The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series)

by Maxim, John R.

  ENMITY: LESKO/BRUGG 21.4

  ENMITY: BANNERMAN/BRUGG 16.3

  ENMITY: BANNERMAN/LESKO 11.7

  ENMITY: BANNERMAN/REID 0.4

  There it was. A 100 percent certainty that Bannerman would now turn all his energy toward hunting down the person or persons unknown. A 94 percent probability that the father, Lesko, would hold Bannerman to blame for what happened to his daughter and was very likely to be in a killing rage when he saw all that had been done to his daughter. A much lower probability that Lesko would blame Elena but, Clew realized, that assessment would change drastically if he told the computer that the weapon was cocaine. Similarly, only a small chance of Bannerman blaming Elena. Or the father. Almost no chance at all that he'd blame Reid. Reid, Clew realized, would not even have appeared on the list had he not built in the presumption that, if Bannerman were harmed in any way, Reid's involvement could never be ruled out entirely.

  And yet Reid had done this. He knew it. He could almost see the meeting in which the decision was taken. Reid and his bitchy little assistant, Whitlow.

  The girl, Reid would remind them, is a reporter. There can be little doubt what she intends to report. Then he would tum away, his back to Whitlow, and he would say something like, “We can do nothing, of course. We are a nation of laws. The girl's actions, however, have put her at risk with others who do not share our concern for due process.” Now, Reid, still not looking at him, would paint a scenario of what those “others” might do about her. The method they might use. And, he would say, it would be no more than just. A case of Elena's chickens coming home to roost. And those of her father. “But, of course,” he would add, “we will pray that no such tragedy befalls these people. We will pray that we are mistaken.” Reid, you fucking snake.

  Whitlow would take the cue. He'd farm out the job, outside the company, probably to the traffickers, telling them it's time Lesko and Elena paid their bill. He would say nothing about Bannerman; no use dampening their enthusiasm. And Reid would keep his back turned. Not even Whitlow would see the gleam in his eyes as he envisioned Paul Bannerman, crushed and broken by the girl's death, lashing out in impotent rage, making mistakes, scattering his forces. He would see Bannerman, Elena, and the girl's father all at each other's throats, whatever plot they might have been hatching now in tatters. He would see a vulnerable Bannerman. A careless Bannerman. He would begin to see a day, not far off, perhaps even at hand, when a clean sweep couid be made of Westport once and for all. His humiliation avenged.

  “Jesus Christ,” Clew muttered aloud.

  It was all so damnably dumb. So pointless. There was no plot. Nothing. Bannerman happened to get involved with a girl whose father happened to know Elena Bragg who happened to have some dirt on Palmer Reid. You couldn't even call it coincidence. Almost everybody knows somebody who has dirt on somebody else except most times they never know it because the chain never connects.

  Anyway, who'd give a shit?

  Tell Bannerman you can prove that Reid was extorting drug money and you'd get, at the most, a yawn. But try telling a paranoid son of a bitch like Reid that nobody cares, that everyone just wants to be left alone, that Bannerman has probably never even heard of Elena before now, and you'll get that patronizing little smile of his that says why don't you ran along and leave these matters to the professionals.

  He should have known. If he'd programmed the computer properly, he would have. But how do you program meanness? Vindictiveness? There had to be a way. He'd work on it.

  A more immediate question, he reminded himself, was what to tell Bannerman. That he knows it was Reid? That he saw this coming? No way. Bannerman would ask how he knew. “How, Roger, could you know what Reid knows unless you told him? Is that what you did, Roger? Did you put a bug in his ear? Did you, for example, make a careless phone call over an unsecured line, maybe to Irwin Kaplan's home phone, knowing that Reid almost certainly had a wire on it? Did you ask him a few harmless questions about Lesko, and Elena, and Zurich? Did you remark on the odd coincidence that Lesko's daughter and I just happened to be on our way to Switzerland? Is that why this happened, Roger? Did you set me up?”

  No. I mean, I never intended . . .

  Christ!

  Get a grip, Clew told himself. Bannerman won't ask those questions. No way he could know about that phone call. And even if he did, no way he could conclude that the leak was deliberate. That his friend of more than fifteen years was playing computer games with his life. And he would certainly be in no mood to listen to computer theory, especially if the girl comes out of this with her brain fried.

  No. First things first. What was needed now was damage control. What he had to do, one way or the other, was head off a war. At least until he was ready. Until it was his war, fought his way.

  “Excuse me?”

  Roger Clew looked up, startled. A man was standing in the aisle—young, middle thirties, dressed in a sweater and jeans. Clew had not noticed him. He raised one hand to cover the screen.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  The man held up a cigarette and gestured toward the front of the business-class section. ”I couldn't get a seat in smoking. It looks like you've got two. Mind if I grab a quick one?”

  Tm afraid I do mind,” he answered. ”I paid for both of them so I'd have room to work.”

  The man's eyes dropped meaningfully to the vacant seat. No papers, no briefcase. Just the uneaten lunch. ”I won't stay but five minutes. One cigarette?” he pleaded.

  Clew hesitated. Then he nodded. “Sure,” he said. “One cigarette.”

  In five minutes, the man was gone. Clew was grateful that he'd made no attempt at conversation. No “What brings you to Zurich?” No “Nice machine you have there.” No questions that would have made Clew wonder about him more than he did already.

  It was so damned exhausting.

  -10-

  “Mister Bannerman? Wait, please!”

  The receptionist, Helge, called his name as he and Billy McHugh passed her cubicle en route to the intensive care unit. He heard her chair scrape against the floor. Ahead, through a glass partition, he could see the bulk of Susan's father rising to intercept him. Billy edged forward, placing himself between the two men. Bannerman turned back. The young Swiss approached him, a message slip in her hand and something, concern perhaps, in her eyes. But his mind was on the confrontation that awaited him.

  “Thank you,” he said, and began to pocket the slip.

  “No.” She stopped him. “You must call.”

  He unfolded the piece of paper. A name and a Zurich number. Urs Brugg. A relative, he assumed, of the woman, Elena. Probably news about Gary Russo's condition. Bannerman looked up at Helge and again he noticed her eyes. He saw more than concern. She was staring at the message slip as if afraid of it.

  “What has happened?” he asked quietly.

  “Please.” She gestured toward her cubicle. “You must come..”

  At Helge's desk, as the young Swiss waited in the corridor with Billy, Bannerman listened, his face drained of color, as Urs Brugg described the ambush that had left Gary Russo and Josef Brugg dead and his niece, Elena, dangerously wounded.

  The voice on the telephone was softly accented, a deep and gentle bass. It sounded somehow familiar.

  “My niece,” Urs Brugg told him, “would not accept sedation until I promised I would speak to you. She is alive because she was shielded by the body of the injured man, Russo. She asks me to persuade you that such use of him was inadvertent.”

  ”I . . . understand,” he answered, stunned. He had watched them leave. Russo in the left rear, held in the woman's arms.

  “It is Elena's impression, however, that your man was unimportant to them. Both gunmen, after first shooting Josef, concentrated their fire on her. My nephew Willem drove them off before they could finish her.”

  Bannerman's brain was whirling. He groped for a chair and pulled it under him. Beyond the shock of Russo's death and learning that a second team, a back-up tea
m of killers had been near, he found himself trying to envision this man, Urs Brugg, who could speak of ambush and murder with such self-possession. But more than that, he wondered why. Why first Susan and now Elena, two women whose only common thread tied them to Raymond Lesko?

  Urs Brugg appeared to read his thoughts. “It is Elena's belief that she and Mama's Boy share a formidable enemy. The policeman, Lesko, is in danger as well.”

  Mama's Boy. Bannerman let it pass. “Did she name this enemy?”

  “Yes.” Urs Brugg hesitated. Bannerman could hear the drumming of his fingers against the telephone receiver. “She accuses Palmer Reid.”

  Bannerman felt suddenly out of control. Too many connections. Too many people knowing more than he did.

  That voice. “Mr. Brugg,” he asked, “do I know you, sir?”

  “We have not met.”

  “Did you call this hospital yesterday? To advise the doctor who was treating Susan Lesko?”

  “Yes. Also at the request of my niece.”

  “How did you know to look for a suppository?’*

  “Elena has seen this method before.”

  “When she trafficked in cocaine?”

  He heard a cluck of the tongue. An expression of distaste. “There are more generous ways to characterize what she did,” Urs Bragg told him. ”I emphasize did. Nonetheless, you are correct.”

  “I'm sorry. I have to know this.”

  “Yes.” A long pause. “Elena asked that I hold nothing back. It is difficult.”

  “Tell me about Palmer Reid, then. How is he involved?”

  ”I am asked to explain this to you as well. But I must also tell you that she accuses him without evidence. It is intuition, no more.”

  Evidence. Bannerman closed his eyes. There is never any evidence. Intuition is everything. “Please tell me.”

  For the next two minutes, Bannerman listened patiently as Urs Brugg provided a capsule history of Elena's life. Swiss father, Bolivian mother, born in Zurich during the war. At war's end, mother and child went to visit her family in La Paz. Kept from returnng. Marriage annulled. Elena then raised in Bolivia where the family plantations had grown coca leaf for nearly 300 years. Did not stop selling it simply because the United States government declared Bolivia's best cash crop to be illegal. Demand soared. Profits huge. Competition became murderous. Elena Brugg forced to protect the interests of her family, many of whom died during the cocaine wars of the eighties.

  Bannerman had little interest in her personal history and less in the justification of Bolivia's drag crop. But Urs Bragg needed to say aloud how he had come to terms with the life his niece had lived; Bannerman did not press him.

  His head stopped nodding when the narrative reached its first mention of the Central Intelligence Agency. When Palmer Reid saw that cocaine traffic could not be stopped at its source, he decided that some of the enormous profits could be used to fund his own activities. He entered into agreements with certain of the traffickers, offering them protection in return for huge sums of cash. The Bolivian growers chose Elena, who was educated, multilingual and non-Latin in appearance, to be their representative in dealing with Palmer Reid.

  Urs Brugg now described the events that had led to her retirement, beginning with the murder of a New York police detective and the retribution exacted by his partner, Raymond Lesko, in a Brooklyn barbershop. One of the dead, unknown to Lesko, was an agent placed there by Palmer Reid to protect his interests. The transaction that Lesko interrupted was actually a transfer of cash and pure cocaine to Reid's people. Elena, left standing there among the dead, decided enough was enough. She told Reid she was finished.

  Reid threatened her. Elena, by then safely in Zurich, told him to do his worst. Reid also accused her of complicity with Lesko, reasoning that he would not have let her live had there not been an arrangement between them. She denied it. Reid said that Lesko, in any case, would have to die. His loved ones as well. Reid would not prevent it. He could not afford to appear weak in the eyes of the traffickers. Elena swore to Reid that whatever harm came to Lesko or his family would also be visited on the family and the person of Palmer Reid.

  “Why?” Bannerman interrupted, startled. “Why would she protect Lesko?”

  “It is ... um, perhaps in the nature of a penance. Perhaps a compulsion. Even Elena cannot explain her emotions toward this man.”

  “This threat. Reid took it seriously?”

  ”I added my voice to it.”

  ”I see,” he said politely.

  Urs Brugg heard the doubt. ”I am not without means, Mr. Bannerman.”

  It was said quietly. Not boastfully. Bannerman chose not to challenge the statement. But the weapons of Urs Brugg's world were likely to be money, influence, connections. Not guns and bombs. And yet, apparently, Reid took him at his word.

  “What changed?” he asked. “Why would Reid try to kill Elena now?”

  “Because he saw that Elena had somehow recruited Mama's Boy to her cause. And that Mama's Boy was clearly in league with Lesko, even to the extent of using Lesko's daughter as the means of exposing his drug dealing on the pages of a New York newspaper.”

  Bannerman was silent for a long moment. “You do realize,” he said slowly, “that none of this is true? That I never set eyes on Lesko or your niece, or even heard her name before today?”

  “Of course. But Palmer Reid does not.”

  Another long silence. ”I don't believe it.”

  “Please tell me why.”

  “To begin with, I couldn't care less that Reid is involved in cocaine traffic. If it wasn't Reid, it would be someone else. I have no interest in Reid as long as he doesn't bother me.”

  “Would he believe that? The man hates you. Therefore, he fears you.”

  Bannerman shook his head. “Which is why he would not dare hurt someone close to me.”

  “But if he had succeeded, if Lesko's daughter had died, whom would you have blamed?”

  Bannerman didn't answer.

  “Drug dealers? Lesko himself? My niece? Have not each of these crossed your mind?”

  Bannerman hesitated. “Yes,” he admitted.

  “And were it not for this conversation, Mr. Bannerman, would you have gone home to Westport and licked your wounds or would you have begun a vendetta?”

  Again he did not answer. There was no need. The first thing he would have done would be to track down the man named . . . “Ortirez,” he said aloud. “Do you know that name?”

  A thoughtful pause. ”I gather you have heard from him as well.”

  “As well?”

  “He telephoned Elena, last evening, from La Paz. It is clear that he thought your Susan was dead. He claimed responsibility. Boasted of it. Elena did a foolish thing. She threatened him, insulted his manhood, apparently frightened him. He reacted more quickly than she anticipated.”

  Bannerman heard the emphasis on the word claimed.

  “Do you have reason to doubt that he ordered Susan's death?”

  “Oh, he probably did. But on his own? Surely not. The man is a creation. A tool.”

  “Of Reid's?”

  Bannerman heard a grunt. The equivalent of a shrug. “Of the money. The power. Reid's hand can be suspected but not presumed. He does not rule that country. He uses them, they use him.”

  Bannerman frowned. Twice now, Urs Brugg had stopped short of unequivocally condemning a man he clearly despised. “What would you like me to do?”

  ”I do not presume to tell Mama's Boy his business.”

  “And yet you've as much as told me that Palmer Reid is behind all this.”

  ”I have told you,” Urs Brugg corrected him, “what my niece thought you should know, and what she believes to be the truth. I do not doubt it. Neither do I rush to accept it. When a truth comes so easily, Mr. Bannerman, I have learned to examine it all the more closely.”

  “One does not,” Bannerman replied slowly, “always have that luxury.”

  For what seemed a long time
, although it might have been measured in seconds, Bannerman stood silently at Susan's bedside. She was breathing easily without the need for oxygen. The tube that had been taped to her nostrils had been taken away and someone, perhaps her father, had arranged her hair so that the damage to her face was less apparent. A part of him wished that she would not waken. That he would have an excuse to back quietly out of the room and out of her life.

  “Two minutes, Bannerman,” Lesko had said to him. “That's enough to say good-bye. After today, I don't want you near her.”

  There could have been another brawl. Lesko had raised a hand against his chest as he approached. Billy stepped in close, his body crowding Lesko's, his mouth almost at Les-ko's ear. “You don't want to do that,” he said, his tone more reasoning than threatening. Bannerman knew that tone. Lesko was within a heartbeat of having his fingers crushed or worse. He had never seen anyone last more than a few seconds against Billy. Not that close. On the other hand, looking into Lesko's eyes, he understood that the same could probably be said of him. Bannerman placed a staying hand on Billy's shoulder. “Two minutes is fine,” he said. He stepped past Lesko.