Dark City (Repairman Jack - Early Years 02) (7 page)

Had a war ever before been captured live on TV as it happened? Fascinated, he watched the tanks rolling through the desert. He almost forgot to continue his whine. If Zalesky was going to show, he hoped he didn’t wait too much longer. Jack was on the clock—had to leave soon so he’d have time to get cleaned up for his dinner date with Cristin.

He’d been combing through issues of
Popular Science
in prep for his scheme, looking for an angle, a way-out investment that had a patina of credibility. He’d glommed onto an article about the glowing future of fiber-optic cable. He’d read it and reread it, learning enough to be both wildly enthusiastic and totally boring on the subject.

At around two o’clock he was maybe halfway into a rerun of his spiel about its applications in the telecommunications field—Joe’s eyes were literally glazing over—when Jack recognized a handsome thirty-something guy with dark, slicked-back hair breeze through the door. Zalesky had arrived.

He zeroed in on a couple of locals seated at a table near the big rear-projection TV in the corner and dropped into a chair. Looked a lot better than he had last time Jack had seen him—back in November when he’d shown up at The Spot to threaten Julio about buying the place. Today he was walking without a limp and his arm seemed fine, though he did appear to have put on a few pounds—the result of inactivity after his injuries, maybe? Still pretty trim, though. Apparently no permanent damage from that fall.

Too bad.

Joe walked off, deserting Jack in mid-sentence, and made a beeline for the table. Jack watched in the mirror as Joe made a show of taking orders, but along the way he leaned over and whispered something to Zalesky. Zalesky leaned his chair back and stole a glance at Jack, then nodded and patted Joe on the arm. Did Zalesky pay referral fees?

Joe returned and busied himself with refilling the burn-outs’ beers until Zalesky approached and leaned against the bar a few feet away. Jack concentrated on Desert Storm on the TV.

5

Kid at the bar’s got a rich grandmother …

Joe’s whispered words had propelled Neil across the room.

His fall off Rosa’s building had kept him out of the game too long. He’d broken his left shoulder, cracked a few ribs, and bruised his hip bone. Everything had taken forever to heal—man, he couldn’t believe he’d fallen last fucking November and the shoulder
still
wasn’t right. Might never be without surgery.

Somehow Julio had been behind it. Oh, yeah, people swore he was in The Spot all that night, but Neil knew the rope hadn’t come untied by itself. Whatever, no more climbing down walls—Rosa’s or anybody else’s—for him. That left getting to her through her beloved little brother. And kicking his ass out of the bar he part-owned was going to be
so
sweet.

He’d been digging into his savings to get by. And now that he was healed up—sort of—business was off. Not so bad—he was used to ups and downs and knew things would pick up. But then that kid, Darren Detrick, had called, saying he was ready to sell his father’s bar.

That put the pressure on. Neil was always on the hunt for a fresh mark, but right now he especially needed a score. The chances of this one panning out were low but he couldn’t afford to leave any stone unturned. If he was going to buy The Spot out from under that fucker Julio, he’d need a big down payment. He had almost fifty Gs in his safe deposit box, but he’d need more.

He shook his head. Sometimes you can be too fucking smart for your own good. To pacify the tax man, he filed annual 1040s and declared just enough income to put him above the poverty line. All well and good until he wanted to buy something like The Spot. His declared income wasn’t enough to qualify him for a heavy mortgage, so he had to produce some major scratch up front.

And he was goddamn well gonna produce it.

He checked out the kid from the corner of his eye. Brown hair, brown eyes, flannel shirt, worn jeans, work boots. Looked harmless enough, and anything but rich. Probably a waste of his time but …

“Gimme a Bud Light, will ya, Joe?”

“Sure thing, Neil.”

Neil winced at how staged that sounded. The kid rubbed a hand across his mouth, almost as if he was hiding a smile.

As Joe twisted off the cap and slid the bottle down the bar, he pointed to the kid. “You two should meet. Neil’s our go-to guy for investments.”

Neil put on a self-deprecating smile and stuck out his hand. “Hardly. Neil Zalesky.”

“Lonnie Beuchner,” the kid said, shaking his hand with a wimpy grip.

Neil hated guys who couldn’t give you a firm handshake. And
Lonnie Beuchner
? What kind of fucked-up name was that? Bet all the kids had called him “Peuchner” in grammar school. Probably high school too.

Joe said, “Lonnie’s trying to get his grandmother to invest in this great idea he has but she’s stiffing him.”

Easy, Joe. No need to lay it on with a trowel.

Neil grinned and raised his eyebrows. “Investing? You hardly look old enough to drink.”

Lonnie looked offended. “Hey, listen—”

“Only kidding, guy.” Neil gave him a comradely slap on the back. “What’s this investment?”

Lonnie launched into this yawner of a spiel about fiber-optic cable and its future in telecommunications. Neil interrupted before he dozed off.

“Hey, that sounds great.”

Lonnie leaned forward with almost messianic intensity. “It’s life-changing, Neil. A guaranteed fortune-maker. Bill Gates had the Big Idea for Microsoft and quit college to pursue it. That’s what I want to do: drop out and start my own fiber-optic company.”

Neil wanted to laugh in his face. Bill Gates … right. You drop out of college, kid, and guess what you’ll be—a fucking college dropout.

He needed to steer this conversation around to the really important topic: Grandma. Lonnie could shove fiber-optic cable up his nose till it came out his ass, and Neil wouldn’t care. That wasn’t why he’d come over to the bar.

“But you can’t do that without money.”

“Yeah,” Lonnie said, the fire fading. Then he brightened. “Hey, you wanna invest—?”

Neil shrugged. “Maybe. But your grandmother knows you better than I do, and if she doesn’t have faith in you…”

“She’s just shortsighted. If she could only see how fiber optics—”

Not again.

“Your grandmother’s got enough to fund you?”

“In spades.”

Neil would have loved to ask how much, but that wasn’t the way to get these things done.

“But she’s not parting with any.”

“Bingo. She’s totally cheap. The bitch.”

Neil raised his hands in a peacemaking gesture. No one should talk about their grandmother like that. But it did offer a perfect opportunity to find out if anyone else was in the picture.

“Now hold on. Maybe your grandfather won’t let her.”

“Grandfather? He’s long gone.”

Excellent.

“Somebody else in the household putting in a discouraging word, maybe?”

“Nah. I’m the only other one in the household now, but I’m back off to school tomorrow.”

More good news.

“Where’s that?”

“UNC.”

“Good school.” Good and far away. “
Great
b-ball team.”

“You a Tarheels fan?”

“I’m a fan of winning teams, and your guys are winners with a capital
W
.” Turning the talk back to Grandma … “So, you’re leaving your grandmother all alone?”

He made a face. “Just the way she likes it. My mom thinks she should have a live-in but Nonna won’t hear of it. Too cheap.”

Now we’re talking.

“Well, then, let’s give the lady the benefit of the doubt. Maybe her money’s tied up in annuities or stocks that she can’t sell right now. Let’s face it, the market’s for shit these days.”

“You kidding? She’s old-country Italian. She’d have the money stuffed in a mattress if it would fit. It’s all in cash in bank accounts, doing nothing.”

Neil resisted rubbing his hands together. This sounded good—
real
good. Maybe this little detour to the bar wouldn’t be a waste of time after all.

He gave his head a sad shake. “Such a waste. Money should be put to work, not left to molder in bank vaults.”

“You’re telling me? Fiber optics, man—fiber optics is the way to go!”

As casually as he could, Neil said, “Which bank, by the way?”

“Chase.”

He gave a sage nod to hide his glee. “A good, solid institution.”

Never hurt to state the obvious. And it never hurt to have a couple of contacts inside a bank. Contacts who, for a modest fee, would ferret out the details of his nonna’s finances. Just one vital piece of info was missing. But how to get it?

As he considered his options, he lifted his Bud toward his lips—but stopped halfway as a sour note sounded in his brain.

“Hey, wait a minute. Did you say she was ‘old-country Italian’? But your name is—”

“Beuchner. Yeah, my mother married a German, much to Nonna’s eternal dismay. But let me ask you: Can you get much more Guinea than Michelina Filardo?”

Neil laughed—not because it was funny, but because he’d just been handed the last, most important piece of info on a mark—what he’d been fishing for since he’d stepped up to the bar.

Asking for a name was always the hardest part because the first response on the other side tended to be,
Who wants to know and why?
But now he had all he needed: the name of a rich old widow and where she kept her money.

“No, that’d be pretty hard.”

He just had to hope that Michelina Filardo was public-spirited enough to catch a thief. Neil was reasonably sure the world-famous Zalesky charm was up to the rest.

6

As usual, they met in Roman Trejador’s suite. And, since he hopped from hotel to hotel about the city, this was not the same suite as the last.

When Nasser al-Thani arrived he found Ernst Drexler already there, his glossy black hair swept straight back from a widow’s peak that pointed down to his aquiline nose. The Austrian was dressed in his ever-present, ever-tacky white three-piece suit; his black rhinoceros-hide walking stick leaned against a nearby wall.

Trejador lounged on the couch. Fiftyish, urbane, Spanish by birth with dark good looks, his rough childhood had contributed to his skills as an actuator, making him the first choice of the High Council of the Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order when it needed a problem solved. He was resplendent in his Sulka silk-and-satin smoking jacket, even tackier than Drexler’s suit—practically an antique.

Nasser wore a simple gray thobe.

“Greetings, Nasser,” Trejador said with no accent, raising his martini. “Spring water on the bar.”

Although alcohol was legal in his native Qatar, Nasser had never developed a taste for it. Even during his Oxford years among prodigious beer quaffers, he’d never been tempted.

Drexler sat in a straight-back chair next to an end table. He poured a little beer from a green bottle into a short glass, then checked his watch. “You’re almost late,” he said with a faintly German accent.

Without responding, Nasser poured himself a glass of Evian. He’d grown to dislike Ernst Drexler over the past few months. Trejador referred to him—behind his back, of course—as “Ernst the Lesser” to distinguish him from his late father, a legend in the annals of the Order.

Trejador said, “We anxiously await your assessment of the local Muslim situation.”

“And by ‘we,’” Drexler added, “he means more than we two. The High Council grows impatient. It wants the money returned.”

Nasser peeked into the bedroom as he passed the half-open doorway, hoping for a glimpse of one of Trejador’s whores, but it appeared empty. Too bad. The women he hired were unfailingly young and attractive. Especially a semi-regular named Danaë he’d seen on a number of occasions.

“I know it’s been a long wait,” he said as he seated himself opposite the other two. “But we can’t set a trap for the hijackers without the help of the jihadists, and they’ve been embroiled in an interfactional turf war.”

“While the thieves squander the Order’s money,” Drexler said.

Nasser did not acknowledge the testy remark. “The problem has been that we have no stick to prod the jihadists into action, nor do we have a carrot. On the first go-round, they needed money. The prospect of a couple of million to fund their holy cause made them easy to manipulate.”

The plan had been so simple. The Order’s goal was to foster chaos. The jihadists’ goal was to scour Russians and Americans and all non-Muslims from the Mideast, topple all the secularist regimes, replace them with
sharia
theocracies, bring holy war to America, then wipe Israel off the map—preferably, though not necessarily, in that order. The massive, inescapable chaos that would accompany those goals was just what the Order wanted. But the jihadists had needed money.

Enter the Order last fall, via Nasser al-Thani, with an offer they could not refuse: Nasser would front them three million U.S. to purchase a truckload of young Caribbean and Central American girls. They would auction off the girls at prices guaranteed to double the money. They would repay Nasser the principal plus one million interest. The remaining two million was theirs to keep.

Of course the more suspicious among them questioned why Nasser didn’t do this himself. He explained that, even though slavery was accepted in the Muslim world, as a distant relative of the Qatar royal family, he could not dirty his hands with trade in children. Earning a thirty-three-percent profit on a short-term loan was incentive enough for him. The situation was win-win all around.

All went swimmingly until the slavemongers and the Arabs met at the exchange point on Staten Island. Gunmen ambushed the Arabs, cold-bloodedly killing everyone in sight, and made off with the cash and the girls. Neither had been seen nor heard from since.

The High Council had fronted the money and wanted it back. But more than that, it wanted to make a statement about interfering with the business of the Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order.

Trejador’s eyebrows lifted. “Our grimy little jihadists don’t need money? Did they win the lottery?”