Predator: A Crossbow Novel

by Wilbur Smith

  If Weiss had been trying to impress Congo with the gravity of his situation, he failed. The big man’s face twisted into a ghastly, wounded parody of a smile. “Man, that was a sweet operation, though, wasn’t it?” he said.

  Weiss kept his expression impassive. “I’m an officer of the law, Johnny, I can’t congratulate you on what was obviously a criminal activity. But, yes, speaking objectively I can see that both the planning and the execution of the escape were carried out to a high standard of efficiency.”

  “Right. So how efficient you gonna be for me now?”

  Shelby Weiss was wearing a $5,000 pair of hand-tooled Black Cabaret Deluxe boots from Tres Outlaws in El Paso. His suit came from Gieves and Hawkes at No. 1 Savile Row, London. His shirts were made for him in Rome. He ran his hand down the lapel of his jacket and said quietly, “I didn’t get to be dressed this way by being bad at my job. I’ll tell you what I’m going to attempt—the impossible. I’ll call in every favor I’m owed, use every connection I possess, have my smartest associates go through every case they can think of with a fine-toothed comb, see if I can find some grounds for an appeal. I’ll work my ass off, right up to the very last second. But I like to be totally honest with my clients, which is why I’ve got to tell you, I don’t hold out much hope.”

  “Huh,” Congo grunted. “All right, I’m on your wavelength . . .” He stood up straight, sighed and lifted his chained wrists so he could scratch the back of his neck. Then he spoke calmly, dropping the tough-guy, gangster attitude, almost as if he was talking to himself as much as Weiss. “All my life I’ve had people look at me and I know they’re thinking: He’s just a big, dumb nigger. The amount of times I’ve been called a gorilla—sometimes, they even think it’s a compliment. Like in High School, playing left tackle for the Nacogdoches Golden Dragons, Coach Freeney, he would say, ‘You played like a rampaging gorilla today, Congo,’ meaning I’d busted up the sons of bitches in the other team’s defense, so some pretty-boy cracker quarterback could make his fancy throws and get all the cheerleaders wet. And I’d say, ‘Thank you, Coach,’ practically calling him ‘Massa.’”

  Now Congo’s intensity started building up again. “But inside, I knew I wasn’t dumb. Inside I knew I was better than them. And inside, right now, I understand exactly where I stand. So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to contact a kid I used to know, D’Shonn Brown.”

  Weiss looked surprised: “What, the D’Shonn Brown?”

  “What you mean? Only one guy I’ve ever heard of by that name.”

  “Just that D’Shonn Brown is kind of a prodigy. A kid from the projects, not even thirty yet and he’s already on his way to his first billion. Good-looking as hell, got a great story, all the pretty ladies lining up outside his bedroom. That’s some friend you got there.”

  “Well, tell the truth, it’s been a while since I saw him, so I ain’t fully up to date with his situation, but he’ll know exactly who I am. Tell him the date they’re taking me up to Huntsville for the execution. Then say I’d really like to see him, you know, maybe for a visit or something, before they put me on that gurney and give me the needle. Me and his brother Aleutian were real tight. Loot got killed in London, England, and it was Cross that done it. So we got that personal issue in common, losing a loved one to the same killer. I’d like to express my sympathies to D’Shonn, shake his hand, maybe give him a bear hug so he knows we’re tight too.”

  “You know that won’t be possible,” Weiss pointed out. “The state of Texas no longer allows Death Row prisoners to have any form of physical contact with anyone. The best he can do is pay his respects to your body, when you are gone.”

  “Well, tell him anyhow. Let him know what I’d like. Now, I can give you a power of attorney over a bank account, right, to pay for legal expenses and suchlike?”

  “Yes, that’s possible.”

  “OK, so I have an account at a private bank, Wertmuller-Maier in Geneva. I’m gonna give you the account number and all the codes you’ll need. First thing I want you to do is get someone to empty my safe-deposit box there and send it back to you, express delivery. I want the box unlocked and then sealed, with wax or some shit like that, so it can’t be tampered with. Then withdraw three million dollars from my account. Two mill’s for you, like a down payment on account. The other mill’s for D’Shonn. Give him the deposit box too; he can open it. Tell him it’s personal memorabilia, shit that means a lot to me, and I want it buried with me in my coffin. I’m talking about my coffin, ’cause I want D’Shonn to organize my funeral service and the wake afterward, make it a real event folks ain’t ever gonna forget. Ask him from me to get all the folks from back in the day, when we was all boys in the hood, to come along and see me off, pay their respects. Tell him I’d really appreciate it. Can you do that?”

  “A million dollars, just for a funeral and a wake?” Weiss asked.

  “Hell, yeah, I want a procession of hearses and limos, a service in, like, a cathedral or something, and a slap-up party, celebrate my time here on earth: caviar and prime ribs to eat, Cristal and Grey Goose at the bar, all that good shit. Listen, a million’s nothing. I read that geeky little mother started up Facebook spent ten mill on his wedding. Come to think of it, Shelby, make it two mill for D’Shonn. Tell him to lay it on real thick.”

  “If that’s what you want, sure, I can do that.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I want, and impress upon him that this is the wish of a dying man. That’s some serious shit, right?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Well, you make sure he understands that.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “OK, so here’s what you’ll need to get into that account.” Congo recited an account number, a name and then a long series of apparently random letters and numbers. Shelby Weiss wrote it down meticulously in his notebook, and then looked up.

  “OK, I have got all that down. Is there anything else you want to tell me?” he asked.

  “Nothing else.” Johnny shook his head. “Just come back when you have done everything I told you.”

  Aleutian Brown had been a gangbanger. He ran with the Maalik Angels, who liked to present themselves as warriors of Allah, though most of them would have struggled to read a comic book, let alone the Koran. But Aleutian’s kid brother D’Shonn was a very different proposition. He’d had it just as tough as Aleutian growing up, he was just as angry at the world, and was just as mean an individual. The difference was, he hid it a whole lot better and was smart enough to learn from what happened to his brother and all the homies he’d hung out with. Most of them were in jail or in the ground.

  So D’Shonn worked hard, stayed out of trouble and made it into Baylor on an academic scholarship. On graduating, he won another full scholarship to Stanford Law School, where he took a particular interest in criminal law. Having graduated with honors, and breezed through the California state bar exam, D’Shonn Brown was perfectly placed to choose a stellar career path, either as a defense attorney, or a hotshot young prosecutor in a DA’s office. But his purpose in studying the law had always been to better equip himself to break it. He saw himself as a twenty-first-century Godfather. So in public he presented himself as a rising star in the business community, with a strong interest in charitable activities: “I just want to give back,” as he used to say to admiring reporters. And in private, he pursued his interests in drug-dealing, extortion, human-trafficking and prostitution.

  D’Shonn understood at once that there was a clear subtext to Johnny Congo’s message. He was certain Shelby Weiss could see it too, but there was a game to be played so that both men could deny, on oath, that their conversation had been about anything other than a condemned man’s desire for a fancy funeral. But just the way Johnny had emphasized that he wanted D’Shonn to see him and to hug him before he died, the way he’d talked about all the vehicles he wanted to be in the procession—well, you didn’t need to be an A-grade student to see what that was all about.

  Still,
if Johnny Congo wanted the world to think D’Shonn’d been asked to organize a funeral and wake, well, that’s what he was going to do. Having accessed the full $2 million allocated to him from Johnny Congo’s Geneva account he decided that an event on the scale Johnny had in mind couldn’t be held in his home town of Nacogdoches. So he made inquiries at a number of Houston’s most prestigious cemeteries before securing a lakeside plot at a place called Sunset Oaks, where the grass was as immaculate as a fairway at Augusta and gently rippling waters sparkled in the sun. A fine marble headstone was ordered. Several of the city’s most prestigious and expensive florists, caterers and party venues, including a number of five-star hotels, were then presented with lavish specifications and invited to tender for contracts.

  All these inquiries were accompanied by supporting emails and phone calls. When deals were agreed, printed contracts were hand-delivered by messengers so that there could be no doubt that they reached their destinations and were received. Deposits were paid and properly accounted for. More than 200 invitations were sent. Anyone who wanted to see evidence of a genuine intention to fulfil the stated wishes of Johnny Congo would be presented with more than they could handle.

  But while all this was going on, D’Shonn was also having private, unrecorded conversations about very different matters connected to Jonnny Congo as he played around at the Golf Club of Houston, where he had a Junior Executive membership; lunched on flounder sashimi and jar-jar duck at Uchi; or dined on filet mignon Brazilian-style at Chama Gaúcha. Leaving no written record whatever, he handed over large amounts of cash to intermediaries who passed the thick wads of dead presidents on to the kind of men whose only interest in funerals lies in supplying the dead bodies. These individuals were then told to coordinate their activities via Rashad Trevain, a club-owner whose House of Rashad holding company was 30 percent owned by the DSB Investment Trust, registered in the Cayman Islands.

  D’Shonn Brown was known to take no active part in the running of Rashad’s business. When he was photographed at the opening of yet another new joint, he’d tell reporters, “I’ve been tight with Rashad since we were skinny-ass little kids in first grade. When he came to me with his concepts for a new approach to upscale entertainment it was my pleasure to invest. It’s always good to help a friend, right? Turned out my man is about as good at his job as I am at mine. He’s doing great, all his customers are guaranteed a good time, and I’m getting a great return on my money. Everyone’s happy.”

  Except for anyone who crossed D’Shonn or Rashad, of course. They weren’t happy at all.

  Engines to neutral. Anchors away!” In the Atlantic Ocean, 100 miles off the northern coast of Angola, Captain Cy Stamford brought the FPSO Bannock A to rest in 4,000 feet of water. Of all the vessels in the Bannock Oil fleet, this one had the least imaginative or evocative name, and she didn’t look any better than she sounded. A mighty supertanker may not possess the elegance of an America’s Cup racing yacht, but there is something undeniably magnificent about its awesome size and presence, something majestic about its progress across the world’s mightiest oceans. Bannock A was certainly built to supertanker scale. Her hull was long and wide enough to accommodate three stadium-sized professional soccer pitches laid end-to-end. Her tanks could hold around 100 million gallons of oil, weighing in at over 300,000 imperial tons. But she was as graceless as a hippo in a tutu.

  The day he took command, Stamford had Skyped his wife, back home in Norfolk, Virginia. “How long’ve I been doing this, Mary?” he asked.

  “Longer than either of us care to think about, dear,” she replied.

  “Exactly. And in all that time I don’t think I ever set to sea in an uglier tub than this one. Even her mother couldn’t love her.”

  The veteran skipper, who had spent more than forty years in the U.S. Navy and the Merchant Marine, was speaking no more than the truth. With her blunt, shorn-off bows and box-like hull Bannock A resembled nothing more than a cross between a gigantic barge and a grossly oversized container. To make matters worse, her decks were covered from end to end with a massive superstructure of steel pipes, tanks, columns, boilers, cranes and cracking units, with what looked like a chimney, well over 100 feet tall and surrounded by a web of supporting girders, painted red and white, rising from the stern.

  Yet there was a reason that the board of Bannock Oil had sanctioned the expenditure of more than $1 billion to have this huge floating eyesore constructed at the Hyundai shipyards in Ulsan, South Korea, and then appointed their most experienced captain to command her on a maiden voyage of more than 12,000 miles. As FPSO Bannock A made her slow, cumbersome way through the Korean Straits and into the Yellow Sea, then on across the South China Sea; past Singapore and through the Malacca Straits to the Indian Ocean; all the way to the Cape of Good Hope and then around into the Atlantic and up the west coast of Africa, the moneymen in Houston had been counting down the days to payback time. For the initials FPSO stood for “floating production, storage and offloading” and they described a kind of alchemy. Very soon Bannock A would start taking up the oil produced by the rig that stood about three miles north of where she now lay at anchor; the first to come into operation on the Magna Grande oilfield that Bannock Oil had discovered more than two years earlier. Up to 80,000 barrels a day would be piped to Bannock A’s onboard refinery, which would distil the thick, black crude into a variety of highly saleable substances from lubricating oil to gasoline. Then she would store the various products in her tanks ready for Bannock Oil tankers to take them on to the final destinations. The total anticipated production of the Magna Grande field was in excess of 200 million barrels. Unless the world suddenly lost its taste for petrochemicals, Bannock Oil could expect a total return in excess of $20 billion.

  So Bannock A was going to earn her keep many, many times over. And it wouldn’t be long now before she got right down to work.

  Hector Cross unclipped the leather top of the Thermos hip flask, removed the stainless steel stirrup cup contained within it, unscrewed the stopper, poured the steaming hot Bullshot into the cup, and drank. He gave a deep sigh of pleasure. The rain had stayed away, which always had to be considered a mercy in Scotland, and there had even been a few glorious shafts of sunlight, slicing through the clouds and illuminating the trees that clustered along the riverbank, creating a glorious mosaic of leaves, some still holding on to the greens of summer, while others were already glowing with the reds, oranges and yellow of autumn.

  It had been a good morning. Cross had only caught a couple of the Atlantic salmon that accumulated in the Tay’s lower reaches during the late summer and early autumn, one of them a respectable but by no means spectacular thirteen-pounder, but that hardly mattered. He had been out in the open, out on the water, surrounded by the glorious Perthshire landscape, with nothing to trouble his mind but the business of finding the spots where the salmon were resting, and the looping rhythm of the Spey casts that sent his fly out to the precise point where he thought the fish might best be lured into a bite. All morning he’d been filled with the sheer joy of life, chasing the dark demons of the night away, but now, as he took a bite from the sandwich the castle cook had provided for him, Cross found his mind drifting back to his nightmare.

  It was the fear he had felt that astonished him: the kind of terror that liquefies a man’s limbs and tightens his throat so that he can barely move or even breathe. Only once in his life had he known anything like it: the day when, as a lad of sixteen, he had joined the hunting party of young Maasai boys, sent out to prove their manhood by hunting down an old lion that had been driven out of his pride by a younger, stronger male. Naked but for a black goatskin cloak and armed with nothing more than a rawhide shield and a short stabbing spear, Cross had stood in the center of the line of boys as they confronted the great beast, whose huge, erect mane burned gold in the light of the African sun. Perhaps because of his position, or because his pale skin caught the lion’s eye more easily than the black limbs to either side, Cr
oss had been the one whom the lion charged. Though dread had almost overwhelmed him, Cross had not just stood his ground, but stepped forward to meet the lion’s final, roaring leap with the razor point of his spear.

  Though he had been given his first gun when he was still a small boy and hunted from that moment on, the lion had been Cross’s first true kill. He could still feel and smell the heart blood that had gushed on to his body from the mortally wounded lion’s mouth, could still remember the elation that came from confronting death and overcoming it. That moment had made him the warrior he had always dreamed of being, and he had pursued the calling ever since, first as an officer in the SAS and then as the boss of Cross Bow Security.

  There had been times when his actions had been called into question. His military career had come to an abrupt halt after he had shot three Iraqi insurgents who had just detonated a roadside bomb that had killed half a dozen of Cross’s troopers. He and his surviving men had tracked the bombers down, captured them and forced them to surrender. The motley trio were just emerging from their hideout with their hands in the air when one of them reached inside his robe. Cross had no idea what the insurgent might have in there: a knife, a gun, or even a suicide vest whose detonation would blow them all to kingdom come. He had a fraction of a second in which to make a decision. His first thought was for the safety of his own men, so he fired his Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, and blew all three Iraqis away. When he examined their still-warm bodies, all of them were unarmed.