Black Market

by James Patterson

  As he arrived at the designated address, Colonel David Hudson felt exactly the way he'd always known he would- if they had won in Vietnam. The adrenaline, the magical excitement of victory, was pumping, rushing furiously through his body.

  This would certainly be the safest house he'd ever used, Hudson thought as he reached York Avenue on Manhattan's fashionable East Side. He entered an elegant glass-and-grill-work doorway just beyond the corner at Ninetieth Street.

  Billie Bogan's apartment was located on the river side of the starkly modem building, a building that apparently had paper-thin ceilings and walls, because Hudson could hear a piano playing as he approached the doorway on the fifteenth floor.

  The lovely music surprised him. He hadn't even known that Billie played.

  David Hudson hesitated before pushing the doorbell. Warning alarms were going off again. It was all perfectly natural. One didn't stop being a military terrorist and saboteur overnight.

  Billie answered the door seconds after the first ring. She was wearing a pink T-shirt that said WINTER across her chest. She had on tight black French jeans, no shoes or socks. She looked stunning and exotic, even now.

  “David.”

  Her brilliant blue eyes passed from puzzlement to undisguised pleasure as she saw who it was. She wore no makeup; she didn't need it.

  She reached out and pulled Hudson toward her. She held him tightly. David Hudson ached to have his arm back-to hold her in both arms just this once.

  “Was that you playing the piano?” he asked.

  Billie pecked at his cheek and gave him an extra hug. “Of course it was me… You know, I think the piano is the reason I ultimately escaped from Birmingham. As I found out about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, I was convinced there had to be more than the dreary dullness I was used to. Come inside. I'm so happy to see you. It's so good to see you.” She kissed him again.

  David Hudson smiled more willingly than he had in a long time. “I'm happy to see you, too. I feel like I'm home at last,” he said.

  Once inside, they talked. They held each other. They stared into each other's eyes for a long time. Hudson told Billie about his past, talking with the speed of a man who had observed vows of silence for too many years. It all came tumbling out-West Point, the horrors of Vietnam, his early, abortive career in the army.

  He told her everything, except about the past year, which he was tempted to tell her as well. How his, brilliant revenge had become his sweet victory. A material reward-millions of dollars for himself and the other Vets. He wished he could share it with her, share everything right now.

  Under the tent of a brightly striped wool blanket, with the windows thrown half-open, they made love once, and then again. Hudson was still learning to feel, and the vigorous lovemaking helped enormously. She brought him closer and closer to climax… right to the delicious edges. But he couldn't make it over.

  Finally, the most debilitating wave of exhaustion swept over David Hudson. He felt shaky. He was sliding headlong toward a tranquil dream state. The warning alarms still hadn't completely stopped, but now they almost seemed a natural part of him.

  One moment, he was softly stroking Billie's thick blond hair, touching the elegant oval of her face. The next, he was falling into sleep. His eyes closed gently.

  Billie lay awake in the large brass bed, watching the ember glow on a filtered American cigarette. She sighed quietly.

  Sometimes she surprised even herself with her ability to effortlessly create a lie, in perfect context, consistent with a whole world of other lies… Deception.

  Her being able to play Chopin, and fitting that so naturally into the Birmingham, England, framework was an inspiration. But then again, wasn't that precisely why she was here with the great Colonel David Hudson?

  She rose silently from the double bed, tossing off rumpled designer sheets. She was certain it would take a miracle to wake Colonel Hudson, even with a cannon.

  She returned to the bedroom with a Beretta. A blunt-nosed silencer was attached to it.

  She knew better than to hesitate for even a fraction of a second. She swung her arms up stiffly. She moved to fire the revolver into his lightly pulsing temple, just below the blond hairline. She hesitated a moment too long.

  The sleeping body jumped forward. Colonel David Hudson's eyes blinked open, and he fired through the covers. He fired again and again and again.

  Warning signals were shrieking in his head. Terrible pain screamed out at David Hudson.

  Deception-forever-deception.

  Everywhere. Even here.

  The Committee of Twelve, the American Wise Men, did not want David Hudson to live. They had easily recruited him after the disappointments of Vietnam, the disappointment in knowing his early promise in the army could never be realized. He'd been their agent provocateur for crises around the world. They had been so intelligent, every bit as smart and precise as he was. They'd sent the girl, of course, his escort. They'd known about Vintage, about his habits. They'd used him so well.

  Finally, Colonel David Hudson understood.

  42

  Brooklyn

  Carroll slowly opened his eyes and sat up painfully. All around him were crashing sounds, police and U.S. Army personnel, blinding bright lights, flashing, running shapes. Faces peered down at him. Who were these people?

  “What happened?” Carroll finally asked. “How long have… What happened to the body? A body was over there!”

  A uniformed New York cop knelt down beside him. Carroll had never seen the man before. “What other body are you talking about?”

  “There was a body there, over near the Cobra. Walter Trentkamp of the FBI was killed right over there.”

  The policeman shook his head. “I was one of the first up here on the roof. There wasn't any other body. You know, you've got a small watermelon growing up on top of your head. You sure you're all right?”

  Carroll stood up clumsily. Everything was spinning. “Oh, yeah, I'm fine. Tiptop shape.”

  Arch Carroll, grasping the bricks in the wall for support, started down the winding metal stairs.

  Somebody had taken Walter Trentkamp's body away.

  “Hey, buddy, you ought to get yourself treated! Have somebody look at your head. There wasn't any body up here.”

  Carroll hardly heard the policeman's words. He wanted to go home. He needed to go home, right away. He thought about his kids and about Caitlin.

  He thought about Caitlin's meeting with Anton Birnbaum and wondered what might have transpired there. He was worried about the people he loved… There wasn't any body on the roof… Sure thing-this was all a dream, a horrible nightmare.

  He didn't know how he managed the first wild minutes of the drive to Riverdale. Maybe it was practice-all those half-drunken nights of his recent past. Maybe God did look after babies and drunks. But there was a time coming when God might make him abdicate his responsibilities, his watchfulness…

  What then?

  The familiar lights of the old house in Riverdale were glittering brightly. As he drove up his street, Carroll remembered a time when his father and mother would have been there, a time when everything had seemed so much saner in America… when Trentkamp was Uncle Walter, for God's sake.

  Walter Trentkamp had been his father's friend for all those incredible years. Had his father ever begun to guess anything? Had his father ever sensed the horrifying betrayal coming from Trentkamp? We had all been so naive about foreign governments back then. About our own government, as it was turning out. Americans thought of democracy as the world's one superior political system. We felt that we understood the parameters of our government's power. We understood nothing, Carroll now saw.

  Trentkamp and the KGB had been so brilliant at fooling everyone. Walter Trentkamp had been so confident. He'd never hesitated to use Carroll. What better conduit for information? Walter's hubris was startling, but his modus operandi was consistent. As Carroll thought back now, he remembered that Walter had spent time in E
urope after World War II. He recalled “fact-finding” trips to South America, to Mexico, to Southeast Asia, while Carroll had been serving there himself. It was no wonder they had never been able to identify Monserrat. They hadn't been looking in the right places.

  No one had thought to look in New York or Washington. Why would anyone suspect the living legend? Walter Trentkamp had no respect for American intelligence, and he had been absolutely right. His ruse, the classic misdirection, had been perfect-the lifework of a master spy, a Donald Maclean or a Kim Philby.

  Arch Carroll's eyes were watering again-only now it was because he was so glad to see his kids. They all jumped up and ran to him as he stumbled inside the house. Then the Carroll family was hugging and kissing. They were squeezing their father as tightly as they could.

  “We have to get out of here fast,” Carroll whispered to Mary Katherine. “We have to move out of the house now… Help me dress them. Try to explain as little as you can. I have to call Caitlin.”

  Mary Katherine nodded. She didn't even seem that surprised at the news. “You go call Caitlin now. I'll outfit the troops.”

  Two hours later the Carrolls, the family of six, and Caitlin Dillon quietly checked into the Durham Hotel on West Eighty-seventh Street.

  Carroll's initial plan was to stay there for a night, maybe a few nights, until they could decide how to work with Anton Birnbaum, how to work with the New York police. Life was suddenly full of treacherous false bottoms. Was there anyone he could trust?

  Once they were alone together in the hotel, Caitlin and Carroll fell into an embrace. They shared a long, tender kiss that neither of them wanted to end. Caitlin pushed against Archer Carroll with a fierce, undisguised need. There was no more reason to hide anything, to hold back her feelings.

  “I love you so much,” she said.

  “I love you, too, Caitlin. I was afraid today. I thought… that I might never see you again.”

  They made love in the hotel room, and it was all passion, definitely not Lima, Ohio. Then a second time, Caitlin and Carroll gently held hands-almost as if they might never do this beautiful thing again. Almost as if they would never share their love again.

  “I hated it when you were out there after them,” Caitlin whispered as she lay beside Carroll. Her breath was like feathers on his cheekbone. “I've never felt so afraid. I don't want to feel that way ever again.”

  Carroll brushed her hair from her face. She was so unbelievably precious to him. “I told Walter Trentkamp that I planned to quit once Green Band was over. I haven't changed my mind.”

  Caitlin stared deeply into his eyes. “There's a catch, though.”

  “Yes, there's one catch. Green Band isn't over yet.”

  There was so much terrifying evidence to be considered and studied. There were classified files from the FBI and Pentagon; there were also taped statements from Birnbaum's highly placed contacts in Washington and Europe…

  They just had to get to the right people with what they knew, with the truth.

  Who were the right people, though? Whom could they trust? The newspapers? Television stations? The New York police? The CIA?

  The Committee of Twelve seemed to be everywhere. Were they connected with the police, the CIA? Did they somehow control the newspapers and TV?

  It was all so unbelievably shitty.

  During the first agonizing hours in the hotel, Carroll and Caitlin read every major newspaper report. Twice that afternoon Carroll took cabs to the large stand in Times Square that carried out-of-town newspapers. He and Caitlin read and reread everything written about Green Band. They searched desperately for a faint shadow of what they knew to be the truth.

  There was none that they could find. Nothing had been reported about secret intragovernmental groups. Nothing had been reported about a terror plan called “Red Tuesday.” Or about Walter Trentkamp. Had the body been spirited away by the Twelve?… Nothing was said about Colonel David Hudson's Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In the news, Colonel Hudson was described as a “Jackal-like provocateur,” the renegade mastermind of Green Band. Hudson was depicted as an obsessed man still looking for some justice, some personal meaning, years after Vietnam…

  It all sounded so plausible, if you didn't know any better.

  Manhattan

  Early on the morning of December 22, Caitlin and Carroll had some visitors at the hotel. The visitors were Anton Birnbaum and Samantha Hawes.

  The best and worst part of the Green Band investigation had begun. The tension and pressure were even more relentless than before. For the past twenty-four hours Carroll's stomach had been doing an uncomfortable dance.

  A picture of Green Band was finally emerging. If not a complete portait, it was at least an outline, a foreshadowing of the truth. The story was certainly different from anything reported in the newspapers or on TV.

  “The Twelve, the American Wise Men, are descended from our own OSS, America's intelligence team during the Second World War,” Anton Birnbaum said in a voice that seemed to grow weaker each day. “The route is serpentine, but it can be followed… The existence of the Twelve goes back to the younger Dulles, his reluctance to surrender his wartime intelligence machine to the politicians. When the OSS was transformed into the CIA, the Twelve began to meet outside official circles. They were still probably the most powerful men in Washington. At first they gave counsel, then they took things into their own able hands… The original OSS was probably the best American intelligence unit ever.

  “The Twelve still smugly believe they are the elite.

  They're convinced they are doing the country a grand service, guiding us through the Cuban missile threat, the time of the assassinations, Watergate, now Green Band. Every year, each decade, they become more and more powerful.”

  Birnbaum was looking pale and brittle. At the outset of the morning, he'd told Caitlin that he was fearful of a heart attack or stroke if he continued at this pace. “The Red Tuesday plan could have incited another market crash, the worst since 1929. Green Band worked to stop that, at least. The Committee members also managed to profit from the results. The companies they control have already made hundreds of millions of dollars.”

  Samantha Hawes had more information about Colonel Hudson. She'd managed to retrieve some of the missing Vets files during the past few days.

  “David Hudson was approached by at least one Committee member when he was still in the army, while he was at Fort Bragg after Vietnam. General Lucas Thompson, his old commander, approached Hudson first. General Thompson knew everything about Hudson's POW experiences. He knew about Hudson's training at Fort Bragg, too. Army intelligence had prepared Hudson to be their Juan Carlos. They backed off when Hudson lost his arm. Well, the Committee had plenty of uses for Colonel Hudson and his special skills… Another interesting note-Philip Berger of the CIA ran Hudson's original commando training at Fort Bragg. Several Committee members have spoken at veterans affairs over the past few years. The connections are there, the manipulation is feasible. The Committee needed a paramilitary group, and they used David Hudson.”

  Carroll had read the missing FBI and Pentagon files that Samantha Hawes had brought with her. “Hudson was given a lot of help with Green Band, probably more than he needed. The help came in the form of Wall Street information, and precise tips about what we were doing inside number Thirteen. That's why he was able to play so many cat-and-mouse games. He also had Pentagon files on all potential candidates for Vets. As it turned out, Hudson chose men who'd served with him in Vietnam. The Committee promised him millions as a reward once the Green Band mission was completed.”

  “Yes, only half the Vets are dead now,” Birnbaum said. “The rest are missing. Colonel Hudson is missing. Where is David Hudson now, I wonder?”

  Caitlin had been unusually quiet for most of the session. She had retrieved the necessary financial backup information. She was still angry. She felt used by this grandiose Committee that believed it was above the gover
nment, above laws.

  “We're beginning to make progress,” she said in a quiet, businesslike manner. “But we are still faced with an over-whelming problem. Can we trust anyone but the people right in this room? Do we take our information to the newspapers? Do we go to the director of the FBI, Samantha? Whom can we tell this story to?”

  There was silence in the room. They were all beginning to understand the frightening power of a select few. Whom could they trust?

  The cover-up was almost as clever and masterful as the Green Band plot itself. The cover-up was brilliantly executed.

  For another twenty-four hours the Carrolls managed to live in cramped quarters in the West Side hotel. So far, they had no other choice. Whom could they trust?

  Late at night, Carroll and Caitlin stayed in the smaller of the two bedrooms. They lay in each other's arms, passing the long, eerie hours exploring each other's bodies. They were realistic enough to know that something nightmarish might still happen-that they might never be together like this again.

  “Hudson said something up on that rooftop,” Carroll whispered as he stroked Caitlin's hair. “He said that he loved his country. You know, I still feel that way myself. I almost feel close to Hudson in a strange way.”

  Caitlin and Carroll made love again that night, and it was more tender than it had ever been. They fell asleep holding each other, like children during a storm.

  At six o'clock on the morning of December 24, Caitlin found that she couldn't sleep anymore. She finally got up.

  When she switched on the tiny portable radio, she heard the news that finally broke her heart.

  “Anton Birnbaum, advisor to several U.S. presidents, was killed on Riverside Drive near his home early today. The elderly, still-active financier was struck by an unidentified hit-and-run driver… Birnbaum was eighty-three years old at the time of his death.”