by Blake Banner
He grunted. “We have a big problem, then.”
“It’s worse, according to this gorilla, they plan to take her to Saudi. Cavendish wanted her interrogated, but not harmed. Now he’s dead, if they take her to Al-Qaeda, there is no limit to what they might do to her. She’s not just a United States Air Force Colonel, she’s a woman too.”
“I’m aware of that, Harry.”
“They took her yesterday. We are really short of time.”
“I’ll get you booked on an air taxi to Malaga. I am going to talk to Araminta…[5]”
“Your tame CIA agent?”
“She is far from tame, Harry, as you well know. She is immensely useful to us. She will know where Hirsch is right now. Grab an overnight bag and get yourself to JFK. I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”
I hung up and sat for a moment looking at the limpid, yellow light of the streetlamps filtering through the leaves of the trees. Did they know yet that Cavendish was dead? How good was the communication between them? How good was the cooperation? The CIA had mediated to take the colonel from two Sinaloa boys to the Middle East. Did the CIA know Cavendish was dead? They must at least suspect it. Would they inform Al-Qaeda? Or would they hold on to the colonel, keep her for themselves and then blame her abduction on one of the other two? With Senator Linchpin gone, the groups might start to fall apart.
I fired up the car, telling myself there was nothing to be gained by speculating, and headed home, for East 128th Street.
When I got there and parked I saw a dark blue Cherokee parked outside my door, with a black Audi RS5 parked in front of it. I climbed the stoop and examined the lock. It showed no signs of tampering, but that didn’t mean much. I let myself in, closed the door behind me and pulled the P226 from under my arm. Then I stood and listened. I didn’t hear anything and I moved to the living room. Light filtered from the lamps outside and picked out the sofa, the armchairs, the fireplace. It laid mellow amber, distorted shapes on the carpet, among the shadows. The silence was dense. The room was empty.
I turned toward the kitchen. Somewhere in my peripheral senses I could feel somebody breathing. The first flight of the stairs was empty, but I moved past it to the kitchen. I left the lights off. Dim light leaned in through the kitchen windows, draped across the pine table and the silver sink. There was nobody there.
Upstairs then.
I went to the foot of the stairs with the Sig held out in front of me in both hands. I leaned my back against the wall and started to move up. At the front of the house, overlooking the street, was my office. I eased open the door and stepped inside. Streetlight, dimmer up on the first floor, filtered in, dappled by the leaves of the trees outside, their shadows playing on the white walls. There was my desk by the bow window, a dark hulk in the gloom. There was the chesterfield armchair, the sofa…
The bulk of the body sitting on the sofa was almost invisible in the darkness. It sat motionless. I stared at it for maybe half a second, and then the violent blow struck me in the face and the head, knocking me sprawling to the floor. I landed painfully on my back and instantly two flashlights blazed in my eyes, blinding me momentarily. A boot smashed painfully into my thigh, another into my side, and next thing a heavy body sat on me, pinning me down, wrestling with my arms to remove them from my face.
I saw the flash of a large steel blade and wrenched my arm away as cold steel brushed my sleeve. Instinctively I grabbed at where I sensed the wrist was and a large, hard fist smashed into my face. The pressure on the knife hand increased and the fist smashed into my face again. Maybe two seconds had passed since I was hit. Too long. I still had the Sig Sauer in my hand. I shoved it in the general direction of where my assailant was sitting, found solid resistance and pulled the trigger as the third punch landed.
I heard a stifled cry of pain, bucked and heaved the dying body off me and scrambled away. Without thinking I aimed at one of the flashlights and fired again. The flashlight smashed and I heard a violent curse. Then everything was movement and crashing through the darkness. I took a large step and hit the light switch.
Three men standing. One bent double holding his wrist, another with his hand under his jacket, staring at me. The third, Captain Bill Hartmann, in a dark suit with a dark coat, scowling at me. On the floor on my right, a fourth man in a suit, bleeding out on the floor.
I shot the guy with his hand in his jacket, just to be on the safe side. The slug hit him square in the chest and he slumped to the floor without ever knowing he’d been killed. I tasted blood in my mouth and scowled at Hartmann.
“You came here to kill me, Hartmann?”
“I got tired of chasing you. I figured if you’re dead, who cares who you worked for. Right?”
“Did Hirsch approve this?”
“Fuck you.”
“Have you gone rogue?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time. Fuck you!”
“Is that going to be your answer to all my questions?”
He turned to his last remaining man and smiled, like he was being real clever. “Seems he don’t hear so good.” His man looked worried. He was right to. I shot him through the forehead and he went over backward like a felled tree.
Now Hartmann looked worried too.
“I’m going to ask you one more time, Hartmann. Have you gone rogue or are you under orders?”
He sneered defiance at me. “Neither.”
“You better start making sense pretty soon, Hartmann. I haven’t much time and I have less patience. Are you here under orders from the Company or not?”
He barked an ugly laugh. “You are so far behind I can’t even talk to you. You haven’t a clue. You haven’t even got the right language so I can talk to you. There’s a New Order, hadn’t you heard? The Company? That’s Cold War ancient history, Harry. The Company got left behind. This is the Corporate Intelligence Agency!” He laughed out loud. “The Camara Illuminata Americana!” He laughed some more. “Confused? Well let me tell you something, pal.” He started walking toward me, stabbing at me with his finger. “You got a lot of people who want to know who you’re working for, but I don’t give a shit. And I don’t need to give a shit, you know why? Because things don’t work the way they used to.” He wagged his finger. “You haven’t got a clue! There are agencies within the government structure you have never heard of, and every day we are more powerful and we have more control, and every day the old institutions become weaker and more decrepit. Am I under orders from the CIA? Ha! No, sir! The CIA, the Consolidated Imbeciles Agency, works for me!”
“You finally lost it, huh?”
“You stupid piece of dog shit.” His voice was rich with contempt. “If you had the faintest…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah! Spare me the melodramatic bullshit, Hartmann. You finally cracked and you went rogue. You and Hirsch. What have you been doing, surfing the dark web, reading all the conspiracy sites and popping zits together? Your operation is not authorized, just like Hirsch’s operation in Panama wasn’t. You got obsessed with me because I killed Ben-Amini, you’ve misappropriated Agency funds to finance your personal, obsessive agenda and you roped Hirsch into helping you. Well you blew it, Hartmann. You lost your grip, you went too far and now you’re going down.”
“You really think you can take me down?”
“Where does your authority come from?”
He shook his head. “You couldn’t begin to understand.” He shrugged. “Smoke-filled back rooms where even the president is not allowed to go. Especially the president.”
“So you can’t tell me.”
His smile was complacent. “No, Harry, I can’t tell you.”
“Then you’re no damn use to me.” I put a round right between his eyes and he died with a stupid, complacent smile on his face. I often think about the Buddhist idea that your dying thought conditions the nature of your next life. Maybe Hart would be born as a Cheshire cat. Or a particularly fat slug.
I called the brigadier.
&nb
sp; “Captain Bill Hart was here with a couple of boys. They tried to kill me.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’ve collected a few more bruises for my collection. Otherwise I’m OK. That’s more than can be said for these bozos. You need to send some cleaners over.”
“Hartmann?”
“He’s gone to the great Central Intelligence Agency in the sky.”
“That’s a shame. It would have been interesting to talk to him.”
I grunted. “I’m not so sure, sir. His brains seemed to have gone south. He was spouting a lot of BS about the New World Order, how the CIA had been superseded and decisions were being made in smoke-filled rooms where the president was not allowed. It was pretty crazy stuff.”
“Everything unfamiliar seems crazy, Harry. The Third Reich was like something out of the most extravagant science fiction when it struck. China and the Soviet Union, when looked at objectively, are quite insane. If you knew some of the antics our political elites get up to at the Bilderberg meetings and Bohemian Grove, you might not be so dismissive.”
I shrugged. “Maybe you should brief me more thoroughly. He was a liability and he seemed to be talking crazy, so I shot him.”
“Fine, I’ll send a crew over. They’ll let themselves in. You get yourself cleaned up and get to JFK. Go to the Fly World desk. The air taxi is waiting for you.”
OK, I’m on my way.”
I stepped over the bodies, had a quick shower, dressed and threw a few things in an overnight bag. Then I made my way down to the car, thinking about Bill Hartmann and his crazy claims, which the brigadier said were not so crazy.
Nineteen
It was a six-and-a-half-hour flight and we touched down in Malaga airport at four AM New York Time, which was nine AM local time. I made my way through passport control, picked up my rental Mustang and slung my bag in the trunk. I climbed behind the wheel and called the brigadier. He answered straight away.
“I spoke to Araminta.”
“What did she say?”
“She had to look into it, but she came back to me earlier tonight.” I glanced up at the blue sky and thought of him sitting in his office in his pajamas with one light dispelling the gloom around his desk. “She said he’s got an apartment in Benalmadena, its an apartment block called Los Patos, at Number 3, Calle Torrealmadena. His apartment is number twenty-four. From the satellite photos you have plenty of parking space there…”
“Gotcha. I’ll check it out.”
“You’re booked in at the Vincci, not far from there, at Antonuio Machada Avenue, number 57. On the seafront.”
“Very nice. I’ll keep you posted.”
It was a ten-minute drive from the airport up into the sierra to Benalmádena, and another five minutes down from the hills, winding through a curious town, built from nothing in the 1980s, that tried too hard to be pretty and only ever made it to odd. This was wannabe California without the oil or the gold, and wannabe Hollywood without the movies. All it ever achieved was a vague lookalike. Though it beat me why any place would want to look like LA or Hollywood.
I wound among villas that really were Spanish, but tried to look like the Hollywood idea of what a Spanish villa would look like, down avenues lined with palm trees to a beach whose sand was gray and brown, rather than golden. A couple more turns brought me to Calle Torrealmadena, with a broad parking lot down a flight of worn steps on the right, and a large apartment block in blue and white on the left. I cruised up the narrow road, made the circus at the top and came down slow again. I pulled in to the side, killed the engine and checked my watch. It was ten AM.
I had options. Go up to his apartment, knock on the door, beat him to within an inch of his life and ask him where the colonel was, or sit on the place until he came out and follow him so I could gather intel and develop a plan of attack.
The second option was clearly the correct one, but I didn’t know how long the colonel had. Hell, I didn’t even know if she was still alive; and besides, beating Raymond Hirsch to within an inch of his life appealed to me.
I got out of the Mustang and walked sixty feet to the blue, wrought-iron gate of the building. A woman in shorts and a straw hat was approaching from the inside. I made a show of checking my pockets for my keys. She opened and held the door for me. We smiled and said, “Hola,” at each other in accents that were clearly not Spanish, and both went on our merry ways.
The block was a maze of tiled passages and small plazas, with two large swimming pools at the center. I made my way up a spiral staircase to the second floor and found apartment twenty-four. I rang the bell, then knocked. There was nobody there. I pulled the Swiss Army knife from my pocket, rammed the screwdriver in the lock with a thump of my fist, let myself in and closed the door softly behind me.
Any hope of finding the colonel there evaporated immediately. There were three rooms. On the right was a bedroom, straight ahead was a bathroom with a small shower cubicle, and to the left was a long narrow room with a couch and a dining table on the right and a sink and hob on the left. At the far end was a balcony.
I scrounged around for ten minutes, hoping Hirsch had gone out for breakfast and would soon come back, but he didn’t, and I didn’t find anything of any use. So I went back down again, climbed in the Mustang and sat thinking and drumming the wheel.
Five minutes after that, as I was about to press the starter and head for the hotel, a Seat Ibiza turned into the road. It stopped outside the entrance to the block and, after a moment, Hirsch got out in a cream linen suit. He slammed the door and stood leaning on the roof, talking through the window. I had the soft-top down, but he hadn’t seen me. I slid down in my seat and hoped the sun reflecting on the windshield would obscure me from view. I could hear a murmur, but no words.
Then he stood erect, slapped his hand on the roof and said, “OK, pick me up at four. See you then.”
He turned and went through the blue, wrought-iron gates and the car drove past me, made the small circus and past me again on the way back to the main drag along the seafront. I didn’t recognize the driver.
I fired up the big V8 and went after him. He turned right at the ocean along the Carretera de Cadiz. I followed, with the sun and the sea air on my face, and the great sweep of the gleaming Mediterranean on my left. After half a mile he slowed and came off the main drag onto the Avenida del Sol. We passed a string of terraced cafes and restaurants and I let him get ahead, like I was looking for somewhere to park. I saw him turn into the Avenida de Europa and followed at a sedate pace. And as I turned in, I saw him take a right through a set of elaborate red iron gates set in a redbrick wall with big iron spears set along the top. The gate was set under a big arch which bore the legend, Le Jardin d’Eden, and had a figure of a golden apple at the top.
I cruised past, frowning. A nightclub. I got an ugly, sick feeling in my gut and backed up to have a closer look. There was a driveway to a sprawling villa half concealed by palms and shrubs. I could just make out a pool, and a sign by the gate said it was a nightclub that opened from five PM until it closed.
I took a photograph and sent it to the brigadier, then called him as I pulled away and headed back to the Carretera de Cadiz, and my hotel.
“You’re calling too often, Harry.”
“I know, but these are exceptional times, sir. I found Hirsch. He was delivered to his apartment by a man in a Seat Ibiza who is going to pick him up again at four PM.”
“What’s this photograph?”
“I followed the guy who picked him up to this place. I figure it’s a nightclub-cum-brothel. I can’t make a lot of sense from it. I need to know who owns this place and what ties they have with either the Company, Sinaloa or Al-Qaeda.”
“It could be money laundering. I’ll make inquiries and get back to you.”
I went and checked in to my hotel, had a shower and then drove to Malaga to buy myself a tuxedo. While I was trying it on the brigadier called.
“The Garden of Eden is part of
the Golden Apple group of luxury, gentlemen’s boutique hotels, where all needs are catered to. The group belongs to a consortium, amongst whom are Yuri Petrovich—”
“Russian Mafia.”
“Yes, mainly drugs and white slaves. Ali ibn Fayad, Alfonso Guerra and Mohammed Binladin. There are others, but these are the ones of interest. Fayad has been known to finance Al-Qaeda operations, Alfonso Guerra’s firm of accountants in Mexico is notorious for laundering money for both Sinaloa and Bloque Meta, not to mention other Colombian and Mexican groups, the Binladins, aside from their one prodigal son, are pillars of the establishment and close friends of the Bushes, but the Five Eyes have been watching Mohammed closely for some years now and the private consensus is that he supports various terrorist groups.”
“This is the place. I can feel it.”
“The Spanish Policía Nacional suspect it is a hub for white slave traffic, but they can’t prove it. Girls are snatched from the former Soviet Union, especially the Ukraine, hooked on heroin and inducted into their new profession in the Garden of Eden, and then the best ones are shipped on to the Middle East.”
I spoke half to myself. “So they have brought her here because the local authorities have already been bribed to turn a blind eye to what goes on at the club, and one more blonde is bound to go unnoticed. Meanwhile, they can keep her locked in a room while they either interrogate her, or ship her out to the Middle East.”
“It’s a lot of assumptions, Harry, but it is probably correct. I think at the very least you’d better go and have a look.”
“I am buying a tuxedo as we speak.”