Titan is so entwined with the government that you’ll never get it free.
It was smoke. It meant nothing. The real foe was not some faceless organization from a pulp novel.
It had a face. It had a shape. It was real.
He turned to Sloane. “You ready for this?”
She took his hand in hers. “Born ready.”
* * *
An army of cops was waiting in the parking garage. The lights from the cruisers washed the entire concrete structure in red and blue. Men and women in uniform were standing behind the squad cars, in front of them, to the rear of them, taking aim with their service pistols and rifles. Half of them wore helmets.
“Don’t move!” bellowed a cop with a megaphone. “Put your hands in the air! Both of you, I want you to set down any weapons, leave them in the elevator, and step slowly out with your hands up.”
It’s the entire 11th precinct, Brendan thought, his heart fluttering like a pigeon’s. His teeth rattled in his head, his skin vibrated. He held his hands out in front of him, slowly raising them in the air. He glanced at Sloane and saw her do the same.
“We’re unarmed,” Brendan called back.
He swallowed, it felt like a stone was sliding down his throat.
“But there are other people in the building who have weapons. They’re coming.”
A few of the cops exchanged looks. The one with the megaphone lowered it for a moment, looking like he just forgot what he had for dinner. Then he brought it back to his lips. His voice was still amplified and loud, but less authoritative.
“Walk this way, both of you. Slowly.”
Brendan and Sloane did as commanded. As they stepped out of the elevator, the doors closed behind them. Brendan heard the motor and cables haul it back up to where the agents, at least one or two of them, were surely waiting to board. The others – he didn’t know how many more were in the building – would be finding another way down. He remembered the cameras – they weren’t there in his father’s day – but he was sure as shit there was video surveillance in the parking garage. Whoever was the eye in the sky knew exactly where Brendan and Sloane were and what was going on.
He considered two possibilities: Either their pursuers would arrive and attempt to hostilely reclaim their quarry, or, seeing the NYPD in full phalanx would keep them away.
The megaphone cop turned to another NYPD officer and said something Brendan couldn’t hear, and jerked his head. A detail of three cops moved up closer, two hands on their pistols, with the one who had been given an order by the megaphone cop. The quartet came towards Brendan and Sloane. When they were close, the cop out in front grabbed Brendan. Another was there in a second, and they brought him to the ground so fast he felt a split second of freefall vertigo. He twisted his head in time to see them do the same to Sloane.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said. His breath blew bits of dirt and dust around on the gritty garage floor.
Megaphone lowered the amplifier again. Another cop, plainclothes, came jogging up beside him. Then the two of them came over as the cops cuffed Brendan and Sloane with thick plastic ties.
Now Brendan felt a firm pressure under his arms as the cops hoisted him to his feet. Sloane too. The air smelled of cop-sweat, starchy uniforms, the exhaust and oil of the parking garage.
The plainclothes cop and the megaphone cop, probably a detective and a sergeant, respectively, Brendan thought, stuck both of their noses in his face.
“You caused quite a bit of fucking trouble,” the sergeant said. “Now who are you talking about, how many more you got in there with weapons?”
He stood eye to eye with Brendan, about five foot ten. He wore the blue sergeant’s stripes patch on one shoulder of his uniform. His eyes were the color of dried mud, his skin pock-marked from adolescent acne likely followed by years of smoking and drinking.
“Just take us. Book us,” Brendan said. He felt suddenly exhausted.
The sergeant turned away from Brendan and sized up Sloane. All the cops seemed to be staring at them now as they stood there, sergeant and the detective pressing into them.
The sergeant’s eyes returned to Brendan. “Oh we’ll book you,” he said. He glanced at the other cops, signaling them to get moving. Brendan risked a look back at the elevator as they started pulling him forward. The car had reached the sixth floor. As he watched, the indicator for the fifth floor lit up. It was coming back.
* * *
The arresting officers moved Brendan and Sloane toward a van. A police officer standing by opened the rear doors.
There were squawks as several radios went off at once, just garbled static that buried a voice Brendan couldn’t understand. The sergeant plucked a walkie-talkie from his belt and stuck it in front of his mouth.
“Copy. We’re sending up the EMTs for the doctor. Go medics.”
Brendan could feel the hot stares of the policemen as they put their weapons away and eased down. Probably some of them felt let down, had wanted a little trigger-action, while a few of them had probably just popped their cherries when they’d unsnapped their holsters for the first time.
Brendan met their gazes. His thoughts had become a jumbled mess, but one idea pulsed through the din of his mind – he was no longer a cop. He didn’t even feel like a detective anymore, a private investigator, none of it. There didn’t seem to be any clear lines anymore. There didn’t seem to be any order in the world.
And just before the cops loaded Brendan and Sloane into the back of the van, somebody shouted.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE / Monday, 5:29 PM
The elevator hadn’t even made it all the way down yet. The female agent was walking fast, the kind of wanting-to-run-but-can’t walking those athletes did in the Olympics. It was the woman from the stairs, coming from the other end of the garage, where it sloped up towards the street. She was holding something out in front of her; it jerked up and down as she closed in. A badge.
“Hey,” she was shouting. “Hey-hey-hey. Those are ours, guys.”
“The fuck?” said one of the cops near Brendan.
The sergeant and the detective went towards her. Brendan saw that half the cops who had holstered the weapons a moment ago, now had them out again, trained on the woman. When the elevator chimed that it had reached the garage level, most of the cops swung in that direction, their faces lighting up with alarm.
Two agents stepped out of the service elevator. They had their badges out, too. They both also brandished automatic handguns.
“Woah, woah, woah!” someone was yelling. Brendan saw the sergeant pat the air with his hands and look around at his men. “Everybody calm down.”
“Put those weapons away,” one of the agents from the elevator said. Brendan recognized him, the one who had called himself Hermes. He looked like he’d gotten a little workout running around the hospital – his perfect hair was slicked with sweat, he was breathing hard.
“You put yours away,” a cop shouted back from the group surrounding Brendan.
“Agent Persephone,” the woman declared to the sergeant, holding her badge higher in the air in front of her. “Central Security Service.”
Brendan’s breath caught in his throat. His mouth was desert-dry; he had no spit. The woman had identified herself as CSS, an organization he only knew a little about, but which had the combined resources of the CIA and the National Security Agency.
“Why’d you come down through here?” the plainclothes cop asked.
Agent Persephone put her badge away, but her gun stayed out. “We wanted to avoid a scene,” she said. She didn’t need to gesture or even nod toward the mob of cops and swirling lights to suggest that a scene was exactly what this level of law enforcement created.
“That man and that woman are in our custody,” she said.
The tension palpably decreased around Brendan. It was a living thing – the violence and testosterone and nerve-wracked endocrine systems put out some kind of acrid perfume into the air. Now it was dissipating as
the NYPD people realized that this was turning into the usual bureaucratic bullshit, the eye-rolling juris-my-diction argument that festered in every crime scene while blood coagulated and bodies went into rigor mortis. Whose perp was it? Blah blah blah. County? City? State detectives coming in on this one? And so on.
Brendan didn’t feel so relieved. He strained to hear every word between the sergeant and female agent, but the cops milling around were already starting to murmur and move around, their shoes noisy on the concrete.
“Sarge? What’re we doing here?” This was the policeman nearest Brendan, still holding him with a hand hooked under his bicep.
The sergeant stuck his hand out in the cop’s direction. Hold on.
“I got a call from a civilian,” the sergeant was saying, “that these two people had him at gunpoint. The city doesn’t respond to a threat like this lightly. This is terrorism.”
Brendan felt something milky and grey roll over in his stomach at the sound of the word.
“I understand,” Persephone was saying in what Brendan was sure was her most patient voice. CSS? The woman was a killer. He knew she was. Ex-military. They all were. They moved like operatives, not analysts. He tried to recall what he knew about the CSS. There wasn’t much in the way of public information about them, but he’d seen a little here, a little there. They had been formed in the 1970s by presidential directive, and tied into Army Intelligence and Security Command, Naval Security, the Marines, Airforce Intelligence – basically the entirety of the U.S. Military. They executed black-bag style operations and operated unmanned aerial vehicles – UAVs, commonly called drones.
He glanced at the two men near the elevator. They kept their weapons out, but Brendan saw they had been lowered, barrels pointing down. They were watching Persephone and the sergeant. But then Hermes turned and looked at Brendan.
Brendan looked back, unblinking.
Hermes wanted him so bad he could taste it, thought Brendan.
“You want them, you come down to the station and you fill out the paperwork. I’ve got a captain, a lieutenant, a bureau chief, and the whole city of New York to answer to, okay? Reporters are going to be here any second if they’re not already outside. This goes by the book.”
The sergeant spoke loudly, making sure everyone heard, Brendan thought.
Persephone spoke quietly, and Brendan could hear little of her calmly articulated but venomous threats. There was something about the sergeant shoveling penguin shit for the rest of his life on the South Pole if she snapped her fingers.
The sergeant was not going to back down. He turned on his heel and started back towards the van. His face was a contorted with indignation and doubt, but he raised one hand, stuck a finger in the air and twirled it around, indicating that his force get going. For a moment, Brendan saw Hermes overcome with pure hate and frustration, and then he disappeared as Brendan and Sloane were shoved into the back of the van. The plainclothes detective piled in after them and began reading Brendan and Sloane their Miranda rights. The doors slammed and the tires squawked as the NYPD drove them away.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX / Monday 7:03 PM
He realized he hadn’t had a cigarette in a few hours. Phantom fingernails were starting to rake across the top of his brain. Brendan reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a squashed pack of smokes. There were three left. He shook one out. The detective sitting across from him looked at the bent cigarette as it fell to the table.
“Can’t smoke in here,” he said. “Whole building is non-smoking.”
Brendan looked longingly at the cigarette. Then he met the detective’s gaze. “Fine. I’m going to be less than pleasant.”
“I’m Detective Kendall.” The detective took a wad of tissues from his pocket and handed them to Brendan, ostensibly to clean up his nose. “You’re being charged with aggravated assault, criminal trespass, burglary, and quite possibly second degree murder if your victim bottoms out. He’s hanging on by a thread right now.”
“Who’s charging?”
“The city. You’ve asked for an attorney. Why don’t you tell me what you were doing in Alexander Heilshorn’s office, first?”
Brendan looked beyond the detective at the one-way mirror set in the wall. He knew he was being watched. By the captain, maybe the lieutenant, and possibly other detectives. This was standard procedure. Get the perp talking before he cried into his lawyer’s sleeve. But it wasn’t a lawyer he was anticipating. He cut his eyes back to Kendall.
“They’re going to be here any minute.”
“Who, our friends at the CSS? Boy, they’re pleasant, huh? What’re they doing here? I thought the NSA and CSS were cryptologists. Decoding enemy secrets. What the hell do they want with you?”
“You can’t let them take her.”
“The girl? If they take her, I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
Brendan shook his head. “She won’t. Neither will I.”
Detective Kendall opened a small notebook and clicked a pen. There was a recording device on the table, and probably the video camera mounted in the corner was archiving this interview as well. Seeing Kendall use a notebook, something a little old-fashioned, made Brendan slightly more hopeful that he could reach the man.
Brendan started to tell his story. He began with his work for Oneida County on the Heilshorn case, but then he hesitated. He really needed to go back even further, but he was afraid there wouldn’t be time. He needed to hit on the salient points, and to convince Kendall and the rest of them that something was going on that was bigger and more complex than anything they had experienced, including any police corruption or political malfeasance they would have ever dealt with.
“My father, Gerard Healy, was a thoracic surgeon at Roosevelt Hospital until his death twelve years ago. I believe it was Alexander Heilshorn who killed him, and made it look like natural causes.”
The detective looked up from his notepad.
“That’s why you were there?”
“I was there for a number of reasons, not the least of which to ascertain the whereabouts of Jennifer Aiken, who works for the Department of Justice.”
Brendan saw something flicker in the detective’s eyes. He stood up, leaving his notebook and pen on the small table. “Be right back,” he said.
He returned a few moments later with an older man in a black suit.
“This is Harland Doherty, of the FBI. He’s going to listen to what you have to say. Is that alright?”
Brendan looked at Doherty, whose thin lips were framed in a handlebar moustache, making him look like some kind of biker. His greying black hair was swept back with pomade. He stood against the wall as Kendall sat back down.
“So, you were saying about Jennifer Aiken . . .”
“I was told Agent Aiken wanted to speak to me. The DOJ has put together an HTPU task force concerning human trafficking. She left her number with Sheriff Lawrence Taber, who passed it to me.”
“The Sheriff you worked under in Oneida County, on the Rebecca Heilshorn murder.”
“That’s correct. Like I was saying, Sheriff Taber called me up the morning after Seamus Argon was killed.”
“He died in a traffic collision while on duty this past Friday night.”
“Right,” Brendan said, “But it wasn’t an accident.”
“No?”
“No. It was a hit. He was murdered.”
“And why was he murdered?” Kendall was scribbling away.
“Because of things he knew.”
“Such as?”
Brendan sighed. He glanced at the cigarette. He would have taken a bat to the head if it meant he could light up and take a drag. One drag. He inhaled deeply, imagining the smoke filling his lungs.
“It’s complicated.”
“Usually is.”
He gave Kendall a look. “Years ago, Taber had an affair that produced a child – that girl that you’re holding. Only person who knew about her real father was Seamus Argon.”
“So, Taber h
ad him killed for this?” Kendall’s eyebrows knitted together. He gave Brendan an expression that said, I’m trying to be patient. Give me something I can work with.
“No. Taber was trying to do the right thing. He left the area and went up to Oneida and was a cop there until he got elected Sheriff. He’s a good man. But I think his illegitimate daughter was used to leverage him. To get him to do some things he wouldn’t otherwise do.”
“Like what?”
“Like let Ambrose Delaney take a case that wasn’t really Sheriff’s Department territory.”
“The Rebecca Heilshorn murder.”
Brendan felt that glimmer of hope again. Kendall might be skeptical, but he was following along and making the right connections.
“Exactly.”
“And why would Delaney want the case?”
Brendan shrugged. “He was influenced. The same people who influenced Taber. Maybe not in the same manner; maybe they had something on Delaney, too, or maybe they just bought him.”
“Who do you think bought him?”
Brendan glanced at the FBI agent who was watching with half-lidded eyes, as if he and his handlebar mustache had been out at a biker bar late the night before. Brendan looked squarely across the table at Kendall.
“I think Heilshorn is the one writing the checks.”
“Why?” Then Kendall answered his own question. “Because Rebecca Heilshorn is his daughter. Okay, but what of that? Was he just trying to protect himself and his reputation? From what you said a few moments ago describing the case, Heilshorn was implicated.”
“Yes, and continued to manipulate things. He put all responsibility on a group he called Titan. Said that Titan were the enforcers behind XList.”
“XList . . .” Kendall glanced at his notepad. “You said that was the escort service Rebecca worked for.”
“More than that. They’re black market; escorts, pornography, human sex slaves, that sort of thing. Great place to do your Christmas shopping.”
SURVIVORS (crime thriller books) Page 27