by John Barnes
I nodded. “Who’s after you, and what do they want?”
“What they want is easy enough to explain. They want to kill me in order to silence me. As for who they are—well, that’s where I’m getting into trouble, getting the police and FBI to take me seriously. Have you read—”
He happened to glance up at the wooden plaque Robbie had made for me, over the desk, the one that said “Mark Strang, Licensed Professional Bodyguard.” His eyes got wide, and he said, “You are not, by any chance, related to Gus Strang?”
This made me believe him a little more; his academic colleagues all call him Gus, family and old friends call him Augie. “He’s my father.”
There was a long silence, while he licked his lips and seemed to think. “Well, then you’re either going to think this is a strange practical joke, or you’re the best man for the job.
“Let me start at the beginning. As a scholar, I’m afraid I am not in your father’s league; I’m not an original theorist and I don’t do anything very groundbreaking. My area of study is the formation of organized crime in immigrant communities. It’s not really a hot area because there haven’t been many new ideas in it for a long time, and my research isn’t exactly hot either, because I end up confirming what everyone knows already, but it’s the sort of thing that has to be done, making sure that what ‘everyone knows’ has some correspondence to the truth.
“What I do is hang around with an immigrant group for a while, talk with them, get to know them, establish trust so they’ll tell me things, and then find out what I can about organized crime, if any, among them. And normally what I find is that if the job ladder is blocked for them, their businesses aren’t succeeding in reaching a wider market than their own community, and they’re frozen out of city politics, there’s an organized crime syndicate pretty soon. If the doors are open to them, for whatever reason, usually there’s not. And if they’re the kind of ethnic group that makes a big deal about family loyalty, then it will tend to be a bigger and more systematic crime syndicate, because the hoods have more brothers and cousins to go into business with.
“None of that’s very new, and it really just confirms what everyone knows. And I’ve been doing that kind of study for fifteen years.” He raised both his hands and made a funny little flipping gesture, as if shooing away his work, showing how unimportant it was.
“It’s dull and it’s routine and I do it because it’s my job. As soon as the crooks find out I’m not a reporter or a cop, they don’t really care about what I’m doing, so it’s not even dangerous.
“Or it wasn’t till just recently. About three months ago, I got interested in a new organized crime mob that seemed to be showing up everywhere across the country all at once, and that seemed to target practically all Islamic American communities. Now, that was strange enough—there are many different kinds of Islamic immigrants and, for that matter, many different kinds of Islam in the United States, and they don’t have a lot in common with each other. Some of them don’t even like each other much.
“And this mob was a really bad-ass outfit, too. They seemed to prefer threats and extortion—often they didn’t really give the first people in a community that they threatened time enough to give in, they just did something to scare hell out of everyone else. The kind of mob that kills just to prove they’ll do it, like some of the really nasty crack mobs, or the bad old days of the Colombian cowboys, or going back farther, like the early days of the Capone mob or the Bronx Irish gangs.
“And most of the Islamic groups have been very resistant to organized crime anyway; too many successful businessmen and kids going to college in the first generation for them to get interested in crime.
“Sociologically speaking, this new mob was the wrong kind of criminal in the wrong kind of community at the wrong time. It made no sense for them to be there according to all the orthodox theory. So naturally they got my attention.” He sighed and stared into space a moment. “After all, if you’re not brilliant, but you’re pretty good at documenting things, your best ticket is to find something interesting to document.
“Anyway, in no time at all, in the Turkish, Pakistani, Algerian, Syrian, and Iranian neighborhoods around the country, there was just plain terror of these guys, and small wonder.”
I felt my throat tightening, and I wasn’t sure whether I was hoping for or frightened of what I might hear, so I made myself ask, “And who are they?”
He looked down at the floor. “I think they’re the remnants of Blade of the Most Merciful.”
4
There was a long silence, and when I didn’t laugh or throw him out, he went on. “The leadership of Blade of the Most Merciful was never caught, you must know, and only about half of them are accounted for by the raids that put it out of business. And the only ones in prison were the few whose lives were saved medically—did you know about those?”
“Yeah,” I said, my mouth completely dry. “Yeah, I know. Nine captured, wounded members. Four died in the hospitals they were in, a couple of them probably with help. The rest died in prison within a year of going in, all of them ruled suicide, though I think a couple of them also had help. Not one of them ever said a thing, not even the simplest political statement to the world.”
Harry Skena nodded, tugged at his ear gently. “In the other case I have the evidence I could show you that these are Blade people.”
“If they are—why are they doing it? And what’s a terror organization doing turning into organized crime?”
He shrugged. “Maybe they’re broke and they need the money, and they’ve got a lot of practice at violence. The Soviet Union recently went out of business, and though I don’t think they were behind Blade, maybe Blade was getting money from them for contract jobs. Or maybe they were never really a terrorist outfit—maybe they were always just a plain old criminal enterprise, that found a way to make cash in the terrorist biz. Or maybe what they really are is something totally different, and organized crime and political terrorism are both means to the same end, which is something different from either politics or profit. I have no idea. The trouble is, I have good reason to think that at about the same time that I was figuring out who they had to be, they were also noticing me, and figuring out what I knew.
“They aren’t the type of outfit that gives warnings, but I didn’t want to run until I had to. So I got kind of a habit of not being at home, keeping irregular hours, making myself unpredictable. Not hard to do, I’m a bachelor, and I’ve lived by myself for years. This afternoon I came by my apartment to get a change of clothes for after handball. My side of my building—the Park Plaza, up on Craig Street—was caved in. Cops and fire trucks were running in all directions. I called the newsline and learned that it had been a bomb blast—there were a bunch of people hurt in Duranti’s, but luckily very few tenants were home. Best guess was that a maintenance man had accidentally set off the bomb.
“Maintenance was coming to my place to set mousetraps this afternoon. They left me a note to that effect.
“I walked back to Pitt—just a few blocks to my office in Forbes Quad—picked up these two cases, which I already had packed, and took a cab here. One car stayed with us for four blocks, so I asked the driver to do some evading. He thought he had lost them.”
I nodded. “Mind if I make a phone call?”
“I’d expect you to.”
I picked up the phone. I had a secure line—they’re a necessity in my line of business—and so did Dad, because with the ever-present danger he’d decided he had to have one, too. We’d never used them to talk about anything other than where to meet for lunch (and come to think of it we usually met at Duranti’s—that would have to change). The phone rang twice, then Dad picked it up and said hello.
I told him what was up, in a few short sentences.
“Well, yes, I know Harry Skena slightly,” Dad said. “Tallish, big, square-shouldered, graying hair, clean-shaven … looks sort of like—maybe I shouldn’t say this, but one of my gra
d students is a former student of Harry’s and always said Harry looked like Fred Flintstone.”
“That’s the guy,” I said. “Is what he’s saying plausible?”
Dad sighed. “Well, Blade has to have gone somewhere. I suppose organized crime might suit them as well as anything. They really had nowhere to run once the world started hunting them down, so there’s nothing too wildly implausible about that part of the story. As for why—well, Harry’s absolutely right. You remember that’s what baffled me about it—why on Earth they were doing the strange, pointless violence they were doing. So in a way the parts that don’t make any sense are exactly the parts that are really consistent with their known character.”
“Okay, but then why haven’t the FBI and the cops believed him?” I glanced up from the phone and saw that he was sitting there, his hands folded in his lap, listening patiently. If what Harry Skena was telling me was true, then he was sitting there watching me decide whether or not to help, which might be literally life and death for him, but he looked no more alarmed than he would waiting for a dog license or for a restaurant to approve his credit card. I liked that about him at once, so I wanted him to be telling me the truth.
Dad sighed. “Well, you and I both got to know them—and I was a consultant while they were hunting down Blade. Mark, we both know the official cops are good, but they’re also file-closers by nature. They like to have things officially over with and they don’t like to reopen investigations. So somebody you’ve barely heard of—a nothing-special professor at a second-rate university—comes to you with a story like that … and you can either reopen the file and trigger all kinds of hard work for yourself … or you can pat him on his head, note him down as a nut, and most likely it will turn out fine. And if it doesn’t—well, Harry Skena may be dead, but then they’ll really know, won’t they? As long as the evidence isn’t ironclad, and it’s not their neck on the line, it’s awfully easy to leave that file closed, and pretty hard to decide to open it. That’s what I would say is going on.”
“It makes sense,” I admitted. “Uh, in present circumstances I’m going to have to get Harry to a safe house somewhere and do it right away. If you like, once I have him somewhere safe with a secure phone line, I’ll fax you his evidence.”
“I’d appreciate that. If Blade is back, I’ve got another book to write. Besides, maybe I can get some official action on this—I think the FBI would listen to me, especially after this bombing attack. Give them a call, too, once you’re dug in somewhere. Tell Harry hi from me. And Mark?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful. I wish like hell you’d get out of that stupid line of work and start using that good brain of yours again, but if you’re going to do it, at least stay sharp and tough. And if you do find you’re shooting at Blade bastards … shoot me a couple too, okay?”
“Deal, Dad. Love to Carrie. You guys get careful, too. Might be worth having Payton put more guards on for a few days.”
“I’d already thought of it.”
We said “bye” and hung up. I nodded to Skena. “You check out okay. So we’re leaving right away—my car’s in a secure area a block away, and we need to get walking before anyone turns up. We’ll head out of town and work out where we’re going as we go—if we take 79 North we can go either way on the pike or just keep heading north, or backtrack and bypass the town. It’s about the fastest way there is to make our tracks hard to follow.”
“Fine,” he said. “Er—on the matter of payment and expenses—”
“What you’ve given me is good for a while,” I said, “and if it really is Blade that’s after you, for purely personal reasons I’d be willing to do this as a pro bono case.”
“Good, then. I shall pay you every cent I’m able, but I’m afraid my case still won’t be much of a moneymaker for you.”
He stood up and extended his hand; we shook on the deal.
Then there was a terrifying roar as the front door of the storefront was blown down with a small shaped charge. Skena grabbed his cases; I yanked a drawer open and grabbed the .45 in there, leaped over the desk, ran to the office door. I could hear the heavy footsteps and the rush of deep breathing, and then the doorknob turned uselessly as they tried it before blowing this door as well.
I put a shot straight through the door—it was solid-core, but at point-blank range a .45 slug will get through the wood, and even if the slug itself doesn’t have the energy left to kill, the spray of splinters into the guy’s chest and face ought to distract him a moment. There was a howl of pain and, as I stepped aside, two answering rounds punched holes in the door, spraying splinters all over the back wall.
“This way,” I said to Skena, keeping my voice a lot calmer than I felt. One thing I had learned from Payton was to have a back way out; you never knew when you might have to move a client through undercover. Mine was a steel fire door behind a fake bookcase; I opened it and gestured him through. A shot rang off the dead-bolt, but the office door held; as I closed the bookcase door it was still holding. “Down,” I said. “This takes us to the place next door’s basement.”
The place next door was Berto’s pizza joint. Jim Berto, the owner, was an old beer buddy. I paid him a retainer every month for these occasions. I’d only had to use this twice before, in five years of business, and it was worth every penny.
The basement was his garage, and I had keys to every delivery car. I had Skena get down in the backseat of one, jumped into the driver’s seat, and we were off through the back alley. From my office I could hear shouting and running, and there was a swarthy type standing by my back Dumpster, but he didn’t look at the pizza car departing—or not right away.
As we were just turning the corner out of the alley, I saw men run out of Berto’s garage, and the Dumpster leaner suddenly looked a lot more excited. Damn—if I’d had a few seconds more they’d have had no idea where we were headed. I couldn’t make an effective run for it in the pizza car—aside from being bright red and white and easy to spot anywhere, it also had less than a quarter tank of gas. And if they knew I was rolling, they’d be headed for my private garage as fast as they could.
If you’re given the choice between impossible and difficult, take difficult. I laid rubber right through the alley stop sign, scaring the hell out of one of Berto’s real pizza drivers, and roared right up Beacon Street toward my office, with its plume of smoke pouring from its shattered door and front window. A crowd was already starting to gather to see what was going on, and I decided more diversion would be a good idea.
I held down the horn and sped up. Sure enough, that had to be their car pulled up on the sidewalk—I guess terrorists don’t worry much about parking tickets—so I took a chance, pushed the electric window down button, pulled my .45 from its shoulder holster, slowed just a little, and leaned over to the passenger side, putting a round into one rear tire and one front tire on their van, and then one into the startled driver. I had just an instant of seeing his shocked face and the hole torn in his neck before I had to get control of the car again and floor it up the steep, winding street.
I’d finally shot someone, and it was a Blade terrorist. My life was made—from here on out anything good that happened was going to be pure profit.
A shot screamed off a phone pole on one side of me, and the back window of a car shattered—whoever was shooting wasn’t being very effective just yet—then we were around the corner and headed down Murray Avenue. With luck they might split up forces and lose me, trying to cover the parking garage and both directions on the parkway all at once. “You okay back there, Dr. Skena?”
“Fine so far. Should I stay down?”
“Might as well. Do you have a gun?”
“Yes, but it hasn’t been fired in twenty years, and it’s been longer than that for me—”
It figured, somehow. “Okay, then just stay down and let me do the shooting.”
I whipped the pizza wagon into the entry of the parking garage I use without signaling or s
lowing down; it fishtailed pretty badly, knocking a traffic post a little, but it minimized the time to react in case anyone was following or watching. At least there was no line, so I rolled up to the ticket booth, grabbed the ticket, and the pizza car was through the gate before it was entirely raised.
You’re really not supposed to drive up the down ramps in a parking garage at forty miles per hour, but it was still a bit before rush hour, and I figured the more chaos I created the better, at the moment. What I hoped for happened; two exiting cars pulled over to get away from me and ended up in fender-bender situations on the ramp. One ramp partially blocked, and I knew which one …
The high-security area was on the top floor of the parking garage; I had the electronic key in my hand as we pulled up to it, and the Mercedes 510 SL “woke up” for me in its stall, the engine running smoothly and the lights coming on, before I had fully stopped the now-battered Berto’s pizza wagon. It occurred to me that if I’d seen the way I was driving, and not known who I was, I’d have ordered all my pizzas from Berto’s from then on—it sure looked like the most determined delivery driver I’d ever seen.
I yanked the car to a stop just short of the gate. “Out, and bring your cases,” I said to Skena, and jumped to push my combination into the gate lock’s buttons. The gate opened smoothly, and Skena and I ran to the Mercedes; another press of the electronic key opened my trunk, and we heaved his cases next to the packed suitcase, spare pistol case, and spare ammo I always keep in there. Then we were inside the car, and I pulled it sharply out and headed outward.
“You’ve blocked yourself in with that—” Skena was saying, but before he could get out “pizza car,” I had slowed briefly, bumped it hard, and, since I had left it in neutral, rolled the pizza car backward onto the down ramp, its doors still hanging open. It gathered speed and headed downward to jam someplace or other, making one more barrier, but I was already on my way—down the up ramp, this time, to balance out the way I had come in.