'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  Cherokee Jordan, one of Maran’s former colleagues from SAWC, led the surveillance team. They had seen a strange delivery taking place on the Dolitz loading dock. A group of men, flanked by security guards armed with automatic rifles, packed a tractor-trailer with large canvas bags that looked like postal service office sacks.

  If they are laundering money, Maran thought, they are doing it in unimaginable size.

  He filled an L.L. Bean duffel bag, left his room at 2 A.M., caught a cab to Fifth and 46th and walked down Fifth to 47th, carrying the duffel over his shoulder. There in the front hallway and back alley of the Dolitz building, he set off a series of smoke bombs.

  Before long, fire alarms began to wail from within the Dolitz building. Night workers poured into the street. Some of them ran to the street alarms at the corners of the surrounding streets. Maran took advantage of the confusion and slipped inside. By the time the four-alarm equipment arrived, all the buildings on the block had been cleared out. The skeleton night crew had fled the Dolitz building. Maran didn’t even have to pick the lock to the counting room. The money was still on the table. No one stayed around to burn to death when it looked like the building was about go up in flames. He found a series of pine plank counting tables. They were in such heavy use they were stained green from the ink of U.S. currency, cash being washed by the truckload.

  Dolitz!

  The operation and its implication was staggering.

  Cabinda.

  His steps back out were long and rapid. A crowd had gathered outside. He pushed and turned through them, forcing himself not to run. The last thing he wanted was to call attention. His watch crew was across the street, surveilling the Dolitz building. He had ordered them to keep well back from the windows and maintain tight security on the office’s front door. They may have been able to identify employees who could be clamped down on as critical sources of information. It was always possible to turn felons against their employers before they faced a judge and a long jail sentence. If that didn’t work, Cherokee Jordan had other options. He knew how to get what he needed.

  Maran turned left onto East 46th. An alley down the street led into a rear entrance of the building across the street from Dolitz at 33 East 47th. He used the back. He didn’t want to be observed going into the building overlooking Dolitz. Inside, he brushed by a uniformed maintenance man and, rather than chance being trapped in the elevator, he climbed the cast-iron spiral staircase. On the second landing he thought he heard a noise.

  Something. A faint rattle. Upstairs.

  A flicker from the past. He glanced up.

  God! Not now!

  The light from the incandescent bulbs in the renovated gaslight fixtures blinded his eyes. His mind began to spin. At the second landing, his hands, shaking, grabbed the handrails.

  Focus.

  Seven floors above, his surveillance team was gathering evidence on just what was happening inside of 33 East 47th.

  The trial. My men. My name. He blinked as it all flashed before him. Pain seared with more intensity than ever. Inside his head, voices screamed‌—‌guilt‌—‌betrayal.

  Cabinda. Diamonds.

  His bad leg almost collapsed under him.

  Impossible. How? Why?

  It was coming together, filling him with fear. He stared down.

  No, not him! Not again. The base of the stairwell. The Animal!

  Maran tried to shake the vision away.

  Reality! Take charge.

  He had to get upstairs. The team would have answers. Instinct propelled him. He limped forward. Any new clues, he was certain now, would lead him back to Cabinda.

  Answers!

  He gripped the rail so hard that when he started to falter he feared his fingers would break. His bad leg throbbed as step by step he climbed.

  A clear sound. Real. A groan. Upstairs. No more rattles.

  Cherokee was up there. His friend was rough as gravel but smooth as eggnog and could be just as sweet when the situation called for it. Give him a human intel target, no matter what the field, he could be relied on to find and download sources with access to the answers: the perfect spy, multi-talented. Maran trusted the man’s judgment. With the 35mm infrared surveillance camera he had brought in, Cherokee even at night could distinguish the color in a goldfinch’s eye at 700 yards. It was trained on the Dolitz building.

  On the seventh floor landing, the scene struck Maran in the face like swarm of riled hornets. He rushed forward, his blood pounding, and cleared his head with the urgency that confronted him. He withdrew the H&K compact from his shoulder holster, cocked the slide, barreled through the splintered wound in the door to the rented office, swept by reality into the past once again. The walls on the 47th Street side were pocked with bullet holes, lines from automatic fire. The eggshell paint was spattered with blood. The blotches misspelled out a macabre omen:

  AVENEG TH GEMSA ARGNAUT

  On the floor, two of his team’s bodies lay, contorted, their heads a blackish crimson mess, mutilated by bullets. Cherokee lay in a pool at the base of a window at the end of a crimson trail. Both his hands gripped what remained of one of the surveillance cameras. He had used it to rattle out an alarm before he clawed his way to the window. It was a miracle he was able to move, a testament to his will to live, his training as a SAW. A bullet had entered the side of his forehead, removed a piece of his skull. His breathing was hoarse, labored like a broken auto ignition.

  Maran bent to grip his hand, his thumb on Cherokee’s pulse.

  “Cherokee. It’s Maran. I’m here.”

  His friend sputtered, gurgled, whispered just loud enough that to be understood.

  “Ah, ahh. No, no‌—‌no use‌—‌broke door‌—‌battering ram‌—‌stood‌—‌ doorway‌—‌firing‌—‌”

  “Cherokee, Cherokee.”

  “‌—‌Gave each of us a burst‌—‌ran. Cowards. Gettem Mack.” The plea burst from inside his chest; a thick gob came up with the words. He convulsed, grabbed his throat with his hands. His body shot off the floor; he collapsed and went silent, his chest still as stone.

  Maran gagged. The nightmare repeated.

  Alone.

  SHAKEN BUT COMPOSED, HE took the “F” Train on the Metro to 2nd Avenue and walked down East Houston to Ludlow, passed up on breakfast at Katz’s Deli, remembering, in a brief respite from his grief, the last time he ate there and got sick to his stomach after washing down a huge tongue and corned beef sandwich with a Mack Maran Mocktail of iced coffee and OJ: “Stirred and shaken, please.” Sometimes he could be a real asshole. He knew it, though, and it never ceased to make him smile. Besides, he made up for it. He was a big tipper. But that was then, a lifetime ago. Now his resolve to track these fiends down bored into his mind. Back in his hotel room, he picked up the phone to make a call. Cole Martin assured him that his friends would stick by him.

  “You know who they are,” Martin said. “Men to whom you’ve proven yourself throughout your career.”

  Maran wanted to believe.

  But can I? Can I even trust Martin‌—‌or Luster?

  Were they friend or foe? His faith in the U.S. military code had been shattered.

  There was nothing more he could do right now so he collapsed on his bed and fell into a fitful sleep. When first light dawned it was 4:45. He was up and resolved to get right back into his normal routine, slipped into a sweat suit and sneakers, took a long, loping run, ignoring his limp, then went back to knock out his daily 200 push-ups and 100 sit-ups. He threw in a bunch of toe-touchers, added some jumping jacks and side-twisters, shit-showered-and-shaved, and was up and out. It was religion. He might not have been his superior officers’ model of conformity, but nothing changed his routine. Arriving early as usual, he took a seat on the 7 A.M. Delta shuttle from LaGuardia to Washington. As much as Martin had helped, Maran’s grief was beyond healing. One thing could ease the pain and one thing alone. Nothing would derail his mission. As the fire of hatred grew, it tempered his
resolve. Whoever they were, he had smoked them out.

  He had to get to Vienna, Virginia, to see Martin’s friend, Jack Connell at FINCEN, the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Presqui’le de Banana

  In her room at Boyko’s Presqu’ile de Banana estate, Amber readied for her trip to Antwerp. She was taking her trunks with her on Boyko’s private jet to Antwerp; four Louis Vuitton trunks filled with diamonds, including 434 pounds of D-perfect gemstones. She had plenty of prior experience helping clients of UBS, the Swiss banking giant, launder hundreds of millions of dollars through sham foreign entities, hiding the profits from the IRS and foreign tax authorities by using undeclared diamonds purchased with illegally-gained funds and transporting them from Angola to Antwerp and all over the world to safe deposit boxes in private banks from Geneva and Liechtenstein to Panama and Miami. Now she was sitting on a micro version of Fort Knox.

  While Boyko had been busy with Pajak in Kinshasa, she was enjoying a bit of time to herself before her trip. The pressure of feigning interest in him was highly stressful. He had returned the night before after Pajak left for Washington and had made plans to see her before she left for Antwerp with the diamonds.

  In spite of her hatred of Boyko, she secretly nourished the excitement. She was the nuts, the Queen of Diamonds. It didn’t make any sense to feel the way she did‌—‌smug, an overreaction to an alien emotion, defenselessness, but she needed some way around her foreboding sense of doom.

  She checked her briefcase for her false passport, citizenship papers, thumbed over a news clip. She had completed the inventory sheets, the shipping documents, packed them all in the travel trunks Boyko had given her, and walked into the area where earlier she had chatted with the office secretary. She was alone. The reception hall echoed with her footsteps. The sound accentuated her aloneness. Her arms tingled, giving her goosebumps. Boyko was in a meeting in a room on the floor above. It was almost 5 P.M. She could feel the day’s strain. The air in the room was still, the windows closed against the putrefied air, which still smelled of burning trash and garbage. She stretched. Then‌—‌for a split second‌—‌a flash of color in the corner of her eye. Behind her.

  A man? A huge Afro wig‌—‌from the 70s’ hippie days?

  She turned to look. Nothing!

  She lit a Dunhill Diamante cigar. Her hands shook. It was the first one she had had in days since deciding to kick the habit, embarrassed into it by the outcry from her son. She glared into the mirror, strained to recapture the image.

  Was it real?

  Her nerves were charged with electric current. She noticed the book she had left that rested on the table. Opened. She picked it up. A piece of paper fell to the floor. A note. She read.

  BEWAR SAYCRD

  GEMS OF ARGNAUT

  Nightmare!

  The note was written in blood. She grew up in a sophisticated family, was schooled by refined people. The occult, devil magic, the spirit world, voodoo, was foreign. She knew superstition still prevailed in the bush, throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but this was her first brush with it. The tremors started in her legs, traveled up her arms, spread through her body. She was shaking apart.

  It took her ten minutes sitting in one of the reception area chairs to regain her composure. She looked around, got up, and walked to the bathroom. She opened the bathroom door, looked into the large mirror over the bright red marbled sink!

  Him! Vangaler!

  But for the cast on one arm where Amber had broken it and a yellow-orange wig that framed his head like an paranormal halo, he was naked and erect.

  Her screams echoed off the spare white walls. They reverberated from the tile floor to the cement ceiling. He had run down the hallway by the time Boyko and the rest of his team rushed down the hallway from their meeting upstairs.

  They laughed when she told them.

  SHE HAD COMPOSED HERSELF by the time she and Boyko and Vangaler met later in the lavishly appointed dining room where they dined before she left for her trip. The incident went unmentioned, just another day in paradise. The walls in the room were decorated with velvety rich wood panel wainscoting and lined with beef crown moldings under a ceiling crisscrossed with oak beams. A wild boar’s head projected from the wall above the long dining room table. A chandelier lit the floral arrangements and brightly colored salads that sat in front of them.

  “I hope you’re enjoying the roast boar,” Boyko said, glancing as he spoke to admire the Bacchanalian scene that hung on the opposite wall, a copper etching of grapevines and cavorting satyrs.

  “Fabulous. Nothing better than a big mouthful of juicy meat,” Amber answered.

  Cunt-scum lapper.

  She hated the game he forced her to play.

  Vangaler thought she sounded like one of the actresses he lusted over in his porn collection.

  “I can buy into that,” he leered, swigging a gulp of whiskey from the Waterford wine goblet.

  “Shut your mouth, savage,” Boyko snarled at the beast. Vangaler stroked the cast on his arm. His hatred boiled.

  The door flew open. A soldier dressed in the tiger stripe camo uniform of Vangaler’s Ninjas rushed into the room. They heard gunfire.

  “PFLEC. Outside!” the soldier shouted.

  “Quick!” Boyko ordered. “To the vault!”

  He pointed to the wall adorned with Rauschenbergs, pushed a button just beneath the wooden frame around the paintings. Amber’s maple eyes widened. The section of the wall rose into the ceiling. Behind it, a sheet of steel ribbed with titanium rods faced them like teeth on a fossil. Boyko punched a code into a switchbox. The shield rose, disappeared, the titanium rods poised overhead.

  The hidden room was lined in steel-reinforced concrete, supported in the villa’s infrastructure by steel H-beams. One wall contained an armory cabinet that held several dozen Chinese CK-88 assault weapons and twelve Steyr P-1 sniper rifles with 16-power U.S.M.C. tactical sniper-scopes and silencers. Vangaler turned to an aide and snapped, “Make sure you take one of these cockroaches alive. We’ll burn his feet until he tells us who sent him here.”

  “Sir, that’s beyond our control now. The Ninjas take no prisoners.”

  Boyko stepped to the open window. The rest of the party joined him. Outside they watched as Vangaler’s forces surrounded the raiders. They were scattered in teams of two or three, trapped in the sugarcane field outside the villa. The merciless volley of automatic fire from the Angolan government’s Chinese CK-88s riddled their unprotected positions. The heavy grass offered scant protection. It parted as the SSI Ninjas moved through in an organized skirmish line advancing over the protective berm that circled the estate. Live bodies jumped as they were bayoneted.

  “PFLEC,” Vangaler snarled. “Scavenger trash.”

  Amber said nothing; she noted Boyko’s concern. He walked her to the reception room where she was packed and ready to go. On the way, she asked him about the note that Vangaler had left in her book, about the “Gems of Argnaut.” He dismissed her question.

  If her plan worked, she would never have to worry about them again.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Antwerp, Belgium

  Boyko’s corporate jet, an eight-passenger Bombardier Challenger 300 had flown out of Kinshasa. It was circling over Deurne International Airport south of Antwerp. She sat at a window seat and watched the city swirl beneath her. The jet landed and taxied to an unloading dock at an old warehouse building off to the side of the main airport. Amber climbed down the ladder in the charter area. Boyko had made special provisions with his security friends there so she could skirt being checked by customs. The freight handler pulled up to the rear of the plane with a tractor and two carts while the cargo door opened. Two handlers unloaded Amber’s trunks onto the carts. She smiled at their attentions, beamed, lifted her arms to fix her copious hair. The motion accentuated the shape of her body in the sleeveless, neon-leopard shift dress. She had on a pair of red-framed Oakley
wrap-around sunglasses with rose lenses; she adjusted the brushed leopard fedora so it shaded her eyes. Her ears dripped with diamond drops.

  The driver pointed her to the limousine waiting for her. She reached into her pocketbook and drew out some hundred-dollar bills‌—‌U.S.

  “Take this,” she said to the handlers who had put her luggage into the trunk of the limo.

  They tooled out of the airport en route to Tolkachevsky’s, past the Meir pedestrian shopping street and Ruben’s house, emerging into the square known as Wapper, and took a right past St. Jacobskerk into Lange Nieustraat. As she passed through the city she began to quiver. Quiet time allowed her more time to think, and when she thought, her thoughts turned to Tony. She did all she could to drive her fears for him out of her mind, but her best efforts only went so far. Now the tears began to run down her face.

  Tony!

  Her mind spun as she recalled the horror she had just escaped at the hands of Vangaler. She held up her disfigured hand and winced. Ever since as a child her Bakongo mother told her the tribal tales of witches and zombies who kidnapped naughty little girls and ate corpses, Amber, always naughty, was haunted by a dread of the unknown as a result. Even more frightening was her fear of the infibulations, female genital mutilation. They were too real. She was lucky her father had sheltered her from them, but she knew that there were two-million cases every year in Muslim areas in Africa, including Angola and the DRC. Though she wasn’t Muslim, it was a custom in many African tribes. She had too many friends who had gone through the barbarous practice.

  The thought of Vangaler’s face made her sick. She asked her driver to pull over. She wretched.

  TOLKACHEVSKY GREETED HER WARMLY at the door to his office. It was located in an early seventeenth century town house with a Baroque façade built on the Meir just by Lange Herentalsestraat, the location of the Belgium Diamond Bourse in the Diamond Quarter. Tolkachevsky was a non-observant Hassid. Although he wore the payot and the long black jacket and black beaver hat required of observant Hassids, in his heart he had no faith left. He hadn’t put the horrors of his family’s WWII Nazi experience in Paris behind him.