by Blake Banner
I gave him a moment. He didn’t say anything but I could sense he was thinking. I went on.
“You and Marni were driving me crazy. I had finally got her to agree to come with me. I knew you were going to cause trouble, and just as you were coming up the stairs, that was when I saw Abbassi. He was the guy stepping out for a smoke, remember? I had no time, Gibbons, I couldn’t risk a ruckus. I had to shut you up and get her out.”
I was half-expecting him to ask what made me think she was Abbassi’s target. He didn’t. Instead, he asked, “Who are these other men?”
“I don’t know any of them. I followed him last night after the party. He has a run-down house in Van Nest. These other three are living there.”
He was quiet again, then asked, almost to himself, “What does it mean?”
“Listen, we have to get off this line. For the hundredth time, we need to talk and we need to unite forces. Let’s meet.”
“All right. Do you know The Parlour, on West 86th?”
“The Irish pub? Sure.”
“It’s not far from you. We’ll meet there in an hour and have some lunch.”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Sounds like a good idea. See you then.”
The Parlour is a big place, and at that time it was practically empty. He arrived punctually, ignored me even though I was the only person sitting at a table and he must have seen me, and went to the bar and ordered a pint of Guinness. He waited for it to be pulled and finally brought it over to the table where I was sitting, watching him. I decided he was obnoxious because that was his intrinsic nature. He couldn’t help it. There was also the swollen bruise on the side of his face, and that might have had something to do with it.
As he sat, he said, “I’ve been thinking it over on the way here, and it is fraught with all sorts of problems. Tell me what you have to say anyway, but be aware, I think any kind of cooperation is almost impossible.”
I sat studying his face, trying to suppress the desire to reach over and give him a matching bruise on the other side. Finally, I sighed and said, “Are you a pain in the ass on purpose or by accident?”
“That kind of thing won’t help.”
“And your strutting in with that kind of hostile, negative attitude will?”
“I am simply being practical and telling you how things stand.”
“OK, Gibbons, have it your way. Now let me tell you how I see it. Either ISIS or Al-Qaeda are planning an attack on the UN. If I am right, they will time the attack for the high point of the conference. That will be your talk and Marni’s…”
He interrupted me. “Why would Al-Qaeda or ISIS have any interest in bombing the conference? It doesn’t make any sense.”
I tried not to snarl but failed. “Just because you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, Gibbons. You can’t see my foot, but believe me, it’s within striking distance.”
“More gratuitous violence, Lacklan?”
I sighed and carried on. “I don’t know what their purpose might be. It might be simply that there will be a lot of western leaders there. It might be a blow against a United Nations that they perceive as biased toward western interests. It might have something to do with the fact that if global warming and droughts escalate as Omega foresee they will, the Muslim heartland in the Middle East will be all but wiped out.” I shook my head. “These people are fanatics, Gibbons. I am not sure they need a coherent reason for the fucked up things they do.” I sat back in my chair and sighed. “Whether we understand their reasons or not, the fact is that in a party thrown by an Arab prince for the speakers and delegates at the conference, Abdul Abbassi was present as a guest. When he left the party, he went to a house that had all the appearance of a terrorist cell.” I held up my thumb. “Why was he invited to the party?” I raised my index to join it. “He was dressed in a two thousand dollar evening suit and driving a three hundred grand Ferrari, what was he doing shacking up in Van Nest with three down and outs?” I raised my middle finger to make a trio. “What have Abdul Abbassi, an Afghan, a Pakistani, and a British Pakistani got to bring them together, with Prince Mohamed bin Awad?”
He grunted and took a long pull on his Guinness. As he set it down, he smacked his lips and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “We don’t know.”
I shook my head. “Wrong. We don’t know precisely. But we can assert with a degree of confidence that they are not practicing for a spelling bee. We can be certain that if Abdul Abbassi is involved, it is related to jihad.”
He nodded. “Yes. You’re right.”
“And in my opinion, it is too much of a coincidence that it coincides so closely with the conference. Whether we can see it right now or not, there is a connection, Gibbons.”
He made a face of reluctant acceptance. “Yes, you’re right. You’re right.”
I waited a moment, then said, “So…?”
He shrugged. “What do you want?”
“For a start, I want to be able to protect Marni.”
He sighed. “That just can’t happen, Lacklan.”
“Why?”
He gave a small, exasperated laugh. “Well, for a start, because you’re so bloody dangerous. You attract violence. You’re like a walking war zone. People go their entire lives without seeing a bar brawl. Five minutes in your company and somebody get a broken bone, or their face pushed in.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I agree. It also happens to be true.”
“She would be safe with me and you know it. What protection has she right now?”
“She is safe.”
“This is a decision she should make. Why are you making these decisions for her?”
“This is her decision, Lacklan. For your information, she thinks you’re insane, and so do I. She believes something happened to you during your time with the SAS, and you are not quite normal. Your absurd behavior at the party only served to confirm it.”
“I explained that to you.”
“Even so…”
I was learning that putting Gibbons under pressure just made him more obstinate, so I changed the subject.
“Explain something to me.”
He eyed me and waited.
“Why is Omega afraid of you?”
A barely perceptible smile. He thought for a long moment. “Omega is not the only organization that is aware we are on the brink of catastrophic change. There are others. You might be surprised if you knew who they were, or who was involved. Let me put a question to you. If the SAS decided to prepare for a coming holocaust, how do you think they would prepare? What would their focus be?”
I frowned. I had never considered it in that way. “I guess they would focus on survival techniques, appropriate armament, technologies, and materials to be able to make effective weapons in the new, changed environment…”
“Precisely. But now imagine that Harvard made contingency plans for such a catastrophic change. What would their focus be?”
I sat back in my chair, curious about where he was going. “I guess they would focus on preserving their libraries, their store of knowledge…”
“Exactly. We all want to preserve the things that we think are important. Who constitute Omega? I’ll tell you, bankers, lawyers, politicians, billionaires—the people who own the Federal Reserve. They are not all that scared of you, Lacklan, because you can kill a hundred of their men and they will just keep buying new ones, until they buy one who is bigger and more dangerous than you are. But they are terrified of me because I know. I have knowledge that can really hurt them.”
“Frank Gilbert’s research…”
“Partly.”
I leaned forward on the table. “Philip, divided we play into their hands. United we could be much more powerful, we could really hurt them. I have caused them a lot of trouble so far, on my own. With you and Marni, we could really make a difference..”
“I’ll tell you why not, Lacklan. On the one hand, as I have already told you ad nause
um, I believe you are too volatile, and dangerously unpredictable. On the other hand…” He took a deep breath and sighed loudly. “I am still not one hundred percent satisfied that you are not in Omega’s pocket.”
“What?”
“You are awfully close with Benjamin Brown.”
“Ben?”
He nodded.
I said, “He keeps offering me a place in Omega and I keep telling him no.”
“You may well be telling the truth, but I can’t be one hundred percent sure, and my instincts tell me to steer clear of you, Walker. Whichever way you look at it, you are a dangerous man. And I don’t want to be involved with you.”
“Marni does.”
“So you say, but that isn’t what she tells me.”
“Where is she?”
He shook his head. “No. I’ve listened to what you have to say, Walker. I grant you are probably sincere, but I am afraid I don’t—I can’t—trust you. Do whatever you have to do, but stay away from Marni.”
He stood and I let him walk out of the bar. Then I got up and followed. On the street I ran the few yards to catch up with him, reached out, and grabbed his shoulder. “Gibbons! Wait a moment!”
He stopped and turned to face me. We almost collided and I staggered a couple of steps grabbing hold of him. He looked mad and snapped, “Good grief, Walker! What is it now?”
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to ask you, will you please ask Marni to call me? I want to apologize and explain.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t you ever give up? Very well, I’ll tell her, but don’t expect her to call. Now, goodbye, Lacklan!”
I watched him walk away with his pompous little strut, and smiled. Then I made my way back to my car, where I had left it on Broadway. I climbed in, slammed the door, and took the tracking device receiver out of the glove compartment. I switched it on and there he was, striding down 86th Street toward Central Park. His bleep stopped for fifteen or twenty seconds and then started moving faster. I figured he’d got into a taxi. The cab took him all the way down to the Civic Center and then across the Brooklyn Bridge. On the other side of the river, they came off at Anchorage Plaza and went, via Middagh Street, to Colombia Heights and finally stopped outside number 75. There he went inside.
You have to have a plan B in life. My plan A had been to try to persuade him we should be allies. But I had been sure from the start that he was going to be either hard or impossible to convince. So plan B had been to drop a micro-tracking device into his jacket pocket. Now I knew where he was, and chances were good that Marni was with him. If she wasn’t, it wouldn’t be long before he led me to her.
Six
Gibbons started to move at five thirty that evening. I was parked a hundred and fifty yards down the road, waiting for him to do something. I saw the bleep had been activated and after a moment, I saw him exit the house carrying a couple of suitcases. Marni was just behind him. They climbed into a Ford Focus and took off up the road toward the bridge. I let them get a mile away and then followed.
Over the bridge, he kept going west through heavy traffic until he reached St. John’s University. There he turned north up West Street. For a moment, I wondered if he was headed for the Upper West Side, if Marni had had a change of heart and he was going to deliver her to my place. But at Canal Park, he turned suddenly right and stared moving south-east again, down Canal Street, like he was going back to Brooklyn. I thought perhaps they were having an argument in the car and couldn’t decide what they were doing, but before I’d had a chance to think much about what the hell he was doing, he’d turned north again up Avenue of the Americas. Then he turned west, through Greenwich Village and West Village. And after that, he turned right into Bank Street and then south again on Greenwich Avenue. He was like a headless chicken on speed. I slowed and pulled over.
Gibbons didn’t strike me as the type to suddenly take leave of his senses. He was as obstinate as a burro with a grudge, but he was about as grounded as you could get without growing roots. It made a lot more sense that he was either trying to shake a tail, or he was trying to make sure he didn’t pick one up. That meant wherever he was going was important.
He eventually came to 6th Avenue and turned north. He passed the Hennessy Foundation and kept going. I started to follow again. He cut through the park a couple of times and then came out on Madison Avenue and I knew he was going to cross into the Bronx. After a couple more twists and turns, he did just that.
Once over the water, he made for Goose Island in the east, via Van Cortland Lake in the north and Throgs Neck in the south, traversing the entire Bronx in the process. In the growing darkness, he crossed Pelham Bridge and we headed through parkland and woodland toward Woodside and New Rochelle, and finally, after more than three hours of driving back and forth across New York, he pulled off Pelham Road onto Hudson Park Road, wound down some dark, empty paths and stopped outside a brace of large, iron gates set in a fifteen foot stone wall. I killed the lights and slipped silently into a small parking lot set nearby, in what looked like a village green.
There I sat and watched while he waited. After a moment, the gates swung open and the car moved into the grounds of a large, gabled house that sat on the shores of Echo Bay, on the East River. The gates clanged closed behind him and the car’s glowing red taillights disappeared from sight.
I lit a cigarette and settled to wait and think. Gibbons was not stupid and he had felt threatened by my insistence on seeing Marni, so he had decided to move her to what he considered a safe location. Judging by the size and grandeur of the house—at least what I could see of it in the dark—he was either very rich or very well connected. I figured it was most likely the latter, and some rich pal was lending him his riverside pad. His sympathetic views and his powerful connections were probably why Marni had hooked up with him in the first place.
I thought about the elaborate, roundabout route he’d taken to get there. It could be just a symptom of an excessively cautious, meticulous nature, but I didn’t think so. Remembering how he had turned up at the Bethesda Fountain, and how he had walked in to the Parlour, he didn’t strike me as an excessively cautious man. If anything, the opposite was true. So the pains he had taken to shake off any possible tail suggested to me that the security and alarm systems in the house were not exactly cutting edge; that its advantage lay in its being remote and out of the way, rather than high-tech secure. Not so much a fortress where to meet an enemy in combat, but a bolt hole where to go to ground and hide.
I took my infrared binoculars from the glove compartment, got out, and had a look at the gate and the wall. I couldn’t see any CCTV cameras. That didn’t mean there weren’t any, and, perhaps more important than that, it didn’t mean there were no dogs either. Give me a CCTV any day over a pissed Rottweiler.
I took a walk by the side of the wall to see where it would lead. It led over a rough stretch of green down to a beach on the shore of the river. There it climbed a small cliff and came to an end at a precipitous drop into the water. I didn’t think twice about it. It was too obvious. I took off my shoes and my socks and waded into the dark, icy water. I swam, shivering and spluttering, around the rocks and into a private cove where the beach led to a well-tended lawn. From there, handsome stone steps rose to a terrace and a set of French windows that gave onto a brightly lit drawing room in a large, pseudo-Jacobean house with tall gables and chimneypots. I could see all this clearly because the garden was floodlit by spotlights concealed in the trees.
The current this close to the shore was not dangerous, but it was strong enough for me to feel it trying to drag me into the deeper water. So I struck out for the shore. In a few strokes I found my feet and, keeping close to the rocks, I waded onto the sand. I found a nook between the small cliff and the base of the wall, settled there, and scanned the house with my binoculars. The image was smudged by the wet lenses, but it was clear enough. Marni was sitting at a table on the terrace, staring at the water and the lights of Glen Cove. Gibbons
was behind her, framed in the doorway. It was hard to make out whether they were talking, but if they were, it wasn’t warm and fuzzy. Neither of them looked very happy.
I waited a while to see if any dogs picked up my scent, but nothing happened. So, staying close by the wall, I crawled on my belly to the cover of some bushes on the lawn, closer to the house. There I stopped and watched Gibbons step out and sit at the table as a girl in a maid’s uniform brought out a tray with drinks. I thought of some of the safe houses I’d been in over the years—take out pizza and you were lucky to get a TV. I guessed it paid to be connected.
I kept inching closer until I was able to pick up snatches of their conversation, or what there was of it. Mostly what I could make out was the odd unhappy comment from Marni, and Gibbons’ hectoring, nagging tones. I crawled a little closer. Marni was saying, “I am really not happy about this, Philip. It feels wrong.”
“Don’t be absurd, Marni. You are a scientist. You can’t be guided by feelings. You must apply rational thought. Would you rather be holed up with that barbarian?”
“I have known him all my life, Philip. We were very close at one time, and he has always been very loyal. He’s a good man. He’s just…”
“A barbarian. He is just a barbarian!”
“We should have him on our side, not against us.”
“We don’t need him. He is irrelevant.”
She gave a small laugh. “No, Philip. He is not irrelevant. He is very relevant.”
He looked across the table at her for a long moment. “You’re still infatuated with him, aren’t you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I just know, a lot better than you do, what kind of man he is—and what he is capable of. We have our hands full with Omega, we don’t want Lacklan working against us, too. And aside from that, he could be a very powerful ally. You’ve seen what he did in Colorado and Arizona.” She paused a moment and added, “Single-handed!”
He shook his head. “You’re letting your feelings cloud your judgment. He’s a liability. And believe me, after the debate tomorrow, things will be very different. Tomorrow will be a game changer. They don’t know what they have got themselves into.”