Rivers of Gold (12 page)

And McKeutchen started bellowing strange things like
Not my men
and
Not cops, not cops
, at More.

Santiago had never backed down from a fight in his life, and he had learned firsthand how time and events can seem distorted through the carnival mirror of combat. McKeutchen's ravings only added to the confusion.

It was only much, much later, after everyone's evening plans had been ruined, after they all were finally allowed to reclaim their weapons after mandatory disarmament, after McKeutchen had screamed himself hoarse about how they were supposed to be fighting fucking
crime
, not
each other
, after he'd given the entire CAB unit a dressing-down that reminded Santiago of the drill sergeant in
Full Metal Jacket
(except Liesl, who only came to after the speech was over and McKeutchen had released everyone—and except More, whom he'd sequestered in his office with the door locked and the blinds down), only after he'd faced down a glowering Turse, who was helping his groggy partner to their cab, only after all that did McKeutchen's odd exclamations come back to him.

What the hell was he talking about?
Not cops
?

McKeutchen's door banged open and More slouched out. If he'd suffered any ill effects from his extra time in McKeutchen's personal toolshed, they did not register. Santiago found his head suddenly filling up with too many questions too quickly. He started after More, then stopped, then tried to phrase some of his jumbled thoughts, but instead what came out was:

“Hey … thanks …”

But More was already gone.

Their first patrol together passed into memory quickly enough. There'd been other, nastier drag hauls: the elementary-schoolers who'd pushed a wheelchair-bound paraplegic in front of a bus; the teens who'd tied their middle-aged teacher to her chair and set her on fire; and the pack of marauding gay twenty-somethings, fried on meth, that they'd discovered gang-raping a male Fashion Institute of Technology student between dumpsters on West Twenty-seventh Street, in the now-defunct Nightclub Alley.

And now some fruitless poking around into a fast-cooling case the homicide dicks didn't want, some Arab cabbie named Eyad who'd apparently picked up the wrong fare, one with psychopathic tendencies and a toolbox. It was a half-hearted effort that yielded little more than the crime scene itself, which had happened to be in close physical and temporal proximity to their fiasco on Broome Street. Beyond that, they had nothing.

Santiago, grudgingly, came to admit that while More wasn't exactly the best company, he was more than up to the job. More never hesitated to throw down with drags (who always gave him ample opportunity to do so), but he never seemed to get carried away, either. The Narc Sharks, Santiago knew, were up for at least one brutality complaint (one of their drags, who'd ended up in St. Vincent's ICU, turned out to be the son of a senior market analyst at Urbank) and were having a hard time keeping their interview date with IAB, for which McKeutchen discreetly provided cover.

His frontline CAB investigators (McKeutchen had declared to a snarling crowd of reporters during a press conference) were now “actively engaged” in what he referred to as Operation Coploscopy, targeting the drug trade in the city's bars. Santiago knew McKeutchen was just using this as a cover to get up on the speaks, but since he had an e-mail from the mayor's office demanding immediate action to curtail the surge in drug-related violence around the city (having hitherto kept a straight face, McKeutchen turned positively gleeful as he flashed the hard copy for the pod of obese, hungover cameramen), he was putting on a show to keep City Hall and the Council from his door (and using the operation's name on camera as a dig at the assholes who'd come up with the gas caps that had nearly caused his unit to self-destruct).

The insertions had actually been going on long before McKeutchen's press conference. On Santiago's team, More had silently agreed to take point, looking as unremarkable as he did. Santiago had been working with More long enough to see the human features behind the Fish Face: A fine web of creases ringed his eye sockets, and fine straight lines made nearly indiscernible axes across and down the tight fleshless planes of More's hard-edged cheekbones and jaw, as though he'd spent a lot of time in someplace very hot, or else very cold and bright. Under the station-house fluorescents these lines instantly aged More nearly a decade, but in the gloom of a bar they effectively disappeared, making More seem like just another raggedy-ass student, a look he sometimes enhanced with an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, or by turning his newsboy cap around backward. He'd even borrowed one of Santiago's hoodies, which fit him like a circus tent, and which stuck out of the top of his field jacket like a poncho. It was perfect; More looked like a bum.

Santiago knew that he himself would stand out where More could blend in. With his height, wide shoulders, narrow waist, and noticeable hands and eyes, Santiago commanded a certain amount of attention whenever he walked onto a set, and his deep voice and direct manner would be remembered. More, on the other hand, faded into the nighttime crowd of revelers like a plank in a parquet floor.

Santiago was amazed by how quickly More could adjust to his environment. More would pick up on words and phrases he heard and immediately rearrange and repeat them in new sequences, at varying speeds, and (to Santiago's frustration) without a trace of the raspy gurgle that he otherwise used for talking to his CAB colleagues, including his partner (which he almost never did). To look at him he was a nobody; to listen to him even less so. Santiago became convinced that More had done undercover work for another unit, maybe Robbery or Narcotics. But that didn't explain More's physical prowess, nor did it account for his odd detachment on duty; More behaved as though he were on autopilot much of the time. Santiago had considered, then dismissed the idea that More was on drugs (too well controlled). If More was an IAB plant, he kept no written records, and he expressed no interest whatsoever in the other members of the unit or its CO. Granted, he could've been wearing a wire during their patrols, Santiago would never notice. After six months together, Santiago still couldn't figure out where on his person More kept that strange little gun of his. When More had been publicly introduced by McKeutchen to the rest of the CAB team (who'd barely noticed), More had slowly and visibly taken a very ordinary-looking Glock in a very ordinary-looking waist-clip holster and put it in a drawer in his desk, which he had locked. Not once had Santiago ever seen More retrieve his weapon from its resting place. Maybe he was trying to duck an old brutality charge, or maybe he had a bad shooting on his record and was on probation. Santiago wondered if More had once been in Homicide, maybe even been in the DA's vaunted Homicide Investigations Unit, going toe-to-toe with gangbangers in all five boroughs. There were too many questions, and Santiago figured McKeutchen had at least some of the answers.

But these could wait. Operation Coploscopy was Santiago's ticket to the big-time, real investigative work. The press, the Council, and even the mayor's office were up in arms about CAB cops doing the work of seasoned city detectives, but this was ignoring a very basic fact: The city homicide rate had now breached its 1990 peak and was rising every quarter. Stressed by budget cuts and forced retirements, the Homicide Bureau, the Medical Examiner's office, the courts, the holding facilities, even the Corrections transports were backlogged and overworked. Somebody had to pick up the slack. CAB wasn't alone. Other bureaus were picking up more man-hours on drug-related murders and collateral killings. Pundits theorized that blending the roles of otherwise distinct departments would have a detrimental effect on the police, the judiciary, and individual rights. From Santiago's point of view, on the yellow-and-black tip of the CAB spear, it was at least holding back the tide, and creating new and potentially helpful surprises as novice officers improvised new techniques and procedures for infiltrating the network of the city's three thousand–plus bars.

This response is what had brought Santiago and his
extraño
partner to the Broome Street Bar the night two morons tried to fillet each other on the sidewalk outside. The night More had (for the second time) whipped out his little big-bore and saved Santiago's ass. And the night that, in their sector (in which they
of course
were the only available unit), the mutilated body of a cabdriver named Eyad Fouad had been discovered near the Holland Tunnel entrance on Dominick Street, inside yet another restaurant padlocked for nonpayment of taxes.

Eyad Fouad was Egyptian, born in Alexandria and a legal U.S. resident. According to his TLC license, he'd been driving a cab for two years. He was not on any known watch list. He had no violations and had never been summoned to the taxi court on Rector Street. He had no known medical problems, nor records for treatment of depression or violence.

But the gasoline that had been used on him had not quite obscured the fractures and dislocations Eyad had suffered before immolation; the postmortem would confirm these had been inflicted while he was still alive. Eyad had been put through the wringer, slowly and carefully, by someone with time and expertise.

Santiago jumped on this one immediately because Homicide nonchalantly dumped it in his lap without so much as a thank-you.

He jumped on it because it meant more credits for him in his Investigative Function class.

He jumped on it because slow torture was out of keeping with the frenzied drug killings that were the usual type of homicide around town these days.

But mostly, he jumped on it because More did.

For once, More actually showed interest.

In a dead cabbie.

Huh.

I N T E R L U D E  I  (
A N D A N T E
)

T
he man called Reza covered his ears as another 747 drifted down toward tarmac that began just a few yards from the water's edge. He was leaning against the front fender of an Audi RS9 that glimmered in the light pollution softly emanating from the airport. A second car, a tricked-out Honda Akuma sedan, idled nearby. Two men sat in its front seats smoking nervously; a third was out in the weeds somewhere with a suppressed STG-2000-C assault rifle with FLIR optics. The man called Reza would never have dreamed of coming to this meet without backup, but he had little faith in his troops. Especially given the ones they'd be up against.

He absently crushed the long paper filter of a Kazakh cigarette in two dimensions, Russian-style, before lipping it up and cupping his hands around a gold Dunhill lighter that spat a three-quarter-inch blue tongue of flame. He held the gas jet to the plug of black tobacco at the cigarette's end long enough to be sure he had a good draw going; they went out all too easily. An acquired taste, acquired long ago, in a prison he didn't care to remember.

The man who'd called the meet liked this sad little spit of land near JFK International because police surveillance aircraft could not overfly the airport directly, and the roar of the jets undermined the efficacy of most listening devices; infrared was usually distorted somewhat by the amount of heat generated by the airport lights and the exhaust streams of the planes. The marshy terrain made the advance insertion of any personnel other than trained frogmen exceedingly difficult. The man who'd called the meet knew all about such things, having learned them in campaigns in Ingushetia, Dagestan, and, of course, Chechnya, where he'd added to his already fearsome reputation by matching the savagery of rebel fighters with his own. He'd been drafted into the army during the second Chechen war, plucked from his home in Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk, where he'd been sent following a homicide conviction ( just how many deaths he was charged with was unknown) in his hometown of Kiev. Magadan was a relic from the days of the purges, when Stalin sent his enemies east, packed in boxcars for a weeks-long trip in temperatures reaching forty below zero. Reza had once known a Turkish criminal sentenced to Magadan. The inmate had bribed a guard for his cell phone charger, and then hanged himself with it the night before his transfer.

The man who had called the meet—whose first name was in fact Miroslav but because of his background was usually called “the Slav,” in hushed tones—was Reza's boss. Reza did not know who the Slav worked for, and knew better than to ask. The Slav was known to be a high-ranking officer in one of the five major syndicates that had sprung up in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse to divide up the country's riches, and then, armed with the capital from their wholesale plunder, had set out to carve up the rest of the world among themselves. Multilingual, ravenous, and utterly ruthless, these men kept up the most enduring traditions of organized crime: Bigotry is for losers; work with whoever you can profit from; always be willing to work with existing local networks when entering a new territory; and, last but not least, use reliable subcontractors (and cutouts) wherever possible to maintain distance between the organization's strategists at the center and those far out on the tactical edge of things.

Which is where Reza came in. Now a naturalized citizen, Reza had first arrived in New York in the early 1990s with only a smattering of English and a criminal record he'd paid dearly to have expunged. As a new arrival from a former Warsaw Pact nation, he'd been screened (though not too carefully) by Immigration, which seemed more concerned with whether he was carrying any diseases and if he'd start paying taxes like a good resident (this was during the 1991 recession) than with scrutinizing his bona fides. Reza had done what many a good immigrant had done before him and would continue to do afterward: got a hack license and went to work as a New York City taxi driver.

How easy it had been, in those days before 9/11, even before the '93 bombing, for a cabbie who didn't have to send money home to support a family of God knows how many in the middle of God knows where, one who actually had some decent connections, to make good money and put it to good use. Of course, he'd had his sponsors. Those who had cleaned up his record, who'd paid to get him into the country and set him up in a shitty apartment on McGinnis Boulevard in Queens, expected a healthy return on their investment. Reza understood his role perfectly; he was a plant, an independent contractor that the organization was looking to grow for long-term gain. He'd never be one of the inner circle, but he was fine with that. He'd always worked best alone.

It hadn't taken many nights behind the wheel, ferrying home horny drunken youngsters from the East Village, the Lower East Side, and SoHo, to the Upper East Side, Chelsea, Williamsburg, Carroll Gardens, and Park Slope, for Reza to figure out where the action was. He'd put out his feelers carefully, seeing which bars were best for women, which ones for drugs, which ones for the commerce in both. New York City nightlife in the nineties was a far easier market to work than contemporary southeastern Europe. Typical nights along Orchard Street, Driggs Avenue, Avenue A, or Houston Street—all were driven by the same hormonal and chemical propulsion as the region he'd left, but with no government or police supervision like the sort Reza was used to, and with none of the seething tribal malice that always simmered just beneath the surface of all the then-EU hopefuls. No, it was the same as working the summer crowd at Laganas, except these people had no sense of danger, no limit to their appetites, and, more importantly, no limit to their credit cards. He'd felt he was witnessing an entire generation underwriting its life on someone else's expense account, and he knew he'd fit right in. God, these Americans are incredible, he remembered thinking repeatedly in those heady early days. The men who'd become his first clients had the same lack of scruples as their contemporaries in the Ionian Sea and points east, but absolutely none of the business sense. They'd film their girlfriends having sex with them, or with other men, or with each other, and then post it on the Internet. Unbelievable, Reza'd thought, these morons give it away for free! No wonder the U.S. had gone the way of its mother nation, the U.K.; its young people were dumber than dogshit, they seemed well aware of this fact, and they continued upon their aimless course unperturbed. A miraculous place, for an operator like Reza.

Full of energy and flush with cash from his cab shifts and initial ventures in flesh and narcotics (and far less encumbered by the expenses faced by his fellow cabbies, thanks to his handlers), he'd spent night after night drawing up new schemes for ever larger returns. The American appetite for marijuana and cocaine was absolutely bottomless, and Reza repeatedly mentioned this to his handlers, had even given volume and percentages from what he'd been able to glean from his contacts in the bars. Not your department, they'd told him. There's a network of wholesalers in place that we deal with, it works much more smoothly and attracts far less attention. Your input is noted. For now, we're sticking with pills.

Very early on—ironically, about the time a new Italian mayor was beefing up the police presence around the city—Reza had investigated more niche markets for party-oriented substances then in vogue in the city's bars and clubs. He'd met some British kid, like the ones he'd remembered from the Greek islands but sharper, who was looking for a connection for lab-grade pharmaceuticals, straight from the manufacturers. The kid had asked Reza if he could come by any Ketamine, Rohypnol, or especially MDMA. We'll get back to you on that, Reza's handlers had told him when he'd relayed the request. Reza had given the Brit a conversational shrug, and promised to keep in touch.

He'd had better luck with his first legal business, a pack-and-ship place along a busy stretch of Queens Boulevard, not far from the TLC building. He was dumbfounded that Americans made it so easy to move vast amounts of freight, any size, by any means of transport, sometimes as quickly as next-day delivery. In Bulgaria moving a container of English cigarettes or Italian beer sometimes took a week's worth of cajoling, intimidation, and bribes. But with a Photoshop-equipped computer and high-resolution color printer, a postage meter, a bank of postal boxes the police never bothered to check, and an account with a marvelous agency called Federal Express, he'd be able to bring the best of Istanbul right to Astoria!

Very good, Reza, his handlers had said. This one will earn you some points with the brass. Of course, they'd commandeered a slew of the postal boxes (various sizes) for themselves, and he'd had to stay up late a few nights designing and printing letterheads for bogus corporations the organization opened and closed on a revolving basis, with multiple “offices” in Liechtenstein, Grand Cayman, Panama City, and, of course, Zurich. FedEx charges to these corporate accounts would be billed to fraudulent company credit cards (another sideline business Reza explored beneficially).

Meanwhile, he'd grown his fleshpots. It had always surprised him how easily American girls would open their arms and legs to anyone with ready cash and an exotic accent, and even more so how many such young women, particularly in the East Village, would be willing to enter into an informal arrangement for services rendered in exchange for what they claimed were difficult necessities in life—a guarantor for an apartment, a letter of recommendation for a job or school, or loan collateral (oh, how Reza loved exploring this avenue for income!). Reza quickly recognized the dynamic commercial potential in party girls. Within eighteen months he had a string of tough barmaids, sycophantic waitresses, bored sales clerks, self-deluding artists, strung-out filmmakers, and neurotic actresses milking cash from barroom Casanovas from Gansevoort Street in Manhattan to Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg. Reza was careful to treat his talent in that casual, just-one-of-the-guys manner they all seemed to respond well to, never making threats or hitting them, and always ready with a few bucks or possibly something more as needed. Not only did the girls stick with him through their most productive years, they even procured new assets for him, since more arrived every fall, a bottomless wellspring of young, willing, needy talent.

Excellent, Reza! his handlers had exclaimed. It's always good to make use of local merchandise. Girls are a much bigger pain in the ass to move than guns. Transshipment points are the worst: they never want to go, we have to insist, and merchandise gets damaged or lost that way. Those fuckers at Interpol and Europol are always busting our balls about that.

Flush with cash from eager orifices, Reza expanded his mercantile horizon. He still drove a cab, and during the long hours of each shift he daydreamed of cabs and contraband, a checkered yellow distribution network that would support his burgeoning empire of sex, chemistry, and software (he was keenly interested in the American addiction to wireless handheld devices and marveled at how many of them simply could not do without every fucking new application that seemed to appear week after week). Reza knew better than to try and cheat the taxi meters; the garage owners' greed was legendary, and any anomalies between the driver's trip sheet and what he brought to the cashier's window at shift change would instantly result in termination and possibly prosecution.

But that was a sucker's game anyway, nickel-and-dime stuff. Reza was much more interested in the brokerages that provided drivers with the loans to secure the all-important medallion, the permit that allowed any moron just off a plane a chance to operate a taxicab in New York City. Since Reza had first arrived in the city, the price of a TLC medallion had more than doubled in two decades (it currently stood at nine hundred thousand dollars for an individual medallion, and two million dollars for a mini-fleet owner). To set up a front company that could access lines of credit for those amounts gave Reza a painful hard-on while he sat behind the wheel. He envisioned a vast, vertically oriented network that funded, secured, maintained, and operated a golden armada of mobile profit centers, which doubled as nondescript ferries of a wide range of products and services (with access to all airports, shipping ports, and railway stations!) widely desired by the general public and foolishly deemed illegal by the authorities, thus stoking demand while—

Forget it, Reza, his handlers had told him flatly. The organization's not interested in a bunch of dirty fucking taxicabs. The brokerage idea's a good one, though. We'll look into it.

Reza was not discouraged by their dismissal. He knew his idea had promise, and he continued to hone and refine it.

While he did so, 9/11 came and went.

Interestingly, despite the initial investigation of the yellow cab fleet by the TLC, NYPD, FBI, and some worthless nonsensical agency known as the Department of Homeland Security, Reza (who had spent many a sweaty night following the attacks tending to his bolt-stash of fake passports, overseas SIM cards, Krugerrands, and cash in half a dozen foreign currencies) was completely overlooked. After all, by that time he was a naturalized citizen with a fixed address and clean criminal and tax records (necessary but unpleasant, for Reza hated paying taxes more than anything else). Moreover, he was an experienced non-Muslim cabbie, and the TLC in those days was desperate to maintain the pool of experienced cabdrivers that was depleted following the attacks by arrests, deportations, early retirements, and general flight from the industry, even going so far as to streamline the reentry process for those former drivers who had left the business but returned once the dust had settled, or once they'd secured new funds from God knows where.