by Barry Lancet
Understanding flooded his eyes. “Screw you.”
“Actually, tonight it’s the other way around.”
I jerked open the desk drawer and fished out a Glock. I examined the weapon and smiled.
“A full clip,” I said. “You’re too kind, Noakes. Time to answer some questions.”
When he heard his name, my prey deflated. If we knew his name, we knew all. The fixer stared morosely, but didn’t speak.
“Let’s start at the beginning. You sent the Steam Walker after me.”
“Who?”
“The hit man in Japan.”
Who was not a man but that is information I have no reason to share.
“We just passed on names. We had no idea why.”
“You were paid too well not to know why.”
I got the morose look again.
I glanced at his desktop. There were no business papers or files or any of the flotsam of a flourishing bar business. I looked at the punk’s desk. More of the same nothing. Noakes did have a red Washington Nationals cap, a small leather-bound journal that looked suspiciously like a bookie’s notebook, and a tumbler with an inch of booze neat. Any of the actual paperwork needed to keep a robust pub running was nowhere in sight. The true back office was elsewhere.
I said, “You’ve got a nice front out there.”
Some more air leaked out of him, but he kept his mouth shut.
“You’re clearly a sharp businessman.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Let’s see if your smarts extend to survival. Give me the person who called you with my name.”
Not a single word. But no denial.
“I don’t have a lot of time, so last parlay, Noakes. I’ll lay it out once. We can reason together and you don’t get hurt, or I can hurt you and then we can reason together.”
His mouth stayed shut.
“As a signing bonus,” I said, “I’ll leave you and your business standing. I have no use for you. Only the guy who passed on the kill orders.” I waved the Glock at him. “Again. Full clip and I don’t mind using it.”
We got the next link in the chain.
CHAPTER 67
NOAKES spit out the names of two high-powered DC lobbyists. Extremely well-connected wheelers and dealers, he assured me. I didn’t want to mess with them, he said. I assured him I did and would.
Then I cautioned the bar-owning middleman about passing on a warning. If I detected even a hint of his meddling, I’d come down on him with my own big sluggers. No matter what the status of his so-called hotshot lobbyists in this town, they would not be able to protect him. Further, they would tell me everything I wanted to know, and if Noakes passed on a heads-up, not only would I find out but I’d also come back and bust up everything in the House & Hill, starting with him.
“You don’t look like you got that kind of clout in this town,” Noakes said.
“Have your gofer pull up the FBI’s number.”
With a cocky mix of wariness and bravado, Noakes nodded and Bomber Jacket called up the listing on his phone. He was nursing a sore jaw courtesy of Noda.
“Now,” I said, “have him ring them. When the operator comes on, ask for Dan Kastor.”
Noakes nodded for his protégé to proceed. Bomber Jacket did as instructed, and when I held out my hand the punk tossed me the phone. I hit the speaker function a second before my new FBI acquaintance came on the line: “Dan Kastor, Special Agent in Charge.”
“In charge of what, I’ve always wanted to know.”
“More than you’ll ever find out, Brodie. You at the pub?”
“Yeah.”
“Noakes there?”
“Yeah.”
I pointed the face of the phone at the fixer and Kastor said, “Do what the man tells you, Noakes.”
“Like I have a choice,” Noakes said.
“Smart man. You might live to cheat another day. Call me later, Brodie,” Kastor said, and was gone.
“So there you have it,” I said, lobbing the mobile back at Noakes’s underling.
Then I plugged the rest of the loopholes.
I stood over the thickset British transplant and told him that if his clients skipped town and I couldn’t find them, I would come back and break things. If they were not exactly where they should be when we rang them, I would do the same. Then the FBI would hound him until he left DC. He’d lose everything.
On the other hand, if his clients were where they should be, I’d forget I’d ever heard of the House & Hill.
Would he continue to exhibit the survival instincts we all suspected he possessed?
He assured me he would. And apparently he had.
We had an appointment with the next link in the chain.
DAY 12, THURSDAY, 11 A.M.
We were quite a welcoming committee.
When Stockton ushered Thomas C. Correll and James Henry Barrett of Correll & Barrett into the second-story room of what was billed as a town hall mansion, the two men got an unexpected eyeful.
The expected attendees were Stockton, Noda, and myself. The ringers were Dan Kastor of the FBI and the inimitable duo of Brown and Green from the CIA. The three men sat together on a couch along the back wall.
Stockton cast a curious eye around the room. “Don’t know why my people chose this place. I think it used to be a bordello.”
“You’re joking,” I said.
He shook his head. “If this was ever a town hall, I’m Tinkerbell.”
“You don’t look that sprightly.”
Correll and Barrett didn’t know what to make of our chatter. Neither did they know who the three additional men were, but they knew at a glance what they were. The pair edged toward the door, but Stockton stepped forward and blocked their retreat.
“Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen,” he said, gesturing to a table in the center of the room.
“I think we’ll stay right here.”
Both men were blond. Correll was trim and tanned. Barrett had bulk.
Stockton shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He turned the lock on the door and pocketed an old skeleton key.
Correll had been a behind-the-scenes powerbroker in the Republican Party, and Barrett was the son of a senator who sat on the Energy Commission. Inclusive of its founders, C & B had six employees—three support staff and one aspiring lobbyist it had taken under its greasy wings. Stockton had requested they leave the fledgling in the nest, and they had.
I jumped right in. “My three friends are only here to observe. You don’t need to know who we are.”
Correll recovered first. “We can work that way.”
He wore a high-end blue designer pinstripe with an embedded silk thread. A pale-yellow handkerchief peeked from the breast pocket of his suit. It, too, was silk.
“Absolutely,” Barrett said, taking a cue from his partner’s newfound cheerfulness. Barrett was an aspiring blueblood who, Stockton had informed me, was piling up money and looking to marry for lineage.
“Good to hear,” I said.
Then I told them what they would be supplying.
CHAPTER 68
SOMETIMES, cases require mopping up,” my father had once told me at the dinner table.
I was three years into my apprenticeship at Brodie Security. At fifteen, you pretend to understand everything, don’t let on that you understood only a fraction, and commit all rarefied dialogues to memory until a point in time when meaning reveals itself. Many such conversations with my father, not to mention with Brodie Security operatives back in the day, were seared into my brain.
“You mean sweeping things under the rug,” my mother said with a wry smile.
They were two years away from a vicious divorce, and already at each other’s throats, but the threads of what had once been a full-fledged love, though frayed, still held.
My father gave her comment some thought. “No, not under, but up. Sewer scum can be tricky. You can’t always bring them into a proper court of law, so you have two choices. Either
let them loose or dish out the medicine yourself.”
“Are you teaching our son vigilantism?”
“I’m teaching him how to kick maggots out of Dodge.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use such language at the dinner table,” my mother said.
She was an art curator by profession. Maggots tested her sensibilities.
“As you wish. But make no mistake, son, their type are out there. And when there’s no other way, you’ll have to clean house yourself, or live with the mess. And if you don’t kick them hard enough, they’ll come back at you.”
* * *
“Our hands are clean.”
Correll reshaped his silk kerchief as he spoke. He was working on regaining his confidence. Under the blond hair were green eyes and a dimpled chin.
“Hardly,” I said.
“We didn’t lift a finger,” Barrett added, echoing his partner’s sentiment, as if the repetition would magically persuade us. His five-thousand-dollar suit seemed to underpin his confidence.
“Ah, but you picked up a phone,” I said. “You caused it to happen.”
Kantor, Brown, and Green watched with amusement. The untrained eye might interpret their practiced looks as contrite, which would be a mistake.
And yet it was a mistake C & B made. It also did not escape the pair’s attention that the total cost of the three government men’s suits wouldn’t cover half of Barrett’s outfit. Disdain flickered at the corners of their mouths, and they missed the bigger picture. Or, more likely, considered such concerns beneath them.
“Which you can’t prove,” Correll said, in a sudden shift in strategies. “Try anything and we’ll squash you like a bug. We own this town. We know everybody in it. After we send you home with your tail between your legs, we’ll find out where you live and—”
“—drink your blood for breakfast. Then, I, personally will—” Barrett paused in puzzlement, sensing a change he could not pinpoint.
A moment earlier, during Correll’s rant, Luke, my old friend from Japantown, had slipped into the room through a back door hidden behind floor-to-ceiling blue velvet curtains. He stood in the corner deepest into the room. His hands were in his pockets. He wore a tailored gray suit. Like he always did.
Luke had listened politely to Correll, then the beginning of Barrett’s follow-up. He didn’t say a word, but a chill crept into the air. Then the faint wintry smell of his cologne permeated the chamber.
Eyes scanning the spacious suite, Barrett sensed Luke’s presence without seeing him, his tirade collapsing in midsentence once he found the CIA freelancer, alone in a distant corner of the apartment.
Luke exuded a faintly frigid Nordic air. His cool slate-colored eyes did nothing to dispel the eeriness of his unannounced arrival.
Barrett stared, confused.
The dynamic of the meeting had shifted. Neither Correll nor Barrett understood how or why, only that it had.
CHAPTER 69
CORRELL, the powerbroker, found his voice first. “Who the hell is this guy? Aren’t there enough of you people already? You think your new friend’s going to stop us from gouging the eyeballs from your skull?”
“I didn’t say he was a friend. In fact, he’s not even here.” I turned to Brown, who had helped me corral Luke on short notice. “Where is he exactly?”
“Wolfsberg, a small town one hundred and fifty miles southwest of Vienna.”
Barrett, the congressman’s son, looked nervously from me to Luke. “What are you doing, Brodie?”
Luke took a step forward.
“I’m not going to lift a finger,” I said.
“Damn right you’re not,” Correll said, regrouping.
He reached for a phone on a side table. I slapped his arm away with my right hand, and with my left yanked the phone cord from its socket.
“What was that?”
“I misspoke. Sue me.”
“We’ll do more than that. We’ll—”
Luke took another step forward.
Barrett’s eyes went rabbit. “Keep him away from us.”
“Who?” I said.
“The guy in the gray suit, you idiot.”
“He’s not here.”
Correll turned to Luke. “And you, when we’re done with you, you’ll be wearing prison orange. We’ll . . .”
As the wheeler and dealer spoke, Luke cocked his head an inch to the left and stared at him. His eyes, without any overt movement on his part, seemed to grow fainter and icier. Correll stopped speaking, and his own eyes became dark tunnels of fear.
Luke shook his head in the mildest of rebukes, as if scolding a child.
Once more taking his cue from his partner’s verbal assault, Barrett stepped into the void. He was confident of his physicality. He worked out. At six-two, he was also three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than Luke.
Barrett faced the new arrival. “Listen, I don’t care who the hell you are or where you come from or how good your schoolyard stare is. Screw you and the dumb-ass donkey you rode in on.”
Something changed in the clarity of Luke’s pale-gray orbs. A gun glided out from behind the left lapel of his jacket without a ripple and he shot the verbal offender in the fleshy part of his hip above the bone. The bullet grazed the silk and nipped the flesh.
Barrett slapped his hand over the wound in disbelief.
The weapon disappeared back behind Luke’s lapel.
A silencer had been attached.
Barrett sunk into panic mode. “What the fuck? What the fuck? Whaaat the fuucccck? You bastard, I’ll sue you for everything you’re worth and everything your parents are worth and everything—”
Luke eased the gun out once more and Barrett said, “You wouldn’t dare. You wouldn’t—”
Luke raised the weapon until Barrett could look directly down the barrel. The lobbyist shut up. Finally. For a guy with an expensive Ivy League education Barrett took an awful long time to connect the dots.
Luke panned his weapon in Correll’s direction, and cocked his head as if miming a question.
Correll raised his palms. “No need for that. I’m listening.”
Luke said, “Both of you on your knees.”
Correll complied, a shaky smile on his lips. “No need to get violent. Just tell me what you want. I’ll fix it. That’s what we do best.”
Luke’s gun disappeared a second time. He stepped between the two men, grabbed a fistful of each lawyer’s hair, and, bending down, pulled their heads toward him until they looked like a cluster of three bushy coconuts.
Then he began whispering. It went on for five minutes in a soft steady hum. Neither lawyer spoke, which in itself was a miracle. I don’t know what Luke told them, but several times I heard key phrases like your career and your family. Motionless, the lobbyists listened. Barrett dripped only the occasional drop of blood on the carpet, testimony to the precision of Luke’s shooting.
After a time, the CIA ace straightened and stepped away from the two men.
“Brodie,” he said, giving a two-finger salute, then making to go. “Always a pleasure.”
“Anything I need to do on this end?”
Luke turned his cold gray eyes toward the pair and they both shook their heads.
“Ask your questions,” Luke said. He turned toward Noda, nodded, and walked out the front door.
We heard the two men’s confession.
Dan Kastor taped it.
A week later, the pair turned themselves in to the authorities, accompanied by a pair of DC’s highest-priced lawyers. Knowledgeable sources said they’d most likely lose their law licenses, receive three- to five-year sentences in a country-club prison, serve a token amount of time before they were released, and be back on the lobbyist circuit in half a blink, but several notches lower in the pecking order.
Correll and Barrett provided a single name.
Another link in the chain.
And it was a shocker.
A lawyer-on-lawyer connection. It made no sense
whatsoever, but the lead was solid. The fear Luke had injected into the proceedings assured the point, even if lobbyists as a breed were among the slipperiest of DC’s creatures.
The name?
Tad Sato, Naomi’s husband.
DAY 13
FRIDAY
WITHOUT WARNING
CHAPTER 70
NARITA, JAPAN, 5:30 P.M.
THE moment Noda and I cleared Customs, we snagged a taxi to Tad’s hospital, a ten-minute ride from the airport.
I rang Naomi from the cab and asked her to meet us in the cafeteria, then requested she keep our pending arrival a secret from her spouse. As a result, when the two of us strolled into an uninviting lunchroom with yellowed linoleum flooring and frayed tablecloths, we faced an apprehensive wife braced for bad news.
“I ordered you coffee,” she said, gesturing for us to sit. “After flights to DC and back, I’m sure you could use some.”
“Thank you,” I said for the both of us.
A boomerang run was a fact of life when you dealt with Western countries from this side of the Pacific.
“How bad is it?” Ken’s daughter asked.
“Bad,” I said.
Naomi took the news poorly, but took it. Like the newshound she was. “Do you know how he could have gotten tangled up in all of this?”
“Blackmail,” Noda said. “Or worse.”
“Does it jar anything loose?” I asked.
Lips pursed, Naomi shook her head.
I said, “Just prepare yourself, okay? We don’t know which way this will go.”
Naomi stood firm. “Someone’s pulling my husband’s strings. That’s the only explanation.”
A thread of an idea dangled at the back of my mind. I took a sip of the coffee. It was hot, bitter, and strong. Naomi threw out a few more questions. I let Noda handle them so I could pursue the elusive thread. The man of few words answered the distraught wife with clipped responses before shutting her down with a bulldog shrug. Great.
I closed my eyes to concentrate. The thread was coming.