by Tom Barber
‘We’ll leave the door open so you can watch. Everything we do to him, we’re gonna do twice as bad to you.’ He laughed. ‘You shouldn’t have run from us, bitch. We were always going to get you. You’ve been a real pain in the ass.’
She sat there staring at him, wide-eyed in terror.
Then Henderson walked back to Archer and dragged him feet-first across the apartment towards the tub.
As he was pulled into the bathroom, the stink of the chemicals got much stronger, making his eyes water. Henderson unceremoniously dropped his legs, the plastic sheeting cold under his back.
‘We’ll be back in a minute,’ Henderson said, laughing again. ‘Don’t go anywhere.’
Then the two men walked out of the room, leaving him on the floor.
Across the apartment, Archer could see April staring at him in terror as he heard the sounds of drawers being opened in the kitchen next door. As he lay there, he knew two things for certain. Number one was he’d been set up by someone at the Bureau, otherwise Henderson and Tully would never have known about this safe-house or that he and April were coming here. Someone must have traced the GPS on his car. Also, Shepherd and Hendricks should have shown up by now, which meant something had gone wrong. The Latino gang had known where he lived too, which meant they’d also been fed that information.
Lying there on the cold bathroom floor, the room stinking of chemicals, Archer’s eyes narrowed as he realised who it had to be, now understanding why Henderson, Tully and Lister had always been a step ahead of them.
The other certainty was he knew he was about to die.
And there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
Inside his office at the 114th Precinct, Royston stared anxiously at his phone and then the radio. He was waiting to hear from ESU to confirm Shepherd and Hendricks were in custody.
He was also waiting to hear confirmation that Archer and the hooker were dead.
Behind the two gadgets on the computer screen was the NYPD’s GPS tracing software, the light pinging on 66th where Archer’s car had stopped. It was the only safe-house in that part of town; Royston had guessed that was where he’d be going and had sent Henderson and Tully there ahead of him.
The phone and radio just sat there, almost defiant in their silence. He swallowed, feeling panic building inside him, seeing the intricate web of lies threatening to entrap him despite everything he’d done to avoid exactly that. All this shit had started several months ago but had come to a crisis four weeks back when that whore had been shot in the car park. A hooker getting shot wasn’t exactly news in New York, but Royston’s phone had rung out of the blue the same night, clear orders issued, the fifty-nine year old Lieutenant being made very aware of the consequences if he didn’t obey them to the letter.
Once the shooting of Detective Vargas had come to Royston’s attention, her file hadn’t been the focus; the man who’d been shot alongside her was. Sam Archer possessed a reputation for being an excellent cop as well as a tenacious son of a bitch and that was a major concern for the people blackmailing Royston. Archer and the rest of Shepherd’s team were going to be a big problem and these people needed them as far away from the case as possible.
Stall this or you know what the consequences will be, he’d been told.
With everything they had on him, Royston hadn’t had a choice.
The shooting had gone down in his Precinct’s jurisdiction which was a bonus, meaning he could call the shots. After delaying the investigation as long as he could, Royston had rolled in to work one day to find Shepherd and his team at the 114th Precinct base on Astoria Boulevard. Panic and a survival instinct had kicked in; he’d confronted the group, reckoning attack was the best option and had deliberately provoked Archer, making some dismissive and derogatory comments about Vargas.
It’d worked. Archer had lost the plot and punched him, giving Royston all the ammo he needed to get Archer suspended and out of the picture.
Or so he’d thought. But true to his reputation Archer hadn’t let it go, and despite his suspension, had continued to work the case. Biding his time, Royston had had him watched, waiting for him to overstep the mark. He’d hit the jackpot when Archer visited Karen Casey, giving Royston the perfect opportunity to arrest him.
Using the charges already against him and Archer’s impending court-date as leverage, he’d arranged a weekend trip to Rikers for the suspended cop, over-ruling the night desk sergeant from the East Village Precinct who’d been uncomfortable with the Lieutenant’s decision.
Staring at his phone, Royston continued to sweat, waiting for it to ring. That son of a bitch should never have made it out of Rikers; Royston had used his knowledge of the city’s gang hierarchy and paid good money to some people inside for that to be taken care of. But somehow Archer had survived the attack and then been sprung by Jake Hendricks, going on to blow this case wide open with the rest of the Counter-Terrorism team.
Earlier this evening, just when he’d been expecting to hear that Archer had been wasted in Rikers, the call Royston had taken instead was from Lister ordering him to send the addresses of Josh Blake, Lisa Marquez, Matt Shepherd, Jake Hendricks, and Sam Archer to an unknown number. Well aware of what the consequences would be if he disobeyed, he’d sent them only to find out a short time later that a Russian gang from Brighton Beach had tried to kill everyone at two of those addresses.
When he’d heard what had happened, Royston had a sudden flare of hope that the crew who’d been blackmailing him had been killed, but that hope had quickly died once he received another call ordering him to get over to the Counter-Terrorism Bureau and stall the investigation. He’d done what he could, and in the process had learned the identities of the people blackmailing him, Nicolas Henderson, Sebastian Tully and Nina Lister, although that didn’t mean shit. So what; he knew their names. They still had all those photos and videos of him which would ruin his career, not to mention the graphic threats they’d made to his physical well-being.
Before the hooker in the car park had been shot, he’d had no idea Henderson, Tully and Lister had anything on him. Only when they needed him did he find out exactly what they’d done, threatening to release the photos of him with the young escort to the press if he didn’t do exactly as instructed. When the shooting had happened, they’d threatened to expose him if he didn’t succeed in stalling the investigation. Things had gone into overdrive tonight, orders flowing in constantly, but he knew he was living on borrowed time and couldn’t get away with this much longer.
After Vargas had been killed at St Luke’s, he knew it was just a matter of time before Shepherd and his team realised how these people had been getting their information and who was responsible. And whatever happened, Henderson and Tully would always have that dirt on him.
Sitting there in his office, his phone and radio resting on the desk but neither still making a sound, something else suddenly dawned on Royston. The call he’d received earlier ordering him to pass over the cops’ addresses had come from a woman. He’d assumed she’d been one of the blackmailers he knew now to be Nina Lister.
But she’d been dead by then.
Quietly pulling his side-arm from his desk drawer, he checked the clip and saw it was fully loaded. Looking up and seeing his people working away at their desks, none of them watching him, he leaned forward, focusing on the GPS tracing software, the circle still pinging on 66th, the safe-house.
Taking his cell phone, he looked at the number that had called him and typed it into the system. It was a disposable, so wasn’t registered to a name, but it was still active.
And it gave him a result.
Looking at it, he rose, shut down the computer and moved to his door.
He could access the same software from his car, but he’d need to make a pit-stop at home first.
As Archer lay on the floor of the safe-house bathroom, he felt hazy from the fumes of the special sodium hydroxide concoction in the bathtub beside him.
Images star
ted flashing through his mind. He remembered being in the ARU car park three years ago, a Glock in his hand, facing down a terrorist leader and shooting him in the head just before he cut another man’s throat. Standing in a New York airfield, having just avenged his father’s death. Saving Chalky and his other team mates on a rainy night last year.
And a few months ago in a tall office building, Chalky saving his.
He saw it all, his friends, his family, all that pain and those moments of triumph, those he’d saved and those he’d lost. He saw Shepherd, Marquez and Josh. Cobb, Chalky, Fox and Porter.
Vargas.
And Isabel.
He pictured her lying on that couch in Shepherd’s office, bereft and now totally dependent on him, waiting for him to return.
He pictured her face when she was told he was never coming back.
And he felt anger start to build inside him.
As he lay there tied up on the transparent plastic sheets, the two mass-murderers laughing next door and about to re-join him, Archer felt those tight binds behind his back.
And then he realised Henderson and Tully had made three mistakes.
FORTY SIX
Given their track record of murdering so many people without the police having any idea who they were, it was abundantly clear how clinical Henderson and Tully were in their preparation and execution. They never slipped up; they didn’t make errors.
However, unbeknownst to them they’d just made three.
They’d bound Archer’s wrists with plastic zip-tie cuffs.
They’d tied them behind his back.
And they’d left him alone.
To most people, zip-tie cuffs seem more secure than duct tape. They’re quickly and easily applied, taking just a second to hook and cinch versus binding wrists by wrapping tape around them.
However, zip-ties have a weakness. With a certain technique, they can be broken with surprising ease, something Archer had seen done in London at the ARU two months into his time there, a suspect they’d arrested suddenly breaking out of his cuffs and trying to smash his way out of an interrogation cell. Although he’d seen it, Archer had never had tried the technique himself.
Now seemed as good a time as any.
Rolling silently to his knees, Archer leaned forward and lifted his bound hands as high behind his back as his shoulder joints would allow. He then brought them down hard onto his tailbone, forcing each wrist as far apart as he could manage in order to increase the tension on the cuffs.
But the plastic held.
Archer repeated the manoeuvre but again, it didn’t work, the only result of his effort being the ties biting into his wrists, causing them to bleed.
Having selected a large cleaver from the drawer in the kitchen, Tully grinned and turned, heading back towards the bathroom, the handle of the blade gripped in his gloved hand.
Arriving in the doorway, he saw the cop was lying where he and Henderson had left him, his hands behind his back.
‘I saw your file, Detective,’ Tully said. ‘I know all about you. The cop who can’t be killed.’
He stepped forward, kneeling down in front of Archer, and looked him in the eyes.
‘But you know the one thing that all heroes have in common? No matter how good you are, you all have to die someday.’
The binding on his wrists having finally snapped from the third desperate attempt to break them, Archer curled his fingers around the beaker of lye he’d just scooped carefully from the tub and nodded.
‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘But not tonight.’
A split-second later he whipped the beaker round.
And rearing backwards, he threw the caustic soda directly into Tully’s face.
The moment the liquid hit the man’s eyes it started to burn; dropping the cleaver, Tully screamed and clutched his face. Jumping to his feet he staggered blindly around the bathroom, stumbling into now-empty canisters, setting them rolling around the floor.
Hearing the commotion, Henderson raced out of the kitchen into the bathroom only to be hit with a gunshot of a straight right punch that broke his nose and turned his legs into two accordions. In a burst of adrenaline-fuelled anger, Archer dipped down, drove his shoulder through the killer’s waist as he picked him up and then slammed him through the door into the space beyond.
Still stunned and taken completely off-guard, Henderson tried to pull his pistol, but Archer grabbed his arm and slammed it onto the ground several times, using his elbow to hit the man in the face. The gun slid out of Henderson’s grasp but he managed to get his legs back under him, trying to wrestle Archer back and get on top. However, Archer immediately locked up a front headlock, tying up the man’s neck and arm, then rolled to his side, taking Henderson with him in a crushing anaconda choke, with his arms pulled in like a vice around the killer’s neck. From what the CSU investigator who found Santiago had said, Henderson liked to strangle his victims before they were given their bath; finally, he was getting a taste of his own medicine.
As Tully continued to scream and thrash around the bathroom, Archer increased the pressure on Henderson, the broken zip ties still around his wrists. The larger man tried to resist but quickly started to fade, blood running into his mouth from his busted nose. The adrenaline-soaked pressure Archer created was savage, thoughts of what this man had done to Vargas flashing through his mind, and he held the lock with total ruthlessness until Henderson suffocated and died.
Still screaming in pain in the bathroom and unable to see, Tully pulled his pistol and started firing wildly in all directions. Two bullets hit the wall above the still-bound and gagged April’s head and she tipped over to her side in a panic, another going through the wall where her torso had just been.
Letting go of Henderson, Archer threw himself forward, scooped up the dead man’s silenced pistol and shot Tully twice in the chest, the two rounds propelling him back into the tub of lye.
He landed with a splash, liquid spilling out of the bathtub and flowing onto the plastic covering the floor. Then just like that, the room was still, the liquid in the bath sloshing around as Tully’s head and torso sank under the surface.
A few moments later, the only sound in the safe-house was a hissing coming from the tub.
Moving into the bathroom and scooping up the cleaver Tully had dropped, Archer re-joined April, pulled off her gag and tilted her forward, sawing through her zip-cuffs. The moment she was free she flung her arms around him, crying and shaking in shock as he tossed the blade to one side.
‘You OK?’ he asked her.
He felt her nod quickly as she clutched him, so scared and relieved she was still alive that she was unable to speak. Archer held her for a few moments then gently disengaged himself and moved over to Henderson’s body. He knelt down and went through the man’s pockets, pulling out a phone.
Dialling the Bureau quickly, he waited to be connected to Shepherd, keeping his pistol in his other hand as he stared at the two dead killers, Henderson in a limp heap and only Tully’s legs visible, the rest of the man submerged in the lye-filled tub.
‘Hello?’
‘Sir, it’s Archer,’ he said, catching his breath.
‘Arch? Are you OK?’
‘I’m at the safe-house above Columbus. April’s OK. But we were set-up.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Henderson and Tully were here waiting for us. They’re both dead.’
‘What? How the hell did they know you’d be going there?’
‘I think its Royston, sir; I reckon he’s been working with Henderson, Tully and Lister.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Think about it. He’s been stalling this entire investigation from day one; that’s why Homicide weren’t making any progress. He was always uncooperative and desperate to keep us away from the case; he still is. You saw him earlier when he barged in; he practically gave himself a hernia trying to take charge of it again. He provoked me into a suspension, he had me put in Rikers and I reckon h
e paid off the Mexicans to take me out then gave them my home address so they could finish the job. And what police lieutenant would close a case-file with so many questions that still needed answering?’
‘But why the hell would he do this?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s him; it has to be.’
‘Shit, I think you’re right. He sent four men to arrest me at Brighton Beach. An ESU team followed soon after. Jake and I both got wounded.’
‘He’s on the take, sir. I know it.’
Pause.
‘Jesus Christ. I’ll put the word out. I hope you’re not wrong about this, otherwise we’ll both be working at McDonalds by the end of the week.’
‘I’m sure.’
Stay right where you are. We’re on our way.’
‘Got it,’ Archer said, ending the call and looking at April, who’d heard everything he’d said.
‘The Lieutenant?’
Archer nodded. As April stared at him, Archer realised that Henderson would definitely have been in touch with Royston recently, otherwise they never could have known he and April were on their way here.
He tapped into the phone’s Call History, and saw a number showing up repeatedly, several calls having been made tonight, the last less than an hour ago.
Selecting it, Archer lifted the phone to his ear. If Royston answered, it was proof Archer was right.
‘C’mon, fat boy,’ he muttered as the call rang. ‘Pick up the phone.’
Across the city, Marquez was driving through Manhattan, heading after Shepherd and Hendricks and having just picked up Palmer on the way. When the detectives had left the Bureau for Little Odessa, Theresa had gone into the city to pursue a lead, but had called Marquez asking her to pick her up so she could re-join the investigation.
In the quiet of the car, Palmer’s phone started to ring. Expecting an update from her people, she answered.
‘Hello?’