Black Market (9 page)

He raised his arm, and in a tone that sounded almost religious, he said, “Now, our rendezvous with destiny.”

It was two-thirty on Sunday afternoon when Arch Carroll kicked both weathered Timberland work boots up on his desk inside number 13. He yawned until his jaw cracked; it felt as if it had just been dislocated.

He'd already finished four absolutely draining and futile interrogations. He'd been lied to by the very best-the most dangerous provocateurs and terrorists from all around New York.

Carroll had purposely chosen a cramped office for himself, tucked away at the back of the Wall Street building. His small but hearty DIA group, a half-dozen unorthodox police renegades and two efficient and extremely resilient secretaries, surrounded the uninspiring office in a satellite of Wall Street-style cubicles.

Like burned skin, paint peeled from the walls of Carroll's office. The windowpane had been shattered, courtesy of Green Band. He'd tacked a square of brown paper to the hole, but rain soaked through, anyway. It was a depressing working space for a depressing task. Even the light that managed to fall inside was oppressive, mangy brown, dim, and hopeless.

The first four suspects Carroll had interviewed were known terrorists who lived in the New York City area: two FALN, a PLO, and an IRA fund-raiser. Unfortunately the four were no more knowledgeable about the Wall Street mystery than Carroll was himself. There was nothing circulating on the street. Each of them convincingly swore to that after exhaustively long sessions.

Carroll wondered how it could be possible.
Somebody
had to know something about Green Band. You don't calmly blow away half of Wall Street and keep it a state secret for over forty hours.

The scarred and rusted wooden door into his office opened again. He watched the door over the steamy lid of his coffee container.

Mike Caruso, who worked for Carroll at the DIA, peeked inside. Caruso was a small, skinny, ex-office cop with a black fifties pompadour pushed up high over his forehead. He habitually wore wretched Hawaiian shirts outside his baggy pants, attempting to create a splash of colorful identity in the usually drab police world. Carroll liked him immensely for his dedicated lack of style.

“We got Isabella Marqueza up next. She's already screaming for her fancy Park Avenue lawyer. I mean the lady is fucking screaming out there.”

“That sounds promising. Somebody's upset, at least. Why don't you bring her right in?”

Moments later the Brazilian woman appeared like a sudden tropical windstorm. “You can't do this to me! I'm a citizen of Brazil!”

“Excuse me. You must be mistaking me for somebody who gives a shit. Why don't you please sit down.” Carroll spoke without getting up from his cluttered work desk.

“Why? Who do you think you are?”

“I said sit down, Marqueza. I ask the questions here, not you.”

Arch Carroll leaned back in his chair and studied Isabella Marqueza. The woman had shoulder-length gleaming black hair. Her lips were full and painted very red. There was an arrogant tilt to her chin. Her hair, her clothes, even her skin looked expensive and cosmopolitan. She had on tight gray velvet riding pants, a silk shirt, cowboy boots, a half-length fur jacket. Terrorist chic, Carroll thought.

“You dress like a very wealthy Che Guevara.” He finally smiled.

“I don't appreciate your attempt of humor, senhor.”

“No, well, join the crowd.” His smile broadened. “I don't appreciate your attempts at mass murder.”

Carroll already knew this striking woman by reputation, at least. Isabella Marqueza was an internationally renowned journalist and newsmagazine photographer. She was the daughter of a wealthy man who owned tire factories in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Though it couldn't be legally proved, Isabella Marqueza had sanctioned at least four American deaths in the past twelve months.

She was responsible, Carroll knew, for the disappearance, then the cold-blooded, heartless murders of a Shell Oil executive and his family. The American businessman, his wife, and their two small girls had vanished that past June in Rio. Their pitiful, mutilated bodies had been found in a sewer ditch inside the
favelas
. Isabella Marqueza reportedly worked for the GRU through Francois Monserrat. According to rumors, she had also been Monserrat's lover. A classic spider woman.

She tossed Carroll a cold, indignant look. Her dark, sullen eyes smoldered as she stared him down in practiced silence.

Arch Carroll shook his head wearily. He set aside the steaming coffee container. The impression he got from Isabella was that of a tempest about to unleash its force. He watched as she leaned forward and thumped her hands on the desk-the fiery light in her dark eyes was really something.

“I want to see my lawyer! Right now! I want my lawyer! You get my lawyer.
Now
, senhor!”

“Nobody even knows you're here.” Carroll spoke in a purposely soft, polite voice. Whatever she did, however she acted-he would do the exact opposite, he'd decided. Step one of his interrogation technique.

He said nothing further for the first uncomfortable moments. He'd learned his interrogation technique from the very best-Walter Trentkamp.

Carroll knew that two of his DIA agents had illegally intercepted Isabella Marqueza as she'd walked down East Seventieth Street after leaving her Upper East Side apartment that morning. She'd screamed out, struggled, and fought as they'd grabbed her off the street. “Murder! Somebody please help me!”

Half a dozen East Side New Yorkers, with the anesthetized look of people observing a distant event that interested but didn't particularly involve them, had watched the terrifying scene. One of them had finally yelled as Isabella Marqueza was dragged, fighting and sobbing, into a waiting station wagon. The rest did nothing to help.

“You people kidnap me off the street,” Isabella Marqueza complained angrily. Her red mouth pouted, part of her routine interrogation act.

“Let me confess to you. Let me be honest, and kind of frank,” Carroll said, still going gently. “In the last few years I've had to kidnap a few people like yourself. Call it the new justice. Call it anything you like. Kidnapping's lost most of its glitter for me.”

The louder Isabella Marqueza got, the softer Carroll's speaking voice became. “I kind of like the idea of being a kidnapper. I kidnap terrorists. It's got a nice ring to it, you know? Don't you think?”

“I demand to see my lawyer! Goddamn you! My lawyer is Daniel Curzon. You know that name?”

Arch Carroll nodded and shrugged. Daniel Curzon worked for both the PLO and Castro's Cubans in New York.

“Daniel Curzon's a piece of sorry shit. I don't want to hear his name again. I'm serious about that.”

Carroll eyed a manila package on his littered desk, a plain-looking folder wrapped in brown string. Inside was his moral justification to do whatever he needed to do right now.

Inside the envelope were a dozen or so black-and-white and color 35-mm photographs of the Shell Oil executive, Jason Miller, and his family, formerly of Rio, all of whom had been murdered. There were also grainy photographs of an American couple who had disappeared in Jamaica, pictures of a Unilever accountant from Colombia, and a man named Jordan who had disappeared last spring. Isabella Marqueza was suspected of murdering all eight individuals.

Carroll continued softly. “Anyway, my name's Arch Carroll. Born right here in New York City. Local boy makes good… Son of a cop who was the son of a cop. Not a lot of imagination at work in our family, I'll admit. Just your basic poor working slobs.”

Carroll paused briefly and lit up the stub of a cigarette Crusader Rabbit style. “My job is to locate terrorists who threaten the security of the United States. Then, if they're not too strongly politically connected, protected, I try my best to put a stop to them… Put another way, you could say I'm a terrorist for the United States. I play by the same rules you do-no rules. So stop talking about Park Avenue lawyers, please. Lawyers are for nice civilized people who play by the rules. Not for us.”

Carroll slowly untied the string bow on the manila envelope. Then he slid out the handful of photographs. Casually he passed them to Isabella Marqueza. The pictures were the most obscene pornography he'd ever seen. Still, he remained calm.

“Jason Miller's body. Jason Miller was an engineer for Shell Oil. He was also a financial investigator for the State Department, as you and your people in São Paulo know. A fairly nice man, I understand… Information gatherer for State, I'll admit. Basically harmless, though. Another poor working slob.”

Carroll made soft clicking noises with his tongue. His eyes briefly met those of Isabella Marqueza.

She was quiet suddenly. His putting-green voice was throwing her off. She obviously hadn't expected to encounter the deck of photographs, either.

“Miller's wife, Judy, here. Alive in this photo. Kind of a nice midwestern smile… Two little girls. Their bodies, that is. I have two little girls myself. Two girls, two boys. How could anybody kill little kids, huh?”

Carroll smiled again. He cleared his throat. He needed a beer-a beer and a stiff shot of Irish would go real good right now. He studied Isabella Marqueza a moment. He had an urge to get up from his desk and whack her. Instead he kept speaking gently.

“In July of last year, you ordered and then participated in the premeditated murders, the political assassination, of all four Millers.”

Isabella Marqueza instantly shot up from her seat. “I did nothing of the sort! You prove what you say! No! I did not kill anybody. Never. I don't kill children!”

“Bullshit. That's the end of our friendly discussion. Who the fuck do you think you're kidding?”

With that, Arch Carroll slapped the wrinkled portfolio shut and jammed it back in his lopsided desk drawer. He looked up at Isabella Marqueza again.

“Nobody knows you're here! Do you have that memorized? Nobody's going to know what happened to you after today. That's the truth. Just like the Miller family down in Brazil.”

“You're full of shit Carroll-”

“Yeah? Try me. Push me a little and find out for sure.”

“My lawyer, I want to see my lawyer-”

“Never heard of him-”

“I told you his name, Curzon-”

“Did you? I don't remember-”

Isabella Marqueza sighed. She stared at Carroll in silence, her expression one of exquisitely cold hatred. She folded her arms, then sat down again. She crossed and uncrossed her long legs and lit a cigarette.

“Why are you doing this to me? You're crazy.”

This was a little better, Carroll thought. He could sense she was melting a little, cracking at the edges.

“Tell me about Jack Jordan down in Colombia. American business accountant. Machine-gunned to death in his driveway. His wife got to watch.”

“I never heard of him.”

Carroll clucked his tongue and slowly shook his head back and forth. He seemed genuinely disappointed. Sitting behind the bare, bleak office desk, he looked like someone whose best friend had just inexplicably lied to him.

“Isabella… Isabella.” He gave an exaggerated sigh. “I don't think you get the total picture. I don't think you really understand.” He stood up, stretched his arms, fought back a yawn. “You see, you no longer exist. You died suddenly this morning. Taxi accident on East Seventieth Street. Nobody bothered to tell you?”

Carroll was feeling dangerously overloaded now. He didn't want to finish this brutal interrogation. He walked out of the questioning room without saying another word.

He'd done his best, he thought as he idly patrolled the long, blurry hallway outside, passing busy secretaries who were tapping away at purring typewriters.

He walked with his head down, talking to no one. Blood pounded furiously in his temples. He was drained and bleached, and his throat was dry. The vision of a cold beer and a shot had rooted itself firmly in his mind, and the image was roaring for attention.

He paused at a water fountain, pressed the button, and let the cold water splash across his face. It was better than nothing. He wiped his puckered lips with the back of his hand, then leaned against the wall. Isabella Marqueza. Green Band. A green ribbon tied neatly, almost cheerfully, around a plastique bomb in a cardboard box.

Questions. Too many disconnected questions. He didn't have any answers. He doubted whether Walter Trentkamp himself could have cracked Isabella Marqueza.

Ordinarily Carroll might have felt bad about the harshness of the Marqueza interrogation. Except he kept seeing the creased snapshot faces of the two senselessly murdered little Miller girls. Those two innocent babies helped put Isabella Marqueza in perspective for him. Beautiful Isabella was a worthless piece of shit.

He finally trudged back to his office, where Isabella Marqueza was waiting.

She looked like a wilting flower. He'd read in her files that she'd joined a GRU terrorist cell in 1978, after which she'd worked for François Monserrat in South America, then in Montreal and Paris, and finally here in New York. Her supposed weakness was that she had little tolerance for discomfort and pain. She'd never had to suffer any in her life. Carroll considered that momentarily, then moved in for the kill.

An hour and a half later Carroll and Isabella Marqueza were finally beginning to communicate. Carroll sipped the day's hundredth coffee. His stomach had begun to scream at him.

“You
were
François Monserrat's mistress here in New York. Come on. We already know about that. Two summers ago. Right here in Nueva York.”

Isabella Marqueza sat with her head hanging. She wouldn't look up at Carroll for long stretches of time. Dark sweat stains had spread under her arms. Her right leg kept tapping the floor nervously, but she didn't seem aware of it. She looked ill. Carroll decided to keep up his staccato attack. Stage three of his interrogation.

“Who the
hell
is Monserrat? How does he get his information? How does he get information that no one outside the United States government could possibly get?
Who is he?
Listen… listen to me very carefully… If you talk to me right now, if you tell me about François Monserrat-just his part in the bombing on Wall Street-if you do that much, I can let you leave here, I promise you. No one will know you were here. Just tell me about the Wall Street bombing. Nothing more than that. Nothing else… What does François Monserrat know about the firebombing?…”