Black Friday

by James Patterson

  Suddenly, a small black Beretta was shoved hard, crunching like a nightstick against Stemkowsky’s temple. “This is the matter! Don’t move. Put back that mike.”

  A second man appeared now, emerging out of the smoky side street darkness. He yanked open the creaking passenger side door.

  “Just turn the cab right around, Stemkowsky. We’re not going home quite yet.”

  An indefinite time later—Hours? Maybe it was days? There was no way to accurately gauge because all time had collapsed under him—Stemkowsky felt hands angrily ripping under his armpits, lifting him rudely.

  The hands propped him hard onto a badly creaking wooden chair again.

  A man’s face, a blur of soft pink, seemed to float down and stop close to Stemkowsky’s face. The man was uncomfortably close.

  Then his mind went into complete shock! Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky’s watery eyes began to blink rapidly; he tried to look away from this particular closeup face.…

  Harry Stemkowsky couldn’t believe who this was.

  His eyes kept trying to lock into focus.

  This face, he’d seen it before, recently, always distilled by a network TV screen or a newspaper—

  No, he was confused: the injected drug had fucked his brain over—

  What was going on here? This person couldn’t be—

  The face smiled horribly and said, “Yes, I’m Francois Monserrat, You know me under another name. This is an extraordinary shock, I know.”

  Harry Stemkowsky shut his eyes a moment. This was all a bad dream; make it go away.

  Stemkowsky opened his eyes: he shook his head.

  Suddenly, Harry Stemkowsky’s head ached unbelievably. His eyeballs felt indescribably heavy, as if they were hanging on elastic bands. He simply could not believe it. So incredibly near the top. The ultimate traitor…

  When Stemkowsky finally spoke, he was close to being incoherent; incomprehensible words squirmed through his gummy, swollen lips. His tongue seemed at least twice its normal size.

  “Ga fuh-fuh-fuck yrrself. Fuh-fuck yrrself.”

  “Oh, please. Your time for being morally indignant is long past…. All right, then… look at what we have here. Look at this.”

  Concentrate, Stemkowsky fiercely reminded himself. Focus. Concentrate.

  Monserrat’s hands were holding out a brown paper shopping bag. Up close to Stemkowsky’s face.

  Monserrat was taking something out. “A blue cooking pot. Familiar?” Once again, that horrible smile.

  Harry Stemkowsky screamed! He fought insanely against his bonds, forcing them to rip into his skin.

  Up close to Stemkowsky’s eyes, a fork dipped slowly into the depths of the pot. The fork speared a dripping chunk of beef bourguignon that oozed brown gravy.

  Stemkowsky screamed once again. He screamed and screamed.

  “It seems you guessed my secret. You should also know by now how deadly serious this interrogation is. How important this is to me.” Monserrat turned to his lieutenants.

  “Bring in the unfortunate cook.”

  Harry Stemkowsky recognized his wife Mary, but only slightly. She was a pitiful caricature of her former self. Her face was bruised, purplish and raw in extended areas. Her mouth opened crookedly as she saw Harry. Some of her front teeth were missing; her gums were pulpy and bloody.

  “Puh-puh-pleez?” Stemkowsky struggled; he lifted the chair legs right off the floor with his tremendous arm strength. “She doe kno.”

  “I know that. Mary doesn’t know how you came to possess stolen Stock Market bonds in Beirut, then in Tel Aviv. You know, though.”

  “Pleez. Doh-doh-don hur’ her…”

  “I don’t want to hurt her. So you tell me what you know, Sergeant. Everything that you know. You tell me right now. How did you get the stolen Stock Market bonds?”

  Once again, that horrible smile from Monserrat.

  It took another cruel and gruesome fifteen minutes to get the information, to find out some, not all, of what Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky knew …

  Information about the stolen bonds and Wall Street securities; about the bombings on December 4. Not where Colonel Hudson was right now. Not even precisely who the Vets leader was. But a start, a beginning at least. And a beginning was better than what Monserrat had been accustomed to recently.

  Francois Monserrat stared down at crippled Harry Stemkowsky and his wife. From Stemkowsky’s perspective the terrorist leader seemed to be looking right through them, as though they were both insubstantial.

  “You see now? None of your pain, none of poor Mary’s suffering was necessary. It could have been five minutes of talking together at most Now, how’s this for just rewards?”

  A compact black Beretta appeared, paused so that the Stemkowskys could see what was coming, then fired twice.

  The very last thing U.S. Army Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky ever thought… he and Mary never got to enjoy their money. Over a million dollars, which they’d earned It wasn’t fair. Life wasn’t ever fair, was it? That same question always left hanging, always unanswered in the end.

  Chapter 68

  THAT NIGHT, CARROLL traveled home to the Bronx. As he slumped up from the garage, the ground around him seemed to be spinning.

  He climbed creaky front porch steps. Twinges of guilt struck hard. He’d been neglecting the kids for too long this time.

  The nightlight was on, but nothing much else downstairs. There was the electric buzz of kitchen appliances. Carroll took off his shoes, and tiptoed quietly upstairs.

  He stopped and peeked inside the front bedroom where Elizabeth, a.k.a. Lizzie, bunked with Mickey Kevin. Their tiny baby figures were delicately sprawled across twin beds.

  He remembered buying the beds years before, at Klein’s on 14th Street Just look at the little creepolas. Not a problem, not a care in the world. Life as it ought to be.

  An ancient Buster Brown clock from Carroll’s own childhood glowed and clicked softly on the far wall. It was next to posters of Def Leppard and the Police. Strange world to grow up in for a little kid.

  Strange world for the big kids, too.

  “Hi, you guys.” He whispered, too low to be heard. “Your dad’s home from the salt mines.”

  “Everybody’s just fine, Archer,” Mary K. spoke. She’d snuck up from behind, and scared the living shit out of him.

  “They understand the problems you’re having. We’ve been watching the news.”

  Mary K. gave her brother a hug. She’d been nineteen when their parents had died in Florida. Carroll had looked after her after that. He and Nora had always been around to talk to her about her boyfriends—about Mary Katherine wanting to be a serious painter, even if she couldn’t make any decent money at it. They’d been there when she needed them, and now it was the other way around.

  “Maybe they understand okay about my work. How about the other thing? Caitlin?” Carroll’s head turned slowly toward his sister.

  Mary K. took his arm and draped it over her housecoat and shoulder. She was such a softie, such a sweet gentle and good lady. It was time she found someone as terrific as she was, Carroll often thought Probably she wasn’t helping her cause, living with him and the kids, either.

  “They trust your parental judgment. Within reasonable bounds, of course.”

  “That’s news.”

  “Oh, you’re the Word and the Light to them, and you know it. If you say they’ll like Caitlin, they instinctively believe it—because you said it, Arch.”

  “Well, they didn’t show it the other morning. I think they’ll like her. She’s a terrific person.”

  “I’m sure she is. You have good instincts about people. You always knew which of my beaus was worth a second look. You’re a sucker for people who are full of life, full of love for other people. That’s what Caitlin’s like, isn’t she?”

  Arch Carroll looked down at his sister, and gently shook his head. Finally he grinned. Mary K. was so smart. She had an artist’s sensibility, but she was so practica
l. A curious combination, and irresistible in his opinion.

  Carroll stretched his arms. The wound, that souvenir of a morning in France, still ached. “One day soon, I’m going to take a week off. I swear it. I’ve got to get back in touch with the kids.”

  “What about your friend, Caitlin? Could she take a week off too?”

  Carroll said nothing. He wasn’t sure if that was such a good idea.

  He went off to bed, where he lay exhausted, but unable to fall over the edge into steep. The No. 13 Wall computer screens were still running through his mind, perplexing images. If there was any one avenue he could follow on the trail of Green Band, it would lead inevitably to Washington, and deeper into the restricted files of the FBI.

  Arch Carroll snored quietly, slept dreamlessly, and when his bedside alarm went off it was just before dawn and dark still.

  Chapter 69

  WASHINGTON, D.C, CARROLL had always thought, was the ultimate Hitchcock movie location: so elegant, so quietly lovely and distinguished, yet with paranoia.

  At 9:00 A.M. he squirmed from a blue Metro cab with a dented fender. His face was slapped with raw cold and drizzle on Washington’s 10th Street Carroll hiked his jacket collar up. He squinted through a thick, soupy, morning haze, which obscured the concrete box that was the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

  Once inside the Hoover memorial, he found the procedure at the escort desk mechanical and unnecessarily slow. It irritated Carroll in the worst bureaucratic way. The Bureau’s famous procedures, the inefficiency they created, played like a skit appropriate for “Saturday Night Live.”

  After several minutes of phone checks, he was granted a coded blue tag with the FBI’s official insignia. He slid the plastic card into a metal entry gate, and passed inside the hallowed halls.

  An attractive woman agent, a researcher for FBI Data Analysis, was waiting outside the elevator on the fifth floor. She wore a man-tailored suit; her chestnut hair was wound back in a tight, formal chignon.

  “Hello, I’m Arch Carroll.”

  “I’m Samantha Hawes. People don’t call me Sam. Nice to meet you. Why don’t you come this way, please.”

  She started to walk away, pleasant but efficient. “I’ve already collected as much material as I can for you to look at. When you told me what you were fishing for, I put in some hours of overtime. My material comes from the Pentagon and from our own classified files. Everything I could collect this quickly on your lists of names. It wasn’t easy, I must say. Some of it I transcribed from material already on computer file. The rest—-as you can smell—is contained in some really musty documents.”

  Samantha Hawes finally delivered Carroll to a library-style carrel beside a silent row of gray metal copiers. The desk was completely covered with thick stacks of reports.

  Carroll’s heart nearly stalled as he gazed at the mountainous stacks. Each report looked like any other. How was he supposed to find something unusual in this great, yawning heap of history?

  He walked around the table, sizing up his task. Hidden among all these folders were connections between men— the tracks, the spoor they laid down; the events they lived through during and after Viet Nam. Somewhere, surely, tracks would crisscross, correspondences would have been made, relationships established.

  “I have more. Do you want to see them now? Or is this enough to hold you for a while?” Samantha Hawes asked.

  “Oh, I think this will do me pretty well. I didn’t know we collected this much dirt on everybody down here.”

  Agent Hawes grinned. “You should see your file.”

  “Did you?”

  “I’ll be back over there, working in the stacks. You just holler if you need any more light reading, Mr. Carroll.”

  The FBI agent started to turn away, then she suddenly turned back. Samantha Hawes seemed to be a very contemporary Southern woman, pretty, very confident, genteel and proper Southern from her looks, anyway. In days of old, Carroll couldn’t help thinking, she would already have been a young mother of two or three tucked away in Alexandria. She would have been a Sam, too.

  “There is something else.” Her face was suddenly quite serious and concerned. “I don’t know exactly what this all means. Maybe it’s just me. But when I went through these files yesterday evening… I had the distinct feeling that some of them had been tampered with …”

  A very unpleasant warning rang in Carroll’s head. “Who would tamper with them?”

  Samantha Hawes shook her head. “Any number of people have access to them. I don’t know the answer.”

  “What do you mean when you say they’ve been tampered with, Samantha?”

  The agent looked straight at Carroll. “I mean, that I think documents are missing from certain files.”

  Carroll reached out and lightly grasped her wrist. He was excited by this information because it meant that certain files, in some ways, were already different from the rest. They stood out.

  Someone else had looked at them.

  Someone had possibly pilfered documents from them.

  Why? Which files?

  He saw a strange look crossing her face, as if she were asking herself about the precise nature of this unorthodox man who’d been admitted into FBI headquarters.

  “Can you remember which files?”

  “Of course I can.” She moved toward the work table and began sifting. She picked out five thick files, dropping them in front of Carroll, saying, “This one … and this … this … this one… this one.”

  He gazed quickly at the names on the files.

  Barreiro, Joseph.

  Doud, Michael.

  Freedman, Harold Lee.

  Melindez, Pauly.

  Hudson, David.

  “Why these five?” he asked.

  “They served together in Viet Nam, according to their documents. That’s one good reason.”

  Carroll sat down. He still expected to come away from Washington empty-handed. He expected that the faint sense of anticipation he felt now would turn out to be nothing more than a false alarm. Five men on the FBI computer list of “subversives”—a term he knew was next to meaningless, at least the way the FBI used it.

  He checked his own printouts, and his heart suddenly clutched.

  Barreiro and Doud had been explosives experts.

  And David Hudson had been a colonel, who, according to the brief note on the printout, had been active in the organization of veterans groups and veterans rights after Viet Nam.

  Five men who had served together in the war.

  Five men who were on both his list, and the FBI’s.

  He slipped off his jacket, then the tie he’d worn especially for his big trip to Washington.

  He began to read about Colonel Hudson.

  Chapter 70

  WHEN HE HAD finished reading, Carroll tilted his creaking chair back. He shook his head.

  The ledger on U.S. Army Colonel David Hudson lay flopped open before him. Hudson’s thick 211 file, his entire life in the U.S. military, was spread out on the desk.

  Suddenly, the Green Band investigation was more hopelessly complex and confusing than it had ever been.

  Colonel David Hudson was the final enigma.

  David Hudson’s military career had begun with high promise at West Point, where he was an honor graduate in 1966. He’d been a four-year member, and finally captain, of the tennis team. He was also a popular cadet according to all the available reports.

  It got even better, or worse, from there. Hudson had subsequently volunteered for Special Forces “Q” courses, followed by a special Ranger training. On a first impression at least, the Army couldn’t have asked for a more diligent or professional young soldier.

  Colonel David Hudson: All-American Boy.

  Every succeeding report Carroll read was highlighted and underscored with phrases like “one of our very best”; “the kind of young officer who should make us all proud”; “a model soldier in every way. Unbridled, absolutely infectious enthusiasm”; “de
finitely one of our future leaders”; “the kind of material we can build the modern Army around.”

  In Viet Nam, Captain Hudson had been awarded the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross during his first tour. He had been captured and transported into North Viet Nam for interrogation. He’d spent seven months as a POW.

  Hudson had almost died in the prison camp…. He had then volunteered for a second tour, and performed with “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity” on several occasions.

  Then, three months before the evacuation of Saigon, he’d been savagely wounded by a Viet Cong grenade blast and subsequently lost his left arm. Hudson reacted with characteristic bravura.

  A hospital report read: “David Hudson has been a godsend, helping other patients, never seeming to feel sorry for himself…. In every way, a thoroughly idealistic young man.”

  Following Viet Nam though, quite suddenly after his return to the United States, Colonel Hudson’s career, his entire life, seemed to become disturbingly unhinged. According to the files, the change was bewildering to his friends and family.

  “It was almost as if a different man had returned from the war.” His father was interviewed and quoted several times. “The fire, that wonderful, contagious enthusiasm was burned out of David’s eyes. His eyes were those of a very old man.”

  Colonel David Hudson: enigma, almost phantom after coming home from the Viet Nam War.

  First at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, then at Fort Sill in Oklahoma; at Fort Polk, Hudson was quietly disciplined for “activities detrimental to the Army.”…

  Another report indicated that he was transferred twice within three months, for what seemed on the surface to be petty insubordinations….

  His marriage to Betsy Hinson, his hometown sweetheart, ended abruptly in 1973. Betsy Hinson said, “I don’t even know David anymore. I don’t know this man who I’m supposed to be married to. David’s become a stranger to everyone he knows.”

  Hudson, in the postwar years, had become almost obsessive about his participation in a handful of ‘Viet Nam veterans’ organizations. As an organizer and spokesman at rallies around the country, Hudson had met and been photographed with liberal motion picture stars, with sympathetic big business leaders, with recognizable national politicians.