by Blake Banner
And that meant leaving no trace of myself at Archer’s Detective Agency, so that even if they traced me there, they would not be able to trace me from there.
After dinner I had a small black coffee and paid the bill, then made my way back to Olympic Boulevard. I rode the elevator back to the fifth floor and, when I came out, I found the outer door to the agency open. I stepped inside but there was nobody in the outer office. I listened at his door, but there was only silence.
He might have stepped out to get some dinner. Or he might not.
I pulled my Sig from my waistband, stood to the side of the door and tried the handle. The door swung open. Nothing else happened. I held my weapon at arm’s length in both hands and went in. The room was clear and Ted was sitting at his desk. He looked scared. He wasn’t scared. He didn’t feel anything anymore. Because he was dead. The back of his head was all over the back of his chair. But the last emotion he had felt had been fear, which was a shame, because I had the impression that Ted Wallace had been a good man. He’d deserved a better death.
His left hand was gripping the arm of his chair so tight his fingers had gone through the black vinyl imitation leather. His right hand was still on the desk, and two of his fingers were sticking up at grotesque angles. I sighed. That could mean only one thing, that they had waited outside for me to return, and they would be coming in at any moment.
Right on cue I heard the voice behind me. “Put the gun down, put your hands on your head and turn around so I can see your face.”
I laid my Sig on the desk in front of me, put my hands up and turned to face him. There were only two of them. They had closed the outer door on their way in, and now the one who wasn’t pointing a gun at me was closing the door to the inner office. I inferred from that that they planed to kill me or torture me or both.
I had a look at the guy who was holding a gun. He was gym fit, with muscles fed by powdered protein, but rarely bruised in combat. He had long blond hair tied in a ponytail, he was smiling and holding a Glock 19. They always drive dark blue Audis and they always carry Glock 19s. It’s a universal law or something.
I looked at his friend who had closed the door and was now holding a Taurus Judge 45 revolver, which can fire .45 rounds or shot, like a shot gun. That’s what they buy when they can’t afford a Glock. He was bald, with a tattooed scalp and a face like the expression of a one kilobyte brain. His mouth hung slightly open because his neurons were engaged in blinking.
I looked back at the smart one. “Now you’ve seen my face. Who sent you?”
“How about I ask the questions, smart ass?”
“Why did you torture him?”
“Hey! Shut the fuck up. I’ll ask the questions. What’s your name?”
“Why do you want to know? What the hell is going on here? I turn up for an appointment and I find…”
“Shut the fuck up! Answer the fucking question!”
I took a step closer, appealing to him with my face. “Please don’t get violent. I’ll tell you what you want to know. I’m just confused and a little frightened…”
“Start talking, man!”
“My name is Benjamin.”
“Benjamin what?”
“Dover.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Benjamin Dover? Ben Dover? Seriously?”
“Yeah, and my wife is Eileen. Why are you here? Who sent you?”
He flushed crimson. He was getting real mad. All he wanted in life was for people to fear and respect him, and I had made a joke at his expense. So he thrust the barrel of his Glock in my face like a prosthetic dick and screamed at me. “I’m asking the fucking questions, asshole! Who’s got the fucking gun here?”
I smacked his wrist hard with my right hand, gripped the barrel of the automatic with my left and levered the grip out of his fingers. The muzzle was now facing him, but as I slipped my right finger onto the trigger I shifted slightly and shot Mr. Kilobyte through the eye. His mouth was still open as he folded gently to the floor. He probably didn’t even know he was dead.
I took a step back with the weapon trained on the guy with the pony tail. He was blinking furiously, like each blink was expressing a “But…” in his brain.
I said, “I am.”
He screwed up his face again. “What?”
“You asked me who was holding the gun. I am. Sit.”
I picked up my Sig from the desk, then, as he sat, I stood between him and his dead pal. I said, “You’re not a pro. You’ve got no bruises. You haven’t even got a broken nose. You have no tolerance for pain. I’m going to tie you to the chair with shoelaces. Then I’m going to stuff your pal’s socks in your mouth to muffle your screams, and I’m going to cut your fingers off one by one with this…”
I pulled the Fairbairn & Sykes from my boot. He looked very pale and sickly. “You don’t need to do that.”
“I’ll know if you’re lying. If you lie I will take all the digits from your right hand, just to show you that I mean business. This is an ugly game, pal. You are not up to it. If you live through this ordeal, take my advice, take up landscape gardening. Now, who sent you here?”
He was sweating profusely and his hands were shaking. “It’s a guy. He knows where we hang out. He gives us jobs sometimes.”
I gave a small laugh. “You’re going to have to do a lot better than that, pal, if you want to step out of here alive. Or even intact.”
“No, wait, I’m getting to it. He works, unofficially, for a security company that takes care of celebrities, millionaires, you know the kind of thing. He said this PI had been snooping on some dude’s house in Malibu, he wanted to know who his client was. Told me to find out what I could, then…” He trailed off.
“Then what?”
“It was just the job man, it wasn’t personal.”
“Then what?”
“Then he said to… to take you out. I’m sorry, it wasn’t me…”
“What about proof of kill?”
“A photograph.”
“I’m guessing he’s not stupid enough to have you send it to his phone.”
“No, man. We meet, at the bar where we hang. Late, like twelve or one AM.”
“When?”
“Tonight, tomorrow night. When the job was done. I’m being helpful, right? Look, I can disappear. I’ll go south…”
“Name, description…”
He made a face like things just kept getting worse. “Oh, man. Nobody knows his name. We call him the Mercenary. He looks kinda military, old, forty maybe, but hard. Short gray hair. He has a Seal tattoo on his arm.”
“The bar.”
“El Chupacabras, twenty-four fifteen Slauson Avenue, Park Mesa Heights. Please, don’t make me go there, man. He’ll kill me.”
“No he won’t.”
I wasn’t sure if the Taurus was loaded with shot or .45s. I pulled the trigger and found out. It was loaded with shot. It made a very ugly mess. I squeezed Kilobyte’s hand onto his gun, and then Pony Tail’s onto his and left a nice mystery for LA’s finest to try to unravel. I put some Scotch tape over my fingertips, searched through Ted’s desk and found my file with a half-written report, some photographs and a couple of memory cards. I checked Pony Tail’s ID and found his name was Charles Oswald Jones. And he thought Ben Dover was funny. I bet they loved C. O. Jones down in Mexico.
I wiped any surfaces I might have touched and made my way down to the Silverado. On the way I thought about Ted’s family. I tried not to imagine how they would feel in the morning, when they found out he was dead. I wondered if it was my fault that he had been killed. I didn’t think it was, but I wasn’t sure.
I climbed into the truck and headed for the parking garage where I had my Zombie. I had twenty-four hours before the Mercenary started worrying about the Pony Tail and Kilobyte, but he was a loose end and I was going to have to address it sooner or later. One part of my mind was telling me I could let him slide, another told me that would be sloppy and careless. Right then I didn’t have time
to think about it. I had twenty-four hours. Right then, that was good enough.
At the garage I changed back into my suit, slipped the Maxim 9 into my holster and got into my car. Then I called Ahmed.
“Hey, Ahmed, how’s it hangin’?”
“Mr. Franklin, look, I really…”
“I am here at the airport with Mr. Giacalone, and he is really enthusiastic to make your acquaintance, know what I’m sayin’? So we are gonna come right on over to your office, and I think you will be very interested in the proposals he is gonna put to you. This is something you are going to want to hear. I hope I am not being too subtle for you.”
“No, Mr. Franklin, you are being very clear. I’ll be here when you arrive. I’ll leave word with security to let you in.”
“Do that.”
It was a short drive from Jefferson Boulevard to the Intelligent Imaging Consultants offices on Figueroa, a fraction of the distance from the airport. He’d be surprised that we’d arrived so early. But that was fine. I was happy to keep him disconcerted. The last of the day was fading from the sky as I arrived, and the lights were coming on in the streets, spilling from shops, bars and restaurants, coloring the blacktop and the sidewalks and lying luminous but oddly dead across hoods and windshields that crawled through the dying dusk into the night.
I left the Zombie at the Jack in the Box and walked to the Ernst and Young Plaza. The main door was still open and the guy on the security desk didn’t say anything to me, so I made my way to the elevators and rode to the top floor. The shining receptionist had gone home. It looked like everybody had gone home, but the doors were open and lights were still on. I stepped in, closed the doors behind me and walked quietly to Ahmed’s office. I could hear him talking inside, but I couldn’t hear anybody answering him. I opened the door softly and stepped in. He was saying, “Fine, I’ll see what I can find out from him, but this is getting out of hand…” He trailed off as he saw me, stared at me a moment, then said. “I’ll get back to you.”
He hung up. I smiled.
He said, “Mr. Franklin, I didn’t expect you for another…” His eyes flicked to the door behind me. “Mr. Giacalone…?”
I pointed over at the leather chairs and the sofa. “Let’s sit. Mind if I fix us a drink?”
He stood, frowning, hesitating, aware that something was wrong. “Um… martini, vodka, thanks. What’s going on? Where is Mr. Giacalone?”
“I have no idea. I owe you an apology. I think I’ve thrown you all into a bit of a flap.”
I smiled blandly over my shoulder. I had dropped the Goodfellas act along with the accent. He’d noticed it and he was disconcerted, searching for an explanation. He came to the coffee table and sat, folding himself carefully into the chair, like if he sat too fast everything would go wrong somehow. But that ship had sailed for him. I handed him his drink and sat opposite. He set the glass on the table with that same worried, careful manner. I continued to smile blandly and waited.
“What is going on, Mr. Franklin?”
I sipped my whiskey, chuckled and made my play. “How much has Aaron told you about us?”
He went very still. I watched the thoughts flit across his face. Now, this made sense to him. It would explain my odd behavior, the incongruent claims and my knowledge of the company’s activities. But he was cautious. He was a very cautious man. He said, “I don’t understand. Who is ‘us’?”
“You don’t understand, and yet all your body language says that you understand only too well. How much has Aaron told you about your employers, Ahmed? Omega, the organization that owns your company. The people that Aaron represents. How much has he told you about us?”
Seven
He stared at me in silence for a long while. I studied him, trying to read what was going on in his mind. A couple of times he twitched like he was going to make some excuse to go over to the desk, maybe to call security, or Fenninger, but each time the impulse failed. His curiosity was getting the better of him, as was his greed. What I had banked on was that if he believed I was Omega, he would see an opportunity to advance his own career behind Aaron’s back. My reading of his face told me I had been right. Finally he said, simply, “Omega?”
I crossed one leg over the other and sipped my drink. “Please don’t insult my intelligence, Ahmed. I know you are aware of our existence. What I am interested to know is, once again, exactly how much Aaron has told you.”
He dithered a moment longer, then committed. “Not very much. Only that he represented you, and that you had the power to further our company’s interests.”
I gave a small laugh. “Oh, yes. We can certainly do that. Which brings me, incidentally, to another point, you have a broker…”
I waited and he filled the void in a rush of words. “Yes, Elena manages the finances. She is very skilled. She engaged a broker because we need to balance the books, explain for the IRS the fact that…” He sighed, closed his eyes and started again, more slowly. “You supply us with a very handsome budget that covers our research and development programs. The problem is that the money you invest in us far exceeds our declared income. The fact that you are not an officially recognized body means that we cannot explain that income to the Internal Revenue Service. So Elena employs a broker who invested the surplus capital we had when we established the company, and the revenue from that covers our R&D program.”
I nodded. “I gather we advise you on where to invest.”
He smiled. He was beginning to relax. “Of course, and I have to say, it never fails.”
I gave a small laugh. “How could it?” I frowned. “So how do you explain to the IRS that despite the fact that you are investing in R&D, you still have surplus to invest?”
It was his turn to give a small laugh. “We don’t. We have an account in Belize where we hold the surplus capital.”
“Of course.” I stared at him with dead eyes until he started to become uncomfortable and shift his gaze around the room. Then I said, “Are you aware that we have a vacancy in our cabal?”
He froze. His eyes glittered. “I had no idea about that. Why are you telling me…?”
“Did Aaron not suggest to you that we might have an opening?”
He thought about it for a moment. “He did hint at something, but I never thought…”
“We have an opportunity coming up, Ahmed. You know that our experts are predicting a global drought, and we are going to use that drought to trigger a very profitable war. It will amount to a world war, but it will be fought in the Middle East.”
He nodded. “Yes, Aaron spoke to me about that, we are looking for movie makers…”
I smiled benignly and raised a hand. “Leave that to others, Ahmed. It’s time for you to raise your sights and move on. There are billions of dollars to be made from this crisis. I am going to need you to make some phone calls. I need you to instruct your broker on where to invest your company’s funds. Get him out of bed if you have to. Tonight, Ahmed.” I put a big, friendly smile on the right side of my face. “Tonight you join the club. You see now why I needed you here alone.”
He swallowed three times without saying anything. “I am overwhelmed. I don’t know what to say…”
“Here’s the thing, I need you to say and do exactly what I tell you to say and do. Can you do that?”
He nodded once.
“Yes, of course you can. That is why we chose you. Now, can you instruct your broker directly, or do the instructions need to come via Elena Sanchez?”
“They would have to be issued by Elena and one other partner.”
“Good, so here is the first thing you are going to do. You are going to call Elena and have her join us here.”
He nodded and stared as though he was waiting for something more.
I raised an eyebrow. “Now, Ahmed.”
He jumped. “Yes! Yes, of course!”
He fumbled for his phone and as he dialed I said, “Tell her nothing except that it is imperative she drops whatever she is doing
right now and joins you here immediately. She is not to discuss this with anyone. Put it on speaker.”
It rang a couple of times and an attractive voice answered. “Ahmed, what can I do for you?”
“Elena, I am going to ask you to trust me. I can’t discuss this over the phone, but I am going to ask you to drop whatever you are doing and come to the office immediately. This is really very important. Imperative, in fact.”
She didn’t answer for a moment. Then there was a frown in her voice. “Are you serious?”
“I have never been more serious, Elena.”
“Is this to do with your visitor, Mr. Franklin?”
“Indirectly, yes, and with the project. I really cannot discuss this with you any further on the telephone. I must insist that you come and see me now, at the office.”
Her voice became serious. “All right, Ahmed, I’ll be right over.”
“And, Elena, for the moment I would ask you not to discuss this with anybody. That is vital.”
“Ahmed, this is all a little unsettling…”
“It will make perfect sense to you when you get here, believe me. Just stick precisely to my instructions, please.”
She was silent a moment longer, then said, “All right, Ahmed. I hope you’re right. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’m on my way.”
She hung up and I drained my glass, smacked my lips and sighed. “Don’t look so worried, Ahmed. You’re about to join the Forbes One Hundred.”
His expression had changed, like he’d suddenly come to his senses and reality was looking all wrong. “I…”
“What is it? What’s troubling you? You stepped outside the box, so what? You know what separates the real winners from the mediocre and the losers? Real winners dare to try. Who dares wins, my friend. And you have just taken a very courageous step.”
He shook his head. “I don’t even know who you are.”
I laughed out loud. “What do you want? You want to see my passport? My ID? My driver’s license?” I laughed again.
He shook his head again. His skin had gone pasty and he looked like he might throw up. “But how do I know…? I should talk to Aaron…”