Dead and Gone
Page 30
“Wolfe won’t … won’t work with me anymore.”
“I can do it,” Michelle piped up.
Nobody said anything, waiting.
“I know just the man,” she said. “An old man. Lives in Key West. A real recluse. A rich recluse. Never goes out. I think he needs oxygen just to get around.”
“How’s that going to—?”
“Baby, let me tell it, all right? He’s an old man, if you understand what I’m telling you. He spends his money on anything that might give him back what he’s lost. Powdered rhino horn, tiger testicles—you know. Plus, he’s a real fascist. Anyone checks him out, they’ll see he’s been giving money to those save-the-race freakshows for years.”
“Yeah, fine. But this Darcadia—why bother? He’s already got his paradise right here, all that money.”
“No, sweetheart. There’s one thing he’s heard that’s guaranteed to give him back what he wants. Little girls. Fresh ones, understand? But he’s scared to death of trusting any kiddie pimp. Plus, he’s afraid to fly, so he only travels by boat. His own boat.”
“So maybe he’d want to buy a piece—”
“—a big piece.”
“—a big piece, okay, of this operation so he could have what he wanted … hell, be a king down there. Christ.”
“It sounds very perfect,” the Mole said.
“What are you saying?” Michelle challenged.
“That it is not true. It sounds as if you took Burke’s specifications and built a person to fit them.”
“Just some of it is built,” Michelle said, not resenting the Mole’s insight.
“How much?” I asked, already tired from the weight.
“The part about little girls. He’s not into that at all.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know what he is into, you idiot.”
I risked a glance at the Mole. He was calm as a snake on a hot rock. A venomous snake.
“What makes you think he’d go along with me taking over his identity?” I asked Michelle. Quickly, before she could go into details.
“Like I said, I know what he wants.”
“But we don’t have—”
“Sure. We have,” Mama said, radiating calm. “In special clinic, yes?”
She’d snapped to it way before I had. “What special—?”
“And it would take considerable time to complete all the testing necessary,” the Mole said, soberly.
“Mole,” I said, “we wouldn’t really be—”
Patches of red showed in the Mole’s subterranean complexion as his eyes flicked rapidly behind his Coke-bottle lenses. “I know,” he said. As close to sarcasm as he gets.
Mama knew an outlaw doctor based just outside of Galveston.
The guy only did plastic surgery. And he didn’t keep records. All it took was cash for him to close down his clinic for a month.
Eight days later, Michelle called from Key West to say, smugly, that the old man was ready to travel. I asked her what kind of boat he had.
“It’s me,” I said, when I heard Gem’s voice on the phone.
“I knew you would call.”
“Are you as certain of the phone you’re speaking from?”
“Oh! No, perhaps not.”
“Can you find the corner of Ninth Avenue and Seventeenth Street?”
“Yes.”
“You have your red coat with you?”
“Yes. It is precious to me.”
“Be sure to wear it. A black man with a West Indian accent will meet you.”
“When shall I leave?”
“Now.”
I watched from my back booth as Gem entered Mama’s restaurant with Clarence. Mama was at her register, but didn’t look up as Gem walked back toward me. Clarence went out the way he’d come in.
As soon as Gem was seated, Mama walked over, snapping her fingers for the mandatory tureen of hot-and-sour soup. One of the gunmen who pretend they’re waiters when some tourist mistakes Mama’s for a restaurant brought it over.
Mama took the lid off the tureen, looked a question at me.
I nodded a “Yes” at her, and she put a small bowl before Gem and filled it, making it clear I could serve my own damn self. She regarded Gem thoughtfully, doing an ethnic read. Then she tried a greeting in Tagalog, but Gem smiled and shook her head, replying in Cambodian. Now it was Mama’s turn to shake her head. She tried French, and Gem answered right back.
Mama bowed slightly and sat down next to me, bumping me over to the wall so she could sit directly across from Gem.
“You both speak English,” I said to her. “What’s with all this—?”
Mama cut me off with a look. Gem giggled.
And they went back to speaking French.
I was well into my third bowl of soup when they decided to let me in on the conversation.
“So? You Burke’s wife?” Mama asked in English.
“Yes,” Gem answered her.
“You understand, Burke my son. Not marry for … final unless I say.”
“I understand,” Gem said, solemnly.
“Your mother …?”
“The Khmer.”
“Ah. Sorry. So many …”
“Yes.”
“After this … thing all finish,” Mama promised Gem. At least, it sounded like some kind of promise. I couldn’t figure out what it meant, but I wasn’t dumb enough to ask.
After Mama went back to whatever she had been doing, I read Gem the specs on the old man’s boat I’d written down from my conversation with Michelle.
“It’s a ninety-two-foot Cheoy Lee cockpit motor yacht,” I told her. “Whatever the hell that is.”
“I am sure they could handle it, but I will call to be certain.”
Then I told her the rest of it. Gem didn’t say a word, didn’t interrupt me once. When I was finished, she said, “There is another way I could help, I think.”
Mama came back over to my booth as if she’d been listening in on a wiretap and knew we were done talking.
“Eat now, yes?”
An hour later, Gem was still shoveling it away.
Mama passed by the booth, saw the carnage, and chuckled approvingly.
“The boat should have at least a four-person crew,” Gem told me the next day.
“At least?”
“It is an oceangoing vessel,” she said, as if reciting a lesson. “So it must be manned around the clock. It is a very big boat, probably cost in excess of three million dollars. You have never been at sea?”
“Me? The only boat ride I’ve ever been on in my life was the Staten Island Ferry.”
“Ah, well. It does not matter. You will not be posing as a sailor. And if you appear … ill at the time of your meeting, it will be in character. But we will need one more person.”
“One more? You said four, right?”
“Oh, I will be going, too,” she said.
“I need a driver, Sonny,” I told the kid. Only he wasn’t a kid anymore.
“I heard you were—”
“Now you know better.”
“Oh man, this is great! I—”
“In or out, kid?”
“Can I use my own ride?”
“Which is?”
“A Viper GTS. But it’s got—”
“No. We need something with plenty of room. Got to carry some people, long distance.”
“Can we use your—?”
“No. That’s gone.”
“Damn! That was one sweet—”
“The job is a delivery. You bring some people somewhere, you pick someone up when you get there, you drive them all someplace else. Then you come back on your own.”
“Why would you need me for that?”
“You thought I was … what? Remember?”
“Yeah. Sorry. Okay. You need fast or smooth?”
“Smooth. And roomy. Lots of room.”
“My buddy has a Ford Excursion. We use it to tow mine to the races. Big enough?”<
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“Plenty. With clean papers all the way through, son. You’re going to be crossing a lot of state lines.”
“Just tell me where to meet you.”
“Sonnyboy!” the Prof greeted him with a hug, then stepped back to look him over. “The wheelman’s a real man now!”
The kid whose mother had named him Randy blushed.
We loaded the truck in the back alley behind Mama’s. The guy she brought over to do the heavy lifting was so big he should have given off a beeping sound when he backed up.
“It’s about fifteen hundred miles,” I told Sonny.
“This one’s got the V-10 in it. I can make fifteen hundred miles in—”
“You can make it in about thirty hours, kid. No tickets, understand? Max might be able to stop a rhino, but he drives like one, too. So you’ll have to break up the run. Just grab a motel anywhere along the—”
“I am an excellent driver,” Gem announced.
“You ever drive anything this big?” I asked her, pointing at the red Excursion’s huge bulk.
“Bigger,” she said. “And over much worse roads than we will be traveling.”
Sonny and I exchanged shrugs. When I didn’t argue with her, he decided he wouldn’t, either.
When the Excursion pulled out, it carried a silent Mongolian who could take a life with either hand; a pasty-faced, pudgy guy with thick glasses and a satchel full of stuff they don’t allow on airplanes; and a cargo hold full of equipment. And Gem.
Right behind them was a dark-blue BMW 7 riding caravan, Clarence and the Prof inside. And me.
I jumped off in D.C., grabbed a flight to Tampa. Met Michelle at the airport. She had a man-and-wife rental at the Hyatt Regency, where we spent the night going over it, again. The next morning, we took off for Key West.
When the rest of the crew arrived—a couple of hours ahead of schedule—we went over it one more time. I finally thought we were all finished, but Michelle had one more thing.
“That nurse’s outfit does look cute on you, but are you sure you can handle the needle?” she asked Gem. “The Mole will get the dosages perfect, but you’ve got to slip it in like you’ve been doing it for years.”
“Shall I show you?” Gem asked, reaching for the syringe.
It took hours to get the old man into the back of the Excursion.
Not to load him, to convince him. Michelle had greased the skids, all right, but the man was old … not dumb.
I was the businessman, in my alpaca suit. Michelle was the working girl who was going to get a cut of the profits—that part actually calmed the old man down, as we expected. Max was the bodyguard, Gem the nurse.
The Mole’s role was mad scientist. Fortunately, that wasn’t much of a stretch. By the time he got done explaining how individual cells could be extracted from first-trimester aborted fetuses, tested for a unique DNA combo-string with a producer-multiplier effect on testosterone, and, once isolated, IV-dripped into a man kept in a quasi-comatose state—“The body must be regulated in all respects during the transfer. Any sudden acceleration of heartbeat, for example, would negate the bonding process. We are not adding to blood. We are making new blood, which will then self-replenish. The goal is a compound, not a mixture”—he had me wanting to try it myself.
“I apologize for what may seem an excessive need for secrecy,” I told the old man. “But this work is illegal on too many levels to describe.”
“You mean the FDA?” he asked, slyly.
I knew where he was going. I gave Michelle the high-sign and she ushered the Mole out of the room, chattering away about whether injected collagen really collapsed after only a few months. The old man’s sulfur eyes followed the whole thing. As soon as the room was empty, I moved my chair closer to him, lowered my voice:
“That’s not the problem,” I said. “Well, certainly, FDA approval would take, perhaps, decades in America. And that would be only if there was a drug company willing to spend the lobbying money. But doing it in Switzerland, or any country that allows revolutionary medical procedures, just wouldn’t work. In order for the procedure to be effective, we need to screen more than just the fetuses.”
“I don’t understand.”
I glanced over my shoulder, as if to assure myself that the Mole wasn’t within earshot. “Dr. Klexter is a brilliant scientist. But he’s a Jew.…”
The old man’s eyes reflected the truth of what Michelle had told us about him, but he didn’t say a word.
“And you know how those people are,” I continued. “Fantastic minds. But they’re not of our race. An intelligent man uses them, but never takes them fully into his confidence. The truth is, sir, that we’ve run the doctor’s calculations ourselves. And the most effective method is with late-term fetuses … if you follow what I’m saying.”
“I believe I do,” is all he said.
“And the early-aborted fetuses which theoretically could be available for scientific purposes are not screened as you would want, either.”
“As I would …?”
“What the doctor was describing—and, look, I don’t pretend to be a scientist, but our consortium has invested so much money in this that I’ve had to learn some things—is a permanent alteration of your blood. This isn’t some ‘injection’ that you get periodically, or some pill you take. It changes your chemistry, the way your blood works. That’s what he meant by a compound, not a mixture. The new blood, those little drops you get day by day until you’re done, will be indivisible. It will be your blood. Do you follow me, sir?”
“Yes. And I would only want Aryan—”
“Pure Aryan,” I interrupted him. “And we are in a position to guarantee it. And from very late-term fetuses. Do we understand each other now?”
His face was calm—maybe the oxygen mask had that effect—but now his eyes were luciferous. “Perfectly,” he finally said.
The Excursion’s cavernous back area was filled with the old man’s special chair, his oxygen tanks, and his new private nurse, Gem. The back windows were deeply tinted. Randy drove, Max on the front seat next to him. The Prof and Clarence would pick them up somewhere out of town, and ride cover for them all the way, the Mole in the back seat of the BMW.
We figured it for approximately the same distance that the Manhattan-to-Key West run had been. Then we factored in some extra time to attend to the old man. He wouldn’t like staying in anonymous rattrap motels along the way; but he’d bought into the whole total-secrecy thing, so he’d go along quietly enough.
And if not, between Max and Gem, he’d stay quiet.
His yacht was already on the water, heading for the South Texas coast. “Just in case,” I had explained it to him. “Nobody wants any exposure here. If your boat’s on the water, you’re on the water, should there be any … interest in your whereabouts. We have people who can move the boat back out to sea while you’re at the clinic. And we’ll just keep it there until you’re ready to return.”
“My own crew is on permanent—”
“But they don’t need to know your business, do they, sir? Wouldn’t it be a better plan to simply tell them you’re having work done to the boat where it’s being taken, give them a month off, and have them stay no more than a few hours’ drive from where it’s tied up? No matter how long they’ve been with you … well, you know what the tabloids are paying for information today.”
“I do,” he said, grimly. “The bloodsucking Jews.”
Michelle and I flew ahead to Houston, where we picked up another rental and headed down to Galveston. The hand-over of the clinic went nice and smooth. The doc who owned it didn’t want to know anything—just when he could come back.
The Excursion pulled in about an hour before we expected it. But we’d timed it for three in the morning, so we unloaded the old man in darkness, as planned.
“Thanks, kid,” I told Randy. “We’ll take it from here.”
“Burke, you know I’d do—”
“You just did,” I said.
“My man’s hip, and he’s got the chips. I say, let him play,” the Prof ruled.
The old man had a good night’s sleep, thanks to one of the Mole’s potions.
And in the morning, we all went to work.
First we explained to the old man that we’d have to run a lot of tests. Sure, we had his complete medical records—he’d had a copy in his safe—but this wasn’t exactly a routine medical procedure. The clinic had all kinds of incoming communications. Bigscreen TV, radio that could pick up anything on the airwaves, a T-1 line to the Internet. But we only used cell phones, outgoing. We explained that the clinic was off the charts. And any land-line call could be traced. We wanted him to be able to do any business he needed to do, so he was free to use one of the cellulars, but if he had a fax or an e-mail or even a FedEx that needed to go out, he’d have to give it to us, and we’d see it was sent from another location.
He just nodded. Hard to tell if it was from understanding or the drugs.
The Mole showed me how the cellulars would patch through a microphone into the harmonizer. I’d learned my lesson from Max’s daughter, and I wasn’t going to have this whole thing die if the target had voice-recognition software.
The T-1 found it in a few seconds. Darcadia had its own website, very slick and professionally done. But the phone and fax numbers were offshore. And there wasn’t even so much as a PO box for a physical location.
On the surface, it looked not only legitimate, but … possible. Why shouldn’t an island in the Pacific form its own country? Darcadia was nothing but an intersection of coordinates on a map, the very tip of a long archipelago, several hundred miles from its nearest neighbor. And it was unoccupied, so there wouldn’t be any indigenous people to dislodge. It could be purchased outright from the country it was … theoretically … part of. And a sovereign government could make its own laws.