RW12 - Vengeance

by Richard Marcinko

  “Not yet.” Cutting the plasterboard was harder than I’d thought it would be. I couldn’t go fast and be quiet at the same time, so I opted for quiet. The Emergency Response people were shifting above us, ready to swing down on their ropes like a troop of monkeys. Two teams were waiting near the front of the bank. If things went to shit, they could blow the window and get inside in a hurry—probably just in time to ID the dead bodies on the floor.

  The temperature in the elevator shaft had to be close to a hundred. Sweat poured out of me, even my eyeballs.

  “I hope the scumbags don’t decide to use the ladies’ room instead of the men’s,” I said.

  “What kind of perverts do you think we have in New York?” Capel asked as I knifed pieces of the wall away. “Our scumbags are high class.”

  Obviously bank robber/hostage takers had one union, Peeping Toms another.

  Finally, I got some daylight through the wall. I made a peephole and stuck a small, telescoping cam through and had a look-see. I worked it through, then connected the viewer.

  Things had been far too easy to this point, so I wasn’t surprised when the layout of the restroom turned out to be different than what we’d seen in the one upstairs before scoping the plan. Rather than being at the back end of the room, hidden from view by a stall, the opening I had just cut sat exactly opposite the door to the room. Something had been moved during construction, and anyone opening the door would have an unobstructed view of yours truly pulling tiles out of the way.

  I pulled the scope out and told Capel I was just about ready. He signaled the scene commander, and in a few seconds I could hear the rattle of a jackhammer starting up across the street. It was meant more as a diversion than to cover the noise I was making. I continued as quietly and carefully as I could, scoring and pulling off the tiles one by one. Capel slid down beside me—a tight fit; you couldn’t have gotten a fart between us. He hunched over as I pulled a large section of wallboard back like a folding closet door.

  As I slipped inside the room I heard footsteps in the hall. Three quick strides got me across to the door. I pushed back against the wall as the door opened. At this point, I wasn’t thinking about anything, I was just reacting. I grabbed the person who walked through the door, hand clamped as hard as I could on her mouth, and pulled her back against the wall with me. We stayed frozen there for a second. I expected one or more of the hostage takers to be right behind her, which would have meant Capel would have blown his head off. All hell would have broken loose next, our carefully laid plans blown to hell by an untimely need to pee.

  But the door swung closed and nothing happened. Capel came up, finger on his lips. I felt the woman nodding. As gently as I could, I turned her sideways, my hand still on her mouth.

  “We need you to be very quiet. We’re with the police,” I said.

  She nodded.

  I took my hand away. Her face was as white as a skeleton.

  “Go to the bathroom,” I told her. “Go ahead.”

  Hey, everything in its place.

  Capel took the door. I went back to the wall and pulled enough away to make it easier for the ninja boys, who were still slipping through. Our hostage had a full audience when she came out to wash her hands.

  “How many kidnappers?” I asked, my voice in a whisper.

  “Two.”

  “Describe them.”

  “Unshaven. Jeans. One’s about your height but real skinny. Other is around five-eight, five-ten.” She told me that they were in the room at the front of the bank with six employees and three customers. The customers would be easy to ID—they were all older women. The male employees were betterdressed than the bad guys, but all were about the second guy’s height.

  Of course, there was one easy way to tell them apart—the bad guys had guns. She’d seen three pistols.

  “They came in with a backpack,” I said. “Are there explosives?”

  “They put money in there.”

  “They mess around with the computers?”

  “Not that I saw. They’ve been in that front area there the whole time.”

  That eliminated the possibility that it was anyone involved with the computer. Whether it was my friend Shadow remained to be seen.

  “All right,” I told her. “I think we can work with this. Come on.” I turned her toward the door.

  “You want me to go back out there?”

  “If you don’t, they’re going to know something’s up,” I explained. “We need to get the full SWAT team into the hallway so we can get them. If one of them catches us in the hall, the other will shoot the hostages.”

  “You want me to go back out there?” she repeated.

  “It’s the safest way for your friends.”

  “Not for me.”

  “No, not for you.”

  I could see her thinking about. It was a tough choice. Here she was safe. Out there, who the fuck knew?

  “All right,” she said. Her jaw quivered a little bit, but she clenched her teeth and set it. “Be careful,” she added, starting for the door. I grabbed her arm.

  “Hold on just a second. We’re coming with you,” I told her. I worked out a little routine with her: she’d open the door, scan the hall to make sure it was clear, then give us a yea or nay. Yea meant we’d come up after her, moving to the edge of the hall, where a pair of copy machines would provide some cover. She’d continue into the bank area, which was to the right. Nay meant we’d wait for her to get up to the front. Then we’d go back to our original plan, snaking the scope out from under the door and waiting until the hall was clear. We’d make our move from the top of the hall one way or the other.

  Of course, she wasn’t going to say “yea” or “nay.” She’d cough for yea and do nothing for nay.

  We gave the ninjas the setup and went for it.

  I was pushing out the door for her when the commander started screaming in my ear about letting the hostage back out there. He had a real hang-up with that; it was apparently against department procedure or some other fucking piece of paper. I just ignored him, listening for Mary’s “yea.”

  She gave a nice polite cough. Capel and I slipped out, guns ready. The emergency response boys were right behind us as we moved up to the edge of the hall, slipping behind the copy machines.

  I slipped behind the copy machines. Capel slipped against the copy machines. And somehow when he slipped, the dork managed to hit the copy buttons on both machines. Both started spitting out paper.

  Doom on you, Capel. What a time to become a spaz.

  Doom on us, I mean.

  I could hear someone cursing down the hall. Mary yelped. Footsteps.

  “Go!” I hissed as Mary turned the corner. Then I shouted “Down!” real loud. As I did that I was extending my arm and firing the P7 point-blank into the soft spot right above the medium-size hostage taker’s ear.

  One shot. Fuck me if I need more at that range.

  By the time the blood began splattering I was charging down the corridor. A flash-bang—two flash-bangs, three—whapped at the front of the bank. A big hulk appeared in front of me, thick Glock in his hand, screaming girl shielding his chest.

  Then in the blink of an eye, he threw down the gun and surrendered, begging me to send him to prison, where he would mend the error of his ways, find Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and go forth and change the world with his unselfish acts of kindness and contrition.

  Yeah, right. In my dreams, maybe.

  Or his.

  Chapter

  12

  Goon and I looked at each other for maybe one one-hundredth of a second. Neither one of us liked what he saw.

  The bad guy took the first shot. I took the one that killed him.

  Note to hostage takers: if you’re going to use a human shield, pick one that’s as tall as you are. My bullet took Goon square in the forehead. The slime flew backward, pulling the woman with him. By the time he hit the ground, ninjas were all around. I think they were pissed th
at I’d taken all their fun, but they had the manners not to show it. They scurried forward to get the hostages.

  Brandy wasn’t with them. Something clutched at my throat, and the scumbag Angel of Death screamed that he’d won another round.

  “There,” said Capel, pointing toward the manager’s office.

  I spun, gun ready.

  Brandy stood up slowly; the manager followed. They’d hidden there the whole time, miraculously undiscovered by the slimebags. We had a quick reunion.

  “I’m okay, Dick,” she whispered. “Really, I’m okay.”

  “I know you are,” I told her.

  “Stick to the script?” she asked. Two of the ninjas came in behind me.

  “Absolutely.”

  Capel, meanwhile, had gone over to the men I’d shot.

  “Just punks, I think,” said Capel. “We’ll know soon, though.”

  They had driver’s licenses; he snapped pictures of the IDs as well as their faces with his tiny digital camera, then pulled out his cell phone and called a police contact who was deep in debt to his favorite bank. We knew that both men were native New Yorkers with good-size rap sheets before the investigators had even been let into the building.

  I made it outside just in time to see Trace land a kick in the crotch of a swarthy fellow across the street. The next kick was better—a running roundhouse to the head that sent him ricocheting against the side of a nearby building. I was enjoying myself too much, I guess; it took me a second to realize that the cops running up to her weren’t there to assist her but to stop her. Bad move. Before I could get off the sidewalk both policemen were reeling on the pavement, and Trace had finished His Swarthiness off with a heel at the top of the head.

  I yelled and waved my hands, trying to get Trace’s attention, as well as that of the three officers who’d pulled their pistols out and were running to the assistance of their comrades on the ground. Fortunately, Capel was right behind me, and one of the cops recognized him. We managed to calm things down without anyone else getting hurt. The police wanted an explanation; I trotted out the words “national security matter,” but that didn’t mollify them much. However, some of the SWAT team boys were just emerging from the bank, and when they started loudly congratulating us, the wariness of their NYPD brethren dissipated.

  His Swarthiness was sleeping rather peacefully, and thus had no objection to a thorough search. When said search produced a weapon in his waistband—a Walther P5 Compact, which, as the name implies, is a very small gun—the cops were positively joyous. The weapon made His Swarthiness a criminal suspect in their eyes, as New York’s gun laws make it extremely difficult for anyone to legally carry a weapon unless they’re sworn law officers or federal officials such as moi and the rest of my Homeland Insecurity team. But charging His Swarthiness with a crime complicated things for us; the reason Trace had attacked him was that she believed he was one of Shadow’s minions.

  Trace had noticed him and two other similarly shady fellows lurking about when Capel and I went into the police station, and, in her opinion, they were much more interested in us than in the hostage situation—so much so that they had used a small set of opera glasses still in His Swarthiness’s pocket. They had surged forward with the crowd, turning around immediately when I came out and glancing back surreptitiously.

  I wanted a chance to talk with His Swarthiness ourselves, perhaps employing techniques of persuasiveness beyond those permitted our blue-coated brethren. I ended up playing public defender with the police, arguing that he shouldn’t be charged and that there were dozens of possible reasons that he might have a gun. I even suggested that he be released to my custody.

  I’d have made a lousy lawyer. They packed him in and scooted him away to be booked while he was still unconscious. I called over to Sean, who, besides Capel, was the member of the team most likely to speak police-eze. “Stay with him,” I told Sean. “Tell them you think he’s Bosnian. Suggest they talk to immigration. I’ll call you with more information as soon as I can.”

  I called Cox to tell him we’d made the switch—and that we needed some leverage with NYPD.

  “Already? Shit. Great!”

  That’s what I like in a superior: confusion, followed by wild enthusiasm.

  Cox agreed to hop on the phone and see what he could do about getting the thug released into our custody, or at least get Homeland Insecurity allowed into the interrogations. In the meantime, Capel began pulling strings of his own. It was, however, the last favor I could ask of him. He had a business to run, and had already been more than generous with me. I told him that straight out, and while he protested that he’d give me another twenty years if I needed it, we both knew that he really needed to get back to his office before his presence was missed in a big way. He let me keep some of the Shadow watch team on the job, another favor I’ll never be able to repay at Christmas.

  Sometime that afternoon, Doc checked in with more information from the French security service. The Frenchies had been pretty forthcoming, partly because Cox had made nice with their honchos, mostly because Danny Barrett had cut through some red tape for them and come up with a DNA sample on the dead man. Their labs hadn’t had a chance to cinch the ID and wouldn’t for a while. French bureaucracy is several times worse than ours, and there was no way they would get solid information for at least three months, even on a rush job. They weren’t even sure they had a sample from Pierre. But everything else about the body matched.

  The French information had to be translated and decoded, and not just with the help of Tiffany’s masterful French. The thing to understand about Frenchmen is that they think the Eiffel Tower is the center of the universe, and that everybody loves their wine. I once had a few hours to kill in Paris and stopped in at a war museum there. Wandering around among the displays, I came across a giant map of D-Day, which showed pretty definitively how the French had saved the invasion and set the stage for the liberation of Europe. Pretty much told me all I needed to know about the French.

  Foreign filters removed, the basic information came down to this: Shitheads for Allah smuggled people into France from a variety of locations in the Middle East. There were several routes, but all involved the successor republics to the former Yugoslavia. The people would be brought into the country—usually Bosnia—and then given fake identity papers. These usually claimed that they were contract workers for NATO sent on a relief mission by France. The papers were decent forgeries, but the relief missions had pretty good local identity procedures, and the odds were that the phony papers would have been spotted as such by anyone in-country. They also didn’t substitute for passports or travel documents, which were checked pretty carefully (or at least might be) at the borders of Bosnia, et al. Shitheads for Allah therefore packed the people into trucks and got them out of the country, depositing them by a circuitous route—as yet unknown to the French—in France itself. There the people would stay with relatives or friends for a while until they were deemed ready to go “above ground.” At that point, they would begin to gather legitimate documents, usually starting with a driver’s license, based on the work documents. The usual spiel was that they had lost all of their official documents somewhere, but had managed to find the papers from their last job. The key was getting the first real piece of paper, be it a license or job certificate or whatever. From there, they could build an identity trail much as one would do in America. The papers were a bit different, but once you had one you could get the rest.

  See why giving away photo ID licenses to any immigrant who wants one without a system of checking is less than intelligent? Not to mention that some states include automatic voter registration in the packet. Just remember to vote before you blow us up.

  Shitheads for Allah had other sidelines in France, including selling cheap guns and other weapons to their former clients. A very vertical and enterprising organization, which, at least from the way the French described it, was more interested in lucre than the word of the Prophet. The
source of the cheap guns, used in at least two murders in Paris over the past year, and countless robberies, was not the former Yugoslavia; those weapons were not dependable or reliable enough to be used by dedicated criminals. American and German weapons were greatly preferred. Makes sense to me. On the other hand, surplus war matériel—the French specifically suspected Semtex, the plastique explosive originally manufactured in the Czech Republic—might be heading out in the other direction, perhaps to terrorists or others of that ilk.

  But why send a Frenchman who looked Asian as an undercover agent into the organization?

  A reasonable question, and one that Doc asked. The answer was that they hadn’t, at least not at first. Pierre had been working on a different smuggling case the year before involving the importation of cut flowers. Apparently there are a lot of euros in daffodils, as long as you don’t have to fill out the paperwork. Doc figured the French weren’t telling him the whole truth about this. It seemed likely that the flowers were a cover for a drug operation from Asia, since, on a pound for pound basis, heroin brings a better profit margin than unprocessed flora. I agreed, but that was all irrelevant to us. At some point, Pierre found himself dealing with Shitheads for Allah and just went with the flow. Within a few months he was in pretty deep. After aborting several business deals, he and his handlers decided he better let one go through or the rest of the group would become suspicious, so he went to America to set up one.

  “A very big risk,” the official had told Doc in heavily accented English. He shook his head ominously.

  “So why the hell did they let him go?” I asked Doc.

  “I got the impression they had no choice. They left him on a pretty loose leash, basically for his own protection. Makes sense.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s also a contract guy. Had some military experience, supposedly, though I haven’t been able to pick that up. Unit on his resumé was disbanded.”

  A lot of intelligence agencies these days use contract agents for special jobs for a variety of reasons. One is that they simply don’t have the manpower to do the job their governments want them to do, and for some reason the bean counters find it easier to justify hiring temp workers than putting on full-timers. It can also be easier to accommodate people with a wide range of skills. And most important, your conscience doesn’t pang quite as badly if they get popped.