“I do. Mind getting me a cup? I’m a fat old man with trick knees and it’s an effort for me to get out of my chair.” Wenzle lifted his coffee mug, proffering it.
Steve rose, toting the empty mug over to the coffee urn. In truth, he was glad for the exercise; his rear was getting numb from perching on the edge of the chair. A couple of inches of blackish brown liquid lay in the bottom of the pot. It smelled burned. The smell of it made his stomach churn.
Wenzle said, “Put some of that creamer in it, will you.”
A container of nondairy creamer stood beside the hot plate. Nondairy? Nonorganic was more like it, off-white powder that looked like drain cleaner. Steve shook some into the bottom of the mug.
Wenzle said, “More, please.”
Steve added some more of the stuff. Wenzle said, “Don’t be stingy, it’s not like it’s costing you anything.”
Steve filled the mug half full of the powder before Wenzle said, “Okay, that’s enough.”
Steve said, “Sure you want some coffee with your creamer?”
“Sarcasm ill becomes you, soldier.”
Steve poured in the coffee, the resultant goop turning grayish brown. Holding the mug at arm’s length to avoid getting a whiff of the contents, he crossed to Wenzle and set it down on his desktop.
Wenzle reached greedily for the mug, pulling it toward him. He used a pen as a stirrer. He held the mug under his nose, savoring the vapors rising off the brew. Raising the mug, he quaffed a long pull, then smacked his lips. “Ahh…”
Steve sat down, starting as a wire from a sprung spring jabbed him in the rear. “Ouch!” he said, quickly shifting position. “Damn! Why don’t you get some decent chairs in here?”
“Because that’d only encourage visitors to waste time sitting around here all day,” Wenzle said, looking smug again.
“Yours looks comfortable enough.”
“I have to sit around here all day, but I’m not wasting time. You, you’ve got business elsewhere.”
Steve brightened at that; it meant that Wenzle was ready to get to the crux of the matter. Wenzle drank some more coffee. “This talking is thirsty work.”
That never seemed to inhibit him otherwise, Steve thought, keeping the observation unvoiced. “You were saying something about Pearsall,” he said aloud.
Wenzle set down the mug and rested his folded hands on the desk. “After being bounced from the force, Donny went into business for himself. Same line of work, strong-arm stuff, violence, hijacking, extortion, and murder. Without a badge to hide behind, he had to operate more circumspectly, but it didn’t cramp his style that much. He gathered a gang of like-minded associates around him. The Black Glove Crew, they call themselves. That’s the kind of work they do, black-glove stuff where you don’t want to leave behind any fingerprints.”
Steve said, “Are they mobbed up?”
Wenzle shook his head. “Independent contractors. Seems like the Mob can’t bring themselves to trust an ex-cop, no matter how dirty he is. A dirty cop, sure, that’s a horse of a different color, because he’s got the straight front and fears exposure and that gives them something to hold against him. But an ex-cop like Piersall with nothing to lose, that’s different.
“Piersall’s been working more of the corporate side of the street. As you may have heard, Big Business has plenty of dirty work that needs doing. Industrial espionage, sabotage, harrassment and intimidation of the competition, not to mention the suppression of squeamish in-house personnel and potential whistle blowers—”
Steve said, “I read the papers.”
Wenzle said, “Lately, Donny’s been working hand-in-black-glove with an outfit called ISS. Internal Security Services.”
Steve frowned, thoughtful. “Sounds familiar.”
“Their name came up during the Brinker investigation,” said Wenzle. “They’re a Washington-based organization that styles itself as a corporate expeditor, combining security operations and confidential investigations. What they are is fixers, hired to solve problems and get results, by any means necessary.
“They’ve been under contract to Brinker for the last two years. Durwood Quentin had a close working relationship with this man.”
Wenzle opened a folder, removed a photograph, and handed it across the desk to Steve Ireland. It was a glossy eight-by-ten head shot of a man who’d been unaware that his picture was being taken.
The subject was about seventy, a well-preserved seventy, white-haired, clean-shaven, with a long, oblong-shaped face. His eyes were dark and alert. Walnut-sized knots of muscle showed at the hinges of his jaws; his mouth was a short horizontal line, the lips thin to the point of being virtually nonexistent.
Steve knew that Wenzle must have a very good reason for showing him the photo. He studied it carefully, committing the image to memory.
“That’s Greg Mayhew,” Wenzle said. “Lieutenant Greg Mayhew, to give him his full title. He used to be number two in the capital police’s old Political Intelligence Unit. There’s not a dirty little secret about the movers and shakers in this town that he doesn’t know about. After reaching retirement age, he left the department with a full pension and founded ISS.”
He handed Steve a second photo, this one depicting a woman, fortyish, with shoulder-length blond hair, oval-faced, her attractiveness slightly offset by a too-sharp, pointy chin. Steve eyed it, then looked over the top of the photo at Wenzle.
“Elise Danner, a CIA analyst for twenty years before retiring to become Mayhew’s co-principal in ISS,” Wenzle said.
Steve put one photo on top of the other and set them both down on Wenzle’s desk. Wenzle said, “Quentin and Mayhew were tight. Quentin went to Mayhew to handle Colonel Sterling when he started blowing the whistle about the Chinese arms scandal. Sterling couldn’t be bought, bluffed, or bullied, so Mayhew farmed the problem out to Donny Piersall. Mayhew’s been using the Black Glove Crew for the rough stuff.
“Piersall himself personally filled the Sterling contract. Recently, Mayhew began harboring doubts about Quentin’s reliability. What with all his drinking and compulsive whoremongering and other erratic behavior, Quentin looked like he was coming unglued, cracking up. And he could tie Mayhew to Sterling’s murder.
“Mayhew contracted Piersall to get rid of Quentin. Piersall put his plan into motion. The girl—Virginia Alden was her name, if you’re interested—was a hooker known to Piersall from his vice squad days. She had a record for blackmail and extortion. She was expendable from the start. She was the honey trap, the sex lure designed to get Quentin where Piersall could give him the chop. Her, too. It would look like a classic case of murder-suicide and that would be the end of it.”
Steve said, “And then I happened along.”
Wenzle nodded. “When Donny realized that someone else was tailing Quentin, it must’ve given him quite a start.”
“What I’d like to do is give him a finish—a big finish.”
Wenzle looked owlish. “I daresay that might be arranged.”
“I’m all ears,” said Steve.
“But don’t get too cocky. He’s no pushover, as you found out last night. He came pretty close to finishing off you.”
“Go ahead, rub it in,” Steve said bitterly. “I notice you’ve got all the answers today. I could have used some of that intel last night.”
“I’ll admit we were a little bit behind the learning curve.”
“That’s big of you.” Steve tried hard not to sneer.
“Thanks to the some of the information you provided, especially those photos of Piersall, we were able to piece the rest of it together,” Wenzle said.
Not for the first time in their association, Steve wondered if when Wenzle said something like “We pieced it together,” he was using the royal “we,” that is, “I,” meaning, “I, Wenzle did the thinking,” or if his “we” meant he, Wenzle, and some of the higher-ups had done the deducing. Much of the inner workings of the Dog Team was a mystery to Steve. As usual, he kept his conje
ctures to himself. It was no mystery at all that it was considered bad form to be openly inquisitive about the outfit.
Instead, he said, “Glad the night wasn’t a total loss.”
“Not at all, not at all,” Wenzle said, making an expansive hand gesture. “Quentin was neutralized and in a way that doesn’t track back to us. The press and the police are both satisfied with the story that Quentin and the hooker fought over the gun, he shot her during the struggle, and then killed himself.”
After a pause, he added, “Donny framed it up very neatly. He does nice work.”
Steve Ireland made a disgusted face. “Christ! Why don’t you recruit him then?”
Wenzle, unruffled, said, “Because he killed Colonel Sterling and he’s not going to be allowed to get away with it.”
“That’s more like it,” Steve said, some of the tension easing up inside him.
Wenzle looked him straight in the eye. “A Team member, especially a field operative like yourself, is like any other kind of performer: no good without a certain amount of temperment. It’s part of the pride and professionalism. But too much can be dangerous.
“Just a cautionary note of advice, Steve. Take it as you like, or not.”
Steve nodded, accepting the justice of the rebuke. “I’ll take it. My apologies, Doc.”
“None needed.”
“I’ve been a little short-fused lately anyhow, and Piersall’s making me for the tail and nearly boxing me in stung me to the quick.”
“Perfectly understandable.”
“I needed a reminder to lighten up. Thanks, Coach.”
Wenzle held up a hand palm-outward, signifying the matter was closed. “’Nuff said.”
Truth was, Steve had been on the sour side for a while, and not just since getting back into harness in the last few weeks. It dated back to Dagaari, more than a half year ago.
Dagaari was a town in Somalia, a bleak, barren, sun-blasted hell of a country on the Horn of Africa’s East Coast. When most Americans thought of Somalia, if they thought of it at all, they remembered it as the site of the notorious “Blackhawk Down” incident. The U.S. had been playing Uncle Sugar, sending in troops as part of an international famine relief operation. As usual, no good deed goes unpunished. A local warlord shot down a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter; the surviving crewmen were massacred and their bodies dragged through the streets by some of the grateful citizenry. U.S. forces pulled out a short time later.
That had been close to two decades ago, and if the average American Joe today was asked about Somalia, assuming he even knew what and where it was, he’d most likely opine that the U.S. was well out of that benighted land.
Unfortunately, things weren’t that simple. Somalia was located in a strategically important site along vital Red Sea and Indian Ocean shipping lanes. Dagaari was an important regional center where a militia leader had exploited an Al Qaeda connection for guns and money to make himself a powerful warlord.
Steve Ireland had been part of a Dog Team mission to neutralize said warlord. His squad was working with a unit of Ethiopian commandoes operating in the area. Troublesome neighbor Somalia was a perennial hotbed of banditry, terrorism, and lately, even piracy; Ethiopian forces periodically made incursions across the border, cracking down on the most blatant offenders.
The sanction came off smoothly, without a hitch, the warlord’s career coming to a close as his skull disintegrated under the impact of a high-velocity round fired from a sniper rifle in Steve Ireland’s hands. It was the exfiltration where the mission went sour. Steve’s squad was en route toward a rendezvous with the helicopter that was going to take them out of the country when the vehicle they were riding in came to a Dagaari crossroads and was ambushed by a roadside bomb. IED, Improvised Explosive Device, in official parlance. Most of the passengers were killed outright; Steve was thrown clear of the blast, but he caught some shrapnel in his guts and some bad burns, too.
A couple of the Ethiopians had survived, too, and they were able to patch him up enough to keep him alive long enough to deliver him to the pickup site. He was airlifted out and turned over to a team of Army medics. It was touch and go for a while, but after long hours of heroic surgery, they were able to stabilize his condition and pull him through.
So he was told; the last thing he remembered was the transport vehicle slowing down at the crossroads to let a donkey cart pass by. The cart was being driven by an oldster so wrinkled and withered that he looked like a living mummy. Seated next to him on the front seat was a boy who couldn’t have been more than eight years old. The boy was slight, with spindly limbs and a big head that looked like it was mostly all eyes. Steve recalled thinking that the kid must be the oldster’s grandson; that was the last coherent thought he had before the world blew up.
It wasn’t the world that had blown up, of course, just the donkey cart, or rather, the explosives concealed in the cart’s hopper. The oldster and the boy had been instantly obliterated, crashing the gates of Paradise on the wings of glorious martyrdom. Steve often wondered if the kid was in on the plan, or merely an unwitting pawn sacrificed on the game board…
So it turned out that he and his teammates hadn’t been done in by a car bomb, but a donkey cart bomb. A sneaky bit of improvisation, that explosive device. To this day, Steve was unsure if the blast had been retaliation for expunging the warlord, or a random strike by some zealous enthusiasts taking the opportunity to rid the world of a handful of devilish infidels. If anybody in authority knew, they weren’t telling Steve.
But such speculation came later, much later. Steve’s first conscious memories after the blast were of waking up in a stateside hospital. After that came a series of operations, followed by periods of recovery, which were inevitably followed by still more operations. Much of that time was a surreal montage of images and scraps of memory, due to the fog of the painkillers he was continuously pumped full of.
His treatment was first-rate; it was some time before he realized that he was not in a military hospital per se, but instead in a private facility, a clandestine clinic maintained for the treatment of wounded, sick, or otherwise impaired personnel with access to classified information. All the staffers, from doctors and nurses down to the orderlies and even the janitors, had cosmic-level security clearances. After all, there was no telling what kind of secrets a patient might babble or cry out when out of his—or her—head with pain or on drugs. It made sense; for covert operatives, a black clinic.
A lot of time and trouble had been involved in putting Steve Ireland back together, but that made sense, too; a lot of time and trouble had gone into making him the precision instrument that he was, namely, a Dog Team assassin.
Months of agonizing rehab had followed before the medics had certified him physically and mentally fit for duty.
Parts of his face had been badly burned; skin grafts made him look good as new, though imparting a certain stiffness to his features, a kind of masklike immobility. This outwardly imposed poker face could be something of an asset in the assassin’s trade, he supposed, once he got used to it. For now, though, when he gazed in the mirror, the face looked much the same as it had always been, but it felt like that of a stranger.
When he found himself thinking that way, all he had to do was think of the other members of his Dagaari squad, all as dead as Carthage. That put things into perspective. Still, he was hungry for a win, and the thought of last night’s encounter with Donny Piersall was as irksome as grains of hot sand under the eyelids. Emotionally speaking, that is.
So Doc Wenzle’s heads-up was a timely reminder not to let emotion cloud his professionalism. Wenzle was saying, “It’s the tie-up between Piersall and Mayhew that we find interesting.”
That “we” again.
“Mayhew’s ISS played a vital hidden hand in the Brinker affair. There’ve been other indications that Mayhew’s been digging into things that are none of his concern. Not with Quentin; the Brinker deal was only one of Mayhew’s sidelines. ISS has a
pparently been serving as a clearinghouse for all sorts of classified intel to all sorts of buyers,” Wenzle said. “We’d like to know more.” He paused, seemingly waiting for a reply.
“Meaning?” Steve said.
“Meaning that we’d like Mayhew to be taken alive if possible,” Wenzle said. “Your run-in with Piersall seems to have had a positive aspect. It’s got Mayhew worried. He’s gone to ground. He’s forted up at his Maryland estate, with Piersall and his Black Glove Crew playing watchdog.”
Steve said, “Convenient.”
“Very,” Wenzle agreed. “It’s a fairly isolated locale, with the nearest neighbors a half mile away.”
“When do I go?”
“Tonight. The estate’s on the water, and Mayhew has his own private boat. He may be thinking of running. Again, we’d like him to be taken alive, but what’s more important is that no unfriendly interests gain access to the secrets locked inside his head. Better he should lose that head than get away, if it comes to that.”
“Understood.”
“We have reason to believe that the Danner woman is with him. The same applies to her. We’d like her taken alive, too, but…” Wenzle didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to.
Steve said, “And Piersall?”
“Law enforcement as such is a job for the police, not for us,” Wenzle said. “On the other hand, the Black Glove Crew has proved itself a nuisance and more. Time to close the files on them permanently.”
“With pleasure,” said Steve.
FIVE
In a second-floor bedroom of Greg Mayhew’s manor house at Arnot’s Acres on Chesapeake Bay, a woman stood in the center of the floor, her body rigid, trembling, her eyes wild, her hands closed into fists that were held pressed to the sides of her head.
Fear is a physical thing.
Elise Danner knew that now, tonight, knew it for a fact, a reality that vibrated every fiber of her being. She’d thought she’d known what fear was when the Brinker deal had first started to go sour, when the FBI had started poking around in the case—when it stopped being a matter of interest and inquiry and officially became an investigation: the Brinker Defense Systems case.
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