"Then it's your intention to sell it to the highest bidder?"
"It's not mine to sell. I'm gathering information, including quotes plus this incredibly unappealing non-offer of yours, that I'll convey to the owners."
"Will you encourage them to consider—"
"I'll encourage them to laugh you out of town."
"The government—"
"Couldn't defuse a firecracker. Oh, you fellas on your level, you're competent enough, and I respect that. But we all know what the politicians will do with this. You've heard from Israel, too, right?"
"Yes. Of course."
"And they claim the bone is theirs."
"That's right."
"Well, they have something in common with Uncle Sam—they have no case. They have a big bundle of trouble just waiting to explode, and since the big bang really hasn't started yet, they figure they'll punt. Swell thinking. Suppose the Israeli lobbyists do allow this thing to go to the Smithsonian—guess where the next airliner crashes into?"
Jabara said, "Mr. Hammer, your cynicism really is not warranted here."
"It's warranted everywhere, chum. Leave your business cards on the desk. I'll talk to my clients and maybe, just maybe, I'll get back to you."
Wilson stood, but Jabara was still in his chair—on the edge of it, anyway. "Mr. Hammer, your reputation is well known. We had assumed, at this point in your life and your career, that you would leave recklessness behind. You are one man. We're a huge organization, and there are other bodies within the system ready to cooperate—the interdepartmental synergy, post-9/11, is quite remarkable."
"Yeah, synergy's a hell of thing. But it doesn't help you, not with the next big trouble just waiting in the wings. You know there's an enemy, you know what they'd like to do, you know the vast probabilities you have to deal with, but you just don't know what to do about it. The enemy can even be U.S. citizens, moles waiting underground until the call comes." I gave them a tight smile. "Something wrong, fellas? Got a bone to pick?"
Both stared at me a while, but neither had anything else to say. Jabara got up, and they nodded and left.
When the door shut, Velda cut the power to the recorder and gave me a hard look. "You were kind of rough on them, Mike."
"Naw—they got just about what they expected. Their experience may be limited, but like Jabara said, they had my history down pretty damn well before they came up here. This was just another practice run."
"Ordinary citizens are supposed to be scared by the FBI."
"Hell, ordinary citizens pay their salary."
For thirty seconds or so, Velda stared out the rain-streaked window, her forehead showing she was deep in thought, the rain traces reflecting on her lovely face.
I went over and stood beside her and watched the rain. Outside, the wind picked up and blew a hard burst against the glass.
I said, "The wheels in high places know damn well we won't give up the Goliath bone, and they sure don't want all the legal and time-consuming details to go through court procedures while the world is dancing on tiptoes waiting for another catastrophe to get pulled on us."
"So?"
"So it's big news. World news. It's startling and it has tremendous repercussions and can affect everyone alive."
"What's your point, Mike?"
"When everything gets out of hand, where do the countries go to get authority to make things go the way they want it to go?"
"Forty-second Street?"
I nodded. "Right. The United Nations building. House of the babbling idiots."
"You don't sound like a big fan."
"Damn well told, baby." She was grinning at me. "What's so funny?"
"You, my love. You're taking on the whole damn world again. One last case before we get hitched, and it has to be this one. What's wrong with a good old-fashioned murder?"
"We've got that, too," I said, and slipped an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. "We've got that, too."
Bozo Jackson was standing near the guard in the black track jacket when I pulled up. Bozo, halfway through a hot dog, nodded hello, took a last big bite of his very late lunch, and met me halfway as I approached.
I asked him, "How's the visitor doing?"
"I think the boy's gettin' the flu, Mike."
"The flu?"
"Yeah—he's definitely got the chills." He laughed at that, but I didn't join in. "Talk about the cold sweats, baby—this chump's got ' em."
"Where is he?"
"In an office, all bundled up, a space heater going."
"Who says you aren't a caring guy?"
"Bet your ass. But no matter how much we warm his ass up, his teeth just keep rattling in his head."
"Yeah?"
"Not from the cold, Mike. Terror. Sheer terror."
"He tell you anything?"
Bozo gestured grandly. "Come on in and ask him your own self."
I didn't have to ask our shooter anything. The little man with the devil beard, arms and legs duct-taped to a scarred-up old wooden chair now, was talking as soon as he saw me, getting it out of his system. He might have seen a lot of street guys under a gun, but what he had faced in Bozo's Scream Room had literally chilled his bones, and the possibility of going through it again had scared him shitless.
He poured it out: He had shot at the "white girl's" purse in front of that hotel, with orders to scare, not kill. He was a precision shooter and could do that. He had returned to Chicago, but was there less than a day when he was sent back with orders to kill the people he'd come in contact with: Lonnie Hartman and the Cosmo kid with the gypsy cabs and the man who sold him the .22, Mr. Jellybean.
"What about George Hurley?" I asked.
"Who?"
"The man in the alley in the Village."
"What man? What village?"
"You didn't do a job last night?"
"No!"
I let my eyes hold his for a full minute, seeing the trembling of his half-frozen mouth. His fingers were clenched together and his arms strained at the duct tape that tied his elbows to the spindly chair.
I asked, "Who do you work for?"
"I receive orders from a man named Kaddour. There are friends in Chicago who introduce us."
"Are you al-Qaeda?"
"No. I do jobs for them, but I am freelance. I work for any group that supports jihad."
"This Kaddour is who sent you here, and then sent you back again?"
"Yes."
"They pay you yet?"
His nod was brief. "Half."
"When do you get the other half?"
This time his eye darted from mine to Bozo's, then back to mine again. He had to swallow, but couldn't make those neck muscles work.
Finally he mumbled, "I had one more job before full pay."
"And I was the target."
His nod was barely perceptible.
"How much would they pay to see me dead?"
The question caught him completely off guard. His mouth moved, but nothing came out. I just kept looking at him and he said, "I would get ... another ten thousand, plus other five owed."
I let him see the nasty grin I wore. "If we don't kill you here, you're toast when you go back where you came from. You know that?"
His head bobbed.
"Maybe we should kill you here. Let you freeze, maybe."
His tongue couldn't even wet his lips.
Beside me, Bozo was grinning. At least I thought he was grinning. That wild grimace could have meant anything. If Bozo hadn't been a retired cop, that expression would have sent my hand to my gun.
I said, "You killed a bunch of people, friend. That's called murder around here."
"I am a soldier."
"Naw, you said it yourself, you're freelance, a hired gun. But I guess you could say that about most soldiers, too, so I'm going to give you a break. You played it straight with us, so a choice is in order."
"Choice?"
"Yeah. Infidels are real big on freedom of choice. We turn you over to the
cops, and there's a big trial, and you die by lethal injection. Or we cut you loose right now, and you take your chances. You've been arrested and printed sometime during your lifetime, so an ID is likely."
This time his neck moved as he swallowed and nodded.
I'll say he'd been printed: Bozo was holding up a white card with inked prints of both hands on it. He was still a cop, after all.
I grinned at the display and murmured, "Bozo—you are a sneaky rascal."
Our prisoner said, "I choose freedom."
Bozo gave me a small grin. He ripped the duct tape off the very nervous hit man and handed him the small overnight case retrieved from the warm-sheet hotel down the street.
It was still light outside, although gray with rain.
Bozo said to him, "The girls got your loot, bro. There's fifty bucks in the bag that'll get you a ticket out of here, but you're on the shoe leather now, and you may have a watcher behind you, to see if you carried out your assignment. You know what I mean?"
He knew, all right. His eyes said so.
"Move it," Bozo Jackson said.
Fingers still stiff from the Scream Room clutched the bag, and legs that had been winterized shuffled toward the door. His strained look back was trying to make sense of the situation.
He was still expecting to be killed before he got out the door in some wild manner even his employers couldn't imagine. He went out, walking backward, and we followed lackadaisically.
When he was outside, he turned and shuffled to the street. At the curb he looked both ways, then, after a moment's indecision and scoping looks back and forth, moved off toward the tall buildings of Manhattan.
Bozo Jackson said, "How long do you think he has, Mike?"
I grunted.
I could see him in a one-room apartment, wrapped in a bloody sheet with a slab of tape covering his mouth, stiff and slowly turning black, discoloring the place.
"Under a week," I said.
Chapter 10
Time could race by or hit a wall. It was like watching an outfielder stand under a fly ball with everyone in the stands holding their breath and the blasted ball wouldn't come down. It just hung there while the world breathed and waited, but nothing was happening. Nothing at all. There was quiet in the stands, the silence of the unexpected. There was no slap of the ball into the fielder's leather mitt. The damn thing just hung there.
I looked at the calendar pad on my desk. It had been almost a month since Paul Vernon had taken Goliath under his wing. I had no way to know how long the restoration work would take, but Paul was a professional and an expert. He would do the best possible job in the shortest time.
What I had put on the back burner of my concerns was the usual stupidity of politicians when they all came to a joint decision. In the meeting place on Forty-second Street where nations gather to turn normal processes into madhouse schemes, a determination was made that Goliath was an international trophy to be shared by the world. The Goliath bone had no owner—no one could claim it as their property. A committee was assembled to assert this non-ownership.
They could get in line.
In the last few weeks, the media had settled down some, after giving George Hurley's murder lots of play for just under a week. Matthew was taking it hard, Jenna didn't show much emotion, but you could tell she was keeping plenty inside, and her mother had held a very small private nondenominational service at a Manhattan funeral home. No burial—George's ashes would be scattered in the Valley of Elah, appropriately enough.
I was still shuttling the kids from safe house to safe house, but on a weekly basis now. With the bill I was racking up with Secure Solutions, the payday on that bone better be a good one. Between the hired security guys, some surveillance by Pat's boys, and whatever skills Velda and I brought to the table, no sign of anybody tailing us or watching us was hitting the collective radar. I'd moved back to my own place, now that the media crowds had abandoned both my apartment house and the Hackard Building.
The morning of the day everything came to a head, Velda and Pat were having coffee and Danish in the outer office when I got there about nine. I took the cup of joe, paper napkin, and cherry pastry that Velda handed me and suggested that she and Pat join me in my office.
"You'd better return your calls first," she said, with just a hint of something in those dark eyes.
Pat was no dummy. He knew he was being excluded from something. But he didn't mind spending a little time with Velda. A long time ago he'd admitted to me he loved her, too. It had rarely come up again, but there had to be a reason why he'd never settled down after all these years. Twice he'd almost married, and twice it had gone south.
Maybe he'd been hanging around being my pal all these years just waiting for me to finally catch the violent death so many evil assholes thought I richly deserved. But I didn't think so.
The scrap of paper with Velda's flowing handwriting on it included four phone numbers for me to return. Three were from news desks that I recognized and ignored, but the final one was from Leon, the Israeli Consulate rep with the unpronounceable last name.
I went through a receptionist and then the secretary named Axler and finally was able to say, "Mike Hammer here, Leon. What's up?"
His voice had an almost musical timbre, his words spoken with an ease that took nothing away from a certain innate seriousness. "Good morning, Mike. I have several interesting things to share."
"Share away."
"We have just received information from an area in the Valley of Elah."
"Are you on a secure phone, Leon?"
"No matter. What I want to share with you is not classified."
"Go ahead then."
He drew in a breath. "In the area where the Goliath bone was discovered, there is currently an excavation party of twenty. They are not Israeli, and they are accompanied by armed guards. They are in a digging frenzy, not seeming to do anything logically. Each has assorted tools, and one man seems to be directing them where to dig."
"You said the area where the bone was 'discovered,' Leon. That specific spot was never disclosed by the kids—not to the media, anyway."
"I'm sure you know that people close to the Hurleys were apparently less than discreet—assistants, drivers. And this excavation site is certainly close to their campsite, according to reports I've received from a ... knowledgeable source."
"Mossad, you mean." It wasn't a question. I put a shrug in my voice: "Let the bastards look."
"It doesn't concern you?"
"Why should it? The Goliath bone's in safe hands where I can get right to it. I'm not worried about thieves snatching this relic."
"These are fanatical people, Mr. Hammer. Zealots of the worst stripe."
"I noticed. If non-Israelis accompanied by armed guards are digging on Israeli soil, why haven't your people moved in?"
"And set a match to this tinderbox?"
I grunted a laugh. "Since when were Israelis shy about sticking up for what's theirs?"
A long pause followed. I was tempted to fill it with another question, but I knew I had Leon in a corner. I'd wait for him to work his way out of it.
Finally he did. "What I'm about to tell you is not official, Mike. It is strictly off the record."
"No problem. You want to shift to another phone?"
"...Yes."
I hung up and worked on my coffee and nibbled at the Danish. Maybe three minutes had gone by when the phone rang again.
Without preamble, Leon said, "Israel wants nothing to do with the Goliath bone. The government does not wish to fan these fanatical flames any further."
"Really?"
"There will eventually be a statement dismissing the notion that this artifact has any historical connection to the giant Goliath. There is a hope that the bone will come home to Israel naturally, through the Hurleys—the children and the widow—to study it and conduct research in the land where it was found. But any sense that this would be a national treasure or symbol, that is not in the
offing."
"That's smart, in my opinion."
"And mine. Great minds, as they say. But not everyone in my homeland feels the same. Mossad reports rumbles from a certain faction I mentioned to you."
Even on the secure line he didn't want to say it: Kakh.
"I appreciate the tip."
"Mike, there's something else. Something serious. That name you shared with me a while back..."
He was referring to the name "Kaddour," the Chicago-based al-Qaeda operative that the Scream Room shooter had given up. I'd called Leon right after and asked him to run it past his Mossad connection, but had heard nothing.
"I was suspicious from the beginning, hearing that name," he said. "Kaddour—there was a hero of the Holocaust named Si Kaddour Benghabrit, imam of the mosque of Paris, who saved over one hundred Jews by giving them Muslim IDs to avoid arrest and deportation."
"I don't think it's the same guy, Leon."
"No. But it reflects a certain irony on the part of what Mossad believes is a double agent pretending to work for al-Qaeda, who is actually a Kakh agent."
That was a stunner. That meant every kill the shooter had done on his jihad-for-hire may have had been inspired by Israeli terrorists, not Arab.
"My friend with the Mossad is an admirer of yours, Mike. He has followed your cases over the years with much interest."
"I'll be sure to send him a glossy for his office. What's your point, Leon?"
" The Mossad does not normally deal in rumor, but what my contact gave me to share with you is merely that. No hard evidence. And I admit it has the flavor of a children's story."
"Let me guess—out of the Arabian Nights, right? Only I don't get any wishes or flying carpet."
That made him laugh. Not a guffaw or anything, just a throaty chuckle. "You are an astute judge of dangerous situations, Mike. My contact says he hears whispers of an assassin dispatched to America—sneaked in from Canada, he was told—whose target is very specific—you."
"A lot have tried, Leon."
"This isn't just any assassin, Mike. The Kakh isn't the only group with a sense of irony; al-Qaeda has its own twisted sense of humor. Their number-one assassin was formerly Saddam's top torturer, known for using nothing but his hands and his considerable strength. His code name, given long before that bone was found, is Goliath."
[Mike Hammer 14] - The Goliath Bone Page 17
