by Jon Land
“Six months after the fact?” Blaine challenged. “I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“Follow the chronology. Four of Black Flag’s soldiers follow Tyrell to a cemetery, end up in a grave, and all of a sudden he’s putting Midnight Run back together again. Six months go by since the Monument, but he waits until three weeks ago to dip into the past? I don’t think so.”
Belgrade flashed Blaine an uneasy glance. “And I don’t like where this is going … .”
“What if Thatch is right about Queen Mary being pregnant? What if she and Tyrell had a kid?”
Belgrade had no response.
“Make some calls, Hank. Get me a meeting.”
“You don’t want to touch these people, MacNuts.”
“Maybe I’ll just wait around for them to go after another American target.”
“They’ve been in the dark too long.”
“Then they’ll be afraid of someone turning a light on them, especially someone who can link them to the Monument.”
“Are you fucking crazy? You can’t take these people on, I’m telling you!”
“Jack Tyrell pulled your tanker of Devil’s Brew out of the ground because he’s got big plans for it,” Blaine responded quite calmly. “You want to sit around and wait to find out what they are?”
“Listen to me! The people you’re talking about don’t work for anyone officially, don’t even exist officially. They’re fucking ghosts, MacNuts, and they can make you disappear as easily as they can make themselves disappear.”
Belgrade’s phone beeped before McCracken could respond, and Hank snatched the receiver to his ear, listening without response. He replaced the receiver and looked back at Blaine.
“It’s ready.”
“What’s ready?” Blaine wondered.
“As soon as you called me from that police station, I put out an alert on the tanker. Tollbooths, police and traffic choppers, state police, even construction crews got nothing better to do than to watch what’s whizzing by them down the road. Add to that any surveillance satellites that happened to be in the area over the last few hours and, if we’re lucky, we get an indication of where Tyrell’s headed. First batch of material just got collated. Let’s take a look.”
Belgrade moved to his desk and pressed a button on a built-in control panel. Instantly the room darkened and a red-tinted, three-dimensional map of the United States appeared where a wall mural had been just seconds before.
“I’m impressed,” Blaine said.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet. Watch.” Hank worked another series of buttons, and the three-dimensional map changed as quickly as he could press them, finally settling on a close-up of the mid-Atlantic region. “So far there’ve been twenty-one possible sightings.” Another press of a button brought twenty-one lights flashing. “Eliminating those of low probability, we can cut that number down to eight.” Just like that, thirteen of the lights disappeared.”And if we eliminate these two, we’re left with a pretty clear trail.”
Blaine studied the screen. With only the six lights left flashing, the direction Jack Tyrell had headed in after pulling the tanker out of the ground in central Pennsylvania was clear:
Northeast.
Blaine snatched Belgrade’s phone from its cradle and thrust it across the desk.
“Make the call, Hank.”
FORTY-SIX
“I get the feeling you’re not comfortable in here,” the man said, as he walked slowly next to Blaine through the reptile house in Washington’s National Zoo.
“I’ve known my share of snakes in my time,” McCracken told him.
It was hours past the zoo’s closing time by the meeting’s start, but as promised, a car had been parked by the front gate to take Blaine to the reptile house, where the man from Black Flag had been waiting. He was an older man, in his seventies at the very least, with silvery hair plastered to his skull and a withered, cadaverous face. But his deep-set eyes were a piercing shade of blue, a young man’s eyes, as comfortable in the dark as some of the creatures lurking in the glass exhibits around them.
“Mr. Belgrade suggested you had a matter of some urgency to discuss,” the man said, still having not introduced himself. “Concerning Jack Tyrell.”
“He was part of Black Flag, wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve lost control of him.”
The man from Black Flag sighed. “In retrospect, I’d say we got greedy.”
“You would’ve been happier if he had succeeded in blowing up the Washington Monument?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. Such an action was required in order that we retain our efficacy.”
“Hell of a way to justify your own existence.”
“Raising funds has become more difficult for us of late. We’ve found ourselves in need of new allies.”
“So taking over the Monument, blowing it up if necessary, was meant to make you some new friends.”
“A small price to pay, in the long run.”
“Sorry I got in the way.”
“No matter,” said the old man. “I’m prepared to let you make up for it.”
Blaine caught the implication in his words. “I get the impression you haven’t exactly gone out of your way to get Tyrell back.”
“Because doing so would mean risking exposure. We consider Tyrell’s unexpected freedom to be an acceptable loss, under the circumstances.”
“Maybe that’s because you don’t know what he’s up to.”
“So Mr. Belgrade informed us.”
They stopped before an illuminated glass case where a Burmese python was slowly digesting a mouse, the last bit of a tail disappearing into the snake’s mouth. Blaine studied the man from Black Flag’s reflection. His slightly sallow skin had a shiny, waxlike quality to it, making it easy to view him as an exhibit every bit as dangerous as any tucked safely behind the barriers.
“During business hours, people flock to the cages where something’s about to die,” the man from Black Flag said suddeny. “Why is that, do you suppose?”
“Morbid fascination, I guess.”
“Only in part. The truth is people are comfortable watching because they can’t really see anything. Just a bulge in the snake’s skin moving slowly downward. If they could see the mouse being slowly digested, nobody would last long in front of the glass.”
“Except you.”
The man kept his eyes on the snake. “They can’t see what we do at Black Flag, either, and they’re just as comfortable for the same reason. People don’t want to know what the mouse looks like on the way down, and they don’t want to know how we keep their little worlds safe for them.” The man moved a little closer to the glass, placed his hand upon it. “You understand this meeting is most unusual, even unprecedented.”
“So are the circumstances.”
“Meaningless to us. The truth is I agreed because I wanted to meet you. Give you my thanks in person.” He paused, studying the snake. “You didn’t know that you’ve worked for us from time to time, did you? We retained you for the same reason we retained Tyrell: because rules don’t matter, only stakes do. The higher the stakes become, the more likely we are to make up our own rules. All of us.”
“Don’t lump me in with men like Tyrell. Please.”
“Would you like to compare your body counts to those he recorded on our behalf? Of course, in your mind the people you killed deserved it, the world is better off without them. It was no different for us.”
“Yes, it was,” Blaine said surely. “Otherwise, you never would have resorted to Black Flag. You couldn’t ask people like me to do your dirty work for you, because you knew what our answer would be.”
“Do you really think you had any more of a choice then than you do today?”
“Am I missing something?”
“You’re here now because we want you to be here.”
Blaine tensed slightly. “If this is a trap—”
“I know y
our Indian friend is in the vicinity, Mr. McCracken. I know what his course of action would be should you not leave here exactly as you came in.”
“That much we agree on.”
“But with you and the Indian here, you see, Mr. Belgrade and Mr. Thatch—both threats to us—are left alone, without any comparable form of protection, since I believe your Mr. Belamo is elsewhere as well.”
Blaine’s stomach tightened.
“But our concerns about Mr. Tyrell, regrettably, have come to mirror your own. He’s become a nuisance for us that needs to be dispatched with all due haste.” The man shook his head almost sadly. “I’ll have to show you his active file sometime. Even you’d be impressed.”
“How’d you track him down?”
“After the Mercantile Bank bombing, he needed to disappear. The people waiting to help him belonged to us.”
“Providing you access to all kinds of people with reasons to disappear.”
“Only the best and brightest. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have employed you.” Blaine could see the man’s frown reflected in the glass. “Of course, unlike Mr. Tyrell, we deactivated your file some time ago.”
“A lot can change in six months.”
“It was considerably before that, I’m afraid. Your approach died with the Cold War, when everything was black and white, before the gray set in. How are you to define yourself in a world without enemies. That world has downsized significantly, and there’s no place left for you.”
“Then why am I here?”
“Because there’s no place in it left for Tyrell, either.”
“You want me to go after him … .”
The old man nodded. “But if your efforts were to somehow lead back to Black Flag, well, your friends would have to pay the price for your indiscretion.”
“Then you’ll answer my questions?”
“Only those pertaining to Tyrell.”
“Let’s start with Queen Mary. She wasn’t with Tyrell at the Mercantile Bank bombing because she was pregnant: right or wrong?”
The man from Black Flag looked unmoved. “Actually, she gave birth the week before. A son.”
“That’s how you controlled Tyrell, isn’t it? You used his son as leverage to make him work for you.”
“We placed the boy in a good home, made sure he had all conceivable comforts.”
“But the threat was always there, what you would do if Tyrell didn’t cooperate.”
“A remarkable equalizer, I must say.”
“What about Mary?”
“Tyrell convinced her he had made all the arrangements himself. For the child’s own good, of course. And he continued cooperating, for his son’s sake, for all these years.”
“Until he killed four of your men when they came to pick him up at a cemetery in New Jersey. What changed? What made him break security and come back to the world?”
The man from Black Flag finally turned away from the glass, back to McCracken. “The one thing we could not prepare for … .”
“Jesus Christ,” Hank Belgrade muttered, looking up from the dog-eared obituary caught in the light of his computer screen. “Looks like you were right,” he said to Thatch.
Will hovered over his shoulder, trembling. “I never thought …”
“It’s all here, as close to proof as we’re gonna get.”
They both turned when the door started to open.
Blaine pulled the cell phone from his pocket the moment he emerged from the reptile house. Hank Belgrade had two offices but only one number, and it rang wherever he was. Blaine heard a distinctive click as the line was answered, the call already being routed.
It rang and rang, went unanswered.
Blaine tried again. After a dozen rings, he hung up and dialed a different number.
“Hello,” Liz Halprin answered groggily, in her father’s hospital room.
“Where’s Sal?” Blaine demanded.
“He just went down to—”
“When he comes back, tell him you’ve got to get out of there. All of you!”
“But my father—”
“There’s no choice. You’re not safe. Neither is he. Sal will know what to do.”
“What’s happened?” she asked, the fatigue gone from her voice.
“I know now where Tyrell’s headed with the Devil’s Brew,” McCracken told her as calmly as he could manage. “He’s going back to the place where one part of his life ended, at the Mercantile Bank building twenty-five years ago, and where another finished when his son was killed after taking a classroom hostage at an elementary school last month … .”
Liz felt the fear pour through her like a cold rush, as Blaine finished.
“New York City.”
5
THE TAKING OF MANHATTAN
FORTY-SEVEN
“You see what I’m talking about?”
Gus Sabella kept his hands on his hips, turning beet red as he continued to gaze at the sign affixed to the construction fence.
When he’d left the job site yesterday it had read: REBUILDING NEW YORK CITY ONE BRICK AT A TIME.
But overnight somebody had painted over the B in “brick” and replaced it with a P.
“We call the cops and get squat from them,” Gus moaned to his shift supervisor. “Every night it’s something different. It’s getting so I’m gonna start sleeping in the trailer with my shotgun. Blow the balls off any punk who messes with this site. Starting tonight.”
“We make a deal with the union,” said Lou Marinelli, shifting his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, “this stops today.”
“You sound like the enforcers they keep sending down. Makes me wonder whose side you’re on.”
“The side that wants us to come in on time and on budget. This vandalism keeps up, we’ll never accomplish either. Means we can kiss any future city contracts goodbye.”
“We should give up, then … .”
“More like in. Play the game, like I been saying.”
Marinelli was big, but Gus, taking a lumbering step forward, seemed ready to swallow him. Sabella was a huge man, with a gut that sagged over his belt. He had dark skin and had managed to keep all his hair, which fell in a wild tangle whenever he took off his hard hat.
Marinelli flinched when Gus yanked something from under his jacket.
It was a can of spray paint.
“Nobody scares me off,” said Gus, who kept a pair of cans ready like six-guns in his trailer. As Marinelli looked on, Gus sprayed over the vandalized portion of the sign in white. Wait a while for it to dry, then do his best to trace out a fresh B in red to match the other letters.
Below in the construction pit on West Twenty-third Street, where a parking lot had been just a few months before, the monumental task of rebuilding a main junction of the city’s sewer system was under way. Payloaders, bulldozers, backhoes, and cranes worked in unison to tear up old piping and install new. Huge, hangar-size entryways had been opened up to access a trio of sewer lines and storm drains, which formed part of the miles and miles of swirling tunnels that ran beneath New York City.
Gus Sabella’s crew was responsible for reconstructing this main junction, which had simply collapsed over time, a job that meant first digging up and clearing the earth to remove the old pipes and conduits, and then replacing them. The company Gus was a partner in had managed to win the bid by undercutting the competition in both price and time: price by being nonunion, time by digging up one section while replacing another. That accounted for the clutter of heavy machines, which sometimes seemed to need a traffic cop to keep them from smashing each other apart. The upshot was frantic, frenzied days that didn’t bother Gus nearly as much as arriving every morning wondering what had been messed with the night before.
“Hey, boss,” said Marinelli, as Sabella checked if the paint was dry. “Take a look at this.”
Sabella turned to see a huge black tanker truck rolling toward the ramp that led down into the block-size construction pit. Thing loo
ked like something out of Star Wars. Gus had never seen anything that even remotely resembled it. The driver brought the tanker to a halt and leaned out his window toward Gus.
“What the hell you call this?”
“State-of-the-art shit removal,” the driver said, producing a crumpled work order. “Got a major backup I’m supposed to pump out in tunnel 73-A.”
Gus looked into the cab and gave the driver a second look. Guy had skin the color of unbaked angel cake and pink eyes that didn’t seem to blink.
Gus took the work order and checked it over. “Something break?”
“Won’t know until I get there.”
“My reason for asking, see, if the rupture’s our fault, we get docked.”
The driver refolded his work order. “I go into the tunnel, find the problem, and drain it. The rest of this stuff, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”
Gus backed off so he had a clear route down the ramp. “Know where you’re going?”
“I’ll just follow the smell.”
The milk-faced driver shifted and eased the tanker onto the ramp.
FORTY-EIGHT
“You look nervous, Othell,” said Jack Tyrell.
“It’s a technical thing.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Othell Vance seemed reluctant to speak. “I followed the parameters. I think I did everything right. It’s just that not a lot is known about how Devil’s Brew performs in battlefield conditions.”
“That what you call this?”
“Am I wrong?”
Tyrell tapped him tenderly on the shoulder. “We know it blows shit up, Othell. That’s good enough for me,” he said, and turned his gaze on the latest addition Marbles had made to their command center: an electronic wall map that featured bright-red lines designating every bridge and tunnel that provided access to New York City, seventeen in all.
The night before, he and Othell had divided them up between two four-man groups disguised as DPW workers. The apparent nature of the crews’ work was line striping, and in fact a pair of men in each group did precisely that to explain the lanes’ being closed off. While that pair painted, though, either Othell Vance or Jack Tyrell sprayed a wide strip of Devil’s Brew aerosol across the width of the targeted sites. It foamed up like shaving cream, making a slight crackling sound before sinking through the surface into the beds and superstructures, expanding to fill as many gaps and cracks as it encountered. The final man in each group was responsible for setting and tuning a tiny receiver and capacitor. A nearby safety rail provided the sites for the bridges, while in the tunnels the equipment was mounted low on a wall and a wire antenna strung upward.