Rivers of Gold (31 page)

Santiago could not understand how cabdrivers did it.

Twelve hours a day, maybe more. Six or seven days a week. Being trapped in these vile yellow boxes alone was bad enough. But to be confined with a passenger (maybe more than one), with all their sounds, their smells, their elation or exasperation over the most trivial matters—that would be enough to drive anyone insane.

But worst of all was to be trapped in a cab full of fear.

It was raw, primordial, I-want-to-get-the-fuck-out-of-here fear, and it had oozed from the kid's pores since they'd bundled him into the Crown Vic's front seat. The kid had refused to get into the back with More, couldn't even look at him in the rearview mirror. He'd merely slunk down in the seat where Santiago had dropped him, feather-light and brittle as crystal, his eyes huge and glassy and sightless. Santiago took in the looks on the faces of the CAB backup team as they silently wrote Renny off for dead, and he wanted to swing massively at all of them, even McKeutchen. It was a suicide run, Santiago knew it, and he hated himself for being a part of it. McKuetchen had even pulled rank to make him go. Oddly, it was the kid who'd finally decided it, back in the interrogation room, saying he'd be better off taking his chances with them than those for whom More was laying another diabolical trap. The kid's voice was gnarled and caked, like roots pulled from wet earth, and it scratched Santiago in a place he could not define.

There hadn't been much room in the backseat anyway, he reflected, not with McKeutchen's girth and More's huge black duffel full of mayhem. The captain had insisted on riding with them. Santiago knew he was there to keep the kid together until More could pull off whatever carnage he had in mind for whoever Nightclub Guy sent, but in the end it didn't matter. The kid reeked of fright and terror and shock, and Santiago was glad McKeutchen had the foresight to keep some EMTs from the closest hospital, New York Downtown over on Gold Street, standing by five blocks from the site, tuned to the same radio frequency as the CAB team.

The ride down to Chinatown had been awful, the usual rush-hour miasma paling in comparison to the fog of anticipation, tension, and terror swirling inside the Crown Vic. Santiago was sweating, the kid was bruxing and swallowing uncontrollably, and McKeutchen was loosing off round after round of stress-induced flatulence. The only still being in the taxicab was More, who had gone someplace far away inside himself to prepare for whatever maelstrom he was orchestrating. Santiago hated More on that long drive downtown, hated him fully and without reservation, and he swore to himself that when it was all over and they had Nightclub Guy's people in bracelets on their way to Central Holding, he would tell McKeutchen he was done with More for good.

And he would have told More the same thing himself, except when they were about eight blocks from the site, riding down Division Street with the bridge looming overhead, More left. Just left the fucking cab, stepping out of a moving vehicle on a darkened street strewn with broken glass, humping that huge black bag like it was filled with straw. If not for the sound of the passenger door softly being closed and the kid jerking like he'd been hit by a Taser, Santiago might not have known at all. He scanned the street—discarded pallets, rusty fencing topped with barbed wire, cracked concrete and faceless, oblivious Chinese—but More was gone. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw McKeutchen's broad head, half in shadow, shake slowly left and right, once. He turned back toward the windshield, put both hands on the steering wheel and slowly squeezed until the tendons in his wrists locked.

Fucking More.

He'd parked the cab about forty feet from the playground fronting the alley More had selected, he and McKeutchen taking turns getting the shotguns from the trunk so that Renny was never alone in the cab. Santiago didn't like it, the kid sitting up in the front seat for anyone to see. For a moment he thought the kid would crack and run, but Renny seemed to have eased up somewhat. At least as much as a battered, borderline shock trauma case about to be murdered could ease up. Santiago figured that was only because More was gone.

Then they'd waited.

At dusk, Santiago walked him from the playground to the alley while McKeutchen repositioned the cab by the playground's entrance. The backup team was two blocks away. Santiago walked about three feet off Renny's right shoulder, his Glock in his pocketed hand, the Benelli on the Crown Vic's front seat with McKeutchen, who toted a Remington 870 12-gauge. At the end of the alley, between a struggling semi-permanent Chinese greengrocer and a thriving heap of garbage, they'd turned around to face the way they'd come. Back down the alley to the playground. Where Renny was supposed to meet Nightclub Guy's contact. For the umpteenth time Santiago cursed the lunacy of it all. The kid would be alone, not even wearing body armor, the nearest help a good hundred yards off. But that had been part of More's plan, and McKeutchen backed it all the way. How could he have gone with such a fucking—

“Six, Ever, radio check,” crackled his earpiece. The kid didn't flinch more than a foot.

“Ever, Six, copy.”

“Six, Ever—get out of there.” More was using his command voice again. Santiago thought longingly of the shotgun for a second, then felt a fluttering beneath his ribcage.

It was happening.

He glanced at Renny, mentally preparing to take him down should the kid try one last time to make a break for it. But Renny appeared to have gone into some sort of fugue state. His lips were parted, even moving slightly, though no sound issued from them. Santiago doubted he'd be able to make the whole walk.

“Don't worry,” he managed, “the backup team's ready, and Captain McKeutchen and me will be watching you all the way. We've got uniforms at your mom's house, she'll be okay. Your dad isn't—” Santiago broke off, cursing, remembering too late what had been in the kid's file. No father.

Finally Renny made a sound. It was somewhere between a snort and a sigh, as though his wiring had frayed so badly he couldn't decide which one he wanted. But something else, barely audible, came with it: “My dad,” he whispered.

Santiago's radio crackled again. “Six, Ever, clear the area
now
.”

He didn't know what else to say, besides telling More to fuck off. It was happening.

“I gotta go,” he said with a steadiness he did not feel. “We'll be with you the whole way.” He forced himself to look at the kid directly, but Renny was staring off somewhere in the vague direction of the playground, lost to him.

Santiago ran.

As arranged, he circled the block instead of heading back down the alley. He took the route at a dead run, up and over and down Henry Street, one hand on the radio, the other on his pistol, Renny in his head stumbling down the alley like a zombie. His heart was hammering by the time he reached the cab, the captain, and the Benelli, which was the first thing he touched. McKeutchen was now in the passenger seat, his shotgun out of sight beneath the dashboard. Santiago brought the Benelli to port arms and cocked it, thumbing the safety off, the barrel pointing out the window behind the driver's-side mirror, just like he'd done during the riots. The street was full of people and devoid of cars. His pulse thudded in his ears. A minute passed. Five. Was it happening?

“Maybe Nightclub Guy called it off,” he whispered to McKeutchen. “Maybe—”

But McKeutchen cut him off with a wave and a gesture of his chins. Squinting out through the windshield, Santiago only saw the vampish Chinatown night.

“Uptown lane, just passed the traffic light,” McKeutchen grunted, reaching for the door handle.

Now Santiago saw it, realizing he'd been anticipating twin headlights—a car. But now he saw it, arcing slowly towards them past a row of ducks hanging by their necks in a greasy, neon-lit restaurant window. A single disc of light, like a phantom Cyclops, hovering impossibly high above the street. Santiago's sweaty fingers slipped twice on the door handle. The Benelli and the steering wheel seemed to fight each other, slowing him down, blocking his way. In the distance, he could hear the motorcycle's engine growl.

My favorite memory of my father is of him singing me this lullaby:

Sing a song of thunder

A long and echoing tone

A song to keep nightmares at bay

A song that's all your own.

Send it down the path you take,

Past every unknown zone,

Through wood and fog and snowbank break

Through pitch and glare and roan.

It always comes right back to you

As though it's always known

Just where you are and where you'll be,

You'll never walk alone.

So if you find yourself distressed

With faculties o'erthrown,

Just sing a song of thunder

And you'll find your way back home.

The sunlight never gets down here during the day, so the stone stores no heat and the dampness never dries. I've seen them clean up at night but somehow it's never really clean, there's always garbage and always the smell of decay. Reza would know how much I hate this place, its squalor and stench and darkness, the fetid, sclerotic eastern auricle of Chinatown with its teeming oblivious hordes. He would know because L would have told him. Sooner or later we all end up working for Reza. I should have known that L was a liar and a manipulator. I should have known that N was an atavistic opportunist. I should have known because I am all these things. I became them with every decision I made. I rationalized my life away. All the way down here, this awful alley beneath the Manhattan Bridge, where I'm going to die.

I used people thinking I'd avoid
being
used, but now it's come full circle. Wait, I want to say to them, wait, I'm not what you think I am. Yes, I made bad choices, but what choice did I have? I had to survive, to rise, to
keep moving
. Is it wrong to want more? Is it a crime to want to live better than your parents did? It must be, for here I am walking through Hell's vestibule. I can see the taxicab waiting at the curb next to the playground that will take me away. I hear the rising grinding roar of a Manhattan-bound Q train passing overhead, and now there is a closer roar, yes, a fiery chimera unfurling one great clawed wing toward me, and now I can see my father but I don't know the way home—

(Thunder's song.)

Q U I E T U S

S
antiago had never before seen a federal pissing contest settled so fast.

Treasury Agent Reale had been figuratively bitch-slapped and sent scowling from the station in seconds.

FBI Deputy SAC Totentantz had gone stomping and braying down the stairs in minutes, vowing to bring down a full-bore Justice Department colonoscopy on the NYPD.

“Wouldn't be the first,” McKeutchen muttered, hands in his pockets, chewing more of his disgusting apple gum, to Santiago's chagrin.

They'd kept More bottled up in an interrogation room for nearly two hours. They'd stayed behind the glass, of course. More reeked to high heaven, a wall of putrefied offal and mulched vegetable matter, congealed oil and grease, urine, and ashes. There were still papers strewn about the floor where a city ADA had dropped them when he turned tail and ran, two seconds after he'd entered to be greeted by More's Fish Face and his stench. The only Fed who'd been able to stand it was Totentantz, who seemed oblivious to the odor. More was oblivious to everything and everyone. He sat in a chair, hands in his lap, eyes hooded, utterly silent. Maybe, Santiago thought, More was immune to people; an enviable trait.

The man who'd shooed the Feds off in such record time was a compact, dapper fellow in his early fifties, with a rough crevassed face that put Santiago in mind of star anise. His hands were square and his dark blue suit fit him like neoprene. He'd given his name as Devius Rune. He offered no badge, business card, nor ID of any kind. He had two men with him who made Santiago feel like a kid on the playground basketball court again. Looking up.

“I had hoped,” said Devius Rune in a measured, methodical voice, “to draw a bit less attention.”

There were news crews and stringers and photographers and bloggers and students from the Tisch School of the Arts and the New York Film Academy and the Columbia School of Journalism swarming like gnats over the Sophie Irene Loeb playground in front of the alley between East Broadway and Henry beneath the Manhattan Bridge, trying to get a few frames' worth of blood and gore. Not to mention about a million local Chinese gawkers, their camera phones held high.

“It was a clean shoot,” McKeutchen repeated for what seemed like the umpteenth time that night. “My men identified themselves as police officers. The shooter drew anyway and made to fire. I was there. I'm not telling you anything I won't say in court.”

McKeutchen was standing up for them all the way, and Santiago was supremely grateful, even if he was only telling half the truth. It had been McKeutchen's idea to go along that night for this very reason. More important than IAB, more important than the commissioner, more important than the DA, McKeutchen had to sell their story to Devius Rune. If he could do that, McKeutchen assured Santiago, the rest of the ducks would line up in a row.

“Oh really,” said Santiago in a dull monotone. There were still spots dancing on his retinas from the muzzle flashes. And what had followed.

“Yes, really. C'mon, snap out of it.” McKeutchen was all business. Maybe, Santiago thought distantly, he'd been through something like this before.

Santiago certainly had not.

He could still feel the burn, from his hands to his shoulders, from the shock delivered to his muscles when he'd squeezed the Benelli's trigger. This was after screaming “FREEZE, MOTHERFUCKER” at the huge, leather-clad specter on a gigantic white BMW R14 GSX trail bike. After the specter had turned its helmeted head from the kid, shivering and crying just a few yards beyond in the archway where the underpass opened into the playground, around toward Santiago and the muzzle of the Benelli, and still had drawn out the suppressed HK MP7 they'd recovered later.

And around the same time that More, ensconced in the sniper blind he'd been in for hours, had fired a single .458 round from his modified rifle from a distance of forty-six yards.

Sitting in McKeutchen's reinforced chair, his fingers steepled together, Devius Rune did not appear angry. His shoulders were relaxed and his craggy features calm, almost slack. Santiago didn't know how he could be so at ease with this.

And he didn't care. He couldn't rid his mind of the sight of the figure on the motorbike coming apart in a cloud of fluid, the big BMW lurching sideways and pinning his left leg beneath, dislocating the hip joint with an audible pop.

More had loaded the Benelli with FRAG-12 rounds, each a 19-millimeter HE projectile that armed itself three meters from the shotgun's muzzle, designed to penetrate armor half an inch thick. Santiago's shot had severed the shooter's arm just below the right elbow, penetrating his Kevlar vest and detonating just beneath the right floating rib. More's shot had gone through the shooter's helmet and pierced the skull half an inch from the foramen magnum. A large amount of energy had been transferred in the process, resulting in a significant portion of the front of the biker's helmet—along with his head—being sprayed outward in a trajectory that ended in a neatly stacked pile of wooden pallets, which had supported several hundred pounds of starfruit only hours before.

Squarely in the middle of this was the kid, who wound up wearing a substantial amount of his would-be assassin all over his head, face, and upper body.

In a bizarre twist, the paramedics treating the kid for shock found a lollipop stuck in his hair.

A crash DNA test ordered by Totentantz, cross-referenced with Interpol database records, would later identify one Ahmed Kadyrov, aka “Babyface,” a Chechen enforcer for a multinational Eastern European crime syndicate rumored to be headed by a Ukrainian national, one Miroslav Tkachenko, aka “the Slav,” among numerous other aliases. The Slav was a high-value target for law-enforcement and intelligence agencies throughout the Russian Federation, several Gulf League states, the E.U., the U.K., and the U.S. A U.S. State Department report claimed the Slav's fearsome reputation extended from a prison on Siberia's Pacific coast all the way to Paris; there were kill-on-sight bounties on him in a dozen countries.

“Which is where I come in,” explained Devius Rune. “The Slav is one of my projects. He's a good example of how commerce becomes weaponized, how the economy is part of the modern battlespace. National security isn't just about bombs and terrorists anymore, detective, it's about money, how the bad gets mixed in with the good at the point where legal and illegal economies meet.

“Increasingly,” he continued, “this city has become that point. Things are getting out of hand in New York. Some of us in Washington thought something had to be done.”

He stood up abruptly, the way More had done in Esperanza's NTU, and Santiago found that although he wanted to draw on him, he did not have the energy. “You've been extremely helpful, Detective Santiago. More speaks well of you. Consider that high praise indeed. Usually he doesn't say much at all. Captain McKeutchen says you have misgivings about legalities.” He gave Santiago an index card, on which was typed
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE DIRECTIVE 5525.5
. “Look it up. Makes for interesting reading.”

Santiago was too tired for this. The rush was over. The kid was safe and his would-be killer was a puddle in a playground. The killer's backup team (intercepted by CAB officers two blocks away) had promptly thrown themselves on the ground shouting, “
Nie strzelać
!” They were still waiting on IDs for them.

Watching Devius Rune chatting idly, almost amicably with McKeutchen, Santiago noticed that he had lines around his eyes and mouth similar to More's, as though he'd spent long periods in cold dry weather squinting into the sun. Santiago wondered if Devius Rune had ever set foot in Afghanistan. Or heard the concussion from bombs he'd helped guide in. Or felt the bite of RPG shrapnel. He decided that he'd never know.

And he did not give a shit.

Rising slowly, almost painfully, he wandered over to the glass behind which More sat in an impenetrable cloud. He'd made his sniper blind in a mound of discarded pallets and garbage, the detritus of dozens of Chinatown markets and restaurants. Hence the rebreather apparatus he'd donned in front of Santiago back at his place in Flushing. Nobody would have looked for him nestled beneath all the cabbage stems and dried fish and pork fat baking in the June heat; no one would think a human being could stand it.

And no human being could.

Except one.

Ever More.

The fuck.

He'd brought along his ballistic cases and returned the M4 and Benelli to their original states before the techs rolled up. Santiago didn't know what he'd done with them, but how easy it would be, he thought, to make a small insertion in his report. Just a deviation from the script. To go back to the way things were. To pretend none of this sick shit had ever happened.

Not a chance.

“You keep quiet about this, detective,” Devius Rune said to him from behind McKeutchen's desk, “you'll get your Second Grade, and that transfer to OCID, too.”

“Where do you usually sit?” Santiago had asked him. McKeutchen, standing in the corner, made a face that suggested acute constipation.

But Devius Rune had smiled, a terrible sight. “Most of the time, detective, anywhere I damn please.”

The next two days dragged by. Santiago had to type up his report, and surreptitiously hand it to McKeutchen to fudge. This was easier than he would have thought, given that the unit was busy with evidence from the restaurant, the brothel, and the office. Two CAB teams were taken up processing the Polish gunnies they'd busted the night of the shooting under the bridge. The Narc Sharks had been interviewed twice (anonymously for print) and were packing their gear for the move to OCID. Santiago felt no envy. In fact, he felt nothing at all. The shooting had left him numb and listless. More's weapons had been turned over without incident. Nightclub Guy was in the wind. The fund manager was due to be arraigned in two weeks' time and had been denied bail. The cabbies had delivered testimony
in obscura
and been released, even Arun. When Santiago had objected, McKeutchen had said, “It's all for the best, kid. We've got more than we know what to do with. This is going to take months, maybe years to unravel. And don't be jealous of Liesl and Turse. They're gonna have company. I'm gonna have to find myself someone as pigheaded as you to break in all over again.” McKeutchen beamed, the effect of which was somewhat mitigated by a mouthful of half-chewed peanut M&Ms. Santiago looked away.

McKeutchen had made arrangements at St. Vincent's Hospital. The kid had his own room. It was better than most; nurses checked him at least once every twenty-four hours. McKeutchen was looking into rat-holing some department money—God knows from where—for a therapist. He was over there every other day. The first day, Santiago went with him. When he walked into the room, the kid started screaming and yanking out his tubes. Shooed out by McKeutchen, Santiago vowed never to let More near the kid again.

While standing outside Renny's hospital room, hating himself, he had been approached by a stout balding doctor with a quiet, self-assured demeanor and a nametag that read
LOPEZ
. Santiago disliked him on sight. Through his salt-and-pepper beard the doctor asked Santiago if he was a friend of the family. Santiago had silently shown his badge.

“Ah,” uttered the good Dr. Lopez. Santiago felt like shooting him, too. The doctor looked at his clipboard. “Reynolds Taylor, age twenty-five, hair white-blond, eyes pale green. One hundred eighteen pounds at time of admission.” Santiago looked through the window in the door. McKeutchen stood over the kid, who stared sightlessly, and an ancient woman, who seemed equally vacant. “Shock, borderline malnutrition, liver function off the chart. You may want to tell him to knock off the partying if he feels like seeing twenty-six.” Dr. Lopez spun on his heel and walked off at a brisk pace.

Shock. It had been More's idea to use the kid as bait. He didn't care about the consequences, he just wanted whichever assholes from Varna's crew showed up for the kid's scalp. Not a thought for the kid, or the case, or the department. Just because More wanted it.

Because Nightclub Guy was More's mission.

Or, more likely, Nightclub Guy's boss. The Slav.

Fucking More.

Not that it would be a problem. Once Devius Rune had returned to Washington, More simply vanished. The Flushing site was abandoned. When Santiago called ESU to ask about More, he was told there was no such name in the department. More's name disappeared from the CAB duty roster and his name was no longer spoken at roll call.

Within two days of the shooting under the bridge, Santiago felt fossilized.

His eyes kept coming back to rest on the desk drawer once assigned to More, which still had the lock More had put on it. Everyone except Santiago had apparently forgotten about it. On the fifth day, while McKeutchen was at the hospital with the kid and the ghostly, wizened old woman who didn't seem quite all there, Santiago went through the lock and pulled the .45 and the inside-the-waistband holster out of the drawer.

The holster was all wrong. Santiago had the torso for a shoulder rig, and felt better with one. The .45 was another matter. The Glock 39 was a short-frame model, which felt spindly and small in Santiago's hands. The kick was something else entirely, bucking noticeably up and to the right, but still manageable, if you had hands like Santiago's. The barrel length was wrong, though, once he sent the target more than twenty yards down range.