Strong Darkness

by Jon Land

47

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  “Do you have a reservation, sir?”

  “No,” Cort Wesley said, brushing past the manager of Providence’s University Club into the main dining room, “but I don’t think I’ll be staying long. I just need to ask one of your guests a question.”

  The club was located in a private arch nestled on a plateau between the city’s downtown area and the campus of Brown University, a favorite lunchtime haunt of power brokers, politicos, and those who fancied themselves to be either. Cort Wesley had come in search of one in particular: a man named Nicolas Dimitrios, better known as Nikki D, who Theo had informed him owned the two college-area venues he managed along with a whole lot of other nightspots in town.

  Theo’s description made it easy for Cort Wesley to spot Nikki D as soon as he entered the main dining room. The man looked to be about his age, with the waves combed and oiled out of his brushed-back hair, a ring for every finger, and olive-toned skin. Dimitrios was in the company of two other men he didn’t know but recognized the type all the same. Their Italian suits shined in the room’s lighting, their shoulders seeming stuffed under the pads and ties thrown back behind them in order to avoid wearing their meal upon them. Living, breathing stereotypes.

  Cort Wesley approached straightaway and took the fourth chair at the table, sliding it into the absence of a place setting before a glass of water with melted ice.

  “Hey, Nic, sorry I’m late,” he greeted, taking a hefty sip of water and feeling the condensation collected on the glass moisten his fingers. “Glad you boys started without me.”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong table, friend,” Dimitrios told him.

  Cort Wesley returned his gaze, while studying his two guests. The one on the left had a fleshy nose and a ridge of scar tissue over his forehead. An ex-boxer probably now with reading glasses held on the tip of his nose, as if he’d forgotten to remove them after studying the menu. The one on the right did everything stiffly, from the way he used his utensils to the way he blinked and reached for his ice-laden drink that looked like scotch. His face was a blank canvas, utterly devoid of emotion because clearly he was a man who had no use for it.

  “No,” Cort Wesley said to Dimitrios, setting the water glass back down, “this is the right table because you’re the man I need to see.”

  Dimitrios looked trapped between both thoughts and intentions. He was eating a salad with lots of colors and stopped his next forkful halfway to his mouth and returned it to the plate.

  “I’m going to ask you politely to leave.”

  “You can ask any way you want, hoss, but I’m not going anywhere until we talk.” He looked toward the other two men at the table who were studying him from behind their flat expressions and noisy breathing. “See, fellas, my son got mixed up with one of Nikki D’s girls. Since he’s buying you lunch at this swanky club, I’m assuming you know all about the side racket he’s got going and you might even be the guys behind this protection he’s got. But he doesn’t have it from me.” Cort Wesley turned his gaze back on Dimitrios. “See, my son ended up in the hospital, half beaten to death.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s why I’m going to make this as simple as I can for you, Nic. The girl my son got involved with was Chinese, mid-twenties probably, who told him her name was Kai. You’re going to tell me where I can find her, then I’m going to get up and walk out. It’ll be like I was never here.”

  Cort Wesley could see Dimitrios’s eyes, too tiny for his head and too light for his coloring, flashing, his mind putting things together. The two goombahs, Left and Right, looked at each other, starting to plot their own response.

  “So what do you say, Nic?” Cort Wesley asked the Greek.

  “I say to get the fuck away from my table.”

  “That wasn’t the answer I was hoping for.”

  “Only one you’re going to get, all the same.”

  “All the same,” Cort Wesley said, catching the goombahs across the table starting to move, “I don’t think so.”

  48

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  The man Caitlin knew only as “Jones,” although it had been “Smith” once, sat behind Captain Tepper’s desk with a pair of shiny cowboy boots crossed on the blotter.

  “With all the time I spend in Texas,” he greeted, without rising or extending a hand at Caitlin’s entry, “I figured I’d finally get myself a pair.”

  “Why don’t you try growing a pair instead, Jones?” she said, stopping just short of the desk.

  “You don’t even know what brought me in for a visit this time.”

  “I know it can’t be good. And I’d like you to take your boots off my captain’s desk.”

  “And what if I don’t?”

  “This conversation will be off to an even worse start than usual.”

  Jones smiled, sat up in Tepper’s desk chair, and eased his feet back to the floor. “Where was I?”

  “Just leaving.”

  “You mean, you really haven’t missed me?”

  “I always feel like I need a shower after our visits, Jones. Why don’t you just fill me in on the shit you dragged in with you this time? I could practically smell it when I walked in the building.”

  “It’s you doing the dragging today, Ranger. I’m just along for the ride, watching you self-destruct in true Caitlin Strong fashion. In so far over your head you can’t even see the surface any longer.”

  “You are a walking cliché, Jones.”

  “You told me that once before.”

  “Apparently you didn’t take the cue.”

  The blind over the office’s single window was yanked all the way up, exposing Jones to a bright swatch of light in a world where he’d come to much prefer shadows. His face was flat and freshly shaven, with a dollop of shaving cream clinging stubbornly behind his right ear. Even in the light, Caitlin couldn’t quite make out his eye color, as if Jones had been trained to never look at anyone long enough for anything to register. He was wearing a sport jacket over a button-down shirt and pressed trousers that looked like a costume on him. His hair, normally tightly cropped and military-style, “high and tight” was the nomenclature as she recalled, had grown out just enough to make his anvil-shaped head look smaller.

  She’d met Jones for the first time overseas when he was still “Smith.” Figured him for CIA back then, but he was with some shadowy subdivision of Homeland Security these days and had pretty much carte blanche to protect the homeland any way he saw fit. That included utilizing the services of Guillermo Paz and the band of killers the colonel had assembled for any purpose Jones deemed worthy. Caitlin’s path had crossed his on several occasions since he became Jones and none had ended particularly well. He reminded her of a cat who shows up scratching at your door, showering you with love until it’s time to move on to the next house offering a bowl of milk.

  “You broke the rules again, Ranger, a big one this time,” Jones told her.

  “Yeah? Which rule is that?”

  “I played football in college, you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “In practice and scrimmages the quarterback always wears a different color jersey, gold usually, to remind his teammates never to hit, not even to touch him. No exceptions. He’s protected at all costs.”

  “So?”

  “So you the hit the quarterback, Ranger.”

  She leaned over the desk. “Come again?”

  Instead of answering, Jones rose stiffly from Captain Tepper’s old chair, moved to the window and lowered the faux wooden blinds that were probably older than Caitlin was. When that failed to shut out enough of the light to make him comfortable, he worked the slats closed. The result, by the time he settled back in the chair, was to cloak him in the shadows that made him far more comfortable.

  “Li Zhen is protected,” Jones told Caitlin, even his voice sounding more confident and relaxed. “He and his company are working wit
h the United States government. You’ve heard of us, I assume.”

  She tried to see him as clearly in the shadows as she had in the light, her imagination filling in the blank spaces that averted her vision. “I must have missed the man’s golden jersey. My visit was routine. Just following up on a few leads.”

  “Right,” Jones said musingly, “flower petals.”

  “Connected to four gunmen who shot up a historical train ride.”

  “Until you gunned them down in typical Caitlin Strong fashion, the frontier gunman reborn in a woman. Only this isn’t the frontier anymore.” He shook his head. “Man, who’s really the walking cliché here?”

  “Those gunmen had camellia petals in their pockets and oil from the same flower in their systems. We traced that flower to Yuyuan.”

  “Conclusively?”

  “If you call the only importer of the seeds from China on record conclusive, I suppose so.”

  “Of course, it’s inconceivable to think anybody might have imported camellias without the proper paperwork.”

  “Where you going with this, Jones?”

  “I thought I told you that already.”

  “I must have been paying attention to something important at the time.”

  “You will case and desist on Li Zhen and Yuyuan.” Jones popped up out of Captain Tepper’s desk chair dramatically. “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “We’re not finished.”

  “Yes, we are. I’m keeping it short and sweet this time. That pressure you feel on your shoulders is the weight of all of Washington bearing down.”

  “You’re in bed with Zhen.”

  “So to speak,” Jones acknowledged.

  “Too bad I didn’t know the two of you were acquainted or I would’ve used you as a reference.”

  “Wouldn’t have mattered, Ranger; he doesn’t know me as Jones.”

  “You back to being ‘Smith’ in his eyes then?”

  “Brooks, Ranger. He knows me as Brooks.”

  49

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  The two goombahs, Dimitrios’s luncheon guests, needed to reach across the table to get to him, and Cort Wesley was ready when they did. The one on his left was closer and banged the table hard enough to spill his water and dump his lunch onto the tablecloth. He must’ve been left-handed because his stretch came all the way across his body.

  Cort Wesley latched on to the man’s fingers, squeezing and twisting at the same time. The move was meant to freeze him more than anything, enough so that Cort Wesley was able to use his left hand to grab hold of the man’s wrongly angled shoulder and yank. He came across the table as if utterly weightless, directly into the path of the wine bottle the man on the right lashed out like a club. It impacted on his skull with a thwack, didn’t break, but sent a shower of merlot spraying into the air through its open top. Much of it landed on Dimitrios, stunning him, his white dress shirt blotched with red.

  The goombah with the wine bottle realized he was in no-man’s-land too late to do anything about it, a wannabe tough guy used to bullying, dominating others by intimidation to the point where he figured this part was cake. It was anything but, though, something Cort Wesley knew all too well, just like he knew guys like this. He didn’t wait, seizing the advantage by punching the second man square in the face, feeling his nose mash under the blow. The man didn’t so much go down as melt into the floor.

  Cort Wesley swung toward Dimitrios, who was cowering in his chair, frozen between motions. Around him the rest of the dining room had grown eerily quiet, those nearest the table having jumped up to put as much distance between them and the melee as possible.

  Cort Wesley leaned over, close enough to the Greek to not have to raise his voice much. “I figure we’ve got two minutes before the cops show up, say ninety seconds to be on the safe side. That’s ninety seconds before you’re in the worst pain you’ve ever felt in your life. You follow me so far?”

  Dimitrios nodded, eyes sweeping about the dining room as if in search of someone closing in to help. But Cort Wesley’s ears had already told him what Nikki D’s eyes were about to.

  No one was coming.

  “Where can I find the Chinese girl, Nic, the one my son called Kai?”

  Dimitrios looked as if he was thinking about stalling, then quickly changed his mind. “All that happened, I had nothing to do with it!”

  “I know. That’s why you’re still talking through your teeth. Seventy-five seconds, Nic.”

  “The syndicate.”

  “The what?”

  Dimitrios seemed like he didn’t know how to say what he needed to, his thoughts chopped up as a result. “Like a subscription service. We get girls. From all over the country. Rotated in and out.”

  “Who runs the show?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Under a minute now, Nikki.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Tell me something you do.”

  “New York. The city.”

  Sirens wailed in the distance.

  “I’m listening, Nikki,” Cort Wesley told the man who looked so scared it seemed his eyeballs were pulling back into his skull. “What am I gonna find there?”

  “Dealers.”

  “Drug?”

  Dimitrios shook his head. “Something else,” he said, Cort Wesley’s mouth dropping when Nikki D told him what.

  50

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Wait a minute,” Caitlin said, her eyes having adjusted to the lower level of light in Tepper’s office, “you’re working with Li Zhen directly?”

  “We’re working with Yuyuan, yes.”

  “We as in Homeland Security.”

  “That a statement or a question?”

  “It doesn’t require an answer.”

  Jones sat back down and leaned forward, into the light spilled downward by the room’s single overhead fixture. The fixture was dusty, the result being to turn his face into a patchwork quilt.

  “You own a cell phone, Ranger?”

  “You’ve used my number.”

  “So I have. It was a figure of speech. The third generation wireless network became the fourth generation wireless network, and already people were clamoring for the fifth. If you weren’t too busy shooting people, you’d be aware that the fifth generation wireless network went active this week.”

  “The subject came up during my last stretch at Quantico. The government had just awarded the contract to build the five G to Yuyuan. The instructor, someone with experience comparable to yours I imagine, called that the dumbest thing he’d ever seen in his life.”

  She could feel Jones stiffen, something in the cadence of his breathing changing, however imperceptibly. “Because someone with experience like mine wasn’t there to tell him we had no choice.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “There isn’t an American company with the wherewithal to handle the job. Sad but true. Cisco failed to get past even the preliminary round, leaving us with Alcatel, Siemens, or Yuyuan. All three of those are foreign, last time I checked.”

  “I believe the point the instructor was making was that doing business with the French or Germans has its advantages over the Chinese.”

  “Curtly spoken, Ranger, but it also has its disadvantages. On merit, technological capacity, and the ability to build a network capable of delivering the goods made Yuyuan far and away the best choice. And they delivered under budget and ahead of schedule. By almost six months, meaning the network beat the new phones and software to the market.”

  “Which means you’re effectively giving the Chinese access to every bit of data and information that travels over the Internet.”

  “They’ve already got it,” Jones told her. “Who do you think built the four G network? Not Yuyuan, but another Chinese company named Shenzen was responsible for maybe three quarters of the work after everybody else involved dropped the ball. Why do you think it took so long to get the network up and running countrywid
e? We’re talking a cluster fuck of biblical proportions. Trust me. I know because I was front and center, and determined not to repeat that fiasco with the five G.”

  “Ah, the fox guarding the henhouse…”

  Jones canted his head to the side like a confused dog. “Am I missing something here?”

  “I was just about to ask you the same question, Jones. You’d never make a call like this, approving a Chinese corporation to build a five G network, unless there was something in it for you. So why don’t you just come clean and tell me what you, what Homeland, is getting out of this?”

  Jones rose, back into the light now. “Back off, Ranger.”

  “You or Li Zhen?”

  “One and the same as far as you are concerned.”

  “Even if he’s behind those gunmen both here and up in Rhode Island yesterday?”

  “You let us take care of things.” Now it was Jones doing the staring. “Just like I took care of your boyfriend.”

  “You want to be more specific?”

  “How’d you think he got released from police custody, Ranger? He’s a free man thanks to some well-placed calls from yours truly. Don’t bother to thank me.”

  “So, what, I’m supposed to see this as a trade-off?”

  Jones started for the door and then stopped. “I don’t give a shit. I’m telling you this is under control. We took care of your boyfriend and now we’re going to take care of Li Zhen. Enough said on the subject.”

  That left Caitlin shaking her head. “Not in my mind. The Chinese are where they are today because everyone who thinks they’re playing them ends up getting played themselves. Guess that’s you now, Jones.”

  “Cut me some slack, Ranger. My department is up to the task.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “You mind telling me what it was Li Zhen did that crawled this deep up your ass?”

  “Are you capable of being objective? Because all this started after Cort Wesley’s oldest got involved with a Chinese girl mixed up in the porn industry and turning tricks. The boy gets his head bashed in and two days later, Chinese hit teams come gunning for Cort Wesley and me carrying flower petals from Yuyuan’s garden.”