Even

by Andrew Grant

  “Good, so far,” I said. “Now, on your feet.”

  “Where are we going?” he said.

  “Upstairs.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s nothing to see down here. And we need somewhere private. We have something to talk about.”

  Taylor went up the staircase ahead of me, hesitantly, one hand on the rail. I kept my distance, just in case, but he didn’t try anything. He just labored his way to the top, took a couple more steps, and then waited for instructions. I directed him to the dining end of the room and put him on the violet chair. That was in the middle of the long side, with its back to the sofas. I sat opposite, on the yellow chair, giving him only me and the blank white wall to look at.

  “Take a minute to think,” I said. “You’ve made some mistakes, this morning. Serious mistakes. So now you have to choose. Either you put them right, or you pay the price. And it’s only fair to warn you. The price is going to be high.”

  “How do I put them right?” he said.

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “I did.”

  I took out the wad of photos, pulled out the one showing the organ containers in the truck, and put it down on the table.

  “So why did you choke when you saw this, the first time?” I said.

  “I didn’t choke. I just took a second to recognize it,” he said.

  “I’m going to ask you one more question. Before Tungsten, were you in the army?”

  “Yes.”

  “Special Forces?”

  “No.”

  “Airborne?”

  “No.”

  “Infantry?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I’m getting the feeling you weren’t much of a fighting soldier. Not much combat experience. Is that fair?”

  “Modern armies stand or fall on their staffwork. Don’t belittle it.”

  “I’m not. I’m just thinking, you saw those guys downstairs? The one guy’s face? The back of the other guy’s skull? Now look at these.”

  I held up my palms, then the back of my hands.

  “If I can do that to those guys, on my own, without getting a single scratch, what’s going to happen to you if you don’t give me what I want?”

  Taylor stared down at the tabletop. But the only thing on it was his reflection, and that didn’t offer much comfort.

  “So, here’s your choice. Talk to me about this,” I said, tapping the photograph. “Or end up in this.”

  I undid the canvas satchel and took out the body bag. I held it up so he got a good look, then gripped one end and flicked the roll toward him so it unraveled across the width of the table. The final eighteen inches cascaded off the far side and dangled down onto his lap.

  “Your buddies brought it for me,” I said. “But it looks more like your size.”

  Taylor sat in silence, mesmerized by the strip of black rubber as if it were a giant tentacle about to grab hold of him. Then he snapped his eyes away, shoveled the end back onto the table, and reached across for the photo.

  “They were organs, going for transplant,” he said. “But we weren’t bringing them in.”

  “Who was?” I said.

  “Nobody. We were bringing them out.”

  “Out? Where to? The U.S.?”

  “Obviously.”

  “So back in your office. You talked about being a principled operator. Giving back to the people. But behind it all, you’re just a bunch of organ smugglers.”

  “Don’t lay your tabloid-headline morals on me. Yes, we make money. Yes, what we do is technically illegal. But, hey, what we do saves lives, and that’s good enough from where I’m sitting.”

  “Save lives? Wake up, Taylor. You steal people’s organs.”

  “We don’t steal them.”

  “You buy them then. Who from? How much? What happens if they say no?”

  “We don’t buy them.”

  “So what do you do? Make them?”

  “You’ve got no idea what state that country’s in. Bizarre as it sounds, there are spare organs literally lying at the side of the street. Back here, people are dying because there aren’t enough. So we put the two together. No one loses. Innocent Americans win.”

  “What do they win? Someone else’s body parts? Who had no choice about donating?”

  “They get to stay alive. And I’m not apologizing for that to anyone.”

  “These spare organs. They’re not still encased inside people’s bodies, by any chance?”

  “You’re an asshole. This is how it works. We don’t just protect that hospital. We provide surgeons and doctors. Pro bono. Patrols scoop up the victims. Our guys save as many as they can.”

  “And the rest you tear apart? Carve up for spare parts?”

  “You’ve got to be realistic. You can’t save them all.”

  “So, the unlucky ones. You just help yourselves to their innards. Like vultures.”

  “What would you do? Leave the organs to rot? Do you know what life on dialysis is like? And that doesn’t always work, anyway. Ten thousand Americans die every year from kidney failure as it is.”

  “How do you get them back here? The organs.”

  “By plane.”

  “What about customs?”

  “We’re licensed government contractors. They’re our planes. No one looks twice.”

  “Once they’re here, how do you sell them? On eBay?”

  “We don’t just sell them. It’s like I said. We do this to save lives. We only work with our own patients. We do the diagnosis, the treatment, the convalescence. Our approach is completely holistic.”

  “Don’t the hospitals blow the whistle? Or do you bribe them to look the other way when you wheel in your crates of meat?”

  “We don’t use hospitals. We have our own facilities.”

  “What kind of facilities?”

  “Private clinics.”

  “Private. Pandering to line-jumpers.”

  “No. Mothers. Fathers. Normal people who just want to stay alive and see their kids grow up. The regular channels let them down, because the fact is—and this is truly sad—the system can’t deliver. It’s inadequate. So they turn to us. And for every one we help, a space is freed up on the list for somebody else. Everybody wins. There is literally no downside.”

  “How many clinics are we talking about?”

  “Five.”

  “In New York?”

  “One is. Around the corner, on Sixty-sixth Street. It was our first.”

  “And the others?”

  “Boston.”

  “All of them?”

  “No. One in Chicago. And Washington. And Miami.”

  “All dedicated to saving lives.”

  “Yes. If you ask me, it’s the only good thing to come out of the whole war.”

  “So why do the FBI have five ex-Tungsten guys in their morgue?”

  “You should talk to James Mansell about that. The asshole. He was new to the hospital detail. Strayed somewhere he shouldn’t have. We didn’t know how much he’d seen. Obviously we couldn’t take the chance.”

  “So you canned the whole team. Clinically excised them. Brought them home, paid them off, sent them on their way.”

  “Right.”

  “Then how did five of them end up on the slab?”

  “That’s Mansell’s fault again. He sent us a copy of this picture. Wanted more money. A lot more.”

  “One guy tried it on, and you wiped out the whole team. That’s a pretty holistic approach, I guess.”

  “It wasn’t my call. I wouldn’t have done it that way.”

  “No. You’d have just killed Mansell. Or had him killed.”

  “If it was necessary. As a last resort.”

  “You’re like a saint, in comparison. So, who made the call?”

  Taylor didn’t answer.

  “Don’t go shy on me now,” I said. “I’m in no mood to compromise.”

  “OK,” he said, “but this is hard for me. Because th
e Tungsten you see today, it’s not the way I set it up. Things have changed.”

  “In what way?”

  “I have new partners, is the easiest way to say it.”

  “Since when?”

  “Three months ago.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know their real names. Iraqis.”

  “You employ large men with automatic weapons. Why let anyone muscle in?”

  “It’s not that simple. They found out what we were doing. We thought they’d try and shut us down. It’s happened a couple of times before. And you’re right. We’re well placed to deal with that. But these guys were different. They didn’t want us to stop shipping organs. They wanted us to ship more. And they were ready to help.”

  “And you let them.”

  Taylor shrugged.

  “They’re well connected, locally. Tripled the supply of suitable donors. Even sent their own surgeons over here, to pick up the slack. We’re averaging one transplant per day, per clinic, since they came on board. Mainly kidneys. Some livers. Now we’re talking about diversifying. Into corneas, that sort of thing. All in all, it’s ninety percent good.”

  “And the other ten?”

  “Day to day isn’t an issue. It’s how they deal with problems that sucks. They overreact. Have different ideas about what you can and can’t do.”

  “I know all about that. So who are they?”

  “I told you. I don’t know their names.”

  “Where can I find them? The bosses. Back in Iraq?”

  “No. They’re here. They work out of the clinic on Sixty-sixth Street.”

  “Hamad’s one of theirs?”

  “Yes. Their fixer. He came over a month after they did. Most of the wild stuff is up to him.”

  “And you stood back and let him get on with it.”

  “What could I do? I’ve had my concerns from day one. But the other directors . . .”

  “Head down, mouth shut, take the money.”

  “Exactly. Why kill the golden goose? And be honest—would you have done it differently?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Pretty much all of it.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  We didn’t return to our barracks straight after the fire incident.

  Instead, we were sent to an army base in Wiltshire for a hostage rescue exercise. None of us could see why. If anyone was being held captive in an embassy it wouldn’t be our job to get them out. Blowing holes in walls and smashing through windows isn’t up to us. But that kind of speculation is pointless. In the navy, you go where you’re told. And besides, it sounded fun.

  The briefing for the first exercise was pretty basic. They told us eight terrorists were holding two hostages in an abandoned vicarage. As far as they knew, the terrorists were dispersed throughout the premises and the hostages were in a windowless room on the second floor. I was allocated to the first rescue team. There was me, another navy guy, and four special ops soldiers who weren’t too keen on working with us.

  The navy guy and I created a diversion, pretending to attack through the basement. The soldiers went through four separate ground-floor windows, entering simultaneously and tearing through the building like wildfire. We came in after them and helped with the sweep. Between us we found the terrorists—only six, it turned out—and neutralized them easily enough with orange paintballs. The hostages were harder to track down. They’d been moved to a tiny cupboard in the attic. One was injured. She was barely conscious, and bleeding badly. Her companion was in a blind panic, convinced she was going to die. The soldiers slapped on a battlefield dressing and started to haul them out. Only by the time we reached the front door, all of us were covered in sweet-smelling red jelly. Because the hostages were already dead. The women were the seventh and eighth terrorists. And no one had found the remote detonator in the casualty’s shoe.

  We didn’t have to take part in any more hostage exercises after that. In fact, there weren’t any. The whole thing had been staged. The soldiers had been in on it from the start. And the point wasn’t to teach us how to storm a building. It was to hammer home something entirely different. To take nothing and no one at face value.

  Or, as I’ve found over the years, it’s usually the person you’re least expecting who causes the most trouble.

  It was a ten-minute cab ride back to the FBI building so I made sure to use the time carefully. First I called for someone to come over and scoop up Taylor and his boys. Then I settled back to think. If I could make sure every angle was covered, there was a chance I could get Varley to sign me off the job after the 12:00 P.M. conference. That way I could take the rest of the afternoon for myself, have dinner with Tanya, and be back in London by suppertime tomorrow. Or suppertime the next day, if things went really well. Only I’d been as far as JFK already, yesterday morning. I didn’t want anyone pulling the rug out again today.

  I was expecting some heavy flak after visiting Taylor on my own, and I could see I was right about Varley’s reaction before the meeting even started. He crashed through the boardroom doors, stomped over to his place, and sat there glowering at me until Tanya arrived. He let me talk first, but I guess that news of the arrests had reached him through the grapevine because he interrupted, sniped, and criticized at every turn as I brought the others up to date. Weston and Lavine weren’t much more constructive. But as the briefing wore on they began to see the possibilities. Bringing down organ smugglers is hard to beat for headline potential. Especially when the operation spans five cities. Coordinating something like that is a dream for career development. A task force would be needed. Leading roles would be up for grabs. Practical details started to dominate the discussion. And no actions were coming my way. There was no mention of James Mansell, so no need for a British presence in general. They had Taylor in custody, so no need for me in particular. Things were looking good.

  Until I realized I was looking in the wrong direction. If anyone was going to trip me up, it wouldn’t be the FBI. It would be Tanya.

  “I don’t agree,” she said, out of the blue. “What you’re proposing, it’ll take too long. It’s turning into a circus. We should hit the New York clinic now. This afternoon. There’s no time to delay.”

  “We can’t do that,” Varley said. “We need confirmation that no other agencies are already into this. They could have people in there, undercover. Then we need surveillance. As of now, we have no idea what we’d be walking into. Or whether the big fish are even there. And we need foolproof cooperation from the other cities. It’s no good taking one crew down and letting four more walk away.”

  “And something else,” Weston said. “The other end. Iraq. We need someone to sweep that mess up.”

  “What a jurisdictional nightmare that’ll be,” Lavine said.

  “I’m not a fool,” Tanya said. “I understand the big picture. But while you’re worrying about ‘what if this’ and ‘what if that’ the people we really want will be long gone. David proved that. Look how Taylor reacted.”

  “We don’t know who’s involved,” Varley said. “We don’t know how many there are. We don’t have names or faces. And you’ve picked out targets?”

  “Yes,” Tanya said. “The people who ordered the five murders. They’re the ones that count. Lives are worth more than money, however much we’re talking about.”

  “Agreed,” Varley said. “And we’re going to take them. Because I know what you’re thinking. They’re to blame for your friend’s death. Well, the way I see it, they’re to blame for Mike Raab’s death, as well. Lesley’s guy pulled the trigger, but Mike’s path only crossed because Tungsten was dropping bodies everywhere. These guys, they’re top of the list. We’ll get them. Have faith.”

  “Those are just words,” Tanya said. “I want action. We’re not going to get anyone, sitting here. I want us to do something, now.”

  She was starting to sound alarmingly like me.

  “OK,” Varley said. “What?”

  “We know they’re at the clinic
,” Tanya said. “A few streets away. Taylor told David. So we find another reason. Tax evasion. Operating without a medical license. Immigration issues. Anything. Then throw a net over the others later, when you’re ready.”

  “No,” Varley said. “And don’t obsess over later. We’re not talking days. As soon as we’re done here, we’ll get onto INS. Kyle will get the tech crews rolling. I’ll liaise with the other cities, personally. I’ll talk to the overseas guys, as well. Then, when we know the who and the where, we’ll move. It’ll be tomorrow morning, at the latest.”

  “What if Taylor warns them before tomorrow?” Tanya said.

  “We’ll up the watch on the airports,” Lavine said. “All flights in and out of that region.”

  “And Taylor can’t warn anyone,” Varley said. “He’s in jail. They’re holding him in solitary.”

  “What if he already did?” Tanya said. “David left him alone in the apartment. He could have phoned before you picked him up.”

  “The phone was broken,” I said.

  “How do you know?” Tanya said. “Did you check?”

  “No. I broke it,” I said.

  “What about their cell phones?” Tanya said.

  “They lost their cell phones,” I said.

  “All three of them?” Tanya said. “Doesn’t seem likely.”

  I reached into my pocket and laid the three phones on the table.

  “What if his disappearance spooks them?” Tanya said.

  “Tanya, I know you’re frustrated,” I said. “And no one cuts more corners than me. But this is not the time. The organ smuggling, the hit on Simon, finding Mansell, they’re part of the same thing. We’ve led the horse to water. Now leave it. It’s up to these guys to make it drink.”

  _______

  Varley took Weston and Lavine downstairs to hit the phones, leaving me to keep an eye on Tanya. He didn’t trust her to stay away from the clinic until we reconvened at 5:00 P.M. The conversation left me wrong-footed. One minute he was shooting me daggers, the next swearing me in like I was his deputy. All I needed was a tin badge. It was a strange role to give me. And not one I was interested in playing.

  I went across to the window and watched the city drift by for a couple of minutes. Looking down through the glass made the streets seem remote, like a museum exhibit. Which reminded me of something. I turned and headed for the door. Tanya came with me. She stayed close all the way down in the elevator and through the garage, but she didn’t open her mouth until we’d climbed the ramp and stepped out onto the sidewalk.