“He fell off the wagon. It happens.”
“Let’s try something that hits a little closer to home. Here are copies of the hotel receipts showing the calls that little Miss Tammi made to Adobe Flats. They’re all to the same number, a pay telephone located just down the corner from Sarkesian’s carpet warehouse building. Here’s a statement from the phone company pinpointing the location.”
Leandro leaned out of his chair, reaching. “Let me see that.” Kilroy handed it to him. He took out a series of photos, eight-by-ten glossies. “Here’s the casino photo surveillance shot of Peters and Tammi at the craps table.”
He laid out a second photo. “Here’s a blowup of Tammi alone.”
A third photo followed. “Here’s one of Sarkesian’s niece Terri, taken yesterday at the funeral.”
He had their attention now. Rio said, “You’re not seriously trying to suggest that that mousy little bitch—”
Kilroy slapped down another photo. Interrupting Rio, he said, “Here’s that same photo of Terri Sarkesian, only with the hairdo and eyeglasses airbrushed out. Compare her face with the one of Tammi.”
Rio and Leandro were doing some hard looking now. They were both standing, leaning over the desktop, intently eyeing the photos. Rio said, “They look a little like each other maybe. In the face. But you can do anything with cameras and Photoshop…”
Kilroy said, “Take it to an expert on facial recognition patterns, and he’ll point out a dozen or more matches between the two that prove that this is the same woman in both pictures. I did. Here’s the report, including a chart detailing the matching correspondences. But don’t take my word for it. Hire your own expert and see what he says.”
He laid down another photo. “And while we’re on the subject, here’s a reconstruction of what Terri Sarkesian would look like with platinum blond hair and the same makeup as Tammi. Take a good look and tell me that’s not the same woman.”
It was Leandro who spoke first. “It could be, Rio. It could be.”
Rio said, “It could be some fancy computer trickery, too. Con men have gone to greater pains than this to put over scams that pay off a lot less than fifity thousand dollars.”
Kilroy smiled. The roles were reversed in the game of cat and mouse and now he was the cat, and it felt good. “You’re a hard man to convince, Rio. That’s why I’ve saved the best for the last.”
Rio said, “I call. Show your hand.”
“It’s not here, it’s outside. Not far, just outside the back.”
“Bring it here then. Hector will go with you.”
“I suggest we all go. It’s not the kind of evidence that travels well.”
“If this is some kind of trick—”
“I didn’t go to all this trouble just to be slaughtered by you for running a clumsy con game, Rio. Now do you want to see it or not? If you can’t be bothered to show your face on the streeet, maybe Leandro won’t be so squeamish.”
Rio said, “Careful, Kilroy, careful. You come perilously close to insult. Walk soft.” His voice was as husky and rustling as a snake slithering through dry grass.
Kilroy said, “No offense meant or implied, Rio. Try to see it from my angle. I’ve got my neck stuck out a mile here, but I can’t deliver my clinching argument unless you give me a fair hearing.”
In the end, they all went out, trooping out of Rio’s office and going down the hall to the back door. Rio sent Hector out first, to make sure that everything was on the up and up.
Kilroy said, “If I wanted you dead, Rio, all I had to do was sit tight yesterday and let Barker and Deetz do their thing.”
Rio said, “Apparently, I have enemies I don’t know about. Why take chances?”
Hector went outside for a look-see, returning five minutes later. “All clear, Boss.” They trooped outside then, Kilroy, Hector, and the two Maldonado brothers. Kilroy led them to the car he’d parked on the street last night. It was a cul-de-sac, a narrow street between the back of the club and the back of another building. No other cars were parrked there.
After the cool quiet of Rio’s office, the street scene was bright and brassy, flooded with hot sunlight. Kilroy took out his handkerchief, using it to open the driver’s side door. He tripped the car trunk release; the lid unlocked, opening an inch or two.
He went around to the rear of the car, the others crowding around him. He lifted the lid and let them have a look at what lay inside. The bodies had been in the trunk for hours in the hot sun; Kilroy held his breath as he opened it up. The others were unprepared and got solid lungfuls of the stench, producing rounds of gagging and coughing.
Standing to one side, Kilroy said, “Know them?”
Leandro said, “It’s Jim and Ray, Sarkesian’s nephews!”
Rio slammed down the lid. Kilroy said, “I didn’t know their names, but I recognized them from yesterday. They were part of Sarkesian’s entourage at the funeral.”
Rio said, “What’s it all about?”
“They tried to take me last night, after I left the club. Instead, I took them,” Kilroy said.
“Why?!”
“Because I was getting too close to the truth about Sarkesian, and he wanted to get rid of me. More important to the Maldonado family business, he wants to get rid of you. The question is, Rio, what’re you going to do about it?”
FOURTEEN
Hellzapoppin’!
That was Kilroy’s reaction to the firefight now erupting in the dead of night at the Sarkesian compound.
Bert Sarkesian made his home outside of town, on a ranch near the eastern entrance to Wild Horse Pass, on the eastern slope of the Tres Hermanos Mountains. He lived there with his extended family and bodyguards, about fifteen people in all. It wasn’t really a ranch, not a working one, for it raised no livestock. There was a one-story ranch-type house with extended wings, a bunkhouse that now served as living quarters for the guards, a barn and stables converted to more modern home offices and work areas, and some outbuildings, all surrounded by sprawling acreage.
It was no ranch, but that was somehow fitting, for there was no Bert Sarkesian anymore either. There hadn’t been for several years. The real Bert Sarkesian had died during a buying trip in Turkey, murdered so his identity could be stolen. The man who’d assumed Sarkesian’s identity was General Ali Abdul Zirani al-Tikriti, an Iraqi despot who’d been one of the driving wheels of the dictatorial reign of Saddam Hussein.
During that regime, Zirani had been doubly blessed. Not only was he a kinsman of Saddam’s, but he also came from Saddam’s hometown. Of course, it took more than that to rise to the top in the tyrant’s power structure. It also required a single-minded ruthlessness, a Machiavellian talent for scheming, and a cold-blooded callousness toward human suffering, torture, and bloodshed on an epic scale. All these traits Zirani possessed in abundance, serving him well as a chief of Saddam’s secret police and earning him the appellation of “The Hangman.”
More cunning by far than his leader, Zirani had laid far-reaching escape plans well in advance of Saddam’s downfall. Well before Coalition forces had moved into Iraq, he had moved out, fleeing with the members of his most trusted cadre across the border into Turkey. His flight was facilitated thanks to an alliance he’d forged with a militant Islamist faction of Turkish military intelligence, who were burrowing from within their highly placed positions of trust to subvert the Turkish government and replace it with a theocracy run on absolutist, fundamentalist principles. Their help had been key in Zirani’s substituting himself for the real Sarkesian.
No less vital was the mountain of money he’d stolen during the golden years of Saddam’s heyday and salted away in a number of secret foreign bank accounts. Posing as Sarkesian and using his passport and other identity documents, Zirani had easily entered the United States, establishing his new home base in Adobe Flats in Nevada, whose dry desert climate was pleasantly reminiscent of the Iraqi homeland he’d fled. It was also conveniently sited on a people-smuggling pipeline, whi
ch Zirani used to infiltrate others of his cadre across the border from Mexico and into the States. Furnished with forged ID papers, they masqueraded as members of Sarkesian’s extended family. The carpet discount warehouse business he operated in Adobe Flats served as good cover for the new spy network that he soon had up and running.
Sarkesian’s real identity had only become known to Kilroy in the last few days, the byproduct of a covert investigation he’d been conducting in the region during the last month. One of the Air Force’s aircraft was missing, an awesome instrument of destruction whose disappearance made the service’s top brass look and feel sick. They lacked the domestic operational capacity possessed by the Army. They had no equivalent to the Dog Team.
The Dog Team had gotten in on the case. Kilroy and his teammate Brand were assigned to the Tres Hermanos region, which analysts had selected as one of the most likely spots where the missing aircraft might be found. The breakthrough had come with the demolition of Greg Mayhew and his ISS. Information supplied by Elise Danner about a secret Iraqi spy cell centered in Adobe Flats had furnished Kilroy with the all-important lead he needed to tie in the missing aircraft with the Iraqi cell and accomplish his mission of finding the former and neutralizing the latter Dog Team style.
Now he and Brand knew Sarkesian’s secret identity, that of Gen Zirani, the Hangman. Kilroy saw no point in burdening the Brothers Maldonado with this intelligence. Kilroy had “proved” to Rio and Leandro that Sarkesian was an imposter who’d launched a program of murderous attacks on them. After that, the violent and paranoid mentalities of the Maldonados did the rest.
The siblings saw it this way: “Sarkesian,” whoever he was, was the head of a crime family not unlike theirs. Who he really was was a matter of indifference to them. What was important was that he was sneaky enough to have convinced them that he was merely a successful and wealthy carpet retailer, a solid citizen with no criminal ties or interests. Discovering otherwise, that he was as much of a crook as they were, was intensely irksome. They were galled at having been gulled.
They reasoned that, being the head of a crime family himself, Sarkesian could have only one ultimate purpose, to take over the lucrative vice, narcotics, gunrunning, and people-smuggling rackets now operated by Clan Maldonado. This was a logical assumption because that’s what they would do were they in Sarkesian’s shoes. To take over the town, they had to take out the heads of the ruling family: Rio, Leandro, and Choey. They’d gotten the kid brother and come within two trigger-pulls of liquidating the older brothers at the funeral. That made this more than a business matter; now, it was a matter of honor, a blood feud.
The only course of action acceptable to the brothers was to do unto Sarkesian before he succeeded in doing unto them by doing them in. That’s why they collected a hit squad of a dozen picked killers and pistoleros to make a night raid on the Sarkesian compound and clean house.
Kilroy made sure he’d be along for the ride. “After all, I’ve got a personal stake in this myself. They tried to kill me,” he’d said. It fitted in with the mercenary gun-for-hire persona, the legend he’d created in order to deal with the Maldonados. Too, it bought him some insurance, some valuable time before Rio put the chop on him to avoid paying the fifty-thousand-dollar bonus he’d earned. Rio would be glad to have an extra gun along for the showdown with Sarkesian; he’d delay eliminating Kilroy until the opposing crime family was disposed of.
That’s why Kilroy was on board an Escalade SUV that closed in on the enemy compound at three o’clock in the morning. The vehicle held Rio, Leandro, Hector, Tony, Roberto, and Kilroy himself, along with a cache of arms and ammunition. Closely following behind it was a second SUV, an Explorer, with another half-dozen Maldonado gunmen inside.
Rio wasn’t much minded to employ stealth and subterfuge on this run. The compound was bordered by a five-foot-tall stone wall; its front gates were made of black iron rails. Rio didn’t try crashing the gates. He drove up alongside them while Tony jumped out of the vehicle, a bundle of sticks of dynamite in hand. Tony lit the fuse, wedged the bundle between the bars of the gate, and jumped back into the SUV. Rio threw the Escalade in reverse, backing up a fair distance from the gates, retreating to where the Explorer stood waiting.
A moment later, the bomb blew, dynamiting the gates sky-high and demolishing a good part of the adjacent stone fence. A cloud of smoke and dust mushroomed at the compound entrance, raining down debris. Rio gunned the motor and drove through the gap into the compound, followed by the Explorer.
The two vehicles punched through swirling masses of murk and dirt, charging the ranch house. Maldonado gunmen were hanging out the open windows of the SUVs, firing rifles, shotguns, and handguns at the house. Guards charged out of the bunkhouse, shooting at the vehicles.
Rio braked the Escalade to a sharp, snapping halt a stone’s throw away from the front of the ranch house. The Explorer did the same. Maldonado gangsters piled out, shooting at anything that moved and much that didn’t, including the big bay windows bracketing the front door.
Kilroy piled out along with them, wielding a .357 magnum handgun. A .45 semiautomatic pistol was tucked into his belt. Bullets whipped around him, spanging when they struck metal surfaces, making whiny ricochets when they struck the house’s stone facing.
A round thudded into a gunman standing next to him, knocking him down. Kilroy pointed his gun at the guard who’d fired the shot and squeezed the trigger. The .357 had a satisfying report, like a hand cannon. The guard went down.
Rio shouted, “Kill them all!”
A handful of guards came into view as they rounded the house’s east wing, their guns blazing. Several of the pistoleros fell to this attack from an unexpected direction. A burst of hammering gunfire sounded, felling some of the rushing guards like an invisible scythe. It came from Hector, wielding an old-fashioned Thompson submachine gun.
Kilroy darted in the opposite direction, toward the house’s west wing. Roberto ran up alongside him, waving a gun at him. Roberto said, “Where do you think you’re going?!”
Kilroy said, “Come on! We’ll go around to the side of the house and break in through there! We’ll be the first inside!”
“Good idea!”
Kilroy charged, Roberto trotting beside him. No guards or defenders appeared to block the way. They rounded the southwest corner of the house, approaching its western face. Lights from inside shone through curtained windows to cast a long yellow oblong on the ground.
Kilroy shot Roberto, the hand cannon bucking satisfactorily in his hand, muzzle outlined by a yellow, spearing flare. Roberto jackknifed like somebody had swung an ax in his midsection.
Kilroy wasn’t minded to fight the Maldonados’ battle, especially not when Rio or Leandro might be minded to cancel their fifty-thousand-dollar obligation by giving him a bullet in the back. Besides, he had another, more important task to perform.
Shunning the light, he faded back into the darkness, slipping away from the firefight. Trotting along in a half crouch, he made his way toward the stone fence where the gate had been. Hopping the fence, he went to the road outside the compound. Across the road, on a rise, stood a pickup truck with attached camper van, its lights dark, engine idling.
That was Brand, waiting in the prearranged spot that he and Kilroy had selected earlier that day. Kilroy put two fingers to his mouth and whistled, two short shrills and three long ones, a recognition code they had also agreed on. It would be a damned shame to have come so far only to be shot by mistake by his own teammate.
Brand, unable to whistle, responding instead by flashing the dimmers in a pattern of shorts and longs. Kilroy joined him at the pickup.
Chaos raged down in the compound, shots, shouts, screams, smoke, and dust. Kilroy said, “We’ve got a front-row seat for the show.
“And there won’t be any repeat performances,” he added.
Brand nodded. He wasn’t much for talking.
A Maldonado man threw a Molotov cocktail at the house.
It burst, splashing flames on the façade and roof. The fire caught, held, thrived, and grew.
Hector stood facing the front door, firing a submachine gun blast at it, blowing out the lock. He bulled his way in, followed by Rio, Leandro, and a couple of pistoleros. Inside, Rio went one way, Leandro another. Sarkesian himself was Rio’s goal; he would accept no less. Clan Maldonado’s head would take the head of the Sarkesians, as honor demanded, and vengeance would accept no less.
Leandro stalked down a long corridor, looking for someone to shoot. An open door loomed on his left. He stepped inside.
Before him was Terri Sarkesian, clad only in a black bra and panties. Leandro saw for himself the voluptuous figure that the seductress had exploited so ably in her alter ego as Tammi. He should have been watching her hand, which came out from behind her back with the gun she’d been holding and shot Leandro’s middle to pieces. Immediately behind him came Hector, less easily distracted. Sticking the submachine gun’s snout in the room, he cut down Terri/Tammi.
Smoke curled and writhed through the house. A tendril of it brushed Rio’s eyes, blurring and stinging him, causing to miss a shot at Bert Sarkesian as the latter flung open a side door and fled outside.
Sarkesian, or Zirani, to call him by his right name, fled to where a Land Rover was parked and idling. In it was Sayyid ibn-Talal, a person of importance second only to Zirani himself. Ibn-Talal was the key component in Zirani’s master plan, and as soon as the shooting started, the general had hustled Sayyid out to the Rover to prepare for a getaway. So long as he and Sayyid lived, all was not lost.
This being Zirani’s territory, he got behind the Rover’s wheel, Sayyid sliding across the seat to the passenger side.
Rio ran outside, firing to no effect at the Rover as it fled across the grounds toward the front gate. He circled around front to where the Escalade stood. On the way, he met Hector coming out the front door, submachine gun in hand. Waving him over, Rio jumped in the Escalade, Hector climbing in the passenger side.
Revenge of the Dog Team Page 21