Gary looked at the biker nearest the movable board that served as a door. “What d’you have?”
“Man, olive skin, thick hair, T-shirt and jeans. Don’t see no gun, but it’s dark.”
Gary grimaced, then slowly moved along the floor to the door.
“Ma chi t’ha pagato?”
“La mia anima.”
The lawyer stood up and peeked through the spy hole. “I can’t tell,” he muttered to himself. The bikers cocked their weapons.
“You gonna let me in or what?” the intruder called out in an irked tone.
“Adoro la politica Italiana,”
Gary called out in an unsure voice.
“It’s fucking cold out here,
cretino!
Forget the bullshit countersigns and let me in!” The man sounded furious.
“If he doesn’t answer in one minute,” Gary ordered the biker nearest him, “cut the fucker down. The biker nodded.”
Long seconds passed. Finally they heard a deep exhaling of an angry breath.
“This is bullshit, Gary!” A sigh.
“Si. Prima o poi tutti vogliono fare il presidente per quindici minuti.
Okay?”
Gary pushed down the biker’s gun and nodded. “He’s okay.”
A moment later Franco was let into the building.
Staring daggers at the lawyer, he was escorted first to Xenos’s side, where he crossed himself as he looked down at him. Then he was brought over to Valerie.
“Congresswoman Alvarez,” Gary said formally, “I’d like you to meet—”
“An ally,” Franco said brusquely as he reached out and perfunctorily shook her hand. “I understand that you know my brother?”
Valerie sounded as confused as she looked. “What? Brother? Who are you?”
Franco looked over at Gary, who shrugged. “I didn’t expect you to come yourself. I thought it was just too danger—
“My brother,” Franco said in a slightly less aggressive tone as he ignored the lawyer next to him, “was known to you as Paul Satordi.”
“Paul?” She sat down heavily. “God, I’m sorry.”
Franco stood over her. His presence at once threatening and comforting. “Do not be sorry, Congresswoman. Be helpful.” He hesitated, but his voice never weakened. “Is he dead?”
Valerie looked up into the resolute face. “I’m not sure. He may be.”
Franco sat down next to her. “Tell me what you know.”
“Paul was working for me,” researching a subway station redevelopment plan, she said, unable to look away from the fuming man across from her. “I think, maybe…”
“Tell me what you know!”
She nodded weakly. “You know what’s been happening to me?” He nodded. “Well, one of the meetings, about two weeks ago, was in a hotel off Broadway. I guess Paul must’ve been working there, ‘cause I saw him behind the bell captain’s desk when I went up.”’
Franco nodded without realizing it. “You told the bastards you’d seen him—your research assistant; a man who should not have seen you there, at that time with those men?”
Valerie heard Paul’s murder in the man’s voice. “Yes,” she said weakly as she wondered how many sins her overburdened soul would carry to its inevitable Hell.
“In culo alla balena,”
he cursed under his breath. “I will kill them all.”
Gary handed him a drink. “Can we get out of here first?”
Franco swallowed the drink, then nodded. “Can he travel?” He waved toward Xenos.
“Barely. You’ve got a way out?”
For the first time since he’d arrived, the Corsican strongman didn’t look invulnerable. Instead, he looked… unsure.
“I always hated New York,” he said with obvious sincerity. “The harbor is fine—big, open, like a Marseilles streetwalker on a Saturday night.” He expertly spit on a cockroach crawling near his leg. “But the rest—bridges, tunnels, airports—too goddamned easy to button up. And here on this island…”
He raised his hands in an act of frustration. “One way on, one off. Lots of goddamn harbors, but all real small, easy to watch. Even if you make it onto the water, you got all fucking New England off one shore,
three
Coast Guard stations and an American naval base off the other.”
Gary looked concerned. “But you
have
found a way?”
“We’re working on it.”
“Shit.” The suddenly morose lawyer poured himself a drink.
“Are you saying we can’t get away?” Valerie blurted out as she began to understand who Franco must be.
The Corsican tilted his head to an angle as he talked, like it was the only way to see the world, which had shifted off its axis.
“There’s muscle everywhere. Government, spooks, crooks. Even surveillance teams on Xenos’s family,
proprio stronzi.”
He accepted another drink. This one he sipped. “But this place is fine place,” he nodded as he looked around. “Away from main roads, deserted, in the middle of the island.” A place no one notices. Another sip. “You could be safe here a long time.”
A commotion behind them caused them all to spin around.
“It’s not safe,” Xenos said as he stepped off the table and tore the IV from his arms. He pushed the nurse away and stepped toward the group. “And we’re not staying.”
Franco got up and walked over to him. “What do you need,
amico?
” he asked as he studied the unsteady man.
He was pale, sweating, muscles contracting in his calves and upper arms, but Xenos stood steadily as he locked eyes with the Corsican. “Can you get us out through New York Harbor?”
“Is the pope a hypocrite?”
“Set it up.”
Franco hurried over to the phone as Xenos began to dress.
“The doctor,” Valerie said as she came over, “he said you were hurt bad. That you could …”
“Where are we?” he asked past her.
“Hauppauge, Suffolk County,” Gary answered as he came over. “Middle island, away from everything and everyone.”
Xenos winced. “Stupid.” He pulled on a windbreaker over his bare chest. “Got a cell?”
“Yeah.”
“Give Franco the number. Then get in a car—
not
the van we came in—and hit the road.”
Valerie looked up at him. “Where?”
“Just get mobile and stay on the island until you hear it’s safe to get off. Keep moving until you hear from Franco. Stick to the main highways, the larger population centers.”
“I don’t understand,” Valerie said as Franco joined them and nodded to the bigger man.
“Why are you still here?” Xenos demanded.
Taking two of the bikers with them in the car, the other two riding escort—alternately in front and behind, several car lengths—Valerie and Gary were on the Long Island Expressway fifteen minutes later.
“I got a Senegalese container ship leaving at dawn, with stops in Miami, Kingston, then Cartagena. From any of those we get home real sweet,” Franco said when they were alone. “If we get to the warehouse intact, the rest is bread and olives.” He took a deep breath. “But getting there, this is the trick I want to see.”
Xenos just grunted and started out of the building. “You got a car?”
“Do I ever walk?”
They were no good, neighborhood thugs and knee breakers. But they were tough, didn’t give a shit about consequences; and most important—they were expendable. Canvas had assigned four of the “local hire” to each of his handpicked field operatives.
Assigned to the five priority sites Canvas had identified, their job was simple and clear.
Observe and report. Take actions only if absolutely necessary; otherwise watch and call for reinforcements in the unlikely event either of the targets showed their face. But they were a back-shelf operation at best. Intended only to cover all
possible
contingencies. So that the “real pros” could continue closing their net on Long Island.
Two of the punks sat in a car in an alley across the street from Sarah Goldman’s apartment. Two more sat in all-night coffee stands on either end of the block. Canvas’s man sat in the window of a lower-floor apartment, dressed
in black, lights out, never taking his eyes off the street below him. And calling in every fifteen minutes to report their futility.
Xenos saw them all from the roof of a building down the block. Shaking his head in sympathy with Canvas’s plight, he pointed them out to Franco.
“Bottom of the barrel,” the Corsican said softly.
“He’s desperate,” Xenos replied. “Somebody’s pushing him for results.” He turned and started for the stairway. “Given time to plan properly, we’d never have made any of them.”
Franco shrugged. “Hard or soft?”
Xenos appeared not to have heard the question. His eyes were closed, his lips silently moving, in what Franco recognized as his analysis mode.
They’d left Happy’s six hours before.
Strictly following Xenos’s orders, Franco had driven them west toward New York City. Xenos had used an atlas that had come with the rented car to call out changes in directions, sometimes on four-lane highways, sometimes on unimproved shale roads. When they arrived in Queens, they’d abandoned the car and walked.
“You see,” Xenos had said as he half leaned on the much smaller man, “their thinking is too systematized, too planned, too procedural. The FBI, the cops, they watch the tunnels, the bridges, the harbor, the ferries, the major airports. Colin deploys his resources on the smaller harbors and ports, the regional fields and airstrips, maybe rolling searches in the countryside.”
“His resources are depleted, he’s on the clock, whoever’s pushing his buttons wants results and wants them fast. So he begins taking educated guesses.”
They started down a dark staircase together, Xenos wincing from the effort.
“He ignores the obvious,” because neither he nor the cops have the resources to deal with it. He’d actually managed a smile amid the pain and the wounds which had
started bleeding again. “Xenos,” the wounded man said in a professorial lecturing tone, “is a professional, wounded, dangerous, on the run. He would never take a risk like the subway.”
Franco bought their tokens and they quickly passed through the turnstiles.
“And if you can think like this,” Franco had asked, “how do you know he has not as well?”
They boarded the westbound train and Xenos collapsed to a seat on the nearly empty car.
“He will,” he said as he zipped up his windbreaker to better cover the bloody bandages. “But he’s not
from
here. He’s acting on intelligence, not experience. I don’t think he’s thought of it yet.”
Franco had been openly doubtful. “You don’t think?
Gesé Cristo!
Why not?”
Xenos had shrugged. “‘Cause
I
just thought of it.’” He took a deep painful breath. “It’s sort of like a psychotic game. I think him. He thinks me. One acts, the other
re
acts. My anticipation against his forethought.”
Franco rubbed his forehead. “And you can think like, anticipate, him better than he can you?”
The unsatisfying answer had been a noncommittal grunt.
In the city they’d changed subways twice more, before emerging on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Franco stole a car, Xenos had popped some pain pills with two cups of coffee, and they’d arrived on the rooftop looking down on the street at the surveillance team.
“So?” Franco almost hated to interrupt, but sunrise was less than two hours away, and most of that time would be needed to get the others to the harbor and circumvent the Feds’ surveillance net there.
“Hard. No time for the other,” Xenos said with commitment and regret as he started down the stairs.
Franco nodded, pulling a large knife out of his boot before following.
Ten minutes later the two gunmen on either end of the block died silently, drowning in their own blood as their throats were cut through to the spine.
The men in the car never saw anything more than two black forms rising up in the dark by their windows as the carbide-steel blades slid obstructionlessly down, guided by the notch in their collarbones. Their aortas severed, heart muscle turned to mush, they quivered briefly and died without sound or movement.
As the black forms vanished into the building behind them.
It was almost time for the next bulletin. Canvas’s man sighed, picked up his radio, and entered the comm code for the hour. “Site one, report. Nothing.” Site one, report. Again, nothing but static. “Site two, report.”
He began to curse under his breath at the incompetents he was forced to deal with. He was going to kick some ass when they were relieved in a few hours, he decided. “Site three, can you see your asshole friends sleeping on the street?”
This time the silence was ominous.
He put aside the radio, pulled out his night-vision scope, and looked down at the car just below him. The men seemed to be asleep, slouched down in their seats. But zooming in revealed their eyes wide open, trickles of black ooze coming out of the corner of their mouths and a growing stain on their chests.
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” the man whispered as he clawed for his cell phone. “Oh Jesus.”
“Go,” a voice on the other end of the phone said flatly.
“He’s here,” the man whispered in open fear. “He’s fucking here!”
A pause. “Unit number?”
“Uh, this is nine-four, dammit! The sonofabitch is here. They’re all fucking dead and he’s here.”
Just then he thought he heard a voice behind him—somewhere in the darkened apartment—whisper
“Wait.”
He pulled his gun, waving it behind him, not hearing a thing, hearing too much.
“Nine-four, stand by for Canvas.”
“Send help, dammit!”
Canvas rushed to the phone in the outer office, tearing it out of an aide’s hands. “Talk to me, boy!”
There were sounds on the other end of the line; strange moving sounds without voice or substance. Then a too identifiable thud. Then more silence and moving sounds.
“Let it end, Colin,” Xenos’s voice came through the phone—tired but committed.
“Things have gotten complicated, Jerry,” Canvas finally said. “We need to talk.”
“Did you
need
to put people on my family?”
“Like I said, it’s complicated.” Canvas held up a hand to stop the flurry of activity around him. “It was nothing personal, it’s not even about you. It’s Alvarez. Let’s you and me just—”
“Let it end,” the voice repeated coldly. “Now”—a deathly pause—“or never.”