There was a pause while Hadrian and Tyrel considered the offer. I looked at Great Hawk.
“What do you think about all this?” I said. “It’s your name on the company logo, after all.”
All eyes turned to the big Apache.
“I see the logic in it,” Great Hawk said after a moment. “We have far more to gain by working together than we do competing against one another. If all parties involved honor the agreement, that is. I will make sure that we hold up our end. As you said, it is my name on the logo.”
I nodded. When the Hawk gave his word, that was that. I looked at Tyrel. “Okay then. I’m on board.”
“Excellent,” Tyrel said. “I’ll have our legal team draw up the paperwork. Why don’t we meet back here Monday morning at ten?”
“Sounds good to me,” Eric said.
Everyone shook hands again. I felt a tension in my shoulders ease and had to resist the urge to smile with relief. The meeting had gone far smoother than I could possibly have hoped. I found myself once again impressed with Eric’s business acumen and his ability to persuade people to his line of thinking. Tyrel was as strong willed a person as I had ever met, but Eric had made winning his confidence look easy.
As we all filed out of the conference room, I decided it might be time to have a talk with Eric about the scope and scale of his businesses. I was still a part owner in a few subsidiaries, but Centurion National had grown far beyond the simple transport and salvage company it started out as. Eric had his fingers in just about everything now, and he was not the kind of man who dreamed small dreams.
Which led me to wonder just exactly how far my friend’s ambitions extended.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Heinrich,
Abandoned Hotel, Refugee District, Outer Perimeter
Over the last two years, the Refugee District had become an island within a city. The problems plaguing the area had been going on since the Outbreak, and for the most part, the city had allowed them to spiral. As long as the district kept to itself, the city’s elected officials figured, the people living there could tear each other apart as much as they wanted.
But the district’s problems did not stay in the warren of shipping containers and crude shanties that comprised the city’s poorest neighborhood. The area had gained a reputation for being a place where one could find virtually anything they wanted, for a price. As a result, people from all walks of life in Colorado Springs frequented the district in pursuit of drugs, prostitutes, gambling, and all other manner of vice. And as much as these slum tourists may have wanted to think differently, what happened in the district did not, in fact, stay in the district.
It started with drugs. The addictions people acquired in opium dens and brothels did not shut down simply because the addicts themselves returned to their homes in better parts of the city. Their habits followed them, and so did the drug dealers. It was not long before even the wealthiest districts had pushers and pimps working every city block.
Next were the loan sharks. The rampant fervor of American consumerism did not die with the civilization that spawned it, nor did the widespread penchant for gambling and prostitution. This led to thousands of people taking shady loans from ruthless gangsters in order to feed their insatiable habits.
Local clinics and the city’s lone hospital soon found themselves overwhelmed with victims of muggings and mishaps who refused to provide a logical accounting of how they came about their injuries. Making matters worse was the flood of destitute, shivering addicts seeking relief from the pain of acute withdrawal and a rapidly growing number of people suffering from venereal disease.
After years of relative peace and prosperity, Colorado Springs found itself in the midst of a massive public health crisis. The mayor, overwhelmed by the tsunami of problems confronting him and facing very dim prospects for re-election, decided to punt the problem over to the chief of police, his only instruction being to end the crime wave at any cost.
It was a disastrous decision.
The police chief was a political appointee with no real law enforcement experience. If he had been a real cop, things likely would not have escalated the way they did. But he was not, and his draconian approach to ending crime in the Springs—an approach strongly resisted by the rank and file—set off a fire storm even the police could not contain.
The chief’s thinking was that if he hit these people hard, and hit them where they lived, he could cow them into withdrawing their operations back to the Refugee District where they could be singled out and shut down one-by-one. What actually happened, however, was a crackdown that saw cops rousting people from their homes, burning opium stashes, seizing trade goods and money from anyone suspected of being involved in drug trafficking—regardless of the existence of actual evidence—and filling the city’s jails with hundreds of people who’d had the nerve to protest this unbalanced show of force.
The police union complained. They held meetings with city leaders. They tried to explain that what they were being asked to do was an incredibly stupid way to enforce the law. Dozens of officers walked off the job. But after all was said and done, those who remained were told, unequivocally, that work was scarce in the city, and if the officers tasked with carrying out their chief’s orders did not like their jobs, there were plenty of people eager to take their salaries.
The cops were human. They had families and needed income to support them. They did not like it, but they did as they were told.
The logic behind the police chief’s madness was that since the city’s problems had originated in the Refugee District, that was where police should focus their efforts. Additionally, in other areas of the city, police officers went house to house questioning everyone they could find as to the location and identity of the dealers, pimps, loan sharks, and illegal gambling operators that had branched out from their home turf. But, as usually happens when law enforcement follows up on tips indiscriminately, everyone with a grudge, debt, or enemy used the police as a weapon against those they wanted out of the way. And when the police came knocking, not all those people surrendered quietly. It was not long before street vendors hawking their wares had to compete with the sound of rapid gunfire on a daily basis.
What had started out as an attempt to curb the city’s vice trade quickly became a nightmare as hundreds of undertrained, underpaid, overworked, and frightened CSPD officers found themselves as pawns in a war between the chief of police, city hall, and nearly a third of the citizens of Colorado Springs, criminal or otherwise.
After two months of violence, the people of the Refugee District finally decided enough was enough. It started with a police raid on an abandoned hotel where hundreds of squatters had taken up residence. The squatters refused to comply with the cops’ orders to clear the building and began firing on the officers trying to storm the entrances. Nearby, the leader of a street gang saw police and heard gunfire and ordered his people to attack the police on their flanks. The cops returned fire, killing two gang members and, disastrously, three innocent bystanders, two of whom were children.
Everyone in the neighborhood had been watching. They were already angry, frightened, and fed up. Seeing the cops gun down two children, even accidentally, was the final straw.
The riot that followed lasted a week. It spread from the Refugee District to every neighborhood within a half-mile radius. The destruction was immense. Buildings burned, dozens of people died—including sixteen police officers—and rampant looting seized nearly a third of the city. The president, seeing that the civilian authorities would not be able to stop the rapidly spreading chaos, declared martial law and sent in the Army, reinforced by three companies of Blackthorns.
Two days later, the riot was over. But so were the lives of nearly a hundred people.
The mayor’s last act in office was to fire the chief of police. Immediately afterward, the mayor resigned in disgrace. When the new chief appointed by the city council took office, the first thing he did was announce a full
-scale investigation into the actions of the police leading up to the riots. His predecessor was to be the central focus of the investigation.
Rather than face further humiliation and the very real possibility of a lengthy prison sentence, the disgraced former chief of police took his own life. His body was found dangling from a rope tied to a rafter in his living room. There was no lengthy note, but around his neck was a thin wooden sign painted white and written upon in black letters. It read, simply:
I’M SORRY.
In Heinrich’s mind, killing himself was the only thing the old policeman had done right.
In the wake of his death, the wounds left by the violence and rioting soon healed, although the scars were still visible to this day. Most noteworthy of them was the twenty-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire that had been erected around the Refugee District. The government’s excuse for putting it up was they wanted to protect the district from reprisals and force the police to gain authorization before taking any action against the people living there. In truth, it was a tacit acknowledgment that although the former police chief may have handled things badly, his fundamental logic was not wrong. The Refugee District was the cradle of the Colorado Springs vice trade, and while there was no real chance of eliminating it completely, the government could at least exercise some measure of control. The people of the district had protested, but not too loudly. Truth be told, most of them liked the idea of putting up a barrier between them and the rest of the city. It may not have been pretty, but it certainly made carrying out the illicit activities that were the lifeblood of the district easier to hide.
Heinrich stood on the top floor of the abandoned hotel that had been the epicenter of the riots and gazed out over the Refugee District through a pair of binoculars. It was a clear morning, and he could see the entire district and a large part of the city beyond. To the east and south lay the two gates that were the only breaks in the fence surrounding his target area. The city guardsmen posted at both gates were on the Storm Road Tribe’s payroll, which was to say, Heinrich owned them.
Nevertheless, he had made sure over the intervening months to manipulate the guard rosters and schedules so that the thirty or so men on duty today were all people without wives or children, or if they were, they were willing to abandon their families for sufficient compensation and the promise of a new life elsewhere. It would have been much more difficult to pull off before the Outbreak, but today, things were different. Many people had come to the Springs hoping for a better life only to find that while the infected may not be a threat here, life was not anywhere near good for most people. It was a long, stinking, crowded, de-humanizing exercise in hard work and long hours for little pay and being crammed into not enough housing and crime and poverty and absolutely no semblance of a secure future.
For all its vaunted security, Colorado Springs now resembled many of the cities in third-world countries Heinrich had frequented during his time as an intelligence officer. The disparity between rich and poor in this place made the pre-Outbreak world look downright egalitarian. There were many who longed for a better life outside the city, no matter the danger, and Heinrich had put considerable effort into making sure the ranks of guardsmen who watched the district’s gates numbered among them. Because after today, Heinrich knew, none of these men would be able to return to the Springs. Not that he was particularly worried about that. He just wanted to make sure no one talked before he could carry out his plan. One had tried already and had met with an untimely end engineered to look like an accident. The rest had learned from his example.
Finished with his survey, Heinrich turned to Maru. “Do we have a signal?”
Maru pulled a burner cell phone from his pocket and flipped it open. “Signal is good. If we’re doing this, we better do it now.”
Heinrich’s eyes strayed northward. From his vantage, he could just barely see a set of antennas protruding from atop a stack of shipping containers. Inside the uppermost container a generator was humming along, powering the equipment connected to it.
“Very well. Do it now.”
“Right, Chief.” Maru held a radio up to his mouth and keyed the transmitter. “All stations, this is Alpha. Mission is go. Repeat, mission is go. Set charges and exfil immediately.”
In less than a minute, several things happened. Heinrich’s men appeared in the streets and ran to pre-staged wagons where they loaded in, snapped the reins, and set off for the gates at a gallop. A short time later, when all teams had radioed they were clear, Maru gave the order for the city guardsmen to seal the district. The men left their posts, stepped outside the gates, and sealed them shut with chains and padlocks. Two wagons waited outside the fence long enough for the guardsmen to climb aboard and then disappeared into the city proper. Heinrich smiled as he watched them ride away. The guardsmen had been promised hefty rewards, safe passage out of the city, and a new life in the Midwest where living conditions were better and the government’s reach was still short. In reality, the only thing waiting for them was a bullet to the head and a shallow grave.
“Won’t be long now,” Maru said. “Pretty soon someone’s going to notice the guards are gone.”
“You know, I’m almost tempted to see how long it takes.”
Maru looked at him. “You sure about this, Chief?”
Heinrich frowned and turned to face him. “What do you mean?”
The big man shrugged. “Gonna cause a hell of a stir. Feds, Army, everybody will be scrambling once this happens. People are going to want the government to do something. It’ll bring a lot more heat than we already have.”
Heinrich patted his second in command on the shoulder. “Maru, I’m counting on it.”
He removed a small cell phone from his coat pocket, dialed a number, and pressed send.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Eric,
Western Estates Hotel
“What was that?”
I sat up in bed and looked at my wife. “I don’t know.”
We both got up at the same time and walked over to the window. The wall it was mounted in faced north, providing a broad view of the city and the surrounding snow-capped mountains. In the center of the frame, far in the distance, I saw four plumes of smoke rising over the early morning landscape.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.
“Those were explosions,” Allison said. “That thumping we heard. It was bombs going off.”
I walked over to my bags, took out a small pair of binoculars, dialed them to their highest magnification, and gazed out the window. The image was hazy, but it looked like the columns of black smoke were all within a few blocks on the northeastern edge of town.
“I don’t know for certain they were bombs,” I said. “But it looks like the explosions are all inside the Refugee District. Knowing that place, it could have been anything.”
Allison looked at me skeptically. “Four explosions, all at the same time, all in the same district, which just happens to be the most crime-ridden part of the city. And you’re saying they weren’t bombs?”
I lowered the binoculars. “No. I’m just saying we don’t know for sure.”
“What else could it be?”
“I don’t know.”
At that moment, a door opened in the suite and little Gabe came toddling out of his room, one small fist rubbing at his eyes. “Mama, what was that noise?”
Allison walked over and picked him up, placing his weight on her right hip. “Nothing to worry about, honey. There was an accident in another part of the city.”
“Did somebody get hurt?”
“I don’t know, sweetie. I’m sure the police are on their way.”
Allison carried our son into the kitchen, cut a few slices of bread, and began slathering them with strawberry preserves. I dressed quickly and retrieved my satellite phone from the nightstand beside the bed. Before putting on my coat, I took my Glock 17, shoulder harness, and four spare magazines from the room’s safe.
; “What are you doing?” Allison asked, her expression not at all happy.
“Gonna step outside and call Gabe. See if he knows what’s going on.”
“Eric, don’t. Just don’t, okay? This doesn’t concern us. Let the authorities handle it.”
The Glock had a full magazine. I chambered a round, secured it in its holster, and put the spare mags in their slots. The magazine in the gun was loaded with seventeen rounds, but the spares were extended mags that held twenty-one rounds each. Between the five of them, I had a hundred-and-one nine-millimeter hollow points at my disposal.
“Believe me, hon, the last thing I want to do is get involved. But all the same, I’d like to know if this is just an isolated incident, or something more serious.”
The amber eyes narrowed, and she stood up straight. “You are not getting involved. Do you understand?”
“Completely.”
I threw my coat on over the weaponry, grabbed a piece of red-smeared bread, kissed my wife and son, and headed out the door.
*****
“We’re mobilizing,” Gabe said.
I cursed and looked down the street. The morning was bright, clear, and cold. The sidewalks were bustling with pedestrians and the streets clattered with the sound of hooves, wagons, and even a few motorized vehicles. My coat was too thin for the temperature, and I tried not to shiver as I crunched through the ankle-deep snow between the hotel entrance and a broad avenue leading north. From where I stood, I could see plumes of smoke marring the pristine blue sky.
“Any idea what caused the explosions?”
The satellite phone vibrated against my ear as Gabe spoke. “Had to be bombs. No industrial facilities in that part of town.”
Surviving The Dead | Book 9 | War Without End Page 10
