by Blake Banner
There was a landing, synthetic pale blue carpeting, double glass doors ahead of me onto a large room with lots of empty desks. On my left, johns, on my right a door: Manager. I took three long steps and kicked the door open.
Plate-glass windows overlooking East Tremont Avenue and the St. Raymond Cemetery. A large steel desk. A man behind it, astonished, gray hair, a gray suit. Beside him, on his right, a hat and a coat on a stand. A sofa on my left. Cabinets on my right. Blue synthetic carpet under my feet.
I snapped: “Aleksio Marku?” Terror in his eyes. “Are you Aleksio Marku?”
He swallowed like he was swallowing a golf ball. “I...what...who are you?”
I snarled, “I need to talk to Aleksio Marku.”
“I am...”
I double-tapped him between the eyes. His brains sprayed over the window and he slumped back, staring at the ceiling like he had never seen a ceiling before and he couldn’t believe it.
I turned and ran down the stairs, pressing the speed dial on my burner four times. I didn’t hear it or see it, but I knew that around the city—around the Bronx—rucksacks were exploding, ripping the guts out of the Albanian Mafia. And within half an hour, Peter Rusanov would be getting the news. I needed to get back to the club.
I left the Audi where it was, spent a couple of minutes looking around the cars in the lot outside, like I was thinking of buying one, and then walked away, peeling the adhesive tape from my fingers.
It was a little less than a mile to St. Peter’s, where I had left my VW, but I took it easy, like I was strolling, and used the time to relax my heart rate and think through what came next. I got there after half an hour, climbed in the VW and called Peter.
“I hear news. Is good. Where are you?”
“On my way to the club.”
“Everything good?”
“No problems. Everything went according to plan.”
“And the money?”
“I’m bringing it with me. I’ll see you in the office.”
I hung up before he could answer and made a slow, three-quarter-hour drive to Mott Haven via Shore Drive on the Eastchester Bay, watching my mirrors more than I watched the road ahead. Nobody followed me.
I finally made it to the club at three PM and climbed the stairs to Rusanov’s office. When I pushed through the door he was sitting behind his vast desk. He was smiling but looking cautious, and raised an eyebrow at the small kid’s rucksack that I had in my hand.
“You take long time to come back. Where is Dima and Fjodor?”
I smiled like he was worrying about nothing and dropped the rucksack on the sofa. Then I went over to his desk.
“They’re downstairs. Did you ever see three and three-quarters of a million bucks before, in cash?”
He nodded. “Yes, and much more. Why downstairs?”
I walked around the desk, still smiling. I knew he had a button he could press to call for help. I didn’t want him to press it.
“They said they needed a drink. I could use one myself. Look, I want to show you something...”
Now he was frowning and I saw his right hand twitch toward his alarm button. I moved fast, faster than him, and delivered a right hook hard on the tip of his jaw. The chair spun and rolled. His eyes rolled too, up into his head as he lost consciousness. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, grabbed the letter opener and rammed it hard down behind his left collarbone, severing his carotid artery and his jugular vein. It’s one of the fastest and cleanest kills there is. The bleeding is profuse, but it is all internal. He never knew he’d died.
I left quietly and trotted down the stairs like a guy whose world is in perfect order. There was nobody at the cloakroom yet, so I stepped into the bar. Chavez was polishing glasses. He was a member of the Chupa Cabras and watched me as I crossed the room, like I didn’t belong and he’d like to put me where I did belong. I smiled at him.
“Who’s here?”
He finished polishing the glass in his hands before he answered.
“El Patron is upstairs. Benny and Oscar, and the other boys in the back room.” He narrowed his eyes. “Where are Dima and Fjodor?”
“They’re with Peter,” I said, and reflected that it was probably true—they were all in hell. I turned and left, got back in my beat-up old VW and accelerated fast toward the Grand Concourse, to take the Deegan Expressway. As I was picking up speed, heading east, I pulled the burner from my breast pocket and pressed the last speed dial number. I heard the explosion, and felt the rumble through the road.
I figured that had been a good day’s work, even a good week’s work. There was significantly less trash on the streets, and also less significant trash on the streets. Peter Rusanov and Aleksio Maku, both gone, and their organizations broken. If the cops and the Feds, and the mayor, took the opportunity and used it, that could make a difference. It could save lives.
I followed the Bruckner Boulevard as far as Hollywood Avenue and crossed the bridge onto Layton, then turned right into Shore Drive. As I approached my small, blue clapboard cottage, I noticed a shiny Chevy SUV parked outside. I pulled up just in front of it and climbed out, looked around. There was nobody looking back, so I let myself in the house and closed the door behind me.
There was a small hallway, a kind of enclosed porch, with a coat rack and a hat rack screwed to the wall, and a small table with an empty fruit bowl for keys. Through there, on the left there was a door that led to my open-plan living room and kitchen. I knew they were there before I went through. It might have been intuition, or maybe I had picked up unconsciously on a handful of small things that were wrong; maybe I smelt them. Whatever it was, I went into the living room with my hand on my newly acquired Walther PPK .38, knowing they were going to be there.
One of them was sitting at the breakfast bar, sipping coffee. The other was sitting in an armchair, reading a National Geographic, which he dropped on the table as I came in. He also had a mug of coffee on the small lamp table beside him.
The one at the breakfast bar was in his late forties, with very short hair and a good but inexpensive blue suit. The one in the armchair was closer to sixty, thin and craggy, with a gray crew cut and an expensive gray suit. He said:
“Our conversation is being monitored right now from the SUV outside, and relayed to the field office in Manhattan. If you shoot us, you will be dead within thirty seconds. I assure you it is not worth it.”
I put the PPK back in my waistband, but stayed standing in the doorway.
“Field office in Manhattan? You’re Feds?”
The older guy reached in his jacket and pulled out a badge. His pal at the bar did the same. I examined the older guy’s one. He said, “Special Agent Butler, and this is Special Agent Levy.” It looked genuine, plus they smelt like Feds.
“What do you want? And why shouldn’t I have you prosecuted for breaking and entering?”
He smiled, but it was devoid of humor. His pal just stared at me without expression. Agent Butler said, “Because we are here to arrest you on multiple counts of murder, drug trafficking and theft. I have a warrant if you really want to see it.”
I shrugged and shook my head. “Bullshit.”
“We’ve been tailing you since you arrived in New York, Mr. Bauer. We know your background and we’ve been watching you closely for the past three weeks. We know about your association with the late Peter Rusanov, and we have audio and video records of everything you did today.”
I shook my head again. “Bullshit.”
Butler laughed. “Not a very compelling defense, Mr. Bauer. Is that what you intend to rely on in court? Bullshit?”
“I don’t need a defense. You’re pissing in the wind. Get out.”
Levy finished his coffee and set the cup carefully down in its saucer. Butler sighed.
“We can arrest you if you want, Mr. Bauer. But I think that when I invite you to come with us to Federal Plaza, to see the video evidence and listen to the audio of your conversations with Rusanov and Maku, yo
u will come voluntarily.”
He wasn’t wrong. I knew I was screwed. But I figured that if all they wanted was an arrest, they’d have done that by now. Obviously they had something else in mind. So I did the only thing I could do. I played along.
Chapter Six
They took me to the twenty-third floor of the Federal Plaza, on Broadway, and locked me in an office with a beige carpet, dark wooden walls and a picture of Trump beside a stars and stripes. There was a black leather sofa which I sat on for about an hour, and then stretched out on to sleep.
There were no windows in the room and they had taken my cell as well as my watch and my brand-new Walther PPK. So it was impossible to tell how much time had passed. I awoke from sleep and knew I was hungry, but it could have been nine at night, four in the morning or nine AM the next day.
I spent about an hour working out and training, then lay doing Sudoku puzzles in my mind until I fell asleep again. I was eventually awoken by the door opening. I sat up. There was a woman in a dark gray suit with a white blouse and a string of pearls around her neck. She was blonde, probably fake, with intelligent eyes and a hard mouth. She was holding an attaché case and watching me with her hand on the handle.
I said, “Do I get to see a lawyer, or are you holding me under the Patriot Act?”
She didn’t answer. She closed the door and went and sat behind the large, polished wood desk, in the large, shiny black leather chair. I watched her from the black leather couch.
She said, “You just killed eleven men. A few nights ago you killed six men and facilitated the murder of a seventh. That’s eighteen men in a week. You’re like a one-man genocide. How do you sleep at night?”
I shrugged. “The ones that keep me awake are not the ones I killed. Anyway, you talk. It means nothing. Aren’t you supposed to show me your badge and tell me who you are?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“So you’re not a Fed.”
She opened her attaché case and pulled out a file. She opened that carefully on her desk, as though she was scared the contents might spill out and cause a genocide.
“Harry Bauer,” she said. “You were named by the orphanage where you were left. You were never adopted. Above-average IQ but found it impossible to take discipline or instruction. After you left the orphanage you bummed around for a couple of years and finally went to Europe, where you joined the Special Air Service, a British special forces unit. It was not surprising they wound up asking you to leave, but it is surprising that it took eight years.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has people who know how to carry out research?”
She ignored the question, cupped one fist in the other and leaned her chin on them.
“When somebody leaves a unit like the SAS the way you did, no honorable discharge, no court martial, just a quiet departure immediately after a mission in Afghanistan, or some similar location, we take an interest.”
“Why? Your jurisdiction is domestic.”
She raised her eyebrows. “If you’re talking about the Bureau, I’d have to say that you’re a little out of date. The Bureau’s jurisdiction is spreading exponentially with the threat of terrorism. In this cyber age, where weapons of all descriptions have global reach, the terms ‘international’ and ‘domestic’ are losing their meaning. But even if you were right, Mr. Bauer, I thought we had established that I am not a Special Agent of the FBI.”
“So who are you?”
She made a face, gave her head a quick shake and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t have to tell you. I don’t have to tell you anything or explain anything or abide by any rules or protocols. I don’t exist. I am not even here, and never was.”
I leaned back on the sofa and felt my chin. I had stubble and absently made a rough calculation of how long I’d been there.
“So if you’re not law enforcement, you’re from the Firm. Why is the CIA interested in me?”
“As far as I am aware, they’re not, especially.”
I stifled a yawn. It was only partially an act.
“OK, so you want to quit the theatrics and cut to the chase?”
“How much did you get away with?”
I didn’t even try to stifle the yawn this time. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I would like to go home.”
She lifted a super-slim laptop out of her attaché case, opened it and spun it so I could see the screen. It showed the parking lot where I had taken the cash. The Mercedes was there, and so were my VW, the RV and the BMW. The Audi was visible outside the gate.
And so was I. I watched myself get busy, wiping them all out, one by one. It wasn’t nice to watch. She waited till I was finished, then spun the laptop back and punched the pause button.
“Satellites,” she said. “You can’t always rely on them. But we had plenty of advance warning in your case, Mr. Bauer, because we’ve been watching you since you got back from Afghanistan. That, incidentally, was a very impressive performance. Very clean and efficient, and devastating.”
“Why? Why have you been watching me?”
“That’s not relevant. The fact is we have everything you did this morning on film, from several angles, and we have audio too.”
“Audio of what?”
She smiled—it was more a mild, ill-concealed gloat—and pressed a couple of keys.
The sound quality was good. It was crackly, but clear and the voices were easily distinguished.
“You take long time to come back. Where is Dima and Fjodor?”
The sound of the rucksack dropping on the sofa, footsteps.
“They’re downstairs. Did you ever see three and three-quarters of a million bucks before, in cash?”
“Yes, and much more. Why downstairs?”
More footsteps. “They said they needed a drink. I could use one myself. Look, I want to show you something...”
A thud, the rattle of wheels, a muffled gasp.
She pressed pause again. “Do I need to go on?
I shook my head. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
“Is that how much you got away with? Three and three-quarters of a million?”
“I guess that’s something you don’t know. Who are you and what do you want?”
She shook her head, like I’d asked a “yes-no” question.
“I told you, I am nobody. I don’t exist. The question is, do you realize how thoroughly sunk you are?”
I thought about it and decided there was nothing to be gained by bullshitting.
“Yeah, probably. So now what?”
“So now I can file all this data away in a vault and forget about it, or I can hand it over to the DA. There will be a sensational trial, and you will no doubt become a public hero, write your autobiography and sell the film rights to Hollywood, so that when you come out of jail, in three hundred years, you’ll be rich.”
I studied the ceiling for a while, then sighed noisily. “Are you ever going to tell me what you want?”
“I want you to come and meet somebody.”
“And then?”
“Let’s take it one step at a time. I figure meeting somebody is a better option than prison right now. I want to be sure that you understand you are as screwed as a two-dollar whore during shore leave.”
“Colorful.”
“Accurate. There is no way out for you. Do you understand that?”
“I understand.”
She pressed a button on the desk and spoke.
“Bob, bring Mr. Bauer’s belongings, please.” Then she released the button. “How much did you get away with, Mr. Bauer?”
“You mean you really don’t know?”
“I want to hear you say it. It’s in a sports bag in the bottom of your wardrobe, in your quaint little bedroom in your quaint little house on Shore Drive.”
“I haven’t counted it yet, but it’s around three and a half or three and three quarters.”
The door opened and a young g
uy in a suit came in. He had a Macy’s bag which he handed to me and left. Inside I found my PPK, my cell and my watch. The woman said, “What were you planning to do with it? Spend it at a rate of five hundred dollars a week?”
“No. I planned to take it to Belize.”
She stood. “We are going to go downstairs now, to a car. Then we’ll take a drive. We’ll be watched all the way, by satellite and by helicopter.” She pointed to the bag in my hands. “You can see I am trusting you. Do something—anything—stupid, and the entire federal system will come down on you like a ton of bricks. You won’t stand a chance.” She gave something like a smile. “Not even you.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
I stood and she held out her hand. “Colonel Jane Harris, JSOC.”
I took her hand, studying her face. “Joint Special Operations Command?”
“Let’s go.”
We rode the elevator down to the basement garage in silence. As we stepped out of the elevator and into the parking area, a black Grand Cherokee SRT pulled up and two guys in suits with wires in their ears got out. One covered me with a piece in his hand while the other opened the door for us to climb in the back.
I sat on her left. The doors slammed and locked, and a couple of seconds later we were climbing the ramp at speed, heading for the road.
“You’ve been looking for a job,” she said, and glanced at me.
“And you’re going to offer me one; one where I do the government’s dirty work with full deniability, and in exchange you don’t put me in a supermax for the next three hundred years. I’m way ahead of you, Colonel.”
She smiled. It was a nicer smile this time, but she offered it to the window instead of me, as we made for the FDR Drive.
“Is that what we’re going to do?”
“Isn’t it?” I raised an eyebrow at her, but she kept her eyes on the road outside.
“The first thing I am going to do is introduce you to a colleague, and then the three of us will have a dialogue...”