Rivers of Gold

by Adam Dunn

  “Why would the Treasury Department care about an NYPD murder investigation, let alone a CAB case?”

  “I’m not saying they do, just that we came up on their radar while checking things out on the supply end, and they probably got curious. I think it’s all part of the same thing. They’re following the money, which we’ve been after all along, but we found dope in cabs instead. There’s probably FBI mixed up in this too, maybe state police. That OCID division you like so much might even be involved.”

  Santiago was feeling more lost by the minute. “Why would so many different outfits be conducting separate investigations? Why not do a joint operation? It worked for—”

  “Because,” More cut in, working his throat again, “the government’s a lot like Urbank. It has lots of people in lots of places doing lots of different things, and the big picture’s usually not very clear, especially when it comes to intelligence work. One of the bosses who knows I’m here is supposed to try to coordinate all that, but not every agency head tells him everything that’s going on. Sometimes it’s competition, sometimes it’s ignorance. When there’s big money involved, it’s like boiling a solution, all the different molecules speed up. Sometimes they collide, like we did with the Treasury team.”

  Santiago still felt lost, though not as much as he had when they’d first pulled into the aquarium parking lot. But questions kept piling up in his head. “So how much of One PP knows what you’re doing here?”

  More shrugged. “The commissioner. Maybe the DA or the AG. I’m not really sure. But they were told to keep it close.”

  A penny dropped for Santiago. “And DC Derricks?”

  “Yeah. As head of CT operations, he had to be kept in the loop.”

  “What were you two talking about at the CPP?”

  “He was curious. Said he’d heard about me through the SOF grapevine. He asked me if I was the only one.”

  “The only what, exactly?”

  “The only SOF operator embedded in the NYPD right now.”

  Santiago felt his stomach sink lower in his abdomen. “Are you?”

  More’s Fish Face came back, which coincided with the shark’s reappearance. Looking at the two of them, separated by a few feet of water and glass, it occurred to Santiago that he’d been mistaken. More did not look like any other creature Santiago had ever pulled from the depths. More was no game fish. More was an apex predator, like the shark gliding through the cold dark water beside him.

  “I don’t know,” More said flatly, and Santiago’s blood ran cold. The thought of an unknown number of highly trained, battle-hardened head cases like More being turned loose in New York with badges and enough firepower to take out entire city blocks and no sense of restraint holding them back scared him. Even worse than More’s driving did.

  “You know, there are laws against this kind of thing.” Santiago figured it was worth a shot.

  More snorted, an ugly sound. “Officially I’m here to help with drug interdiction. On the books, that’s legal. The Corps got stuck with drug detail a long time ago, I don’t know why. The ESU embed is perfect cover, I really do sniper training; your guys need it bad. Volunteering for CAB duty was my idea, and as far as I know, it was never an issue. Until today.”

  More leaned in closer, and Santiago fought the urge to step back. “Law is reactionary in nature, Detective Santiago. It’s always playing catch-up and it always will be. But with New York City going down the tubes, the bosses figured it’s time to get proactive. I’m not supposed to make arrests, interrogate suspects, or testify in court. I’m not supposed to interfere with the process.” Santiago thought he heard the faintest hint of a sneer from More in that last word. “And don’t worry, you’ll get all the credits. Anything else?”

  “What were you doing on the roof of the library the other night?”

  “I’d been doing some research on the taxicab business, just to get some background. The last time I was there, I’d noticed some delivery vans parked down the block on the Fortieth Street side. Guys were carrying in boxes of booze, stereo speakers, stuff like that. I wondered why someone would be setting up a party in a restaurant that’s supposed to have been closed for years.

  “When you’re a scout and a sniper, you get used to sitting in places for long stretches. You watch and wait, and if you’re patient, eventually you get some good intel. I’m very patient. When that librarian took me up to the roof, I ditched him and stayed up there after he left. The crowd started showing up around nine-thirty. I watched the taxi traffic with this—” More held up what looked like a mini-Maglite “—it’s a night-vision monocular, and took down some of the numbers off their dome lights. Arun’s cab came back twice, and so did another one Baijanti Divya’s running down for us. I stayed up there just long enough to see the security guys work. Looked like they knew what they were doing; I saw them toss some kid out like trash. I think I’ve seen him before. Then I left. They never saw me. Anything else?”

  Santiago didn’t know. His situation had been so drastically altered in one day he didn’t know what to ask. “What’s that weird-looking piece you carry?”

  “A Heckler and Koch P2000SK chambered for point forty-five GAP rounds.”

  “What’s wrong with a nine?”

  “Point forty-five’s for Force Recon.”

  “So why do you keep yours locked in your desk?”

  “I got that from ESU. Glock sells to police forces all over the world. My weapon was custom-made for me at the RTE shop in Quantico, same as for all Recon operators.”

  “I thought you jarheads were all married to your rifles.”

  “We are.”

  “So why’d you ask me to sign out an M4 for you? Don’t you have your own? And couldn’t you just get one from ESU anyway?”

  More made a sound that might have been a sigh. “Detective, try to keep up. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be inconspicuous.”

  “You call what you did to that drag inconspicuous? Lemme tell you something, if I could make you, anyone on the force with half a brain probably could, if they cared enough. The only reason I cared enough is ’cause I gotta work with you.”

  More frowned. “How did you make me?”

  Santiago explained about the speeding ticket he’d dug up through RTCC. More listened, looking out into the tank, and nodded once. Santiago could almost see him mentally giving himself a demerit for carelessness. “Hey, it was a year old. Anyone else would’ve missed it.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Like I said, I have to work with you. And you know, whatever you did in Afghanistan, that shit won’t play here. You want to look like a cop, you gotta think and act like one, not like you’re goin’ out every shift to smoke some Taliban motherfucker shootin’ RPGs and shit. They may be drags, but they’re still people; they got rights.”

  From More, a noncommittal grunt.

  They were quiet for a time, watching the shark follow its ancient circle. “They’ll be releasing Carl in a few days,” More said with a uvular rattle. “Captive white sharks die if they’re not released soon after capture. They weren’t made to be cooped up.” Santiago wondered if More was trying to tell him something.

  “When we start rolling up the network, you won’t always see me,” More continued, as though they were discussing shoelace colors. “We’ll have to keep our comms clear. I need a handle for you, something nobody else knows, in case the guys we’re after can monitor NYPD signal traffic.”

  Santiago thought about this. Where it came from, he didn’t know, but somehow it fit. “When I was a kid, I played a lot of basketball. I used to get in pick-up games at the park with the older kids,” he mused, picturing them in his mind, nineteen or twenty, impossibly tall and bulked up, fresh out of jail. No fouls. “They called me Six.”

  More nodded. “Six. I like it. Short and easy to remember.”

  Santiago dreaded asking it. “So what did they call you?”

  More did his impression of a smile formi
ng in geologic time. “They called me Ever. Ever More. Get it?”

  Ever More.

  Christ help us.

  Nuts. Completely fucking nuts. That was his impression of it, but here he was behind the wheel of the Crown Vic, holding a laptop far more expensive than anything he’d ever worked on. Baijanti Divya sat in the passenger seat beside him. They were parked in a bus lane on Twenty-sixth between Fifth and Madison, on the northern border of Madison Square Park. More was on the roof of the Flatiron Building, with a camera that had an obscenely large telephoto lens. Once he had the eyeball on Arun Ladhani, high-resolution images would be sent to Santiago’s laptop, from which he could beam them to the phones of the half-dozen CAB volunteers that the Narc Sharks had asked, cajoled, or threatened into being part of this lunacy. More called the photo-transfer system SIDS. McKeutchen had said hell, why not, the department sure didn’t have the equipment for this kind of stunt, but he said they’d have to have an independent confirmation of the eyeball before they took the burnout down. Hence Santiago’s present companion.

  They were on a ridiculous schedule. Baijanti Divya had organized a massive driver protest after the identity of the third cabdriver victim, Raghuram Rajan, was released, which was already starting to cohere in Harlem. Santiago had pointed out to the CAB force that while victim number three had been summarily executed, shot twice in the head, the postmortem showed no indications of torture, as with the first two cabbies. This looked more like a straight hit-and-run. They’d kicked it around a CAB Group One huddle before rolling out.

  “Maybe they didn’t have time to break out the toolbox,” Turse proposed.

  “Maybe somebody saw them jack the cab,” Liesl suggested.

  “Maybe it was someone else,” More expectorated.

  “Enough fucking maybes. Pick up the burnout and the other one, see if we can get one to roll on the other. But do it fast. Three dead cabbies and a big fucking protest drive is not helping our cause any, gentlemen.” In spite of the long odds and short shot clock, McKeutchen was visibly pleased at the progress they were making, and at the fact that they were finally working together, albeit grudgingly. He no longer held More in his office for private meetings, yet he had seemed able to keep the rest of the department from sharing More’s secret. Santiago did not press his CO on the state of things with One PP vis-à-vis More.

  Baijanti Divya agreed to confirm More’s recon of the burnout cabbie, but she had stressed that the other one was to be treated with care. When Santiago asked why, she made a point of looking at More.

  “This man, detectives, is a refugee from one of the worst conflicts raging on the planet. He is from a town near Goma, on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He has lost his entire family to the ongoing proxy wars there, and was repeatedly victimized as he struggled to make his way here, where becoming a cabdriver was one of the only occupations open to him. All cabdrivers have difficult lives, but his is an extreme case, even for the industry. He has no relatives here, and there are few people with whom he can communicate in his native language. If he can make enough money and learn enough English, he may be able to assimilate, assuming he can survive. For now, driving a cab is all that he has. Becoming involved in your investigation will likely jeopardize his standing with the TLC, which of course will inform both the FBI and ICE, which will ultimately decide his fate. This man’s life has been a violent, dangerous river. Now that he has found a reasonably calm eddy I would like to see him stay here, as long as he likes.” Baijanti Divya crossed her arms. No gold or traditional dress for her today, Santiago noted. Today was an olive-green one-piece garment covered with pockets and zippers. She looked like Che Guevara in drag on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

  “We’ll try to make things as easy as we can for him,” Santiago assured her, though he wondered how they’d pull it off.

  That was before the cabs had started massing for the protest at the north end of Central Park, near where his sister was working. She had taken some shots with her phone and sent them to him; the lush green of the northeast corner of the park clashed sharply with the bright yellow blob that seemed to stretch from 110th and Fifth all the way to the East River bridges. Santiago had never seen anything like it. This was much, much bigger than the taxi lot at the airport. This was a seething yellow mass, and it was made up of angry, frightened cabdrivers. The NYPD had mobilized auxiliaries in riot gear and staged a dozen motor cops at the corner of each major crosstown artery from Ninety-sixth to Twenty-third. There were three mobile command posts parked along the route and two choppers from Aviation hovering motionless over the park, along with half a dozen helicopters from various news agencies. Santiago had idly wondered aloud if there weren’t one or two high-altitude drones up there as well, their cameras sending high-resolution feeds back to Washington that just might be useful to their investigation, and maybe More could make a call. More had given him the Fish Face and Santiago had skulked off to the cab in disgust. His mood only lifted when Baijanti Divya joined him.

  It occurred to him that while he would admit to no man what he thought or felt about More, Baijanti Divya did not technically qualify. Despite having had his earlier impressions sufficiently shattered, he had to admit there was something about her that went beyond the sort of intuitive female radar he had been subject to in the course of his life, from his mother and sister on. Baijanti Divya had something the women of his experience did not. He did not believe in psychics, ESP, spiritual mediums, or any of the other pop-psych garbage littering cable television. While he accompanied his family to church for the usual occasions, he himself felt no connection to the divine, nor did he hold much faith in his fellow man. His upbringing and vocation had thoroughly cured him of that. Still, there was something ethereal about Baijanti Divya that he couldn’t put his finger on. And while he couldn’t quite read her interest in More, he was absolutely convinced that she knew what More was, and had known since their first meeting at the airport. This was all gut, no rational explanation at all.

  Cabdrivers all over were making for the staging area uptown, their dome lights reading OFF DUTY. Several of them appeared to be listening to the same Punjabi radio station, with the same Bhangra tune pumping out of their lowered windows. Even Santiago thought it was a pretty good beat.

  “It’s ‘Sonne da Challa’ by Vikrant Singh,” Baijanti Divya informed him.

  How the fuck does she know what I’m thinking? Santiago ranted to himself. More had said she was some kind of tranny, intersexual, whatever. Said there was a tradition of them over there. How did he know about that? Were there people like Baijanti Divya in Pakistan as well as India? Why would a crazy motherfucker like More know about them? Maybe the whole cross-dressing thing helped with Deep Recon.

  And why had she decided to help them, anyway?

  He had just decided to sound her out on this when she said, “You and your partner haven’t worked together long, have you?”

  Santiago was caught off guard, a feeling he’d had entirely enough of lately. “What? Uh, about six months or so, give or take,” he sputtered.

  She smiled, a lovely sight, especially compared with the looks he usually got these days. “I’m confirming an observation. I don’t suppose you know his background?”

  She knew. But she couldn’t know. McKeutchen had kept More under wraps and trusted Santiago to do the same. Was it the Narc Sharks? DC Derricks, or maybe that dweeb Saffran? What the fuck?

  “What, you want his phone number?”

  “What I want is of little consequence in this context. If the government sees fit to spy on cabdrivers, all it needs to do is look to the regulatory agencies overseeing the industry. But I fear this matter is deeper and more serious, with cabdrivers being caught in the middle of a dangerous game between extremely dangerous opponents. I want to protect those in the industry from what promises to be an ugly confrontation between your department and men in cabs who are not cabdrivers, although both sides are using them f
or their own purposes. What I want, detective, is a safe and decent taxi industry, which has historically been anything but. The taxi business is an integral part of the city’s infrastructure, and it has provided a starting point for generations of immigrants who come to this country to help build and support families the world over. The man you seek is an exception, one whose corrupt ways are well known to those in the trade. The time of his reckoning is long overdue, like your investigation. I want the livelihood of the rest, the decent, hard-working majority of the industry’s labor pool, protected for as much time as it has left.”

  Santiago was in over his head. “Left?”

  Baijanti Divya sighed, looking through the windscreen. “They say that some hijra can predict the future. I don’t know if I can, but I sense the time is coming when the occupation of cabdriver will be rendered extinct, replaced by automation. The amount of overregulation, health hazards, cost overruns, insurance, and whipsawing fuel charges has reached a zenith. It won’t be long before someone creates a cost-effective robot cabdriver that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, doesn’t get kidney trouble sitting behind the wheel for days at a time, doesn’t speed, doesn’t get lost, and maybe even doesn’t get into accidents. It will constantly broadcast its location to the TLC, never talk back to customers, and never stage a protest like this one today. That’s him,” she said, pointing to the screen. Santiago looked down. The image of a young Indian man standing beside a cab stared back at him. The man had disheveled hair, mirrored sunglasses, and an easy smile, and he was gesturing to a small group of cabdrivers parked in the plaza. More’s photos indicated the man was pointing to the side of an abandoned building on Twenty-fourth, and laughing.