The Golden Kill

by Marc Olden

  Aging whores came there, sick with heroin and syphilis, trying hard to squeeze a handful of coins from winos with money and desire left over after a breakfast of muscatel. Heroin addicts and homosexual prostitutes also gathered here, sometimes in sunlight, always in darkness. And they left behind them crushed glassine envelopes empty of heroin; the dead, dried bodies of pigeons, killed for a moment’s feeling of power over something in this world; broken, empty wine bottles; and condoms used for a minute’s grunting over a body bought and paid for.

  And urine. Always the harsh, ammonia smell of urine.

  Anyone getting close enough to the house now would see the police car, itself an effective warning to the usual wooden house occupants to keep away. They would.

  Cal, the small cop, shoved his left forefinger up as far as it would go into his left nostril, lightly touching his ivory-handled handgun with his black-gloved right hand, saying, “You sure about killing him?”

  “No other way,” said Carl, still tapping the hickory-wood nightstick against his upturned left palm. “Blackie here wasted Ivan something terrible, beat the pee out of him, and there’s no way we can haul his ass to a doctor and be sure he don’t start running off at the mouth. You know and I know that some big people got some big plans, and if Ivan talks too much, well, I don’t have to say any more, do I?”

  His finger still up his nose, Cal slowly shook his head from side to side.

  As he quietly listened and watched Carl, Robert Sand was aware that his own death would soon be ordered just as casually. On the outside, he was calm, his breathing even, his eyes on Carl’s face. Inside, his mind was razor-sharp and alert for anything he could learn from these men, and above all, for the opportunity to turn his captor’s carelessness into escape.

  Their decision to quiet Ivan by killing him showed the Black Samurai that these phony cops were pros, men moving comfortably in a world of killing, who wouldn’t hesitate to kill at any time. Sand made a mental note to move hard and fast when the time came to do so, and not to underestimate any of these three phony cops.

  “Another thing,” said Carl, “Mr. Black Dude here hasn’t said much, fact is, he ain’t said nothing at all about us dragging him off into the woods. So that means we got a lot to squeeze out of him, right, black boy? First we want to know about the Chink’s picture being in your wallet. Then we want to know how come you knew Ivan here was making a hit today. Now, Cal, you go and put some holes in Ivan; you’re probably doing him a favor anyway. Me and Norton will get started on our friend here; then you come back and join us. We’re gonna use the clubs, gonna lay some wood on his black ass to get him in a mood to talk. He ain’t gonna be much trouble with his hands cuffed together like that, now, are you?”

  Cal snickered. Norton slipped his hard brown hickory nightstick from inside his belt, then stepped over to a boarded-up, glassless window and smashed the club against it. The loud noise ripped through the room, echoing, then dying out. The blow cracked the top board, opening it up and showing the clean, tan splinters inside under the dirt and filth. Grinning, Norton turned to Carl.

  “Move it,” Carl said to Cal, who took his finger from his nose, wiped it on his dark-blue pants leg, and walked through the door, shutting it behind him.

  Stepping toward Sand, Carl said, “Sorry about this, Jim. It’s a job. It’ll be over soon. We’ll give you pain, and you’ll give us answers.”

  Moving one small step backward, the Black Samurai now faced both men. Carl was on his left, Norton on his right, grinning and touching his upper lip with the top of his pink tongue.

  There’s only two of them now, thought Sand. In seconds there’ll be three. Whatever I do has to be done quickly, and it has to be done right the first time.

  He had trained hard enough, seven years in Japan under Master Konuma, and more than once Sand had been carried out of the dojo unconscious or bleeding or with broken bones.

  But he had become a Samurai, the first man other than a Japanese to do so, and he was good, so good that he had won the last competition Master Konuma had given among his Samurai students. Twenty-six martial arts—judo, karate, archery, swordsmanship, stick fighting, horsemanship, knives, ropes—these were just some of them, and Robert Sand had practiced them all, year in, year out.

  Until the slaughter, until Sensei Konuma and twenty-three Samurai brothers had been massacred by a man corroded with revenge and evil. Sand had tracked that man halfway around the world and killed him with a Samurai sword.

  Sand had learned how to fight as few men in history ever had. And he had learned to fight with his hands tied front and back, learning against knife and sword, and getting cut and bleeding when he was slow, inattentive, nervous, or indecisive.

  He was ready for the two phony, club-swinging cops.

  Norton moved in first, drawing his right arm back as far as it would go. Quickly dropping to his side on the filth-covered concrete floor and landing on his left hip, Sand drove his right foot hard, into the softness of Norton’s balls, powering the kick in so strongly that Norton folded in half. His eyes bulging, hanging out as though they would soon roll down his cheek, the acne-faced cop moaned and doubled over. His nightstick clattered on the dirty concrete floor.

  Without hesitating, the Black Samurai rolled over until his stomach was flat on the concrete, then spun around as fast as he could, both of his legs clipping Carl hard at his ankles.

  The swiftness of the attack gave Carl no chance to do a thing. The large cop seemed to leap off his feet and hang in midair, his police cap slipping off his head, his arms flailing wildly to break his fall.

  He landed head-first, his skull smashing into the concrete and making a popping sound as though a melon had been thrown against a brick wall. In seconds, blood slowly crept from behind his dark hair and began pushing its way through dirt. His silver-mirrored sunglasses now covered his lips, and his left arm was under his body. The nightstick was still rolling toward the wall behind Carl, who wasn’t moving.

  Norton was.

  On his knees in the dust, old newspapers, and green broken wine bottles, he looked at Robert Sand and painfully whispered, “Shit, nigger,” slowly moving his right hand toward his .38 Smith & Wesson.

  Lying on his stomach, Sand felt his mouth grow hard, and he sensed a coolness inside him from knowing death was near, reaching for him with icy, bony fingers. Forcing himself to remain calm, he quickly looked at Carl’s unconscious body and saw his own .45 still tucked in the big cop’s belt.

  Scrambling to his knees, Sand crawled and rolled toward the gun, his new white silk turtleneck now stained black and brown from the filthy floor. The fingers of his cuffed hands touched the handle just as Norton, still moving slowly with pain, cleared his gun from his holster.

  With reflexes honed under the finest of martial-arts instruction, Sand yanked his .45 from Carl’s belt, and bringing it no higher than six inches from the big cop’s stomach, the Black Samurai quickly fired twice. The roar of the big handgun in the small house seemed strong enough to knock down the wooden walls.

  The first bullet exploded into Norton’s chest, lifting the acne-faced cop completely off his feet and throwing him back into the wall. As he hit the wall, the second shot ripped into his head, turning it into bloody pulp. When Norton’s body slumped to the ground, his face gone and replaced by blood and pieces of white bone, he was dead. Sand, who had fired .45’s in Vietnam and on pistol ranges in Tokyo and America, knew the gun made a hole the size of your fist going in, and a hell of a lot bigger than that coming out.

  “Carl! Carl!”

  The small cop was shouting from outside, his high-pitched voice cutting through the stillness and gunsmoke inside the small wooden house.

  “Carl! Goddamnit, what’s going on in there?”

  Sand stood up and moved quietly to a boarded-up window, bending down to peer through a slit between two rotting pieces of faded brown wood. He saw the small cop, standing off to the side, nervously lick his lips, take out his ivory
-handled pistol, and again scream in a high-pitched voice, “Carl? You O.K.? Norton?”

  Sand waited.

  Suddenly the small cop turned and ran, disappearing from Sand’s vision. Quickly the Black Samurai moved back to Carl, placing his fingers on the big cop’s neck. Dead, probably from a fractured skull. Fumbling through his pockets, Sand got his own wallet, then took Carl’s wallet, as well as Vanich’s wallet and passport, tucking them in his belt.

  Crossing the room to Norton, he found the key to the handcuffs, and as he twisted and turned his wrists to reach the lock, he heard the gunshots. Three of them, flat, popping sounds. Then he heard a motor rumble and the sound of bushes and branches brushing against the metal of a speeding car.

  Quickly tearing off the handcuffs, Sand ran outside as the police car sped off. He ran along the small concrete walk, then stepped off it into the trees and bushes.

  Ivan Vanich was lying face-down. Turning him over, Sand saw the small holes in the right side of the dead man’s neck and right temple, holes black with gunpowder and red with warm, flowing blood.

  He heard the fading sound of the car; then it was quiet around him.

  Standing up, he looked down at Ivan Vanich, then looked back toward the small wooden house. Then, tucking his .45 in the small of his back, the Black Samurai began to jog along the road he had been driven along just minutes ago.

  He was on foot, but he was alive.

  Chapter III

  EX-PRESIDENT OF THE United States William Baron Clarke answered the telephone himself. Only he and Robert Sand ever used this particular number. Over the phone, his Texas drawl sounded only ten feet away from Sand, rather than almost three thousand miles away in Texas on a 1,250,000-acre ranch Clarke ruled like a tiny kingdom.

  “Grenade?” drawled Clarke, known to friends, enemies, and historians as “The Baron.” “They ain’t playing shit, are they? Damn, even down here, all the boys are prone to do is stick a shotgun in your mouth and pull the trigger a couple times. But a grenade?”

  “Two other people are dead,” said Sand. “A woman and her daughter, plus a man had his leg blown off, and three other people are bleeding in the hospital. I think they wanted more than just Li’s death.”

  Alert, The Baron said, “How you figure that?”

  “They wanted Li dead, but they wanted it done in public, where it was sure to be seen and end up in the newspapers. They also didn’t care who else got hurt. It only makes for more pressure on both parties concerned.”

  Clarke was silent. Then he drawled slowly, “Y’all got a point there. That brings up another problem, and one you got to consider. The phony cop that got away knows what you look like, and by now he’s beatin’ his gums to whoever paid him. He’s describing you down to your underwear. So from now on, walk easy, son. They ain’t gonna forget what happened today. By now they know about your little fracas in the park, and they’re ready for you.”

  “I know,” said Sand.

  “As important as this thing is,” drawled The Baron, “I got to warn you. Right now you are the topic of conversation in some dangerous circles.”

  “Well, like you told me once,” said Sand, “black people are invisible. Nobody gives them a second thought, even when they look them dead in the face. We all look alike, remember?”

  Clarke chuckled. “Some of you are uppity, too.”

  “Especially me,” said Sand.

  “Particularly you, but if you weren’t a hard-nosed son-of-a-bitch in your own black way, you wouldn’t be working for me.”

  “Working with you,” corrected Sand.

  The Baron chuckled again. “Like I said, working with me. What’s your next moves?”

  “The U.N. hit,” said Sand. “That’s tomorrow night. I don’t think they’ll change plans. It’s too late for them to do that, and it’s too important for them to let this opportunity go by. They need another incident.”

  “Two weeks,” said Clarke. “That’s all we’ve got.”

  “Wrong,” said the Black Samurai. “We have to stop them before that. If we let it go two weeks, a lot of people will be dead, and a lot of money is going to end up in the wrong hands. We don’t have two weeks. We’ve got less than that.”

  Chuckling again, The Baron said, “You don’t let anything get by, do you?”

  “Anything that gets by you,” said the Black Samurai, “can kill you,” and he hung up the phone.

  Stepping from the white-tiled shower in his comfortable Park Avenue hotel suite, Sand began toweling beads of water from his smooth brown skin. Looking into the mirror, he stopped. His own strong, handsome face stared back at him, and in his mind he traveled back two weeks ago to William Baron Clarke’s 1,250,000-acre ranch.

  At Sand’s insistence, all missions were never discussed in front of anyone, either servants or Clarke’s relatives and friends. Clarke agreed, and on the night this new mission was outlined, the main ranch house was empty except for the white Texas millionaire-politician who had ruled America along with a great deal of the world for several years and the Black Samurai, whose body and mind had been sharpened to a peak achieved by few men in history.

  They sat in the main dining room at a long, shiny black wooden table, Clarke in four-hundred-dollar custom-made black-and-yellow boots, sipping chilled white wine from a Spanish silver goblet, while Sand sipped water from an English crystal glass. The Baron had cooked supper, and it had been excellent.

  He chuckled. “Damn. If Congress could see me now. A white man and a former President of these here United States cooking for a black man.”

  “I might not eat it,” said Sand.

  Throwing back his head, Clarke, six-foot-four, silver-haired, hawk-nosed, and deeply tanned, laughed out loud. But there was no laughing when they discussed Sand’s next mission.

  He passed a brown folder over to Sand, who opened it and took out the pile of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs inside.

  “Top one’s Print Jerrold Drewcolt,” said Clarke. “He’s fifty-six years old, smart as hell, meaner than a rattlesnake with an inch of tail sliced off. He runs CCE, Consolidated Communications and Electronics, and that’s the seventh largest business in the whole world, son. Five-hundred thousand people in seventy countries work for him. He says jump, they don’t even say how high, they just start leaping for the clouds.”

  “Where’s he located?” asked Sand, staring at the black-and-white photograph of a long-faced man with thick white hair and piercing clear eyes that were either green or blue.

  “Spends most of his time in a luxury castle in England, forty miles out of London. He’s American. Cheated and connived to get to where he is. Left more than a few dead bodies along the way. How else do you get to own over a thousand businesses around the world?”

  Sand whistled. “One thousand?”

  “Uh-huh. Communications, electronics mostly. That’s the big money. Factories of all kinds—I’ve got a sheet here on what he owns. Yearly total these one thousand companies bring in is over five billion dollars.”

  “More than I make in a week,” said Sand.

  “He took over the company fifteen years ago when it was struggling along on fifty million dollars a year. By wheeling and dealing and hurting a lot of people, he’s got profits stacked from here to the moon. He’s tough, and anybody getting in his way don’t live to tell the tale.”

  “This castle,” said Sand.

  “It’s called Crafford Castle. It’s small, about sixty rooms. Most castles have three hundred rooms or more, but he wanted this particular one. Land’s flat around it, and you can see for five or six miles. After that, there’s a small town, some forests, and roads leading to highways going into London and south again. He’s got another castle in upstate New York, of all places. Had it shipped over from France brick by brick and rebuilt. He’s a nut on medieval history, particularly English. Damn fool even went and learned how to play the harpsichord. I got a whole file on him and his personal habits. Check that out later.”


  “Who’s this?” Sand held a photograph of a white man with a harelip, a top lip that looked as though it had been ripped apart, then sewed back together by someone who had done it with his eyes closed. The man had dark hair combed forward, looked no older than thirty-five, and his round, thin-lipped face held no expression at all.

  “Bad news,” said Clarke. “Talon. That’s the name he goes by. Just Talon. In effect, he’s Drewcolt’s number-two man, the guy who’s in charge of security, not only at the castle, but throughout CCE. He reports directly to Print Drewcolt, and no vice-president or lawyer ever tells him what to do. He’s a killer with a few strange twists. He can practically talk to animals. Don’t look at me that way, I’m serious.”

  Taking another sip of chilled white wine from the silver goblet, Clarke said, “Talon keeps killer hawks at Crafford Castle, trains ’em, feeds ’em, and according to what I’ve been able to find out, he uses ’em sometimes to painfully dispose of people he and Drewcolt don’t like. He also keeps killer dogs as guards at both the New York and English castles and at CCE buildings in some cities. They say there’s something evil and spooky about Talon, the way he and those killer birds and dogs understand each other. He once caught a man giving a hawk a hard time, and he put out the man’s eye, just like that. He’s coldblooded, no women or little boys either. Just work and running security around Drewcolt.”

  “Is he always near Drewcolt?”

  “Always,” said Clarke. “Drewcolt never travels without him, but sometimes Talon travels without Drewcolt. Like when he makes a surprise security check on a CCE company. He won’t tell ’em he’s coming, just shows up and kicks ass. He’s got a lot of power, and he uses it. Watch out for him. He’s known for pulling surprise security inspections anytime he wants, and God help your ass if he catches you doing something he doesn’t like. He’s hated in the organization by everybody—everybody except Print Drewcolt, and that’s what counts, I guess.”