Internecine

by David J. Schow

  I needed to contribute. “How did that thing get on me? Not in jail. I didn’t even have my jacket on at Zetts’s place . . .”

  They all stared at me, pityingly, until I figured it out.

  “At Alicia’s,” I said. “When Marion patted me down.” Specifically, in the elevator, as he scanned me for nonexistent bugs. “But why bug me there? I wasn’t supposed to walk out of there.”

  “See?” said Cody. “Dumb luck.”

  “They tin-canned you in case something outside the purview of their plan happened,” said Dandine. “It did, too. God, I’m losing it. I should have searched you, first thing. I thought the costume change would be enough. I never should have let you keep your coat.”

  Leave it. He’d told me to leave it, because his senses were that good, and he’d turned out to be right.

  “What did they tell you the op was?” said Dandine to Cody, who was working on his second slice of our pizza.

  “Do him. Walk away. No peripherals. Straight eye-for-an-eye deal, as a favor from NORCO, to Jenks.”

  “Do you know who Jenks is?”

  Cody shook his head. “Couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. No idea.”

  “Then who’s supposed to pay you? For Jenks to call in a favor from NORCO that fast, the rubber stamp man had to be Gerardis.”

  “Yeah, who else?” said Cody.

  “Okay . . . NORCO purges Ripkin’s staff, but—brilliantly—misses Ripkin. Probably the same team travels directly to Alicia’s, to purge her. They budget like that; two-for-one. Except Alicia is already neutralized, and Connie and I get out of the parking lot just as the NORCO squad rolls in. Ripkin panics and calls the cops—real cops—who show up right after we do. But Connie is bugged, so when NORCO bags the SOS, they let it ride, figuring we’ll take the fall for the shootout. Which means . . . dammit, that really was a police helicopter.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I figure Captain Ramses is a cautious enough man to radio the chopper and say, follow those guys for a bit.”

  It certainly queered our chances of saying, later, Hiya, Captain Ramses, old pal, mind if we talk to the guy you have in max-lock custody?

  “And Ripkin didn’t call NORCO, he called the real police. Somebody in NORCO’s pocket wouldn’t bother. Either way, I’d say NORCO has decided which candidate they really like.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why all the . . . commotion, agitation? Why now?”

  “Because their delicate balance of Jenks-versus-Alicia-versus-Ripkin has been disrupted by our, um, accidental incursion. NORCO likes to jettison liabilities instantaneously; that’s one of the things that keeps them subradar. They’re called bathwater jobs, as in baby-with-the-bathwater.”

  “Man, that shit is like them time-travel movies,” said Zetts.

  “Paradoxical,” said Dandine. “Look it up.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s givin’ me a headache.”

  “Sounds to me like I don’t even wanna know what kinda panty-twist you guys are into,” said Cody. He took a sip of the only available unused water glass, the one with the dead bug in it.

  “How do you know it was Jenks that requisitioned your op?” Dandine asked Cody.

  “Like I’m trying to tell ya, man, I don’t. It was an à la carte gig. Gerardis says for me to do the Ad Man, for somebody named Jenks, is all I heard. He prorated for two backups, so I figured, cool—fast cash, not cheap, therefore Jenks has gotta be some rich asshole. I had no idea you’d be here—if I had, don’t you think I woulda brought a fuckin tank, and twenty guys? Jesus!”

  “Holy shit,” said Dandine. “You know what that means?” He was talking to Zetts. “It means we can skate. It’s not about us, not anymore. It’s about Connie, here. It’s exactly as he said—everyone has gone to Plan B.”

  That sounded to me like something really . . . bad. I almost felt as though Dandine and Zetts would finish their meal, leave me at the table with my soon-to-be murderer, and be home in their beds, all snug, while I began the process of decomposition in some Dumpster.

  Dandine just looked at me and said, “Don’t worry. I know what you’re thinking. You’re ignoring the significant karmic bill that NORCO has amassed, through its own mismanagement and thuggishness. They have to pick up their own check, and we have to be the instrumentation for that balance, because if we don’t—”

  “They’ll be up your ass, like a sigmoidoscope,” chimed Zetts (carefully pronouncing each syllable), “for the rest of your life, until you like drop into your assigned hole, dude.”

  “Where the hell did you get that word?” asked Dandine. Then he thought about it. “Never mind.”

  “What about me?” asked Cody, having stealthed a third slice. He looked like he ate a lot.

  “You get to live,” said Dandine, “because I’m feeling unusually forgiving today. But not if you don’t tell us when and where on your pay drop from NORCO.”

  That caused Cody to woof a chunk of pizza down the wrong tube, and he grabbed for the water glass.

  “Don’t drink the bug,” said Zetts.

  Which is how I got to be bait, just after midnight.

  DAY FOUR

  Ever since the vaguely religious hiccup that hysterical media have shortformed as “9/11,” you can see guys in military fatigues, toting M-16s, inside the Bradley Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. Go there right now and check, if you don’t believe me.

  The cameras have been doubled; the guards, tripled. Bored employees wipe your baggage down for trace explosives and make you remove your shoes. There are cops with K9 dogs, and everybody is watching everybody else, to make sure some hausfrau from Thousand Oaks doesn’t compromise national security by trying to sneak a nail file onto a passenger jet. Or a roll of tape. Or a deadly can of deodorant. Posted signs enumerate lists of words it is forbidden to mention, even jokingly. Joking is illegal there, which means if someone greets a friend by saying, “Hi, Jack!” they’ll most likely be detained and beaten with rubber hoses. No one sees the irony of a terrorist government, terrorizing its citizens, to protect them from terrorists.

  And this was before the passenger-profiling and color-coding fiasco.

  It’s a great place to hang out if you don’t want strangers pulling mysterious shit, which is why Dandine picked it. T-4, christened in honor of ex–LA mayor Ed Bradley (a former police officer), was LAX’s showcase for paranoid security measures, and a terrific, live-action exemplar of the difference between liberty and freedom, for those who had never bothered to ponder the distinction.

  “Flyover surveillance and tracking devices won’t work here,” Dandine said, “because their micro wave grid over protected airspace is too precious. No bugs, no leashes, no choppers. The terminal is a huge, open area under twenty forms of watchdogging, so no surprise firefights, or, at least, the possibility is minimized. NORCO may be able to selectively hammerlock the police, but there are too many forms of good guy here for them all to be compromised. It’s too public.”

  Even at 1:00 A.M., the international terminal was fairly bustling. Completely different from Terminal One, where we’d rented another getaway car less than forty-eight hours ago. Flights to Sydney and Shanghai take a long time, and cannot countenance farmer’s hours, the agrarian nine-to-five hellhole inside which most people, the walking dead, persist in living, even a century after the invention of conveniences like electricity. There was a fellow who ran for mayor here in the last election, who proposed putting the city on a twenty-four-hour clock, since telecommuting had become a practical option for over a third of the workforce. This would have destroyed the notion of “rush hour” traffic, freeway gridlock, and a pretty fair amount of road rage (for which our state is particularly infamous). Needless to say, the guy didn’t win, because his opponent had looked at the chad-mincing, double-dealing big lie of a recent presidential election and thought, hey, I can get away with that, too!

  Back in my old life, I had heard people bitching about politics in
the normal, air-filling, useless way most citizens prattle on about food or the weather, and more than once I overheard the assertion that maybe the United States wasn’t such a swell place to live, anymore, what with basic rights being whittled away almost one per day. Some people groused about becoming expatriates. All I know is, Shanghai sounded pretty good to me, right now, and that place was full of communists.

  I wasn’t taking a political stance, though. I was defaulting to a skin-saving stance.

  The Bradley Terminal is the largest at LAX. The booking section is an open area consisting of three enormous free corridors lined with ticket counters. At the far west end, escalators bleed up to bars and restaurants, prior to the gauntlet of gates and X-ray machines. But out in the main booking area there is no overlook, no mezzanine access to customers. If you’re looking for a wide-open space in which you’d rather not be caught in the middle, T-4 was ideal.

  Picture me and my new friend, Cody Conejo, trying to appear casual as we walked down the slanted ramp and into the main terminal, no different from ordinary citizens, merely two more of the walking dead. My teeth were grinding, and the rest of my body gently urged me to run like hell.

  Zetts held a visual on us from the parking garage. We left Dandine next to him, cellphone at the ready.

  Cody had to run a lap in place before he had sounded breathless enough to place the call to the NORCO relay line, his next step toward getting paid. I think he may have had a few overdue bills, because he seemed piqued at having to barter his deal upward (or at least, laterally) in order to keep wearing his skin.

  Cryptically, Dandine had specified that Cody not use a scrambled cellphone. He made the call from a pay phone near baggage claim. When everyone went askance at that, Dandine merely said, “I want to check something.” The rest of his instruction menu was pretty pinpoint.

  “Tell Gerardis the op got compromised,” Dandine instructed. “Tell them the bug was lost and you were forced to grab the principal in a public place, but you can’t leverage him out, because a gun in the terminal would expose the op. That’s pretty thin ice, but they may skate on it if they believe you were just doing your job, and now you need their help for an extraction. But—this is the important part—tell them you know about Jenks, and that the take-out order could not possibly have come from him. Therefore, the whole delivery is tainted, because something stinks at NORCO. They’re always eager to hit their own internal affairs button. Tell them you will only surrender the principal to Gerardis, who is the only guy you know at NORCO.”

  “Shit, man,” said Cody. “He’s the only guy left at NORCO that I used to know . . . before he got promoted.”

  “I’m laying odds that Gerardis is the guy who pulled your name out of the dormant file,” said Dandine. “Because if NORCO had been able to triangulate on Connie’s bug, you’d be dead right now, too.”

  Cody pinched the bridge of his broad nose, hard. “They weren’t gonna pay me? I don’t believe this crap. You can’t depend on nobody, anymore.”

  “It’s nothing new,” I said. “They work you like a pirate on a galleon, then abandon you when they downsize. No future, no benefits.”

  “Remind me again what we pay taxes for?” piped up Zetts.

  Dandine rounded on him with a grunt. “Like you’ve ever paid taxes in your life, dude.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Zetts said, mock-aggressive. “Kidding. I’m kidding. Christ . . . Mr. Sensitive.”

  I was still wearing Zetts’s much-cursed GAY MAFIA MEMBER T-shirt—inside out, under my jacket—and wanted very much to just take a nap.

  “I hate to ask,” said Cody, “but if Gerardis shows—what then?” He was still a little skittish with contriteness.

  “We take him,” said Dandine. “But that’s jumping ahead.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’ll be easy.”

  According to what I could glean about the mysterious Mr. Gerardis, he was one of NORCO’s favored, fair-haired subjects, rather akin to an executive vice president, the kind you can never get directly on the phone. I, too, had begun to enjoy the insulation of the VP mantle at Kroeger, which gave me the right, for example, to text Danielle at the office and have her arrange for a rental car, as I was flying back from Pittsburgh.

  Yeah, that had worked out like gangbusters.

  Easy: Pull NORCO’s officer-on-deck out of the press of a posse of handpicked samurai, without pulling a gun, in the middle of an airport bristling with security. Yep, pie.

  “I’m counting on them having guns,” Dandine said. “Be aware.”

  “Yes, and what if one of them successfully shoots one of us before he’s, y’know, detained and searched?”

  “They’ll know about all the cameras on you, Connie. It’d have to be an irresolvable situation for them to go public with gunfire. Not their style. Gerardis won’t risk bringing an army—”

  “ ‘Cos he doesn’t know you’re here,” said Cody.

  I tried my best to nail Dandine directly, “Tell me, in your experience . . . does this have a hope in hell of even working a little bit?”

  “I’ll admit I have some issues with NORCO right now,” Dandine said evenly. “But I am not going to let them simply erase you, and move on.” He let his gaze go abstract. “It’s the best I’ve got.”

  It was no longer a case of what would you do? It was now What the hell else was I going to do?

  I swallowed the boulder on the back of my tongue. “Alternatives?”

  “We go to NORCO, fight our way in, and force them to deal with us. You know where they are, Connie—right there on that piece of paper the Sisters gave you.”

  “What about Ripkin? Couldn’t he help us, I don’t know . . . expose them?”

  “Expose them how? Go to the Times? To Rolling Stone? Out them on the Internet? That shit only works in the movies, Connie.”

  It was true. Unveiling a conspiracy was not the same thing as eliminating the conspiracy. It was like pleading injustice to a bribed cop. NORCO was one of those chameleonic malefactors that simply adapted in response to threat, changing its cellular structure to render any irritant subpotent . . . until the truth would not set the stoutest of heroes free. The truth didn’t cut it anymore. You also needed backstops, armament, allies, evack, safe houses, cash drops, and bogus identities. Today, Woodward and Bernstein would be eaten alive—discredited, defrocked, unmanned, professionally ridiculed, and cinder-blocked into a drowning pool of disinformation.

  As Alicia had sniped at me, right before her death, Why, Mr. Maddox—they couldn’t put it on TV if it wasn’t real.

  Which put Cody and I in the middle of the terminal, in the middle of the night, feeling stupid and sore-thumb obvious because we had no suitcases, no props. I confess I wanted to look the enemy right in the eye, to at least see these NORCO drones, these bad-boy enforcers. They had been shadow figures, these past few eventful days, always seen at a distance maddening for its imprecision. When the enemy is faceless and remote, you tend to credit them with superhuman abilities—that’s one significator of true paranoia, as a medical condition. The kind for which you take medication . . . so you won’t see the enemy anymore.

  The entrance of the NORCO phalanx stirred no notice among the forty or so travelers in the terminal at this hour. To me, from my newly enlightened vantage, they seemed as obvious as if they’d come decked out in Roman battle armor and plumed helmets, fanfare guard and all.

  “Gerardis was bald the last time I saw him,” said Cody. (So much for “fair-haired!”)

  My heartbeat began to redline. “There’s at least ten of them.”

  “Oh, fuck us,” muttered Cody. “Dandine said he wouldn’t bring an army.”

  “Guess a platoon is okay, though,” I said.

  They had dismounted from two vans still in the loading zone, hazard flashers blinking. Add two drivers to their number. They were all clad in casual clothing—chinos, Banana Republic shirts, Bass Weejuns, windbreakers—but each of them had the hard-ass carriage of an ex-Ran
ger or bulky prison guard. Four were women, walking arm-in-arm with their mock partners. They had sling bags, briefcases, and rucksacks. But the way they scanned the perimeter and casually fanned to cover each other, moving all the time, betrayed them. This, then, was where all social mutants, decommissioned Berets, psychos, and Visigoths wound up when there was no juicy war on which to feed. They wound up under the wing of NORCO, which cherished your thousand-yard stare; saw it as an asset.

  “Stay or go?” said Cody. “I say abort.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Let’s see what they’ve got.”

  Their “principal”—as Dandine would say—was a large bald man in a business suit whose own passage vectored the movements of the entire team. He was clean-bald, probably shaven, practically polished. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and was at least six two, but the dramatic profile of his shiny head was adulterated by his lack of an equally strong jawline. His chin seemed to curve softly into his neck, and surplus flesh bulged from his tight, high collar. His head hung forward, rather than projecting up from his backbone; he had what is called a “dowager’s hump” below the back of his neck. His sharp eyes seemed silver behind his glasses, and he made Cody and I the instant he saw us. He wasted no time, walking directly to within discreet speaking distance while his hunter-killers arranged themselves into a rough semicircle of protection.

  This, then, was the face of NORCO. It didn’t seem very compassionate.

  “Mr. Conejo,” he said, smiling. “And you would be Mr. Maddox, is that correct? My name is Thorvald Gerardis.”

  “No, it ain’t,” whispered Cody, to me. We both startled at the tinkle of breaking glass.

  Then the bald man’s inadequate jaw ripped free of his head and flew away like a home run, in a spray of blood.

  Cody swept me back with a forearm as the NORCO team unlimbered their hardware from all the breakaway sling bags, briefcases, and rucksacks—an instant arsenal of weapons with extralarge mags and obnoxiously protuberant silencers. They moved to employ available cover while trying to fix the trajectory from which had come the high-velocity shot that took the bald man’s face off.