The 500: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  I thought I had decent radar for undercovers, but apparently not today. As I moved out, Rivera’s backup materialized. Where one minute there was a student, a retired guy, and a tourist, the next there were several men, clearly working with Rivera and watching me, who looked like they knew how to handle themselves. Switching buildings may have bought me a little time, knocked them off their game, but now they were closing in quickly.

  Most of my fighting experience has come while drunk, very drunk. Funny coincidence. As a result, the lessons learned are a little hazy. Nonetheless, I picked up two moves in the service that have, for the most part, helped me avoid getting the shit beaten out of me too badly.

  Thing one: As I raced away from Rivera, a guy in shorts and a ball cap came around the corner and tried to collar me. I peeled his hand off, grabbed his wrist, and twisted his right arm back across his body. I know from firsthand experience (open bar, military police) that this hurts like a motherfucker, especially when you get the elbow going in the opposite direction, twisting the ligaments in the shoulder like a dishrag. Like most of the other goons coming at me, the guy had a fifty-pound advantage, so this sneaky-bastard stuff was my only hope. Once he was off balance I leaned my hip in near his center of gravity and threw him over my shoulder.

  I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize to Mr. Flavin for the damage to his tubes. I really didn’t mean to send my man that way, though I’ll admit that the shower of shards and sparks as the twenty-foot wall of lights came down was pretty spectacular.

  By the time I made it to the atrium floor, I could see I was trapped. The exits were all covered. Something about these men, a lethal competence, convinced me that they were Marcus’s agents, not cops. I was probably only making things harder on myself by fighting back, pissing them off without any possibility of getting out of there. But after the week I’d had—seven days since the murders—there really was nothing more satisfying than unrestrained violence.

  As I skidded around a Richard Serra sculpture—massive steel plates leaning at impossible angles—I encountered Marcus himself. He appeared beside me out of nowhere and grabbed my hand with a much more effective wristlock than I’d managed on his pal. A Taser threw off a little lightning bolt in his hand. He told me to come along and save myself the pain.

  Since I’d already used one of my two moves, this was a no-brainer. My shoe had a hard edge to the sole. I scraped it down Marcus’s shin, ending with a hard stomp that wrenched his ankle to the side with a popping noise that made me wince.

  His grip eased for a split second, and I managed to get a half a step away before he seized my wrist again and twisted it up in front of me. To keep my shoulder ligaments from tearing, I spun, but my back slammed into the cold steel of the Serra sculpture. Marcus, now facing me, kept up the pressure. I felt something give in my shoulder. His other hand stabbed the Taser at my face, arcing blue an inch from my eye. I wrestled it back with my free arm. The hold he had on my wrist positioned him so that his weapon hand was at an awkward angle to my body. I couldn’t get away, but I could keep him from lighting me up: a stalemate.

  After a few seconds, Marcus tilted his head slightly and looked at the sculpture. He couldn’t get to my body, sure, but he didn’t need to. He had an eight-foot-high metal plate pressed against my back that would do the trick nicely. I had already used both my moves, so I was out of luck. He let go of me as he shoved the Taser against the steel, and shot small blue arcs of lightning into it.

  I screamed without pause every obscenity I knew. He kept me cooking on the plate for four seconds before I slumped, and he Tased me for another five on the ground. Everything started getting hazy by the time I hit the floor, though I distinctly remember feeling every muscle contract with the current, trying to tear itself off the bone, and then seeing Rivera holding his badge up and saying, “Metro Police, please clear this area, make way,” as Marcus hauled me out a rear door and threw me in the backseat of a sedan.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  LAID OUT IN the backseat, I could see only trees whipping by through the car windows. I had barely regained my senses when we turned off the road and approached a concrete tunnel set in a hillside. A steel rolling door opened slowly, and swallowed the car.

  We stopped. Marcus wrenched my cuffed wrists high behind my back and marched me through an underground garage and then up to a heavy door. He stopped twenty feet down the corridor and looked up at the black dome of a camera set up in the ceiling. A second later, the door opened.

  “I need the Clark tape,” Marcus said to the man inside. The guy stood six six and was a soft three hundred fifty pounds. He took a gulp from a twenty-four-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, then waved us in. It took me a second to recognize him. It was Gerald, the lead IT guy from Davies Group. He led us into a room lit only by the gray-blue glare of a dozen computer monitors covering an entire wall.

  Some monitors showed what you’d expect from a security office: hallways, offices, exits. Other footage unsettled me: a woman folding laundry in a family room as toddlers played around her; a man’s face in close-up, staring blankly just to the right of the camera.

  Gerald handed Marcus a disc. We started back through the hallway, then went up three flights of concrete steps. We turned and passed the gray door of a Sargent and Greenleaf vault with a biometric-entry system. Marcus pressed on a door at the end of the hallway. Sunlight flooded in, blinding me for a moment. When my eyes adjusted, I saw Henry Davies, wearing a broad smile.

  “Welcome back,” he said. Marcus and I stepped into his corner office through the door hidden in the wood-paneled wall behind his desk. We were at the top of the Davies Group mansion. Everything I’d just seen must have been a secret annex extending into the hill behind it.

  “Maggie,” Henry said through the open doors of his suite. His assistant—the woman I had lifted the tape from in Colombia—stuck her head in.

  “Would anyone like anything?” Henry asked. “Coffee? A soda?”

  She looked around the room, at Marcus, at Davies, and finally at me. My hands were cuffed behind my back. I had a ridiculous bandage hanging off my nose and a growing red welt on my neck where Marcus had cooked me with the Taser. Henry had several assistants, but Margaret had been his secretary for decades. She must have been in on it; she didn’t seem any more put off by my condition than if I had been wearing mismatched socks.

  “Water,” I said.

  “I’ll have an RC Cola,” Henry said.

  “Nothing for me, thanks,” Marcus chimed in.

  She returned a minute later with the orders and set a tall glass of ice water in front of me on Henry’s conference table. Just your typical business meeting/hostage situation.

  “Why don’t you take off those cuffs,” Henry said to Marcus. He unbound my hands. Henry indicated that I should sit at the table. It was where he always conducted meetings. I took a chair.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked.

  “Simple.” He patted my hand on the table. “I want you back. Of course you tried to play the hero. It’s understandable. I told you already: most people think they’re honest until they learn, as you are starting to learn, the real price of honesty.

  “I can’t blame you for coming after me. I tried the same thing when I was your age—pushing my bosses out of the way, taking the top spot for myself.

  “I, however, succeeded,” he added. “I see a lot of myself in you, Mike. Whenever anyone—and there are only a few around here in the know—initially grasps the scope of our endeavor, the first reaction is either to run away or to try to stop us. People think it’s their fine moral fiber at work, but really, it’s fear, hesitation, lack of will.”

  “And what are you up to, exactly, in this endeavor?” I asked.

  “You’re a smart boy. I’m sure you already know. I own the capital,” Henry said. “I’ve collected every powerful man and woman in it like baseball cards. Everything used to be so easy. You could own a man if you caught him
cheating on his wife or taking a ten-thousand-dollar bribe. But nothing shocks anymore. A senator will bounce back from infidelity with a press conference and a month of church. It’s a shame, really. We live in a debased time. I don’t particularly like the rough stuff. But since so little horrifies people today, we’ve had to raise the stakes, the circumstances in which we ensnare our targets.

  “And now, for all intents and purposes, I am the government, all the power without all the bullshit that comes with actually running it. Who has time for details?” He waved them away, and went on.

  “I’ve pursued that vision for a long time, and Haskins was going to be the last piece. Things didn’t go quite as I had planned, but I am certain that his replacement on the Court will be more amenable. As an employee here, you have enjoyed the fruits of that vision. You never seemed that curious about where all the money came from. You can’t pick and choose, Mike. It’s time you pitched in on the dirty work.”

  “And if I say no?”

  Henry chuckled. “I see you’re still a little confused. No isn’t a possibility. It’s not a question of yes or no. At some point you’ll beg to be taken back.

  “Everyone breaks,” he said, and glanced at Marcus. Marcus looked at his own feet. I could only wonder what decades-old hold Henry had on him. “The only question,” Henry went on, “is how much leverage we’ll need to apply.”

  “Like killing me?”

  Henry seemed disappointed. “That’s always what people think of first. It shows a lack of creative spark. On the continuum of fears, death is pretty easy to beat. Most people won’t admit it, but they’d choose death any day over betrayal, over embarrassment, over pain to the ones they love. Probably over public speaking. It’s just a question of slowly applying those…we’ll call them inducements, in order of increasing severity and sitting back and waiting to see how long your subject holds out. It’s fascinating work, really.”

  “So how far along am I?”

  “Well, we started small. Take away a man’s work, his esteem, his reputation. If his worst fear is being a criminal, next we make the world revile him as just that: a pervert, a murderer. Then we take away what he loves most. Annie, for instance.”

  “Not quite,” I said. “If Rivera sold me out to you, then Annie didn’t. She knows me. She won’t buy this garbage you’ve been feeding to the cops.”

  “What aren’t you understanding here, Mike? It’s not either-or, Rivera or Annie. Anyone can be bought. As for Rivera, I gave you fair warning that he would hand you over for the right price, I just didn’t mention that we’d be the buyers. Do you know why he turned you over? To get friendly with us, of course, but the money he needed for granite countertops. As for Annie…well.” He turned to Marcus. “Play the tape.”

  Marcus put the disc Gerald had given him into the side of the laptop and turned it to face me. He started a video: Annie, sitting where I was sitting now.

  From the perspective, the camera must have been on the bookshelves. I looked. “You won’t see it,” Davies said.

  A sickening realization came to me as I thought back to the surveillance footage I’d seen down in Gerald’s lair.

  “You’re watching through all of our laptops and cell phones too,” I said.

  Davies smiled. He could tap into the cameras on all the company-issued equipment. I’d seen Gerald lumbering through the hallways, leering, his head turning as women walked by, Annie especially. I shuddered when I thought what he might have seen of my private life.

  Henry nodded toward the laptop on the table as the video played on. In the footage, he was wearing the same clothes he had on now.

  “It’s from this morning,” he said. “She came to us.”

  “I thought about what you said last night,” Annie said to Henry and Marcus in the film. “I want to help. When Mike came to my apartment, he had this look. I was terrified. I’m scared he’s going to try to hurt me. Is it true what they say? Is he dangerous?”

  “Very,” Henry said.

  She stared at the table for a long moment, then looked back to Davies. “What can I do to help you stop him?” she asked.

  My fists tightened on the arms of my chair. “This is bullshit,” I said.

  Marcus shushed me. “This is the best part.”

  Annie went on. “Mike told me certain things about the work you and Marcus do. Perhaps I haven’t yet had a chance to appreciate the full scope of the group’s undertakings. I want to help you find him, and I hope that you’ll consider me for opportunities in the more sensitive, and lucrative, areas of the enterprise.”

  Henry stood behind her in the video and put his hands on her shoulders.

  “I’ll do anything,” she said.

  “You motherfucker.” I jumped at Davies. Marcus grabbed my biceps and, curling his fingertips inside the arm, pinched a nerve against the bone. Pain knifed up to my shoulder.

  I dropped back. He watched me warily as I cooled down.

  “You can see how this will go, Mike. Step by step, we’ll ratchet up the pain. We’re just getting started. At a certain point you’ll swallow your pride and give in. If you do that right now, I’ll give it all back to you: the money, the job, respectability, freedom, the life you’ve always wanted. Save yourself and the people you love. Work with me. Tell me what Haskins told you in that house. Where’s the evidence?”

  I smiled. It threw Henry.

  “I know something you don’t. It kills you.”

  “It may kill you, Mike. Don’t get smug.”

  “Is it true?” I asked. “You killed the reporter?”

  “Pearson?” Henry ran his fingers along his throat, the scar along his neck I’d first noticed back at Harvard. I could hear gravel in his soft voice. “I lost something that day. I want it back. You’re playing a game whose dangers you don’t understand. Just talk, Mike. It all gets so ugly if you don’t.”

  “You’re going to torture me,” I said.

  “In so many ways,” he replied. “You probably have some silly picture in your mind. What, the rack?”

  “I was actually imagining Marcus with a car battery hooked up to my nuts,” I said.

  Henry sighed. “You shouldn’t be afraid of the police, Mike. Life or lethal injection would be the path of least resistance. If I wanted exotic bloodshed, I would turn you over to Radomir.”

  “Dragović?”

  “Yes. I guess you’ve been too busy to grasp that angle. You killed the Butcher of Bosnia’s daughter.”

  “So he is a war criminal.”

  “He’s the war criminal. But once the war ended, he took the warlord thing private, started taking extension classes at Harvard Business School. He grew very enamored of what we call best practices, and he applied that concept to intimidation. He read in the Economist about some nineteen-year-old warlord in Liberia who liked to snack on his opponents’ hearts. He thought it made him invisible or invincible or something. Radomir saw synergies between those tactics and his burgeoning human-trafficking syndicate. He invited all but one of his rivals to dinner, and in front of them ate the heart of the missing rival, formerly his main competitor.”

  “Sous vide,” Marcus added.

  “A bit theatrical, in my opinion,” Henry said, “but it got the job done. Dragović wrote the case study on psychopathic violence. Torquemada, Wu Zetian, Saddam Hussein: he took all the best-ofs. Now he’s in the United States looking for the man who killed his daughter, looking for you. What suffering he has in mind beggars the imagination.”

  “But the extradition,” I said. “He wouldn’t risk coming to the U.S. He could be tried. That’s why you dragged me to Colombia.”

  “I thought you’d put that together. You’re right. Only a madman would risk his empire to avenge a daughter he considered a whore. Dragović is an interesting case, though. Marcus and I are good American Homo economicus. However ugly it gets, we always pursue our best interests. Dragović is trickier. He lives by blood and honor. Irrational, and frankly a pain in the ass when
it comes to my usual calculations. He can’t really be bargained with. He’ll risk every penny he’s earned, he’ll risk his life, he’ll risk anything to get you. The only way he can buy his honor back is with your dead body.”

  “Threats won’t work,” I said. “Haskins didn’t tell me anything.”

  “It’s so easy to act tough, Mike. Dragović uses an ax. We prefer a scalpel. Are you really willing to risk the people you love?”

  “Annie’s gone. My mom’s dead. Who’s left?”

  “Sixty-two fifty-one Dominion Drive,” Henry said. My father’s address.

  “The guy who abandoned my family. What happened to doing your homework? I couldn’t care less what you do to him.” I’d softened on my dad since his release, but Henry didn’t know that.

  “I’ve owned you your whole life, Mike. You’re just finding out about it now. That’s why I plucked you out of Harvard. Tell me, why would a competent financial swindler like your father suddenly take an interest in burglaries? Why would he rob an empty house?”

  I sat up straight in my chair. I’d been asking myself that question my whole life.

  “I’m not the only one who’s done some killing,” Henry said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Perry, James Perry,” Henry said. That was the name of my mother’s old boss. “He was an acquaintance of mine, a good political hack, the party chairman out in Virginia.”

  Henry loomed over me and looked me in the eye. “Your father murdered him.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. My father had one rule: no violence. He’d pounded that into everyone he ever worked with. No one gets hurt.

  “It wasn’t a burglary, Mike. Your father was in the house to cover his tracks. All these years with that big brain, and you never put that together?”