Red Alert

by James Patterson

  “Yes, and now that man is cuffed to a bed in Bellevue, his wife is filing for divorce, and the DA’s office is charging him with half a dozen white-collar crimes. So I guess you’re right. It sounds like a win-win all the way around. How do you plan on celebrating?”

  “C.J. and I are going for dinner at the Mark.”

  “Are you serious? The same hotel where the robbery took place?”

  “They have an incredible restaurant in the lobby. The hotel manager invited everyone at the poker game to be his guest, anytime. Hey, do you and Cheryl want to join us?”

  “Thanks, but Cheryl took the Amtrak down to Philadelphia for a conference. My victory dinner will be a solo affair: sausage pizza, a six-pack of Blue Moon, and a Yankee game.”

  “That sounds dreadful.”

  It did. But it was a lie. Not the Cheryl part, but everything else. Q had texted me earlier in the day and told me he had a lead on the two thugs who had chloroformed Bob Reitzfeld, tied him up, and escaped with eight hundred thousand dollars. It was ironic that C.J. would be returning to the scene of the crime on the very same night that I was working hard to connect him to it.

  As soon as Kylie left the office, I texted Q. Some of my informants like to give up the information they’ve got, take the money, and run. Not Q Lavish. He doesn’t take money, and he enjoys turning our get-togethers into a social event.

  An hour later, we were at Nom Wah Tea Parlor in Chinatown, sharing eight different kinds of dumplings. Halfway through the meal, the waiter brought us an order of boiled chicken feet with black bean sauce, which I happily pushed over to Q’s side of the table.

  “The two boys who hit the poker game are Tariq Jessup and Garvey Jewel,” Q said, picking up a turnip cake with his chopsticks and taking a bite.

  “You sure?”

  “A hundred percent. I have a signed confession,” he said, totally straight-faced. “They’re waiting for you to cuff ’em and stuff ’em.”

  “Sorry. Dumb question. Let me rephrase. What makes you think they’re the perps?”

  “Jessup and Jewel are two bottom-feeder hip-hop promoters. They troll the streets and the internet looking for any wannabe Kanye or Nicki Minaj who can keep a beat and chant a rhyme. They put together a show, package it to any low-end club that will take them on, then beat the bushes for friends, family, and anyone else they can get to line up behind the velvet rope.”

  “So they’re musical impresarios,” I said.

  “Impresarios who get paid in watered-down drinks and a small percentage of the gate if they’re lucky. There’s a ladder in the music business, Zachary, and these brothers barely have one foot on the bottom rung.”

  “And yet…”

  “Are you familiar with Gansevoort PM? It’s a club in the meatpacking district.”

  “I’ve heard of it.” From Kylie. She was supposed to meet C.J. there but called it off when Aubrey Davenport’s body turned up on Roosevelt Island.

  “Now that’s a club,” Q said. “Their music rocks the roof off the building. And so do their prices. But guess who was seen there the past two nights?”

  “Jessup and Jewel.”

  “Correct. They had their mitts all over two women who were totally out of their league, and they’d traded up from rack vodka to bottles of Dom. These mofos never had that kind of money in their lives.”

  “Is it possible they won it in a poker game?”

  Q picked up another chicken foot. “You sure you won’t try one of these?”

  “No, I’m more of a breast man. Do you know where I can find Jessup and Jewel?”

  “They move around.”

  “How about tonight?” I said.

  He gave me a wide grin and sank his teeth into the chicken foot. Of course he knew. Q knows everything.

  CHAPTER 56

  After dinner we polished off an order of sweet fried sesame balls and two pots of bo-lay tea while Q gave me everything he had on Jessup and Jewel. Then he helped me craft a cover story I never could have invented on my own.

  “It’s a little over-the-top,” I said. “Can we make it more…I don’t know…realistic?”

  “You mean like the Nigerian prince scam? Zach, you know the old saying ‘You can’t make this shit up’? Sometimes the more unbelievable something is the more people are willing to believe it.”

  “You think they’ll buy it?”

  “You think you can sell it?” he fired back.

  I shrugged. “Early on, I worked undercover for Narcotics. I remember my first day on the street. I hadn’t showered or shaved for a week, my clothes were stained and raggedy, and I was totally convinced that I was the most authentic wreck of a junkie ever to try to make a buy. I approached the dealer, and the first thing he says to me is ‘Take off your shoes.’”

  Q started laughing before I even got to the punch line. “And I bet you had on a nice clean pair of socks,” he said.

  I nodded. “Dumbass rookie mistake. After a year I transferred out because I hated smelling like the inside of a Dumpster, but by the time I left I’d gotten pretty good at lying. I guess I’ll find out if I still can pull it off.”

  “Drug dealers are hard to con because they think everybody’s a narc. Jessup and Jewel are two-bit hustlers who have no reason to suspect you’re undercover. You’ll do fine. Just act like the guy in those old Westerns: you’re Black Bart walking into the saloon.”

  “More like Caucasian Bart,” I said, “but I get your point.”

  I paid the check and found a store in Chinatown that sold burner phones. Then I walked to Grand Street and took the D train uptown to the Bronx. It was a forty-five-minute ride, which gave me plenty of time to repeat my cover story to myself till it was second nature.

  I got off at Bedford Park Boulevard and walked another eight blocks to Webster Avenue. The club was called Rattlesnake. If you could call it a club. It was more of a dive bar with a sandwich board on the sidewalk that said LIVE MUSIC TONIGHT.

  There was no line, no velvet rope, just a guy in a muscle shirt sitting outside. He nodded at me and said, “Welcome to the Snake. Two-drink minimum.”

  It was relatively crowded for a Tuesday night. Close to a hundred people, most of whom checked out the white guy, then went back to what they were doing. I went to the bar, ordered a beer, and found a table near the back, as far from the music as possible.

  Two minutes later, just as Q had predicted, a good-looking man with shoulder-length dreads and a black beard flecked with gray pulled up a chair and flashed me a warm, gracious smile.

  “Garvey Jewel,” he said. “You with a label?”

  I barely looked up from my beer. “No.”

  “You just into hip-hop?”

  “Not a fan,” I said.

  “Then you in the wrong room,” Jewel said, his smile morphing into a challenge. “And if you’re here to cop some blow, you really in the wrong room. This place may look low-rent, but the old lady who owns it keeps it clean. Nobody underage. Nobody dealing. Just a bunch of people who come for the drinks and the music.”

  “I’m in the right room. But I didn’t come for the music.”

  “Then why you here?”

  “Same reason I go to the parking lot at Home Depot when I’m looking for day workers.”

  “What kind of day work you talking about?”

  “Night work, actually. Not too dangerous, and it pays well.”

  “How well?”

  I bent low and leaned forward, clasping my hands on the table. This was the moment of truth, and I dug down, hoping to channel the gravitas of Al Pacino and the psychological instability of Christopher Walken. I dropped my voice to a whisper. “More than you and your partner made last Wednesday night on the Upper East Side.”

  He pushed his chair away from the table, and his hand instinctively went to the waistband of his pants. “You a cop?”

  I didn’t flinch. “Answer me this, Garvey. Do you think the NYPD heard about your little blindman’s bluff game at the Mark hotel,
but there were no African American cops around, so they sent one lone white guy up to the Bronx to arrest you? Or do you think maybe you bragged to some woman who was sucking your dick, and she told her friend, who told her friends, who told their friends, and it finally got back to me?”

  “Fucking Inez,” Jewel said. “She got a big mouth.”

  Q had been right. “Guys like Jessup and Jewel won’t be happy with a fat wad of money,” he had told me. “They need to impress people with how they got it. Let him think the leak came from a girlfriend.”

  “What if he calls her on it?” I said.

  “She’ll deny it,” Q said. “But he won’t believe her. He’ll believe you.”

  “Don’t be mad at Inez,” I said to Jewel. “She brought us together, didn’t she? Now, would you like to hear what I have to say, or should I leave?”

  “Wait here,” he said, and walked toward the front of the room.

  Two minutes later, he was back with his partner, who was wearing an Apple Watch on his wrist, just like the blind man in Reitzfeld’s story.

  “Twenty-five words or less,” the new guy said. “And it better be good.”

  “Saturday night,” I said. “Serious poker game in Jersey. The buy-in is a hundred and fifty grand. I’ll be on the inside. I’m going to need some…”

  “Some what?” Apple Watch said. He looked around, wondering why I had stopped. “Nobody’s listening. Keep going.”

  “That was twenty-five words,” I said. “I was counting on my fingers.”

  “You’re a piece of work,” he said, extending a hand. “Tariq Jessup.”

  I shook his hand and dropped my next whopper. “The name is Johnny Wurster,” I said. “My friends call me Johnny Fly Boy.”

  “You a pilot?” he said.

  “Back in the day, a couple of gorillas came over to my apartment and tossed me over a seventh-floor balcony. I bounced off an awning and landed on a three-hundred-pound doorman. I’ve been Johnny Fly Boy ever since.”

  The two of them laughed. “Okay, Mr. Fly Boy,” Jessup said. “You just bought yourself a few thousand more words. Tell us about this poker game.”

  I told them all about it, and they hung on every word. I was their Nigerian prince.

  CHAPTER 57

  At three in the morning, Geraldo Segura put on his backpack and slipped out of his hotel on Sumner Place in Brooklyn. He stopped at an all-night market and bought a bottle of Poland Spring, two KIND bars, and the early editions of the New York Post and the Daily News.

  He ate the energy bars and drank the water as he walked to the Flushing Avenue station. Then he climbed the stairs to the elevated subway platform, caught an eastbound J train, and scanned the papers.

  A picture of the detective wielding a pair of bolt cutters to free Nathan Hirsch was on the front page of both. The Post headline said

  HERO COP SAVES LYING LAWYER

  He turned the page and read the banner above the lead story:

  THAI BOXING CHAMP IS HOTEL BOMBER

  There were two pictures of him: one from his high school yearbook, the other from his fighting days in Thailand. At this point, he looked like neither. He’d come to New York with a bagful of professional disguises, and for this outing he’d aged himself twenty years, his head bald on top, with a fringe of mousy gray hair on each side. A matching beard obscured his face.

  The details in the article were sketchy because the 911 tape had not yet been released, and Hirsch, who would have lied anyway, had been hauled off before the media could descend on him.

  The Daily News coverage was the same as the Post’s, but the caption above his Muay Thai photo made him smile:

  The Most Wanted Man in New York

  He carefully tore the page from the newspaper, folded it, and put it in the pocket of his Windbreaker. He couldn’t wait to show it to Jam.

  He remembered the day he met her. She had come to Klong Prem prison not for the boxing but to watch her older sister parade around the ring in a bikini, holding up a card announcing the number of the next round.

  “You’re from America?” she asked him after he’d won four matches that day.

  He smiled. She was cute. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Who was your favorite president?” she asked.

  “Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Then he’s the one I’m going to read about,” she said, flashing a bright smile. “Thanks.”

  He was twenty-two at the time. Jam was only twelve.

  She came back for his next match and told him she’d read three books about Lincoln. “I cried when they shot him,” she said. “What’s your favorite book that you read when you were my age?”

  “To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.”

  And so the friendship took hold. Soon Jam would start visiting between boxing matches, and the prisoner and the schoolgirl would talk about literature, philosophy, history, and her favorite subject, America.

  “Whenever the girl comes,” Pongrit Juntasa instructed his guards, “let her in. She makes him a better fighter.”

  That may or may not have been true, but by the time he was twenty-eight, Geraldo Segura had become Rom Ran Sura, the best Muay Thai boxer in Southeast Asia—with his sights set on the rest of the world.

  Special prisoners are afforded special privileges, and one evening Segura was given a hot shower and clean clothes and driven to Juntasa’s house. A guard escorted Segura to the dining room, where the head of the Department of Corrections was standing next to a table set for two.

  “Rom Ran Sura, your most recent victory at the World Combat Games has once again brought great honor to the kingdom,” Juntasa announced. “As a reward, His Majesty has graciously reduced your sentence by another seven years.”

  Segura silently did the math. He had been fighting for his freedom, and with this latest grant from the king, he would be out by the time he was fifty years old. He thanked his benefactor.

  “I have one other gift,” Juntasa said. He raised his hand, a door opened, and Jam Anantasu entered.

  “It is her eighteenth birthday,” Juntasa said. “The age of consent. Enjoy your evening.”

  He left the room, and Segura stood there, barely able to breathe. Jam was a vision, a goddess in a white-lace dress, her shimmering black hair cascading down to her bare shoulders, her lips parted in a shy smile, her smoldering eyes locked on his. She was no longer a child. She was a woman—the one he wanted to spend his life with. If only she was willing to wait.

  They dined. They drank. They talked. They laughed. And then they adjourned to a bedroom suite, where the air was filled with soft music and the scent of jasmine, and they made love by candlelight.

  The next morning, he returned to prison. He never lost another fight, and with each new achievement, the king rewarded him by taking more time off his sentence.

  The conjugal visits continued, and over the next ten years, he and Jam had four children. As the dream of a life together slowly became a reality, she took a job working in the American Embassy in Bangkok. She was the one who secured his passports: one that gave him easy entry into the U.S., and a second passport with a new identity for his new life. Their new life.

  He was too well-known in Thailand to go back, and as much as he knew Jam would want to live in America, that was impossible. The plan was to meet her and the kids in Adelaide, Australia. Flynn Samuels had given him contacts. After putting his life on hold for twenty years, he was ready for a fresh start.

  But not yet. He still had two more people to see in New York.

  Princeton Wells was no doubt expecting him. But first he had to pay a surprise visit to one of the most ruthless men in the city.

  The J train stopped at Broadway Junction, and Segura connected to the L, took it six stops, and got off at the Rockaway Parkway station in Canarsie.

  He tightened the straps of his backpack around his shoulders and started the mile-long walk to the Karayib Makèt on Rockaway Parkway.

  He had a gift for Malique La Gr
ande, and he planned to deliver it personally.

  CHAPTER 58

  “Good morning, handsome.”

  I looked up from my keyboard. It was Cheryl. I checked my watch. It was only eight thirty. “Hey,” I said. “What the heck are you doing here?”

  “Well, I was thinking you’d be happy to see me,” she said, “but I guess I thought wrong.”

  I jumped out of my chair and gave her a hug. “Of course I am. I just thought you were spending the day at that conference in Philadelphia.”

  “It was a total yawn. Then Captain Cates called this morning and asked me if I could come back. I caught a six-thirty train, and here I am.”

  Kylie was at her desk taking it all in. “I don’t know about Zach,” she said, “but I, for one, am thrilled you’re here. It would have been even more fun if you’d been here last night.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “You know the robbery we caught last week at the Mark hotel?”

  “Shelley Trager’s poker game,” Cheryl said. “Did you find the guys who did it?”

  “Just the opposite. Shelley doesn’t want us poking around. The hotel management is so grateful he’s sweeping it under the rug that they offered us dinner at the Jean-Georges restaurant in the lobby. C.J. and I went last night. The place was packed, the food was incredible, and it was free. Guess who turned down an invitation to go with us?” Kylie pointed in my direction.

  I looked at Cheryl. “Hey, you were out of town.”

  “I know. But the Mark restaurant? I’d have gone if you were out of town.”

  “Tell her what you did instead,” Kylie said.

  “I have a better idea,” I said. “Instead of standing here rehashing every detail of my pathetic evening, I’d rather be alone with my girlfriend, so I can tell her how much I missed her. Excuse us.” I put my arm around Cheryl and walked her to the stairwell.

  “What’s going on between you and Kylie?” she said as soon as we were alone.

  “Nothing.”

  “Zach, I’m a cop and a shrink, so I get lied to every day.”