DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) (10 page)

If the West Facility was a quiet, less-populated building than the rest of Rikers Island, the protective custody wing was a morgue. Baker led Brendan along a narrow corridor which pitched gradually down into nothing but the echo of footfalls and odorless pumped air.

Brendan was to wait two hours until yard-time when he would be able to see Lazard.

The time passed as slowly as his first night inside. He’d been transported by bus after being processed out of the 11
th
precinct in Manhattan, driven in the back of an NYPD cruiser to another jail in midtown where he’d spent three nights, and then from the midtown jail up to the bridge over the East River to Rikers. He remembered the way it had looked in the haze, like some medieval island fortress. The flat, grey buildings, the chain-link fences bent on top with an interminable coil of cyclone wire. As the bus had drawn him across the long bridge, he felt a deep ache in his chest. He was utterly alone. He’d always been an outsider, even when he was married to Angie he would exile himself emotionally. But there was a time when he’d had a wife, a mother, a father. He’d had a child. And it had all been over in ten minutes, a flurry of scrapbook images he’d filed away to perhaps appreciate later, sometime down the road when he arrived in some elusive place.

Here it was. Doing time in an island jail complex, a place of lost souls, violence, and desolation. A place he knew he deserved to be. A place where the present would find him at last and unfurl into painstaking eternity. This new purgatory even lonelier than the last. No cellmate, no noise, no life.

It had been so long since he’d studied a picture of his wife and child that their images had left him. He tried to trace their faces in his mind and found he couldn’t.

He suddenly wanted a cigarette. He fantasized about lowering his head to light the cigarette, the flash of lighter flame in his eyes, cupping it in his hand. The taste, the smell, the moment, the relaxation. The time-out from the torture.

He tried to focus on something else. He decided to mull over what he knew about the IMF.

In their own words, the IMF promoted financial stability around the world, sought to reduce poverty, promote economic development, high employment, and facilitate international trade. They called themselves “financial firefighters,” and sought to put out the economic fires around the world by deploying emergency loans. The IMF was composed of 188 countries worldwide, and the organization described itself as working to foster global monetary cooperation and to secure financial stability. Didier Lazard had been its head.

And then there was the other point of view about the IMF, probably one Tremont would share. Seamus Argon, too. Detractors considered them economic slave masters, that the loans deployed were highly conditional, unrealistic for the struggling nations they were supposed to be helping. They would drag the indigenous workforce into endless debt and wage slavery while exploiting the natural resources and fleecing those nations dry.

Claims were made that the monetarist policies of the IMF towards low inflation and low budget deficits prevented developing countries from being able to scale up public investment in public health infrastructure. Indebted countries were also said to damage their own environments to generate cash flow from oil, gas, coal, and forest-destroying lumber and agricultural projects.

It was global economic slavery.

Brendan heard a guard approaching, the whispering of starched fabric and the jangle of keys. The sound roused him out of his reverie. The time had passed.

A shape appeared outside of the cell, a dark face, eyes shining.

“Healy. Yard time.”

The door opened.

* * *

As if he’d been waiting for him, Didier Lazard watched Brendan emerge from the jail and into the yard. He had thick, black eyebrows and silver hair. He probably weighed over two hundred pounds, filling out the jail-issue winter coat, his thick legs stretching the fabric of his pants.

He was smoking a cigarette.

Lazard looked Brendan up and down, and then took a pull from the tobacco. Brendan couldn’t help but stare at it.

The yard was nothing but a dirt square surrounded by three stories of brick and barred windows. The sky was a low, bruised rectangle of clouds. Snow flurried down and dusted the ground. Brendan stood a few feet away from Lazard, but he could smell that cigarette.

Lazard pulled a pack of Dunhill from his pocket. He pulled the lid back and shook the pack so that a few cigarettes slid halfway out. He thrust the pack in Brendan’s direction. “You want?”

Brendan practically licked his chops.

“I’ll pass, thanks.”

His inner voices screamed in protest.

Lazard shrugged and tapped the cigarettes back into the pack and returned the whole thing to his jacket pocket. “Probably think I’m a prima donna — smoking, special privileges.” Lazard had an accent, French, though Brendan had read he was of Hungarian descent. He took another drag and squinted through the smoke pirouetting up from the glowing tip. “So, who are you?”

“Brendan Healy.”

“Okay, Brendan Healy. I’m Didier Lazard.” The last name sounded like
Lassald.
He looked upwards towards the sky. “It’s pretty, you know.”

They stood like that for a moment, looking up, Brendan suddenly full of doubt, wondering why he had done this, what he thought he was really going to get out of it. Grimm was going to expect results and he would have nothing to show. The whole thing had been a ruse to get in here and talk to the ex-head of the IMF. All based, really, on the rumor that Lazard had been in the city for a defense department meeting, one that had included the Deputy Chief of the CSS.

Brendan watched the falling snow as Lazard smoked. He decided the best route was the direct one.

“I’m in here because of the CSS.”

Lazard turned and looked at Brendan with the same detached expression he’d maintained since they’d met. “You don’t say.”

“Were you in the city to meet with them?”

The big man narrowed his eyes. “And how is this your business?”

“Did you do what you’re accused of?”

Lazard broke into a smile, and then he laughed. He had a jolly laugh, like someone’s uncle. Then Lazard pursed his lips and looked down and shook his head.

“Ah,” he said, “the prisoner’s taboo question: ‘Did you do it?’” His shrewd eyes focused on Brendan again. “Maybe I was a bit intoxicated and I made a pass at one of the hotel staff. Hmm? Beautiful woman. I have a weakness for women, you see. I can never get enough. And so I think, this woman, she is something quite special. Honey-colored skin, big eyes, the perfect figure; she is in the hallway and I am coming in from dinner where I drink too much. I see her and I say, ‘I have lost my key card. Can you let me in?’ And we go to the door and she opens it. And I ask her to come in for a drink. And she says — polite, she is very polite — no, she prefers not.”

Lazard shrugged and inspected the ash on his cigarette. “So I take her by the arm, I lean into her and I give her a little kiss on the neck, and whisper in her ear. You know, I say, ‘you won’t regret it.’ And I feel her swell against me. But then she pulls away. The blush is off the bloom. And I reach for her and grasp her arm firmly, and I try to persuade her. But now she is unhappy.”

Lazard lifted his shoulders again and then, with the hand holding the cigarette, pointed around him in the air, into the sky. “Cameras. Cameras in the hotel record everything. She tells her superior, and the police come and take me later that night, knock on my door while I sleep.”

“Don’t you travel with security?”

“Well, yes. But, they are not going to go to jail, too. So, the police come in. And here I am.”

“You weren’t set up.”

“I admitted my mistake. I’ll do a little waiting, deprived of women here in this stone city of hard men, I’ll go to trial, I will pay, and pay some more, but, it will be alright.”

“Will you get your job back?”

“No.”

Lazard dropped his cigarette into the dirt and stepped on it with his Velcro prison shoes. After he was finished he put his hands in his pockets and drew a whistling breath through his nose and looked up at the sky. Snow had collected in his hair and bushy eyebrows. “It’s definitely coming down.”

Brendan glanced up again. The snowfall was intensifying. Lazard was watching him with a little smile playing on his lips.

“Now you tell me why
you’re
here,” he said.

It was amazing, Brendan thought. Here was Lazard, and the man was charming, friendly, if perhaps a misogynist pig. Brendan had expected a razor-sharp financier, inaccessible, dry as toast, probably uncommunicative. Lazard had a natural warmth to him, it seemed, or, he was a good actor. It wasn’t that long ago, Brendan reminded himself, that Alexander Heilshorn had seemed like a decent man, caring, even vulnerable. And look where that had gone.

Brendan began to tell Lazard his story, censoring himself a few times, but otherwise laying out the tale, omitting the personal details and delivering an improvised résumé, including his three years as a beat cop for Mount Pleasant, and the blink of an eye he’d spent as a homicide detective in Oneida County. He described the Rebecca Heilshorn case, and how it had led to the human trafficking and prostitution rackets, but didn’t share how he felt the evidence had coalesced around Titan. He skipped ahead to the showdown with Heilshorn at Roosevelt hospital.

“Heilshorn,” Lazard interrupted in a musing tone.

“You’ve heard of him.”

“You were the man who killed him?”

Brendan had a flashback to the office at Roosevelt Hospital, and saw Sloane running through the door and hurling the fire extinguisher at Heilshorn, hitting him square in the chest, a blow he had never recovered from. It was Sloane who had killed him, but Brendan said, as he had been saying for months, “Yes.”

With this information in the open, Brendan relaxed. He decided it was time to do what he had come here to do. Ask what he needed to ask.

“So as I said, I believe you met with the Deputy Chief of CSS.”

There was a twinkle in Lazard’s eye. “You believe correctly.”

“A man named Wick.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Lazard looked thoughtful. But it seemed put-on. “Business. The IMF has a long relationship with the CSS.”

“New York Police took me in after Roosevelt Hospital. But the CSS were there. I met with one of their agents. A man named Staryles. They’ve been around, in some way, since I first investigated the murder of that woman three years ago. Tell me about them.”

Lazard scowled. “That’s a piece of string.”

“Give me the basics.”

“Okay. The Central Security Service are cryptologists. Signals intelligence, tactical information assurance. It is an agency of the US Defense Department.”

The wind swept through the yard, spinning the snowflakes. Brendan glanced at the guard standing at the entrance to the yard who looked back briefly before returning his attention to the phone he was poking at. He was beneath an awning by the door, somewhat sheltered from the storm.

Lazard didn’t seem bothered by the wind tousling his hair. He turned his face into the breeze and smiled. “Here it comes,” he said. Then studied his palms as the flakes landed on them and melted. “The CSS was founded after World War II, following the deactivation of the Army Security Agency.” He glanced up at Brendan. “AFSA became responsible for all US communications intelligence and security. But at the physical, tactical level, it was the army, navy, and air force performing intelligence tasks, and these entities were not willing to accept the authority of the AFSA. So, the National Security Agency was created.”

“Okay . . .” said Brendan, thinking it seemed like these intelligence agencies kept mutating into larger, more powerful bodies.

“Now, again, the tactical, on-the-ground forces, these are the specialized soldiers, sailors, and airmen. These are marines, coastguard. Men and woman doing the work. And as they’re working independently, information is lost. There needs to be cohesion. There are increasing cryptologic requirements as the enemy upgrades, there needs to be unification of signal intelligence among these Service Cryptologic Agencies — the SCAs. Otherwise it is a . . . how do you say it, a ‘pig roast.’”

Brendan thought the usual expression was cruder, but he let it go. Lazard went on, and Brendan was beginning to see where it was all headed.

“NSA was meant to integrate with these Cryptologic Agencies, but there was resistance. So, the CSS is formed as an inter-service organization. A way of merging all the armed services, all the intelligence, promoting full partnership with the NSA and the SCAs.” Lazard took a breath. “It was conceived this way, executed this way — on paper.”

“But in the end,” Brendan said, picking up the thread, “the CSS is really a fourth service. Right? There is the army, the navy, the air force, and the CSS.”

“Yes. A tremendous organization with all of the resources of the three other services, the intelligence of the NSA, both under presidential directive and free to operate independently. The best of all worlds, and unknown to most people. With one particular aspect that is perhaps the most elusive.”