by Blake Banner
“Yes, that’s what we heard, or words to that effect.” He arched an eyebrow. “I had no idea the two of you had grown that close.”
“Neither had I.”
“Be that as it may, we were aware that something had to be done, and as we investigated it became clear that Cavendish, with his connections in DC and also among the cartels and the Islamic groups, had become something of a linchpin, garnering and using intelligence from these otherwise disparate groups. And the more we investigated, the more we discovered about him, and the crimes he had been associated with. That was when we decided to eliminate him. Unfortunately we were a little late.”
“There is something I don’t understand.” He poured more coffee. I spoke as he poured. “If they were made suspicious by the fact that she and I had had dinner a few times, why did she suggest we have dinner when she instructed me on this job?”
“That’s not as strange as it may seem, Harry. They were watching her. They were watching you too. If you had met secretly or furtively, if you had changed your behavior in any way, that would have suggested to them that we knew. It was essential you both behave exactly as though you had no idea you were on their radar.”
“I can see the logic, but it got her abducted.”
“Yes, we had people in place, but she insisted we be discreet so as not to alert them. That discretion meant our men were not close enough to intercept her abductors.” He paused, and for a moment looked haggard. “She knew the risks, Harry.”
“Screw that, sir. She should not have been allowed to take that risk.”
He stared at the table for a long moment, then raised his eyes to meet mine.
“You think I feel any differently, Harry?”
I grunted. “I guess not. They are waterboarding her. The only limitation on the torture was that Cavendish wanted her alive and, in his words, undamaged. He wanted, again in his words, no irreversible damage done to her. But now Cavendish and his wife are dead, she could become a liability to them. They may decide to go all out on the torture and then kill her.”
“I know. We are tracing that number as we speak.”
“I want to be there.”
“You will be.”
I took a pull on the whisky. “I have another question. If they were suspicious of me and my relationship with the colonel, why the hell did you send me in instead of somebody else?”
“Because nobody else would have got inside.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We were counting on two facts. First, nobody was really one hundred percent sure that the Harry Bauer the colonel was seeing was the same Harry Bauer who seemed to be linked to the hits. The death and funeral we arranged for you seems to have sown some degree of confusion. The perception they had of you was that of a playboy millionaire, so we decided to play on that. And I may say you played your part to perfection.
“The other fact was that Cavendish would be very curious on being approached by you. He would want to know what you were about and if you were for real. That virtually guaranteed that you would get close to him.”
“That explains why he reacted so violently when he discovered I had a file on him.”
“I’m afraid so, and poor Sheila paid the price.”
“Couldn’t you have briefed me on this from the start?”
“In retrospect perhaps we should have, but the colonel was against it. She felt it would have compromised you emotionally, and your performance would have been unnatural. It was vital to the plan that you approach Cavendish in the most natural way possible. He was an intelligent man and he might have seen through you.”
“He did.”
“But only after you’d got close enough to kill him. I know it’s tough, Harry, but this is what we do.”
“You rented this place. You had the plane ready. How’d you know I’d be here?”
“It wasn’t so hard. When you disappeared and he moved out suddenly in convoy to Avila Beach, and we saw he had the yacht here, it was a fair bet he’d try to take you out and dispose of you. We were assembling a team to go and get you.”
I nodded. “You were a little slow. So what now?”
“Now we find out where Jane is, and you go and get her.”
“How long will that take?”
“Not long, but long enough for you to sleep.”
I nodded. “Yeah, OK. I need to sleep.” I stood. “Thanks for the food.”
“You did a good job, Harry. I’ll call you as soon as we get any news.”
I climbed the stairs to my room and collapsed on the bed, and was instantly consumed by the blackness.
* * *
When I woke up it was to the thud and sigh of waves on the beach. The window was dark gray and the drapes were bulging slightly as they moved on the sea breeze. For a moment I struggled, unsure where I was, or when. I came up on one elbow and images and sensations came to me: the yacht, the blood on my wrists, the bowie knife slicing into their necks, one after the other as they panicked and struggled.
The massive, hard smack of the explosion and the shower of sparkling glass above the sea. I sat up and was aware of a shadow in the doorway.
“Harry…?”
“Sir, what time is it? How long have I been sleeping?”
“You slept through the night. It’s six thirty.”
“Shit…”
“You needed the rest. Have a shower and get dressed. I’ll make the coffee. I have news.”
He snapped on the light. I shielded my eyes and heard him turn and tread down the stairs.
I had a cold shower, dressed and met the brigadier in the kitchen. There was no eggs and bacon this morning. I sat at the breakfast bar and he put a demitasse in front of me with a basket of toast.
“They’ve tracked the phone.”
“Where?”
“New York.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Two eighty-eight, East 151st Street, in the South Bronx. It’s a seedy old house opposite the Governor Smith athletics field.”
“How soon can you get me to New York?”
“I can get you to Los Angeles in two hours. I have an air taxi on standby to take you directly to JFK. I’ve hired you a car at the airport. Your TVR is on its way to New York as we speak.” He pointed at the dining table where there was an attaché case. “There you have a P226 Tacops, I know you favor that gun, and a Fairbairn & Sykes. You may need them. I certainly hope so.”
“Yeah, me too.” I drained my cup. “We’d better get going.”
He drove fast and with skill through the dawn and the early morning. The car, with three hundred horsepower and an aluminum body with no weight to speak of, shifted like a bat out of hell with a hornet up its ass. It was a two-hundred-and-forty-mile drive, and two hours and ten minutes after we left the house, we were pulling in to LAX.
He walked me to the air taxi office where I checked in and he signed papers. On the way I paused to buy a Swiss Army knife. My own was probably at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean by then, and I had a feeling I was going to be needing one. After that he hustled me through VIP security channels with a pass that got him a lot of respectful nods and salutes. Finally, after a couple more passages, we got out on the tarmac and he walked me at a brisk pace to the steps of the waiting Gulfstream G650. There he shook my hands.
“Harry.” He hesitated a moment. Hesitating was something you didn’t often see him do. “Harry, I have no doubt you’ll find her. I hope you find her in time. But, whether you do or not…” He stared me hard in the eye. “Punish them. Punish them for what they have done to Jane, punish them for what they have done to so many people. Make an example of them, so that others like them will think twice before trying this again.”
I nodded. “I will, sir. You know I will.”
The flight was somewhat less than five hours and we touched down in Teterboro Airport in New Jersey at six thirty PM. I picked up a cream Chevy Malibu from the car rental and floored the pedal out of the airport and east along Route
46. By the time I hit the freeway the traffic had grown heavy and we moved frustratingly slow, like a sluggish river, across the George Washington Bridge and under the tip of Manhattan onto the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, and finally into the Bronx. I took Exit 24 and turned onto Jerome Avenue. The traffic there was no better and we crawled down to the Yankee Stadium and took a left onto East 161st.
It finally loosened up as I turned south onto Concourse Village and then Morris Avenue. There I hit the gas again and the tires complained as I swung into East 151st, and again as I pulled up outside number 288.
It was a dirty, three-story redbrick that had once been painted beige, and all the beige paint was now peeling off, leaving big, ugly patches of weathered brick, like the building had scurvy. There were three sash windows on the upper floor. One had a cracked pane of glass, the other two had brown blankets hung over them instead of drapes. The second floor had only two windows. Both were closed but they were so thick with dirt you couldn’t see through them.
The ground floor had a barber shop which looked like it had been closed for a long time. A steel roller blind concealed the door and the window, and was covered in soulless graffiti spelled out in letters that nobody could read.
Beside the roller blind there was a beige, chipboard door. It would probably not have withstood a decent kick, but I wasn’t keen to attract attention. So I took my brand-new Swiss Army knife from my pocket, pulled out the screwdriver and rammed it in the lock. I turned and it opened. A sudden hot jolt burned in my belly at the thought of what I was going to find up there. The colonel—Jane—or what was left of her.
I stepped inside.
I was in a narrow entrance hall with a steep flight of stairs, a threadbare carpet and peeling paint on the walls. At the top of the steps there was a narrow wooden door. I made my way up carefully, treading on the outer sides of the steps, but it made no difference, they creaked anyhow.
By the time I got to the door they had made so much noise that I stopped being careful and rammed the knife into the lock again, opened the door and stepped in with the Sig in my hand. There was no one there to greet me.
I was in a small entrance hall carpeted in threadbare green. Straight ahead there was a bathroom. The door was open, the seat was up and there was a dirty towel on a rail. To my left there was a short passage with a closed door. As I approached it I saw the passage made a dogleg into a living room. I opened the closed door and switched on the light. There was a dirty, rumpled bed, soiled clothes on the floor and a brown blanket nailed over the window. No people.
I stepped out and made my way round the dogleg to the living room. There were a couple of brown, vinyl armchairs, a coffee table littered with takeout containers, ashtrays and beer cans, and a black, vinyl sofa with a fat guy lying on it in bare feet, jeans and a string-sleeved vest. One hairy arm projected out and there was an empty bottle of tequila on the floor. He was snoring heavily, but occasionally he went silent, like he’d stopped breathing. Sleep apnea. Those guys are really hard to wake up.
Across the floor there was another door. I went and opened it. Another bedroom, as filthy as the first, soiled underwear on the floor, a powerful stench of stale cigarettes and another fat guy lying on his side in the bed.
It’s a myth that a cushion muffles the sound of a gunshot. The only way to muffle the sound of a gunshot is with a suppressor. So I dropped the Sig back in my holster, stepped quietly up to the guy snoring in the bed, placed the tip of the Fairbairn & Sykes over his jugular and leaned hard on it. It slipped in smooth and easy. His legs kicked and jerked and his hands twitched. He made a spluttering, gurgling noise, and then lay still.
I withdrew the knife, wiped it on his vest and returned to the living room. There I put away the knife and pulled out the Sig. I sat on the coffee table, just opposite sleep apnea’s face, and placed the muzzle of the gun at the tip of his nose. Then I gave him a gentle shake.
“Hey, grease ball, wake up.” He opened his eyes and I leered at him. “Good morning.”
Eighteen
You wouldn’t expect a guy that big to move that fast. He lunged off the couch, grabbed the barrel of the Sig with his right hand and swung a wide, clumsy hook with his left while wheezing stale tequila and tobacco all over my face. I leaned back and the hook passed a few inches in front of my face, but he kept coming. Crimson-faced and grunting, he knocked me off balance and carried me sprawling to the ground. He scrambled to a sitting position on my belly, trying to pin my arms under his knees and pummel my face at the same time. He’d have been better doing one thing first and then the other. He was fat and his belly didn’t let him get a good position. So he had to go up on his knees and lean forward to deliver his punches. I took a couple of grazing blows to the face, but I managed to cover myself with my left arm and drive my right fist into his lower belly.
That hurt him, so I grabbed the collar of his vest, dragged him down and drove the next punch into his floating ribs. Then I slipped both arms around his right side, flipped my hip and heaved, and he fell against the sofa.
Like I said, he was fast for such a big guy, but I was faster. I scrambled out from under and was on my feet while he was leaning on the sofa, pushing himself up. Next thing he was shouting for help in Spanish, “José! José! Ayúdame!”
He made to lunge at me again, using his weight, but I exploded forward in a low sidekick and smashed my heel into his knee. He screamed in pain and I followed up with a roundhouse to the same spot and heard the joint crack. He fell to the floor and I went and retrieved my weapon from where it had fallen. I slipped it under my arm and returned to where he was lying, whimpering José’s name. I rolled him on his back and pulled the Fairbairn & Sykes from my boot. He looked at me with big moist eyes and sobbed.
I said, “What’s your name?”
“Feliciano, please don’t hurt me. I dunno what you want. You don’t need to hurt me, man.”
“Your friend, José, is dead. I cut his throat.”
He began to sob like a child, shaking his head and repeating, “Please, man, you don’t gotta kill me. You don’t need to kill me, man.”
“You’re right.” I nodded. “I don’t need to kill you. I don’t want to kill you. But I might need to torture you. Because I need information.”
He was wild now, shaking his head. “No! No, no, no! Don’t do that!”
“You going to give me my information? I can cut your fingers off…” I showed him the knife. “Your toes, I can even cut your leg off at the knee, where it’s broken…”
I placed the blade above the broken knee and he screamed like a woman, pushing out both hands toward the blade.
“Please, man! Please! Just tell me what you want! Just tell me, anythin’, man! Anythin’!”
“Where’s the woman?”
He froze. “The woman?”
I let the razor-sharp tip of the blade rest on his knee. It pierced the skin and he started his frenzied screaming again.
“That’s your last warning, Feliciano. The next time I am going to drive this blade right through the joint. Do you understand me?”
“Si! Si! Si!”
“Don’t bullshit me, don’t try to play me, and don’t answer my questions with questions of your own. Now, there was a woman here, right?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“What did she look like?”
He was sweating profusely now. He’d gone a sickly gray color and he was trembling.
“Blond, thirties, good lookin’.”
“Do you know her name?”
“He call her the colonel.”
“Who did?”
“The boss, man, I am not so good. You gotta help me, please.”
“Who’s the boss?”
“Guillermo, I don’t know the boss. We never see the boss. We talk to Guillermo. He tells us, he pays us, maybe you need talk to Guillermo, man.”
His pupils were dilated and I could tell he would soon become delirious.
“OK, Feliciano, I j
ust have one more question and we can get you to a doctor. OK?”
He clawed at my arm. “Thank you, man! Thank you! God bless you!”
“Where is she?”
“They took her. They took her away.”
“Who took her?”
“I dunno, man. He was a Yankee. We call him Billy. ’Swhat he said to call him. Just Billy.”
“Where did they take her?”
His face creased up with pain and he clutched at his knee with both hands. His voice was thin, like it was being squeezed out. “Please, man. It hurts so much! Please…”
“Where, Feliciano? Where did they take her?”
“Spain! They took her to Malaga, Spain. I don’t know exactly where. They gonna take her to Saudi Arabia or some shit. Man, you have to help me! Please!”
I pulled out my cell. “OK, I’m going to call an ambulance. Just tell me how long ago she left.”
“Yesterday. Just yesterday. Now, please mister! I’m beggin’ you...”
But he could see in my eyes what was coming next. He covered his face with his hands and started to sob again. I shifted my position and drove the long, slim blade through his jugular and the carotid artery. He jumped and made an ugly quivering motion with his body, stretching out his arms and his fingers. He grunted and gurgled a couple of times, then sighed and became peaceful.
I rinsed the knife with water and bleach in the kitchen, wiped away any fingerprints I might have left and made my way down to the car. There I called the brigadier.
“They took her to Spain.”
“Dear God…”
“There were two guys, Mexicans. I took them both out. One of them spoke to me before he died. He said a Yankee called Billy took her to Malaga, in Spain. I don’t know exactly where, but for my money Billy has to be Captain Bill Hartmann, and two gets you twenty he has taken her to Raymond Hirsch.”
“Based on what?”
I stared out at the dark street.
“Based on the fact that there are still people in the CIA who want me and want to know who I work for. This whole business started when I snatched Mohammed Ben-Amini from Captain Bill Hartmann’s friends at Central Intelligence, and then killed him[4]. Raymond Hirsch was detailed by those same friends to capture me in Puerto Rico or Panama and extract from me exactly that information. The same information they are trying to get from the colonel right now. This has Hartmann and Hirsch written all over it. But now they are collaborating with Sinaloa, and, according to Cavendish, with Bloque Meta and Islamic groups too. He described himself as the linchpin that was holding them together.”
