by Ed Kovacs
I could have just stood there watching, except two thugs were both swinging their pistols toward me from four yards away. I simply could not afford to let them shoot first. And any politically correct idiot who says that a police officer should only shoot to “wing” an assailant is an imbecile who has no concept of what it’s like to stand feet away from men who want you dead and are about to achieve their wish. Besides, my trigger finger was broken and my pistol was in the wrong hand. I’d practiced shooting with the weak-side hand—all serious shooters do—but this was the real deal, not practice. So since I didn’t want to die tonight, I double-tapped both men, close as I could get to center mass.
I ran toward Decon, who delivered a couple of chops to Tong’s throat area, stunning the Chinese agent. Damn, Decon knew how to fight! It was a shocking sight, but so was Chu, standing in the Osprey doorway, pointing a long gun at me. I knelt and fired five rounds at him, and he dropped back into the darkness as the plane started to lift off. As the door closed, I put twelve more rounds into the aircraft, then was blinded by swirling dust and groped for a handhold that didn’t exist, feeling like I was in a wind tunnel. Honey was saying something over the comm-link that competed in a jumbled cacophony with the roar of the straining engines and the concussion booms from the .45 still echoing in my brain.
Decon and Tong grappled on the concrete mere feet from me. Three muted shots rang out, muffled only because of my inability to hear well at the moment.
Tong stood up with a gun in his hand, and I instantly did the same. He turned and faced me. I had the Glock, but something made me try another tack. Maybe it was something that I needed to prove to myself. Maybe it was my fighter’s instinct. Either way, I was in no condition to rumble, so I put everything I had into one move; a picture-perfect recreation of the turning back-kick I’d used on Bobby Perdue, but this time my intent was to inflict major hurt. I planted, spun right, sighted on Tong as he raised his gun, then I unleashed the right leg, donkey style. My heel crunched his sternum with a sound that reminded me of chomping on a mouthful of Corn Flakes before they had a chance to get soggy.
The force of the blow was such that he fell back against the low guardrail and just kept going over the side. If he were conscious and a long-distance swimmer, he had a slim chance.
I dropped down beside Decon. Even with body armor, being shot at point-blank range can kill you. His vest had stopped two of Ding Tong’s rounds, but one had entered his chest just above the top edge of the vest. He was barely conscious. I peeled off my shirt and used it as a compress on the chest wound.
I glanced up as the Osprey’s nacelles pivoted forward, the rotors now looking like oversized, slightly droopy prop blades, and the hovering craft shot off into the night sky.
“Homebody, where’s that chopper? Man down and we need to med-evac him ASAP!” I yelled into my headset.
“You see the way I went toe-to-toe with that dude?” asked Decon, weakly.
“Don’t talk. We got a bird coming in for you right now.”
“We get the money?”
The money bag lay on the concrete within reach, so I grabbed it and placed it next to Decon, put his hand on top of it.
“You got it, man.”
“The day I make a million dollars is the day I die. What a bitch, you know what I mean?”
And then he died.
I stood up in a daze. Honey was saying something over the comm-link, but it didn’t register. My body hurt everywhere, a walking ball of pain. I felt the Russian killer’s tanto knife slicing me all over again—I’d broken open stitches just by doing the one move on Tong, and could see the blood seeping into my bandages. My shotgun-pellet wounds hurt my leg like it was on fire, the bullet wound in my calf felt like a red-hot poker had been inserted into it, my fingers ached, my head throbbed. And Decon had just died in my arms. I wobbled as I walked to the guardrail and looked down. Tong needn’t have worried about being a good swimmer. He bobbed face down in the inky water. He was chum.
I knew I should be doing something, but I couldn’t think of what. Then another roar enveloped me, and a MH-6 Little Bird flown by two FBI special agents put down on the crossover. I hobbled under the six spinning rotor blades as soon as it was safe, on the off chance we could track a big black vulture.
It wasn’t much of a race, since Ospreys cruise at 460 kilometers per hour and the Little Bird could do maybe 250. The fact we were heading out to sea, in international waters, surprised me; maybe Chu was making a run for Mexico knowing we didn’t have the range to follow that far. The chopper’s advanced night-vision system and state-of-the art surveillance optics kept the Osprey in sight, even as we fell far behind. Surveillance, after all, was the prime mission of the FBI’s air fleet. Then something strange happened about fifteen miles out into the Gulf. We started to catch up.
The Osprey had slowed in the far distance and was circling to land on what I assumed was an offshore rig. I zoomed-in the mast-mounted optics unit, shocked to see the Osprey setting down—on a cargo ship.
And five would get you ten the cargo ship belonged to a certain Mr. Nassir Haddad.
“Can you get us in close enough to read the name on the ship’s stern?”
“That shouldn’t be a—”
The flash from the explosion caused the co-pilot to whip his head away from the night-vision sight. I gawked in awe as the watery horizon flickered with bright yellow light, then secondary explosions rocked the cargo ship and it actually lifted out of the water.
The vessel began to break up, but not before we confirmed its name: El Fazlin. In short order the broken, burning ship slipped below the choppy, wind-whipped waves and disappeared into the dark bowels of the Gulf.
Just like that, there was nothing left but clumps of floating debris. Just that quick, souls had been judged and sentences carried out, the obtuse machinations of plotters gone moot. The power of steel and diesel and money and nefarious intent was simply silenced and sealed with a cleansing of salt water, like washing out an ulcerated wound.
The Little Bird’s pilot notified the Coast Guard as we circled, checking for survivors. I knew there wouldn’t be any, and there weren’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
My attendance at the packed 8 AM press conference was mandatory. Chief Pointer orchestrated the show like a garrulous circus ringmaster who was getting a fat percentage of the gate. Clayton Brandt now resided in New Orleans Parish Prison, under arrest for the attempted-murder conspiracy on the life of an NOPD officer. Honey and I made sure that Detectives Mackie and Kruger took the bow; file that one under good politics in the Homicide Section. In addition, the local FBI office, in the guise of a smiling Agent Harding, had charged Brandt with numerous crimes related to illegal transshipments of weapons to embargoed countries based on files extracted from his office computers and the sworn statements of his former employees Mario and Jerry.
The arms-trafficking case, the chief hinted to the rapturous Fourth Estate members, was related to the murder of one international weapons dealer named Grigory Pelkov, shot in his Uptown home by a sniper. The chief got in a little poke at CI-3 by reminding the press of the recent drug arrest of arms dealer Nassir Haddad, a confidant of Pelkov. He emphasized that it was the hard work of NOPD detectives that broke the case, now in the hands of the FBI for further investigation. Honey took the bow on that one. There was no mention of any U.S. government “sanctioned” weapons sales. Or of the crash of a V-22 Osprey and sinking of a cargo ship in the Gulf of Mexico. Any further questions were referred to FBI CI-3 Agent Minniear, doing the best Prune-face impression I’d seen in years.
As to the dramatic closure of the Causeway Bridge and the subsequent shoot-out that left four men dead at mile marker seven—JP deputies had recovered Tong’s body at dawn—the chief trumpeted a joint NOPD/FBI task force that had stopped cold an attempt by an unnamed foreign power from obtaining super-secret American technology. I’d just moments ago given the chief Del Breaux’s laptop, and Pointer now mad
e a showy presentation of the DOD-issued computer into the hands of Harding and Ralph Salerno, who shared the credit with me. CI-3 Agent Gibbs stood off to the side; he and I looked ready to kill each other, but really I just wanted some sleep. I’d been up all night doing the post-lethal-force-shooting debriefing and paperwork dance.
The chief left out the part about one million dollars in sequentially numbered bills from the Bank of China in Beijing being logged into the porous NOPD evidence warehouse as a result of the action on the Causeway Bridge. It was no doubt one of the reasons he looked so happy.
As the press conference neared an end, Chief Pointer deftly directed all follow-up questions to Gibbs and Minniear, since they were now in charge of the “on-going investigations.”
Honey and I had officially missed the forty-eight-hour deadline to solve the murders of Del Breaux, Ty Parks, Leroy and Jimmy Jefferson, and Herbert Rondell. Not to mention Terry Blanchard, Eddie Liu, and Grigory Pelkov. Chief Pointer said nothing to me about the murders or deadline, he just happily shook my hand. I’d again escaped the mandatory post-shooting-desk-job assignment; I think he sensed I had another good headline for him if he left me alone. It struck me I was shilling for a sleazeball, but that was the deal I had made.
This was a red letter day for NOPD and Chief Pointer mugged for the cameras like the old pro he was. Solving the murders wasn’t what he cared about anyway; it was the positive headlines, the perception that NOPD was kicking ass and taking names. So in a sense, Honey and I had made the deadline after all.
That we did it on the back of Decon’s corpse was a bitter pill that I had not yet been able to swallow.
Harding and I had spoken briefly before the press conference. Her report and video documentation sent to Washington on the GIDEON espionage activities of Tan Chu and Ding Tong while under the de facto protection of CI-3 was causing major shock waves inside the D.C Beltway. CI-3 had been keeping their efforts to recover the GIDEON items hush-hush, but now that the truth was emerging, well, the long knives were really coming out. She’d be making brutal new enemies and powerful new allies, and isn’t that how it usually goes? Harding said she had already given the authentic GIDEON sample to Salerno. That and his acquisition of Breaux’s laptop insured his job as Michoud security chief would most likely be preserved; Salerno shook my hand for over thirty seconds after the press conference had finished, and invited me to lunch.
As for Global Solutions Unlimited, no doubt the government’s arms-dealing operation was already being set up with a new Pentagon point man in a new U.S. city with new CI-3 agents assigned to keep a lid on things. Business is business, after all.
Just stay out of my town.
After a triple vanilla latte, I wandered up to the Homicide Section offices and found Honey sitting at her battered desk that was covered with case files and paperwork. I sat down across from her.
“You think I’m to blame for Decon’s death.”
“No, I heard the transmissions. You tried to abort; he wanted to go for it.”
I knew Decon hit the nail on the head when we were in the van; Honey had grown fond of the guy, in her own way. Women always seem to fall for the dashing rogues. Even the kind of creepy ones.
“The Buyer’s Club is history,” I said.
“Seems to be.”
“Any chance Haddad wasn’t on his ship?”
“If you were him, would you have been?”
I nodded. Honey didn’t want to talk. Maybe she just felt empty, like I did. Well, not exactly like me; she hadn’t just killed three more people. Maybe she was disappointed with me. I couldn’t say, and I knew she wouldn’t, so I slowly stood up and moved toward the door.
“Take some time off, okay?”
“Good idea,” I said.
“And go to the hospital. Have them check you.”
I limped out knowing my first stop was a place full of people who wouldn’t be getting well anytime soon.
It all came back to the laptop. Why did Decon keep bringing a fake laptop into play with the Chinese? In his wildest dreams he knew that he would not have been allowed to keep any of the cash exchanged for either a fake sample or a fake laptop.
On the bridge as the operation went down, I’d thought he’d made a smart move, using the computer, since it couldn’t be quickly vetted one way the other. But where did he come up with a replica DOD-issued laptop so quickly? Had he somehow mocked something up after he disappeared from the Holiday Inn? The unit passed muster with Tong, who seemed to know what he was looking for as he examined the exterior sticker. That made sense, because Breaux always his laptop with him at the Michoud auctions, and Tong attended the auctions, too. But how would Decon know to duplicate such a laptop? That he simply took it upon himself to provide better bait in the Chu sting seemed less and less plausible.
Then there was the way he fought with Tong. I’d been muscling Decon around for the better part of the last five days. But he fought Tong better than I fought Tong. And he’d never ceased mouthing off about his background, claiming he’d called in air strikes and taken out wet teams in foreign countries. Had he? He said he served in the military, so his prints should have been on file in those databases, but they weren’t. He wouldn’t be the first charlatan to claim he served his country when he really hadn’t. Decon was as big of a mystery now as he was the first night Honey and I collared him.
And that’s why I found myself performing a meticulous search of his crypt crib in Greenwood Cemetery. Honey and I had gone through his stuff once, but now I painstakingly looked for hiding places and stash holds. I checked all of his garments for secret pockets or items that might be sewn into the material. I found six hundred dollars tucked into a padded backpack strap. Taped under the sarcophagus was what had to be a house key. It didn’t add up to much, so I drove out to Metairie.
I hobbled along uneven concrete sidewalk slabs in a neighborhood with a lot more bars than churches, soaked to my skin as a rain shower downpour rinsed the sweat from my arms and face and turned my bandages into soggy lumps. I walked a grid pattern, using the key I’d taken from Decon’s pants cuffs the night Honey and I collared him. He’d said it was a gate key, and I was trying it on every apartment security gate in the neighborhood. At the thirty-seventh gate the key worked, and I opened the fake wrought-iron gate to a ten-unit building that needed an exterior makeover.
His was apartment D. The key from under the sarcophagus opened it. Worn carpeting, shabby furniture, dirty dishes in the sink. A large flying cockroach took a pass at me from atop the kitchen cabinets; I swatted it with my finger splints, then crushed it under my boot as I checked the kitchen drawers.
I found cheapie day planners for the last two years, the kind you can get at a ninety-nine-cents store. Every day he had worked for the Jefferson brothers was noted along the lines of: Scrap Brothers, 7AM-5PM. I saw no entries indicating any kind of social rendezvous. A key ring held vehicle keys to an Audi sedan and a Ford Explorer parked outside in the lot.
In a shoebox in the living room on the lower shelf of the pressboard coffee table, I found a tattered white envelope stuffed with fading photographs showing a heavier Decon with short hair and no goatee in European and Asian cities, drinking a café crème on the Med, having a Beerlao in an open air bar with a pretty Asian girl on each arm, standing over a bloody corpse in a narrow street in what looked like Africa.
In dirty fatigues with no insignia I saw him smiling, crouched behind sandbags with the butt-stock of an M240 machine gun against his shoulder. Somalia? I saw him geared up for a nighttime high- altitude / low-opening jump in the open doorway of a cargo plane. And I saw him in a team photo: twelve very salty-looking operators forming two rows as they held exotic small arms and were loaded for bear like they were ready to overthrow a small country. Decon wore a Special Operations-issue helmet.
A medical discharge, he had said. Steel plates in his head, he had said. Time in the brig as a prisoner of conscience, he had said. I set the photos aside and
kept looking.
In the bedroom, in a dirty Whole Foods shopping bag—one of those canvas ones you pay a premium for in an attempt to assuage your guilt at being a consumer—I found a UPS uniform: brown shorts, brown shirt, brown baseball-type cap.
Decon had put the bomb in my refrigerator.
He was the UPS guy on my security video. It made sense that a master burglar like him could get past my locks and alarms. In the bottom of the bag, the presence of a short blond wig and theatrical facial hair-pieces confirmed this.
I didn’t stop to make assessments; I just kept looking. A mud-caked backpack in the closet contained items from J-19, a half-dozen of the black exploding ink pens, several of pager-like devices I’d seen, and three odd-looking hand grenades. He hadn’t lifted these when he was there with me. A digital camera in the backpack contained photos of the exterior and interior of J-19. The time stamps indicated he had been there earlier the same evening we had gone, so he had made two trips in one night. Maybe he was the guy who had left the doors so conveniently open.
I spotted a cell phone on the nightstand—he’d said he didn’t own one. I checked the DIALED NUMBERS folder and recognized a phone number I hadn’t called for about six months.
Suddenly, it was almost as if the room started to spin. I knocked over the bedside lamp as I backed against the wall for support, the scheme clicking into place in my mind’s eye, a veil of confusion and misinformation suddenly evaporating.
I’d been set up.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Reduced visibility from the evening’s heavy rain worked to my favor. Stabbing pain ripped through my left leg as I ran crouched through the front gate behind the limousine. I rolled right onto the wet grass and sprinted next to the black Lincoln out of the driver’s mirror’s sight lines. Everything hurt, until I just tuned out the pain, the way I’d always been able to do before. I felt very alive, and more important matters were at hand than physical pain.
