Read The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series) Online
Authors: John R. Maxim
“The Ripper Effect. Have you shown it to him?”
“No.” Clew looked away.
“You're supposed to be so tight, why not?”
“The timing is wrong.”
“Don't tell me about timing. While we're sitting here, there are people packing Semtex into portable radios. You're going to wait until a couple of more airliners drop on Scotland?”
“If that would get him to act, yes.”
Hagler stared, then started to speak. Kaplan interrupted.
“When you have a problem,” he said, his expression pained, “and you have a friend who can help, you go ask him. Explain to me why this is more complicated than that.”
“We ask friends if we can borrow their ladders, Irwin,” Clew said patiently. “We don't ask them to risk their lives. Nor will Bannerman ask his people to risk their lives for someone else's problem.”
“It cuts no ice,” Kaplan asked, “that he's an American, and that his country is under siege?”
“As a matter of fact, it does,” Clew answered. “If this country's problems touch him, or anyone close to him, he will act. Go try to make a serious drug buy in Westport. Go hurt one of his neighbors.”
”I see.” Kaplan sighed.
“Do you?”
“Sure.” He stood up and began gathering his belongings. “It's the new American dream,” he said wearily. “Sorry about your problems, America, but you're history anyway. You've got an economy that is now more dependent on drug money than it is on foreign oil. You've got cities in which it's a statistical certainty that someone in every family will be the victim of a crime at least once a year and nearly all those crimes will be drug related. But I've got mine so screw everybody else. What I'm going to do is pick a nice white-bread community like Westport, draw a circle around it, and say, this is my world, there's the border, keep your problems on the other side of it or I'll kill you.” He turned to face Hagler. “You sure you need someone like that?”
Hagler nodded. ”I need him.”
“What for? You could borrow picked men from any of a dozen federal agencies, to say nothing of the Delta Force or the Rangers. And you'd have men who'd follow orders.”
“Lawful orders,” Hagler corrected him. “And in writing. If we were talking lawful, we wouldn't need Bannerman.”
Kaplan started to argue but Clew waved him off. “Irwin,” he said patiently, “it's true that we have no shortage of Rambo types who are dying to be set loose. They're talented, well trained and very gung ho but there are three things wrong with them. First, if captured or otherwise identified as American service personnel, we
would have
to expect reprisals against our civilians. Second, take the weakest person in Bannerman's entire network and that person, guaranteed, has a hundred times the experience of the best operatives we could field. Third, our own people, no matter how carefully we pick them, will eventually bum out. Bannerman's won't. His people, each of them, are the one in a million who can do this kind of work without being destroyed by it. It takes years for people like these to develop. We don't have years.”
“First things first, Irwin.”
Kaplan turned to Hagler, spreading his arms. “Did I just ask an unreasonable question? Roger the dodger here insists he has nothing up his sleeve and now he wants us to believe there's nothing in his head either. Do we believe that, Harry?”
Hagler didn't answer.
“And do we believe that Roger is just going to sit back and wait for Bannerman to develop a social conscience or do we think he's going to give him a little push.”
“Irwin—” Clew set down his mug.
“And do we think—is it just possible—that Roger has given him a little push already?”
Clew's face turned ashen.
“Deny it, Roger.”
”I do deny it. It isn't true.”
”I deny that, too,” he said evenly. “There is no such plan. There is no such hook. Not that I haven't tried to think of one.”
“And the best you've come up with is wait and see.”
“For the moment. Yes.”
“Look at Harry.” Kaplan gestured with his head toward Hagler who was pacing the sun porch, his eyes, now and then, falling on his briefcase and lingering there. “Does he look like someone who's going to wait and see?”
Hagler froze.
“Yes,” Clew answered. “Not for very long. But yes.”
Kaplan held his gaze for a long moment. Then he looked up at the ceiling. The sound of the shower had stopped. Fuller, he assumed, was probably listening at this point. It would be hard not to. Unless he had a hell of a lot more faith in Roger than Kaplan could manage at this moment.
“The man said we could talk to him. Individually and in private.”
“He didn't say you could compromise him. I'd rather you left that to me.”
“You can't do that.”
“This conversation,” Clew said coldly, “stays here. The three of us. You gave your word.”
“The two of you,” Kaplan corrected him. “If and when you decide to level with me, we'll take another head count.”
Clew watched him leave. “Like you said,” he muttered, “he's a pain in the ass.”
”I never said he was stupid.” Hagler stood close to his shoulder, his own voice kept low. “Is he right, Roger? Do you have something going?”
“Like what?”
”A way to move things along here.”
“Patience, Harry. My immediate concern is getting Irwin locked in.”
“You really think he'd go to Bannerman?”
“No. Not to Lesko either. He won't do anything that would compromise Fuller.”
“As long as we're whispering, what do you have in mind? More drugs in his kids' lockers?”
Clew turned on him, glaring. “That better be a joke, Harry.”
“Roger,” Hagler closed one eye. “I've got six years in this job and not a single big win. I don't joke. And don't tell me to be patient.”
“Tell me to my face. Do you think I'd set up that man's kids?”
”I think you'd do what works, Roger. So would I.”
-16-
The last week of January. Westport.
Susan Lesko had gone home with her father.
He took her, by train and taxi, to her apartment on Manhattan's West Side. He had hoped to spend the night with her, that night at least, sleeping on her couch. She said no, firmly. She wanted the couch for herself. She did not tell him that.
The bruises on her face had faded, for the most part, to a pale yellow, and the cuts had almost healed. Her own doctor would remove the sutures. The predicted after-effects of her cocaine overdose were now little more than light-headedness, an occasional nightmare, trouble recapturing certain memories, trouble dismissing others. She would be fine, she told her father. She needed time to be alone.
Susan stayed home three days. She took no calls, letting her machine screen all of them, returning those of her father only when he threatened to come and kick in her door unless he heard her voice saying that she was all right.
The call she'd been hoping for did not come. Not even a just-making-sure-you're-okay call left on her machine. It was just as well. For all that she rehearsed . . . fantasized . . . what she might say to him, she knew that she would remember none of it if the call should come. Her response would be cold, or angry, or bitter, or, worse, she might cry.
She'd tried to argue that. “What about soldiers?” she asked. “Killing is what they're trained for from the time they're eighteen. They're ready and willing.
Semper fideliso.
What about street cops? What about Raymond ‘the Terrible’ Lesko who was no older than Paul when he threw a rapist down an elevator shaft, the story goes, or the four or the nine more men he shot depending on which of the other stories you believe? And don't say that's different.”
“It is and it isn't,” he answered. “You've grown up with cops. You've seen how cops, after a few years on the job, get so they can only talk to other cops. It's what happens when day in, day out, you only see people when they're at their worst. Even someone they stop for running a red light, decent guy, wife and kids, is all of a sudden insulting, he hates you for doing your job, and now and then he pulls a gun and blows a hole in you. Cops get so they can only talk about these things to each other. No one else could understand. No one else wants to know. Including their wives. What wife wants to hear that shit every night? So they talk about new slipcovers, or what's on TV. They pretend. They wait for the pension. Meanwhile, the cop starts seeing women on the side. Lady cops. Hookers. Cop groupies. Women who live in his world or at least he doesn't have to pretend with them. At least there isn't this great big wall between them. And in the end, most cop wives never make it to the pension anyway. Except for the part the divorce court gives them.”
“That's what happened to you and Mom?” she asked. Although she knew the answer.
“Every story's different,” he said, “and every story's the same. The point is, you take what happens with cops, and you multiply it by ten, and maybe you're still not even close to what happens to people like that crowd up in Westport.”
”I love him, Daddy,” she said, very quietly.
He sat her down. Hugged her. “You want the truth? I even like him. A little. The guy you think you love is Paul Bannerman. Nice guy. You could do worse. But the guy you can't live with, for a million reasons, is Mama's Boy.”
She said nothing. She shuddered.