Omega Series Box Set 3: Books 8-10

by Blake Banner

  I shook my head. “Never mind. Have your man take six long paces and put the bags down. Then I take six long paces, collect the bags and leave this one behind. I check the contents right here, you collect your bag and check the contents there. Everybody happy, we all go home. Agreed?”

  There was some more guttural muttering and the gorilla took six long paces, which placed him about twenty feet away. He put down the bags and stood leering at me.

  “Now you come.”

  I smiled and waved him away. “Go back, pal, I am not looking for a bear hug tonight.”

  He grunted and walked back to his comrades. I took six long paces of my own, dropped my bag and picked up the two he’d left. I figured each one weighed a good fifty-five pounds. I hefted them back to the Zombie, then turned to watch the gorilla lumber back, pick up the bag and carry it to the goatee.

  The goatee and the blond unzipped it. The guy with the assault rifle trained his weapon on me and the ape aimed at me with his automatic. I smiled and put my hands in my trouser pockets. Goatee pulled out the package and frowned at it. I pressed the detonator and a quarter of a pound of C4 vaporized his hands and pretty much tore him and the blond in half. The blast wave shattered the windshield of the Ford and hurled the gorilla and the guy with the assault rifle to the ground. They lay there deeply concussed and groaning.

  As a back up plan, in case plan A didn’t work out, I had placed the HK 416 under the fallen tree. I walked over now and retrieved it. I made my way toward the guy with the assault rifle. As I passed the gorilla, I shot him in the back of the head. Then I rolled the last survivor on his back and knelt with one knee on his chest. There I paused, hearing the sound of a reversing engine. The skid of tires on gravel, and then a car accelerating away, fast, toward Freeport.

  The guy under my knee was still groaning, and his pupils were the size of soup plates.

  “Do you speak English?”

  I had to ask him twice, but finally he said, “Da…”

  “Where is Gregor?”

  “Fuck you…”

  I leaned back and pressed the muzzle of the HK416 against his right kneecap. “If I squeeze the trigger, it will tear your leg off. Now, where can I find Gregor?”

  He groaned some more and said, “He always at Caribbean Casino on Caribbean Island, Jamaica Beach. He is owner. He always there.”

  “Thanks.”

  I shot him between the eyes.

  I dragged them all to the bayou and rolled them in. The big gorilla was difficult. He must have weighed four hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce, but with the help of the Ford and a length of rope, he went in too. After that, I put the two bags in the trunk and drove back to my house at a nice, leisurely pace, letting the sea breeze batter my face and blow away the stench of death. The moon was rising, in its first waning, but it was still brilliant and cast a faint, turquoise sheen over the world.

  I parked the Zombie under the stilts of the house and, with some difficulty, carried the two heavy bags up the steps to the terrace. Between them, they weighed easily a hundred and ten pounds, and I was out of breath by the time I got there. I opened the sliding glass doors, dropped my luggage on the sofa and poured myself a generous glass of whiskey. I knocked it back, then locked the doors, went to my bedroom and retrieved the parcel Emily had originally intended for the drop, before I’d replaced it with half a cake of C4. I dropped it on the sofa with the two bags, poured myself another whiskey and sat in an armchair, sipping Irish and contemplating the three peculiar articles.

  I had a pretty good idea what the two sports bags contained, and it wasn’t memory cards for a camera. But the package in the middle was a real mystery: something the Russian Mafia apparently wanted real bad. Finally, halfway through my second whiskey, I got up and unzipped the two bags. As I’d assumed, they contained hundred dollar bills, bound into tight packages of one hundred: each package worth ten thousand dollars. I did a rough calculation and decided that there was five million dollars contained between the two bags. I made a dozen random checks and all the money seemed to be both present and authentic.

  I picked up the parcel Emily had given me and sat back in the armchair, asking myself, what nature of a thing is eighteen inches long, six inches deep and twelve inches across, and worth five million dollars? Then I asked myself, how did Emily come to be in possession of such a thing, and why would she be selling it to the Russian Mafia?

  I shook my head, pulled out a pack of Camels, poked one in my mouth and lit up with my old, battered brass Zippo. I shook my head because that wasn’t the question either. The question was…

  I blew smoke at the ceiling, framing the question carefully in my mind. A good question is worth a million good answers. The question was: why did she want me to make the exchange, believing I was paying them money, when she must have known full well I would realize immediately it was the Russians paying me, and not the other way around? Why would she arrange such an elaborate ruse, when it would so obviously become transparent right away? It didn’t make any sense at all.

  Unless…

  I pulled the knife from my boot and cut open the paper packaging. I tore it away and found I was looking at a sleek, shiny black cube that was perfectly featureless. It was hard to tell what it was made of. It felt like either ceramic or highly polished steel. I ran my fingers over it very slowly, with my eyes half-closed, seeking for the slightest seam or crack. I found nothing on the top or sides, but on the underside, exactly half way along the front edge—or back edge depending how you looked at it—I felt two minute, parallel ridges about half an inch apart. I applied slight pressure between them and the top of the cuboid levered open.

  Inside, resting on a bed of red felt, was a smaller replica of the box, perhaps twelve inches long, three inches deep and six inches across. This time, however hard I searched, I found absolutely no features of any kind. And this perfectly featureless cuboid was what Gregor was prepared to pay five million dollars for.

  I spent an hour thinking, smoking and drinking whiskey. In the end, I phoned Emily and said, “It’s all sorted. You can come back tomorrow.”

  There was a small gasp on the other end of the line, then silence, followed by, “Is there any… was there any problem?”

  “None at all. We’ll talk when you get here.”

  “My God… I can’t believe it…”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I hung up, carried everything into the bedroom, dumped it on the bed and went to sleep on the sofa in the living room, with my Sig in my hand.

  At five, I got up and went for a swim in the ocean. After that, I spent an hour training in the sand, then returned to the house to have a shower and make a cooked breakfast of bacon, eggs and mushrooms, with a large pot of black coffee. I ate on the terrace, watching the sunrise and deciding what I was going to do that morning.

  The first thing I did was to call Kenny and give him some very precise instructions. “Call me the moment it’s done, will you?”

  “Of course, sir, as soon as the café is open.”

  “Be waiting at the door.”

  “I shall, sir.”

  Then, I dragged the two bags of money to the Zombie and threw them in the trunk. Emily’s bag I dropped on the floor in front of the passenger seat. I made the drive to Pier 32 in a leisurely ten minutes, parked in the parking lot and strolled into the bar. It was empty at that time of the morning, but JD was behind the counter polishing glasses again. I climbed on a stool and put Emily’s bag in front of me.

  “How come you’re always polishing glasses, JD? How come you never wipe down the bar and talk about dames like the rest of your profession?”

  “I’m a Master of the thirty-second degree. We don’t do that kind of shit. Apart from wasting my time with stupid questions, what do you want, young Lacklan?”

  “To drink coffee, Old Wise One, and reminisce about when I was a young hell raiser.”

  “Most people ’round here would be glad to forget those day
s. You were lucky not to wind up in jail.”

  I watched him pour my coffee and observed, “You were lucky not to wind up there with me.”

  “True enough.”

  “You remember my dad’s associates used to come down to visit him to talk finance and business?”

  He did his imitation of a truck out of gas. “You used to steal their wallets. Son of a bitch! I don’t know how you never got caught.”

  “Remember I used to bring them up to the bar with my jacket over them, and you’d keep them in the fridge, under the cokes? Then we’d share the spoils.”

  He nodded for a while, staring at the bar and smiling. “I remember, all right. You said it was OK because your dad’s associates were all crooks. You used to say, ‘It is no crime to steal from a thief.’” He raised an eyebrow at me. “You still think that way?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, JD. I think most laws are there to justify theft, not prevent it. Just so long as that theft is by the state or its allies. I’m not above helping the little guy if the occasion calls for it.”

  He nodded and my phone rang. I answered:

  “Kenny.”

  “Good morning, sir. It is all organized, just as you requested.”

  “Thanks, Kenny. Any problems?”

  “None at all, sir.”

  “Good, see you soon, old friend.”

  I hung up and climbed off the stool. “Thanks for the coffee and reminiscing with me, JD.” I dropped some coins on the bar and walked out. He watched me do it with a small smile on his face.

  After that, I drove to Clute, East Main Street, and parked in the post office parking lot. I sat there for a while, smoking, staring at the building and thinking, then I got out and went inside, to send a small package priority mail express, to be delivered within twenty-four hours.

  Finally, I went to the parking lot, got in my car and headed south, back toward the coast and the Bluewater Highway. It was almost ten o’clock, and I was beginning to feel it was high time I paid Gregor a visit. I had a few questions I needed to ask him, and I was pretty sure he had a few burning questions that I was eager to answer, too. Plus, I had five million bucks that were burning a hole in my trunk, and I wanted to get rid of them.

  Four

  I turned north and east onto the Bluewater Highway and put my foot down for the twenty-five miles of perfectly straight road that took me to Jamaica Beach, on Galveston Island. I covered the distance in somewhat less than thirteen minutes and, just outside Jamaica Beach, I slowed, turned into Indian Beach Drive and followed it to the one mile bridge that crossed to Caribbean Island, where Gregor had his casino.

  Caribbean Island was slightly less than half a mile across and devoted exclusively to a variety of bars and restaurants situated around a central casino. They had managed to circumvent Texas’ very strict laws on gambling by persuading the state authorities to accept a claim from one Bob Auia, that he was descended from the Karankawa tribe, which had inhabited that part of Texas until 1860.

  Bob Auia had amassed a body of evidence that, he claimed, proved his lineage as one of a very small number of Native Americans descended from the Karankawa, or Carancahua, tribe. He had also acquired the services of a leading Houston law firm which lodged a claim, on his behalf, for one billion U.S. dollars, against both the State of Texas and the Federal Government. The claim was naturally never heard in a court of law because it was settled out of court with an undisclosed sum of money and the grant of the island as an Indian reservation for those few remaining descendants from the tribe. Having secured this singular victory, he promptly went into business with a Russian associate and built a casino, exempt from the state laws relating to gambling, by its status as a reservation.

  What happened to Bob after that, nobody was very sure, but it was rumored that he retired to a luxurious estate somewhere in California and left his Russian partner to run the casino. That had been over twenty years earlier. Whether Gregor was that same Russian partner, or whether he had taken over from him, I didn’t know.

  The island had been planted with abundant palm trees and a rich variety of tropical gardens in order to emulate its namesake. At the center of the island was a large and highly ornate building that seemed to be modeled on the Kremlin, and made gaudy seem restrained by comparison. I parked in the lot out front, beside a Rococo fountain with a statue of Poseidon vomiting an endless stream of water onto a dolphin’s head, grabbed the two bags of cash from the trunk and climbed the nine marble steps to the main entrance.

  The foyer was carpeted in violet and had a vast, crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling and a total of four gleaming, white, full size statues of David (the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence only has one), two at either end of the lobby. On the right, there was a broad, wooden staircase that rose to the second floor and was big enough to have a palm tree in a vast earthenware pot on the first landing. Sharp right, just inside the door, there was a pale oak desk with a pretty, dark-haired woman behind it.

  She observed me with a fixed smile and an odd mixture of curiosity and disquiet. Her eyes shifted from my face to the two large sports bags I was carrying and up again. I dumped them on the floor in front of her desk and said, “I need to talk to Gregor.”

  Her expression didn’t change, but she blinked and said, “Gregor?”

  I leaned down, picked up one of the bags and dumped it on the counter. I unzipped it and let her look at the money for a while. Her expression became the sort of thing you see on a five year-old’s face when they go for the first time to Disneyland. I zipped it shut again and said, “I need to talk to Gregor.”

  The disquiet had gone from her face, never to return, and she said, “Of course. Your name, sir?”

  “The man returning his five million dollars.”

  She blinked a few times and picked up the internal phone. She pressed a button and waited a moment. “Mr. Ustinov? There is a gentleman here asking to see you… Well, he says his name is, ‘the man returning your five million dollars,’ sir. Yes, sir, he is alone… Yes, sir.” She hung up and said, “Somebody will be right down.”

  Thirty seconds later, two men came down the broad staircase. They had the unmistakable look of special forces gone into private enterprise. One of them was tall and lean with very short hair, an expensive Italian evening jacket and a burgundy bow tie. His pal was shorter and stockier, with a clipped beard and a short ponytail, a cream tuxedo and a black bow tie. He was the one who spoke to me.

  “What you want?”

  “Again? I want to see Gregor.”

  “What you want with Mr. Ustinov?”

  “If I had wanted to talk to you, I would have asked to see the asshole with girl’s hair and the IQ of road kill. But I don’t and I didn’t. I didn’t because what I have to discuss with Gregor is none of your damn business. Either take me to him or get out of my face.”

  His lip and his left nostril curled. He muttered something to his pal in Russian and his pal leaned forward to grab one of the bags.

  As a general rule of thumb, if you are hitting something soft, like a belly, it is best to use a closed fist, and if you are hitting something hard, like a skull or a jaw, it is best to use an open hand. It isn’t always true, but often enough, it is. On this occasion, it was. As the guy with the burgundy bow tie leaned forward, I bitch-slapped him twice, first backhanded and then with my palm. Then I made cups out of my palms and smacked them both simultaneously over his ears, bursting his eardrums.

  His pupils dilated wide, he said, “Ah…” staggered back a couple of steps and fell on the violet carpet, holding his head and vomiting.

  The guy with the ponytail reached for his piece, but I already had my Sig in my hand. I said, “Do I need to explain in more detail?”

  He frowned at me like I was being unreasonable. “You cannot take pistol into Mr. Ustinov. Is not allowed.”

  I sighed and pistol-whipped him. Then I turned to the girl behind the counter. “Where is Gregor’s office?”
r />   She swallowed hard and looked at the stairs.

  I said, “Up the stairs, first on the right?”

  She made a slight sideways move of the head.

  “Second on the right?”

  An imperceptible nod.

  I pointed at the internal phone. “If I see you reach for that, I’ll shoot you. Understood?”

  Another nod.

  I grabbed the bags and climbed the stairs, keeping an eye on her. When I got to the second floor, I saw that the first door on the right was a gents’ restroom. The second was a large, walnut door. I knocked on it and a deep voice like a geothermal disturbance rumbled something inside. I turned the handle and went in.

  The room was large, thirty or forty fet square. It was furnished as you’d expect, with lots of mahogany, red Wilton and chesterfields. At the far end of the room, there was a huge, oak desk, and behind it, broad double windows looked west, over the gulf. Silhouetted against the nearest window was a huge, bald man in a dark suit. He had his back to me and the morning sunlight was reflecting off his head. He spoke quietly and said something in Russian. I kicked the door closed with my heel, crossed the room and threw a hundred and ten pounds worth of cash onto his desk, knocking over an ink well and sending his landline and internal telephones crashing to the floor.

  He turned and scowled at me, saw I was alone and scowled at the door, then back at me.

  “Where are Zoltan and Peter?”

  “I’m not your damned information service, Gregor, and I am not here to waste time. There’s your five million bucks. Count it. It’s all there.”

  He took a couple of steps toward the desk. His face said he was struggling to make sense of what I was doing. I decided to help him.

  “You’re not dealing with Emily anymore, Gregor. You’re dealing with me. The four men you sent to kill her last night are dead. Most of their bodies are in the bayou, though bits of them are still scattered across the grass and in the branches. Am I getting through to you? Do you need a translation?”