Mamasan’s attention was wrapped in an iPad she was browsing, but like a shrewd lynx she put it down immediately when she sensed his presence. Seth flashed her the smile of a man whose body had just been serviced in heaven.
The figure-hugging red dress she wore was an impressive feat for her age. She must have been quite a stunner in her younger years, with pouting lips, hair held tight in a bun with sliver chopsticks, and the very essence of womanhood dripping from her gaze. Handy features to have if you’re selling love.
“Happy ending?” she said with a poker face that gave away nothing. Like whether she had a clue her security cameras had been taking a long siesta, recording nothing but static.
He feigned a glowing, blissful smile to keep their interaction innocent. Casually, he scanned her hands to make sure she wasn’t about to press a panic button or pull out a piece. A slight tilt of her head to one side and Seth found himself in the crosshairs of her liquorice eyes. It chilled him to be there.
“Why you ask for this girl by name?” she said without blinking once. His heart drummed fast and a sheen of cold sweat erupted on his skin. If I look away, she’ll suspect something’s off. I need to keep looking at her, whatever happens.
“Word of mouth,” he said, now grinning like a moron he needed to be to get through this. The longer he maintained uninterrupted eye contact with her, the more he feared she would read him. With her porcelain face lacquered in the expensive stuff, Mamasan stood her ground and granted him zero clue as to what was bubbling inside that head of hers. She’s on to me.
In rapid succession, and of its own volition, his mind began formulating an escape plan with Orapan’s safety at its core. Reaching out and snapping the Mamasan’s neck was messy and risky but surfaced as the only viable option given how little time they had left.
“She pleasure you okay?” An even better game face.
“More than you can imagine,” he said, tensing the muscles by which he would end this woman’s life.
The Mamasan erupted in loud, unexpected cackles, like the joke was on him.
“I got best girls in valley, right?”
“Can’t argue with that,” Seth said slowly, not sure whether to relax his loaded arms yet.
Now smiling for the first time, the Mamasan stood up to survey the rest of his body from behind the counter.
“You good lookin’ boy. Very fit. Why no girlfriend?”
“I like to eat all types of cuisines, all at once.”
“Maybe nes time you can try Mamasan? If you have the energy, we can do it right now.” Her hands slid down her hips to demonstrate the viability of this offer.
To her credit, she wasn’t exaggerating. Old is gold.
She brushed her French-manicured fingers against his crotch, hoping this would help him make up his mind.
“Next time. I promise.”
Seth sat in his running car in front of the brothel and dialed a number.
“Fifteen minutes. Be quick. The old lady checks in with her off-site security every half hour.”
Like his recurring nightmare that had started his day, all he could hear was a ticking sound. Through his windscreen, the San Fernando Valley sun was setting in a glorious explosion of purple and blood orange against a painted blue sky. A great day for freedom.
From the external façade of the Eternal Bliss massage parlor, it was near impossible to suspect the human suffering and injustice required to keep a place like this in business. But any minute now cataclysmic changes were about to unfold inside for all its protagonists, innocent and evil.
Seth closed his eyes until the ticking noise was absorbed into an infinite black hole in his head. A place where he had learned to relegate every sin he ever committed in the name of justice.
He held his breath. On his skin, he felt the vibration of the three bullets exiting his silenced gun inside the parlor. Before he had even exhaled, the door flew open and Orapan rushed out with his Beretta in one hand and Mamasan’s iPad in the other. Before his eyes, art depicting birth was being created. A morbid beauty shrouded her white robe, splattered with brain and blood and skull splinters. Just like Orapan’s second afterbirth.
She jumped into the passenger seat and he shot away with her toward a safe house in North Hollywood. There he would remove the GPS tracking device on her ankle so they would never find her again.
Right behind Seth and Orapan, two men in a white van will have less than five minutes to rescue the other twelve girls in the brothel, before the blood-curdling wrath of the Moldovan mafia rained hell on them.
FIVE
Saturday, November 5, 2011—12:56 p.m.
Somewhere over the Caribbean Sea
Blackwell gazed down from the Seahawk at the Caribbean Sea. A cobalt canvas speckled with white strokes of surf trails painted by speedboats and yachts crisscrossing. He’d only ever left Anguilla a handful of times in the last two years, and it was always to see his kids.
Carter was only too eager to brief him quick, like the case was a scalding lump of coal in his hands that he couldn’t wait to dump on someone else.
First, he showed him Julia Price’s proof-of-life video. It stirred something deep and festering in Blackwell. No matter how corrupt or implicated her father or uncle may have been, Julia didn’t deserve this. No one did. Naked and tied to a chair, the senator’s daughter was in full frame pleading for her life. Bleeding lips, bruised face, and unsubtle signs of what her captors were doing to her stamped all over her neck, arms and thighs.
Knee-deep now in this investigation, Blackwell was alarmed how quick he had been able to reconnect with his old self. No different from a recovered heroin addict who crumbles at the site of a lighter and a tourniquet. As a hostage negotiator, his biggest opiate had always been the suspect, and this guy was off the charts. Just how large do your testicles have to be to hold the staff of a defense and security company hostage? Better still, armed with nothing more than the promise of violence, using a piece of stolen tech developed by the same company.
In his dizzying career as a critical incidents negotiator, he’d come across many variants of criminals and terrorist operatives. One type fazed him the most. Those who thought and planned big and accounted for every possible outcome, methodically, even scientifically. The intellectuals, the philosophers and the poets were the worst. More ruthless than those who espoused brute force as their primary tactic, because only the diabolically smart understood that violence alone could never get you to the finish line.
Who the hell is this guy, anyway? He had asked for Blackwell by name and articulated all the right threats to ensure the FBI would deliver him. A plan engineered to ensure Blackwell himself would have no option but to come. Whoever he was and whatever his endgame, his first move was masterful. Blackwell needed to acknowledge this before he went any further, so at no point of the negotiation would he underestimate what they were up against.
As a young idealist, Blackwell had signed up for the FBI out of college with a dream of changing the world. History was his first degree and it had taught him a recurrent pattern in the human condition: the innocent and the vulnerable are always sacrificed for progress to march along. He thought he could alter that. To stand up for the victims of crime caught in the crossfire of big players settling major scores. How stupid he had been.
After completing his training at the academy, he paid his dues for five years as a lowly field agent in Baltimore. A freshman gig he hoped would be a stepping-stone to big-time cases.
When a year later the Bureau merged its crisis management, rapid deployment, hostage negotiation and profiling units under a ubiquitous entity called the Critical Incident Response Group, Blackwell waited until his boss retired then raised his hand as high as the heavens to join this new team. He’d made a name for himself on the ground and the CIRG was looking to attract the Bureau’s best. What they were innovating there was the
future of how the FBI would handle the most complex critical incidents and he wanted in on that action.
For two years he struggled at the bottom of the food chain, walking a straight line and overworking his rear side. He became a sponge, learning and absorbing anything and everything to swim upstream, while taking better care of his body and training it for what lay ahead.
When he felt he was ready, he gave himself yet another six months of preparation to be sure. Only then did he apply for the selections and training to qualify as an operator in the CIRG’s now-legendary Hostage Rescue Team. A grueling four-and-a-half month process that few men survive. Especially men like him who came to the game without some form of military or law enforcement background.
His best odds going in were somewhere between bad and terrible. Those who cared for Blackwell warned him he was exposing his heart to be broken.
The elimination process was brutal, but whoever lived through it joined an elite counterterrorism force of physically superior agents who can run, swim, dive, fast-rope and fly under any conditions.
Against every single naysayer’s prophecy of failure, Blackwell made the cut, his intellect and strategic mind making up for whatever combat experience he lacked.
The next half decade of his life was spent serving in the HRT’s gold squad. Five gruelling years during which Blackwell witnessed firsthand the devil’s DNA imprinted on the human soul. Mothers butchering their flesh and blood to mollify manipulative lovers, gangsters wiping out entire bloodlines to strike fear in their enemies’ hearts, and self-proclaimed soldiers of God who desecrate the sanctity of life to superimpose their twisted version of holiness.
Still, something kept eating at him. A craving for a more effective role in altering the outcome of violent crimes. Pointing a lethal Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun at horrific human beings to stand them down or shoot them had become a stale, inconsequential part of the case spectrum. What he really wanted to chew on was the negotiation process. Done right, there would be no need in the first place to deploy a tactical response team and risk losing innocent lives as collateral damage. Stepping into depraved criminal minds to manipulate them out of whatever horrendous acts they intended to commit was the ultimate challenge.
He zeroed in on Jerry Nester, the God of critical incidents at the Bureau. He shadowed Nester whenever Blackwell was relieved of his HRT duties. After completing the negotiator’s training, Nester took him under his wings and taught him the tricks they don’t tell you about in the manual. He must have recognized in Blackwell a hungry heir, maybe even the only one. No one aspires to be a negotiator, most agents just end up playing the part. Blackwell was different.
Nester eventually retired and handed over the keys of the kingdom to his protege. Blackwell had been primed and ready to take his own show on the road. His instincts about being a natural hostage negotiator had been right all along. In time, Blackwell too etched his own name on the walls of the Hoover building. Like Nester, he had an impeccable record with zero casualties on his clock. That is, until Hermosa Beach.
Many years had elapsed since Blackwell had played this game of trying to decipher the mind of a hostage-taker based on their actions. The party hadn’t even started, and Blackwell was already at a disadvantage.
“Help me out here, Carter. Exertify is a security company, correct?”
Carter nodded.
“Didn’t they background check this prince character before doing business with him or letting him in their cathedral?”
“They did.”
“And?”
“He checked out.”
Blackwell shrugged for a better answer.
Carter tapped on the side of his chair a semi-decent beat and took a deep breath. “There is a real Prince Omar Al Seraj.”
“He stole his identity?”
“The hostage-taker had been impersonating the real prince for at least six months prior. He ran a silky-smooth operation, staying in his London penthouse, using his expense accounts and not one red flag lit up.”
Maybe the last four years in the cold had made Blackwell somehow dumber, but what Carter had just said made no sense whatsoever.
“How about the real guy, where was he during this whole scam?”
Carter grinned without expelling any noise. “Back in his country with a litter of kids and a bunch o’ wives, as one would expect. Probably got more money to his name than the coffers of the proud states of Maryland and Virginia combined.”
“Don’t you find it odd he didn’t realize someone was staying at his place?”
“He hasn’t been back to London in at least four years.”
“Why not?”
“Nasty neurological condition struck him young so he stays put.”
“He’s a prince though. Someone he knew or who worked for him had to notice our guy was fake.”
“Theoretically, but Omar Al Seraj was what you would call a ‘nobody’ prince.”
A large question mark must have sprouted on Blackwell’s head because Carter was quick to supply an explanation.
“He’s one of hundreds of royal offspring who have never been in the public eye or in line to rule anything.”
“A prince in principle?”
“That’s one way to put it. Unimportant in the larger scheme of the universe.”
Blackwell hadn’t spent much time in the past pondering the fine nuances of Gulf Arab royalty, but had he known it would one day come in handy, he certainly would have paid more attention.
“Think of it this way. No one in London cared to notice the perpetrator was an impostor.”
“Let alone Mark Price and his people, is what you’re trying to say.” Now that made sense.
“Exactly.”
Whoever had picked this prince as their ticket into Exertify chose well. A blank canvas with little prior public history, he could be shaped according to whatever narrative they wanted to peddle.
Carter rolled up his sleeves, and although Blackwell couldn’t be sure, it seemed his former colleague had worn his shirt inside out. When the mind is stressed, all sorts of funny things happen.
“Wanna hear something crazy?”
“Always.”
“Our guy didn’t even initiate contact with Exertify.”
“Who did?”
“Their rep in London, Jennifer Willis. She approached the faux prince at a US Defense attaché event and then hounded him for months to get his business.”
“Carter—”
“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. ‘Classic entrapment.’ He fished them out first.”
“Exactly. Have we communicated with the real prince or his government?”
“We don’t have a Legat in-country, but a team from our Baghdad office is heading there to speak to him.”
“Evidence from the penthouse?”
“Our guys in London are working with the MET for prints and DNA, but access is not a given.”
“Brits playing hardball?”
“If only. The real prince has paradiplomatic status in the UK, which complicates things a shade or two.”
Blackwell’s ears burned. A criminal takes over the residence of a prince for months while he’s spending his money and transacting on his behalf, and no one lifts an eyebrow. Yet the FBI has to submit to procedures to get in. Whatever evidence they could dig up at the prince’s London home could crack an active crime and save the lives of hostages.
A dullness in his head reminded him the migraine hadn’t really gone away, but was just taking a breather. He raised his empty bottle to one of the marines, asking for another one of those concoctions they had given him before take-off to knock the pain down a little.
“How about security footage or photos from Exertify?”
“We have a few PR shots from the cocktail party in London. Nothing exciting.”
&nb
sp; “New York?”
“Oodles. Exertify has a Brooklyn operation and all security data is mirrored in real time.”
“Anything fun to watch?”
“We got him on camera from the moment he entered the building until the end of his meeting.”
Carter toggled through a gallery of images on his tablet. The suspect looked like the very best stereotype of an Arab man from the Gulf. Sculpted goatee, huge sunglasses, covered from head to toe in a bed sheet. A subtle disguise that must have been well-researched to avoid raising suspicion but at the same time masking any identifying features.
“Build?”
“Six foot one, quite buff.”
“That’s not typical for Gulf men.”
Carter dropped his head to the side as if to consult his internal database of ‘typical Gulf men,’ only to come up blank.
He pointed to one of the photographs. “That’s when he broke the news to Mark Price about what he had done to his niece. He showed him the video and revealed he was wearing the vest thingy.”
“From that point on no one could touch him, right? He had the upper hand.”
“I suppose if there was one way to stick it to a security company, that was probably it.”
Carter had no more images to show.
“What happened to the cameras after that?”
“He forced Exertify’s security personnel to disable all surveillance equipment before he released them.”
“Have we debriefed them?”
“Yeah. They all concede this hombre knew his shit inside out. One of them tried to leave a running camera and an open mic but he saw through it like daylight.”
“Voice recognition?”
“Nothing came up, which is why we’re assuming for now he’s a cleanskin.”
“Any security footage from the Rome abduction?”
“Up until today, the whole Julia Price affair was kept out of the Bureau’s system. Deputy Director Benny Marino wanted it that way and only involved his inner posse. With the blessings of the director, might I add. If there’s anything, I haven’t seen it.”
Terminal Rage Page 4