Countdown to Mecca (3 page)

“You ran here from the Fairmont?” Sammy asked. He glanced at her legs, following their shapely curve down.

She raised her luminous eyes to the face of a man she had come to like, to trust. She nodded.

“That's nearly a mile, most of it up hill!” Sammy said incredulously.

She nodded. “I have run farther.”

“Barefoot?”

She seemed surprised when he said that. She looked at her feet. Her stockings were torn, the bottoms bloody. “Oh. I could not run in those heels and I dared not stop. I just left them in the lobby.”

“A regular Cinderella,” he said, trying to inject some levity. It didn't seem to work. Her eyes were still full of fear. “Did they follow you?”

“I do not know,” she admitted.

Even if they had, Sammy did not think a group of officers would go after her in broad daylight. “Well, it's over now. Relax and we'll see what we can find out about this General Morton and Firebird.”

He walked around the kitchen table and moved the clown suit that was stretched out there to dry after he had sprayed it with fabric freshener. He had come back from a gig just an hour before and, as usual, the costume was damp with sweat, along with splashes from excited kids holding cups full of juice. Anyone who thought making balloon animals, doing magic tricks, honking a horn on his belt, and talking in a funny voice was easy should walk a mile in his oversize shoes.

He grabbed his laptop from the table and brought it back to the sofa. He pressed the
ON
button and looked at Ana.

“I have never seen and heard a man so frantic,” she said.

“When men take chances, and those chances bite them in the posterior, they are already a little on edge or guilty or both,” Sammy said.

“He never worried about that before,” she said.

“Maybe he was afraid you heard someone's name and would blackmail him, threaten to tell a wife or superior.”

She shook her head. “I only heard ‘Firebird,'” she insisted. “No names.”

“Well, we're gonna get through this,” he assured her as he tapped in the word ‘Firebird.' “Sammy Michaels doesn't know the meaning of the word ‘retreat.'”

“You can look that up after ‘Firebird,'” she joked.

He grinned. That was actually pretty funny coming from a woman who was afraid for her life.

The first cite on the search engine was from that day, just ninety minutes earlier. He clicked on it as Ana sat and hugged his arm. It felt good.

“I feel safe with you,” she said. “I always have.”

“Really?”

“Even if it was just talking at the mailbox, you made me feel like I had a neighbor, a home, a friend.”

Those weren't exactly the words Sammy had wanted to hear, though it was a start.

“But who is—what did you call her?” Ana asked. “Sindrella?”

He grinned. “Cinderella. A fairy tale character. A poor girl with a fairy godmother, loses her glass slipper at the prince's ball—”

“Ah,
Zalushka
!” she said. “It is a Russian story.”

“Of course it is,” he said as her cell phone beeped. “The Russians came up with everything.”

She didn't seem to have heard him, her expression souring as she retrieved her phone from her purse.

“You expecting any calls?” Sammy asked. She shook her head as she looked at the text message. Sammy started reading the Firebird reference on the computer then heard Ana gasp. “What is it?”

Her breathing sped again as she handed Sammy the phone.
We know where you are. Come back now.

“How could they know?” she asked.

Sammy felt a chill but remained composed. “With the NSA spying on every American, you ask how the military
knows
something?” he asked. “He probably cloned the GPS signal from your phone the first time he met you.”

“He what?”

“Copied your data, just in case you ever tried to blackmail him.”

“
Chyort voz'mi!
” she said and rose suddenly.

Sammy didn't know any Russian, but that sounded like something you wouldn't say or hear in polite company.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I don't know, but my father taught me that waiting for the executioner was the worst way to live. It is better to keep one step ahead. I'll have to go.”

“You mean—for good?”

“What choice do I have?”

“I don't know, but there has to be one.”

“An escort cannot go to the police—”

“No,” he said firmly. “But I have another idea.”

He took his own cell phone from the end table beside the couch.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I'm calling the one man in this town who can help.”

“Who?”

“Someone I thought I'd never call again,” he responded hollowly. “My big brother.”

 

2

Before going to the hotel for a press conference, Jack Hatfield walked around the park atop Russian Hill, the prime real estate location in the Gilded City. As he did, he wondered about exclusion. How the uber-liberal city “leaders” excluded all but their sycophants from any and all recognition. Jack had long ago accepted his status as an outcast and wore it as a measure of pride in a corrupt and soulless place. The top families were filled with whores, thieves, drug addicts, alcoholics, and sex maniacs. Of course there was the Petty family, living off the old man's oil fortune while espousing “green” nonsense, cashing in on fraudulent solar contracts. Then there were the two politicians. One whose husband did deals with China that crossed the borderline of treason and the other whose husband and son did land deals that violated zoning codes while appearing on the boards of other “green” groups. Then there was Mr. Berkowitz, one of the chief donors to socialist causes the single largest recipient being the ACLU. His money was made by selling his savings and loan chain to a major bank just before the housing crash of '08. He made billions while the bank that bought his junk mortgages went under. Jack could only ask how a city, let alone a nation, could survive with such abject thieves running the show.

Yet, of the many species of liars Jack Hatfield dealt with, no one topped a CEO. This was not because they were particularly skilled at lying; their techniques were obvious and predictable: deny, deny, deny. Jack's interest was entirely philosophical. He wondered if having renounced their moral compass as they climbed the corporate ladder, they could no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood. He suspected that they believed every word they spoke was the truth.

Not that all CEOs were liars. It was just that he had personally dealt with quite a few: those who had appeared on his cable TV series
Truth Tellers,
and those who had pressured the station to cancel his controversial show because of an hypothetical question: “
If it came down to it, would you rather see a hundred million of
us
killed, or kill a hundred million Muslims?
” Jack lamented the fact that in the old days—the
very
old days, the time of the Continental Congress—one delegate, he forgot who, seconded the debate on Independence because he felt there wasn't a topic so dangerous you couldn't at least
talk
about it.

Now, if talk wasn't all about political correctness and spin, the mainstream media and CEOs shunned it.

Take the man standing at the podium across the Hyatt Hotel's meeting room, holding forth to a group of eager news stringers and bloggers for a cross section of business websites. As CEO of Der Warheit Unternehmen, Helmut Schoenberg represented a German multinational company with a wide array of products and interests from coal mining to health care, with high tech and textile manufacturing thrown in on the side. It was German in name only; like many internationals, it had long ago located its corporate offices in a tax haven.

Jack wasn't here to talk to Helmut about DWU's pledge to donate several million dollars to a Silicon Valley fund aimed at finding jobs for the homeless. The press already knew that the real purpose of the donation was to burnish Der Warheit Unternehmen's image after a horrendous fire in one of its computer chip factories in Manila where hundreds of poor Filipinos perished. They were lobbing softballs, since DWU was a major advertiser in print and on the web.

Finally, Jack raised his hand. “Jack Hatfield, Hatfield Independent News,” he said when the German nodded in his direction.

There were muffled groans among the assemblage. They actually made Jack smile. A reporter who didn't piss people off wasn't doing his job.

“Sir,” Jack said, “I was struck by the speech you gave last year, denouncing the work by Der Schlauch on the Iranian-Pakistani pipeline. It was quite courageous. You were criticizing a brother German company.”

Schoenberg smiled superciliously. “Any trade at all helps Iran build a bomb.”

“Right.” Jack looked down at his tablet, which was also recording the press conference. “Yet earlier this year, one of your subsidiaries, Der Gro
ß
e Kreis, shipped two hundred centrifuges to France, supposedly for medical use. But they never got to the institute in Nice. Instead, another company owned by DWU picked them up at a warehouse in Dresden, took them directly to the airport, and flew them to Tehran over a period of ten days.”

Jack was quoting almost verbatim from the summary of a CIA document assessing how close Iran was to getting the bomb. Apparently Herr Schoenberg had read the report because he denied the charge, criticized Washington for its program of anti-European propaganda, yet offered no facts to refute it.

Not that he tried very hard. Schoenberg's answer was brief and it was also his last. He thanked the group and left.

Jack called the man's name, was ignored, and rose to plan his next move. That was not a lot to form the basis of a syndicated radio piece. But Jack was not one to be deterred by a man's back, handlers, or hasty departure. European nations were doing more to prop up Iran's sanctioned economy than Russia and China combined. The only reason the United States had turned to diplomacy to deal with Tehran's nuclear ambitions was to get a piece of that, too.

Jack intended to break that story like a brick over the heads of the perpetrators.

None of the other reporters came over to chat with Jack. Even though he had saved San Francisco from destruction, associating with an accused Islamophobe—or gay basher or climate change denier or any of the dozens of other politically charged landmines that crippled free speech in America—was tantamount to professional destruction.

However, one man did come over to talk to the journalist. Someone who was an even bigger pariah.

Standing between Jack Hatfield and the door toward which his quarry was headed was a short, powerfully built, wide-shouldered man. He had thinning, swept-back gray hair, a broken nose, a jutting chin, no neck, and piercing gray eyes. His gray sport coat was bulging under the arm. It was Sol Minsky, one of the West Coast's most notorious and elusive mobsters. He wasn't just Teflon: this guy was porous. Criminal charges sailed through him and hit other people, stooges he had carefully put in place—often without their knowledge.

He approached Jack casually as the reporter headed from the meeting room of the Hyatt Hotel. Jack's manner became just as casual, but he couldn't contain a slight, thin grin of bemused respect. Sol was a strange breed. Of all the big-time criminals he had tracked over the years, Jack had never come across one who was as staunchly patriotic as Sol—and less hypocritical. Sol did not pretend to be anything other than what he was, yet he also worked hard to make sure there was never collateral damage among the general public. He didn't deal in drugs, didn't deal in human trafficking, mostly shilled for corporate clients and their money laundering. That didn't merit a Nobel Peace Prize, but he wasn't as bad as the Vietnamese, the Russians, and other local urban gangs.

“Mr. Jack Hatfield,” said Sol. “You just pissed all over one of my biggest clients.”

Jack closed the flap on his tablet and stopped to talk to the mobster. “The businessman or the skunk?”

“Ha!” Sol laughed. “I knew you were good, even when you were investigating my operations back in the day.”

“That's high praise, coming from you,” Jack acknowledged.

“This isn't our first rodeo, Truth Teller,” Minsky reminded him. “You know I always respected you.”

“Even when I got close to finding out what the cops never could?” If Jack expected the mobster to react negatively, he was disappointed. The blockhouse of a man merely snorted.

“
Especially
when you got close,” he said, his grin matching Jack's. “When push comes to shove, you may find we disagree on less than you think.”

Minsky's “hail fellow well met” approach put Jack back on his guard. Acquaintances who were this chummy out of the gate bore watching. Jack intended his next words to put Sol in his place.

“So what does Herr Schoenberg run for you?” Jack asked, glancing around to make sure no one was recording them. “Guns?”

“Oh, you're
very
good!” Sol said. He shrugged. “The big
macha
transports them on his planes. Let it not be said that we don't support freedom fighters in Syria, Kurdistan, and elsewhere.”

Jack grinned. “No one's listening, but how do you know my recorder was off?”

Sol shrugged. “You got honor. You don't do ‘ambush.'”

Jack acknowledged the compliment with a nod. “What about those guys?” He cocked his head toward the hall full of journalists, a few of whom were eyeing Sol as though trying to figure out what he was doing here. “Aren't you worried they'll try to pin your ears back?”

“Those bloggers and hacks? They're here for the free food and ads. Anyway, I could be in Sacramento, buying politicians, before they're done posting anything on their impuissant little minds.”