Dark City (Repairman Jack - Early Years 02) (31 page)

“Then send bigger boats!”

“A bigger boat draws too much to make it to shore through those shallows. I’ll see if I can dig up some cars and send them ’round.”

Nasser’s gaze settled on the rear of the truck idling thirty feet ahead of him.

“Never mind.”

He ended the call and got out of the car. As the wind bit into him he realized that the marina man was probably right. He certainly wouldn’t want to have to fight this gale in a little skiff.

Reggie and Mahmoud were leading the jihadists toward the limo. Nasser opened the trunk so they could return their weapons. When Mahmoud reached him he pulled him aside.

“After they’ve dropped off their weapons, have them get into the truck. We’ll take them back in that. Find someone who can drive and knows the way back to the center.”

Mahmoud pointed to Reggie. “Not him?”

Nasser turned to Reggie. “You and Kadir drive back with us. I have more questions about this police stop.”

Reggie suddenly looked worried. “Hey, we did everything by the book.”

Nasser wasn’t in the mood to explain. “We’ll see about that. You ride back with me. Fetch Kadir.”

*   *   *

“Well, well,” Dane Bertel muttered as he watched the would-be ambushers climb into the back of the truck. “What have we here?”

He forced his frozen fingers to work the wheel and focus his glasses on the suave-looking Mohammedan outside the limo. No question that he was in charge here. But who was he? Not one of Sheikh Omar’s honchos, but he gave them orders and they obeyed.

Was he connected to the third player Dane sensed at work here?

He wished he had better light. He watched Mahmoud close the rear doors on the truck and then head back to the limo. The mystery Mohammedan was already inside, but he didn’t see Kadir and the trailer-park white man who’d ordered Tony’s death. Back in the cab of the truck, he assumed. Where else?

He pulled out his tracker as he watched the limo pull around the truck and lead it back to Ocean Parkway. Much as he’d love to follow the mystery Mohammedan and see who he reported to, he’d be kidding himself if he thought he could pull off a successful tail. At this time of night there simply was not enough traffic for adequate cover.

He saw the blinking light on his tracker. The truck’s transceiver was still transmitting, but what use was that? He knew where the truck was going: It would head to the Al-Kifah center to drop its passengers, then wind up back in some Ryder lot.

Looked like here was where this journey ended.

He flipped the protective cover off a toggle switch attached to the tracker.

He’d see to it that it turned out to be the end for some other journeys as well … especially that trailer-park trash guy. He couldn’t sit by and let him ride off into the sunset.

He put his thumb on the toggle.

This is for Tony …

*   *   *

Nasser turned in the front passenger seat to face Reggie and Kadir. He wanted more details on the stop by the police, but something had been niggling the back of his brain since his call to Drexler. Something the Austrian had said …

I was sure they’d try
something …

And then it hit him: the auction attendees.

He grabbed for the car phone. “Oh, no!”

“What is wrong?” Mahmoud said in Arabic.

Nasser ignored him as he frantically tapped in Saleem Haddad’s number at the auction house. As the phone rang and rang, he cursed himself for not realizing that the auction attendees might wind up targets—especially once the hijackers knew the truck was empty. Not that he cared about the bidders themselves—scum of the earth, as far as he was concerned—but they had been gathered under his aegis and if anything happened to them, it might well cost him his credibility with the jihadists.

At least he wasn’t alone in his error. No one else had foreseen it either.

“Answer, damn you!” he shouted into the phone.

Then a blinding flash flooded the limo’s interior through the minuscule rear window, followed by a deafening boom. A shock wave slammed the car with enough force to lift its back tires off the pavement.

Nasser stared in shock and dismay at the flying bits of flaming debris where the rental truck had been.

8

“How could this go so astonishingly wrong?” Roman said.

Dawn lit the windows as he paced his suite’s living room, staring at Drexler and al-Thani where they sat with averted eyes. He was angry, yes, but more baffled and dismayed than anything else.

When neither replied, he went on. “I didn’t hold out much hope for success, but—”

Drexler’s head snapped up. “Is that so? You said nothing of the sort.”

“I figured that if they had even half a brain between them, the hijackers would smell a trap. But there was always the chance they wouldn’t. Always a chance, as you said, that their fervor for their ‘agenda’ would overcome caution. So I let it proceed. Why not? The overhead was low, and the potential reward was high.” He pointed to al-Thani. “You were there. How could this have happened?”

The Qatari shook his head. “I questioned Reggie and Kadir separately and they both swear they stopped only twice of their own accord, both times at public rest stops to call in. The bomb must have been placed at one of those stops. I can assure you that no one came near the truck when we were parked on the beach.”

“And no one could time the explosion so perfectly,” Roman said. “Someone had to be watching.”

“But from—?” He stopped. “He could have been hiding behind one of the more distant dunes. Reggie and Kadir saw no one following. Was it possible he was waiting there?”

“Then he would have had to know where you were meeting.”

“But only we three and Kadir and Reggie knew—and only just as they were leaving. They had no time to tell anyone.”

Reggie … that worthless piece of subhumanity.

Roman said, “What do we know of this Reggie?”

“We know he was supposed to be behind the steering wheel when the truck blew up. The only reason he wasn’t was because I wanted to question him and Kadir about their trip. If you had seen how white and shaken he was after the blast, you’d know he was as shocked as I was. More so, because he would have been blown to pieces with the others.”

Too bad he wasn’t, Roman thought.

“If nothing else,” al-Thani added, “we know now there’s more than two of them.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, it requires more than two men to have followed the truck from Virginia or been hiding on the dune while committing the slaughter at the auction house as well.”

Roman closed his eyes and fought for control.

“Yes, the auction house slaughter. We should rejoice that no one knew the Order was connected with this, because do you realize what asses these hijackers have made of us? And by extension, the Order itself?”

“But—” Drexler began.

Roman silenced him with a slash of his hand. “No
buts
! They outplayed us at every turn. I don’t care about a bunch of pederasts being burned alive, but I
do
care about the painful fact that we were completely unprepared for the possibility. And I
do
care about a bunch of jihadists being blown to pieces while assisting us. They are the greatest potential source of chaos in the world today and we need communication with them to know what they’re planning. We can’t guide them if they suspect us of treachery or, perhaps worse, incompetence.”

“I’ll smooth it over,” al-Thani said.

“How do you plan to do that?”

Drexler said, “They were only in it for the money. We can offer them the two hundred thousand they were to receive if we were successful.”

Roman shook his head. “They lost a dozen of their faithful. Somehow I don’t think that will be enough.”

“It will be if we shift the blame,” al-Thani said.

“To whom?”

A slight smile twisted his lips. “Whenever anything goes right, they give credit to Allah. But when things don’t go their way, when they suspect treachery, they have a favorite target for blame: the CIA.”

Roman nodded and saw Drexler doing the same. “Excellent. Can you sell it?”

“Of course. It feeds into their paranoia. It stokes their fervor against the Great Satan.”

Roman liked it. What was the expression? When handed a lemon, make lemonade.

9

The
Post
front page said it all.

AMITYVILLE

HORROR!!!

Abe was slicing a second bagel in half. “And you’re saying you were there?”

Jack had spent the better part of twenty minutes telling him just that, so he simply nodded as he skimmed the news piece. Details were scant. Not all the bodies had been identified yet, and no one was talking about those that had. He wondered if the truth about them would ever come out. Motive unknown, perpetrators unknown.

“I shouldn’t doubt it. Blechedich you look.”

He’d heard that word before.

“I gather that’s bad?”

“Of course it’s bad.”

“No sleep.”

Not for lack of trying. Jack had parked Ralph in the garage space he rented for an astronomical fee, then collapsed onto his bed like a felled tree. But sleep had played coy, coaxing him with false promises into believing he’d fall off, and then jolting him awake with sights and sounds from the Amityville house.

By seven thirty he gave up, dressed in his hoodie disguise, and started walking around, sipping a series of coffees from a series of food trucks. Finally he showed up at Abe’s with a bag of fresh bagels and nothing else. He was too fragged to come up with anything more original.

“Well,” Abe said, “I’m sure it was a horrible scene, even if they were human dreck.”

“Oh, trust me, I don’t feel sorry for them. And as one of the brothers said, it did improve the gene pool. But for some reason…”

He shook his head, not sure where he was going with this.

“What? It doesn’t sit right?”

“You could say that, but I can’t put my finger on what about the whole thing that doesn’t feel right.”

“You would have let them live?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, I wasn’t given a choice. I had no vote, so…” And then it came to him.

“Nu?”

“I think that’s it: no choice, no vote. It was the Mikulski brothers’ show and I was just along for the ride.”

“Well, you knew that already.”

“Yeah, I did. But I’d sort of lost sight of the fact that I don’t play well with others—at least that’s what a lot of my early grammar school reports used to say.”

“But then you learned?”

Jack smiled. “Well, I learned to fake it. Anyway. I’m impressed with the way the Mikulskis get things done. The take-no-prisoners approach has its strengths, but it lacks something.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know.” Suddenly he remembered
All About Eve
. “Symmetry?”

Abe frowned. “Symmetry? You want symmetry, draw a circle. Or a square.”

“No, seriously. A symmetrical solution would have left each of them being horrendously abused for the rest of their days.”

Abe shrugged. “Who’s to say some of them wouldn’t like that?”

“Yeah, there’s that.”

“And how would you arrange that?”

“No idea.” He remembered what Black had said about the pervs getting off. This was further depressing him. “One thing I think I’ve learned from all this: I don’t like tagging along.”

“No
nochshlepper
, you.”

“Whatever.”

He was watching Abe. As he read the paper he was scooping the insides out of his bagel, leaving only the crust and piling the soft innards to the side of the counter. He’d done the same with the first, but Jack had been involved in telling his story and hadn’t commented. But now …

“What are you doing to that bagel?”

“I’m making it low cal.”

“Really.”

“If I eat only the crust—which after all is the best part—by half I cut my calories. Besides, you brought no cream cheese. Already my bagel was less than happy, being eaten without a shmear”—he gave Jack a pointed look—“so I might as well gut the poor thing. My waistline rejoices already.”

“What about the leavings?”

Abe glanced away from the paper at the pile of soft innards. “Not for me. You?”

“Nah. Like you said, the crust’s the best part.”

“A shame to throw away. I should have some sort of
chozzerish
pet to devour the leavings. A puppy maybe?”

“I don’t see you with a puppy. You have to take a puppy out and walk him.”

“
Gevalt!
Something else maybe?”

“A weasel?”

“Too sneaky.”

“A lizard. Say, an iguana.”

“A cold-blooded reptile you want for me? I’ll be an alter kocker soon. I’ll need warmth in my sunset years.”

“You could always toss your leavings out on the sidewalk for the birds.”

Abe’s eyes lit. “A mitzvah for our feathered friends! I—” He stopped and stared at the paper. “Did you see this?”

Jack rotated the tabloid—the
Daily News
—and scanned the pages.

“What?”

Abe tapped a header in a lower corner. “Here.”

A brief article on a truck explosion near Gilgo Beach. A dozen bodies were found scattered about the blasted remains of a Ryder truck. The dead appeared to be dressed in Muslim garb, but no further details were available at press time.

“Jeez.”

“Could that have been the Ryder truck you and Bertel were following?”

“Ours was empty.”

“Doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been filled. The brothers again?”

“They didn’t know where it was. Where’s this Gilgo Beach?”

“Near Babylon … which is near Amityville. Did they care about the truck?”

“Not once they learned it was empty.” He felt a chill. “But I know someone who
did
care.”

When Bertel had tagged the truck with that radio transceiver, was something else with the package? Jack never saw the contents of his duffel. Could something like C4 have gone along for the ride too?

He shook it off. Bertel a mass murderer? He couldn’t see it. But then what did he really know about Dane Bertel?