Internecine

by David J. Schow

  Dandine had intentionally loaded one of the hazard-striped rocket rounds so I would see it, and in a semipanic, not reinsert it. Leaving his own special fireback round up second. He had known it would rest there, waiting, because I wouldn’t pull the trigger. He had known.

  “Gerardis was gonna shoot you with his gun, and him with your gun,” said Zetts. “Done deal. Then I think he wanted to shoot me, and somehow blame one of you. He had about fifteen seconds to decide on a plan, before the higher powers at NORCO came along to close his window of opportunity.” He nodded at me. “You were only out for about two minutes, tops. Gerardis had his boys deliver Mr. D’s gun and stick us in the chairs. Then he kicked them out. What, no security, in a top-security room? It was his chance to pull something shady and wash a lot of old laundry, so he had to make up his mind in a hurry.”

  “What’d they do to you?” I asked Dandine.

  He sniffed. “Processing. At the bank, remember? I had no idea they’d really built new offices.” Another reason the renovation of the First Interstate building had taken more than two long years. He held up one hand. “Look—they did my nails.”

  I had read an article somewhere about how prisoners of war had had their fingernails yanked out with pliers during various wars. The trick was to get a positive grip on the entire nail, and apply slow, steady force to remove it intact. Dandine’s tormentors had completed the left hand and begun on the right when Gerardis’s summons had come down through channels.

  “They burned him,” said Zetts. “Electroshock. Then they beat him up with those canvas tubes full of iron filings? Purees your insides.”

  “Why? What did they want to know?”

  “They didn’t want to know anything,” said Dandine, almost scolding. “That was just . . . Gerardis, being a prick.” A laugh tried to bubble up from deep inside, but it hurt too much. “Hm. Fucker’s retired now.”

  “That was the real guy? Not a stand-in, like at the airport?” The only people I knew who could ID the real Gerardis were Cody Conejo, who had made the stand-in at LAX, and Dandine, who now appeared semiconscious at best.

  “That was the real guy. We finally got him.”

  “Yeah . . . and now we’re trapped in a bulletproof room.” I thought, If the guards can’t get in, maybe I can take a nap on the table . . .

  “Not for too long,” said Zetts. “Just until El Chingón gets here. Remember, you asked for Gerardis’s boss?”

  I already knew the reason, but I let Zetts announce it anyway.

  “Well, he’s coming. He’ll show up. He has to. Because he’s my dad.”

  I tried to glare Zetts into a confession. He fidgeted. All the while, indistinct bad guys tried to breach the secure door to the secure room, banging and chipping and prying. It was slightly comic. Exasperated, Zetts came across loudly, trying too hard to make his point, now that he had blurted out a very intriguing bit of information indeed—a fact that occupied no database anywhere, a truth that only guys like the Mole Man would know, because such facts can have great value, and accrue massive cost.

  “Look, it’s not like I have a beeper number for him or somesuch shit,” Zetts said. “I don’t know how to get in touch with him. Let’s just say we don’t have like the greatest goddamned relationship in the world, okay?”

  I looked at Dandine, and Dandine looked away, because he was aware of his own failure to provide full disclosure. I hadn’t been far wrong, back at the Wily Toucan, when I’d divined a weird father-son vibe between Dandine and Zetts. They weren’t lovers. And Dandine was nobody’s surrogate father.

  Babysitter, I thought. Guardian angel.

  “Your father . . . runs NORCO.” I wanted everything to be declarative; gemstone-pure.

  “Yeah. Basically. Whatever. Listen, brah, that totally doesn’t mean that I wasn’t—”

  “And Dandine knew this,” I interposed. “All the time, he knew.”

  “It doesn’t work the way you think it does,” Dandine said from the floor, staring at the ceiling, at the universe, praying for strength. His voice was still low, and delivered through clenched teeth. “Just hope he gets here before those idiots outside break through and murder us.”

  Murder. Dandine was using kill-words, now. To anyone but us, our deaths would be called something else.

  “I was down with your whole plan, right?” Zetts butted in. “Right? Even when you told me . . . I said like, fuckin-A, let’s go get him back? I did that because contact with my father is not part of the deal. Never was. Isn’t, now.”

  “What did you do?” asked Dandine.

  “When I found out Zetts’s little secret, I marched him in here like a hostage. Just like your plan for getting into Norco, but with a huge advantage: Nobody here is going to let anybody kill this kid. But your plan . . .” I shook my head. “What would’ve happened if I needed to start shooting?” I imagined my own face, sticking somewhere else besides my head. I was not smiling.

  “If we had gone into Norco,” countered Dandine, “Gerardis would have dropped everything, to do me on the sly. He would have taken your weapon. And he wouldn’t have been able to resist trying to kill me, right there, especially with a non-NORCO weapon and you, standing right there, as the best scapegoat in the world.”

  “Except you didn’t know that NORCO had decentralized. It wasn’t hidden in the First Interstate Bank building. That’s just a branch called Processing.”

  “I know it now,” said Dandine.

  “They’ve got this train setup,” Zetts told Dandine. “It’s like a whole second subway system; secret, private. I mean, like it could be all over the whole city!”

  “Besides,” said Dandine. “If I got in using Jenks as a hostage, I was going to cut you loose. Using you was a fallback contingency. At which point, I would have worn the booby-trapped gun. See? That’s why I never cuffed you.”

  “But you were going to,” I said. “You lost your temper and killed Jenks in the limo. So, Plan B. What happened?”

  “I surrendered,” said Dandine. “I told them to tell Gerardis that I’d surrender directly to him . . . if they let you go and laundered your debits. Gerardis agreed, but decided to fuck me up first, by sending me through Processing.”

  The whole time I’d been goldbricking on clean sheets, and ogling Nurse Vanessa, minions of NORCO had been torturing Dandine. Andrew Collier’s prediction had come true: Once they had Dandine, they didn’t give a damn about me, and had more or less returned me to where I’d begun on the timeline. Deactivated my pending bogus murder charge, for Choral Anne Grimes. Whipped up a fresh owlshit story for the hospital. Restored my credit and un-besmirched my name. While Dandine was hemorrhaging, accreting trauma, and losing his fingernails.

  “How’d you know where to come in?”

  “Trade secret,” I said. “You have your subterraneans; I have mine.”

  A tiny laugh wheezed out of him. “Bravo.”

  The drones of Security had stopped trying to bust down the door to the safe room. Nothing at all happened for several unnervingly quiet moments.

  “You jumped in front of a gun for me, Connie,” said Dandine. “That was very stupid. It was very courageous.”

  “No,” I said. “It was very stupid; I agree. Not like me; agreed. But if you had died, who would explain all this crap to me?”

  “Help me up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re about to torch the door mechanism with a burning bar. Magnesium rods at nine thousand degrees. That’ll liquefy the polymer, the lockdown brace, the frame, everything.”

  As Dandine spoke, a fan of slag-hot sparks sputtered from the underside of the key-card box Zetts had sabotaged. It sounded like extremely loud static. Sizzling white droplets and chunks landed on the far end of the floor and conference table, where they settled into melt patterns as they destroyed whatever they touched.

  “It’ll make tempered steel drip like orange juice on contact,” said Dandine. He took up the Beretta M93R that Gerardis had
intended to use on me, steadied his bloody, two-handed grip on the tabletop, and got ready to give the door a few three-shot bursts.

  Zetts and I looked around. Having nothing more intelligent to do, we crouched behind Dandine. You know, to hold him up if he sagged.

  The entire door assembly fell into the room. It’s edges were molten and glowing. We felt the superheated air it pushed as it crashed down and began to burn the floor. Gravid clouds of white smoke fogged through the entry, drifting low. A pair of men in hazmat suits put down a hundred tiny fires with dry-chemical extinguishers. I learned later that CO2 would not work on magnesium fires.

  “Don’t inhale that shit,” said Zetts, of the fog.

  We anticipated facing a brace of state-of-the-art killing technology, but instead a single man stepped through the breach, holding a handkerchief to his face and ineffectually batting away the billows of retardant. Under his other arm he carried a soft leather document holder, half a step down from a briefcase, but capacious enough for a phonebook.

  He was tall and slightly top-heavy. He looked like a Danish film producer, with a young face and an old neck. His ruddy cheeks shined, and I suspected more than a bit of plastic surgery, to tighten out age lines. His hair appeared authentic—gray-blond, backswept, thinning but not receding. He tried to keep from coughing as he used his handkerchief to fan the air in a gesture of capitulation that was almost droll.

  “Rainstone,” said Dandine. “Thank the Fates.” He angled his gun up, off-target.

  “Could I prevail upon you to unload that weapon?” the man asked Dandine.

  “I’d really be a fuckup if I did.” Dandine was sounding a degree more like his old self.

  The man—Rainstone—seemed to accept this as a correct response, and acknowledged Zetts. “Declan. It’s good to see you.”

  Almost subaurally, Zetts mumbled, “Yeah, whatever.”

  “And this would be . . . Mr. Maddox, yes?”

  He already knew it. Behind him, visibly holding back, were several NORCO suits with Bushmaster M-17s, chopped for military use and fed by ugly 99-round magazines. That was thirty-three bullets earmarked for each of us . . . by each gun. I felt proud of being that threatening.

  “We need to talk,” I said, “and I don’t want to fence with you.”

  “This is my expert at bullshit,” said Dandine, meaning me. He had lowered his weapon but not decocked it. “Watch what you say.”

  Rainstone dispensed with façade. “Fair enough. We don’t talk in here. This place is compromised.” He turned to the men behind him. “Stand down and clear out. I don’t want to see anybody in the main corridor. Nobody on the platform, not even security. That’s a direct order.”

  The men withdrew soundlessly.

  “Good?” asked Rainstone.

  “Search him,” said Dandine, and Zetts hustled over to perform a pat down, never once meeting the taller man’s gaze. He checked the leather bag and gave us an all clear.

  “Help me stand up,” Dandine whispered to me. I grabbed the back of his pants and assisted; the move looked pretty natural. To Rainstone, he said, “Sorry, but these two are the only men I trust, right now.”

  Rainstone concurred, forgiving the search. “Understandable.” His eyes took stock of the room, inside and out, and hinted at potential ears, all around us. It was the way he didn’t say it that was convincing.

  We moved together down the far side of the table, to avoid stepping over what was left of Gerardis. Zetts backed off two paces, broadcasting that he was with us. The passage beyond Rainstone was clear of staff. Past the open doors at the end—no one.

  “Tight group,” said Dandine. “No space.” He let Rainstone lead. Rainstone kept checking back to ensure he wasn’t moving too fast.

  “We’ll take my car,” he said.

  The rubber-lipped door went fsss and settled into its seam. The blue tracking lights began to pass overhead, and the ride was so smooth that the illusion of standing still while the tunnel moved reminded me of old-fashioned, stage-bound Hollywood, where backgrounds moved on a loop, and you could watch the same tree pass four times if you were diligent. You’ve experienced the same confusion, if you’ve ever been inside an airplane or commuter train and something moved past your window, causing your brain and eye to insist that you were in motion, instead of the rest of the world.

  When Dandine learned I had a pocket full of Percodan, he dry-swallowed two. Rainstone’s personal NORCO shuttle was more lavish than the standard-issue cars on the secret subway, slightly wider and definitely shorter than a limousine, with fewer windows Leather appointments, goosenecked halogen lights, a bar. A set of monitors and a comm board. The internal illumination dimmed as we began to travel.

  Rainstone was seated in the forward end. Dandine had positioned himself in the middle, on a wing seat. I sat in back and Zetts was in the corner, as though putting the greatest amount of available distance between himself and the man who was supposedly his father. There was a well-thumbed, curly-paged copy of Los Angeles magazine on an empty seat.

  Rainstone concentrated on Dandine, as though anxious to talk him into a storyline, “Gerardis was old-school, from the seventies gang,” he said. “You knew that he could be recklessly, ah, violent.”

  “Yeah.” Dandine looked to me. “He broke my nose the first time he tried to kill me.”

  “It was Gerardis’s intent to cleanse the organization of anyone with enough ethics to question his orders,” Rainstone said. “It was a pogrom disguised as a recruitment drive. Gradually he filled personnel with the sort of steely-eyed college grads and executive thugs you all saw.”

  The spear-carriers. The snipers with iffy eyesight at Varga’s. The glossy yuppie killers at the airport. The faceless crews in vans who came to sweep and clear in the dead of night. Muscle. Candidates for this sort of work were probably lined up ten deep wherever NORCO recruited. You could kill a hundred of them and twice that would show up the next day. They weren’t even pawns. If you knew where to look, you could induct as many bent sociopaths as you needed and sacrifice them willingly, because nobody would ever miss them when they were gone. Large guys who liked packing heat and hurting people. Skilled torturers. Alien pods who could take orders and simulate the behavior of ordinary citizens.

  You probably know a few people like this already.

  “But specialists, you’d have to train,” I said. “You need strategic thinkers and resourceful operatives who can make command decisions in the field, on their own.”

  “True,” said Rainstone. “Gerardis valued those less than I did.”

  Times were changing, even inside NORCO. Nobody likes to admit to a paradigm shift. They put off the admission for as long as possible. Sweeping changes don’t happen all at once. They have to accrete, like barnacles.

  I remembered what Dandine had said about no retirement program, and shredding documents. “But you’re supposed to be the head guy.” The indictment was clear: Why hadn’t Rainstone just stepped in and asserted some authority?

  “Gerardis had powerful contacts, and was well-entrenched,” said Rainstone. “Within the organization he functioned brilliantly. He helped produce results, and made sure people knew that. Things are vastly different now than they were even two months ago. Actually, the . . . ah, interior rot, began to become apparent about the time our friend, here, severed his ties with NORCO.”

  Never once yet had Rainstone referred to Dandine by name. Any name.

  “And Gerardis has been hunting me ever since,” said Dandine, rising to his medication. “With the resources of NORCO.”

  “In another month, there won’t be a NORCO,” said Rainstone. “It’ll be called something else, organized differently. We have a whole new government to deal with now.”

  Putting a name to a conspiracy doesn’t eliminate it. It didn’t really matter what the club was called; the aims were always the same. In evolution, the only constant is change, and this truism applied just as relentlessly in the world that ordin
ary people never saw.

  “I think I’ve got it,” said Dandine. “Gerardis cut a deal, a master plan: Jenks gets the California governorship, and Gerardis gets NORCO all to himself.”

  “That was my conclusion, yes,” said Rainstone. “It only recently became undeniable. You must appreciate how much of this transpired without my, ah, knowledge.”

  It was no different from executives in big oil, or the movie business, enacting their elaborate backstabbing scenarios. The left hand cooperated with the right hand until the prime opportunity arose for one to chop off the other. Then, golden parachute time for the last men standing.

  “So the whole deal with Alicia Brandenberg?” asked Dandine. “That never crossed your desk?”

  “Not in its true form. All I saw was a leverage play architectured by Gerardis. His plan was to sacrifice a freelancer to confer tension to the triangle of Jenks and the other candidate, Ripkin. That potential blackmail held in reserve, Gerardis could then exert more control, adjusting the tension, publicly and privately, to keep both men beholden to him. I had no idea that he pulled strings to make sure you were the . . . ah, freelancer, involved.” Rainstone looked toward Zetts, silent and sullen in the far end of the car.

  I instantly felt like the biggest dope in the known cosmos. “You’re Jaime Shannon,” I said to Rainstone. “You called my answering machine.”

  “I made no such call,” said Rainstone. “Things have been in a panic here ever since our friend eliminated NORCO’s pick for governor. Ripkin, as a sympathy vote, is worse than useless. NORCO hates losing control. Gerardis took an administrative demerit on lousing up what should have been a slam-dunk election. I was charged with securing a workable alternative candidate. That’s what I’ve been doing, and why it took so long for me to arrive here.”

  “Wait a minute—you didn’t call me?”

  “I would make no such clumsy attempt at direct contact,” said Rainstone. “You had somehow become involved and your situation was only worsening, but, against all textbook odds, you acquired a noteworthy ability to stay out of sight, and duck conventional radar. I’ll confess you became so good, so fast, that I feared you were a ringer from a rival organization.”