by Brian Wiprud
“How?”
“It’s better you don’t know all the details. But if you do as I say they won’t see the sun rise.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Why the hell not? Did I have to come to you to help me? No. Have I lied to you? No. Look, I felt bad for all the crap you’ve had to put up with because of what happened the other night.”
“What happened the other night was that you stole from me and ruined my life!” Tito was fumbling for his gun again.
“Tito, shooting me won’t change what happened. I didn’t do this to you on purpose. You have to think about the future, and about how you’re going to move on. Move on without Idi, without a messy divorce and paying her every month to keep that dog in luxury.”
He palmed his silver pistol under the bar, pointing it at me. “Or I could just bring you to him.”
“What good would that do?”
“It would get me off the hook with the Kurac.”
“He’s about the last one standing, Tito. When he’s gone, your problem is gone. When Idi is gone, your other problem is gone. You’ll be a free man.”
He squinted. “Why should I trust you? The man who stole my gems and then my cell phone!”
“Let’s be fair. The gems were an accident that I couldn’t undo, and the cell phone I returned.”
“How can I be sure you’re not playing me for a fool?”
“Tito, I’m giving you a golden opportunity. Tell him he has to show up with two hundred grand and that Idi has to come with him. They have to come get the car and follow directions on where to meet.”
“Two hundred grand.” His eyes were far away. “I’d love to have two hundred grand, that would solve other problems.”
“Well, you’ll never have two hundred grand paying for facials for that dog every week.”
He slid the pistol back into his pocket, and a calm came over him as he mumbled to himself.
“Tito, will you do it?”
He seemed to awaken from a dream state: “Yes, I’ll go now.”
The bartender placed a hot coffee in front of me. “Milk and sugar?”
“This is fine the way it is. Will you call a cab for Tito?”
He nodded, and picked up the phone.
I put a hand on Tito’s shoulder. “You got it straight, right? Red fuzzy dice …”
He nodded. “… handicap space in Excelsior upper garage, instructions on the windshield, bring two hundred grand and Idi.”
I zipped through half a cup of coffee worrying about Tito, who for him seemed unusually calm.
“Cab.” The bartender pointed out the front windows toward a taxi at the curb. I threw a five on the bar and walked Tito out to the car. He was almost smiling: “And you say they won’t see sun-up if they follow the instructions?”
“Not if they do what we tell them to.”
“What if they don’t follow the instructions?”
“Then they will see the sun come up.”
Tito slid into the cab, which did a U-turn and sailed south on Boulevard East.
I found my Toyota with the red fuzzy dice and drove to Fort Lee and Tip Top Gym.
THE ART OF WAR INSTRUCTS US TO DEPEND NOT ON THE PROBABILITY OF THE ENEMY’S NOT COMING, BUT ON OUR OWN PREPAREDNESS TO RECEIVE HIM; NOT ON THE POSSIBILITY OF HIS NOT ATTACKING, BUT RATHER THAT WE HAVE MADE OUR POSITION UNASSAILABLE.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Forty-six
The hot tamale was under the back seat of the Toyota and set for a twenty-second delay. The handicap spot was near the elevators and a straight shot to the garage exit. The grenade’s pin was pulled most of the way out. When Spikic released the hand brake, it would pull fishing line threaded under the carpet that would pull the pin the rest of the way out, starting the timer.
Half the Britany-Swindol take was in the gas tank. When the car went up in flames, the gas tank and fuel would actually protect the gems from being incinerated. It would take awhile before the tank blew, and when it did it would burn at a much lower temperature than the Mark 77 fuel in the grenade, and probably the force of the explosion would force the tank away from the car body. I was counting on the gems being blown out onto the pavement and recoverable.
I was also counting on two bodies being almost completely immolated in the car fire. One male, one female. One me, one Trudy. I had no doubt they might have some way of figuring out the two bodies were not us, eventually, after some pretty serious lab work on what little remained of the bodies. At first, though, they would have to believe it was us, what with the gems and the story Roberto and I fed them through the jukebox.
I had to make sure this all went down the way it was supposed to, so I had to be onsite but out of sight. Across from the Excelsior was a five-story brick apartment building. Slipping the locks on the building’s foyer was about as easy as it gets, and at the top of the stairwell the door to the roof was unlocked. I was in position on the roof by eleven thirty, and the car was in the handicap space in the Excelsior garage across the street.
My timing was good. The FBI started to show up at quarter to midnight. A large van with tinted windows and a phony magnetic sign for restaurant supply rolled gently to the curb opposite the Excelsior’s driveway. Nobody got out.
Then a fake cable TV truck arrived and parked just north of the driveway at a hydrant.
The black and Hispanic agents I saw at the Plaza strolled arm and arm and sat on a bench at a bus stop. They checked their watches. After ten minutes they stood and strolled into the lobby of the Excelsior and did not come out.
A sedan with tinted windows showed up and parked just south of the driveway at the bus stop.
They had the place pretty well bottled up from all angles by twelve thirty. I’m sure they were hoping to catch us arriving at the lower level.
Was it possible not to smoke a jillion cigarettes waiting for this show to start? This was the culminating moment. My success and my escape depended on them believing at least for a while that I was dead, or at least that someone else had the gems and that most of them were destroyed in the fire.
I smoked and chewed Wrigley’s, careful to avoid the two sticks at the end.
“Hey.”
I turned.
“Hello.”
“Your wife not let you smoke inside either?” My new friend was also in a tracksuit, but he was fat with long black hair and yellow slippers on his feet. “Haven’t seen you up here before.”
“I’m visiting.”
“What floor?” He flashed a huge flame from a lighter at a cigarette.
“First.”
“Then how come you came all the way up? You coulda stepped out onto the stoop to smoke.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke.
I pointed at a wedge of Manhattan between the Excelsior’s towers. “The view.”
“Not from around here. If you were, you’d get used to that. Where you from?”
Second time in the same day I had to run into people that ran off at the mouth. I wanted to be left alone with my nervous tension and daydreams about the Bahamas.
“Clifton.”
“Oh yeah? I know people from Clifton. You know Peter Dremmer?”
I glanced at the street and saw Tito walking fast toward the Excelsior lobby.
“No, never heard of him.”
“What school you go to?”
“Fairleigh Dickinson.”
Tito went into the lobby.
“No, I mean high school.”
“Clifton High.”
“I knew a guy once who went there. What year?”
A yellow cab—the kind they have in Manhattan—pulled up to the curb across the street.
“Um, eighty-nine.”
“I went to high school in
Weehawken. What are you looking at?”
“Me? Just people. I like to watch people.”
Wrapped in a white fur coat, Idi and a runt in a leather trench coat headed from the cab toward the lobby. Spikic was practically dragging her, and I could hear her whining.
My companion pointed at Idi and Spikic. “Heh, look at those two! Just the type that live at the Excelsior.”
“Is it fancy over there?”
“Fancy but no class. Lotta foreigners, Russians, that sort of thing, and they throw their money around.” He flicked an ash over the edge of the building. “I’m Fabio.”
I shook his hand, and it was moist. “I’m Ralph.”
“Ralph? Like Ralph Kramden?”
I shook out another smoke.
“Here.” Fabio pointed his flame thrower my direction and almost burned off my eyebrows while lighting my cigarette. “So who is it on the first floor? What apartment?”
“Huh?” I was riveted on the garage exit. What was Tito doing there? Sure, he lived there, but he should have had sense to be elsewhere, and with an alibi.
“Who are you visiting, Ralph?”
Three gunshots sounded from across the street, from the garage.
Fabio leaned on the building parapet. “What was that?”
Three more shots.
“I don’t know, Fabio. Were those gunshots?”
That idiot: Tito.
Two men in FBI jackets emerged from the sedan and jogged toward the garage entrance.
“Lookit, Ralph. It’s like on TV. The FBI!”
Fuzzy dice swaying in the window, the Toyota lurched from the garage, narrowly missing the two agents. It was hard to make Tito out behind the wheel as street light twisted through the car, but his silver pistol flashed, clasped to the steering wheel. Idi was easy to make out in the white fur coat in the passenger side—she was screaming hysterically. He cut the wheel hard and drove across the sidewalk, sideswiping a tree.
The cable TV van zipped forward and blocked Tito’s path, so he pulled a squealing U-turn that took him up on the sidewalk directly below me.
I leaned back. I didn’t want my eyebrows singed a second time that night.
The fake restaurant supply truck made a U-turn at the same time as Tito and slammed the Toyota’s front fender and wheel. The ball joint collapsed and the wheel splayed out sideways. The Toyota came to a stop in the middle of Boulevard East.
Agents from the cable truck were already jogging across the pavement toward the Toyota, guns drawn.
The black and Hispanic agents raced from the Excelsior lobby.
Doors to the fake restaurant truck opened.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi …
It looked like a camera flash went off in the back seat of the Toyota, then a blob of light grew like a balloon and burst into a white hot gas. Fire that hot doesn’t look like fire. It almost looks like a plume of glowing, roaring milk.
“Holy bejesus!” Fabio shouted, turning away from the searing white light.
I ducked my head, momentarily blinded. “Dammit, Tito.”
“Holy fucking bejesus!” Fabio shouted again.
Agents reeled away from the Toyota shielding their eyes. The safety glass vaporized; the tires burst and melted into crackling puddles. The hissing chassis thudded to the pavement and the shriveled driver’s door swung open. Tito was a glowing white cinder behind the skeleton of the steering wheel.
I had to give Tito credit. His idea wasn’t really a bad one even if it was crazed. Kill Spikic and take the two hundred grand and don’t follow the instructions, just take the car and run. The cops would likely think I did it. He had no idea the car was rigged with a hot tamale. I guessed the result was the same, more or less, as long as Spikic was dead. Tito’s empty revolver should have taken care of that. First three shots probably dropped him, the next three shots used to finish him off, probably shots at the head.
The bad part of the plan was taking Idi with him. When will men learn that you can’t force a woman to love you?
For my purposes, I was glad he had done that. One man and one woman. Me and Trudy.
Fabio had his phone out. “I’m calling 911!”
The black van managed to back away from the Toyota’s volcanic roar, the paint on its hood smoking from the heat. Local cops arrived lights flashing and barricaded the street in either direction. Fire engines wailed in the distance.
As the chassis buckled, the trunk popped open and gas from the tank leaked onto the pavement, bursting into flames on its way to the gutters. Local police ran forward with fire extinguishers to put out the flaming fuel. People don’t realize that it takes a lot to make a gas tank explode. You can’t just fire a bullet into it and make it go off. The fuel itself needs air to burn, so even a flaming leak from the tank will only ignite what leaks out, not the rest of the tank. Fumes in the tank above the fuel have to ignite to blow out the tank, and that takes a lot of heat, but preferably a spark. I’ve seen car fires on the side of the highway blacken cars whole and the gas tank never goes off, probably because the brunt of the heat produced by the fire rises. The heat from this Mark 77 fire might be different, and the agents and police seemed to realize this and back away from the fireball. Fire engines roared to the scene, positioning themselves at the hydrants.
“Well, Fabio, I’d better get downstairs and make sure people aren’t near the windows. If the gas tank goes off …”
POOM! A mushroom cloud of yellow and orange fire rose from the Toyota’s trunk.
Fabio’s eyes were wide. “Wow!”
I slid past him and into the stairwell.
Downstairs on the sidewalk there was a crowd. They’d spilled out of the apartments to watch the fire. In their shadow I walked north and around the bend. Ambulances blooping their sirens raced past me. I walked down the cliff to River Road to the Port Imperial Ferry terminal. Taxis were always waiting there for ferry passengers, and they stood outside their vehicles looking up at the dimming glow of the Toyota atop the cliff. Flashing red lights from all the emergency vehicles spun on the Excelsior like it was a disco. The incendiary would run out of fuel soon enough unless it caught the asphalt road surface on fire. The fire department’s hoses would likely prevent that.
I had a cab stop at an all-night liquor store on the way to the Days Inn in Edgewater. I arranged a wakeup call for five and a cab to the airport for six. Old Crow bottle on the nightstand, I sipped bourbon in front of the TV and watched an old Western. Henry Fonda was a gunslinger trying to retire, but there was some punk pestering him to shoot it out one last time with a hundred men for some reason. I couldn’t figure out if it was a comedy or not, and didn’t make it to the end.
I didn’t dream.
Forty-seven
VORTEX 5 SATELLITE
LOCATION: OLD EBBITT GRILL, 675 15TH STREET NW
DEPUTY DIR. EOCTF SUPERVISOR PALMER (SP)
DEFENSE INTEL. AGENCY DIR. LEE (DL)
DATE: TUESDAY AUGUST 10, 2010
TIME: 1721 EDT
SP: I hope I’m not single-handedly ruining your marriage, Bill. Making you go out for a drink every night after work …
DL: I could get used to this, Tom!
BARTENDER: Gentlemen?
SP: A sidecar for me.
DL: Ketel One martini, up, dry, dirty, twist.
SP: So have we gotten any spookier, or am I just paranoid?
DL: Like a haunted house. Your man Spikic? His real name is Major Zoran Radmatic, the “Butcher of Pov,” massacred a couple thousand defenseless Bosniaks in 1995. CIA had pictures. Nobody ever saw them.
SP: How is Spikic’s alias not in the Y3 SPT database? We should have been informed. 381 receives our departmental briefings, they know what we’re working on.
DL: Why do you think?
BARTENDER: Gentlemen.
SP: Thanks.
DL: Perfect, thanks.
SP: Take it out of here. I’m not sure what to think, Bill. Except maybe the worst.
DL: Word is that the CIA sanctioned the Pov massacres and many others. They even encouraged Radmatic to destroy that village and mow down all the people. Women, old people, children …
SP: Not personally, not verbally …
DL: Verbally.
SP: Why would they do such a thing?
DL: Bosniaks were Islamists. Not all of them from Bosnia.
SP: Mujahideen?
DL: There was a battalion: El Mujahid. Bad guys were in it, al-Qaeda, to include some of the 1993 World Trade plotters, so the thinking went.
SP: But to kill a whole village …
DL: People seem to forget that even before 9/11, and particularly after 1993, al-Qaeda has been on the radar as a serious threat. They wanted as many of them dead as possible. And by “them” I mean not only the Mujahid but their future: their families, the families of those who would support them.
SP: Bartender? Another? Bill, I think I’m going to need a lot more than two drinks to choke this down.
DL: Tom, you have to admit, for the CIA, the genocidal Serbs were a blessing. No U.S. boots on the ground, and people like Radmatic and General Mladic to do the dirty work of wiping out a generation of terrorists. Not as noble as what we did in Afghanistan against the Russians, perhaps, but a means to an end. And the feeling was that the Bosniaks had been warned not to invite the Mujahid to come fight. They knew they were a liability but fought with them anyway. Their mistake.
SP: So now all these years later we have Radmatic posing as Spikic running a global gem-theft syndicate. We’re about to grab him. So 381 sends in a man to stop us? What do they care?
DL: I heard what happened last night.
SP: You mean about Spikic? Yes, he’s dead. Shot three times in the chest, three in the face.
DL: Imagine if you grabbed Radmatic. Imagine you were set to prosecute him. Do you think he wouldn’t try to use what he knows about the CIA’s complicity in Bosnian atrocities to save his skin?