by Blake Banner
Finally, I went to the window and opened it. Then I dragged Ahmed over and, with considerable difficulty, I dragged him up and kind of folded him out through the gap. As I watched him slip and fall, I wondered if he’d wake up on the way down. Then I decided that, like him and Elena, and the rest of them, I didn’t give a damn. After a couple of seconds there was a sickening thud and several shouts. I walked away from the window.
The Maxim was unregistered, so they would not trace it to me. I left it there, on the floor, where the boys from the LAPD would find it and deduce that Ahmed had dropped it on his way to jump out the window, after murdering his colleagues. They’d never know why he did it, but they would guess it had something to do with the disastrous investments they had made on his recommendation.
I stepped out of the office, rode the elevator down to the parking garage and exited unnoticed on foot.
I sat in the Zombie drumming my fingers on the wheel, listening to the sirens and thinking. I knew I had probably blown my chance of hitting Fenninger on the highway the next day because he would now be not only changing his routine, but also alert. Maybe I hadn’t been as smart as I ought to have been, but I figured it was a fair price to pay for sinking Intelligent Imaging Consultants. Besides which, I was kind of curious to see how long it would take the news to reach Fenninger, and which way he would jump come morning. My guess was they would assume it was the work of the FMW, which was fine by me.
My next steps were clear. I had to go and find the Mercenary and take him out of the equation one way or another. After that I had to go to Malibu and sit on Fenninger’s house. It wouldn’t be long before the cops had identified Ahmed and got into the offices of Intelligent Imaging Consultants. Their first step then would be to notify the families and senior management, and it wouldn’t be long after that that Fenninger got to hear about it. It could be anything from a couple of hours to sometime in the morning.
When he did, when he and Omega learned that Intelligent Imaging Consultants had been wiped out, one of two things was going to happen: Fenninger was going to drive to his office as he did every morning, or he was going to sound the alarm and take some form of defensive action.
If he drove to the office, I would take him out en route. Then I would go home and start making plans for Beta and Alpha.
If he took some defensive action, that would either be to barricade himself inside his house while Omega took care of the threat, or he would be transported to some secure location. It was impossible to predict what they would do on the information I had available, but the Mercenary might be able to help.
I was about to hit the ignition when something caught my eye. It was a guy walking into the parking lot and heading toward me. He was about six foot six, but he hadn’t the muscle strength to keep his skeleton straight, so he looked like an animated ‘S’ with stooped shoulders and rubbery legs. He was swearing a woolen coat two sizes too small for him and a colorless wool hat pulled down on his head, and he was walking straight toward me. I eased out my Sig and cocked it. When he’d drawn level with my car he stooped down and stared through the passenger window, with his face creased up, showing his top teeth and his gums. He tried the door, I unlocked it and he pulled it open.
“Hi.” He pulled some strands of limp blond hair from his face and I caught the smell of stale sweat and onions. “My name is Njal? I em from Norvay? Can I come in?”
“No. I’m just leaving. What do you want, Njal?”
“Oh, yah! I can come wiz you. I em hoping ve ken be friends. Ve heff de same enemies. I sink.”
I sighed. “Can the accent. What enemies? What are you talking about?”
He took that as an invitation and climbed in, slamming the door behind him. When he spoke his accent was less exaggerated, but it was still there. “You have been watching Aaron Fenninger. You have followed him to the IIC, and shortly after you go up…” He smiled with dry, Scandinavian wit. “Ahmed Musa comes down. Meanwhile Elena Sanchez, Erick Dunbar and Izamu Suzuki also have gone up, but they are not coming down. Only when the police bring them in the gurneys, yuh?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. How about you get to the point?”
He fingered some fine strands of platinum hair away from his face. “The point? The point is not so easy. I am a Free Mind Warrior. You know what this means?”
“I know what it means.”
“I think you also are a Free Mind Warrior.”
“You’re wrong. I’m not.”
He gave a small laugh that suggested I had potential but I was still in my intellectual infancy. “You think we are an organization. But that, if you are looking for a point, is a point. We are not an organization. We are not even ‘we’. We are individuals, chaotic in many creative ways, who are united in only one thing.” He held up a very long index finger. “That thing is our hatred of the organizations that are seeking to take possession…” He stared at me as he clenched a huge fist in a graphic illustration of taking possession. “…of our minds.” He pointed at me and shook his head. “Whatever you say, you are a Free Mind Warrior. I know this.”
I rubbed my face with my palms, telling myself that this I did not need. I shook loose a Camel and offered it to him.
He grinned and nodded elaborately. “Oh, uh-huh, yuh…” He took it and I took another myself. I flipped my Zippo and we lit up. He filled his lungs with a deep drag and blew smoke at the roof of the car.
“Look, Njal, I seriously have no idea what you are talking about. And, to be honest, I haven’t got time for this.” I spread my hands. “If you are a member, or a ‘not-a-member’ of the FMW then, so long as you are not killing innocent people, I have some sympathy with you. But I am not a…”
He raised a very mobile eyebrow on a very mobile face. He finished for me and there was a hell of a lot of irony in his voice. He said, “What? A warrior? You are going to tell me that you are not a warrior?” He chuckled, and like the rest of him, his chuckle dwarfed the car. “We actually know quite a lot about you. You would be surprised.” He took another drag and I noticed that the cigarette looked dwarfed in his hand. “Let me save you some time. We are not a bunch of hysterical maniacs who believe we are going to go to some kind of fucking heaven if we die for the right cause. We are all intelligent, well educated professionals and we all have skills we bring to the enterprise. I would not be here, sitting in this car with you, if I did not know who you are. We should stop wasting time and move on to the next, more interesting, step.”
“What is that step, Njal?”
“We know what you are doing. We like it. We want to help.”
“I don’t need help.”
“Ach! Come on! You are more intelligent than this! Aaron Fenninger is a magnate in the TV and movie business. We are on the cusp of a new era, where TV, movies and IT are all coming together in a nightmare that is making Orwell look like light, comic relief. IIC is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. You want to take out Fenninger, but when you do that you are taking on the…” He searched for the word, “The linchpin of their global power.”
The question snapped out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Whose global power?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. We don’t know. Bilderberg? Illuminati? The Masons?” He made a little explosion with his lips and blew out, making a pffff! sound. “Is all conspiracy theory bullshit, but whoever they are, they exist. And they own the media.” He wagged his two fingers at me, holding the cigarette and squinting through the smoke. “Point is, you need help. You cannot take on all this power on your own.”
He was right. He was right in everything he said. And he knew too much for me to ignore him. But I could not afford to be sidetracked now, like this, into a dark ally where I had no control of what happened next.
“Look, pal, Njal, with the greatest respect to you and your Free Mind Warrior friends, I cannot do this. You are wasting my time and I have somewhere I need to be. So I am going to ask you to get out of my car.”
He sighed, and as he did, smoke trailed from his nose, making him look like some weird, Scandinavian dragon. “You are going to Aaron Fenninger’s house.” I didn’t answer. “Is not a good plan. He has people looking after him, not just his Bilderberg friends, professional security. They know about you. They have been watching you watching them.”
“What do you want, Njal? You have convinced me that you know what you’re talking about. You have convinced me you’re smart and professional. Cut to the fucking chase. What do you want from me?”
He smiled. “All I want is to introduce you to a friend. You will have a lot in common with him. He can help you, and you can help him.”
I nodded, “OK. I understand. Now let me explain something to you. I am out of the game. I was in, now I am out. But, when this is all over, when I have finished my job tonight, I will give you an introduction to the people you do need to talk to. I am certain that they will be very interested in your movement. I am not. After tonight, I am going home.”
He nodded several times. “Ooooh kay, so you do not want to come and talk to my friend tonight.”
“No. I don’t want to, and also I can’t.”
He gazed for a moment out the passenger window and said again, half to himself, “Oooooh kay… Fine…” He turned to me, smiled and held out his hand. I took it. He held it and winked. “OK, Mr. Lacklan Walker. It was nice talking to you, anyway. So, good luck to you and maybe see you around, yuh.”
He let go of my hand, climbed out of the car and walked away across the parking lot on his long, gangling legs.
“Who the fuck…?” I muttered it to myself as I watched him disappear. “Who the fuck was that?”
I fired up the huge, silent engine and slipped out of the parking lot. As I moved away, in my rearview mirror I could see the patrol cars and the ambulance parked outside the office block, their red and blue lights flashing a dreary, banal message of death and tragedy. People were dead, but the Great Machine would grind on, the droughts would come, the faceless, nameless victims would pile up in the deserts, with the flies on their bloated faces, while the stars shone brighter in Hollywood, and the kings and queens grew richer in their palaces, in Malibu and Riyadh.
Nine
El Chupacabras was not hard to find. Nothing in L.A. is hard to find. It is a vast, sprawling grid, a matrix, where everything is connected to everything else by straight lines, miles long. It’s the city that generates the wildest, most expensive dreams in the world, yet it has all the character and style of a graphics card.
El Chupacabras, however, was a little different. It was small and set back from the road beyond a concrete forecourt, and the buildings on either side were concrete slabs. On the left there was a plumber’s business that looked like a small factory, and on the right there was a drama and dance school that looked like a prison. El Chupacabras sat between the two of them, low and squat, with a green awning and iron bars on its windows, like an hacienda teleported out of Mexico onto Slausen Avenue.
On the forecourt there were a couple of trucks, a couple of Harleys and a couple of old saloon cars. There was dim light in the windows and the soft hum of music. The rest of the street was still and quiet, but for the occasional car that hummed past. I parked the Zombie across the road and walked to the bar, wondering if my suit would be conspicuous, but not much caring either way.
I pushed through the door. The place was noisy, thick with smoke and people. There seemed to be an eclectic mix, from city suits to bums, Hell’s Angels and hookers. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the owner had some kind of arrangement with the local PD. There must have been a couple of dozen bodies or more, some leaning at the bar, others at tables. There was an agreeable hum of conversation and they were playing what sounded like ’60s and ’70s classics. Another time, another place, it might have been my kind of joint.
I scanned the bar and then the tables looking for somebody who fit the Mercenary’s description. Nobody leapt out at me, so I shouldered my way to the counter. A guy with a big moustache and disinterested blue eyes jerked his chin at me. I said, “Irish, straight up.” While he was pouring it I put my money down and said, “I’m looking for a business associate. They call him the Mercenary. Charlie said I might find him here.”
He pulled a face and shrugged. “I don’t know nobody. Take a seat. Maybe he’ll find you.”
I took my drink and found a small table at the back where I sat and pulled my cigarettes from my pocket. I lit up and waited. I didn’t have to wait long. After a couple of minutes I saw a guy pushing his way through the crowd in my direction. I figured he was in his late forties. Like Charlie had said, he was hard, sunburned and lean. He sat at the table and studied my face for a moment. “You looking for me?”
“That depends. If people call you the Mercenary and you have a Seal tattoo on your arm, then I probably am.”
He pushed up his sleeve and showed me the tattoo. I glanced at it, gave a single nod and sipped my whiskey. As I set the glass down I said, “You gave Charlie a job, him and the gorilla with the tattooed head.”
“Did I?”
“That’s what Charlie said.”
“What was the job?”
“To kill Ted Wallace, and me.”
“Is that so?”
“Ted is dead. So are Charlie and his tame gorilla.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, friend. Even if this bullshit were true, why are you telling me?”
“I figure we can do business.”
He narrowed his eyes.
I smiled. “My life maybe worth nothing to Aaron Fenninger, but it’s worth a lot to me. And it could be worth a lot to you.”
He sat for a long moment without moving. He took in my suit and my face, then tried to work out the situation. He could walk away, and in that crowded bar there wouldn’t be a lot I could do. But he knew he would just be postponing the problem. He could probably call friends, take me outside and get rid of me, but that would leave a lot of unanswered questions, like, why the hell had I gone there alone, knowing he’d tried to kill me? He needed to talk to me and find out what my game was. Finally he shrugged and said, “I’m listening.”
“How much do you get paid to neutralize the PI and me?”
“That’s not an issue. I do my job.”
“I get it. You’re a soldier. Special ops. It’s what you’re good at. That’s my background too.”
He narrowed his eyes. It made sense to him.
“That’s how I dealt with Charlie and the Ape.”
“What was your outfit?”
“British Special Air Service.” I smiled. “They don’t encourage tattoos. We do a lot of plain clothes work. The tattoo is a bit of a giveaway.”
“SAS, huh? You don’t sound British. What are you doing here?”
I smiled at my glass. “Looking into the possibility of recruiting you. There is a market for your kind of skills. You don’t need to settle for a retainer. You get paid by the job, you can make a lot of money.”
“What job?”
I sighed. “At the moment all I need is information, for which I can pay you cash, right now.”
He shrugged one shoulder. He wasn’t buying it, but he was fishing. That was good enough. “What information?”
“Suppose Fenninger had to leave town in a hurry tomorrow morning. Suppose he needed to go somewhere safe. Where would he go?”
“How should I know?”
“Because you’re his minder. You take care of him. Don’t insult my intelligence. Why else would Ted Wallace be dead? Why else would you employ Charlie to take me out? You’re his babysitter.”
“If that were true, what makes you think I would betray him?”
I drained my glass, stood and went to the bar for two more whiskeys. I brought them back to the table and put one in front of him. I showed him the pack of Camels and he shook his head. I extracted one and lit up. As I breathed smoke through my nose I said, “Because men l
ike you, and men like me, know that there is one thing in life, only one, that is more important than loyalty, and that is power. That’s why the most expensive commodity on Earth is violence. If you control the violence, you control everything.” I sighed. “So loyalty becomes a qualified virtue. You’re a smart man, and you know that it’s not enough just to be loyal. You have to be loyal to somebody who is loyal back, and somebody who controls the violence. Somebody powerful.”
“That’s a lot of theory. Got anything more concrete?”
“Yeah. The people who own Fenninger pay me. Fenninger is through. He’s going down. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning, maybe next week…” I shrugged. “Either way he’s finished. You can go down with him, or you can offer your sword to a better master. One who pays you better, per job, and has a more solid position.” I paused a moment, reading his face, then added, “I also have five grand in the trunk of my car. Give me the information I need, I’ll give you the five grand and introduce you to my employer.”
He stared for a long moment at the glass without touching it. Then he said, “You want me to set Fenninger up for you.”
I nodded.
He picked up the glass and took a sip. “Personally, I don’t think he’s going anywhere tomorrow. I think he’ll follow his daily routine. But if he does run, he’ll go to his vineyard out near Topanga.”
“His vineyard?”
He smiled for the first time. “It’s not very original: Viña Topanga, Bodegas Fenninger. It’s good wine, though.” The smile faded. “Sometimes he meets with business associates from out of town. Fenninger is a very rich man. He’s a billionaire. He has connections in high places. He’s part of the ‘club’, you know what I mean? He meets privately with the president. He just came back from Camp David…”