Warrior Knight

by Aarti V Raman

  And he would comb every red herring lead there was to, in order to do so.

  So he commandeered a computer for himself and started to look into the accounts of everyone who was rumored to have done business with The Woodpecker - arms suppliers, raw material manufacturers, seven building owners, a couple of higher ups in the legal world and many, many scumbags who were just ripe for someone like The Woodpecker to tap into when he needed help.

  One such scumbag had been a small time thug named Raoul Hernandez who was found washed up on the shores of Miami, with most of his insides bled out and a knife wound to the jugular that had killed him instantly. A near-perfect kill shot.

  That, in itself, was not a strange coincidence.

  Two months after Raoul had gone to sleep with the alligators, a stripper named Maria Solis and her entire family had been found murdered, in various beaches around Miami and Sarasota, with almost the same kind of death wounds. Their bodies wiped clean of any DNA evidence. No fibers, no saliva, no fingernails or hair, not one damn thing.

  A professional clean up job, if ever there was one.

  Too big of a coincidence, for anyone to ignore.

  There was a red flag alert out for any intel relating to these deaths and Krivi was intrigued enough to read up on the police and ME reports.

  Raoul’s last job had been to deliver a batch of marbles from a local manufacturer to an address in downtown Miami at the waterfront section. Raoul had been the courier boy for several Miami gangs and knew his way underground, quite well.

  There was no receipt for the marbles having been received by the company that had asked for it and, Krivi could find no trail of the company’s existence after that day, almost fourteen months ago.

  He followed the marble manufacturer to another operation based in Mexico and found a small amount, just ten thousand dollars that had been transferred out of the company’s account on the day a big blast had happened in Lebanon. It had been in the market square and had killed almost a hundred people.

  The most important thing: the British Ambassador to Lebanon had been caught in the explosion.

  That was significant.

  That was the first useful lead he’d had in almost four days, so Krivi gulped down two more cups of coffee, went home to Ziya, shaved all his stubble and went to sleep holding her. With a smile on his face.

  He didn’t plan on telling a single soul about what he’d found, until he had more confirmation. Double confirmation.

  ~~~~~~

  The next morning, when Krivi walked in to the room he was using, Harold was sitting on his chair, a Cheshire cat grin on his face. He held a slim disc in his hand.

  “What’s that?”

  Krivi was itching to go on the computer and finish finding out if the rest of his suspicions was correct. He had a hunch it was, and the possibility was enough to make his brain go into total autopilot mode.

  Harold stuck the DVD in the drive and patted the CPU tower affectionately as it started whirring quietly. “That is what is going to give us the intel we need, Iyer.”

  “I doubt it.” Krivi dragged a chair and sat next to Harold and watched as the nineteen inch computer screen filled with the sobbing countenance of a ginger-haired, acne-filled boy who didn’t have a nose.

  “This,” Harold said expansively. “Is Hank Sturgeon. And his story is appalling and sad.”

  “And we are going to watch him because…”

  “He lives in Cancun, the bastard’s rumored hideout.”

  “He is rumored to have lived in Antarctica too. What’s so goddamn special about this rumor?”

  Krivi didn’t want to waste any more time watching one more tape and listen to one more sob story when he could be getting closer to finding out the whereabouts of the person whose money had been allegedly used to finance a bombing.

  A bombing that was almost certainly the handiwork of The Woodpecker.

  Big if, but it was worth a shot.

  Harold smiled.

  “Because, this boy has had contact with The Woodpecker. The bastard shot his nose off.”

  Krivi’s brows rose up.

  “No fucking way. The Woodpecker would never leave anyone alive.” He was ruthlessly confident about that.

  Harold nodded. “Yep. Still don’t want to watch it?”

  Krivi thought about it for a single second.

  “Play it.”

  Thirty-Three

  Two hours later, after numerous viewings and repetitions, they had a name.

  They had a history, and more importantly, as Harold put it, they had the man’s Achilles heel, all ready to be chopped off at the foot, if needed.

  By moving all the pieces on the board, Harold had stationed people in South America, found what he was looking for and, by whatever Gods favored them, the agents scanning the flight manifests found the name that they were looking for landing in at a flight from Cancun, Mexico arriving at Heathrow Airport in approximately six hours.

  Harold knew then, that fate was on their side and that elusive thing they had all been searching for; was here.

  Serendipity.

  When all the stars in the universe conspired to give you the very thing you wanted.

  All you had to do was make your play.

  Which, between him and Iyer, Harold knew was not going to be a problem at all.

  Now, all they needed was to prep the Interrogation room and watch Krivi Iyer work his magic on Pedro Panetta, a major business owner in the tourist town of Cancun, and, money launderer to the terrorist known as The Woodpecker.

  ~~~~~

  Eight hours later, Krivi stared at the blackened Plexiglass partition with hooded eyes.

  Ziya stood next to him, staring at the man in the room. He wore such ordinary clothes, black pants some kind of woolen shirt and a shearling jacket over it. He was of average height and didn’t have a single distinguishing feature that identified him as a terrorist’s money man.

  Pedro Panetta.

  The name they had all been chasing for four days now, and finally, through a combination of luck and propinquity he was here.

  In Britain, in the freaking city of London and inside this shady labyrinth of humanity and technology that had made finding this man possible. That had made any of it possible at all.

  Ziya didn’t know which emotion was uppermost in her head as she watched Krivi watch the man move around the room.

  There wasn’t much in the room by way of things.

  A scarred table, a chair, a rusted john with the flush not working and suspect brown stains that had made her wrinkle her nose when she saw it. There was a metal cot, like the ones they’d used in old-time mental hospitals, when they used to be called Bedlam. With straps and chains hanging desultorily to the floor, like disused props.

  There was a single sheet that could be used as a bedcover or to cover the mattress. And no pillow.

  A single swinging forty-watt bulb provided what little illumination there was in the room.

  Pedro, with his tanned face and his pleasing smile did not look at all put out by his new surroundings. He was surprised, which was evident from his next question, which he directed into the air.

  “Why am I being held in some private cell instead of being produced before the City police?”

  No one answered, although the four micro-bugs, Russian-made, captured everything right down to the level of his deep breathing.

  Pedro was fine. He wasn’t upset or even unduly disturbed in finding himself in these new circumstances. As was standard operating procedure for someone with his level of clearance in the terrorist world.

  They didn’t let a little change of plans deter them.

  Improvise, was the mantra for both sides.

  “I mean, should I be worried, gentlemen?” Pedro asked genially. “Should I call my lawyer?” He even smiled self-deprecatingly and turned his empty slacks pockets inside out. “Do I even get a phone call here, wherever here is?”

  Harold opened the door to the v
iewing room and came to stand beside Ziya, Krivi and the on-call techie who was monitoring the comm.

  “It’s your call, Iyer,” he said quietly. “We need intel now. Fast. So you have to figure out the best method to…extract it.”

  Ziya glanced sharply at him.

  Extraction. It was not the nicest sounding word in the English lexicon and, especially considering where they were and who they were and what they were doing, filled Ziya with a sense of enormous foreboding.

  “What is Krivi going to do?”

  She asked this of Krivi, who was still watching the man move around the room. Run a hand through the back of the chair, walk leisurely to the john and shake his head heavily. Just as if he was in a hotel with poor service.

  Pedro Panetta was one cool customer.

  Harold chuckled; it was a disquieting sound under the circumstances.

  “Krivi?”

  Ziya turned away from the screen and looked at her lover.

  “What are you going to do?”

  ~~~~~~

  “Whatever needs to be done,” Krivi answered. “Get her out of here. Have him sweat it out for two hours. Then bring in the food and the video. Make the food salt-less. Keep tape rolling. And inform me pronto if he starts to say anything about wanting to deal before that.” The last, he instructed of the on-call technician.

  “Okay.” The twenty year old London School graduate put on his earphones and went back to reading Batman comics.

  Ziya shook her head and grabbed his hand as he prepared to leave the room.

  “I am not going anywhere. You can’t make me go.”

  Krivi shot her a glance of pure irritation.

  He glanced at Harold who was watching the scene with a lot of interest and amusement. There was no one that he knew of who could speak to Krivi Iyer in quite that particular tone of belligerence and defiance and not expect some kind of payback.

  Verbal and or physical.

  He really wanted to know how his junior was going to maneuver around the little lady. Or, more important, if he was.

  “Ziya,” he spoke with deliberate calm. “This is ugly work. Interrogation. You shouldn’t be here. There is no need for you to be here and you know that. Don’t put yourself through this just to prove a point.”

  “And what point is that?” she spoke softly, her eyes luminous in the bright viewing room lights. “That I had to watch Noor and Sam explode? That I had to see their empty kafans being lowered to the ground or that you think my delicate sensibilities cannot handle whatever it is that your team is going to do in there to that man.”

  “Not team,” Harold felt obliged to point out. “Him.”

  Krivi shot him a look of annoyance, while Ziya’s eyes widened.

  “You are going to extract information all by yourself?”

  Krivi hesitated. “I have my ways.” He shoved his hands in his pants pockets and went back to watching the man through the glass.

  Harold spoke quietly, sympathetically in Ziya’s ear, “You really shouldn’t be here, my dear. He is right. You shouldn’t see this.”

  Unexpectedly, tears filled her eyes and she had to blink them back rapidly.

  “If this man is responsible for…for…Sam and Noor, then I am standing right here and watching Krivi go to work on him. I owe them that much.” She cast her eyes to the floor.

  “I owe them that much at least.”

  Harold hesitated before speaking, in a world-weary tone. “You will think differently, Ziya, dear. You just don’t know that yet. But if you want to stay here; then be quiet, stay out of the way and no matter what, do not interrupt Krivi. Are we clear?”

  A thousand doubts flitted into her expressive eyes as she heard the unspoken but very definite order in the mildly posed question.

  “Are we clear, Ziya dear?”

  Ziya nodded, twice, for confirmation. Even though she was now filled with severe misgivings. She couldn’t leave now. She couldn’t leave Krivi or this horrible cell where destruction waited for one blissfully unconcerned animal.

  Thirty-Four

  Krivi had always considered interrogation and the extraction of information a refined art.

  If you applied the right kind of pressure, sooner or later, everyone sang.

  The threshold for pain for people was different and, in most cases, higher than they themselves were aware of. Survival brought about the strangest, most animal changes in a human.

  You could live without an eye, without ears, without your tongue, without hands and legs and fingers and toes and nails…as long as you lived.

  Survival.

  Breaking someone, Krivi had been taught, was not about making someone suffer pain. It was basic human fear and the way you accessed it.

  Paranoia.

  Most terrorists were afflicted with a healthy dose of both and were, therefore, easier to break than one would imagine.

  It was the others, the ones involved in the business of killing, the moneymen and couriers… the ones who made the all-important decisions regarding the hiring of such skilled individuals who were another matter, altogether. Getting them to break required a level of skill that not every interrogator possessed.

  Because, these men were trained in the art of holding out against pain and torture. Precisely in the event that any of them was caught.

  How did you break a man who was unwilling to be broken? Go after the weakest link, the Achilles heel.

  And Krivi had already figured out what Pedro’s Achilles heel was.

  He watched as the food was taken into the room by a pleasant female agent.

  Pedro didn’t try to engage the woman in any conversation or detain her in anyway. He sat down at the scarred table, placed his napkin on his lap with a theatrical flourish and uncovered the steaming food dishes. He hummed to himself and then looked at the room.

  “Thank you,” he said, politely. “I didn’t expect anything more than piss water.”

  Krivi nodded at the other agents who were waiting with the huge television. They wheeled it in.

  Pedro good-naturedly adjusted his chair, and his tray and looked expectantly at the black screen.

  “Dinner and entertainment,” he said, with an appreciative smile. “What’s next, guys? Strippers with thigh-high boots?”

  He dug into his food with gusto, and barely paused when he discovered after the first mouthful that there was no salt in his chicken a la Kiev.

  Krivi nodded at the on-call tech who flipped on a few switches and the TV came to life.

  Pedro paused eating as he looked at the TV with interest.

  There was a man in a hospital bed. .

  That it was a man, a boy, was not entirely clear as he had been shorn bald and had no nose to speak of. The man had bandages covering his hands as he covered his messed-up face in shame and terror. The boy was crying.

  And the boy spoke now; in answer to someone prompting him off-camera.

  “I had…had…gone to deliver pizza. I worked at Catalino’s, because they were okay with my school schedule.”

  There was text on the screen: What happened when you reached the hotel?

  “I was directed by the concierge up to the seventeenth floor to the room where the order had come for. I told them, I could wait down while they delivered it and collect payment from them, but Julio, the concierge was sure I should go up.” The boy started crying again.

  The text appeared: What happened then?

  “I went up to the seventeenth. Knocked on the door of 1705.”

  The text read: What was your pizza order?

  “Half Hawaiian, half farmhouse special. But I had been to a couple of places that day, and kind of mixed up the order. I apologized, I said, I would bring the right pizza back, no charge but…it…it…” His chest started heaving from the force of his sobs.

  They filled the tiny room with their terrible, hopeless sound.

  The text on the TV appeared: What did he do to you?

  “He...she…he…I am not sure…b
lindfolded me and tied me to a chair and broke my thumb. Then all my other fingers and then shot my nose off because I couldn’t smell the right pizza. I knew I was going to die…I knew I was going to die…until…until...”

  The text appeared: Until what, Hank?

  “Until he appeared and calmed it down. Then it…he…stuffed me into a bed sheet and threw me down the laundry chute. They found me there two days later. I could have died from the blood loss…I can’t smell anything anymore…they tell me surgery is so expensive and risky…”

  The boy, Hank, simply broke down and started crying like a little baby.

  The text appeared: One last question, Hank. Which hotel was this that you went to?

  Hank shrugged, wiping ineffectually at his streaming eyes.

  “Everyone knows that it’s Mr. Panetta, Pedro Panetta’s hotel, even if it’s not in his name. Mr. Panetta owns everything down in Cancun.”

  The TV screen switched off as suddenly as it had started.

  Pedro looked calmly at the screen and said, “Even if you prove whatever it is you think you can prove. You cannot. My lawyers will make mincemeat of this boy’s testimony if you ever put him on a witness stand.”

  But for all Pedro’s bravado, he had stopped eating, his fork and knife resting limply over the plate.

  And that, Krivi knew, was his cue to go in and break the man.

  ~~~~~~

  Krivi walked in, holding a small black bag, like what doctors would carry in years gone by. It had a golden buckle at the mouth, and two sturdy handles for easy carrying. The fabric was stiff, black weather and it was stamped with his initials. KKI.

  Krivi Karthik Iyer.

  Pedro’s face twitched minimally in recognition, as he saw the tall, forbidding man come in with a breezy nonchalance that belied the predator alertness in his fit body.

  Krivi smiled, placing the bag on the floor near one of the walls. “Hello, Pedro. Welcome to Britain. I know you know me, so let’s just dispense with the formalities, shall we?”