by Blake Banner
He raised a very mobile eyebrow on a very mobile face. He finished for me and there was a hell of a lot of irony in his voice. He said, “What? A warrior? You are going to tell me that you are not a warrior?” He chuckled, and like the rest of him, his chuckle dwarfed the car. “We actually know quite a lot about you. You would be surprised.” He took another drag and I noticed that the cigarette looked dwarfed in his hand. “Let me save you some time. We are not a bunch of hysterical maniacs who believe we are going to go to some kind of fucking heaven if we die for the right cause. We are all intelligent, well educated professionals and we all have skills we bring to the enterprise. I would not be here, sitting in this car with you, if I did not know who you are. We should stop wasting time and move on to the next, more interesting, step.”
“What is that step, Njal?”
“We know what you are doing. We like it. We want to help.”
“I don’t need help.”
“Ach! Come on! You are more intelligent than this! Aaron Fenninger is a magnate in the TV and movie business. We are on the cusp of a new era, where TV, movies and IT are all coming together in a nightmare that is making Orwell look like light, comic relief. IIC is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. You want to take out Fenninger, but when you do that you are taking on the…” He searched for the word, “The linchpin of their global power.”
The question snapped out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Whose global power?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. We don’t know. Bilderberg? Illuminati? The Masons?” He made a little explosion with his lips and blew out, making a pffff! sound. “Is all conspiracy theory bullshit, but whoever they are, they exist. And they own the media.” He wagged his two fingers at me, holding the cigarette and squinting through the smoke. “Point is, you need help. You cannot take on all this power on your own.”
He was right. He was right in everything he said. And he knew too much for me to ignore him. But I could not afford to be sidetracked now, like this, into a dark ally where I had no control of what happened next.
“Look, pal, Njal, with the greatest respect to you and your Free Mind Warrior friends, I cannot do this. You are wasting my time and I have somewhere I need to be. So I am going to ask you to get out of my car.”
He sighed, and as he did, smoke trailed from his nose, making him look like some weird, Scandinavian dragon. “You are going to Aaron Fenninger’s house.” I didn’t answer. “Is not a good plan. He has people looking after him, not just his Bilderberg friends, professional security. They know about you. They have been watching you watching them.”
“What do you want, Njal? You have convinced me that you know what you’re talking about. You have convinced me you’re smart and professional. Cut to the fucking chase. What do you want from me?”
He smiled. “All I want is to introduce you to a friend. You will have a lot in common with him. He can help you, and you can help him.”
I nodded, “OK. I understand. Now let me explain something to you. I am out of the game. I was in, now I am out. But, when this is all over, when I have finished my job tonight, I will give you an introduction to the people you do need to talk to. I am certain that they will be very interested in your movement. I am not. After tonight, I am going home.”
He nodded several times. “Ooooh kay, so you do not want to come and talk to my friend tonight.”
“No. I don’t want to, and also I can’t.”
He gazed for a moment out the passenger window and said again, half to himself, “Oooooh kay… Fine…” He turned to me, smiled and held out his hand. I took it. He held it and winked. “OK, Mr. Lacklan Walker. It was nice talking to you, anyway. So, good luck to you and maybe see you around, yuh.”
He let go of my hand, climbed out of the car and walked away across the parking lot on his long, gangling legs.
“Who the fuck…?” I muttered it to myself as I watched him disappear. “Who the fuck was that?”
I fired up the huge, silent engine and slipped out of the parking lot. As I moved away, in my rearview mirror I could see the patrol cars and the ambulance parked outside the office block, their red and blue lights flashing a dreary, banal message of death and tragedy. People were dead, but the Great Machine would grind on, the droughts would come, the faceless, nameless victims would pile up in the deserts, with the flies on their bloated faces, while the stars shone brighter in Hollywood, and the kings and queens grew richer in their palaces, in Malibu and Riyadh.
Nine
El Chupacabras was not hard to find. Nothing in L.A. is hard to find. It is a vast, sprawling grid, a matrix, where everything is connected to everything else by straight lines, miles long. It’s the city that generates the wildest, most expensive dreams in the world, yet it has all the character and style of a graphics card.
El Chupacabras, however, was a little different. It was small and set back from the road beyond a concrete forecourt, and the buildings on either side were concrete slabs. On the left there was a plumber’s business that looked like a small factory, and on the right there was a drama and dance school that looked like a prison. El Chupacabras sat between the two of them, low and squat, with a green awning and iron bars on its windows, like an hacienda teleported out of Mexico onto Slausen Avenue.
On the forecourt there were a couple of trucks, a couple of Harleys and a couple of old saloon cars. There was dim light in the windows and the soft hum of music. The rest of the street was still and quiet, but for the occasional car that hummed past. I parked the Zombie across the road and walked to the bar, wondering if my suit would be conspicuous, but not much caring either way.
I pushed through the door. The place was noisy, thick with smoke and people. There seemed to be an eclectic mix, from city suits to bums, Hell’s Angels and hookers. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the owner had some kind of arrangement with the local PD. There must have been a couple of dozen bodies or more, some leaning at the bar, others at tables. There was an agreeable hum of conversation and they were playing what sounded like ’60s and ’70s classics. Another time, another place, it might have been my kind of joint.
I scanned the bar and then the tables looking for somebody who fit the Mercenary’s description. Nobody leapt out at me, so I shouldered my way to the counter. A guy with a big moustache and disinterested blue eyes jerked his chin at me. I said, “Irish, straight up.” While he was pouring it I put my money down and said, “I’m looking for a business associate. They call him the Mercenary. Charlie said I might find him here.”
He pulled a face and shrugged. “I don’t know nobody. Take a seat. Maybe he’ll find you.”
I took my drink and found a small table at the back where I sat and pulled my cigarettes from my pocket. I lit up and waited. I didn’t have to wait long. After a couple of minutes I saw a guy pushing his way through the crowd in my direction. I figured he was in his late forties. Like Charlie had said, he was hard, sunburned and lean. He sat at the table and studied my face for a moment. “You looking for me?”
“That depends. If people call you the Mercenary and you have a Seal tattoo on your arm, then I probably am.”
He pushed up his sleeve and showed me the tattoo. I glanced at it, gave a single nod and sipped my whiskey. As I set the glass down I said, “You gave Charlie a job, him and the gorilla with the tattooed head.”
“Did I?”
“That’s what Charlie said.”
“What was the job?”
“To kill Ted Wallace, and me.”
“Is that so?”
“Ted is dead. So are Charlie and his tame gorilla.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, friend. Even if this bullshit were true, why are you telling me?”
“I figure we can do business.”
He narrowed his eyes.
I smiled. “My life maybe worth nothing to Aaron Fenninger, but it’s worth a lot to me. And it could be worth a lot to you.”
He sat for a long moment
without moving. He took in my suit and my face, then tried to work out the situation. He could walk away, and in that crowded bar there wouldn’t be a lot I could do. But he knew he would just be postponing the problem. He could probably call friends, take me outside and get rid of me, but that would leave a lot of unanswered questions, like, why the hell had I gone there alone, knowing he’d tried to kill me? He needed to talk to me and find out what my game was. Finally he shrugged and said, “I’m listening.”
“How much do you get paid to neutralize the PI and me?”
“That’s not an issue. I do my job.”
“I get it. You’re a soldier. Special ops. It’s what you’re good at. That’s my background too.”
He narrowed his eyes. It made sense to him.
“That’s how I dealt with Charlie and the Ape.”
“What was your outfit?”
“British Special Air Service.” I smiled. “They don’t encourage tattoos. We do a lot of plain clothes work. The tattoo is a bit of a giveaway.”
“SAS, huh? You don’t sound British. What are you doing here?”
I smiled at my glass. “Looking into the possibility of recruiting you. There is a market for your kind of skills. You don’t need to settle for a retainer. You get paid by the job, you can make a lot of money.”
“What job?”
I sighed. “At the moment all I need is information, for which I can pay you cash, right now.”
He shrugged one shoulder. He wasn’t buying it, but he was fishing. That was good enough. “What information?”
“Suppose Fenninger had to leave town in a hurry tomorrow morning. Suppose he needed to go somewhere safe. Where would he go?”
“How should I know?”
“Because you’re his minder. You take care of him. Don’t insult my intelligence. Why else would Ted Wallace be dead? Why else would you employ Charlie to take me out? You’re his babysitter.”
“If that were true, what makes you think I would betray him?”
I drained my glass, stood and went to the bar for two more whiskeys. I brought them back to the table and put one in front of him. I showed him the pack of Camels and he shook his head. I extracted one and lit up. As I breathed smoke through my nose I said, “Because men like you, and men like me, know that there is one thing in life, only one, that is more important than loyalty, and that is power. That’s why the most expensive commodity on Earth is violence. If you control the violence, you control everything.” I sighed. “So loyalty becomes a qualified virtue. You’re a smart man, and you know that it’s not enough just to be loyal. You have to be loyal to somebody who is loyal back, and somebody who controls the violence. Somebody powerful.”
“That’s a lot of theory. Got anything more concrete?”
“Yeah. The people who own Fenninger pay me. Fenninger is through. He’s going down. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning, maybe next week…” I shrugged. “Either way he’s finished. You can go down with him, or you can offer your sword to a better master. One who pays you better, per job, and has a more solid position.” I paused a moment, reading his face, then added, “I also have five grand in the trunk of my car. Give me the information I need, I’ll give you the five grand and introduce you to my employer.”
He stared for a long moment at the glass without touching it. Then he said, “You want me to set Fenninger up for you.”
I nodded.
He picked up the glass and took a sip. “Personally, I don’t think he’s going anywhere tomorrow. I think he’ll follow his daily routine. But if he does run, he’ll go to his vineyard out near Topanga.”
“His vineyard?”
He smiled for the first time. “It’s not very original: Viña Topanga, Bodegas Fenninger. It’s good wine, though.” The smile faded. “Sometimes he meets with business associates from out of town. Fenninger is a very rich man. He’s a billionaire. He has connections in high places. He’s part of the ‘club’, you know what I mean? He meets privately with the president. He just came back from Camp David…”
“I know. He’s a big shot. So what?”
“So when he has meetings with people like that, people who need high level security, he meets them at the vineyard.”
“You take care of that security?”
He shrugged. “It depends. If it’s a high profile politician they will often have their own security. Sometimes it’s arranged by the Secret Service. In cases like that we collaborate. Other times we arrange it in house.”
“So if he went to the vineyard tomorrow and wanted to lay on security…”
“That would be me. I would arrange that.”
I stared into my whiskey, chewing my lip and wondering how easy this guy would be to buy. So far it all felt a little too easy, and I was damned sure you didn’t get to oversee Epsilon’s security by being disloyal or easy to bribe.
“But in your opinion,” I said half to myself, “He’ll be following his usual routine…”
I glanced at him, making it a question, and saw he was watching me. There was something dangerous in his eyes. He said, “How about you show me the color of your money before this conversation goes any further?”
I nodded. “Sure. Let’s go.”
You can get it right a million times, but to really fuck up, you only need to fuck up once. I should have been expecting it. Maybe I was tired, maybe I was over-confident, maybe it was just my time to make a mistake. Whatever the cause, I had expected him to be curious enough to come to the car and see if I had the money, and what else I had to say, but I misjudged him. I misjudged him badly.
He got up, led the way through the bar, making sure to stay ahead of me where I could see him, giving me a false sense of security. He opened the door and stepped out into the lamp-lit forecourt, went down the steps onto the concrete. There he stopped and turned to face me. He said, “Where’s your car?”
And then my head exploded with pain.
* * *
There are many places and many ways you don’t want to wake up. You don’t want to wake up with a hangover in a strange bed with your best friend’s wife lying next to you; or your wife’s best friend. You don’t want to wake up on your wedding morning on a train at the Mexican border, when your wedding is in Boston or Seattle. You don’t want to wake up in Jeffrey Dhamer’s kitchen with paper frills on your wrists and an apple in your mouth. But most of all, you don’t want to wake up in a very dark, confined space, with a really bad headache, nylon rope biting into your wrists and ankles, and the sound of an internal combustion engine in your ears. When you wake up like that, you know you have a big problem. You’re on a one-way trip to a six foot holiday.
That was exactly how I woke up after the Mercenary’s guy had smashed a steel girder into my head. I lay and groaned for a moment, trying to get a hold of my thoughts. They were not good thoughts. The consequences of my lapse of judgment, for want of a better word, were almost endless, and exclusively bad. Really bad. So bad that after a moment I decided there was no point in thinking about them at all. What I needed to do instead was think about how the hell I was going to cut my bonds and get out of the trunk.
I was pretty certain they had taken my Sig and my knife, and the ropes were biting tight enough that it would be impossible for me to pull my hands or my feet free. So unless I could find some kind of cutting edge in the trunk, I was not going to get free before they pulled me out. So anything I tried would have to wait till we arrived.
And that led me to the next question. Where were they taking me? Like I said before, L.A. is a massive grid. When you drive through L.A. you drive in straight lines with an occasional right angle to your right or left. But the motion of the car, as we moved along, was more of a gentle weaving motion, like long curves from right to left and back again, and the angle of the car, with the front slightly raised, suggested we were climbing up a steep incline. There wasn’t much doubt, we were going to the vineyard in Topanga: Bodegas Fenninger.
I didn’t know how long
I’d been out, but it was obviously long enough to get out of the city, say fifteen or twenty minutes. I set my mental clock to counting seconds and minutes and began to explore the darkness for some kind of tool or weapon with which to cut my bonds. I didn’t find anything, but about twenty minutes later the corners became more frequent and we began to slow.
Finally we stopped. I told myself they either wanted to execute me where they could hide my body, or they wanted to interrogate me. If they wanted to execute me, it was beginning to look like the end of the line. I was pretty much out of options.
The trunk opened and I found myself looking up at an awful lot of stars strewn across a dark turquoise sky. In the foreground there was an inky silhouette who was blocking about half of them out. It reached down with a massive hand, hauled me out and dumped me in the cool dust. Something told me this was the same guy who had put my lights out. I was expecting a kick, but it didn’t come. Instead the Mercenary squatted down next to me and grabbed my hair in his fist.
“You’re a piece of shit, SAS. Let me tell you something. Let me tell you what comes above loyalty. Nothing. They call me Mercenary, that suits my image down there, but I ain’t no fuckin’ mercenary, boy. There ain’t nothing for sale here. I made my pledge to the flag, and I am loyal to the stars and stripes. I don’t need to tell you what I think of an American who fights for another flag. Git up!”
The big guy who’d dragged me out of the trunk hauled me to my feet and his boss covered me with a revolver while the big guy cut the rope from my ankles. Then the Mercenary who wasn’t a mercenary came close and snarled in my face, “I am just praying you’re going to make a run for it. Just give me an excuse.”
I nodded. He’d answered one of my doubts. Somebody superior to him wanted me alive, for now at least. I said, “Maybe later.”
I had a quick look around. We were on what appeared to be some kind of ranch. A black stencil of trees formed the northern horizon. Before that there were fields that were cloaked in shadow, but I figured they were vineyards. Ahead of me, beyond the Mercenary, there was a sprawling, two story Spanish villa with sloping, red-tiled roofs.