by Blake Banner
“The other three are in Sinaloa. They have a lab in the jungle, but we don’t know what they’re using it for or what kind of experiments they are conducting out there. I just figure whatever it is, if the John Richard Erickson Institute was anything to go by, it’s not aimed at ending world hunger[5].” I gave my head a small, sideways twitch. “Not by providing food, anyhow.”
She narrowed her eyes and seemed to scrutinize me. “You’re a son of a bitch, aren’t you, Lacklan?”
“My father would probably have agreed with you. He wasn’t really fond of my mother. He wasn’t really fond of me, either.”
“These are people you’re talking about, Narciso, Rocha, these others…”
“Don’t lecture me, Cyndi. If you don’t want to be a part of this, I respect that. But don’t lecture me about these bastards being human beings. First of all, in my experience, human beings tend to be somewhere below paramecia on the evolutionary scale; second, these particular human beings are murdering sadists who are happy to destroy women and children to make themselves richer and more powerful, third—I’ve been there, seen it and done it. As far as I am aware, the closest you have got is reading the reports on your desk.”
She went rigid. The waiter arrived and placed our glasses in front of us. He smiled. “Are we ready to order?”
Cyndi’s face said she was ready to stand up and go home. She took a deep breath and said, “Give us another ten minutes, will you, Paul?”
He left and I said, “I apologize. That was uncalled for.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then sighed. “Yes, it was, but I should not have lectured you. You’re right. Apart from our jaunt down to Texas, I have never experienced violence first hand. But I have read the reports and I do know what Omega are capable of.”
“This is a particularly brutal branch of Omega, Cyndi. General Francisco Ochoa, head of the special forces division of the Mexican Army, Felipe Gonzalez, governor of the Free State of Sinaloa, and Samuel Zapata, known as ‘El Vampiro’. These are the senior members of this cell. Samuel Zapata is the godfather of the Sinaloa cartel, and he didn’t get his nickname because of his excellent teeth, believe me. The heroin and cocaine trade are at the heart of their operation and they are making hundreds of billions of dollars from it every year, which by the looks of it is being plowed into the resurgence of a new Omega, pared down, revitalized, stronger…” I shrugged again. “They have to be stopped.”
“But, like that? Is there no other way?”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Yeah, we could enter into a meaningful dialogue with them. They’re probably not bad people at heart. They probably just feel disenfranchised, that they haven’t got a voice in this world. They’re merely victims of Western exploitation.”
“Remind me why I like you. I keep forgetting.”
I smiled. “Don’t ask me, I never could work it out.”
I pushed the menu across the table to her. She gave me a baleful look and after a moment, she picked it up and started leafing through it and sighing like she couldn’t make up her mind. Eventually I called Paul over and I told him, “The lady will have the caviar followed by the Maine lobster. I will also have the caviar, but followed by the pan seared venison. We’ll have a Dom Perignon with the caviar, the lady will have an Alain Chavy white Burgundy with the lobster and I’ll have a bottle of Savigny-Les-Beaune Burgundy.”
Paul gave Cyndi a look you could only describe as fearful. She narrowed her eyes at the menu, then handed it to him and smiled the way only politicians know how. He gave a small bow and hurried away. To me, she said, “Are you trying to provoke a fight with me for some reason, Mr. Walker?”
I turned my glass around a few times, watching the olive bob. I spoke without humor. “I don’t honestly know.” Then I raised my eyes to meet hers. “Maybe.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know that either. I almost had a fight with Jim and Njal just before I came here. I’ve been thrown in the cooler five times in the last six months, for brawling.”
She smiled, then started to laugh.
I went on. “Three times I was actually arrested, and I’ve been thrown out of six bars from Texas to Arizona. I keep getting into fights. I don’t think it’s intentional, I’m not aware of provoking it…”
Her laughter subsided, but not the smile. “Well, you were definitely provoking me. The last time a man ordered my meal for me was…”
I watched her, waiting. I was smiling too now, because I knew what she was going to say.
“Oh, yes, it was you.”
“In Corpus Christi. Then I was definitely trying to annoy you.”
She spread her hands and shook her head, wide-eyed. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”
I sat looking at her, smiling, thinking that she was actually very attractive and I had never allowed myself to notice before. “Maybe I feel there is unresolved sexual tension between us and this is my way of expressing it.”
Her face flushed. Her eyes were bright but her expression was scandalized. I found myself enjoying that and wondering why. She was shaking her head. “Lacklan! That is so… That is awful! It’s primitive! That is not the way to seduce a woman!”
“I don’t like being told how to do things. Maybe I am primitive and awful.” I leaned forward with my elbows on the table. “You’re so good, so moral, so upright. But you are also very attractive. I want to rough you up a bit, make your cheeks burn.”
Her face lit up like a Christmas tree and her cheeks burned red, but she was laughing. “Lacklan! Stop that immediately! My God! What has got into you?”
I shook my head. “I told you, I don’t know. Maybe I am just learning to speak my mind. Maybe I’ve realized life is too short for anything else.”
She wagged a finger at me. “You, mister, are on the rebound, and a very dangerous man. You are still in love with Marni.”
“Is that what you believe or what you hope?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. But don’t you come marking my territory until you know for sure what you feel.”
I knew she was right and let my face say so. “Deal.”
She sighed. “Now, you had better tell me about your plan.”
I gave her the outline we had worked out at Njal’s place, then said, “So I need an introduction to Rocha in Brazil and Narciso Terry in Argentina. Obviously the introduction has to be convincing enough for them to bite, but deniable enough so that if it comes to light, you can distance yourself from it.”
She stared down into her drink. After a moment, she said, “Yes, I can do that.” She raised her eyes to hold mine. “There are unacknowledged channels for this kind of thing. We all know about them, we all know how to use them. It’s how business gets done in certain countries. I’ll get you your introductions. Are you going to kill them?”
“Yes. You know I am. All five of them. They are too dangerous to leave them alive.” I hesitated a moment. “Besides, Cyndi, somebody has to speak for all the victims: all the kids, all young girls forced into prostitution, the murdered men and boys, the bereaved mothers, all the grief, all the people whose lives have been destroyed because of those men. There has to be some comeback, some retribution.”
A small frown creased her brow above her nose. “I agree, but what makes you the judge, jury and executioner?” The question wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t a challenge. It was a genuine question. She added, “Aren’t you playing God?”
I gave my head a small twitch. “If God ever starts doing his job, maybe I can give up mine.” She didn’t like that and her face showed it. A couple of waiters arrived, one with our caviar and the other with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. He popped the cork and poured, then went away.
I sighed. “I’m not a philosopher, Cyndi. I’ve been to some dark places and I have seen men, women and children in extreme situations most people wouldn’t believe. I have seen cruelty and savagery most people couldn’t begin to imagine, and I have seen honor, courage and compassion that
beggar belief. I have seen human beings digging deep and finding that cruelty and that compassion and courage inside themselves. But I’ll tell you what I have never seen. I have never seen a devil rise out of a fiery pit and force anybody to be cruel, and I have never seen an angel or a god come down from the sky and rescue a baby from the hands of a killer.” We were quiet for a moment, staring at each other. After a moment, I picked up a piece of toast and stared at it. “And I never saw an animal that understood morals. The whole damn show is something we invented, so that people would abdicate responsibility.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
I spooned caviar onto the toast and put it in my mouth. I spoke around it as I chewed. “Morality is something we invented so that people would hand responsibility for their actions over to the kings and the priests, appointed by God to judge mankind. But it’s a fiction. Morality does not occur in nature. Balance, pain, pleasure—all of those do; but morality does not. These five men have crossed my path, what they do offends me and causes pain to incalculable numbers of people. So I will eliminate them. Nobody else is responsible, Cyndi. Nobody gets to judge me or send me to hell or heaven. I do that, and go there, travel the path, all on my own.”
I drained my glass, refilled it and spooned more caviar into my mouth. She watched me do it and, with an odd expression on her face, said: “You are a very frightening man, Lacklan.”
I smiled.
After a moment, she shook her head. “If what you say is true, how do you decide what is right and wrong? How do you decide who is good or who is bad? If there is no morality, what makes El Vampiro a bad person, or General Ochoa?”
“Nothing. They are not bad people. They are just people. They are people who murder and torture, and destroy lives. They are people who cause suffering on a massive scale. As long as you’re using ideas like good and bad, moral and immoral, you are in the land of smoke and mirrors and you will never see anything clearly. These men are not bad, they are cruel. They make people suffer and they enjoy it. End of story. I don’t want these people in my world, so I take them out.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you telling me you have no moral code at all?”
I shrugged. “Be kind.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Are you going to be kind to these five men?”
“I am going to be kind to the world they have raped and pillaged.” Then I hesitated, thinking of Jim and Njal, and added, “Yeah, I’ll be kind to them. I won’t torture them,” and added in my mind, ‘unnecessarily.’
After a moment, she turned her attention to her own caviar and said in a small voice, “I’m glad you’re on my side.”
I sat back and sipped my champagne, watching her eat. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m glad you’re on mine.”
SEVEN
It was midnight and the air was cool when we climbed out of the cab and stood at the door of her apartment block. The city was quiet but for the desultory hiss of tires on blacktop on the avenue behind me. Behind her were the plate glass doors of her block, with the amber reflection of the streetlamps in them, and our own dark shapes, standing close, looking at each other.
She placed her hand on my chest and said, “You know I want to ask you up.”
“Are you going to?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame.”
“You’re all kinds of trouble, Lacklan. I can’t do that.” She smiled. “I’m not a one night stand kind of girl, and you are a lifetime of trouble kind of guy. Can we be friends?”
I bent and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Always.”
I watched her step inside and disappear toward the elevators, then I started down New York Avenue. My hotel was a fifteen minute walk down 14th Street and I needed to think. The last four hours of conversation with Cyndi had been all kinds of interesting, but they had done nothing to clear my mind or resolve the issues that were troubling Jim and Njal.
I took it easy, with my hands in my pockets, watching the sporadic traffic hiss past, listening to the occasional noises of the closing night: car doors, a rattling roller-blind coming down, shouts of laughter across the dark city. My mind wandered back, trying to recall something Njal had said. He had thrown my Camels and the Zippo on the bed and pointed at me with a smoldering cigarette between his fingers:
I’m talking about your father and your mother. Your dad was Omega! That’s a lot of betrayal, man, going back a long way. You don’t need to be Freud to see what’s goin’ on there. And Marni wasn’t just the straw that broke the camel’s back. She was more than that… You got some dark shit going on, and you need to understand that and get a grip on it in the next couple of days.
My father’s betrayal was clear enough to see. He just hadn’t liked me and I hadn’t liked him. Our life together had been a constant battle which he had resolved by sending me to boarding school. It was something I had grown accustomed to many, many years ago. So why should it start troubling me now?
I turned into 14th Street and started south. A red and white taxi sighed past. Its brake lights glowed, it slowed and turned right. A hundred yards ahead, a car was parked with its hazards on. There was a man standing by the open door talking to a woman. She was gesticulating at him. He was gesticulating back.
I logged it as a failed date, a lovers’ tiff, and thought about my mother breaking up with my father. It was a thing that had happened by degrees, while I was boarding at school. She was always there when I came home for holidays, but they were always a little more distant, a little less involved with each other. I never questioned that she spent so much time at the apartment in New York, or that she started traveling back so much to visit her family in England. All the while she had been leaving, without telling me. Was that betrayal?
The car was a BMW. It was fifty paces away now and I could see the couple and hear them clearly. She was leaning forward slightly, talking loudly, staring into his face. She was mad. He was leaning back, but the expression in his eyes said he was reaching his limit. She told him he was a loser and followed up by telling him he had a small dick and was shit in the sack.
His voice came out through his teeth: “You fucking bitch!”
He stepped forward and shoved her. She staggered back a couple of steps and screamed louder than was justified. He shouted, “Shut up!” and took another step.
I was closing on them and said, “Hey, pal, take it easy.”
He turned to look at me and his face was ugly. I saw he was in a suit. It looked expensive. “Take a hike. This doesn’t concern you.”
I was drawing level. I smiled. “If I see you push a lady, that concerns me. Get in your car and go home.”
The girl was scowling at me and scowling at him. He stepped toward me. “I’m telling you to mind your own goddamn business, pal!”
Now the girl was stepping up. The smell of alcohol was strong from both of them. She was shouting, “Did you see? He hit me! Did you see him put his hands on me?” To him she said, “You’re going down, you motherfucker!”
I fixed him with my eye. “Go home. Now.”
“Mind your own fucking business!”
He thrust his face at me and the blow came out of nowhere, of its own volition. I slammed the heel of my hand into the tip of his chin. His eyes rolled back in his head, his legs folded and he sank to the sidewalk. I frowned down at him, wondering why I’d hit him. I looked up the road to see if there was a cab. There wasn’t. I looked back at the woman and saw that she was gaping at the guy on the ground. She kneeled and took hold of his head.
“Jerry? Jerry, sweetheart? Are you OK?”
I said, “He’s fine. He’ll have a headache in the morning, but he’ll be fine.”
She stared up at me and her eyes were wild. “You fucking maniac! You fucking animal! What have you done to him?” Next thing, she was on her feet screaming, “Help! Help! Somebody help me! Police! Somebody get an ambulance!”
I sighed. This was life. T
his was love. This was loyalty and betrayal. I asked myself, who needs it, crossed the road and continued on my way back to the hotel, hearing her cries and shouts behind me. We imbue our memories with drama, but when they happened, most of them were tawdry and banal.
I reached the hotel ten minutes later and pushed through the doors into the plush, almost archaic lobby. I was about to head for the elevator and go up to my room, but went to the concierge instead. “What time does the bar close here?”
“Not till two AM, Mr. Walker. Not for another hour and three quarters.” He leaned across the counter in a way that was conspiratorial. “And to be honest, as long as there are customers in the bar, we keep it open.”
“My kind of bar.”
I crossed among the pile carpets and the palms to the sober green and dark wood of the bar. There was still a quiet hum of conversation. Half a dozen tables were occupied, so I climbed on a stool and the barman approached.
“Give me a vodka martini, extra dry.”
He went away to put it together and I sat looking at my thumbs. Suddenly I was sick of soul searching, sick of asking irrelevant questions about my emotions and my parents and Marni, Abi and Cyndi. I had a damned job to do—a difficult damned job—and I couldn’t afford to be contemplating my navel and questioning my motivation. And as far as Omicron was concerned, if he had information I needed and he wasn’t prepared to talk, I was going to make him talk, whether Jim and Njal liked it or not. That wasn’t morality, it was reality.
The barman came and placed my drink in front of me with a bowl of peanuts. I sipped and considered the possibility of doing the operation on my own. If they were going to get squeamish, Njal could become more of a hindrance than a help. With Cyndi’s introductions I could get close enough to Rocha in Brazil and Narciso Terry in Argentina. Setting up a couple of accidental deaths was certainly not beyond my skills. Maybe I should tell Njal and Jim the op was off and I would do it myself.
