Rise: Luthecker, #2

by Keith Domingue

  When he first became aware of Safe Block, he actively sought to become involved, as it fit his ideology and world-view perfectly. He was also aware that the Block was the benefactor of unique circumstances. There was never any question about the validity of the need within the more compassionate eyes of the public, human trafficking becoming an increasing and alarming problem. Still, most felt that there was nothing much that could be done about it. But because of recent events that had private mercenaries attacking civilians—along with a corporate owned Black Hawk helicopter being one trigger pull from changing law enforcement in Los Angeles forever—the 108th block of Watts had become a political landmine. It had grown increasingly popular with the public, with several legal firms and rights groups joining in support, and no politician or corporate entity wanted to be seen trying to attack or dismantle the cause. The timing couldn’t have worked out better for Rodriguez, the circumstance being a perfect confluence of his youth, sense of duty, and history. He felt honored to be part of the Block, honored to be part of what he believed was the beginning of a true revolution.

  “Try not to wake the baby this time. You know how mad she gets,” Coleman said to Rodriguez, right before Dino’s knuckles were about to rap on the apartment door.

  Rodriguez hesitate a moment, smiled to himself, before very gently knocking on the door. After a moment, Rodriguez and Coleman heard footsteps, and then the door opened a crack, with Camilla peeking out from behind. She recognized the two officers, smiled, and opened the door.

  “Oficial Rodriguez, es bueno ver a usted,” Camilla whispered to Rodriguez.

  “El honor es mio. Lo siento molestar a usted. Espero que lleguemos?”

  “Of course. You are both always welcome. But be quiet,” she said, as she let the officers in.“Can I get you anything?” she asked, as the officers entered the apartment and gently closed the door behind themselves.

  “No thank you. Is the old man around?” Rodriguez whispered, referring to Winn.

  “You just missed him.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “Didn’t say. You know Winn. I think he’s looking for a new place to train.”

  “Knowing him, it could very well be the sewers under the city. Does he still avoid owning a cell phone?”

  “Even a prepaid. He doesn’t want his movements tracked at all.”

  “Damn fool. I need to talk to him.”

  “What’s up?”

  “We’ve been chasing away mercs. Three in the last week alone. They say they’re not from Coalition Properties, but who else? The last guy was Russian. Streets are scary quiet, too. I figure something’s up, maybe the old man knows something.”

  “I don’t know. He did mention a name. Lucas Parks. And that he’s out of jail.”

  Coleman and Rodriguez looked at one another. “Are you sure about this?” Rodriguez asked.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “First we heard of it,” Coleman replied, more than a bit surprised.

  “When?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Winn came and told us today.”

  “Who told him?”

  “Rooker.”

  Rodriguez looked at Coleman. “Lucas Parks. I haven’t heard that name in a long time. Him being loose would explain the quiet.”

  “I understand he’s some sort of big time gangster,” Camilla said.

  “He’s still got a lot of sway on the street, so he’s a concern. But don’t worry, we’ll deal with him,” Rodriguez replied, trying to minimize the man to alleviate worry.

  “If he’s out, my guess is he’ll keep on going and high tail it out of the States in less than twenty-four hours. The big question is—why in the hell did they let him out?” Coleman added.

  “Thank you, Camilla, for the update,” Rodriguez said. “If you see anything strange, just give us a call. We’ll go pay Mr. Rooker a visit. In the mean time, tell the old man to reach out to us…or to get a damn cell phone.”

  8

  Empire

  Lucas Parks stood at the window of his Century City office and gazed over the angular topography that made up the Los Angeles horizon. Like most days in Southern California, it was clear and sunny, and from the vantage of the forty-second floor of the Century Tower II building, he could see all the way to the bright blue of the Pacific Ocean. After two years of incarceration, the view was a thing of true beauty to Parks, one that mesmerized him, his gaze over it all being a meditation he appreciated and would never take for granted again. He took one last look before checking his watch. It was 2:55pm. His first business meeting since being released from prison would begin in five minutes.

  The office space, buried under multiple shell corporations in regards to the leaseholder, was bare save for a desk, chair, and laptop. It would be his temporary base of operations until he could assess the status of all his business interests, which now included finding the whereabouts of Alex Luthecker and Nicole Ellis.

  Parks sat at his desk and went over the numbers on his computer screen for the tenth time. Worldwide, Parks had over six thousand people who, one way or another, were on his payroll, not including mercenaries or soldiers. Even when he was incarcerated, his business had grown by more than 20 percent over the last two years.

  Born into a middle class immigrant family, his father Irish and his mother Cuban, Parks entered the narcotics trade in Miami during the height of the cocaine boom of the early 80s. Just a teenager during that era, Parks used the connections his Cuban heritage provided to move cocaine and marijuana for the Columbian drug cartels at a time of unprecedented growth in the industry. There was literally seven billion dollars worth of cocaine moving through Southern Florida annually at the time, and no laws or regulations in place to stop it. The amount of drug cash being deposited into both the local banks and the Federal Reserve system was the highest of any state in the country. As a result, hundreds of banks sprang open throughout Miami-Dade County in order to handle the profits generated by drug business. Dealers could literally walk into banks with suitcases filled with cash and deposit the money, no questions asked. It wasn’t long before this cash filtered its way into the legitimate economy, with high-end car dealerships opening up and moving millions of dollars worth of Mercedes Benz automobiles, jewelry stores seeing Rolex and Cartier watches flying off the shelves faster than they could stock them, and expensive night clubs opening up as fast as they could be built. Soon, entire housing developments, along with full-scale commercial real estate projects, were being financed by drug dollars. The City of Miami, in the ‘80s was literally built by the cocaine trade.

  With this amount of money moving through the city, the young and ambitious Parks was making millions in the business in no time. But when violence between the Cuban and Columbian cartels, over control of the business, escalated to an all out war in the streets, he saw the writing on the wall and quickly focused on selling to high-end, out- of-state clientele only; he started with a few Los Angeles-based rock stars and professional athletes, but he soon moved on to high net-worth business leaders. And when the body count and blood spill on the streets of Miami were too much for the U.S. Government to ignore—forcing countless arrests, new laws and restrictions, essentially ending both the reign of terror and easy money—Parks was long gone, having fled Miami for Los Angeles, with over fifty million dollars in cash. He was just nineteen years old.

  A move to the West Coast and the downfall of Pablo Escobar meant a change in suppliers, and the surging productivity of the Mexican drug business was more than capable of meeting the demand of Parks’ unique clientele list. But still, the DEA was constantly encroaching on the trade as a way to increase the prison work force, and Parks wanted to diversify beyond narcotics. One of his biggest clients, an extremely wealthy and notorious Saudi arms dealer in his late fifties by the name of Bader Arnan, had taken a strong liking to Parks. Arnan felt that the young man had the requisite charm, intellect, and business sense to do well in the weapons trade, and he began to
introduce Parks to the international community. It wasn’t long before Parks was jetting around the world as Arnan’s junior partner, selling everything from small arms in bulk to tanks, rockets and war planes to the handful of nation-states who could afford them, including well known adversaries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel. The sellers in this trade were limited for the most part to major American weapons manufacturers, including the former McKinnley aircraft, now part of the much larger firm Coalition Properties.

  In 1994, Arnan was gunned down in the streets by terrorists during a solo visit to Lebanon, and Parks was suddenly looked upon as the new leader in the arms trade. Parks, who began his life selling drugs as a teen in Miami, was now a true power player in the global community, and at only 27 years of age, he had accumulated a net worth of over 400 million dollars.

  Soon after his rise to power, the confluence of three events changed everything for both the world and Lucas Parks’ business—the fall of the Soviet Union, the attacks of 9/11, and the Internet. Squeezed out of the legitimate arms trade by new laws that were designed by both Federal agencies and American suppliers in order to maximize their own profits, and with civil wars now raging in all corners of the globe due to a fallen superpower, Parks adapted, turning to new customers and a new source of product—the massive influx of Soviet-era weaponry now available on the black market and the return of old tribal conflicts. He moved his base of operations from the United States to a breakaway region of the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, a near lawless district but a gateway nation to his suppliers. He quickly built roads, hospitals, and schools, bought politicians, and armed soldiers to complete his new home.

  Being a drug lord and an arms kingpin proved to be a very profitable and powerful combination, and the Internet made the process synergistic and easy. Now, borders between nation-states only served to hinder law enforcement, and banking was heavily encrypted, allowing transactions to be done safely over the Internet with the push of a button. With Parks’ sophisticated infrastructure and tremendous cash flow entrenched, coupled with no borders, he realized he could easily move any illicit product he chose; legitimate trade, regardless of the product, didn’t stand a chance. And now Parks was free to take command of it all once again.

  Parks looked up at the sound of his office door opening. Three men entered, all over six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds. Dressed in perfectly tailored and nearly identical business suits, their attire was an almost comical contrast to their rough and ominous looking features. It was impossible to hide the fact that these men, regardless of their current duties, were what most observers would consider “muscle.”

  “It’s good to see you, sir. When are you headed overseas to see your new home?”

  Parks looked over David Two-Good, one of his most respected soldiers, and nodded in response. Two-Good, a tall, barrel-chested Native American, was a former supply sergeant in the U.S. Army during the early part of the war in Afghanistan. An altercation with a superior officer led to a dishonorable discharge for Two-Good, and it was not long after his return to the states that he crossed Lucas Parks’ path. In Two-Good, Parks saw potential in molding the man’s anger to his purpose. Already trained by the U.S. Army in both marksmanship and supply logistics, it wasn’t long before Two-Good oversaw U.S. operations for Parks’ organization.

  The other men, Anthony Logan and John Mitchell Jr., were tactical support soldiers for Two-Good.

  “Soon. Tell me what you have.” Parks locked eyes on Two-Good. “Who in the hell are Alex Luthecker and Nicole Ellis?”

  “Can’t say for sure, sir, regarding Mr. Luthecker; yet. The woman was easy enough to trace. She used to work for an oil futures trading firm in New York by the name of Kittner-Kusch before it went belly up after that terrorist attack on the Saudi oil refinery over a year ago. Word has it, she was the one that made the call that bankrupted the firm. She was also dating the lead partner of the firm, a guy by the name of Michael Kittner, who is now deceased. Kittner, along with an LAPD detective by the name of Philip Miller, was gunned down by a sniper in an apartment leased by Ms. Ellis’ younger brother by two years, Benjamin Ellis. The sniper had ties to Coalition Properties, but that never came out. The brother is in Hawaii now. We have someone watching him.”

  “What makes her so special?”

  “Apparently she’s some sort of software genius. She designed a program that can accurately predict market trends. She was making a lot of money with it in the oil futures business before she made the bad call that bankrupted the firm. She moved to Los Angeles shortly after, and that’s when she met up with this Luthecker character.”

  “And what’s his story?”

  “Well, sir, that’s where things get a little strange.”

  “Humor me with what you have.”

  “According to my sources inside Coalition, apparently this Luthecker character can accurately predict the future.”

  “What?”

  “He’s some sort of savant or something. Lived off the grid since the age of sixteen. Apparently he can see the patterns in anything, including human lives. My guy tells me that Alex Luthecker can tell you the day you’re going to die and exactly how. Allegedly, he can read every detail of your life like a book. And if he does this to you, it’ll drive you insane. Apparently he did this to an expert CIA interrogator by the name of David Lloyd. Again, allegedly, after one conversation with Luthecker, Lloyd blew his own brains out. And former CEO of Coalition Properties, Richard Brown, went completely crazy after encountering Luthecker, totally going off the reservation. As you know, his own people had no choice but to take him out.”

  “Sounds like NeoCon corporate paranoia to me.”

  “Maybe. But the Coalition brass takes it pretty seriously. They see him as very dangerous in the wrong hands, which is why they want him in theirs.”

  “So they want him, but they’re afraid of him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s why they send for me.”

  “That sounds accurate, sir. I think we need to be careful until we know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

  “Was he part of some program or something that they’re not telling us?”

  “It doesn’t appear that way. At least I can’t find anything. He’s an orphan. Pretty average birth parents. They gave him up for adoption, but both subsequently died before the kid came of age.”

  “How?”

  “Car accident.”

  Parks mulled over Two-Good’s intel. “What is Coalition’s interest in Luthecker, specifically? Other than that they’re afraid of him? What use do they see him for?”

  Two-Good shrugged. “If this guy really can predict the future, I suppose you could use him to own it. Lord knows they own everything else.”

  “That’s a mistake.”

  “Sir?”

  “The future isn’t set, it’s created. And there are no shortcuts.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  Parks strongly believed that your destiny was in your own hands. There were inevitable and unforeseeable variables, but in his mind, he didn’t need someone to help him own the future—he already did.

  There was one element of the human condition, however, that even men as shrewd as Parks often made errors in when judging. And that was in a person’s character; how trustworthy they were under pressure. Eddie Dollar Monday had been proof of what could happen if you guessed wrong. Parks certainly saw the advantage of having someone like Alex Luthecker in his control. He saw how a man with Alex’s skill set, if proven to be true, could be a tremendous asset. He also knew that what you feared in life owned you. An idea dawned on Parks as to how he was going to handle the situation with Nicole Ellis and Alex Luthecker as well as the Coalition. But first he had to know more about these two anomalous individuals who scared so many.

  “Where are they now?” Parks asked.

  “Not sure yet, but I know they’re not in the country.”

  “And how do you know this?
”

  “My connection at the LAPD told me that they had travel documents arranged. They’re traveling under assumed names.”

  “What are the names?”

  “My guy didn’t do the docs, he just knows of the cop who set it up; a Dino Rodriguez. But my guy did tell me someone else who would know that might be easier to get at.”

  “Who?”

  “Well apparently these two are tied to that area in Watts called Safe Block. It’s where they take—”

  “—I know what Safe Block is. I lost product because of that place, and in time that’s something that will be answered for. Who’s running it?”

  “This low rent street thug goes by the name of Rooker controls the territory. He has for decades. Word has it, he’s gone soft. Apparently he’s leasing it out to some martial arts guru, who is running the actual operations of the Block. The guru is allegedly connected to this Luthecker character as well.”

  Parks mulled over the intel before making a decision. He knew that if he dug harder, he could easily find out the pseudonyms and tap into security camera feeds. He could approach it like Coalition Properties and take advantage of the same resources. But Parks believed that there was an art to the hunt. That individual reputation counted more than resources, its influence being more reliable. He looked over his three employees.

  “I think we need to start by paying Mr. Rooker a visit.”

  9

  Home

  “You think he’s alright?” Yaw asked Chris as they waited curbside at LAX. Yaw was behind the wheel, Chris in the passenger seat of a perfectly maintained 1991 Ford Explorer. It was late afternoon, and passenger pick up traffic at the airport was heavy.

  “We’ll see. Nikki didn’t say much in the emails. Just that they were coming home.”