“Charlie, this is me you’re talking to.”
“You heard me, John. Do yourself a favor.”
“Do me a favor or you a favor? Come on, Charlie, who’s leaning on you?”
“John, I’ve been made to understand that you’re not a well man. Officially, you’re operating in violation of duty regulations. I know that no one values those rules more than you. I’m officially taking you off active duty. As of now, consider yourself on paid leave.”
“This is my turf, Charlie. I’ve been keeping the peace here for over thirty years. Something happens on my turf, it’s my business to clear it up.”
“Bill McBride’s on his way up now. He wants to have a little talk with you.”
“About what?” asked Franciscus, copping an attitude.
“About me taking your badge and your gun for good. Then you can pay for your bypass yourself! Or you can drop dead!”
“Who’s leaning on you, Charlie?” Franciscus’s heart was rattling like a southbound train, and somewhere along the line, he’d lost his breath. Sonofabitch, he kept whispering to himself. He had to sit down.
“John.” Esposito’s voice had lost its bluster. It was the man speaking, not the uniform. “Listen to me. This is one beef you want no part of.”
Franciscus hadn’t heard that voice since Esposito’s son had been nabbed in a heroin bust uptown and Chargin’ Charlie had called Franciscus to ask that his boy walk on the charge.
“Why are you sending McBride? Is he gonna knock my teeth out if I don’t cooperate?”
“When Bill gets there, I want you to give him what you got from the Kovacs woman.”
“The who?”
“You know who. We know what you’ve been up to, John.”
Franciscus hung up the phone. His chest felt like it was in a nutcracker. He extended his left arm and curled his fingers into a fist, expecting a sharp, debilitating spasm to seize the left side of his body. He exhaled sharply and his breath came back to him. The pressure lifted from his chest. He glanced at the ceiling and chuckled. He was turning into a real drama queen.
He felt Melendez tap him on the shoulder. “Johnny, you okay? What’s going on?”
“Get me a glass of water, would you?” asked Franciscus.
“Sure thing. Right away.”
“Thanks.” Franciscus leaned over his desk and put his face in his hands. It didn’t pay to get himself worked up like that. Melendez arrived and handed him the glass. Franciscus took a sip, feeling better.
He checked his incoming e-mails for a notification about Theo Kovacs’s prints. There was nothing yet. He picked up the phone and dialed a number at 1 PP. “Yeah?” an unfamiliar voice answered.
“I’m lookin’ for Matty Lopes.”
“Not here. Who’s callin’?”
“John Franciscus.”
The voice dropped a register. “Don’t you learn?”
“Excuse me?”
“Word to the wise, Johnny. Be careful. You know what we do to nosy people? We cut off their noses.”
“Who is this? You one of Guilfoyle’s buddies? What game are you playing, anyway?”
“One that’s bigger than you.”
“Bigger than me? I’m a cop. One guy. I’m nothing. This is the law we’re talking about. No one’s bigger than that.”
“The law? I’ll let you in on a secret, Detective. We are the law.”
Franciscus slammed the phone in its cradle. “Says you,” he cursed to himself.
Outside in the hall, Franciscus could hear Bill McBride’s booming voice, yukking it up with Short Mike and Lars Thorwald. He ducked into the booking room. Plugging his pass code into the LiveScan, he brought up the last search and checked for any results. He heard McBride asking after him, “Where’s Gentleman Johnny?” as if his visit were purely a social one. “Anyone seen the old dog?” Thankfully, he didn’t hear Melendez offer up any answers. Everyone knew McBride as the bag man from downtown. He was well hated across the five boroughs.
The LiveScan’s status screen was blank. As of yet, no matches were forthcoming from any of the databases. Franciscus was out of luck. Esposito could have his badge, but he’d be damned if he handed over Katie Kovacs’s papers.
He put his hand on the door, figuring out where to stash Theo Kovacs’s moving box. Opening the door a crack, he peered into the hall. McBride’s broad back was to him and he appeared in no hurry to leave.
Just then, the LiveScan bleeped. Franciscus hurried to the screen. The system had found a match in the Federal Identification Database. That meant the print belonged to a government employee, or someone with past military service. He highlighted the database and clicked the mouse. A moment later, the name of the man whose fingerprints had been found on David Bernstein’s Fanning .11 millimeter pistol appeared on the screen, along with a social security number, a home address, and the notice that the individual had no outstanding warrants. Suddenly, he didn’t give a crap about the moving box.
“Oh, Christ,” muttered Franciscus. Charlie Esposito was getting leaned on all right. Leaned on from the top.
54
“What is ‘Crown’?” shouted Bobby Stillman.
“I have no idea,” said the man they had captured in Union Square for what she thought was the fortieth time.
“Of course you know,” she insisted, then slapped his face, her sharp fingernails leaving angry furrows on his cheek.
He sat kneeling in the center of the hard terrazzo floor, wrists and ankles bound, and a broom handle laid across the backs of his knees. Prime U.S. beef buffed up, brainwashed, and trained to kill by the finest minds in the military, then spat out onto the streets to ply his trade to the highest bidder.
“You work for Scanlon,” she said, walking a circle around him, spitting her words at him like bullets. “Or is that musket on your breastbone just to attract the girls? Scanlon hires out exclusively to Jefferson. Why were you in New York?”
“We go where we’re ordered.”
“And your orders were to kill Tom Bolden?”
“No ma’am. Please, may I stand up?”
He’d been sitting in this position for thirty minutes. The weight of his buttocks and upper body pressed the broom handle into the crook of his calves, cutting off all circulation to his extremities. By now, the balls of his feet and his toes felt as if thousands of razor-sharp needles were stabbing him again and again. Soon the pain would advance to his ankles, his calves. She’d forced the experience on herself. It was unbearable. She had screamed in less than half the time.
“No,” she answered. “You may not. What brought you to Union Square?”
“We were supposed to find Bolden.”
“You were supposed to kill him, weren’t you!”
“No.”
“Your shooter missed. He wounded an innocent woman. Tell me something I don’t know. What is ‘Crown’?”
The man tried to lift himself off his knees, but Bobby Stillman pushed him back down. He moaned, but refused to answer. When his moans became shouts, and then screams, she lifted her foot and pushed him onto his side. “Five minutes,” she said. “Then we start over.”
Bobby Stillman walked outside the cottage and gazed into the falling snow. She was tired. Not just fatigued from the events of the day, the last week, but bone tired. She’d been on the run for twenty-five years. She was fifty-eight years old and her belief in her cause was fading.
A gust brought a flurry of snowflakes onto the porch. At least five inches had already fallen, clogging the mountain roads that led to her cabin in the Catskills. In an hour, two at most, the roads would be impassable. They would be stranded. She breathed deeply, and listened to the silence. The man’s shouts remained with her. It was necessary, she told herself.
She remembered a night long ago. The hot, humid air was electric with the chirping of crickets and the rattle of cicadas. And then the tremendous blast as the bomb that she and David had so carefully put together exploded outside the R & D lab of
Guardian Microsystems. It had been her first step; the moment when she decided to vote with her feet. To act. To rebel. No, she corrected herself. To exercise her rights as a defender of the Constitution.
Twenty-five years . . . a lifetime ago.
She had arrived in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1971, a young, ambitious woman eager to make her mark. A graduate of NYU Law School, editor of the law review, a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, she burned with a desire to serve. She had never viewed the law as a license to earn money, but as a call to duty, and her duty was to ensure that the rights granted by the Constitution to individual and government alike were scrupulously enforced. When she accepted a job as a staff attorney on the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, her friends were shocked. To cries that she had jumped the fence and joined the establishment, she said, nonsense. The choice was a natural one. There was no better place to exercise her calling than Capitol Hill. “Make law, not war,” was her activist’s motto.
The vice chairman of the subcommittee was a maverick second-term congressman from New York named James Jacklin. Jacklin was a decorated veteran, a winner of the Navy Cross, as close to a real-life “hero” as she’d ever met, if that’s what you could call a man who dropped napalm on women and children from the safety of a supersonic steel tube zipping high above their heads. She came to work prepared for battle, a red-haired rebel in a miniskirt with a maxim for every occasion and attitude to spare. Her job on the committee was to advise on the legality of actions proposed by the intelligence community. Even then she was a watchdog.
Instead, the two hit it off immediately. Jacklin was not the hawk she had expected. He, too, was against the war, and never afraid to express his opinions. For her every lick of fire, he contributed a chunk of brimstone. Together they exposed the secret war on Cambodia. They argued against the CIA propping up General Augusto Pinochet, the corrupt Chilean strongman. They called for an end to the firebombing of Hanoi. If her rulings were not always adopted, he urged her to keep fighting. To speak up. Jacklin anointed her the committee’s conscience.
The words were praise, indeed. He had served. He had lost a brother in the war. He knew firsthand the cost of conflict. He said that the price paid for a government’s foreign involvement was measured not only in lives but also in loss of influence, and a ceding of moral authority. It was this last that America could least afford. America of all nations. America must be a beacon of democracy, a bastion of freedom. America was the only country in the world formed not on the basis of common geography, but on a common ideology. America must remain a symbol.
And she loved Jacklin for it. For daring to speak out. For putting his ideas more eloquently than she ever could. For showing her that America’s values were a question not of politics, but of common sense.
Until the night she discovered him secretly copying her briefs and leaking them to his friends in Langley.
James Jacklin was a spy. A mole, in the vernacular that was just beginning to make itself known. And his mission was to infiltrate her and the “team” he said she represented. “The left.” His job was to gain her trust. To influence her rulings. To report the enemy’s actions in advance. He succeeded brilliantly.
Bobby Stillman’s initiation into the radical fringe was immediate.
She resigned her position on the Hill. She left Washington for New York. And she took a job with the organization that was the bane of all lawmakers regardless of age, color, creed, or party affiliation: the American Civil Liberties Union. She filed briefs. She argued cases. She wrote articles to halt the incursion of the government into the private sphere. Yet, her passivity sickened her.
From the sidelines, she watched as Jacklin rose to the position of secretary of defense and quietly rebuilt the nation’s military. She listened to his promises of a peacetime force and a need to look inward and knew he was lying. Every day that passed, she promised herself that she would act. Her anger grew in proportion to her frustration. After four years, she had her chance.
Jacklin had left the Pentagon and started Defense Associates, an investment firm that specialized in restructuring businesses active in the defense sector. When she saw that he had bought Guardian Microsystems, she knew she had found her chance.
Guardian Microsystems, which produced the most sophisticated listening devices known to man. Parabolic surveillance dishes capable of picking up conversations a half mile away. Miniature bugs that could listen through walls. The Reds didn’t have a chance. He had talked about the technology lovingly back when they had shared a bed. The thought that he would turn it against the people was the final straw.
Then came Albany.
A cry echoed from inside the dilapidated cottage. Reluctantly, Bobby Stillman walked back inside. Her colleagues had returned the Scanlon operative to his kneeling position. Look at him, she told herself. He’s the enemy.
She was no longer sure.
Sometime in the last hour, she had come to believe that she was as guilty as he.
“What is ‘Crown’?”
55
Bolden stared at the pair of diamond-crusted ruby earrings. Twenty-seven thousand nine hundred dollars, from Bulgari. The next display held watches. Ten thousand dollars for some rubber and stainless steel.
Through the jewelry store’s windows, he enjoyed an unobstructed view across the lobby of the Time Warner Center. Smoked-glass doors guarded the entry to 1 Central Park, the address given the luxury residences occupying the fiftieth through seventy-fifth floors. He had been waiting ten minutes. In that time, a lavender-haired matron and her two shih tzus, a once-famous movie star, and a harried, instantly recognizable rock musician had scurried past the guards to disappear behind the smoked-glass doors.
A welter of bubbling voices drew his attention. Parading through the building’s main entrance at Columbus Circle was a tight-knit group of six or seven men and women. Several carried briefcases, one a round cardboard tube commonly used to transport building plans. All were dressed in black outfits. But it was the strange, geometric eyeglasses that gave them away. Architects, thought Bolden.
He watched them closely, waiting for them to veer to the left or right, toward the pavilion of retail shops flanking the entrance. The group steered a course toward the smoked-glass doors. Leaving his position by the jewelry store, Bolden strolled briskly across the lobby. A young woman trailing the pack caught his eye. “Just move in?” he asked, catching up to her.
“Me? Oh, I don’t live here,” the woman responded.
“But you should,” he said. “The views are marvelous. On a clear day . . . well, you know how the song goes.”
Ahead, the leader of the group waved to a guard who had already swung the door open and was ushering them in.
“The top floors are a must,” Bolden prattled on. “Cost a fortune, but the way I see it, if you’re going to break the bank, why not go all the way. What’s this, a birthday party? Someone get a raise?”
He was the bullshit artist he’d always despised, throwing one line of garbage after the next. To his horror, he saw that it was working. Not only was this serious, reserved-looking woman giving him the time of day, she seemed flattered by the attention.
“A celebration,” she said. “We just won a commission. Champagne at the boss’s place.”
“Congratulations, then. I’m sure you did all the work.”
The woman smiled self-consciously. “Only a little.”
“You’re lying. I can tell. Your cheeks are turning red. You did it all.” Bolden never removed his gaze from the woman. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the guards giving every member of the group the once-over, doing a head count as they passed. It was then that the woman stumbled. Her heel caught on the carpet and she turned an ankle. As Bolden put out a hand to steady her, he bumped into the security guard holding the door. The woman cried out briefly, caught herself, and laughed. The entire group stopped as one, and turned to check that she was all right. The boss, an older man with a long
iron gray ponytail, insisted on escorting her to the elevator. The group ambled down the hallway, their voices merry.
Left alone, Bolden turned and smiled at the guard. He was waiting for the hand to fall on his shoulder and ask him who he was, and just what in the name of God did he think he was doing trying to fake his way into the apartment building. Instead, he received a gracious “Excuse me, sir,” followed by “Have a nice evening.”
And then it was over. He was through the doors, strolling across the muted gray and polished-silver lobby, past the oriental antiquities and faux Bayeux tapestry.
He caught up to the group and they all filed into the same elevator. The architects got off at fifty-five. Bolden waited until the last had gone, then pushed seventy-seven. The penthouse. Gossip around the office was that it had gone for a cool twelve million.
“On a clear day,” he whistled, for the security camera and for himself. Reaching into his overcoat, he pulled out his baseball cap. A few calls had established that Schiff was at home, waiting to be picked up by Barry, his chauffeur, and driven out to Teterboro Airport to fly down to D.C. for Jefferson’s Ten Billion Dollar Dinner.
The elevator opened and he stepped into a cool beige corridor. Beige carpeting, beige paneling, dim lights. A door on either side of the corridor led to the penthouse apartments. Schiff’s he knew faced east, toward the park. Bolden rang the bell. He stood with his shoulder to the door, his head cocked to obscure his face. Just then, he heard a buzzer. The latch turned automatically. A voice issued from an invisible speaker. “That you, Barry?”
“Yes sir.”
Bolden pushed open the door.
Mickey Schiff rounded the corner of the entryway. He looked tanned and dapper, dressed in evening attire. Bolden rushed forward, took him by his collar, and slammed him into the wall.
“Get out of here,” said Schiff. “I already called security.”
The Patriots Club Page 31
