooperation.’ By the time I finally found someone who’d talk to me, Pryce was gone again.
“That’s the way he works. Tells people he’s with the Company sometimes. Or DEA, ATF, you name it. And by the time anyone can actually check, he’s moved on again.”
“Transferred, maybe?”
“Not a chance. I think he’s sanctioned, but he’s on permanent-disavowal status.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Pretty much what it sounds like,” she said, combing both hands through her thick mane of dark hair as a river breeze came up. “He does contract work, but never on the books.”
“Hard work?”
“I don’t think so. He’s an information guy, not hands-on. What he is, I think, is kind of a super bounty hunter. A bounty spotter, if there’s any such thing. I never heard of him making a collar, or doing any wet stuff. He only works the edges. But he’s not just a tracker; he manipulates situations, makes things happen. Like I said, he’s self-employed. So he doesn’t have to play by anyone’s rules.”
“Could he get favors done?”
“From the feds? I’m sure. At least he could from whatever agency he’s bird-dogging for at the time.”
“And he doesn’t play for headlines?”
“I remember one thing he said to me. ‘I never take credit. Only cash.’ I think that about sums him up.”
“You had a beef with him?”
“Not at all. He was very polite, very respectful. Said he knew about a pedophile ring. A new twist: online molestation, in real time.”
“What!?”
“One of the pedo-skells would get the little girl—they only used girls in this one—in his studio. Then he’d set up the cameras, notify the others, and flash her image over their modems. They could tell him what they wanted him to do to the little girl, and they could all watch as he did it.”
“And Pryce knew this how, exactly?”
“He didn’t say. But I got the impression that he had reached one of them. Had him in his pocket.”
“Was he trying to make a deal, have this one guy roll over on the rest in exchange for a walk-away?”
“No, it wasn’t anything like that. He doesn’t work for defense attorneys. As near as I could tell, he was willing to let the guy who tipped him go down with the rest.”
“So what was the problem?”
“Pryce wanted to get paid. He didn’t want a favor; he wanted cash.”
“How much?”
“He never said. But he made it clear we were talking six figures.”
“And you wouldn’t go for it?”
“I couldn’t. We don’t have a budget for anything like that, and neither does NYPD. Nobody ever posts a reward until there’s a victim, right?”
“And nobody knew—?”
“This was the first I’d even heard of any such thing, and I wasn’t even sure I believed him when he told me. I tried to put on some pressure. Told him if he didn’t turn over the information, not only was that one little girl going to continue to be gangraped over the Internet, there had to be others, too.”
“And . . . ?”
“Didn’t faze him. In fact, he said that should make his info worth more. I even tried threatening him with obstruction. He just stood up, gave me this weird smile, and disappeared. Nobody remembered seeing him leave; the security cams didn’t pick up his image. I never saw him again.”
“So what they were doing to that girl, it just . . . kept going?”
“Actually, no. A week later, there was a huge bust. Federal. The FBI vamped down on the whole operation, took it all in one fell swoop. A beautiful case; even the first freak to roll pulled serious time. And the Bureau got major press, from the Director on down.”
“You think Pryce sold it to the Gee?”
“There’s no way to know. I asked a friend over there how they got word, and he said all he knew was that it came from a CI.”
“Pryce, you don’t think he was the confidential informant?”
“No. But he could have been running him, whoever he was. Or maybe there was no CI, just a bogus setup so they could get a search warrant. They knew what they’d find when they did. That’s the kind of thing Pryce gets paid for.”
“You got anything else on him?”
“No. But I know he’s out there. If I hear anything, I’ll call you.”
“You think I’m trying to scare you, Burke? After all the extras I just put on the table?”
“No,” I admitted. Pryce already had more than enough to bury me in the basement of some no-name prison if he ever wanted to go that way. I’d hovered outside the grasp of the law for years, but I knew the truth—my freedom was nothing but a tethered kite. “Anyway, you’ve already got the Prof.”
“Saving his life, not holding him as a hostage,” he responded tranquilly.
I sat there. I kept my face blank, but my mind was in warp drive. Risk-gain. Threat assessment. And all of that meant nothing, because I knew Pryce was telling the truth. Once he’d taken the Prof in his hands, he’d given himself lots of choices. All the extras he put on the table had to be there for a reason, but whatever it was, it didn’t matter.
“Tell me what you want,” I surrendered.
That finally tripped his “on” switch. “You know who Prince Fazid el Kandal is?” he asked.
“No.”
“He’s a direct descendant of Abd al-Aziz.”
“No kidding?”
“A Saudi,” he continued, unruffled. “In 1902, Abd al-Aziz bin Abd al-Rahman al-Saud captured Riyadh, and spent the next three decades trying to conquer the Arabian Peninsula. One of his sons rules the country even today.”
“Awesome.”
He ignored me. “Saudi Arabia is governed by the Basic Law, which stipulates that the throne shall always remain in the hands of the kingdom’s founder.”
“Ah. So this guy’s in line for—”
“The Saudis don’t grow anything,” he cut me off. I was there to listen, not figure things out—Pryce had already done that for me. “And they don’t make anything. Most of their land is uninhabited. Their government makes North Korea look like the Berkeley city council. None of that matters to us. Tonga, Burma, Zimbabwe . . . ‘Democracy’ is whatever we say it is. And oil is what we need.
“The Congo is lousy with untapped oil reserves. All of central Africa is, actually. But getting to it, that’s another story. Even close to the coast, there’s all kinds of interference: kidnappings, pipeline bombings, sabotage. Some of that’s just banditry, extortion masquerading as revolution. But some of it seems to be your old pals at work.”
“You lost me,” I said, knowing he’d done the opposite.
“Nigeria’s a military dictatorship, playing itself off as a democracy. That’s not a new script: the Brits colonize a country, and the minute they grant ‘independence,’ it goes up in flames.
“You remember?” he said in his ice-cored voice, twisting his lips just enough to tell me that he had that in his files, too. “The ‘rebels’ were Igbos and Yorubas. The ‘government’ was Hausa. Tribalism? Muslims versus Christians? Same difference. The breakaway group claimed
some of the Niger Delta area for their own. They named it the Republic of Biafra before they were exterminated like termites in a Hollywood mansion. Nobody called it genocide, because . . .”
“There was oil under that ground, and only niggers were standing on it, anyway.”
“Yes,” he said, the way a teacher congratulates a slow student who finally solved the equation on the blackboard.
“So what’s with the history lesson? The Saudis don’t have a rebel movement to deal with. Any group who even looks like trouble, they just pay them to attack somewhere else. That’s why they financed 9/11.”
“Thanks for the insight,” Pryce said, drier than dead cactus. “Try and pay attention, all right? We can’t rely on the Saudis. If the pressure gets too strong, they’ll fold. We don’t need to develop new allies; we need to develop new sources for oil.”
“So I’ll drive a Prius, okay? Can you wrap this the fuck up? I know I’ve got work to do, and I’d like to know what it is.”
But Pryce’s river kept on rolling. “In Africa, all the natives are good for is grunt work, like diamond mining. For large-scale oil extraction, you need geologists, drilling experts, rig constructors, pipeline designers, CAD-CAM experts . . . . Understand? For that level of expertise, you need outsiders, and you need them to do more than just pay a visit, they have to live there.”
“Good luck with that one,” I said. “I don’t care who’s on the throne, warlords still rule the interior. You think that little sprinkling of blue helmets can keep anyone safe in the Congo? They’ve probably sold more weapons than they ever fired.”
Pryce shrugged that off, as excitable as a mortician. “That’s just a military problem—clear-cutting could get it solved in a few weeks.”
“Then what’s your problem?” I asked him, still just a raft drifting down Pryce’s river.
“What did you think all this ‘cure for malaria’ press-release slop was really about? Unless there’s a way to vaccinate against it, we can’t get personnel to remain there for the length of time we’d need. No amount of firepower will take out those damn mosquitoes. Malaria kills millions of Africans every year, but not half as many as it would if the indigenous people hadn’t developed some genetic resistance over the centuries.
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