24 Declassified: 07 - Storm Force

by David S. Jacobs

  He was muttering to himself about the heat and humidity and not paying attention when suddenly a figure loomed alongside him in the driver's side.

  A glimmer of movement on his left came simultaneously with the driver's side door being yanked open. A hand reached in, grabbed Meade by the back of the neck, and hauled him bodily out of the car.

  His car was idling in drive. With his foot now off the brake pedal, the machine rolled forward several feet before bumping hard into the bumper of the minivan in front of it, which was also halted for the red light. Metal and plastic crunched, glass broke, and Meade's car bumped to a stop.

  Meade lay on the asphalt, dazed, winded, his elbows and knees scraped and his side and hip bruised. Shaking his head to clear it, he started to raise himself up on his elbows.

  Before he could do more, a gun loomed in front of his face. And not just any gun. A monster gun, a mini-machine gun whose big-bore muzzle was staring him straight in the face.

  The gun was in the hand of a medium-sized, stocky man whose head looked like a pineapple. A pineapple with red eyes. They were the only live, moving things in his rough-textured visage.

  Most likely, he'd decided on the sedan because it looked faster than the minivan.

  The minivan's driver started to get out to inspect the damage to his vehicle from the fender-bender, until he saw the man with the gun. He froze.

  The gunman hopped into the driver's seat of the gray sedan. He threw the car into reverse, backing up hard into the car behind him, smashing the headlights and front grille of the latter and crumpling the rear of the sedan.

  He was making room for his exit, pushing the car behind him backward. He executed a rubber-burning U-turn, wheeling across the yellow line into the opposite lane.

  Meade got his feet under him, scrambling to get out of the way of his own stolen car coming at him.

  The carjacker whipped the machine around 180 degrees. Tires yelped like a dog with a stepped-on tail as the gray sedan whipped around and headed away down the opposite side of the street.

  It turned right at the next intersection, scooting around the corner and out of sight.

  * * *

  Such was the tale told by Meade himself, while he was being treated in the emergency room of a nearby hospital.

  He'd been there for several hours already, in crowded corridors filled with screaming kids, groaning pain sufferers, and scared-looking loved ones, relatives, and friends. Doctors, nurses, and orderlies moved with purpose along the halls, flanking wheeled patient-laden stretchers along linoleum-floored corridors.

  Hospital security guards (unarmed) grouped in clusters at strategic points along the halls; there were also uniformed NOPD cops stationed there to help enforce the peace in this time of prestorm jitters.

  Several hundred miles from landfall, Everette was already racking up a casualty count. There were those who'd been injured during hurried preparations to escape, falling victim to stress or strain: cardiacs, panic attacks, even hernias induced by trying to tote too much away. Crimes of violence had spiked dramatically: shootings, stabbings, beatings. Abandonments, too: a number of elderly relatives, wheelchair or bedridden invalids, had been left by their families on the outskirts of the hospital grounds.

  Not least of those present was Thurlow J. Meade, who'd just finished telling his story to Jack Bauer and Pete Malo, following up the tip furnished to them by Floyd Dooley.

  A police officer on duty in the ER had originally taken Meade's statement and passed it along to headquarters; now, as the incident assumed vital importance in light of the Golden Pole massacre and manhunt, a detective stood alongside the victim, minding him until the CTU agents arrived.

  The detective, Stankey, balding and sharp-featured, wore a rumpled summer-weight suit, pale yellow shirt, and charcoal-gray tie. He said, "What with all the extra calls coming in because of the storm, this one got lost in the shuffle for a while."

  Meade was sitting on top of an examining table. He wore a hospital gown. Bandages patched his face and skinned elbows. His right ankle was taped up.

  "Do you recognize any of these men?" Jack said, using his cell phone monitor to show Meade a series of six photographs, head shots of different men. Five of the shots were ringers, the sixth was Colonel Paz. The purpose was to avoid leading the witness while certifying the validity of the identification, should any be made.

  At the last photo, the one of Paz, Meade sat up straight — an action that caused him to groan with pain — and said, "That's him! That's the guy! I'll never forget that face!"

  "Thanks, Mr. Meade, you've been very helpful," Jack said. He and Pete were already in motion, heading toward the exit.

  Meade called after them, "If you catch up to that guy, watch out for his gun. It's a big mother!"

  * * *

  CTU Center contacted the NOPD to put out an all-points bulletin on the stolen car, yielding swift results. A police patrol car found it several miles away from where it had been taken.

  Jack and Pete arrived at the locale, which was several miles north and inland from the French Quarter. It was a working-class neighborhood of small, modest houses laid out on a grid of cracked-pavement streets. The area had suffered some Katrina damage but had remained largely intact.

  A fair-sized crowd of neighborhood folk, men, women, and children, stood grouped around the gray sedan. Not many residents would evacuate this area. Few cared to leave behind their meager, hard-earned worldly goods to the tender mercies of thieves and looters. Most were staying. The area was on a gentle rise, most of it above sea level, but potentially exposed to gale force winds that could sweep the knoll clear if the storm came roaring in at full strength.

  There were lots of kids around, running in circles, dodging in and around the clusters of adults, narrowly avoiding collisions, the adults snarling at them but the kids already gone, out of reach.

  The gray sedan had been found quickly because it had been involved in another carjacking, this time of a boxy Korean-made tan-colored coupe. The sedan had cut off the coupe, blocking it and forcing it to a halt. Its gun-toting driver, who was undoubtedly Colonel Paz, had abandoned the sedan, charging the coupe on the driver's side and forcing out the two occupants, an elderly couple.

  They'd been slow on the uptake, stunned by events, and for a moment remained frozen in place in their machine.

  Paz had goosed them into action with a burst of machine-gun fire, emptying it into the side of the sedan he'd just quitted. Glass windows blew, doors cratering and crumpling under the burst. Then he waved it at the duo in the coupe. This time they got the message, piling out of their car and scuttling away.

  Paz jumped in the coupe and took off. He was long gone when the first patrol car arrived on the scene.

  Pete Malo shook his head, grinning wryly. "The Colonel is sure cutting a wide swath across town."

  Jack said, "But where's he headed? And to what purpose?"

  * * *

  New Orleans is a big city that covers a lot of ground, a crazy-quilt patchwork of neighborhoods and districts that includes such disparate walks of life as the urban cityscapes of the business and commercial precincts, the French Quarter with its Old World charm spiced with sleaze, the suburban sprawl of the Lakeview District, and such blighted zones as the lower Ninth Ward and East New Orleans.

  Sandwiched inland where the business district ends and the residential neighborhoods begin is a decaying factory-warehouse area that began running to seed a long time ago.

  A rough, scrappy patch of reclaimed marshland knit together by a spidery skein of canals, truck routes, and access roads, it features mostly warehouse buildings, transport company depots, and junkyards, aging sites mostly bordered by tall chain metal fences topped with spiraling loops of razor-sharp concertina wire.

  An eyesore for decades, it's now a full-blown industrial wasteland. Katrina had seen to that. The storm surge had swamped the area, flooding the flats. Floodwater alone is bad enough, brackish and diseased, but th
e Katrina-borne deluge had served as a kind of universal solvent, leaching out tons of chemical, oil, and sewage pollutants that had been buried underground and surfacing them.

  The citizenry called the sludge "toxic gumbo." When the waters finally receded, they left behind the residue, a noxious ooze several inches deep that contaminated all it touched.

  This area had been hard hit. The polluted residue was plain to see, a silver-gray coating resembling metallic frost that blanketed fields, lots, and canebrakes. From a distance it was oddly beautiful, like a November frost, but every piece of plant life it touched, it killed, while leaving them perfectly preserved, like museum pieces.

  Running through the middle of the badlands was a truck route, a two-lane blacktop ribbon. During the weekdays the road was lively with truck traffic, big rigs, flatbeds, deuce-and-a-half carriers, and pickups, all ferrying material to and fro.

  Saturdays, with many of the trucking companies closed for business, traffic was much less.

  Today, this Saturday, with a storm imminent, traffic was close to nonexistent.

  In the middle of this emptiness, on the west side of the north-south road, stood an abandoned gas station. A rusting marquee sign's faded letters were just barely legible to make out the name of its long-defunct off-brand: JIFFY PUMP.

  The pavement was cracked and weed-grown. The gas pumps were long gone, removed, though the underground fuel tanks remained, rusting, corroding, leaking oily residue into the subsoil. A flat-roofed cube that had once housed a combination garage and convenience store now stood with its doors and windows boarded up.

  The dreary solitude of the setting was broken by a tan coupe that scooted southbound and riverward along the roadway. It slowed as it neared the abandoned station on the west, turning into the driveway and rolling around to the back of the building.

  It was now screened from view of any other vehicles that might pass along the route.

  The car stopped, its engine chugging and gurgling for another half minute or so after the ignition had been switched off before thudding to a halt.

  Clambering out of the vehicle was Colonel Paz.

  * * *

  Take a piece of lead pipe and slam it against a hornet's nest a few times; the results are explosive. Such was the mindset of Martello Paz. The assassination attempt was the lead pipe, and the inside of his head was the hornet's nest.

  He was buzzing, electric with fury. Red eyes rolled in the dark, lumpish mask of his face. His machine pistol was clutched in one hand. He was dangerously low on ammo, with barely a few rounds left in the sole remaining clip.

  Somewhat the worse for wear, he'd lost his hat, his clothes were filthy and torn from rolling around on sidewalk and street scrambling for cover during the shootout, and his body was bruised, sore, and aching. Otherwise, though, he'd come out of the kill zone pretty much unscathed.

  He talked to himself, maintaining a running monologue under his breath. "All those bullets flying and not a mark on me! That's because my guardian saint is looking after me. Saint Barbara! She protects her favorite son!"

  In his way, Paz was a religious man: a diabolist. Like many narco traffickers and killers, he looked to the spirits of the invisible world for protection in this one. His was not so uncommon a belief in the violent underworld, the vida loca of South American drug cartels, where a trafficker must fear his rivals, his allies, and the police, while the ever-present fear of betrayal, torture, and violent death hangs miasmalike over the milieu.

  A trafficker seeks to up his odds of survival any way he can. That includes help from the beyond, the domain of spirits, ghosts and phantasms; the dark world of devils, demons and dark gods. Many pistoleros take to the practice of magic, witchcraft, the invoking of presences and spirits for supernatural protection against earthly foes.

  Paz's guardian spirit was Saint Barbara, traditionally the patron saint of gunpowder, a Christian icon who in the realms of voodoo and Santeria stood for Ogun, the god of war.

  Around his neck, strung on a thin chain, Paz wore a medallion stamped with the image of the saint, a vital protective talisman that had been blessed by a powerful bruja, or witch.

  Paz reached into the top of his shirt, wrapping a hand around the medallion of Saint Barbara and squeezing it as he made a sacred vow to the deity.

  "I, Martello Paz, give thanks for deliverance from my enemies. I will send many souls to serve You in the afterlife, I promise You that, and You know that is one promise that Paz never fails to keep. There will be blood... "

  * * *

  Paz set about turning sacred vows into secular reality. He had already been surprised once today; it would not happen again. Gun in hand, he prowled around the site, making sure it was as lonely and abandoned as it looked. Doors remained locked; the plywood boards covering plate-glass windows were intact and untouched.

  He'd just completed his survey when he glimpsed a blur of motion to the north.

  He ducked behind the rear of the building, out of sight, peeking around the corner.

  Instinct had proved right, as he now observed a police car driving south along the road.

  Paz at this moment was in no mood to be trifled with by anybody. If the lawmen were on his trail, it would be just too bad for them. However few rounds he had left in his machine pistol's clip, he'd put them to good use. When the bullets ran out, he still had his bare hands. He was Paz, Martello Paz.

  The stolen car was parked behind the back of the station, which should hide it from casual observers passing by along the road.

  The oncoming police car was in no hot pursuit; its emergency lights and flashers were dark. It rolled past the Jiffy Pump ghost station and kept on going, not slowing down, rolling southbound and away until it was out of sight.

  "Lucky for you, bastardos," Paz said to the rear of the police car as it dwindled in the distance, becoming a blur, then a dot, then winking out into nothingness. He spat in their direction.

  He lingered long enough to note that there was a light but steady flow of traffic on the road. Generally, at any one time, it was never empty; there were always a few vehicles following it north and south. He saw no immediate threat implicit in that fact.

  Restless, he prowled around the back of the lot, making sure there were no homeless derelicts, winos, or bums encamped in the brush, and no youngsters exploring the nearby polluted creeks and fields. If any witnesses saw him making use of the station hideout, he'd kill them. Which bothered him not at all, but hiding the bodies afterward would be real work, especially in the suffocating heat, already oppressive at this hour of the morning.

  The station building was a flat-roofed blockhouse consisting of two parts, an office/convenience store area and the larger section, a two-bay garage. The outer shell of the station was faced with white ceramic tiles, now faded to a dingy gray, set in a grid pattern. The plate-glass window display area was encased behind sheets of nailed-up plywood. All other windows, large and small, were also boarded up.

  Paz went around to the rear door. It was made of solid metal, with a door handle but no keyhole.

  He reached around to the left door frame, at about chest height, probing and feeling around the tiles and the grouting until he felt one tile move under his touch. He pushed in on it, hard. A metallic clicking sound came from within; he'd tripped some kind of concealed internal locking mechanism.

  The tile under his fingertips was mounted on a hinged metal square plate. With the release tripped, the hinge-mounted tile flipped up, jutting at right angles to the wall. Beneath it lay a hidden recess containing a numerical keypad.

  Paz's stubby, strangler's fingers punched out a six-digit numerical code number and pressed enter. Triggering an electronic impulse that released a concealed locking mechanism in the door. The bolt retracted, unsealing the door.

  Paz opened it, stepping aside as a blast of hot, stale air wafted out. It reminded him of the "hot box" cells he'd used back in the Venezuelan jungles, penning prisoners in them for days and weeks
at a time to break them; or, having broken them, to let them rot in their own filth.

  * * *

  Light shone through the doorway, illuminating the office side of the building. A long wooden counter ran down the long axis of the space, dividing it in half. The countertop bore a faded imprint of where a cash register had once sat, back when the station was actually a going concern.

  The front of the building had featured a large plate-glass window front and glass door. They'd been painted black and encased from within with metal grilles. Thieves would need heavy-duty equipment to break in, deterring kids, crackheads, and all but the most determined burglars.

  A pall of dust covering the floor was undisturbed. No one had entered the hideout since he'd last been here over a month ago.

  He set his gun down on the counter. Stacked under it were supplies, boxes of dried foods that would keep forever, stacks of half-gallon containers of bottled water. Not to mention other, vital creature comforts, such as a humidor of top-quality Cuban cigars. And adult beverages.

  He hauled out a cardboard carton containing four bottles of rum. Dark Jamaican rum. He pulled one out, broke the seal on it, unscrewed the cap, and took a long pull from it. It poured liquid fire down his gullet into his belly, then all through the rest of him. It felt good, nerving him with energy.

  He followed up with several more solid belts, leaving the bottle half empty when he set it down. He let out his breath in a long sigh: "Ahhhh... "

  For the first time since the gunfire at dawn, he finally felt like he had time to catch his breath.

  * * *

  Martello Paz had come up in a hard league and had never forgotten it. He'd come far and risen high, but it could all vanish in the blink of an eye. The wheel of fortune throws down as capriciously as it lifts up. The regime that prized his services today might seek to liquidate him tomorrow.