by Gulvin, Jeff
‘What did you want with Teniel Jefferson?’ she asked him.
‘They found him, then. I haven’t watched the news.’
‘What did you want?’
‘It’s not good to talk on the phone, Angela. But one day I need to tell you something about that—interesting thing with feathers. Very strange, but not entirely unlooked for.’ His voice was suddenly cracked and cold. ‘Tell your husband to think about what I said, tell him to consider the jackal and the crow.’
Louis Byrne was sitting at his desk when Angie called him with Storm Crow’s latest message. ‘Goddammit, Angie. That sonofabitch.’
‘Keep your shirt on, honey. It was just another phone call.’
‘Yeah, but Jesus, you’re my wife.’
‘I can handle it, Louis. He’s just another wacko on the phone.’
‘He’s a very dangerous wacko.’
‘So, you want I should live my life in fear?’
‘Why don’t you let me put a watch on the house?’
‘No, Louis. No way. Fuck him and his delusions. If anybody breaks into my house, I’ll shoot them myself.’
‘OK, look, I’ll pass this on to Kovalski’s team. Where are you, by the way?’
‘Sitting in the roof garden, keeping an eye on the President.’
Byrne laughed and hung up. He scratched his lip with his thumbnail, rocking from side to side in the chair and staring at the black feather that hung on the wall.’
Swann slept soundly for the first time in a long while after Webb’s phone call. He lay close to Cheyenne, his body outlining hers. He awoke still pressed against her, her back to him, her hair in his face and the warmth of her flesh on his. He did not want to move, did not want to get up. But the red digits on the clock read 6:45 and he eased himself away from her. She joined him in the shower, soaping his body till he stiffened and they made love standing up, with the water cascading over their heads.
Swann dressed first and went down to breakfast. He found Harrison seated in a booth on his own, stirring sugar into black coffee. His hat was beside him on the seat and his hair was long and silver and untied. It hung on to his shoulders. Swann looked at him, still lean and fit, and he wondered what would have happened if Harrison had hit him back.
‘Ah, Mike Tyson,’ Harrison muttered.
Swann sat down opposite him. ‘Why didn’t you hit me back?’
Harrison touched his jaw, where the skin was tinged red.
‘Why?’ He opened his eyes wide for a moment. ‘I don’t know why. I guess I was being polite. Neighbourly, we call it.’ He looked at his coffee cup. ‘I don’t know, Swann. I guess it ain’t gonna solve anything.’
Swann stared at him then. ‘That’s the first time you’ve called me anything other than bubba, limey or duchess since I arrived in this country.’
‘I call everybody names, duchess. It’s just my way.’
‘Listen,’ Swann said. ‘I had a phone call last night after I got back to the hotel.’
‘Did you now?’
‘From the UK.’ Swann shook his head at him. ‘I wasn’t responsible for you getting burned, Harrison. Brigitte Hammani did not tell anyone about me going to Paris. Nobody outside the job knew except her and she did not pass the information on.’ He paused for a moment and looked closely at him. ‘My partner spoke to her again. She had no reason to lie. She can gain nothing now.’
For a long quiet moment, Harrison stared at him, his eyes thin and fixed in concentration.
‘You bullshitting me?’
‘Fuck, am I.’
Harrison closed his hand over Swann’s fist and squeezed. ‘You wouldn’t bullshit me, just to deal with this thing between us.’
‘No.’ Swann looked him right in the eye. ‘I wouldn’t. The point is, Harrison, if it wasn’t me, then who the hell was it?’
‘John Henry Mackey.’ Harrison looked through him now, eyes edged in shadow.
‘Who?’
‘Militia man in Idaho. He took the call. It came from a payphone in London.’
Logan was on her way over to the table and Harrison sat up straighter. ‘She know we had a fight?’
Swann nodded.
‘Shit. Now I got that to deal with.’
‘She’ll be cool.’
Logan had stopped to talk to the waitress. ‘She was part of that FEST,’ Harrison said.
‘That thought crossed my mind last night.’
‘Sweet on her, ain’t you.’
‘Yes.’
‘You got no worries, bro. This was nothing to do with Logan. She’s one of the best they’ve got back at the puzzle palace.’
‘So who, then?’
Logan was almost at their table, and Harrison lifted a finger to his lips. ‘Talk about something else. This is between you and me, right now. I’d appreciate it if you kept it that way.’
Logan said nothing about the previous evening. She could see as soon as she sat down that the tension had eased between them. When they got to the field office, there was a message for her to call Washington, and Kovalski told her about the latest phone call to Byrne’s wife.
Harrison was quiet, sitting in the room they had been allocated and checking the various reports that had come in from the intelligence analysts, regarding the inmates of Carson City Jail. He laid down the papers and looked at Swann. ‘Nothing jumps out at you, does it?’
Swann, too, had been reading, and he shook his head. ‘All we know is that Jefferson knew Greer through the blackjack tables at the casino.’
Logan came through then and sat down. ‘That was D.C.,’ she said. ‘Boese’s been on the phone again.’
‘What did he say this time?’
‘He asked Byrne’s wife if the jackal and the crow ate together?’
Swann screwed up his eyes. ‘Ate together?’
‘Carlos again,’ Harrison said.
Swann got up and walked to the window. ‘“When the prey is down, does the jackal or the crow eat first?”’ he said, half to himself. ‘The jackal eats first. Then the crow.’ He turned and looked at them. ‘They don’t eat together. They never ate together.’ He felt a little chill ripple through him. ‘Ben Dubin believes that Boese was with Carlos in 1982. He probably was. Dubin was the one who first put forward the theory that the John Doe at the Paris-Toulouse train bombing was the man who eventually became Storm Crow. Ismael Boese.’ He leaned against the glass behind him. ‘The jackal and the crow do not eat together. They never did.’ He stared from Logan to Harrison, then back again, aware of a coldness which began at his scalp and worked the length of his body. ‘Did it ever occur to you that Boese might not be Storm Crow?’
Logan had already started looking into Teniel Jefferson’s life. Before he went to Nevada, he had been a prison warder at Ellis Island Correctional Center on the Virginia/North Carolina state line. It was logical to assume that if he had been running contraband in Carson he would have done the same at Ellis Island, only he had never been caught there. She got the team in Washington to start looking at prison records for Ellis Island, which meant getting into the computers at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, as Ellis Island, unlike Carson City, was a federal penitentiary. She spoke to Harrison and Swann.
‘We’ve drawn a blank here, apart from identifying how Jefferson knew Mary Greer,’ she said. ‘I’m going to speak to D.C. again and then I think we should ship over to Virginia.’
Harrison cocked an eyebrow. ‘Regular globetrotters, ain’t we. I haven’t covered this much soil in years.’
Logan went to call Washington again, and Harrison looked evenly at Swann, then took his battered leather briefcase from where it lay by the desk. He rummaged around for a moment, then pulled out a file bound with elastic. Swann squinted at it and Harrison took out a large paper evidence envelope.
‘What’s that?’
‘Operation Bubble Burst.’ Harrison laid it on the desk. ‘My copy of the entire file on Salvesen. Undercover in Passover, Idaho.’ He sat down again and sighed. ‘I’ve had this mother
with me every day since I left the place. I kept my goddamn trap shut and let Kovalski make his enquiries.’ He hesitated, thinking hard for a moment. ‘Interesting point he came up with.’
‘What was that?’
‘It was Louis Byrne who told him you went to Paris, right about the time my product got over to you.’
Swann thought about that, as Harrison leafed through the photographs he had taken, looking for one in particular. He found it, chewed on his lip and reached for his snuff tin. Swann looked over his shoulder at the picture of the receipt for a meal for two in Paris. Poking out below it was the scrap of paper with bits of handwriting on it.
‘What do you think that is?’ Harrison said.
Swann felt a rush of adrenalin. ‘Winthrop directions to a dead drop.’ He paused for a moment. ‘At the Virginia City overlook.’
Harrison nodded slowly. ‘That’s what I figured.’
‘We assumed the money was paid to Boese,’ Swann went on. ‘We did a partial financial investigation on him, but got nowhere. Somewhere, he’s got a lot of money stashed.’
‘You didn’t find it?’
Swann shook his head. ‘We already had him in custody, remember, enough forensic evidence to get him his thirty years. It wasn’t that important.’
Harrison took a notebook from his bag and flicked through it. ‘I gotta make a phone call,’ he said. ‘Shoulda done it months back, but I let the Bureau handle things and look what happened.’
‘Who’re you calling?’
‘Old buddy of mine from ’Nam. Marine colonel.’ Harrison picked up the phone and dialled. ‘Bill,’ he said, after a moment’s wait. ‘This is Johnny Buck. Where can I find The Cub?’
The sky over London was white with cloud, weighted over the city. It had snowed in light flurries the previous evening and it looked as though it would snow again today. Collier and Gringo sat on their chopped motorcycles and watched Janice Martin window-shopping.
‘There she is,’ Gringo said. A twist of the throttle and they roared away from the lights. Janice heard the rattle of engines and instinctively looked over her shoulder. Collier pulled up alongside her, a helmet flapping from his left elbow. He shoved it at her. ‘Get on,’ he said. She looked at him, fear suddenly sharp in her eyes. She put the helmet on, glanced at Gringo, then climbed behind Collier.
They parked the bikes in the little yard at the front of the clubhouse and got off. All the way across London, they’d both been scanning for surveillance and were satisfied that no one was following them. Collier tripped the alarm and unlocked the front door, then pushed Janice ahead of him. Gringo got beer from the fridge and they sat in the living room, the three of them. Nobody spoke; Collier staring at Janice.
‘You got nicked,’ he said after a while, voice low, grey eyes like chips of broken ice. She bit down on her lip. Gringo watched her, resting his can of beer on his belly.
‘What did you say to the police?’ Collier spoke again.
Janice looked at him sharply then, the fear gone from her eyes. ‘What d’you take me for?’
He smiled thinly. ‘I take you for a rich bitch with a very bad habit.’
‘I don’t talk to coppers, David.’
‘You’re on the street. How is that?’ He jutted his chin at her.
‘Bail. It was only possession. I had enough on me for one line of coke, that’s all.’
‘You’ve been nicked twice before. How come they let you out?’
‘My rich daddy, remember.’
Collier still stared at her, eyes not wavering. She had to look away, the gaze was so intense.
‘When’s the hearing?’ he said.
‘I’ve had it.’
‘When does the case come up?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Did you tell them anything about this place?’
‘Of course not. I’ve got my own address. I never even mentioned you.’
He was quiet for a moment, then he glanced across at Gringo. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘I’d say she’s cool, man.’
Collier shook his head. ‘Your trouble is, you think with your dick.’ He squinted once more at Janice. ‘You’re banned from this place for a month. If you weren’t such a good lay, I’d expel you altogether.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘Go upstairs and wait for me.’ When she was gone, he looked again at Gringo. ‘What do you really think?’
‘I think she’s cool. OK, so she snorts a little coke. But she’s not a talker, man. I know it.’
Collier was still again. ‘Did she ever ask you anything about anything, when she was your old lady, I mean?’
‘The usual stuff. Nothing I wouldn’t want her to ask.’
‘Contracts?’
‘She doesn’t know they exist.’
Webb’s eyes lit up when GCHQ told them that Collier had mentioned the contracts. He and Harris were on their way to Grosvenor Square for another meeting with the US Secret Service, when McCulloch phoned and told them.
Combes, the secret service agent, offered them chairs across the desk in his office, and studied the papers in front of him.
‘Banco De California,’ he said slowly. ‘As you probably know, Mexico does not adhere to any of the banking or financial regulations that the likes of our countries do. That makes it fertile ground for dirty money. Russia, Turkey and Estonia are the same. Russia, particularly, because it’s a cash economy.’ He paused. ‘We’ve been looking at the Banco De California for years, I think I told you.’ He held up a copy of the inventory that Webb had taken at The Regiment’s clubhouse in Hounslow. ‘This company—TCX,’ he said. ‘It’s a junkyard in San Antonio, Texas. They bank with the Mexicans. This list of motorcycle parts, receipt, whatever, is some sort of code. It’s possible goods changed hands, but the amount of money is paltry, and why would anyone hide it under a paving stone?’ He scratched the side of his face. ‘We can link TCX to the Bandido Nation in Texas. They run legitimate businesses, but fundamentally they’re into organized crime. They use the Mexican bank all over the southern states, and we’re pretty confident that a whole string of senior management are involved. The DEA have been working with us for years, looking for a weak link we can exploit.’ He tapped the inventory again. ‘TCX are involved in selling motorcycles and motorcycle parts, for certain. But we think they’re into the Colombian drug cartels in a big way. And we also believe they’re a clearing house, a financial go-between, if you like, for motorcycle gangs doing business worldwide.’
Webb smoothed the tips of his fingers over the line of his moustache. ‘NCIS told us that when David Collier left the army he spent some time in the States. He had links with the Bandidos and the Outlaws.’ He stabbed a finger at the inventory. ‘Could that be some kind of coded contract, maybe?’
‘Easily.’ Combes looked at it again. ‘It’s been done before. Biker gangs like their transactions on paper. It stops tongues wagging, but they have to be careful. This could be a contract. It could be for drugs. It could be for weapons.’
‘The Regiment, as far as we know, don’t deal in drugs.’
‘Then it’s something else.’ Combes sat back in his chair. ‘We’re going for production orders on TCX’s bank accounts. Normally, we’d never get them from Mexico, but San Antonio’s in Texas, so we will. We’ve been looking for a way in for ages. This might just be it. We can check everything—electronic transfers, in and out. We can then get orders on accounts where they’ve made or received payments, assuming the countries are cooperative.’
‘If somebody paid The Regiment to hit the special escort group, it will have cost a small fortune,’ Webb said.
Combes shook his head. ‘They’ll be smart, George. Instalments, small payments, but they’ll be a regular size, and we’ve seen the like before. If there’s something there, we can find it, believe me.’ He smiled then. ‘You’ve done us a favour here. Like I said, we’ve been after these Mexicans for years. Any chance we get to have another pitch at them, we’ll take it.’
>
Christine fished in her bag and brought out the information her colleagues in financial investigation had got on Jorge Vaczka’s organization. ‘These might be useful,’ she said. ‘We think there might be a link between Vaczka’s gang and the SEG break-out. You may have come across him before. Nasty piece of work. He’s got an operation based here at the moment. We think he might be linked to Abu Nidal.’
They left Combes then and went back to the car. Two red diplomatic protection group vehicles buzzed down Upper Grosvenor Street with their lights flashing. Webb got behind the wheel. ‘Any word from our little girl?’ he asked.
‘Nothing so far, but it’s only been a few days.’
‘She’s got guts, I’ll give her that. Messing with Collier is dangerous.’
‘She’ll be all right. No doubt, she’ll get the third degree about the drugs bust, but you saw the way she looks, George. We might just get lucky.’
Webb’s pager sounded on his belt, and he picked up the mobile phone and dialled McCulloch at the Yard.
‘What is it, Macca?’ he asked.
‘Where are you?’
‘US Embassy. Why?’
‘Get back here, will you. We’ve just received a call from Avis in Shrivenham. They were calling you back. Apparently, a Detective Sergeant George Webb of Scotland Yard has been requesting vehicle rental records from August 1997.’
Angie Byrne took a hot soak in the tub. Darkness had fallen long ago and Louis was still stuck at the office. He had called her an hour ago, saying he might be in for an all-nighter. Everyone was working round the clock, trying to find something from Teniel Jefferson’s past that could give them a clue as to what Boese was doing. Angie’s day had been long and hard, most of it in court with Judge Arnold T. Benson, who was a moody sonofabitch at the best of times. He must’ve lost his golf game over the weekend because he’d been moodier than ever today. Angie had poured herself a glass of white wine and was sipping it now, wrapped in herbal oil and bubbles, the water lapping about her chin.
She dried herself, her hair still piled on her head, and closed the white slatted shutters over the windows. She sat on the bed in her dressing gown, flicked on the TV set and idly surfed the channels. Then she switched off the overhead lights.