Michel Chevron remained standing behind his desk. He was obviously impressed with himself, his position and all the trappings that surrounded him. A regal Fragonard hung directly behind the bank executive.
The Frenchman began to speak rapid, excellent English as soon as his assistant left the room. His tone remained cool and superior.
“There is a problem, Monsieur Carroll. A regrettable circumstance, beyond anyone’s control. I’m very sorry, but I have an important engagement at Taillevent. The restaurant monsieur? The rest of my afternoon is equally bad… I can spare these few moments with you only.”
Arch Carroll could suddenly feel a very cold place in his stomach. He knew the sensation and be tried to ignore it, but a fuse was burning. When the spark reached close to his private emotional arsenal, there was very little he could do to stop the explosion.
“All right, then just shut the hell up now,” Carroll suddenly raised his hand, palm out. “I don’t have time to be civil anymore. You kept me waiting through my polite and civil period.”
The bank executive broke into a disdainful smile.
“Monsieur, you don’t seem to understand whose country you’re in now. This is not America, I’m afraid. You have no authority whatsoever here. I consented to see you, in the spirit of cooperation only.”
Carroll reached into his sports coat pocket and sent a light tan envelope spinning across Chevron’s desk.
“Here’s your spirit of cooperation. It’s a signed police warrant. A French police warrant for your arrest. It was signed by Commissionnaire Blanche of the SÛretÉ The charges include extortion, bribery of public officials, fraud. I’m honored to be the one to deliver the news to you.”
Michel Chevron sat down heavily in his chair. His aquiline features appeared to have imploded so that the face seemed squat, crinkled like a concertina that has had air thrust out of it.
“All right, Mr. Carroll. You’ve made your point. Why exactly have you come here? What information is it that you wish to extract from me?”
Carroll eased himself down into a chair across from Chevron.
“For starters, I’d like to know about the European and Middle Eastern black markets. I need names, places, specific dates. How the black market is structured, the principals involved.”
Chevron cleared his throat. “You have no idea what you’re saying, what you’re asking of me. We are speaking of billions of dollars. We are speaking of participants of a less than savory nature.”
Chevron sat back in his chair and Carroll could see tiny stars of perspiration glistening on his forehead. The impressive black hair seemed to have lost its color. Carroll felt relaxed and confident for the first time since he’d arrived in Paris.
“I’m listening,” he said. “Keep going.”
Just then the oak doors into the executive suite splintered and crashed suddenly.
For one incomprehensible moment Carroll imagined that what had happened on Wall Street was repeating itself in Paris.
Three armed men had appeared from the direction of the bank director’s reception area. Each had a machine gun pistol. In the narrow corridor behind them stood Michel Chevron’s blond assistant.
Carroll didn’t hesitate. He was already diving across the floor. Glass and wood was suddenly splintering, shattering everywhere around him. Automatic machine gun explosions slashed through the previously secure and elegant office suite. Carroll’s heart felt like it had been caught by a wire garotte.
Out of the corner of his eye, Carroll watched Michel Chevron.
The banker suddenly twisted and turned eerily in the air. He was nailed against the wooden wall by a terrifying machine gun volley.
His body arched spastically, then spun away toward the floor. His blue suit was blood soaked.
The assailants switched their attention to Carroll. Hollow-head slugs thudded like hammer blows into the oak-paneled walls around him.
His heart pounding, Carroll lunged forward beyond the heavy drapes, which fanned the air as bullets ripped through the fabric. He smacked himself against the glass door to the terrace and was surrounded all at once by splinters of glass, by snapped pieces of the wooden frame that twisted out of the glass like limbs awkwardly broken …
Sharp needles pierced his neck, his hands. Violent, numbing cold clawed at his face.
He scrambled to his feet, the glass slivers slicing deeper with every movement.
The outside terrace was a long, narrow stone catwalk, sixteen stories above the Paris street. The walkway seemed to stretch around the length of the floor.
Feet pounding the ancient stone, Carroll ran toward the nearest corner of the building.
He could hear deafening gunshots, followed by screams of incredulous terror and agony inside the French bank offices. Machine gun pistols coughed and fired repeatedly, insanely.
French terrorists? The Brigade? Francois Monserrat?
What was happening now?
Who had known he was going to be here?
Bullets suddenly whistled past Carroll’s face, nicking the brooding stone body of a crouching gargoyle.
Behind him and to the left, Carroll registered the direction of the gunfire and quickly glanced back over his shoulder.
Two of the assassins were closing fast. Their leather trenchcoats flapping, they were the kind of European thugs he thought only existed in movies. Furiously, Carroll raised his own gun. He fired, hearing the muted spit of the silencer.
The man in front grabbed his upper chest, then stumbled and fell over the stone wall. He continued down, somersaulting to the street.
“Oh, goddamnit!” Carroll suddenly clutched his shoulder. Blood spread where he’d been shot.
The thick cords of his neck bulged with the concentrated fear of the last few seconds, possibly the final seconds of his life. He felt as sick as he had ever felt. He temporarily lost his breath as he stumbled around the next carved stone corner of the French bank building.
He moved now, no longer fully aware of himself. He wasn’t connected with events taking place. It was all a dream, a very bad nightmare.
Then he started to sprint down another clear stretch of stone terrace. The walkway ended abruptly at a gray brick wall topped by severe iron fencing.
He could taste warm, metallic blood in his mouth. Piercing chest pains came with each breath. The wounded arm ached with a deep, searing pain he’d never felt before.
To die here in Paris suddenly seemed ironic.
To die here surrounded by memories of Nora.
He watched the sky slip away. The wintry sun was a hard uncaring disc.
Carroll used his good arm on the restraining wall and vaulted over the side. He saw a spinning flash of cars sixteen floors below. And cold concrete, gray as an undertaker’s face …
As he safely landed on the terrace six feet below, he struck the wounded shoulder hard against a slab of granite. The pain that exploded into his brain was a savage, biting agony. Blinded by it, he forced himself to reel forward toward a casement door which opened as he leaned into it.
He was bleeding badly. He stopped running. A package-crowded stockroom lay before him.
Carroll crouched on trembling legs, and waited inside. Emery Airborne mail was stacked all around. There was no place to hide if they came through. If they found him now.
His thoughts were shattered: His mind was blurred, almost useless. Nothing was left inside his chest but rage. Splinters of glass still ached in his forehead, his cheeks, the back of his neck. He felt dizzy and sick.
Gunshot explosions and screams continued to echo through the SociÉtÉ GÉnÉrale office building. Then warbling French police sirens shrieked and throbbed outside. They filled the air with the sudden news of disaster. Carroll finally took off his shirt and wrapped it around his bleeding arm.
Michel Chevron would be telling nothing about the powerful black market in Europe and the Middle East now. Nothing about what Green Band might be.
Who was behind this horrifyin
g massacre? What could the banker Michel Chevron have known?
Carroll could longer stand.
He slumped against a plaster wall, his head drawn between his knees.
What could Chevron have known?
What could be worth this massacre?
What could justify this?
Chapter 34
IT WAS A MAGICAL MOMENT, and one that Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky knew he would never be able to forget. It was like a movie scene he’d been dreaming about for as long as he could remember.
As dawn edged through soiled, slate gray skies, Stemkowsky rolled his wheelchair down the concrete ramp he’d built to get in and out of his house in Jackson Heights, Queens. His wife, Mary, a former nurse, who was ten years older than Harry, sauntered close beside him.
“This is it, sweetheart,” she said in a whisper.
“This is definitely it,” Harry said brightly.
Mary Stemkowsky carefully set Harry’s two new Dun-hill travel bags down. She glanced at her husband. She couldn’t believe how impressive and businesslike he looked in his dark pin-striped suit.
His hair was neatly trimmed and shaped. He held a soft leather attachÉ case that looked like it cost big money.
“Excited, Harry? I’ll bet you are.” Mary Stemkowsky couldn’t control a shy, softly blossoming grin as she spoke. She believed that Harry was a saint. You could ask any of his friends at the Vets Cab Company, any of the physical therapists who worked with him at the VA, where she and Harry had originally met.
Mary Stemkowsky didn’t know how he’d done it, but Harry seemed to accept what had happened to him more than a decade before in Viet Nam. He never complained about the wounds or the pain.
‘Tell the truth, I’m a li-li-litde scared. Nuh-nuh-nice scared.” Harry tried to smile, but he looked pale around the gills, she thought.
Mary bent and kissed him on both cheeks. It was strange the way she loved him so much. What with his infirmities, his physical limitations. But she did.
“Sa-sorry you can’t go, Muh-Mary.”
“Oh, I’ll go next time, I guess. Sure, sure. You better believe I will.” Mary suddenly laughed and her broad horsey smile was close to radiant. “You look like the president of a bank or something. President of Chase Manhattan Bank. You do, Harry. I’m so proud of you.”
She stooped and kissed him again. She didn’t want him to ruin one minute, not a single heartbeat of his European trip because she couldn’t go with him this time.
“Oh, here he comes! Here Mitchell comes now.” She suddenly pointed up along the row of dull, virtually faceless tract houses.
A yellow cab had turned onto their street Mary could make out Mitchell Cohen at the wheel, wearing his usual, flap-eared Russian fur hat.
She knew that Mitchell and Harry had been working on their business scheme for almost two years. All they would tell her and Neva Cohen was that it had to do with arbitrage—which Mary loosely understood as trading currencies from country to country, making money on discrepancies in the exchange rates—and that this arbitrage scheme was their ticket out of hacking cabs for the rest of their lives.
“He takes two Dilantins before bedtime,” Mary said as she and Mitchell Cohen helped load Harry into the Vets cab.
Harry cracked up at that remark. He loved the way Mary continually worried about him, worried about dumb things, like the Dilantin which he took regularly every night and three times during the day.
“You have a wonderful trip over to Europe, Harry. Don’t work too hard. Miss me a little.”
“Awhh cah-cah-mon. I muh-muh-miss you already,” Harry Stemkowsky muttered, and he meant it.
He’d never really been able to understand why Mary had decided to live with a cripple in the first place. He was just happy that she had. Now he was going to do something for her, something that both of them deserved. Harry Stemkowsky was going to become an instant winner in life.
While Stemkowsky and Cohen drove to Kennedy Airport, another of the couriers, Vets 7, was already on board Pan Am flight 311, winging its way toward Japan.
Jimmy Holm was entertaining a first-class stewardess, skillfully recounting the stories of how he had survived three years in a North Vietnamese prison; then two more years in a Bakersville, California, VA hospital. Bakersville, he said, had been much, much worse.
“And now, here I am. This high and mighty clipper class life-style. Europe, the Far East” Holm smiled and drained his glass of Moët & Chandon. “God bless America. With all the ugly warts we hear so much about, God bless our country.”
At approximately the same hour, Vets 15, Pauly Melindez, and Vets 9, Steve Glickman, were enjoying first-class treatment on another flight scheduled for Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport Both Melindez and Glickman had most recently worked as private rent-a-cops in Orlando, Florida. Today, December 9, they were personally in control of something over sixteen million dollars…
“Samples.”
Vets 5, Harold Freedman, had already arrived in London. Vets 12, Jimmy Cassio, was in Zurich. Vets 8, Gary Barr, was settled in Rome—where he was sitting on a beautiful stone terrazzo which overlooked the Tiber.
Barr had most recently been a comedy nightclub bouncer for over four years on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. Now he was thinking that this had to be a dream.
Vets 8 finally closed his eyes. He blinked them open again … and Rome along the Tiber was still there.
So was the twenty-two million for his negotiations.
More “samples.”
Chapter 35
IN THE WEST VILLAGE section of New York, Vets 3 wasn’t flying, or even living very first class. Nick Tricosas had no four-hundred-dollar Brooks Brothers suit. He had no leather Dunhill wallet full of credit cards. Vets 3 was wearing a cut-off USMC T-shirt, a greaser’s head bandana, and faded khaki-drab fatigue trousers.
Tricosas stared around the cramped radio room and felt a rush of claustrophobia tighten his chest. The broom closet was tucked up on the third floor of the Vets garage. The only furniture was a gray metal card table and matching folding chair, the PRC transmitter-receiver, a First Blood movie poster taped to the wall.
“Contact. This is Vets Three.” Tricosas’s index finger finally clicked on the PRC again.
“All right all you brave veterans of foreign wars. You purple heart and medal of honor winners…. Who can handle a pickup at Park Ave and Thirty-ninth Street? … A Ms. Austin and her day nurse Nazreen … Ms. Austin is a very sweet lady with a fold-it-up wheelchair. Fits very nice-like in the trunk of a Checker. She’ll be going to Lenox Hill Hospital for her weekly chemotherapy. Over.”
“Over. This is Vets Twenty-two. I’m at Mad Ave and five-two. I’ll pick up and take Ms. Austin. I know the old chick. Be there in approximately five minutes. Over.”
“Thank you kindly, Vets Twenty-two…. Okay, here’s another hot one. I have a corporate account at Twenty-five Central Park West. Account T-21. Mr. Sidney Solovey is headed for the Yale Club at fifty Vanderbilt. Mr. Solovey used to work for Salomon Brothers. Before somebody blew the living shit out of Wall Street, that is. Over.”
“Over. Vets Nineteen. I’m CPS and Sixth. I’ll take Mr. Solovey to Yale.”
Nick Tricosas stood up. He stretched another three inches into his body, and rubbed the small of his back. He needed a break from the taxi dispatcher radio clatter, the constant radioman duty since five that morning.
Tricosas lit up a cigar, gently rolling it between his thumb and index finger.
Then he wandered down the winding back stairs of the Vets building, trailing clouds of expensive smoke. He climbed down another twisting flight of stairs to the main garage itself.
The basement floor was thick with collected filth and debris. It was a typically rat-infested New York cellar. There was a second dispatcher’s office flanked by cabbie waiting benches. Off to the left were rusted candy and soda machines, and an unpainted gray metal door.
Tricosas squinted and started down the serpentine, dungeon-like hallw
ay. He sighed out loud. Colonel Hudson had said nobody was to go inside the locked basement room under any circumstances.
Tricosas produced a key anyway. He turned it into the stout Chubb mortise lock, and heard the releasing click-click-click. He pushed forward the creaking door.
Then he finally peeked inside Colonel Hudson’s forbidden holy of holies …
Nick Tricosas couldn’t help smiling, almost laughing out loud. His breath got completely sucked away. His deep brown eyes might have doubled in size. His head tensed and felt like it might actually explode, blow off his shoulders. Right back up three flights of stairs to the claustrophobic radio dispatcher room.
Nick Tricosas had never actually seen four and a half billion dollars before! What he was looking at, staring at with what he knew must be a dumbfounded expression, just didn’t seem possible.
Four and a half billion. That was correct, Nicko.
Billion!
Chapter 36
COLONEL DAVID HUDSON did a highly unusual thing: he hesitated for once before acting. He reconsidered one final time as he waited in the phone boom at the southeast corner of 54th Street and Sixth Avenue and stared at the condensation on the glass panes. He understood that he was taking an unnecessary chance, asking for the same girl again.
He tapped a quarter against the black metal box, then finally let it drop.
Ding. Ding. Connection made.
Yes, he wanted to see Billie again.
He wanted to see her very much.
Less than an hour later, she glided into the buzzing, and crowded O’Neal’s on West 57th and Sixth. Hudson watched her from a stool at the bar.
Yes, he wanted to see her again.
Billie…. Just Billie.
She had on a long, speckled-charcoal coat, and black leather boots to her thighs. A soft, pearl gray beret was carefully placed on the side of her flowing blond hair. She stood out in the side of young and middle-aged businesswomen crowding into the popular bistro.
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