Fanatics

by Richard Hilary Weber

  But what would be remembered now?

  Their twentieth, their flop, their one flaming failure.

  The fiasco…

  And all because these dumb Chechen lowlifes were so ignorant, they killed the wrong black man.

  The organization was humiliated. Dues would have to be paid.

  And Zanonovich knew their paymaster in Moscow would demand repayment in full.

  And then some.

  I must make amends.

  Fiasco lured him like a wrecker’s lamp.

  3:08 P.M.

  “That’s not what happened.” Homicide detective Flo Ott was adamant. “He didn’t kill himself.”

  But the mayor, his disembodied voice ratty with rancor over the speakerphone in Cecil King’s apartment, was having none of it.

  The mayor was in his helicopter flying above the Brooklyn Bridge on his way back to city hall, and his words peppered his listeners in the King family home with sarcasm and anger.

  “You mean, Lieutenant, we got ignominious failure on our hands now? But he’s dead, right?”

  “Very dead. Claiborne Smith was unarmed. He didn’t have a bomb. And he didn’t do it.”

  “Then why the hell was he at that school?”

  “He was talking with the school clerk just before it happened. He lied to her, said he was the senator’s advance bodyguard. Yes, he was a mental case, he’d killed before and we’re just about positive on that identification. But this time he wasn’t armed, it was a mortar. There’s shrapnel—”

  “Whoa, wait a goddamn minute here, Lieutenant. First you people tell me he’s a suicide bomber, the same guy who killed the rapper, his own brother. And now it’s a mortar? You’re making me look like a fool in front of the entire city, the whole world. Lieutenant, this is totally unacceptable.”

  Unacceptable…The politician’s word for war. For unreserved revenge.

  Flo soldiered on. “Our explosives people are sure about the weapon. If you’d waited until they’d—”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, Lieutenant. I relied on you people and you let me down, all of you. I’m having my police commissioner reassess the city’s obligation here.”

  We’re toast…Flo scribbled this on a legal pad and showed it to Frank Murphy and Cecil King.

  The senator-elect shook his head. No way, he wrote back. “Mayor,” he said on speakerphone, “I owe my life to these police. And we can’t tell if the Committee, the Double-A, will give up now or try again soon.”

  “The Committee, the Committee. Stop with the goddamn Committee, Cecil, stop turning this into a political drama. It’s unseemly, it’s unbecoming. It’s a disgrace.”

  “Who else is firing off mortars in Brooklyn? And at my car, Mayor, you tell me. Nineteen times they’ve been successful. Here’s their first public flop and you think they’re giving up? And if they don’t stop and they finally get me and you’ve withdrawn my protection—”

  “You threatening me, Cecil? The police are with you right now, am I correct? And they’ll stay with you as long as you’re in the jurisdiction. But no one threatens me, Cecil, I don’t scare. And I’m still not convinced he wasn’t a suicide bomber. Lookit, this is a killer and he was killing again, that’s exactly what we got here.”

  “We got witnesses,” Flo interjected.

  “Who, where?”

  “The school clerk. Like I said. She spoke with Smith right before it happened and she’s totally reliable. I’ve known her for years, she’s a neighbor. And then we got a woman walking up Fourteenth Street when it happened. She saw a dark green van speed away the same time as the explosion. No license number, she didn’t spot that, but she’s sure about what she saw and when she saw it.”

  “Now you tell me?”

  “We didn’t know that before you went on the air.”

  “And what’s the chance of another bomb or mortar attack?”

  “Small for now,” Flo said. “But that’s no reason to relax. They’ve killed mostly with sniper rifles. Okay, we barely escaped the first attempt, but the next step will be even harder.”

  “What next step?”

  “Stopping them before they’re ready to hit again. Catching them here in Brooklyn. The assassins in the green van. They’ve killed nineteen so far. This one today was their bad luck. A humiliation. They’ll want to make up for it. They might take a second shot. Which they may or may not announce in advance.”

  “They better not. I don’t want them taunting the city of New York. Talk about humiliation. You people better know what the hell you’re doing.”

  “Just one request,” Flo said. “Mayor, please, no more public statements, nothing. We keep the Double-A in the dark.”

  3:22 P.M.

  The organization’s operating principle was strike fast and flee.

  Vanish immediately.

  Leave no trace.

  Reattempting a failed operation to achieve an original objective was a perilous violation of principle.

  “I repeat,” Zanonovich said to the Chechens. “It’s fatally dangerous. I don’t think we’ll get the order. But we wait now, and that’s our procedure. We wait and we see.”

  He was breathing heavily, still unsteady on his feet as the boat motored slowly across Rockaway Inlet toward Breezy Point.

  “Wait where, Paul? We got plane reservations.”

  The Chechens were scheduled to fly out that night to separate destinations.

  Reykjavík.

  Marseille.

  Copenhagen.

  Helsinki.

  Zanonovich was booked for São Paulo.

  “We have two safe houses,” Zanonovich said. “Fallbacks. As soon as we get to shore, change the flights. Postpone every day we have to wait, up to a week. But no more.”

  To keep up appearances, Ivan and Lenny continued trolling off the boat’s stern, but they had little interest left in fishing. As far as they were concerned, they had to get to Marseille and Copenhagen to even start feeling safe.

  And the not so small matter of payment for their twentieth job, the transfer of funds into bank accounts in Singapore and Luxembourg, would remain suspended until the organization back in Moscow judged this last operation as settled. The provocateurs’ mission accomplished.

  Zanonovich said: “You have a place in Rockaway not far from here, the Irish part of Rockaway, the white part. You take the car. And you go there. When we get back to shore, I give you the address. You drive there directly.”

  “What about you, Paul, you deserting us?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  Zanonovich’s eyes flashed anger at the peasant’s insolence. But he wouldn’t berate them now for their ignorance and stupidity, for botching the whole operation.

  No, not now, there was no point. He might need these dumb serfs, if only one more time.

  “Listen to the radio,” he said. “To the news. There’ll be a computer in the house where you’re staying. Go online. The Committee will make an announcement, one way or the other. If it’s a go, I’ll join you with instructions. If not, we go our separate ways.”

  And good riddance to you…

  “Ben, take the wheel,” he said. “We’re heading back.”

  3:31 P.M.

  “Now the real work starts,” Flo said.

  Cecil King peered into his coffee cup as if staring down at clouded crystal, searching for the future. “Right, finding them…real work.”

  “Them and their dark green van,” Frank Murphy said. “Marty’s knocking on doors all over the neighborhood there. Someone else might have seen it.”

  “This witness,” Flo said. “She better not be color-blind.”

  Cecil King put down his cup. “Okay, in an hour and a half I’ve got that church group. So right now I’m going for a bike ride.”

  Flo was incredulous. “Hold on—”

  “In my bedroom.” The senator-elect smiled. “On my Exercycle.”

  Brooklyn Heights

  4:52 P.M.

  Igor Z
anonovich, alias Paul Santarian, presented himself at the top of the brownstone stoop and rang the bell.

  As soon as the door opened, he said, “Benedicamus domino.” Latin was much safer than Russian. Russian would have been asking for too much, a risky flirting with fate.

  The landlord at 8 Garden Place in Brooklyn Heights—a shuffling, hunched, and flabby man, red bulldog face, rheumy blue eyes behind thick glasses, a fringe of uncontrollable white hair framing a pate as dry and stretched as ancient parchment—the monk-like Gerald Francis Xavier McLaughlin, a retired St. John’s University professor of Russian law and politics, replied: “Deo gratias.”

  And he said this like he meant it, Thanks be to God, at last a new tenant from the organization. The rent for the upstairs apartment was paid every month, even if the place was empty most of the time, but the rent tripled on the rare occasions someone from the organization appeared for a brief, though never explained, stay. Whenever this occurred, the old professor again felt himself useful to the highest causes, just as he appreciated the extra several hundred dollars for each day the temporary tenant remained, which was rarely more than a week at a time.

  Zanonovich and his host entered the Victorian-era parlor.

  “Are you the only person living here?” the Russian said, his voice tired, drained, nearly a whisper.

  “At night, yes,” the professor replied. “I’m usually alone in the house. My caregiver arrives at eight in the morning and leaves by the end of the afternoon, after she’s prepared my supper. She’s a simple soul, from Jamaica. Not in the least inquisitive.”

  Zanonovich welcomed these appearances of normalcy. And he warmed to the elderly professor Gerald F. X. McLaughlin.

  “That’s reassuring, thank you,” he said, grateful for a safe refuge, and at last the company of a man who seemed to possess an intellect approaching his own. He was greatly relieved to escape the ignorant Chechen peasants, although for how long he’d be spared their rude presence, at this point he still had no idea.

  “The area around here,” he said, “is it quiet, is it peaceful?”

  “Yes indeed, peaceful. Blessedly so, nothing much ever happens in the Heights. Here in my house, you’ll enjoy your privacy. But we’ve got them around the neighborhood now, too, you know, so it’s no longer quite what it used to be. Whole tribes of them have moved in.”

  “Tribes of who, professor?”

  “The chosen. The Hebrews. This place is turning into a ghetto. First the fags, then the Jews. Lying, grasping, conceited, these vulgar, unforgiving people deserve no forgiveness. They don’t trust or love or need anyone so much that they wouldn’t betray him with a smile. Absolutely freeze my blood, these people.”

  Zanonovich suspected—although he thought McLaughlin himself didn’t fully realize it—that this display of contempt wasn’t only for the sake of a performance, a flash of organizational anti-Semitic credentials. The old man sincerely felt threatened, surrounded by predators, spending his golden senior days waiting for some nameless vultures to descend and swoop in through his door at the moment he was drawing his last breath, ravenous creatures circling, aiming to steal the pennies from his lifeless eyelids before devouring his corpse and appropriating his property.

  Zanonovich could empathize with such discomfort. He, too, had squeezed dry that bitter lemon’s acid. “I’m very tired,” he said. “Would you mind if I went upstairs now?”

  “Of course not. Good night, frater,” the professor said. “Here are the keys to the front door and the upstairs apartment. Sleep well, brother. Tu autem Domine miserere nobis.”

  “Deo gratias.” Thank God, all right. Their exchanges in Latin soothed Zanonovich.

  He trudged up the steep staircase past lily-white, chubby-cheeked ladies in lacy veils cavorting across the wallpaper. In the vestibule behind him stood an elephant’s foot hollowed out for umbrellas and canes, a floor-to-ceiling mirror mahogany-framed and bevel-edged, a worn red velvet chair, dusty-fringed and horsehair-stuffed, and over all this creaky Victoriana, parading over the wallpaper dancers, a family history in fading monochrome photographs, weddings and wakes, first communions, confirmations, graduations, ordinations, a bishop’s consecration, Pope Pius XII blessing a young man in private audience at the Vatican, the youth scarcely recognizable as Gerald F. X. McLaughlin, and finally the older man being received as a convert to Orthodoxy by the Patriarch of Moscow, all elegant mementos from distant and busier times for the pensioned professor. Zanonovich felt a warm fraternal rapport with the old man.

  Examining his latest safe apartment, however, he was less appreciative.

  The building was pre–Civil War—United States, not Russian—McLaughlin had told him proudly, and the apartment appeared to Zanonovich not to have been painted since the end of that earlier war.

  The view from the windows was more reassuring. After the vastness of beach and harbor vistas seen from his Brighton Beach hideout, the evening street and backyard scenes on Garden Place were to Zanonovich’s mind as warming as a hearth’s firelight, close cozy pictures of rooftops, faded brick and brownstone and, most comforting, across the yard and along the street, windows illuminated as if each interior were a stage set where he could observe episodes of family life and, more important, the movements of anyone attempting to observe him.

  He was immediately taken by this opportunity and, lowering the lights and the blinds and drawing the dusty curtains, he went from window to window in the front and rear of his safe apartment, searching for signs of surveillance while exploring emergency routes of escape.

  The rooftops looked accessible, clear.

  But given the prosperity of the neighborhood, rooftop entrances to the houses below were probably locked from the inside, barriers to burglars.

  Zanonovich could see no fire escapes on these nearby two- and three-story buildings. Other than jumping, he doubted there would be any exterior way to get down from a roof.

  The laptop computer he needed was set up in the kitchen.

  In the cupboard under the sink, in a toolbox, he found his first fallback, a .357 revolver and ammunition.

  The second fallback should lie directly underneath.

  He tested the floorboards beneath the kitchen sink plumbing. Lifting the three boards nearest the wall, he removed a canvas case shaped for tennis rackets. Its weight was deeply reassuring.

  Inside, folded, a SOCIMI sniper’s rifle with a telescopic night-vision sight and ammunition.

  6:01 P.M.

  The apartment was warm, expensive steam heat and hot water galore.

  Zanonovich took a shower and lay on the bed in his undershirt and shorts.

  He turned on the radio to an all-news station and didn’t have long to wait…

  “Mister Mayor, that new announcement from those killers, from that so-called Committee, it states that they don’t accept defeat, that the senator-elect is a traitor and still deserves execution. The police won’t let us interview Cecil King himself, but what are your views on these new threats?”

  Zanonovich sprang upright and reached for a pen and paper.

  The mayor answered…

  “These people are insane, these people are evil, these people will not succeed with their devil’s work, not in New York. You’re right, the police are doing a great job here. I’ve put the city’s best homicide detectives in charge, and I’ve got every confidence in Lieutenant Florence Ott. She’s outsmarted them so far. They’re as good as dead, we’ll find them, we’ll hunt them down, and we’ll bring every single one of them to justice…”

  A woman? Incredulous, Zanonovich wrote her name—Florence Ott—the bitch.

  Outsmarted?

  The news item ended and a commercial came on…“Don’t let the booming economy pass you by…”

  Vultures, circling. Zanonovich was disgusted almost as much by American life as with the operation’s failure, and most of all with having to try again, one last time in this godforsaken, benighted land, before he could get out for good.r />
  The organization’s message was clear on this final point.

  As was the mayor’s.

  The police were now more than simply bodyguards. The police had turned hunters and he and the Chechens were their prey.

  Mistakenly, he credited the woman with masterminding his failure at the school. But that credit, while unwitting error, was motive enough for him to stop her from interfering again.

  6:23 P.M.

  “These people are insane…”

  Flo thought, Look who’s talking—insane?

  She, too, was listening to the news, sitting at home eating supper alone in her kitchen. And the mayor’s revelation of her name—in spite of his promise to say nothing—left her in shock and despair.

  “Call our easy home loan experts at once for a prompt…” She turned off the radio and reached for her laptop. She Googled the Aryan-American Committee, and there it was on a website, the latest threat…

  …the New York police and the traitor Cecil King sacrificed one of their underworld thugs as a substitute for the radical leftist himself. We were duped. But we won’t be tricked again. By Christmas, if not before Thanksgiving, our homeland will be clean once more…

  Thanksgiving.

  Her cell phone rang. Frank Murphy.

  “You heard?” Flo said.

  “Yeah, we heard. He’s a schmuck.”

  “Only if it was a slip of the tongue. Which I don’t think it was. Where’s the senator?”

  “Right here with me. At his place. And he’s staying here at least till tomorrow morning.”

  “Keep him longer.”

  “You mean like hold back the wind?”

  “I can be over by eight. We do a long planning session at his place. In the morning, Marty and I go through every lead on the assassins and get moving. And I owe his mother a few words—”

  “What mother?”

  “Smith’s. Claiborne Smith did it, he took the bullet for us. Two sons dead in a matter of days? I owe her a drop by, at least that.”

  Flo made herself a mug of hot lemon tea and added a shot of dark rum. It was going to be an early morning reviewing the leads.