4
October 27th.
Matt Burke:
Rome isn’t what I thought it would be. Too many postcard-romantic commercials made it seem somehow—I don’t know—bigger, I guess. And less worn. It’s the acid rain (and the centuries of pigeon shit), corroding away the history. And the vids never make it look so lived in (like only the film extras and models ever populate the place).
The hospitality’s been good, I have to say that. I’m not used to going anyplace with history where Americans are still welcome. Maybe it’s because I kept the uniform packed in favor of the semi-tourist look: khakis and a bright baggy Hawaiian (big enough to hide my vest and sidearm), plus I still have the beard left over from the field (though I’m keeping it HumInt reg trimmed now). Or maybe it’s because they’re that desperate to bolster their tourism, especially with the dust still settling on that little girl marting herself yesterday. Anyway, everybody speaks English (or at least keeps a translator vox handy) and they’re generous with the food and wine, enough to keep the mission waiting until I’ve gotten a serious lunch in me.
I’ll blame my attitude (this time, anyway) on the other hospitality: It was too damn easy getting here. No questions about the last-minute flight voucher when I showed up at the counter—one call and they gave me priority over a dozen other poor stand-by zombies who’d been waiting maybe for days, and got me on the first commercial with only one connect in Frankfurt—and then they had a car and driver (who knew me by sight—no little flash sign with my name on it held up at the gate) waiting when I landed. Too slick. Like they knew I was going to come before I did. Especially since the driver was a Ranger Specialist from the local NATO Union Counterterror honcho’s unit—Colonel Richardson, or whatever his name is—who’s apparently onsite live himself, running the Grayman chase with his own Urban Ops teams (teams I’ve apparently been assigned to as some kind of bullshit “Special Intelligence Liaison Officer”).
This is all getting a little too strange for me too fast. I get pulled from deployment to sweat out six months of loose cannon treatment, and now today it’s like I’m their star player. So I let the NATO-ized Spec-4 take me to drop my kit at the embassy-row green zone hotel, then I convince him it’s vital to the operation that I blix the bombsite before he drags me to his CO.
The cafe that got hit is still closed, of course, but there was a nice little bistro down the block with damn good smells and fresh handmade bread. So I got myself a table where I could look like I was officially blixing ground zero, and took my sweet time savoring the local flavors. I figure if Richardson is onsite at bomber daddy’s place now, maybe he’ll be gone by the time I get there.
I keep myself sold to the Specialist by ticking on my tablet every so often, trying to look like I know what I’m doing. I wonder if they told him anything about me, at least anything straight. Not likely—he’s not acting that nervous. So I decide to feed his imagination.
“Did they let you see the backfile on this one, Specialist?”
“No sir.” Very professional. I may well enjoy playing this guy. I give him the single-eyebrow-raise like I’m reconsidering his usefulness, and hope he doesn’t notice when I drip fresh olive oil on my tablet screen.
Between lunch and dessert (real gelato, not that commercial stuff), I tick back over what sparse notes I’ve bothered to take. They wouldn’t let me carry any of the VR reconstruct files (I doubt they’d flash on my lean gummint-issue tablet anyway—too dense), so all I’ve got is the basic read-files, some video and what I scribbled into the tablet on the flight over.
Current score for the Grayman: Thirteen dead (plus two very big dogs), and two busted-up bank guards (he was apparently in benefit-of-the-doubt mode so he didn’t just kill them for being there, but he didn’t hold all that much back).
After the six he took out breaking out of Wiesbaden, he popped over to Frankfurt and had a little quality time with a Turkish cabbie who turned out to be an affiliate of the cell he’d just wiped. They found the poor fucker in his own trunk. Gray’d taken his time—and demonstrated again a pro skill with a knife—and I can only imagine what new intel he’d gotten (if any) that he hadn’t gotten from the safe house. The knife he used still had traces of DNA from his last adventure, both his own and the girl’s. I’m thinking that was more symbolic than sloppy.
The next night the cops find two bouncers from a local underground noise club, gutted while on an illegal smoke break in the back alley. Same knife again: thick, heavy dagger, pro-sharp, with at least seven inches of blade. Being relatively public, he’d made it fast and nasty, yet again showing a definite knowledge of military technique (especially the wind-piping: I can’t think of any civvies that would know to cut a throat by stabbing through and ripping out instead of trying to slash it like in the movies). Background checks on the victims put both on old Qaeda watchlists. Tends to back up the theory that the Wiesbaden cell had a pretty good system for picking up hostages. Also supports the theory that they’d snagged Grayman with a common scam: local hottie rubs herself all over the lonely and slightly drunk target, then lures him out back so her buddies can bag him, likely with onsite assist from the club’s own muscle and a local taxi driver (who may have been casing his passengers incoming for potentials). Anyway, Grayman made damn sure they’d never be pulling that little dance again.
After effectively closing down the Wiesbaden Wabs, he drove the cab to Switzerland (with the cabby’s body still in the trunk) and left it outside the rural estate in Kusnacht where he did the banker, Gustaf Klemp. Caught him coming home after a long day’s laundering at his main branch in Zurich. The banker’s two beefy cop-trained dobeys would have let him know something was up, but Grayman did them first (knife again—sumbitch has titanium balls taking on two German attack dogs with just a knife). Then he jumped Klemp when he came out onto his porch wondering why his beloved pets were so quiet.
He spent time with Klemp, too. Poured himself a good Scotch between kneecaps. I back up and take in the scene from satellite: Kusnacht is pretty farmland, scenic hills and lakes, and Klemp had enough land around the old farmhouse he turned into his private retreat that none of the neighbors heard any screaming.
From the reconstruct of the living room, Klemp writhed around a bit on his expensive Persian, with his rather unhappy guest continually pushing his notebook back where he could reach it (persistent little bugger, Grayman is). When the knees weren’t productive enough, he proceeded to the fingers. The keypad was glued with blood when they found Klemp’s body the next day, choked on about ten million worth of large-cut conflict diamonds that had apparently come out of his own wall safe (Gray left the safe open, just to make it clear that robbery was not his motive—the volume of illegal treasures left untouched therein could have gagged ten Klemps). I’ve still got the scans of the body burned into my brain: Gray had dislocated the banker’s jaw and rammed fistfuls of exquisite stones in so hard Klemp’s windpipe was torn to ground beef. Staring bug-eyed up at the ceiling, his mouth gaping twice as wide as it should be, it looked like he died foaming bloodied gems.
Gray had left Klemp’s computer open too, dropping the passwords so that anyone could get in and see exactly what kinds of business Klemp had been doing. Only a banker would keep such meticulous records of his own crimes. Turned out to be pretty much what we’d suspected but could never prove: six-billion-plus in Qaeda-cash and enough pro-forged documentation to give a few hundred Rads free access to the civilized world.
Grayman had broken their bank for us (or at least one of them). Then he apparently felt the need to go and do it for real first thing the next morning.
Klemp’s notebook pointed us at a number of safety deposit boxes he was keeping for his “special clientele” in one of the shadier banks in Bohn. But by the time anybody came looking for Klemp, Grayman had already made his withdrawal.
The bank security video doesn’t show much: he’d changed “costumes” and come in looking like Eurotrash in something expensively sporty he’d p
icked up at Klemp’s. The garage cam even shows him using Klemp’s Jag (which is what he left in, too—very good taste, Grayman has). No weapons on the detectors—he walked in empty. Still wearing the big hat, though, and careful not to let the cameras get a good look at his ghostly cut-up face. Probably knew Klemp’s special clientele wouldn’t be subject to I-Scans or prints: they just accessed their boxes with their flashkeys (and he’d apparently wrangled a good dozen out of the reluctantly helpful bankerman, not to mention whatever he’d taken from Wiesbaden).
Video loses him going into a privacy cubicle with the boxes he had pulled. There are two burly suits on the floor providing wetware security, shadowing him with just a little more than standard professional suspicion. Then after a few minutes of alone time, he calls one in to help him. You can’t see it, but you can actually hear the goon’s jaw breaking before two hundred and fifty pounds of steroidal meat hits the floor. Another call for help, this one almost sounding embarrassed, like there’s been an accident. The second suit came running with his gun drawn instead of hitting the alarm. He got it worse, but didn’t go out immediately like his partner. Apparently Grayman was just keen to show somebody what kind of business they were doing in their fine establishment, then strongly suggested that the guard find himself better employers.
I remember the video of the police debriefings in the hospital: Jawbone couldn’t say much through the wiring, only grunting and head-shaking enough to swear he had no knowledge of what was in any of the customer deposit boxes (though he didn’t seem surprised by what he was shown in way of a sample). Number Two was more vocal, his jarhead hardbody façade shaken to its foundations by his close encounter with the Grayman. He stammers and rambles about being in a cage with a lion, a tiger, a raging gorilla. It makes me wonder if they got to see the visuals from Klemp’s townhouse—or any of the other kill sites—before the interviews
So two things we know about Grayman: 1) He’s apparently doing this at least partly because he’s really pissed, and 2) He’s definitely impressive when he’s really pissed.
And cool, too: He walked out of the bank and got back in the car like any other happy customer, driving off into the sunset. Whatever he took with him, it fit in a medium-sized case. What he left behind (besides the carnage) were a handful of flashkeys left neatly at Klemp’s, giving us a decade’s worth of golden intel on the inner workings of the EU terror trade, either as a gift or a calling card, to let us know what he was about.
Two days later, he pops a small-time flashware dealer in Milan. Just walks into the back-alley shop and shoots the bastard cold in the face with a .44 magnum semi-auto. Leaves a chip unraveling his victim’s identity going back as far as the original Bin Laden posse. First-gen Bushwar Wab. We’d been looking for this guy for fifteen years. A keydrive he left on the body busted another twelve of his fellow most-wanted, scattered all over the Union. Guess Gray figured they wouldn’t be on his itinerary, so he left them for us.
Next he makes a stop across town. Waltzes into an upscale neighborhood, all secure townhouses for the retired demi-rich. Whatever he’d lifted on his previous stops gave him pass through the automated security. Not quite so smooth when he gets where he’s going, though. Has to ventilate the engineered beef playing bodyguard to the relic he’s come to visit: another Iraqi, but this time a card-carrying ex-Baath—major player in bombing relief workers and local police and interim players and pretty much anybody else who tried to get the power and water back on in that post-invasion clusterfuck. Not much now, though: just a rotting old bastard in hiding most all his life, spending his days jacking on VR porn. Gray just tossed him out of his powerchair and left him to try to crawl away from the HAMAS Industries suicide vest he’d set on remote. Needless to say, the old guy didn’t get very far, but just far enough to ensure that he’d have time to savor dying of the shrapnel wounds.
Then, trading the Jag for the Baath’s Lexus, Gray’s on to Rome, on to visit Bomberdaddy.
And so am I, after I finish my ice cream.
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 3
