Black Market (2 page)

“And we are definitely not?” President Justin Kearney's expression was one of extreme doubt and suspicion. He had discovered the awkward fact during his term of office that one branch of government all too frequently didn't know what another was doing.

“Which we are not, Mr. President. Both the CIA and the FBI have assured us of that. Sir, Green Band has still made
no
demands.”

President Kearney had been rushed, under intensified Secret Service guard, to a windowless, lead-shielded room buried deep inside the White House. There, in the White House Communications Center, several of the most important political leaders in the United States were standing around the president in a manner that suggested they intended to protect him from whatever forces were presently at work in the country.

From the White House Communications Center, the president had been put into audio and visual contact with the Pinnacle Club in New York City.

The FBI chief, Walter Trentkamp, stepped forward to appear on the monitor screen. Time and his job had given him a tough, weathered policeman's look and a harassed attitude to match.

“There's been no further contact from Green Band, other than the pier firebombing, which is the demonstration they promised us, Mr. President. It's the kind of guerrilla warfare we've seen in Belfast, Beirut, Tel Aviv. Never before in the United States…

“We're all waiting, Mr. President,” Trentkamp went on. “We're clearly past their stated deadline.”

“Have any of the terrorist groups come forward and claimed responsibility?”

“They have. We're checking into them. So far none has shown any knowledge of the content of the warning phone call this morning.”

Minutes had never seemed so long.

It was now 5:09… 5:10, and slowly, slowly counting.

The director of the CIA moved before the lights and cameras in the White House emergency room. Philip Berger was a small, irascible man, highly unpopular in Washington, chiefly skilled at keeping the major American intelligence agencies competitive among themselves. “Is there
any
activity you can make out on Wall Street? Any people down there? Any moving vehicles? Small-plane activity?”

“Nothing, Phil. Apart from the police and the fire department vehicles on the periphery of the area, it could be a peaceful Sunday morning.”

“They're goddamn bluffing,” someone said in Washington.

“Or,” President Kearney said, “they're playing an enormous game of fucking nerves.”

No one agreed, or disagreed, with the president.

Speech had been replaced by the terrifying anxiety and uncertainty of waiting.

Just waiting.

But for what?

Manhattan

At 6:20 P.M., Colonel David Hudson was doing the only thing that still mattered-that mattered more than anything else in his life.

David Hudson was on patrol. He was back in major combat; he was leading a quality-at-every-position platoon into the field again-now the field was an American city.

Hudson was one of those men who looked vaguely familiar to people, only they couldn't say precisely why. His wheat-colored hair was cut in a short crew, which was suddenly back in vogue. He was handsome; his looks were very American. He had the kind of strong, noble face that photographed extremely well and a seemingly unconscious air of self-confidence, a consistently reassuring look that emphatically said “Yes, I can do that-whatever it is.”

There was only one thing wrong, and a lot of people didn't notice it right away-David Hudson had no left arm. He had lost it in the Vietnam War.

His Checker cab marked VETS CABS AND MESSENGERS rolled forward cautiously, reconnoitering past the bright-green pumps at the Hess gas station on Eleventh Avenue and Forty-fifth Street. This was one of those times when Hudson could see himself, as if in an eerie dream… as if he could objectively watch himself from somewhere outside the scene. He knew this uncomfortable, distorted feeling extremely well from combat duty.

He'd felt it like a second skin ever since he'd stepped off a crowded USMC transport and watched himself encounter the one-hundred-and-seven-degree heat, the gagging, decaying, sweet-shit smell of the cities of Southeast Asia. He'd known this awful sensation of detachment, of distance from himself, when he'd realized that he could actually die at any given beat of his heart…

Now he felt it again, this time in the sharp wintry wind blowing through the snowy gray streets of New York City.

Colonel David Hudson was purposely allowing the Green Band mission to wind out just one highly important notch tighter. It was all moving according to the elaborate final plan.

Every second had been rigidly accounted for. More than anything else, David Hudson appreciated the subtleties of precision, the detail and the fine-tuning involved in getting everything absolutely right.

He was back in full combat again.

This strange, strange passion was alive again in David Hudson.

He finally released the hand microphone from the PRC transmitter built into the cab's dashboard.

“Contact. Come in, Vets Five.” Colonel David Hudson spoke in the firm, charismatic tones that had characterized his commands through the late war years in Southeast Asia. It was a voice that had always elicited loyalty and obedience in the men whose lives he controlled.

“This is Vets One… Come in Vets Five. Over.”

A reply immediately crackled back through heavy static over the transmitter-receiver. “Hello, sir. How are you, sir? This is Vets Five. Over.”

“Vets Five. Green Band is now affirmative. I will repeat-Green Band is now affirmative…
Blow it all up
… and God help us all.”

Brooklyn

“Yougotaquarter, sir? Please! It's real cold out here, sir. You got two bits?… Awhh, thank you. Thanks a lot, sir. You just saved my life.”

Around seven-thirty that evening, on Brooklyn 's Atlantic Avenue, a familiar bag man called Crusader Rabbit was expertly soliciting loose change and cigarettes. The bag man begged while he sat huddled like a pile of soiled rags against the crumbling red brick facade of the Atlantic House Yemen and Middle East restaurant. The money came to him as if he were a magnet.

After a successful hit, forty-eight cents from a trendy-looking Brooklyn Heights teacher type and his date, the street bum allowed himself a short pull on a dwindling halfpint of Four Roses.

Drinking while begging change was counterproductive, he knew, but sometimes necessary against the raw cold wintertime. Besides, it was his image.

The deep slack cough that followed the sip of whiskey sounded convincingly tubercular. The bag man's lips, bloated and pale, were corpse white and cracked, and they looked as if they'd bled recently.

For this year's winter wardrobe, he'd carefully selected a sleeveless navy parka over several layers of assorted, colored lumberman's shirts. He'd picked out open-toed high-topped black sneakers, basketball player snow bird socks, and painter's pants that were now thickly caked with mud, vomit, and spit.

The tourists, at least, seemed to love him. Sometimes they snapped his picture to bring home as an example of New York City 's famed squalor and heartlessness. He enjoyed posing. Asked them for a buck or whatever the traffic would bear. He'd hold his two puffy shopping bags and smile extra pathetically for the camera. Pay the cashier, sport.

Now, through gummy, half-closed eyes, Crusader Rabbit stealthily watched the usual early evening promenade along Atlantic Avenue 's Middle Eastern restaurant row.

It was a constant, day-in day-out noisy bazaar here: transplanted rag-headed Arabs, college assholes, Brooklyn professionals who came to eat ethnic. In the distance there was always the clickety-clack of the subway.

A troop of counter kids from McDonald's was passing by Crusader Rabbit, walking home from work. Two chunky black girls and a skinny mulatto boy around eighteen, nineteen.

“Hey, McDonald's. Whopper beat the Big Mac. Real tough break. Gotta quarter? Something for some McCoffee?” Crusader coughed and wheezed at the passing trio of teens.

The kids looked offended; then they all laughed together in a high-pitched chorus. “Who asked you, aqualung? You old geek sheet-head. Kick your ass.”

The kids continued merrily on. Rude little bastards when Ronald McDonald wasn't watching over their act.

If any of the passersby had looked closer, they might have noticed certain visual inconsistencies about the bag man called Crusader Rabbit. For one thing, he had impressive muscle tone for a sedentary street bum. His shoulders were unusually broad, and his legs and arms were as thick as tree limbs.

Even more unusual were his eyes, which were almost always intently focused. They scanned the teeming avenue over and over again, relentlessly watching all the street action, everything that happened.

There was also the small matter of the quality of the dirt and dust thickly caked on his ankles, on his exposed toes. It was all a little too perfect. It was almost as if it might actually be black Kiwi shoe polish-shoe polish carefully applied to look like dirt.

The conclusion was obvious after a careful and close look at the street bum. Crusader Rabbit was some kind of undercover New York cop on a stakeout…

Which Crusader Rabbit truly was.

His real name was Archer Carroll, and he was currently the chief terrorist deterrent in the United States. He had been on a stakeout for five weeks, with no end in sight.

Meanwhile, across the busy Brooklyn street, inside the Sinbad Star restaurant, two Iraqi men in their early thirties were sampling what they believed to be the finest Middle Eastern cooking available in New York City. They were the objects of Arch Carroll's long and painful stakeout.

The Iraqi men had purposely chosen a rear alcove of the small, cozy restaurant, where they noisily slurped thick carob bean soup. They gobbled up mint-flecked tabbouleh and cream-colored hummus. They eagerly munched greasy mixtures of raisins, pine nuts, lamb, Moroccan olives, their favorite things to eat in the world.

As they savored the delectable food, Wadih and Anton Rashid were also immensely enjoying their official American immunity from criminal prosecution and harassment, something guaranteed them by the FBI. On the strictest orders from Washington, the two brothers, admitted Third World terrorists, were to be treated like foreign diplomats on UN duty in New York. In return, three marines, convicted “spies,” were soon to be released from a Lebanese jail.

New York and federal police authorities were permitted to act against the Rashid brothers only if the Black September killers actually moved to endanger property or life in the United States. These, of course, were two of their favorite avocations in past residences: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Paris, Beirut, and most recently London, where they had coldbloodedly murdered three young women, college-age daughters of Lebanese politicians, in a Chelsea sweetshop.

Back out on Atlantic Avenue, Arch Carroll shivered unhappily in the probing, icy-cold fingers of the rising night wind.

At times like these Carroll wondered why it was that a reasonably intelligent thirty-five-year-old man, someone with decent enough prospects, someone with a law degree, could regularly be working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, invariably eating stone-cold pizza and drinking Pepsi-Cola for dinner. Why was he sitting outside a Middle Eastern restaurant on a Friday night stakeout?

Was it perhaps because his father and two uncles had been pavement-pounding city cops?

Was it because his Mickey Finn grandfather had been a rough-and-tumble example of New York 's finest?

Or did it have to do with incomprehensible things he'd seen a decade and a half ago in Vietnam?

Maybe he just wasn't a reasonable, intelligent man, as he'd somehow always presumed. Maybe, if you got right down to it, there was some kind of obvious short circuit in the wires of the old brain, some form of synaptic fuck-up. After all, would a really bright guy with all of his marbles be standing here freezing his dick off like this?

As Arch Carroll pondered the tangible mistakes of his life, his full attention began to wander. For several minutes at a clip he'd stare at his sadly wiggling toes, at the equally fascinating burning ember of his cigarette, at almost anything mildly distracting.

Five-week-long stakeouts weren't exactly recommended for their entertainment value. That was exactly how long he'd been watching Anton and Wadih Rashid, ever since the State Department had let them come into New York for their sabbatical.

Suddenly, Carroll's attention snapped back.

“What the…” he mumbled as he stared down the congested street. Is that who it looks like? he asked himself. Can't be… I think it is… but it can't be.

Carroll had noticed a skinny, frazzle-haired man coming directly his way from the Frente Unido Bar and Data Indonesia. The man was scurrying up Atlantic Avenue, periodically looking back over his shoulder. From a distance he looked like a baggy coat walking on a stick.

Carroll squinted his eyes for a better look at the approaching figure.

He just couldn't believe it!

He stared down the street, his eyes smarting from the bite of the wind. He had to make sure.

Jesus. He was sure.

The fast-walking man had a huge puffy burr of bushy, very wiry, black hair. The greasy hair was combed straight back, and it hung like a limp sack over the collar of his black cloth jacket. The man's clothes were soberly black; if he hadn't known better, Carroll would have taken him for a minister of some obscure religious sect.

Carroll knew the man by two names: one was Hussein Moussa; the other was Lebanese Butcher. A decade before, Moussa had been recruited by the Russians; he'd been efficiently trained at their famed Third World school in Tripoli. During the late seventies he'd worked in the European network under the guidance of the supreme terrorist himself, Juan Carlos.

Since then Moussa had been busily free-lancing terror and sophisticated murder techniques all over the world: in Paris, Rome, Zaire, New York, in Lebanon for Colonel Qaddafi. Recently he'd worked for François Monserrat, who had taken over not only Juan Carlos's European terrorist cell, but South America, and now the United States as well.

Hussein Moussa halted in front of the Sinbad Star restaurant. Like a very careful driver at a tricky intersection, he looked both ways. Twice more he looked up and down Atlantic Avenue. He even noticed the bag man camped out on the other side of the busy street.

Apparently he saw nothing to fear, nothing of real concern or interest, and he disappeared behind the gaudy red door of the Sinbad Star.

Arch Carroll sat up against the crumbling brick wall of the restaurant. He was stiff, half-frozen.

He groped inside his jacket and produced a stubby third of a Camel cigarette. He lit up and inhaled the gruff tobacco.

What an unexpected little Christmas present. What a just reward for endless winter nights trailing the Rashids. The Lebanese Butcher on a silver platter. His bosses in State had told him not to touch the Rashids without extremely strong physical evidence. But they'd issued no such orders for the Lebanese Butcher.

What was Hussein Moussa doing in New York, anyway? Carroll's mind was reeling. Why was he here with the Rashids?

The firebombing of Pier 54-56 went quickly through his mind. He had picked up strands of information from gossip he'd heard all day long on the street-somebody had taken it into his head to blow a dock and the surrounding West Side area, it seemed, and for a moment Carroll pondered a possible connection between Hussein Moussa and the events on the Hudson River.

He'd heard nothing definitive, though. Gossip, whispers, street rumors, nothing more substantial. Somebody had finally said it was some kind of natural gas explosion. Another street rumor had offered the opinion that the city of New York was now being held for ransom. Mainly the speculations he'd heard were vague. Until he knew more, he couldn't begin to link the Lebanese Butcher to the West Side firebombing.

Arch Carroll had been ramrodding the Antiterrorist Division of the DIA for almost four years now. During that time only a few of the mass murderers he'd learned about had gotten to him emotionally and caused him to lose his usual policeman's objectivity. Hussein Moussa was one.

The Lebanese Butcher liked to torture. The Butcher liked to kill. The Butcher enjoyed maiming innocent civilians…

As he studied the Sinbad Star restaurant, Carroll reflected that he didn't particularly want Moussa dead. He wanted the Butcher locked away in a maximum-security cage for the rest of his life. Give the animal lots of time to think about what he'd done, if he did think.

From underneath newspapers and rags inside one of his shopping bags, Carroll began to slide out a heavy black metal object. Very carefully, peering down close, he checked the firing chamber of a Browning automatic. He quickly fed in eight shells with an autoloader.

A stooped, ancient Hasid was passing by. He stared incredulously at the street bum loading up a handgun. His watery gray eyes bulged out of his sagging face. The old man kept walking away, looking back constantly. Then he walked faster. New York street bums with guns now! The city was beyond all prayers, all possible hope.

Arch Carroll stood up. He felt stiff, ice cold all over. One globe of his rear end was completely numb.

He was getting too old for extended street duty. He had to remember that in the future: it might be very important for staying alive and intact one of these days.

Weaving through the thick, fuzzy night traffic, Carroll only half heard the bleating car horns and angry curses directed at him.

He was drifting in and out of reality now; there was a little nausea involved here, too. The same thing, the same absolutely identical feeling, came to him every time-just the possibility of killing another person was so foreign and absurd to him that it left a bitter taste in his mouth.

A middle-aged couple was leaving the Sinbad, the fat wife pulling her red overcoat tight around bursting hips. She stared at Crusader Rabbit, and the look said “You don't belong inside there, mister. You know you don't belong in there.”

Carroll pulled open the ornate red door the departing couple had slammed in his face. Hot, garlicky air surrounded him. A muffled
snick
of the Browning under his coat. A deep silent breath. Okay, hotshot.

The tiny restaurant was infinitely more crowded than it had looked from the outside. Arch Carroll cursed. Every available dining table was filled to overflowing. Every one.

Six or seven more people, a group of boisterous friends, were waiting in the front to be seated. Carroll pushed past them. Waiters wearing black half-jackets hurried in and out of the swinging kitchen doors in the rear.

Carroll's eyes slowly drifted along the back of the crowded dining room.

Hussein Moussa had already seen him. Even in the packed, bustling restaurant, the terrorist had noticed his entrance. The Lebanese Butcher had been watching every person who came in from Atlantic Avenue.

So had the restaurant's owner, an enormous two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man. He charged forward now, an enraged bull guarding his herd at mealtime.

“Get out of here! You get out, bum! Go now!” the owner screamed. The diners were suddenly silent.

Carroll tried to look lost, dizzily confused, as surprised as everyone else that he was inside the small neighborhood restaurant.

He stumbled over his own flopping black sneakers.

He weaved sideways before moving suddenly toward the right rear corner of the dining room.

He hoped to God he looked cock-eyed drunk and absolutely helpless. Maybe even a little funny. Everybody should start laughing. If he did this exactly right, he'd have Hussein Moussa and the Rashids without firing a shot.