by Matt Hilton
‘Go on, Harve,’ I prompted.
‘You want the full history or just the potted version?’
I checked the charge on my phone. Down to two bars. ‘Best just give me the main points.’
‘OK, then.’ Harvey paused, as though ordering his thoughts. Not that he needed to. I believed he knew exactly what he wanted to say. ‘First off, you know the family business goes back three generations here in the US, right? Since Korea, Vietnam, and up to the modern day, the Jorgensons have been working hand-in-fist with the Pentagon. The partnership has been a rosy deal and brought millions – actually billions – of dollars into the Jorgenson coffers. Problem is, it seems that for the last half-dozen years Valentin Jorgenson has been ruffling a few feathers. On both sides. His company has been responsible for the development and production of vaccines for the use of the military. Well, you remember the fuss following Desert Storm, don’t you? Gulf War Syndrome, it was sometimes referred to. Soldiers returning from war complained about debilitating problems brought on by the inoculations they were given before going out there. Well, Valentin wanted no part of the fallout from that. Seems like old news now, but with the current rumblings in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are new questions being raised in Congress about the chemical soup our troops are being fed these days.’
‘The chemical soup that the Jorgensons are supplying?’ I clarified.
‘One and the same. The Jorgensons certainly don’t have a monopoly on government supply, but they do develop some of the vaccines. Valentin didn’t want any involvement in the same kind of scandal that went down first time round, so, basically, he’s pulled the plug.’
‘And the other Jorgensons aren’t happy?’ I thought back to when Bradley had defended his father in the room at Baker Island.
Harvey said, ‘His ethical decision could cost them billions in lost revenue.’
‘You’re saying could cost them? So the contracts haven’t been terminated yet?’
‘No. As in all businesses, Valentin hasn’t got the ultimate say. Has to be a majority agreement. He has had some stiff opposition in the form of his partners.’
‘These being his nephews and son?’
‘Yeah.’ Harvey sounded like he was riffling through papers. ‘Petre, Simon and Jack. His son, Bradley.’
‘I’m guessing that Valentin had a majority share in the business?’
‘No, just over the quarter mark.’
‘So how come he was outvoted? Oh, wait, I get it. Bradley?’
‘Yeah, Bradley’s vote went his cousins’ way. Between them they own a little over seventy percent of the vote. With Bradley on their side, the decision was made to honour their agreement with the government.’
‘So why, if that’s the case, is someone trying to kill Bradley? Are you saying that our shooter might belong to some group opposing the supply? Some Gulf War Syndrome support group?’
‘Not at all,’ Harvey said.
I was relieved by Harvey’s answer. I had some friends from back in the day who had suffered badly on their return from Desert Storm, could sympathise with them in a big way. Didn’t really want to go up against anyone with the same fundamental belief that I had on the subject. Apart from the fact their decisions could mean death for innocents like Marianne. For that I’d fight them tooth and nail.
Harvey went on: ‘Bradley has changed his outlook these past few months.’
‘He’s gone across to his father’s way of thinking?’
‘He has. Valentin was dying – you knew that, huh? – and he had recently bequeathed his share of the company to Bradley. Added to his own shares, that gives Bradley a majority sway. He hasn’t done it yet, but when Bradley takes over, then the military contracts will be dropped. It’ll cost the company billions of dollars.’
Marianne was rocking in place, humming that same sad tune I’d first heard in the garden at Baker Island. Suddenly I knew where Harvey was going with this.
‘Someone has Bradley’s ear? That’s what you’re suggesting?’
‘His opinion changed round about the time his new girlfriend came on to the scene.’
I noticed Marianne’s eyes flick my way but she didn’t add anything. Neither did she argue.
‘It’s starting to make a little sense now,’ I said. ‘So Bradley has gone against his cousins, and that’s pissed them off? If Bradley is killed off then they inherit his voting power. They keep on with the billions that the government are happily handing them.’ I again looked at Marianne and saw that her eyes had closed. Confirmation of my theory. To her I said, ‘And that’s the reason the killer wants you as badly as your boyfriend? You’re the reason that Bradley has changed his way of thinking.’
She didn’t answer, but her nose dipped below the neckline of the bullet-proof vest.
From the front, Rink asked, ‘Where are you now, Harvey?’
‘Where I said I’d be,’ Harvey said.
‘OK, buddy, we’ll see you in a short while.’
‘Gotcha, Rink,’ Harvey said.
‘Keep on digging in the meantime,’ I added. ‘See if you can find out anything on the shooter. You might want to listen in to what’s going on at Neptune Island. By all accounts, the crazy fucker paid Petre Jorgenson a visit before he came for Bradley and Marianne again.’
‘Reading between the lines, I take it that Petre didn’t survive?’
‘No one survived,’ I said. ‘Except some pussy that goes by the name of Seagram. Bradley’s bodyguard. Maybe you can do a little digging on him, too. West Point’s a good starting place.’
‘Leave it with me.’
‘Thanks, Harvey.’
‘Pleasure.’
I clicked off the phone, pushed it in my pocket.
We’d come off the highway on to surface streets. Nice enough area. Low single-level houses with pretty gardens. No one around as though people here lived only for the sun and dissipated when darkness fell. On our right was a tributary of the Loxahatchee. The water was slow and still. I wondered if alligators sometimes crawled up out of the river and wandered these lonely streets. That would explain the lack of domesticated animals prowling through the night. There were no cats, no dogs, but then again, there were no alligators, either.
We had agreed to meet Harvey up at Hobe Sound. That meant taking a circuitous route back up past Neptune while avoiding the coast road. There’d be an army of law enforcement personnel converging on the Jorgenson estate by now and I didn’t want to run a cordon of blue lights. The only way I trusted that Marianne would be safe was if she stayed with us. OK, it appeared that Petre Jorgenson was now shaking hands with his murdered uncle, and it would take a very lucky man to survive the fall from the bridge into the sea, but that didn’t mean that other attempts wouldn’t be made on her life. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the probability that Petre and the shooter were in cahoots. Something had happened between them that had left Petre dead. But that didn’t mean all our enemies were done with. There were still two cousins alive who had reason to wish both Bradley and Marianne were out of the picture.
28
Following our detour round the back streets of the suburbs of Jupiter, Rink found a slip road that took us to the Florida Turnpike, where we picked up the 95 north. He drove on through the darkness in silence, and eventually we arrived at a motel on the edge of Seabranch Reserve State Park. Here I saw my second lot of mangrove, as well as sand pine and scrubby flatwoods and many other trees I didn’t recognise. Wild buckwheat and fetterbush grew interspersed among the trees and the wild sandy hummocks that the Atlantic had moulded into weird shapes.
Harvey’s rental was in the lot outside the motel entrance. It was a Ford Explorer, not unlike the one I’d been forced to abandon down at SoBe. For our purposes it wasn’t the most discreet of vehicles but it was still less conspicuous than the bashed-up Crown Vic. Rink pulled into the parking lot and I accompanied Marianne towards the room that Harvey had booked. Rink drove off again, heading for the nearby sta
te park on a short errand to get rid of the Crown Vic. Maybe it would turn up one of these days when the shifting and squeezing of the earth’s crust forced it out of the depths of the mangrove swamp like a corroded leviathan rising from the depths.
The motel celebrated the local Native American Hove culture, but spoiled it somewhat with a fake totem pole, copied from one I’d seen a few years ago commemorating the great Chief, Seattle, in the Northwest city of the same name. The totem pole was mid-centre on a swathe of grass in front of the motel reception. Standing nine feet tall, it almost dwarfed Harvey Lucas where he leaned against it. Almost, but not quite. Harvey is a huge man. He doesn’t have the musculature of Rink, but he’s still a physical specimen that would make most men envious. He stands well above my near six feet. His skin is so black and sleek that he looks like he has been carved from jet by a master sculptor. On his broad shouldered, slim-waisted frame, clothes hang on him the way clothes are meant to hang. At forty years old he could give men half his age a run for their money on the football field, as well as a lesson in style.
We greeted each other the way old soldiers do. A masculine hug of the left arm, our right hands hooked together at our thumbs, a bump of chests.
‘Looking good, Harve.’
His jeans and shirt weren’t that different from mine, only he looked like he’d just stepped out of a Hollywood gossip magazine, while I looked like something that people gossiped about – for all the wrong reasons.
He touched the wound in my scalp. Shaking his head in amusement. ‘I see that Rink’s been practising his field dressings on you. Never could see straight, that one.’
I’d forgotten about the slash on my head. But now that Harvey mentioned it the damn thing reminded me it was still there with an itch that demanded scratching.
‘Brought some supplies with me,’ Harvey said, nodding over his shoulder towards his room. ‘Better get that cleaned and apply some antiseptic cream. Don’t want it getting infected.’
‘What’re they going to do if it does? Cut my head off?’
‘Sure would be an improvement,’ Harvey grinned.
Marianne was standing in our shadow, looking up at Harvey as if he was a demi-god who’d come down from Mount Olympus on a cloud. There was trepidation in her gaze, but not a little awe.
‘You must be Marianne.’ Harvey held out his hand.
‘Mari,’ she answered shyly.
‘Mari,’ he repeated, and he took her hand in his, giving it a gentle squeeze. Her smile made her look like the girl I’d seen in those first couple of photographs.
She said, ‘You’re not what I …’
‘Not what you expected. Yeah, I know. You thought I was gonna be as ugly as these two brutes you’ve been stuck with?’ He shot me a wink and I grinned behind Marianne’s back.
‘Joe isn’t ugly,’ she said, and that made me grin even more. I should have maybe defended Rink, but to some he did seem like he’d be more at home dressed in skins and wielding a club. Then there were others who found his rugged face and scarred chin attractive; the epitome of the bad boy look.
Harvey asked me, ‘How is Rink?’
‘Holding it together.’
‘He shouldn’t be here.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Harvey turned back to Marianne. He touched the shoulder of the Kevlar vest. ‘Come on, girl. Let’s get you inside and out of that fashion disaster, huh?’
The motel was the type that has a stand-alone reception with rooms located in adjacent wings. It was constructed like a loose crescent, the parking lot nearest the road, then the grassed area with the faux-totem pole, and the rooms curving round on either side. Harvey had rented the room furthest away on the right-hand horn.
It was a standard room in a standard motel. Twin beds. Couple of chairs. A desk. A credenza with a pay-per-view TV sitting on top of it. Instructions for dialling up porn on a card on the wall. Harvey’s laptop computer was plugged into a socket on the wall and was resting half-open on top of the nearest bed. A partly open door on the left showed a glimpse of a standard bathroom. Marianne’s eyes widened, but then a shadow crossed over them.
‘I’ve checked it out,’ Harvey told Marianne. ‘No creepy-crawlies. Shower’s hot and the towels are clean. Why don’t you go ahead? Make you feel better.’
Marianne agreed with a slight nod of her head, then walked towards the bathroom, tugging at the straps of the vest. She dumped the heavy vest by the open door, then slipped inside. I heard the locks engaging. Not that she’d need them with us there, but it made sense. She was shutting out the horror of the last couple of days. I suppose that we were as much a reminder of that horror as anything else that had happened.
The shower went on.
Harvey closed the door to the outside.
‘Got anything for us, Harvey?’
He picked up a bag, delved inside it and tossed me a tube of antiseptic cream. ‘That for starters,’ he said. Then going over to the laptop he pushed open the screen and tapped a few buttons. ‘Plus this.’
There was a profile photograph of a fat man on the screen. Then a portrait. Then a profile from the opposite side. Police mugshots, all of the same man. He had dark hair in sweaty fringe on his forehead. His jowls were blotchy with broken veins, and his eyes were the type you normally see on bloodhounds. He was smiling, but it was just bravado for the camera. His eyes weren’t smiling. They were fearful.
‘Dead for a start,’ said Harvey. ‘He’s one of the guys shot dead inside Petre Jorgenson’s house.’
‘Got a name for him?’
‘Gabriel Wellborn. Goes by Gabe. Not the kind of character you’d normally expect to move in the same circles as the Jorgensons.’ He held his hand at shoulder height. ‘On the social ladder, the Jorgensons rate a nine.’ He dropped his hand way down. ‘Gabe Wellborn scores a minus two if he’s lucky.’
‘So what’s his deal?’
‘Officially? He has a web design business. Small potatoes, not so many clients. Just a front, if you ask me.’
I nodded. ‘Unofficially?’
‘Go getter.’
I didn’t catch his meaning. Not at first. Then I said, ‘Go get me this, go get me that?’
‘Yeah,’ Harvey said. ‘You want something, Gabe’s your man. Particularly if the thing you want is illegal. Guns, drugs, underage sex … you know his type.’
‘Maybe there is an argument for justifiable homicide. Pleased to hear he’s dead,’ I said. Then, ‘These things he gets for people, does that include killers for hire?’
‘Unconfirmed rumour. But, yeah. He’s been on and off the FBI radar for years, but they haven’t been able to make anything stick. He recruits through these soldier of fortune sites that have sprung up all over the web. Takes on mercenaries who are after a quick buck. Very discreet operation. All coded to protect their anonymity. Works for anyone who can pay, not just a select clientele.’
‘How is his operation run?’
‘I spoke to an FBI contact. It’s only a theory of theirs, and up until now they’ve been unable to prove it. It’s so simple it goes way beyond sophisticated.’
‘Usually the way. Hide in plain sight and people don’t see what’s right under their own noses. So, how is he doing it?’
‘All via the web. Untraceable URLs are used. Hosting by ex-Eastern Bloc companies. Firewalls that would rival Homeland Security. Until now, the FBI have been unable to crack it. His employees use disposable cell phones with internet connections to keep in touch. Gabe gives them their instructions under the guise of a fantasy role playing game based upon the war between heaven and hell.’
My snort of derision was like the air brakes on a taut-liner. ‘And he’s the Archangel Gabriel, no doubt?’
Harvey smiled. ‘Got it in one. But what about the others?’
‘Named after the fallen angels?’
Harvey patted me on the shoulder. ‘See, I knew there was a reason Rink took you on as his business partner.’
‘Got a name for the shooter yet?’
‘Nope. But I got this.’ He started pressing keys on the laptop. The screen changed to a list of names. They were all picked out in magenta, underlined. Shortcuts to web pages, I guessed. Alphabetical, beginning with Amdusias and ending with Zagan. Weird names from a forgotten language or a cheap sci-fi movie. There were eighteen names in all.
‘Names of all the fallen angels?’
‘Not all,’ Harvey said. ‘There are many more than this. I lifted this list from the FBI. These are all names assumed by the players in Gabe Wellborn’s game.’
‘So we could be up against this many shooters?’ I asked.
Harvey shook his head. ‘No. You don’t have to worry. Only one of these assholes has been active in the recent months.’
With a manicured fingernail he tapped the screen.
‘Dantalion?’ The name tasted like bile in the back of my throat. ‘What do we know about him?’
Harvey double tapped the blue line under the name and the computer flickered between screens. First came words written in flame. They said:
The seventy-first spirit is Dantalion.
He is a great and mighty duke, who governs thirty-six legions of spirits. He appears in the form of a man with many countenances, all men’s and all women’s faces. Dantalion knows the thoughts of all men and women, and can change them at will.
Next, I saw a stylised painting of a man in a long white coat. His skin was white and he had flowing white hair. He held an open book in one palm and a sword in the other. I stared at the face. Androgynous, it could have been male or female. Beautiful but cruel. The eyes were like slivers of arctic ice.
I’d seen that creature before. Not so beautiful, but even more evil. Right now it was lying at the bottom of the sea with a Lincoln sedan as its tomb.
Or that was my hope.
29
First came weightlessness as the Lincoln fell through space.