by Adam Hamdy
Bailey nodded. “Proper gangster.”
“Ain’t I just?” Salamander replied without smiling.
“You want a game?” Bailey asked, nodding toward the PacMan.
“Sure.”
They played for about an hour, but neither of them concentrated enough to get beyond the orange. Bailey could sense Salamander’s quiet, menacing fury grow with every passing moment, and he struggled with his own dark thoughts. If Mayfield killed Melissa and Francis, there would be no way to get the truth out. He’d been discredited and, as career criminals, Salamander and Danny would be dismissed by anyone in authority. Their only hope was to recover Melissa and Francis, or hope that Wallace . . .
Bailey pulled out the burner Salamander had given him and dialed the number he’d called from the Channel Tunnel terminal building in France.
“Who ya callin’?” Salamander asked nervously.
“John Wallace,” Bailey replied, listening to the international ring tone.
“Hello?” Wallace’s voice was quiet and hesitant.
“John, it’s Pat Bailey. It’s risky to talk long, but I wanted to check in.”
“We found her,” Wallace revealed. “She’s in a bad way, but we got her back. What about you?”
“I got screwed, and some of our mutual friends got caught in the crossfire,” Bailey replied. “Can I talk to her?”
“She’s out cold. She needs rest,” Wallace responded. “You going to be OK?”
“Maybe. We’re waiting to hear from someone.” Bailey was about to hang up, when he asked, “Did you ever get anywhere with Freefall?”
“No. I got caught up in things. I’m with new friends. I’ll ask them and call you if they know anything.”
“We think we know who’s behind all this,” Bailey advised. “It’s a group called the Foundation.”
“I can’t say how I know over the phone, but you’re right,” Wallace confirmed. “Be careful.”
“You, too,” Bailey replied, before hanging up.
“How’s he doin’?” Salamander asked.
“Hard to say,” Bailey responded. “He knows about the Foundation.”
“He say how?” Salamander asked.
Bailey shook his head. “We should check the news. See if there’s anything about Danny, Frank, or Jimmy.”
Bailey used the phone to connect to the BBC News website and was looking at the London section when an old-fashioned phone came to life with a shrill ring that echoed off the stone walls. Salamander reached under the tabletop PacMan and produced a shiny black circular dial phone. He lifted the receiver.
“It’s me.” He listened carefully to whatever the caller had to say and then replied, “We’re on our way.”
He hung up and got to his feet.
“Come on,” he said. “Danny’s found them.”
73
The sun was setting when Reeves flashed his ID at the cop by the barricade. The paunchy man pulled the gate aside and allowed him beyond the cordon. Reeves parked across the street from the Bunker, a Harlem nightclub that was now a major crime scene. NYPD officers worked to keep people beyond the cordon. A local news crew was setting up on the corner near the forensics trucks.
Reeves crossed the street and showed his ID to the cop guarding the door. He was nodded through and stepped into a busy crime scene. A young woman was being interviewed by a couple of detectives, while an older man, presumably the manager, protested at the intrusion and demanded that he be allowed to phone his lawyer.
“Detective Oriol?” Reeves asked a cop who was milling nearby.
“Through there,” the cop replied, indicating a corridor that ran alongside a flight of stairs.
Reeves walked through the building until he reached an archway. To his left, at the bottom of a flight of stairs, lay the body of a large white male. A forensics officer was too busy examining the body to notice Reeves, so he walked on, turning right into a large bar.
Detective Saul Oriol stood with one of his colleagues, discussing the scene in hushed tones, while two forensics officers worked a pair of bodies. Reeves recognized one of them instantly: Alejandro Luna, the FBI agent who’d betrayed one of their own.
“Agent Reeves,” Oriol said as he approached. “One of the bartenders came in to get the place set up and called us. I think her boss would prefer it if we weren’t here.”
“Looks professional,” Reeves observed, indicating the single bullet in Luna’s skull.
“Yeah,” Oriol replied. “We’ve got forced entry using an explosive charge. Two shot here and one at the bottom of the stairs. This guy you know, Alejandro Luna out of the Bureau’s Pittsburgh office. The guy next to him is a gangbanger who goes by the name Echo, real name Jose Lopez. The man at the bottom of the stairs is Marty Wilkes, a street player who’s been in and out of jail all his life. Lopez and Wilkes match the descriptions of the men who killed the US Marshals Egan and Gatlin while trying to abduct Agent Ash. We’re working on getting confirmation from witnesses.”
Reeves looked up at an old camera fixed in the corner of the room. “Any security footage?”
“The manager says the cameras don’t work,” Oriol responded. “My guess is he doesn’t want any record of the shady shit that goes down here.”
“You think this is where they kept Ash?” Reeves asked.
Oriol nodded. “Yeah. I think she’s been here. I want to show you something.”
The detective led Reeves out of the bar and down the basement stairs. They sidestepped the large corpse and entered a room that lay at the head of a long corridor. Inside, Reeves saw two forensics officers working the room. A powerful field light illuminated the large space, and Reeves saw a fourth body lying on the floor, face up. He’d been stabbed in the neck, and the surrounding carpet was drenched in his blood. Reeves didn’t know the man, but he recognized the look of horror that was his death mask. He’d suffered, his fingers frozen near a jagged shard of plastic that protruded from his throat.
“We haven’t ID’d this guy yet,” Oriol said.
He wandered past the body to an old barber’s chair that stood at the back of the room. The seat was badly stained and the arms and footplate were tangled with thick cord, the ends of which had been severed.
Reeves noted a tray next to the chair. On it lay a curved metal cross that was connected to a power source. Some sort of torture device, Reeves surmised, and he suddenly felt sick at the thought that Ash had been held here.
“Agent Ash was found last night, correct?” Oriol asked.
Reeves nodded, recalling the terrible moment he’d seen her floating in the river.
“These men were killed a few hours ago,” Oriol said, crouching beside the chair. “The blood on these bonds is still wet,” he added, indicating the severed cord.
Reeves tried to process the implications.
“This was a rescue,” Oriol continued. “Someone was in that chair when these men died.”
“Who?” Reeves asked.
“We lifted one set of prints from the armrest,” Oriol continued. “They belong to Christine Ash. And over here, we’ve got what looks like a woman’s handprint in this guy’s blood. I don’t want to get your hopes up, but we’re going to need to take another look at that body we found in the river. I think Agent Ash might still be alive.”
Reeves looked at Oriol in disbelief. Questions flooded his mind, the foremost of which was: if the detective was right, and Ash was still alive, where the hell was she?
74
Bailey’s call had come at the end of their silent, paranoid, circuitous journey back to Steven Byrne’s warehouse, just as they’d been carrying Ash into the bedroom in the residential quarters. Wallace had taken the call in the corridor, and when he hung up, he thought about relaying the limited information Bailey had given him, but Tyrese and Steven’s somber moods dissuaded him. They were still grieving for Ethan.
Entering the bedroom, he placed his phone on the bedside table and watched Tyrese check Ash with a
medical kit. He declared that apart from slightly low blood pressure, which was probably the result of dehydration, and the obvious cuts and bruises, she was OK.
“Whose blood is that?” Wallace asked, indicating the congealing liquid that covered her clothes and hands.
“It’s Ethan’s. She was with him when he died,” Steven explained, before he and Tyrese left Wallace alone with her.
Wallace stood still and took her in. Part of him was terrified that this was a dream, that he would tumble out of this perfect reality and wake in a world where Ash was still dead. He’d been given another chance, redeemed by unknown forces, offered an opportunity to be with her again. The feeling of relief, of happiness was almost overwhelming. Finding it unbearable to see Ash looking so battered and soiled, he stripped her, stowing her filthy clothes in a linen bag he found in the closet. He had seen Ash naked when they’d shared a Connecticut motel room, and had marveled at her body, but this time he felt nothing but sadness. Her skin hung off prominent bones and the deterioration went beyond her recent ordeal, suggesting months of skipped meals and lost sleep. As he walked to the bathroom, Wallace wondered just how hard Ash had been pushing herself.
He wet a towel and used it to clean the worst of the caked blood and dirt that crusted Ash’s body. He worked carefully, ensuring he was gentle so as not to wake her. When he wiped her head, which was rough with stubble, Wallace noticed that circular patches of dirt marked her skull in regular intervals. Ash stirred as he tried to remove them, and groaned as though wrestling with some dark nightmare. Wallace sat back until she fell still, and when he leaned forward to continue, he finally realized the marks were actually blemishes on her scalp. The stubble made it hard to see whether they were bruises or burns, and Wallace choked up when he thought of what might have caused such injuries, wondering what suffering Ash had endured because of him.
He found a pair of blue boxer shorts and a white T-shirt in the closet, and gently dressed her, before pulling up the quilt. He looked at her face, which was twisted by whatever specters invaded her mind, and as gray and gaunt as it was, he was simply overjoyed to have her back. He traded the main lights for the gentle glow of the small bedside lamp so that she wouldn’t wake in darkness, and made sure the door remained ajar when he left the room.
He could hear the quiet murmurs of a hushed conversation, but it stopped as he approached the end of the corridor, and when he stepped into the living area, Steven and Tyrese were sitting in silence on adjacent couches. Neither man looked at him, as though they were ashamed to catch his eye, and Wallace immediately found himself wondering whether he could trust them. Had they simply used him to get Ash? Was Steven really the one behind it all?
“How is she?” Steven asked, finally looking at Wallace. The words seemed oddly stilted, reinforcing Wallace’s concerns.
“Still out,” Wallace replied, studying the two men for any sign of danger, but their expressionless faces gave nothing away.
“Probably best,” Tyrese observed.
“What do we do now?” Wallace asked.
“I’m thinking of turning myself in.”
Steven’s reply surprised Wallace.
“I thought I could do something good,” he continued, “but this . . . what happened to you, to her,” he gestured toward the bedroom, “to Pope. Ethan really suffered . . .” Steven trailed off, before continuing. “I should never have given Smokie that kind of power. If I go to the Feds, I can tell them everything I know about the Foundation and make enough noise to stop him.”
“The Feds can’t protect you,” Tyrese countered. “Smokie will neutralize any threat. He’ll reach you anywhere.”
“We can’t just sit here,” Steven argued. “We’ve lost Pope. We’ve got no way of knowing what Smokie’s really up to. I’ve got to do something.”
“Have you ever heard of Freefall?”
Wallace’s question was met with blank looks.
“Pat Bailey, the detective who saved me, said I should look into it.”
Steven nodded slowly. “I’m glad you felt you could share it,” he said, before turning to Tyrese. “Can you handle this, Ty?”
The powerful man got to his feet. “He say what it was?” he asked Wallace.
“No. He just said I should look into it.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” Tyrese said as he left the room.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” Steven suggested, indicating the couch Tyrese had vacated.
Wallace accepted the invitation. “What happened to Ethan?” he asked.
The memory weighed down Steven’s eyes, dragging them toward the floor. “He wasn’t careful,” was all he said.
Wallace studied the older man and wondered how much loss one person could take. He knew what it was like to carry the burden of grief, and even after so many months, the memory of Connie’s death was potent enough to cripple him. When Wallace had thought Ash was also gone, he’d lost his senses, so he could only imagine what it was like for this man to lose first his children and now his son’s friend.
“I appreciate you trusting me,” Steven changed the subject. “I think, if things had been different, we might have been friends.”
Wallace was saved from having to reply to the suggestion by the sound of a ringing phone. Steven rose and approached the cabinet underneath the large television. He opened a drawer and produced a satellite phone, similar to the ones Wallace had seen the military use.
“This is a Foundation line, only to be used for emergencies,” Steven said, before he answered the call. He listened for a moment and then set the phone to speaker.
“. . . and I know what you did.”
Wallace shuddered at the distinctive sound of Smokie’s snarling voice. It was a voice he would never forget.
“So Pope was your boy? Well, he ain’t nobody’s boy no more. You shoulda just stepped aside, Byrne, cos I’m gonna get to where I’m going whether you’re in my way or not.”
“This wasn’t what we—” Steven began.
“Save your speeches, old man,” Smokie interrupted. “You think it matters that Wallace is still alive? That you’ve got the FBI bitch? You think you can stop me? By this time tomorrow, it’ll all be over, Byrne. You and everyone like you will be finished.”
With a click, the line went dead.
The kiss of bare feet on a polished wooden floor. Fragile fingers trailed along a whitewashed wall. A light cotton dress, crisp and cool against the skin.
Sunlight warm on her back. A line drawn ahead of her, separating light from shade. She shivered as she crossed the border into shadow.
A door ajar. White wood framed by light. A hand reached out to push it open, only this one wasn’t young, it was older, fully grown.
Ash wasn’t a child when she entered her father’s room. There was no warning, no inner voice telling her to beware. In her dream, she relished what was to come.
When she entered, she saw her mother at the foot of the bed, lying trembling in a pool of her own blood, which was spreading from an angry wound in her stomach. Nicholas sat on the bloodstained sheet holding an old revolver. Smoke wisped from the barrel and drew serpentine shapes in the still air.
Ash felt something hard in her hand and looked down to see a long, sharp, crescent-shaped shard of plastic. She leaped across the room, slashing at her father’s neck, but as the first blow landed, he was replaced by the man from the Cromwell Center, the man she knew as Ethan Moore. He unleashed a wet, rasping scream, but the sound only made her angrier and she drove the shiv home again and again, snapping her hand back and forth like the head of a sewing machine, until the man had fallen silent.
Ash wanted to cry out when her eyes snapped open, but she bit her lip. She didn’t want them to know she was awake. Instead of darkness, she squinted into low light. She looked away, nervously, wondering whether what she was seeing was real or a dream, and realized that she was no longer in her cell, but was instead lying in a soft bed in a large, expensively furnished ro
om. She felt soft, warm fabric against her legs and threw the quilt off to see that her filthy T-shirt and shorts had been replaced by clean ones. She swung her feet on to the soft carpet and sat up, wincing as a jolt of pain ran from her neck to her tailbone. Her skull felt as though it had been excavated with a dental scaler that had left the inner bone sensitive and raw. When she rose and crept to the nearest open door, she saw her reflection in a bathroom mirror. Her shaved head was an obvious disfigurement, and the loss of her hair accentuated her haunted appearance and made the cuts and bruises that covered her body seem even more severe. Her sunken eyes were wild and deeply shadowed, and her cheekbones were more pronounced than she’d ever seen them. She became possessed of the idea that if she exhaled too much she might be able to make her belly button meet her spine, but she dared not try it in case her weakened bones should shatter and snap. She was suddenly overcome by a flash of violence and saw her dream repeated, but this time she was stabbing Ethan Moore on the floor of her cell.
She steadied herself against the wall and examined her reflection—there was no blood or anything that would indicate such violence, but when she looked down at her right palm she saw two deep lacerations, the kind that might have been made by gripping a shard of plastic. It was a dream, she told herself, but her mouth muttered something unintelligible and she saw a smile flicker across her face. She felt uncomfortable looking at the broken figure in the mirror, and backed away, crossing the bedroom to the door on the other side of the room.
She pulled it open slowly and when she slid her head through the gap was surprised to find her room unguarded. She could hear voices, the indistinct words tumbling into one another as they made their way down the corridor. Ash crept forward, moving toward a large, lit room, and as she neared it, she pressed her back against the right wall, inching closer, taking great care to place her feet to ensure they made no noise against the deep carpet. As the conversation became intelligible, Ash thought she recognized one of the voices. It belonged to the man she’d suffered for.