Courier (9 page)

"Who the hell wants to ride across Africa? It's already like Africa in this city, anyway. Why don't you get a real bike?"

The biker was clearly looking for a fight, but Rick didn't feel like obliging, "Maybe someday. Is Hector here?"

"That whackjob? Watch out for him. His brains got scrambled bad over in Nam."

"Yeah, I've seen that happen to a lot of people. Is he here?"

The biker just jerked his thumb toward the garage door as he headed back to his chair in the sun.

Coming from the bright sun into the gloom of the garage, Rick was unable to see for a moment until his eyes adjusted. Motorcycles and scavenged skeletons of motorcycles littered most of the filthy floor, and a bright red, immaculately clean mechanic's toolbox stood out all the more in contrast. Beside it was a candy-coat green chopper with elaborate swirling chrome exhaust pipes – also immaculate.

Hector was bending over the engine from another bike, hitting an impact wrench with a ball peen hammer.

"Hey,
Gordito
."

Without standing up or looking around, Hector said, "I hate that name," and slammed the hammer down on the wrench again. "What the fuck do you want, Zippo?"

"That green chopper is a really sweet bike."

Hector glanced over at the bike. "You know what that is? That's what I thought about every night over in Nam. Designed every inch of it in my head." He walked over and rubbed at an invisible speck on the tank. "When I got home, it took three years of nights and weekends to build it. I'd never been a biker, but that taught me how to keep other guys' hogs running and led me to the position of leadership I hold today." As Hector stood up and started to wipe his hands on a red shop rag, he used his chin to indicate the garage. "
El jefe
of the Dawn Riders – the world's most sorry-ass motorcycle club."

He spat on the floor and then turned back to face Rick. "Now, let me say it again: what the fuck do you want?"

"I need some help."

Hector looked at Rick for a long moment. Then he spoke. "I don't like you. Why the fuck should I help you?"

"Because you and I were both there."

"Being fucked up in the same firefight doesn't make us buddies."

"I don't want to be your buddy. I wasn't your buddy when we were over there. But we counted on each other when we were in the shit, and I don't know about you, but I can't say that about too many people out here in the world."

Rick looked the mechanic in the eyes. "I think someone is trying to kill me, and I need your help."

Hector pulled out a cigarette pack, took one, and, after a pause, offered the pack to Rick. Rick took a cigarette, then pulled out the Zippo and lit it off his leg.

Hector scoffed. "You still doing that dumbass trick? You still think it's going to keep you alive?"

"Worked so far."

"Guess I can't argue with that." Hector took a light from the Zippo, then sat down on a half-dismantled Harley and slowly blew out a cloud of smoke. "OK, what do you need?"

 

When the door to the restaurant opened, Mrs Jin looked up and saw the man in the gray suit come in. For an instant, she could feel how much she loved this man showing in her eyes. She started, remembering that she could never let him know that. If he knew, he would leave. Never come back.

So, she stripped all emotion from her face, returning it to its usual blank mask, and motioned for him to follow her into her office.

"So Yun, take the front," she snapped. "Those drunks from the GSA will be in soon. Don't let them just sit at a table and waste our time with drinking. Make them buy food so they can walk out of here without being carried."

Opening a door next to the swinging double doors that led to the kitchen, she stood aside and let the quiet man in the gray suit into her office. It was a tiny space with barely room for a desk and two chairs, almost entirely devoid of character. The walls were bare, the two shelves behind the desk held no books or mementos, and the surface of the cheap desk was empty except for a single blue ledger placed precisely in the center.

The man, with an oddly courtly manner, waited until she was seated behind the desk before sitting down in the other chair. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then he said, "It's good to see you again."

She frowned. "Yes, it is good, but dangerous. You shouldn't come again during the day."

The man nodded once in agreement. "It's necessary, or I wouldn't have put you at risk. I'm having problems tracking down all the parts of this puzzle. I think the twins would be helpful."

There was another period of silence.

The woman appeared to be considering his request, but in reality, she would always do what he asked. Her mind drifted back to the hot day more than twenty years ago, when the smell of the filthy river had combined with the stench of cordite and death, and this man had saved her life.

Carefully keeping any evidence of these memories from her face, she returned to the present. "Of course, I will have them contact you. Remember that they need very close supervision. They can be impulsive."

A small smile crossed the man's face. "I'll try to keep them from killing any more people than strictly necessary."

There was another silence; it might even have been called "companionable".. Then Mrs Jin shook herself back to the present. "How bad is the trouble? I've already told the club owner to go to ground."

"Going to ground won't help. It's not about what he's doing now, but what was done years ago." The man shrugged. "I've dealt with worse after the Bay of Pigs and Dallas. This will end the same way."

She nodded slowly. "With silence, yes."

"With silence," he agreed.

CHAPTER 11

 

Rick always thought of Georgetown as a sad part of the city. Sure, there were many neighborhoods that were more run-down – most of them, to be honest – but Georgetown had been the home of the Kennedys and the center of Camelot not all that long ago.

Now, it had a defeated air: there were too many young kids with backpacks or blanket rolls, sitting in doorways and asking for spare change with dead eyes. The stores were all covered with so many layers of new paint laid over old paint that they looked thick and pulled out of shape. The few high-end restaurants that had arrived with the Kennedys were struggling to survive next to stores selling marijuana papers, elaborate bongs, and multicolored glass pipes.

Rick made the turn at Wisconsin and M streets, marked by the Riggs Bank with its trademark copper turret on one side and Nathan's – a legendary DC watering hole – on the other. Halfway down the block, he turned into a narrow cobblestone alley and then made a hard right turn into the courier company's garage.

He had the bent brake pedal replaced and waited impatiently while the Ecuadorian mechanic changed the oil. The company mandated that couriers stop by and have the oil changed every week. Rick guessed that that was the reason so many of the BMWs had been driven over a hundred thousand miles, and a couple upward of two hundred thousand.

It could be that they just didn't want anything in the engine to ever go wrong – they were as stingy on repairs as they were on his paychecks. Almost every other Friday the dispatcher used every excuse in the book to stall until the couriers couldn't get to the bank before 3.00pm to cash their checks and the company would have the weekend to come up with the payroll. They were terrible bosses, but then again, they had all used to be couriers, so it shouldn't come as a surprise.

He chatted idly with one of the commercial couriers while he waited. The commercial riders were paid on a commission basis – the more they delivered, the more they earned – and consequently tore through town like complete maniacs. Rick had started out as a commercial courier but had decided on the second day that he wasn't going to die to deliver some lawyer's brief in record time. Luckily, on the same day, the dispatcher had decided that Rick was never going to ride fast enough to make money for the company, so they sent him over to ABN, where they were paid $7.50 an hour no matter how long it took him to deliver a roll of film.

Well, Rick thought, it was that and the fact that the previous ABN courier had been caught with an unlicensed .45 while he was working the night shift at a convenience store. Gun and drug arrests were all they checked for at the White House, but it was definitely one strike and you're out. Rick might have been new to Washington's confusing network of streets, but at least his record was clean.

On the other hand, he felt a bit guilty about bumping the guy – having a gun under the counter in an all-night market seemed reasonable when you realized that everyone except the most desperate and disoriented junkies knew that all the money was kept in a drop-safe. A buddy in the army who had pulled the graveyard shift at several all-night stores told him that anyone so fucked-up that they would even consider such a low-profit crime was so far gone that shooting a clerk over a twenty-dollar bill would simply strike him as the sensible thing to do.

After his oil change, he cut down to the waterfront under the Whitehurst Freeway – usually the quickest way back to the bureau. Today, however, the three coal cars that made up the only train that ever used the Georgetown Branch rail line – a beautiful right of way through the trees along the Potomac – had just arrived. It was a ridiculously wasteful way to deliver coal, but the small power plant under the freeway was where the White House got its electricity.

It was a bad place for motorcycles. It was the one area in the city where the company had ruled that any crash damage had to be paid by the rider – and the only place that Rick had seen a diamond-shaped danger sign with a picture of a motorcyclist. Even with all these warnings, every month or so, Rick would hear of a rider getting his front tire jammed in a sunken railroad track and flying over the handlebars.

Consequently, he picked his way slowly through the maze of coal cars and cobblestones, feeling like he was following the flags that marked the safe path through a jungle minefield. Rick was almost a half hour late when he finally got to the bureau. Being late meant that there was no room to park with the other bikes just outside the 18th Street entrance, and he had to scout out a space behind a bar in the alley that ran through the center of the next block.

The minute he walked into the bureau, he knew something was terribly wrong.

All around the newsroom, there were small groups of men talking earnestly in low voices, and the secretaries were sitting at their desks with red eyes and streaked makeup. Rick asked Moretti what had happened.

"Hadley and his crew are all dead. They went off the George Washington Parkway last night. You know, where it's way up high over the river." Don shook his head and continued. "The crew wagon was so smashed up that the cops didn't even identify the bodies until late last night. What a fucking mess." The editor turned and went back into his small edit room – sitting on a high stool with his head in his hands.

As a courier, Rick wasn't really considered a part of the newsroom, and he was guilty but grateful that this allowed him to skirt the emotional chaos and make it back to the courier desk. Between his mother's destructive methods of child-raising and an unhealthy dose of battle trauma, he'd realized long ago that he just didn't react to this kind of emotional situation the way most people did.

Just another way that I don't act like a normal person, he thought.

The courier phone rang as soon as he sat down, and he was sent to the White House. Yes, everyone was upset, but there was still a show at 6 o'clock.

To avoid having to talk to anyone, Rick took the garage exit next to the courier desk. As he walked across the street to his bike, he saw the slim silhouette of a Datsun 240Z parked a bit farther down the alley. He considered the 240Z to be about the best-designed car on the road, so he was looking at the car, not paying much attention to the two men seated inside. But as he started his bike and pulled out, he realized that the men in the Datsun, two young Asians – almost certainly Vietnamese – had stopped talking, and both were staring straight at him.

After he turned the corner and started up the alley toward 19th Street, he heard the Datsun's engine start up. It sounded like it was fitted with glass-pack mufflers, and the ripping snarl of the engine echoed off the surrounding buildings. He decided that even if he wasn't sure they were following him, they'd shown an unhealthy interest, and putting a couple of dozen cars between the red sports car and his bike couldn't hurt. By the time the Datsun reached 19th Street, he had already made the left onto L and was out of sight.

Arriving at the southwest gate of the White House, he waved at the guards, and they opened the black iron gates to West Executive Avenue and let him through. As always, he was amused at the idea that a helmet and a radio could get you into just about any place in this town. He parked next to three other courier bikes at the bottom of the stairs leading to the West Wing and jogged up to the guard booth.

The bored Uniformed Service officer inside said, "ID please."

Rick thought for just a second, and then reached into his jeans pocket, pulled out a wallet, and handed over the license with his real name on it.

"Birth date?"

The answer surprised Rick. "Today!" He'd totally forgotten.

Promptly, the guard in the booth and another officer standing just outside proceeded to sing a chorus of "Happy Birthday". Rick smiled. He'd be able to tell his kids someday that he'd celebrated his birthday in the White House, or more accurately, on the White House grounds. He took back his license and walked over to the pressroom.

Inside, it was hot and steamy. The camera crews had strewn their winter gear in heaps across half of the seats in the back of the briefing room and were either napping or smoking in the others. Rick turned left and headed through a maze of cubicles and down a set of stairs to the ABN booth. He opened the door and said "Hi" to the two reporters, a producer, and a radio engineer who all shared a space so small that their shoulders touched.