“Yes, sir,” said Bob.
“Okay, your five minutes start now.” Duke and Vinnie Skins got up and left the table.
Five minutes and a bit later, Richie/Bob pushed open the glass door in the rear of the Washington Post building and strolled down a long, cool, air-conditioned and carpeted corridor. To his left he could see through the glass walls a huge, busy and bustling newspaper office with desks and computers and a properly diverse cross-section of liberal yuppie humanity tapping on the computers. The Post was one of only about a dozen actual printed newspapers left in the United States, although their press run was subsidized by federal funds in the name of “American heritage.” Other than New York and the District itself, the paper was virtually unobtainable throughout the country, since almost no one read newspapers anymore, but the Post and the Gray Lady, the New York Times, as well as the Wall Street Journal, were the official voices of the United States government and as such rated the dignity of the traditional printed page.
To his consternation, Bob saw one of his regular customers coming out of one of the men’s rooms on his right, one of the Post’s reporters. Harrison Hart was a harried-looking man in his thirties with a frizz of blond hair and glasses, and despite the air-conditioning, his short-sleeved yellow pastel shirt was soaked with sweat and his loose tie was drooping. “Richie!” Hart exclaimed. “Great! Just the man! I was going to give you a call. Got any butts on you?”
Bob knew he shouldn’t stop, and he also knew that although he hadn’t looked back, the Asian Secret Serviceman might be behind him and Duke might be about to shoot him or garrote him or whatever he was going to do right in the Post building, if he hadn’t been able to intercept the fed outside. But blowing Hart off would be out of character for a pharmaceutical entrepreneur, and would cause his visit to be remembered. Bob looked around, and couldn’t see anyone else in the long hallway, and so he motioned Hart back into the men’s room. Once inside he said, “I’m on my way to a drop, but I got a spare carton of Rothman’s I can let you hold for a couple of G-notes,” he told the newshound.
Hart shuffled in his wallet. “All I have on me is a monkey,” he said. “Can I owe you the rest?”
“Come on, Harry, you know that’s not how it works,” said Richie. “Cash on delivery. It’s two hundred a pack. Tell you what, gimme the monkey and I’ll give you three packs. Call it a good customer discount.”
“You’re a prince among men, Richie,” said Hart gratefully, handing over the five hundred dollars. Bob tore open one of the cartons of cigarettes, handed Hart three packs, and pocketed the money. A minute later Campbell stepped out onto 15th Street and got into Vinnie Skins’ late-model Lincoln, run on sinfully expensive premium gasoline instead of politically correct and even more expensive electric UPS. Cardinale was on the phone, which he closed as soon as Bob got in.
“Duke’s done,” he said. “Now we pick him up, and I try to think of some way to save a nigger’s life. One of the things they don’t teach you at Whidbey Island is how fucking ironic this job can get sometimes.” Several minutes later, they spotted Duke lounging on a bench in McPherson Square. He got into the back. “Flatface get his Dear John letter?” asked Cardinale.
“Yeah. He was devastated,” replied Duke. “In the alley, and I went out the same way I came in. Nothing on camera.”
“What’s Dear John?” asked Bob.
Duke took out the pen from his shirt pocket and handed it over the seat to Bob. “Ordinary ball point pen, to all appearances,” he explained. “It even writes. Take both ends and rotate them in opposite directions. Yeah, like that. They come apart. Now put them back together but in reverse. See?”
“It’s a little gun!” exclaimed Bob admiringly.
“Yeah. A single twenty-two-caliber long rifle hollow-point cartridge goes inside. Half a twist to the right to cock it, squeeze the clip-on to fire it. Of course you got to be at point blank range, and you have to hit a vital spot in the head, through the eye or the ear, or in this case the base of the skull at a forty-five degree angle. Best to use it like you would a knife, press it into the target’s body and use his own flesh and bone as a silencer. That’s how the Office writes somebody a Dear John letter.” Bob handed the tiny weapon back to Duke.
“You get the gook’s phone?” asked Cardinale.
“Yeah, I checked it out while I was waiting for you before I took out the chip and tossed it. Lot of Secret Service numbers and stuff we can send to the analysis unit back Home, and I found a photo of Richie and Belladonna, one of Richie, and one of us three together, but I checked his last outgoing calls and he didn’t make any from the Garden. I don’t think he transmitted the photos.”
“The gods are watching over us, as always,” said Cardinale with a sigh of relief. “Okay, now how do we stop this Kanesha Knight rubout?”
“First problem, maybe insurmountable, is that they know the when and where, and we don’t,” offered Duke practically. “If we have her private phone number and GPS we can do a trace.”
“Or maybe just plain call her and warn her?” suggested Bob.
“And say what?” asked Cardinale. “‘Hi, Kanesha, we’re the wicked racists you’re planning on exterminating, but we have a soft spot in our hearts for brown sugar, so we figured we’d tip you the wink that your boss is going to throw you under the bus, literally?’ I don’t even think we have her phone number. We try to keep up to date on data like that, but it’s hard. CIA personnel are issued those souped-up satellite phones that actually acquire and use a different number for each call, like the old dial-up computers used a different dynamic IP address for every log-on.”
“CIA headquarters is in Langley, Virginia, right?” asked Bob. “Maybe they’re planning on killing her in her own office building, but Georgia said she specifically overheard reference to a drive-by shooting. They’ll probably attack Mammy K between her office and home. Do we know where she lives?”
“Of course,” said Cardinale. “In Southeast. Anacostia. But we don’t know if she’s going straight home. She may be working late, she may have some kind of social function or work-related meeting elsewhere, or she may be going to a nightclub to boogie until dawn,” Cardinale glanced at his watch. “It’s eight o’clock now. We have no clue where she actually is. Belladonna just said it would be tonight. It may be going down as we speak, dammit!”
“I notice Hunter Wallace is very noticeably out of town,” said Duke. “As if anyone would think he needs an alibi. The guilty flee where no man pursueth, and all that Shakespearean crap. That nigger Hadding is supposed to be his personal bodyguard. I wonder what excuse they’ll come up with as to why he’s not with his boss in New York?”
“Maybe Hadding is the key,” said Bob slowly. “He’s the only lead we have. He’s the only individual we know who’ll be in the right place at the right time. Any chance we could track him instead of the negress? Do Secret Service agents also get those special phones you talked about?”
“Their phones use special encryption, and their GPS is masked against anything we’ve got or anything Birdie’s got,” said Cardinale. “But his fucking FLEC card won’t be masked! Duke, get Birdie on the horn and tell him we’re coming over, rush job, money no object.”
“Birdie’s not Office,” warned Duke. “He’s just a player. We use him to track a federal agent, he’s going to wise up to the fact that we do more than peddle cancer sticks and glazed ham.”
Cardinale nodded. “I know, but this is an emergency. I may be overly pessimistic. We may actually be able to stop the whole fucking invasion if we prevent the ostensible casus belli. That means we have to give it a shot, no matter what the risk. Actually, if we can find out when and where, and we can interdict the hit successfully, I have an idea as to how we can turn this whole thing really to our advantage. But we have to get into the loop first. I’ll talk to Birdie tonight. I’ll tell him the bare minimum he needs to know, which is that we’re gonna need his help like never before, but he doesn’t get to ask
question one. When it’s over he’ll have enough money to retire for the rest of his life, but if he rats us out we have friends who will douse him with gasoline, put a rubber tire around his neck, and touch a match to him.”
George Byrd turned out to be a slender, geeky individual of indeterminate age who lived in the house he had inherited from his mother on a quiet back street in Arlington. Cardinale told Bob on the way over that the land on which the house stood was worth tens of millions of dollars, but Byrd refused to sell his childhood home and instead made his money the old-fashioned American way, by stealing it. Birdie’s kingdom was in his basement, a huge bay full of computer equipment and electronic gadgetry that looked like a mad scientist’s laboratory, which in a way it was. A few taps on the keyboard got him into the Social Security database where he retrieved the SSAN for one James Roscoe Hadding, and from then on, it was child’s play for someone who knew how to hack into any computer system in the world, which apparently, Byrd could. He established an uplink with a private corporate satellite that was used by the world financial industry for its own assorted spying purposes, and piggybacked onto Bank of America’s system. Within a matter of minutes, he had located the said James Roscoe Hadding. “Got him,” said Byrd. “Right now he’s on basement level at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue, but on a wild guess, I’d say you guys knew that already. What the hell are you into now, Vinnie? Who is this guy?”
“He’s a guy who’s planning on giving us some problems, so we’re gonna return the favor,” said Cardinale. “You need to keep us posted on his whereabouts for the next few hours. Duke and I need to get going now, but I’ll leave my man Richie here with you, in case you need any help.”
“What kind of help? You matrixed?” asked Birdie.
“I don’t even know what that means,” replied Bob.
“It means you don’t know shit about computers, IT, or telecommunications. So how can you help?”
“We’re going to need you to follow this guy around for us, all night, and Rich here will pass the info on to me,” said Cardinale. “Did I mention that money was no object? Here’s a down payment.” He tossed down a flat pack of thousand-dollar bills of enormous thickness that he pulled from his jacket pocket; it must have been a couple of hundred grand, at least. Birdie eyed the money but did not pick it up.
“You’re going to whack a federal agent, or somebody politically connected enough to be hanging at the White House at this time of night,” he said. “Not that I’m opposed in principle, mind, but something tells me I need to know what the itinerary is before I sign up for this cruise. So what the hell’s going on?”
“Okay, I’ll tell you,” said Bob quietly, before Cardinale could say a word. “Never mind the money, Mr. Byrd. That’s not what this is about, not for us, although don’t worry, you’ll get paid. I’ll level with you: if any of us get caught, we’re dead, including you. What we’re going to be doing is illegal as hell, but it’s not wrong. I don’t know if you see any difference in your own worldview, and if not, I’m not judging you, but that’s the truth. We’re gonna take a break from being criminals, and we’re gonna be heroes for a while. I hope you’ll join us. It may not make us much money, but it feels damned good. We’re asking you to help save lives. Maybe millions of lives, of people like ourselves. Good people. I know some of them. White people. Men, women, children, like my wife and my children and my family back where I come from, who are going to be murdered because they have white skin and because they won’t bow down to a dog. That’s what the hell is going on.”
“Yeah?” said Byrd, looking at them. Cardinale nodded. “You know, Vin, I always figured your crew was a bit sharper than was right for our little slice of life, and there was something going on below ground with you lot.” He picked up the pack of bills. “Keep it. If you’re from where I think you’re from, I and my twinkling keyboard fingers are at your service, and there won’t be any charge.”
“Thanks, Birdie,” said Cardinale.
After they left, Byrd said, “Richie, right? I remember I made your FLEC card. Not from Chicago, I daresay?”
“Nope,” replied Bob. “Never been there.”
“I’m sure you’re here to keep an eye on me and maybe whack me if I crumple or turn rat on you. Fair enough. But I meant it.” He nodded upward. “My mom died in the upstairs bedroom. She never moved out of it for eight years. She was on her way home from work one night when niggers threw her into a van and drove off with her. They dumped her three days later, after they were through with her. Besides all the usual stuff they did to her, she was beaten within an inch of her life, with crushed vertebrae in her spine that paralyzed her and put her in a wheel chair, and brain damage so she could never talk or think right again. I dropped out of MIT and I took care of her from then on.”
“Why didn’t you Go Home to the Northwest after she died?” Bob Campbell asked him.
“Partly because we’re old Virginia people. Ever heard of William Byrd, the colonial plantation owner? Very famous. Historians used to write books and dissertations about his journals from the seventeenth century. I’m the last Byrd of Virginia, and I figured I should run out the clock here. But mostly it’s because Mom left me this house, and if I didn’t live here the asshole developers would find some way to get hold if it, file an eminent domain writ or some such shit, use the law to steal my home like happens all the time in this country when the rich want what the poor have. Naboth had a vineyard, if you’re into the Bible. That’s why I need a heavy cash flow: I keep a team of lawyers on retainer just to fight off the corporations who want this little house, and they don’t come cheap. They’d tear it down for condos or boutiques or some such shit. Then there would be nothing left of her at all, nothing she knew or touched, nothing that remembered her, if you get what I’m saying? I won’t let her be extinguished by black animals, erased as if she never existed. I stay here so this house and I will still remember her together, and in the meantime I make it a point to do whatever I can to fuck up the system.”
“You understand that things may get really dangerous, and they may find out?” asked Bob. “You may have to Come Home anyway, because you’ll no longer have a choice if you want to live.”
“Yeah, I get that,” said Birdie. “Look, I’m not Norman Bates. I know she’s dead, and at some point, it gets time to move on. This looks like it might be a good way to segue into a new time and place. Don’t worry. I’m in. All the way.”
Back at the Arlington warehouse, Cardinale quickly assembled a team of six men and two women, most of the wet workers attached to the D.C. station. He explained his plan to them. Betsy spoke up, “Uh, boss, all due respect and all that, but are you sure you haven’t flipped your lid?”
“Maybe,” admitted Cardinale. “Look, comrades, I know this makes the whole operation a lot more dangerous. One thing we learned back in the day is when you go in, you go in to kill quick and vanish. No frills, no conversation, no Three Musketeers swashbuckling, just get the job done and then break contact with the scene fast, before Fattie or the cops can react. I know this violates that basic principle. I suppose that logically, we should just go in and take out everybody, including the CIA mammy, make a clean sweep of it.
“But remember, we have a larger mission here, and there is a big picture. Kanesha Knight is an affirmative action employee these morons put into one of the most sensitive positions in their government for the sole reason that she’s got a pair of black knockers. One of our most vital tactics has always been to take out key people in the enemy régime and ruling class who either pose a direct threat to the Republic, or often someone whom our intelligence and political analysts predict might develop into a threat in years to come. Nip their asses in the bud. But there’s a flip side to that. Sometimes an enemy individual is such a complete incompetent dipshit that it’s actually better for the Republic’s interests in the long run for them to remain where they are, and let them gum up the works from within.
“In my opinion,
this applies to Mammy K. She believes we’re in contact with UFOs, for Christ’s sake! The Americans gave control of one of their major intelligence services to a kook for idiotic political reasons, and stupidity like that is a gift from the gods to us that we shouldn’t waste. We need to make sure this black bitch stays where she is, but in a state of such complete paranoia and confusion that we can knock the whole Central Intelligence Agency out of the game, at least for a while, and force the Americans to deal with a major public embarrassment before they can get her out of there and get the CIA back up and running. Betsy, you’ll be taking the most risk here, so if you have any doubts about it…”
“No, actually I think it will be a real hoot,” she said with a giggle. “Hey, if that’s the way you want to play it, I’ll render an Oscar-winning performance.”
“That is, if we can figure out when and where Jimbo is going to make his move,” said Duke dubiously. “We don’t know how many hostiles there will be or what the kill zone will be like.”
“Duke, back in the day we used to call improvised tickles like that floats,” said Cardinale with a grin. “Remember?”
“Yeah, I remember, and I also remember some Volunteers getting killed like that,” replied Duke. “But it’s not like we have any choice.”
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