“That’s why blacks get sickle-cell and other races don’t. You want non-native experts to live there, you have to guarantee them more than protection from the warlords. Human-borne disease isn’t a problem: we can fly in whores every week, certified clean. But those miserable little bugs . . .”
“So the people who are putting up all that money are just . . . ?”
“Businessmen,” Pryce finished my sentence. “This is about money. Period, end of sentence. And they get a triple-return on their investment, too.”
I looked a question at him.
He held up a hand. Went back to his trick of ticking off points on his webbed fingers. “One, there’s all that recognition as saviors of humanity: prizes, great press, tax breaks . . . maybe even a goodwill barrier against hackers. Two, there’s the oil. Three, the drug companies get to experiment on humans.”
I remembered that one—it was the Mole’s theory of where HIV had actually been developed: in Haitian prisons, when Papa Doc was in charge. “No lab rats, no FDA, no . . .”
“Exactly. You could test anything on those sorry bastards. Africans don’t trust us. Why should they? Nigeria may be the richest country on the whole continent, but it has the highest rate of polio in the world. In South Africa, they think they can prevent AIDS with a good hot shower and lots of soap. Once we get deep enough into the Congo, all we have to do is pay off the warlords, and they’ll round up the cattle for us to brand.”
“To do real research, you have to keep records . . . .”
“So? Even the Nazis kept records.”
“That got some of them hung.”
“You really believe that was the reason?” he said, shaking his head. “Hitler knew what was coming, so he hid in his bunker until he could make his hands stop trembling long enough to take the easy way out. All that ‘evidence’ was just a sales pitch, and Americans lapped it up with a spoon. I don’t mean there wasn’t hard evidence—those ‘Holocaust deniers’ are nothing but Nazis in suits. But the government had to keep the public’s eyes on the right spectacle. To this day, the average American doesn’t even know there were Japanese war-crimes trials, too.
“Think about that, just for a second,” he continued, in a suddenly professorial tone. “‘When his master dies, the true samurai performs ritual seppuku.’ What a crock. Those banzai pilots weren’t volunteers. And their master—the Emperor—wasn’t dead. No, he was safe inside his palace as those kids took off in their balsawood bombs. They weren’t following some ancient code of honor; they’d been ordered to their deaths. And the man who gave those orders? Hirohito himself never even went on trial.
“It was all symbolism. Pure Kabuki. If ‘just following orders’ was no defense to war crimes, how come only a few dozen Nazis had to pay the bill for killing so many millions? And how come the ones with skills we could use got a pass, so they could come over here and help us build our weapons? You know, the ones we’d need to deal with our ‘allies’ down the road.”
He tilted his head, inviting a challenge. Waited a beat, long enough to make sure I wasn’t going to say anything. Then he leaned closer, letting a lower harmonic into his voice. “This is supposed to be your city, Burke. Take a look around, why don’t you? Got any idea how many foster kids end up taking part in experimental drug trials?”
I shook my head “no,” but Pryce got the message: I didn’t know the number, but whatever it was, it wouldn’t surprise me.
“Besides,” Pryce said, his voice somewhere between bored and bitter, “it’s not like the people living in that jungle have street addresses; you just tag-and-release. Their average life expectancy is about fifteen years anyway. This way, you could end up with the oil and a cure for cancer at the same time. Here, researchers can’t even use stem cells. Over there, they can use humans. It’s perfect.”
Something lurked just beneath the way he said that last bit. Made me think about how he always made sure I could see his fingers. As though he was clinging to them as . . . what?
But now wasn’t the time to think that through; what I needed was to get him back on track, close the deal, and protect my father. So all I said was “Okay. You tell me what you want; I do it, period. For that, I get the Prof and Terry . . . and that other stuff you mentioned. Done?”
He nodded.
“What if I can’t pull off . . . whatever you want?”
“You still get everything I promised. But you have to go at it with everything you’ve—”
“This is a blood contract,” I cut him off. “I’ll do it, or I’ll die trying.” I gave him a few seconds to scan me, opening myself up to whatever truth-detecting skills he thought he had. “Deal?”
He held out his webbed right hand. I grasped it. Tight, like it was the Prof’s only chance to live.
He opened with: “A missing kid.”
“You want to me find—?”
“Prince Fazid el Kandal wants you to find. Not you personally—he doesn’t know you exist, and he never will. He wants his son, Amir Aziz Ghazi, returned. And our . . . government wants his wish granted.”
“Runaway?” I asked. No idle question: runaways may end up on the Most Wanted lists, but most of them start out on the Unwanted one.
“The boy is two years and seven months old,” he said, cutting out my next hundred questions.
“Snatched?”
“Four days ago. No ransom demand, despite the well-known fact that the father has unlimited assets.”
“So did Lindbergh.”
“Meaning what? Lindbergh never got his kid back.”
“Not alive, he didn’t. But they executed a patsy to make it all come out even.”
“This isn’t about covering up a crime,” Pryce said, “or finding someone to pin it on. If it was, we’d hardly need you. There’s a whole . . . department in place for that sort of work, and they’re very good at it.”
“Why me, then? You’ve got access to far more resources than I could ever—”
“Because, whoever took the baby, we think he’s one of yours.”
“I know you must mean something by that, but I don’t like riddles. Just get to it, okay?”
“Not one of your people,” he said, as all-in-a-day’s-work as a doctor signing a fake Medicaid claim. “One of . . . those you hate. The kind you used to hunt. One of your sworn enemies. By tribe, not name. Whoever took the child, he’s somewhere in a world that nobody knows better than you do.”
“And you know this because . . . ?”
“We have a deal?”
“You want me to just keep saying that, or you want me to get to work?”
“We need you, Father. Please come back to us,” Clarence whispered urgently, as if the presence of all the gleaming, pristine machinery had put the steel back in his voice.
“He is trying,” a white-uniformed nurse said. She was a slender woman with an achingly beautiful café-au-lait complexion, and midnight hair so lustrous it would make a raven jealous. The pain she saw every day had turned her exquisite dark eyes into occupied territory. Any other time, any other place, Clarence would have been siren-called.
But he didn’t even look up. “Father,” he prayed. Very softly, holding the Prof’s hand.
We never left the Prof’s side, handling it in shifts. Except for Clarence, who always seemed to be there.
Michelle spoke, Max touched, the Mole hovered.
We expected Gateman to show. But when we saw Terry pushing his wheelchair, Michelle threw the Mole a look that would have made Godzilla flinch.
The Mole didn’t even blink. Neither did the kid.
Mama came, too. Seeing her outside her restaurant was like running across a polar bear sunbathing in Tucson. The nurse looked at the soup she brought, opened her mouth to say something, scanned the black-ice eyes in Mama’s ceramic face, and let it go.
Clarence finally passed out. The nurse, Taralyn, told us they knew it was going to happen, and they were ready for it. No shortage of “special beds” in this hospita
l.
I wasn’t there as much as the others. I was working. Paying the hospital bill.
“Under the Basic Law, all human actions are on a continuum: obligatory, meritorious, permissible, reprehensible, or forbidden.”
“Spare me,” I told Pryce.
“You think Shari’a is—”
“A fraud? No more than any other god-control crap. The rules are fine. But any fucking pervert can ‘interpret’ them, like that ‘God Hates Fags!’ tribe of degenerates in Kansas. And everyone knows rules don’t apply to bosses, anyway.”
“Everybody?” he half-scoffed.
“Everybody who’s not a serious candidate for a CAT scan,” I said, slamming back his lob, but working extra hard on using a mild tone. Non-believers can still be fanatics, and evangelical atheists can be dangerous. “You think the high-school football players who kneel in the locker room before a game don’t know that the guys on the other side are doing the same thing? What, they think God has a point spread? The Sunnis and the Shiites who slaughter each other both swear they’re serving Allah. Enough, already.”
Pryce didn’t move.
“It doesn’t matter what oath you take, who you pray to or swear behind: the bosses are always the bosses,” I said. “Like that omertà handjob the movie boys love so much—you ever met a don you couldn’t turn?”
“Gotti—”
“—was dimed out by his personal hit man. Gotti was the top of the pyramid, so what did he have to trade? You know how it works: you have to rat up, not down. He’d reached jurors before; maybe he just liked the odds. Or maybe he already knew he had cancer, and wanted to take his rep along for the ride.
“Besides, it’s not like he had a choice. Any soft-sentence deal prosecutors make, they have to sell it to the media first. That’s what counts. That’s all that counts. You think New Yorkers would have gone for the sweetheart package they put together for the ‘Preppy Killer’ if the DA’s Office hadn’t talked the victim’s mother into holding press conferences supporting it?”
“So you think—?”
I made a chopping motion with my hand, telling him I was done talking. I’d let myself slip, temporarily forgetting how information was plutonium in Pryce’s hands. He’d rather pick a brain like mine than the lock at Fort Knox.
“This isn’t about me,” I said. “How about we stop this debate-society routine and get to the part that is.”
His blue-for-today eyes held my one good one for a long second. Then he moved his head in a barely perceptible nod, released a shallow breath, and then laid it out.
“Prince Fazid el Kandal’s car was found at approximately 3:05 a.m., near an abandoned pier off the Hudson, south of Canal. He was slumped in the front seat, immobilized. The vehicle was his personal car: a bespoke Rolls, rebodied as a ‘shooting brake.’ You know what that is?”
“Brit-speak for ‘station wagon.’”
“Close enough. This one had a lot of custom work, including a column shift, a fold-down padded panel between the front buckets, and a permanent slot for a baby seat, centered in the back. That seat was for his son. The Prince was in the habit of taking the child out in that car during the evening, just the two of them.”
“Not even a—?”
“The windows were prescription glass; you’d need an astigmatism to see inside, especially at night.”
“But he still got nailed?”
“This wasn’t an assassination,” Pryce said. “In fact, whoever’s responsible went to a lot of trouble not to go that way. It’s easy enough to detonate any car if you have the right equipment. Or a tank, for that matter. But what this team wanted was inside the vehicle, so it had to be a surgical extraction, not a scorched-earth blast.”
I waited, listening to a faint echo of admiration in his voice for whoever had put such a complex operation together.
“The Prince had been chemically restrained; some sort of full-body paralytic. Whoever hit him with it knew exactly what they were doing.”
“You talking about how they hit him, or the dose?”
“What does that matter?”
“If you want to get a specific result with a drug, you need to know a lot more than chemistry.”
“Such as?”
“Weight, blood-alcohol level—”
“He’s a Saudi. They don’t drink.”
“And they never have diabetes? Or bum tickers? Epilepsy? See where I’m going?”
Pryce blinked his eyes. Once, like a camera shutter. “According to the Prince, he was swarmed by a group of men who sprayed some kind of mist in his face. And before you ask, they were all masked, gloved, wearing generic clothing. They never spoke. The Prince was just waking up when a sector car spotted his vehicle.
“Now, this is important: the Prince had not been reported missing. The cops were not responding to a BOLO of any kind, just drawn to the sight of such a car in such a place.
“Actually, the Prince was lucky that night. When the uniforms opened his vehicle, he was still wearing all his jewelry. In that neighborhood, if the cops hadn’t gotten there first, he would have been picked clean.”
“In that ‘neighborhood,’ they would have harvested his fucking organs.”
Pryce shrugged. I didn’t waste any focus trying to interpret what that meant.
“The baby was taken. That was all I got from him.”
“And you think someone took all those risks, spent all that money . . . just to get their hands on a kid?”
“No ransom demand,” Pryce repeated. “You tell me.”
“How could it not be some kind of political thing?” I said. “One baby’s the same as another to traffickers. Value varies, but the kid you’re describing, he’d be too old and too dark-skinned to be worth much.”
“Too old? He was only—”
“Worth maybe one percent of a blond-and-blue, doll-faced white baby girl. The kind of money it would have cost to put together an operation like you described, it had to be that particular kid they wanted. So how could it be anything but political?”
“Watch” was all he said, reaching for a thin black box on his desk. His eyes directed mine toward a flat-screen TV.
“Car tricks are always scary.” I put the age of the woman on the screen at anywhere from sixteen to thirty—impossible to tell more because of the slightly out-of-focus image and hazy lighting. I figured the tape had been diffused to produce the copy Pryce was showing me, so I didn’t put much stock in the voice being her own, either.
She looked like an upscale streetwalker: a lush packaging of illusion and delusion, from the plastic breasts to the expensive wig to her pass-a-polygraph belief that what she did was all about “love.” Half reclining in a stark white padded chair, she recited her lines: “All G.K.’s ladies stroll, but he won’t let us do business outdoors. He’s got a deal with a very fine place—private parking around the back, no register, satin sheets, fresh flowers . . . everything.
“G.K. says a john isn’t buying sex; he’s buying an experience. You don’t buy us, you buy our time. We’re actresses, not hookers. That’s why G.K.’s the king of—”
Something out of camera range induced her to cut out the infomercial and get back to what she was being paid for this time: a quick round of Truth or Dare. And Dare wasn’t an option.
“Look,” she said, haughtily, “you want a quick blowjob while you’re sitting behind the wheel of your hoopty, you drive on over to Skankville. G.K. says I’m double-fine enough to work outcall, but we all live by his Three Commandments: no credit cards, no paper trails, and no partners. Some other girls use the Internet, but even that’s a—”
Whoever cut her off the first time did it again.
“Okay,” she said, after a little pause . . . long enough for her complexion to get closer to the color of the chair. “One time, a cop got me in his car. He told me I could either take a ride around the corner and do him for free, or take a ride downtown. My choice: front seat or back. I told him I’d take the back,” s
he said, pride swelling her fake chest. “I carry a panic button, and I knew G.K. would have a lawyer—a real lawyer—waiting for me at arraignment.
“Besides, G.K. says, you give it away to a cop even once, he keeps coming back for more. You call his bluff, he might bring you in, but most of the time it’s not a collar he’s trolling for.
“And G.K. was right. The cop went into this rap about working for Internal Affairs, just ‘testing’ me, some line of bullshit like that. Whatever, I was done for the night. That’s another of G.K.’s rules: any cop contact means your shift is over. And he knows I’d never lie to him.”
The interrogator, whoever he or she was, had the good sense or natural instinct to stay quiet. Let the whore keep rolling, even if that meant listening to her explain why she could have been a grand-an-hour outcall star.
“So I was on my way to get a cab,” she said, “but when I saw that car, I knew it was something supernova. Maybe a pro baller, maybe an actor, maybe even an out-of-town player, trying to pull me. That happens all the time,” she boasted, “but my man knows he doesn’t have to worry. He’s got my heart.
“I remember thinking to myself, no way the Law’s got a ride like that. I mean, it wasn’t flash, it was just . . . better, you know what I’m saying? Way past anything I ever saw in my life. I know a Rolls when I see one—who doesn’t?—but to go custom on one? No way. That’s not bling; that is class.”
That last word almost made her come. For real, for once.
“The window slides down and I get over there quick, before one of those other . . . But that wouldn’t have mattered; it was me he wanted. ‘Mink,’ he said, soon as I get close. So I knew he’d been scouting me, using my name like that,” she said, still excited about winning the pageant.
She tossed her store-bought dark-streaked mane of cornsilk hair, said, “A thousand, cash. In my hand. Before he so much as touched me. I hadn’t even gotten in the car! Anyway, we end up under the FDR. Dark, but not scary. Plenty of people close by there. Always is.
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