by Matthew Hart
Pierrette’s wrists bled from her attempts to wrench her hands free. Annie stood behind her, trembling.
“Sit there,” Vanderloo said, pointing his gun at the chair beside Pierrette.
“This isn’t the way it was supposed to go, was it,” I said. “When you planned it, this wasn’t the ending.”
He tossed a silver key onto the floor near Annie. “Cuff them together.”
Annie picked up the key and started to sob. She had no tears left, just big, dry gasps that shook her whole body.
“It’s OK, Annie,” I said, but Pierrette gritted her teeth.
“Annabel,” she said harshly, her eyes fixed on Vanderloo. “Do not cry in front of this person.”
Annie unclipped one bracelet from Pierrette and snapped it onto me. The metal clamped the cuff of my shirt tightly to my wrist. I wasn’t sure how that would affect the bear banger taped to my forearm.
I studied Vanderloo’s face. A killer has a picture of himself. What was it?
“There are better ways to fight this war,” I said, betting that’s how he’d see himself. “Keep me. I’m a combatant. Let Pierrette and Annie go. I’ll give you whatever I know, and that’s a lot. Don’t dishonor yourself.”
His lip curled as he watched me.
“Don’t talk to me about honor. That’s not a virtue you care about. It’s out of fashion. This country’s lost that. It needs a leader with spine.”
“And you think it’s got one.”
He frowned. “Got one?” he repeated. “You mean the president?” The idea seemed to stun him. “Are you out of your mind?” His mouth drew down in disgust. “You think that a soldier of the United States, sworn to protect the constitution with his life, would support that man?” He glared at me. “I don’t understand you, Turner. How could you be so clueless?”
I was wondering the same thing myself. If he hadn’t been trying to protect the president, what was he doing? Vanderloo read my confusion.
“The president’s a traitor. He’s made us weak. We’re a laughingstock in the world.” Each outrage seemed to cause him pain. “A laughingstock. He made us that.”
“So you support Nash?” I must have looked stunned.
“Of course we support Nash!” he spat. “He’s fearless. He acts. He doesn’t let enemies stand in his way. He wore his country’s uniform.”
His country’s uniform. I heard Tommy’s words. Zealots at the White House. Maybe military intelligence. So that was true. Except they weren’t trying to protect the president. They were protecting Nash. That’s why he’d killed Amy Curtain. Now he would protect Nash again. From me. What could I say to gain time?
“Is this the right way to make Nash look good? Nobody’s going to shed tears for me, but killing a mother and daughter? For a politician?”
“For a country,” he said. “And I’m not killing anybody. He is.”
He already had his pistol out, so it was easy to drop the kid with the HK. The bullet hit him in the neck. A nine-millimeter slug at that range: his head was hanging by a tangle of sinews as the body slid to the floor. Annie began to gasp as if she couldn’t breathe. Pierrette stared in horror.
Vanderloo stepped across the room and picked up the machine gun.
And finally the penny dropped.
The latex gloves meant the only fingerprints on the Heckler would be the dead man’s. Vanderloo would make it look like the kid had shot the three of us, and then he’d shot the kid.
Where was DeLucca? Where were the state troopers?
Then I heard the sound Vanderloo was waiting for. The slap, slap, slap of helicopter blades echoed in the hills. He checked his watch again then looked straight at me. He would wait until he knew for sure it was his pickup. Everyone in the room was concentrated on the sound. That’s why we heard the other noise so clearly.
From just behind the paneling. The sound of a floorboard moving against a hundred-year-old nail.
Vanderloo’s eyes snapped to the wall. He stared at the paneling. But he wasn’t sure what he’d heard and didn’t fire immediately into the wall, which he should have, because here’s what happened next.
The helicopter popped into view above the hill on the other side of the lake. The clatter of the rotors rose to a roar.
Vanderloo took a step through the door and onto the terrace to signal the fast-approaching chopper. As he did, the piece of panel that concealed the back stairway started to inch open. Vanderloo finished signaling. He turned to step back into the room, where he was sure to spot the opening panel. With my free hand I clutched at the bear banger through my shirt. It was the size of a fountain pen, with a kind of plunger sticking out one end. I guessed that the way to fire it was to push that in.
A tongue of flame shot out through my cuff. The explosive detonated with a terrific bang. At the same time I launched myself out of the chair at Vanderloo, but with one arm fastened to Pierrette, that did not go well.
I collapsed in a heap with Pierrette on top of me, and the barrel of the HK tracking toward my head.
Suddenly a terrific boom reverberated in the woods as DeLucca finally fired the bazooka. For a split second, a quizzical expression formed on Vanderloo’s face, and he paused, and Augie Treacher sprang through the hidden door with a tire iron in his fist and swatted away a small but apparently important piece of Vanderloo’s head.
He sprawled backward onto the terrace. He lay there with a surprised look on his face, staring at the sky. Augie jumped through the door and snatched the HK. Vanderloo’s heels started drumming on the wooden decking.
The sound of the approaching helicopter, amplified by the hills, shook the air.
“Augie,” I shouted, “the key!”
He stepped over and unlocked the cuffs. By the time I got free and grabbed the HK, the helicopter was coming in to land on the shore. How many men were in it?
“Annie, Pierrette,” I shouted. “Get to the back of the house and into the woods. Augie, there’s an Uzi and a Walther on the grass out front. Grab them now.”
I was trying to decide how to mount a defense when a large Cadillac-shaped chunk of red came streaking out of the trees and down the road toward the lake. The pilot of the Twin Huey must have had all his attention on the landing, because he took no evasive action as Tommy hurtled off the road, slewed on the grass, and T-boned the chopper into the lake, the car plunging in behind it.
By the time Augie and I made it to the water, Tommy had floundered to the bank and was struggling to climb out. Augie grabbed his hand and yanked him ashore. Behind him, two rotor blades stuck out of the lake in a cloud of steam. The water churned with bubbles and an oil stain began to spread. No sign of the pilot.
“This isn’t what I wanted,” Tommy said, his shirt clinging to his massive frame. He looked stricken. “I mean,” he gestured helplessly at the pieces of the aircraft that projected from the turbulence.
Tommy was used to violence, but not the kind that ended in death. Watching him stand there helplessly, I forgot for a moment how angry I was at him for playing Bolt’s game behind my back. And let’s face it: The only person standing there who’d screwed up more than he had was me.
* * *
That night a vampire moon rose out of the trees and spilled a lurid light onto the black waters of the lake. A military crane arrived and the operators set up arc lights on the shore. They hoisted out the crumpled helicopter.
A black SUV with army plates pulled up in front of the house to collect Vanderloo’s body. Two soldiers zipped it into a bag while a young lieutenant stood stiffly by, speaking to no one. Then they drove over to the helicopter and retrieved that body too. The pilot had been alone. The kid Vanderloo had shot turned out to be a Russian contract shooter from Brooklyn.
Pierrette hadn’t uttered more than the few monosyllables needed to confirm to the police who she was. Annie’s face had frozen into an unreadable mask. She had let me wipe away the specks of Vanderloo’s blood that had spattered her when Augie struck him. I might
have been dusting furniture for all the emotion she showed. She stared at the night, and each time I managed to catch her eye, she moved another mile away.
* * *
Later, when the crane was gone and the moon had slunk from the sky, a pallid dawn oozed into the hills.
My phone pinged. Patrick Ho.
The play on Great Pipe had begun.
19
The first move on Great Pipe came just after 6:00 A.M. Three and a half hours before the New York market opened, a buyer took a single block of a million shares at fifty cents a share. The stock had been trading at forty cents.
Anyone following the stock would immediately wonder: What does the buyer know that made him take such a large position at twenty-five percent above the last price? Who is it? Should I jump in?
Trading programs all over Wall Street would spit out alerts. Now other traders would start to watch to see what would happen. But nothing happened. It went quiet.
Interest faded immediately. Great Pipe was a junior exploration stock. Some insider hocus-pocus. That seemed to be the market’s judgment.
Not for long.
Two days later someone took another million shares. At sixty cents. That was at 8 A.M., an hour and a half before the opening bell. Attention snapped back to the little stock, because in two trades it had increased by fifty percent. The feeling now was—what the fuck?
I was waiting for the opening. From my vantage point on the top floor of NYPD headquarters I watched the morning traffic stream across the Brooklyn Bridge into the city. A SeaStreak commuter ferry rounded Governor’s Island heading for the Wall Street pier. Trillions of dollars’ worth of stocks are listed on the big board in New York City, and tens of thousands of people pour across the bridges, through the tunnels, and into the ferry terminals every morning to trade them.
The market opened. Great Pipe went through one dollar in the first fifteen minutes, heading north. By noon it had brushed past two dollars.
Others began to trail into the conference room. I put my phone away, grabbed a coffee, and sat with DeLucca. Silver Bill Fitzgerald, the police commissioner, was chairing the meeting, but he would not come in until everyone else was in place. Silver Bill knew how to make an entrance, especially when the purpose of the meeting was a dogfight with a two-star general who was coming up from Washington. The general had made it clear he expected answers as to how a full colonel in US Army intelligence came to be returned to them in a body bag with part of his head chipped out.
The general came in scowling. He wasn’t more than forty. He had battle ribbons from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a purple heart. His adjutant was a marine half-colonel, and the lawyer he brought along from the office of the judge advocate general was a US Navy captain. They established their beachhead in the center of the gleaming conference table.
As soon as the military were seated Silver Bill appeared. He was a short, thin, sharp-eyed former Boston cop. With only a high-school education and street smarts so sharp you could shave with them, he’d risen through the police hierarchy to run, successively, the three largest police forces in the country.
He wore a pearl-gray summer-weight suit with a dark, silk Ferragamo tie. A starched white linen handkerchief blazed in his breast pocket. His hair had a part so straight it looked as if it had been put there by a surveyor. The four highest-ranking uniformed officers of the NYPD marched in behind him and arranged themselves across the table from the visitors.
The general asked for straight answers and he got them. DeLucca dealt them out in a series of eight-by-ten glossies of material recovered from Amy Curtain’s folder in the cloud, bolstered by printed excerpts from phone intercepts that devastatingly established Vanderloo’s complicity in the murder of Amy Curtain, the planned murder of a federal agent and his family, the murder of a foreign national (the kid with the HK), and other acts, “in the commission of which,” DeLucca concluded, “he conspired with foreign nationals to subvert the laws of the United States.”
When DeLucca was done, Silver Bill’s hard blue eyes met those of the officers across the table.
“Are we agreed, then, gentlemen,” he said in his Southie accent, “that the late colonel was not a credit to the distinguished service of which our country is so rightly proud, and that he acted wholly without the knowledge or authority of his superiors, and that, therefore, nothing in connection with recent unfortunate events reflects to the discredit either of the United States Army or of the other services represented here today?”
It was a wide door that Silver Bill held open. Clearly he thought the general would step straight through. He didn’t. He was a highly decorated officer who had reached two-star rank while still comparatively young. He hadn’t come up to New York to have his cheek patted by civilians and sent home again. Also, he seemed to have his own ideas about where things pointed.
“Is that your considered opinion Mister, um…” he flipped through his agenda as if looking for Bill’s name. He knew Bill’s name, and everybody at the table knew he knew. Maybe boardroom tactics is a course they give at West Point. It was not a maneuver that would throw Silver Bill, but it served to make the point that the general wasn’t going to sign on anybody’s dotted line.
“Your considered opinion, if I may restate it,” he continued in a hard voice, “is that Colonel Vanderloo was a renegade who acted solely on his own without the knowledge or support, tacit or otherwise, of superior officers?”
Silver Bill sat back in his chair and gazed at the general. He’d thought of the meeting as a funeral service where the army got to bury an embarrassing situation free of charge. He had wrapped the Vanderloo package as neatly as he could and must have wondered why they weren’t just taking it and going away.
“Because if that’s your opinion,” the general said, when it became clear that Bill was not going to reply, “the opinion that Colonel Vanderloo flew solo, that would be convenient. You could just close your file.”
“We have closed it,” Silver Bill said.
“Minute that,” the general said to the JAG officer. “The NYPD has closed the file on murdered colonel possibly implicated in hostile powers’ plan to subvert the Constitution of the United States.” He looked back at Bill. “So noted.”
Bill’s smile could have welded steel.
“Let me explain something,” he said. “This is New York City. What we do here, in the police, we catch people who commit crimes in the five boroughs, and we bring them to justice. Vanderloo committed a crime when he murdered a girl in Brooklyn. Being dead, he can’t be brought to justice, but the crime is solved. See, that’s our business right there. Crime,” he raised a hand, “solution,” he slapped the hand back on the table. “Then we close the file and pick up the next one. We are cops.”
“Let’s just unpack that statement,” the general said. He put out his hand and the marine half-colonel handed him a manila file. He opened it and ran his finger down a column. “The NYPD has almost 36,000 police officers and 19,000 civilian personnel, including highly trained forensic technicians as well as counterterrorism and intelligence analysts.” He shut the folder. “You have more people and you pack a bigger punch than the FBI. You are not the town cop pounding a beat. You’re the biggest law-enforcement operation in the country, by a very substantial margin.”
Keeping his eyes on Bill, he raked in DeLucca’s glossies and the records of the intercepts and slid the pile in front of the marine. The officer tamped the loose material together and put it in a briefcase, snapping the case shut and spinning the dial of a built-in combination lock. The general laced his hands together.
“We know you have much more information than you’ve shown us,” he said. “We think it’s important for the security of the country that we see it. The point here is: The United States Army doesn’t train lone actors. That’s not how we work. To my superiors, it’s unthinkable that a career officer of Colonel Vanderloo’s long service did not believe he was acting with authority. We’d like to see all the i
ntercepts, not just the ones you’ve produced for this meeting.”
He looked directly at DeLucca and me, shoved back his chair, and stood up.
“As soon as you can put them together, if that’s convenient. Minute formal request,” he said to the JAG officer, and they left without another word.
When the door closed behind them, Silver Bill glanced at his senior officers. “Uniforms excused.”
As soon as they were gone, he shook his head. “OK, since we’re all security-cleared from the arsehole up, maybe someone can tell me what kind of jackoff bullshit is going on.”
“Sir,” DeLucca began, but Silver Bill held up his hand.
“I was speaking rhetorically. I don’t need anybody to tell me what’s been going on because I’m supposed to be able to discover that for myself by reading through the stack of files and debriefs and the meeting minutes that tell this sorry tale. But for the benefit of anybody who’s been having trouble following, I’m going to say it out loud as if it was something that fully grown adults had thought up.”
He ruffled through some pages.
“Basically,” he said, raising the papers and letting them drop, “everything in here is one version or another of some kind of conspiracy to affect the outcome of the upcoming election, starting with the party nominating convention that opens tomorrow. The information about Nash’s pink diamond and his secret business arrangements will embarrass him by showing that he’s a Russian patsy getting rich with Russian help.”
He shook his head at the papers.
“As far as I can see, all suppositional in nature. Have I got that wrong?”
No one spoke.
“About that murder of the young Curtain woman,” he said to DeLucca. “Would you call that solved?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine. Tie a ribbon on this file,” he patted the papers, “and send it back to Treasury. If they stumble across a crime anytime soon, tell them to call 9-1-1.”