“I don’t understand a word you just said. What are you some kind of word nerd?” She turned her attention back to the dancers on the floor.
“No, I assure you, words are not my craft.”
“No kidding.”
“I am more of a theoretical physicist.”
“If I dance with you, will you talk like a normal person?”
“Most assuredly — eh, yeah. Sure.”
“You’re learning,” she said as she offered her hand.
She sounded like she was from the U.S., but there was something else, something Germanic mixed in. Raffey couldn’t discern it over the throbbing bass of the music.
They hit the floor as the DJ changed to a popular house music cut that any American would have known was five years old, but the crowd let out a collective “whoo” as the first slamming drum beats were instantly recognized. Hanna’s hand flew from Raffey’s fingers as she became a writhing, flame-like entity, wavering to the seductive beat. Raffey maintained his two-step, stiffly choreographed routine, one that most girls let pass for some kind of dance. In her throbbing bass-induced dance trance, Hanna was in a world of her own. Raffey was drawn to her indifference, as if she were beckoning him to her boudoir with a come-hither finger gesture. He was hooked.
∞§∞
“The report you requested is in from the Navy.”
“Are they still at four hundred million for the recovery?”
“Here’s where you got to love the government, even though I was at the meeting. See here where it says, Ultra Secret Eyes Only. That’s the part that says, not for me to know and for you to find out,” Joey said as he spun the thirty-two-page finding across Hiccock’s desk.
“Raise your right hand.”
“What?”
“Raise — your — right — hand!”
Joey did.
“Repeat after me, ‘I am a big jerk.’”
“I am just like you. So help me God,” Joey ad-libbed.
“Good! You’re cleared to see this — go to the summary page and tell me the number.”
“Recovering crucibles from the bottom of the Indian Ocean…deep sea trials…target acquisition and plotting soundings and imaging…here it is, total estimated costs four hundred two million dollars. Wait. Didn’t they say three hundred eight-five at the meeting? Now it’s four hundred and two? What did they do, add tax?”
“Sounds cheap at half the price,” Bill noted sarcastically as he reached to take the page back.
“Wait, you agreed to this number or something close. You having buyer’s remorse?”
“I don’t know,” Bill said flipping through the report.
“So what’s wrong? They’re not making you pay for this personally are they?”
“Nah, but a funny thing happened at Mimmo’s the other night.”
“Indigestion?”
“A guy cornered me in the men’s room.”
“I don’t want to hear the rest of this. Maybe you should take it up with the White House shrink.”
“Listen, shit for brains, the guy was an ex-spook. Somehow, he knew all about the meeting I had with the Navy brass. He said some things that were, at best, disturbing.”
“Now that I am cleared for this restaurant review, you gonna tell me the rest of the story?” Joey plopped down into one of the two tufted, plush leather chairs in front of Bill’s desk.
Hiccock wrote down the man’s name, rank and the notation ‘Nav Intel,’ then tore off the page from the pad and handed it to Joey. “Read the Navy’s report, then see what you can dig up on this guy.”
“If he is an ex-spook the shovel will have to go pretty deep,” Joey said, tapping the report.
“Keep it tight, but use sources we can trust. Don’t tell them why or who wants to know in case you are on a two-way street.”
“Got it. People we can trust but only one way — that’s going to bruise a few egos.”
∞§∞
Hanna’s gyrations weren’t attracting Raffey’s eyes alone. Prince El-Habry Salaam, nephew of the Saudi King, was unwinding in the VIP section of the club. His father had sent him to study banking in Switzerland so he could better administer the Royal Family’s billions. Across the velvet ropes, Hanna’s undulations made him don his hated glasses, which he never wore in public, in order to see if she was the vision she appeared to be. Upon more focused inspection, he nodded to Abrim, his head of security. Abrim knew the drill.
As Raffey and Hanna were in the middle of their fifth dance, the six-foot-three-inch guard of the Prince appeared and, in English with a hint of Arabic accent, asked for forgiveness. “Pardon the intrusion, but my employer wishes for you to join him.” He pointed in the direction of the roped off area.
Hanna shot a quick glance at the thin, dark-skinned man wearing dark glasses in a dimly lit corner of the club. “No, thank you.”
Abrim pushed, “He is a prince of the Royal Family Saud. His intentions, I assure you, are the most honorable.”
“Not interested.” Then she turned away and danced even more seductively.
Raffey moved in close, “Who was he?”
“An errand boy. Want to get a drink?”
Raffey smiled and led her to the bar. It being three deep, he decided to get the drinks while Hanna found a small table. She removed her right shoe and rubbed a complaining instep. When she sat back up, Abrim was there.
“You again?”
“With apologies.”
“Look, why doesn’t he just come over here himself?”
“He is a Prince. He could not be seen making an overture to a… a… “
“Commoner? Is that the term you are looking for?”
Abrim just half smiled.
“Well, my father always called me Princess when I was a little girl, so what’s he so high and mighty about?”
“The Prince has a great interest in you and would be happy to pay you for your time.”
“Oh he would, would he?”
“Yes. Ten thousand dollars, U.S.?”
“Fuck off!”
Abrim imperceptibly twitched his hand, the result of the conflicting instinct to strike this infidel bitch, and the training that the social dictates of these Western countries demanded, which immediately stopped him. He just nodded and walked away.
“What did she say, Abrim?” the Prince asked.
“She declined your offer.”
“No, I mean what exactly did she say?”
“A crude woman, I’d rather not repeat it.”
“What did she say exactly?”
“She said, “Fuck off!”
He turned to admire his new interest, “Brilliant. She is full of spirit. One to be tamed.”
Abrim just rolled his eyes.
Raffey came back with the drinks. “I saw him from the bar; he came over again. What did he want this time?”
“He didn’t want anything, he was sent by someone with no balls. At least you had the courage to approach me yourself. Let’s get out of here.”
“But our drinks…”
Hanna reached down and grabbed Raffey between the legs, “You’d better have a set.” Then she walked off. Raffey followed like an obedient dog.
∞§∞
Brooke was finishing her room-service breakfast while reviewing her notes and trying to find patterns in the international web of petty crime even the local police didn’t pay much attention to, and only then for insurance requirements. Yet, something was in there she couldn’t quite see as yet. She had taken statements from Disney employees at both the Long Island and French facilities — managers, artists, engineers. She checked past employee histories, even janitorial staff. Like this one, Davis Honsberry, a Nigerian who had locked up the night of the break-in in Easthampton. Wait a minute. She put down her coffee cup. The janitor on duty the night of the French break-in was…was… She rifled through her notes and circled the name Jean Claude Vastow — a Nigerian.
Her suspicions were confirmed when she opened a
PDF with the personnel roster for both Disney facitilities and found that both had suddenly left their jobs the day after each break-in. She reasoned that their getaways were clean because no one had suspected an immigrant janitor of a high-tech robbery. She packed up her laptop and left.
Her next stop was to U.S. Immigration and its French counterpart. It took half a day to find out that, although their passports claimed Nigerian citizenship, in each case the port of departure prior to entry to the United States was Sudan. Pirates.
Her next call was to the African desk at the CIA. It took some sweet talk, but she managed to get a small investigation going into any connection between these two Nigerians, whatever their real names were, and the outlaw regime of Theodore Roosevelt Maguambi. Named after the U.S. president, and using his half-brother’s United Nations clout to wrangle funds, Maguambi went on to bribe and murder his way into power. Now he had unleashed on an indifferent world the second coming of the Barbary pirates. But unlike the 1801 solution ordered by Thomas Jefferson, “Find them and hang them,” which solved the problem once and for all, today’s more civilized approach was to pay off the pirates and hope they went away. They didn’t — and the ransoms enlarged their war chests and created more acts of high seas piracy.
The cop in Brooke knew she needed to connect the robberies at Disney to the pirates and then maybe to the attack on the Vera Cruz and the Nebraska. Mush. That was it, today’s Mush moment, as she had started to call them — times when her mind wandered to Mush and she got all — mushy. These episodes made her doubt she had matured at all. Silly schoolgirl crushes were supposed to have been drummed out of her at Harvard Law, and if not, surely in basic training, JAG School, and then Quantico on her way to becoming number one in the Bureau’s New York office. Now she worked at the White House. If they only knew that late at night, when it was just her and the moon shadows on the wall, she was just a teenage girl with insecurities intact. Somehow they always evaporated with the morning light. The real issue she dealt with whenever she met men, certain men, was that as soon as they found out she was an agent, they viewed her as “butch” and crossed her off their list of potential love interests; but not Mush. The fact that she worked in a man’s world never affected the way he looked at her. I wonder where, and under what ocean, he is now?
∞§∞
Joey Palumbo hadn’t been on a carrier since he visited the Intrepid Museum back in New York. The USS Ronald Reagan was massive, twice the length of the old Fighting “I,” and a city unto itself. Eight minutes after getting an escort to lead him down to the CIC, he was finally face to face with the man he had come seven thousand miles out to sea to meet. He had traveled the last four hundred of those miles in the backseat of an EC3 Hawkeye, which hit the carrier deck at one hundred miles an hour and was jolted to an arresting-wire stop just forty feet later. He was still rubbing the welts the four-point seat belt had made in his chest as his body kept moving at one hundred while the plane lurched to a stop.
“Hi, Brick.”
“Palumbo! This has got to be real important to get you out of San Francisco.”
“Is there someplace we can talk alone?”
Sensing that the issue was really serious, he extended his hand and they left the Combat Information Center and found a small stateroom in officer country a few feet down the hall. Two LTs were about to bunk in it. When they saw him they snapped to attention.
“At ease, men. Give us the room for a minute.”
Joey waited for them to pile out and then shut the door. “I ain’t in SF anymore, Brick. I’m now at the White House. I am here on a very urgent and sensitive matter.”
“White House, huh; so that’s how you get the frequent flyer mileage to fly out to the Mediterranean tail-hook class.”
“I can’t give you any details, but I need you to tell me everything you know about Commander Russ Klaven.”
“Clay? Is that why you are here? Joey I served with him…”
“Yeah I know, ten years ago. It took forty hours of computer time to match databases with someone I knew who also worked with Klaven. Your name came out of that hat.”
“You know he was Naval Intelligence, right?”
“I pulled his service jacket. What I want, is to know about him, the man?”
“I need more than that.”
“I told you I can’t discuss the details.” Joey started to feel concerned; he hadn’t come all this way to make some kind of deal.
“No, I mean, I need to see some contravening orders to my oath of secrecy before I put myself in Leavenworth.”
“Fair enough.” Joey opened his portfolio and took out an order from the White House, endorsed by the Secretary of the Navy. He slid it under Brick’s nose. “Will this do?”
“The president? Yeah, I’d say so. All the same, I’m keeping this just in case,” Brick said as he folded the “get-out-of-the-brig-free-card” and slid it into his day-uniform shirt pocket.
“I understand. Now, about Klaven.”
“Man, he was the brains of the outfit.”
For the next hour Joey learned all about the man who had confronted Hiccock in the rest room of Mimmo’s.
∞§∞
Outside the club, Raffey took out his ticket stub for the valet; Hanna stuffed it back in his pocket. “My place is just on the corner. You can pick up your car in the morning.”
Raffey liked the sound of that, especially the “in the morning” part.
As they walked off down the street arm in arm, Abrim emerged from the club and watched.
In the hallway of the flophouse hotel, Hanna fumbled with the key as Raffey started kissing her neck. She laughed and shook him off to better focus on the lock and key. Once inside she went straight to the cabinet and pulled down a bottle of vodka. “The bathroom is through there. I’ll fix us a drink.”
“That’s okay; I don’t need to use the bathroom.” He plopped down on the couch and started to unbutton his shirt. Because her back was to him he didn’t see the slight mask of frustration wash across her face. He grabbed the remote for the TV and turned it on. Behind him a man emerged from the bathroom with a rolled towel between his two fists. As Raffey yawned, the man brought the towel down across Raffey’s mouth. Startled, the young man started to scream, but the towel heavily muffled it. Hanna was tapping the air out of a syringe when the doorbell rang.
She and her accomplice were stunned. “Hold him.” She put down the syringe and went to the door. “Who is it?”
“It is Abrim. I have a message from the Prince.”
“Scheisse . It’s the goon from the club,” she said in a whisper to the man who was trying to stop Raffey from making any noise.
“Get rid of him.” He whispered loudly.
“Go away — I am not interested,” she yelled to the door.
“The Prince has asked me to tell you he will pay fifty thousand dollars if you’ll just agree to have dinner with him tomorrow night.”
“Fine, I will. I will be at the club tomorrow at eight. You can pick me up there. Now go away.”
Abrim didn’t know whether to believe her or not. But he didn’t really care. He had done his “pimping” for the night. He could report back that he had made the offer and she accepted. If she didn’t show up, it would only make the Prince more smitten and he’d up the sum to one hundred thousand. He turned to walk off.
Raffey had started to kick and caught the coffee table in front of the couch. It swung his body sideways and his next kick toppled the ginger jar lamp on the end table. It hit the floor with a terrible crash. In his attempt to stop him, the man had loosened the grip on the towel and Raffey’s scream accompanied the crash.
Abrim stopped dead in his tracks when he heard the calamity and went back and pounded on the door, “Is everything all right in there?”
The man behind the couch punched Raffey in the face as hard as he could and Raffey slid down to the floor like a sack of hammers. Rubbing his fist, the goon nodded to Hanna to open the do
or and let the man inside. He stepped to the right of the door and snapped open a stiletto-type knife. Hanna saw the shiny blade and knew at once what she had to do.
“No, please help me, he’s passed out,” she said as she opened the door. Abrim saw Raffey barely moving on the floor. “Could you just help me get him on the couch to sleep it off?”
Abrim was no more than four feet into the apartment when the blade entered his lung between the sixth and seventh vertebrae. The killer’s hand came down on the man’s mouth at that same instant to stifle the scream. But Abrim was a big hulk, and even though fatally wounded he shook off his attacker like a rag doll. Hanna grabbed the vodka bottle and hit him hard on his temple. The bottle shattered and he went down on his back. She thrust the broken end of the bottle into Abrim’s neck, severing both his carotid arteries, which sprayed blood all over her. The man held his hand over Abrim’s mouth. In ten seconds his legs kicked one last time. He was dead.
When Hanna rose to wipe the blood from her face, she saw that Raffey was gone. The window to the fire escape was open. She turned to her partner, and cursed in German, “Verdammte Scheiße! You idiot.”
Raffey, choking, spitting blood, and gasping for air, was hobbling with a limp from jumping the last six feet off the fire ladder. He bounced off cars and storefronts as he staggered down the empty 3 a.m. Genève streets.
∞§∞
At seven thirty, Hiccock powered up his SCIAD terminal at his desk. At the top of the list was a report from a leading synthetic materials chemist. Bill read with great interest that electric ice, Bill’s pet name for the electroexpansive fluid of the kind Percival had flung at him, was non-existent in the commercial chemical field. The writer had never heard of or even considered the possibility of such an invention, but theorized that in order to have that kind of molecular slowing coefficient, some sort of nuclear agent must be employed.
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