Fanatics (18 page)

Flo turned back from the church.

6:44 P.M.

Marty Keane was waiting for Flo Ott and Frank Murphy when they entered McDonough's Grill.

He was sitting next to a clutch of drinkers gathered below the TV set at one end of the long room, all the men—no women present, only Flo now—keenly anticipating the kickoff of a college football game.

Frank was specific over the phone. “We don't go in looking like cops on duty, says Marty. Just come in like it's a weekend day of rest.”

Marty introduced the bartender, Donny Reilly, and Flo slipped him a photocopy of the drawings. Reilly nodded and pointed up at the television. “Yeah, I saw those before. Watch the TV. It's supposed to be a good game. Behind me, the two at the other end. I think it's them. No, I'm sure.” He slid the page back over the bar to Flo. “They've been in here before and so have the other two. Never together. Sour bastards, all of them. No idea what they're talking. Always mumbling. Their English is okay, when they talk, nothing great. What can I get you?”

“Two ginger ales,” Flo said, her eyes fixed on the boring pregame entertainment. A clown was chasing cheerleaders down the sidelines. Flo glanced at her watch. She would have preferred to be at the Sheepshead Bay nursing home for supper with her husband, Eddie. But if God was on their side, she hoped the evening might instead be spent in a courtroom at the killers' arraignment for the murder of Claiborne Smith.

Or at a meeting at the morgue linking identities with the assassins' corpses.

Or, if God turned angry, they'd be visiting houses, consoling colleagues' families.

“Marty,” she said, “go to the john and call in. No marked cars. Civvies, no uniforms. As many people as they can get here, fast. They don't come in the bar. Just cruise. And wait. We'll tell them when and where to move. We want all four alive. Or five. What about this fifth guy?” Flo asked the bartender, referring to the drawing of the distinguished-looking older man.

“Never seen him.”

Marty left for the john, and Flo feigned immense interest in the marching band parading down the football field.

“They drive or walk here?” she said to the bartender.

He freshened her ginger ale. “Not sure. Probably walked, they come in looking all wet and windblown. Hang on, I think they're finished eating down there. Steak and fries. They eat, drink, leave. Always the same.”

The taller man signaled for the bill. Bartender Donny Reilly walked to the cash register, picked up the order slip, and moved down to the other end of the bar.

Marty returned from the john. “Cars on their way,” he muttered, and his eyes stayed glued to the TV screen.

“They're leaving,” Flo said. “They're paying up. You two go. Bartender figures they walked here.”

6:50 P.M.

Zanonovich had returned from a Roman Catholic Saturday evening Mass—no Orthodox church nearby—walking back with Professor Gerald F. X. McLaughlin to the safe house at 8 Garden Place in Brooklyn Heights.

The professor's caregiver had stayed late and was about to serve supper. She'd set the dining room table for one person.

The house echoed with the sound of the professor's silver bell, an insistent noise.

A thin black woman with a tired, patient expression appeared from the kitchen.

“I have a guest,” the professor said. “Two settings, please, Winona.”

“Yes, sir. I made roast pork.”

“Let's have a Gigondas with it. Something that stands up to pork. And candied yams, Winona?”

“Them, too, sir.”

“We got enough?”

“Yes, sir, always enough.”

Zanonovich looked forward to a pleasant meal, good food and drink, a bit of intelligent conversation, before he would descend into the subway again for the ride out to Sheepshead Bay, with his sports bag holding a SOCIMI rifle and telescopic night sight.

And he would remove the obstacle to God's work.

6:53 P.M.

The Chechens left McDonough's Grill by the main entrance, and detectives Murphy and Keane stepped out the side door behind the television crowd, who never once looked away from the screen.

“They're going up the boulevard,” Marty said.

“Go up the other side.”

The police officers walked along the north side of Rockaway Boulevard a block behind the Chechens, until the pair ahead of them turned down 137th Street toward the oceanfront. When the detectives reached the corner, they saw the Chechens enter a house.

“Third from the beach,” Marty said. “A summer place. Got to be colder than a grave digger's ass.”

“Good thing. Shit weather, great game. People stay home. Out here, it'll hit the fan soon.”

“This windy? Our luck? God bless.”

Marty spotted the black Mercedes, New Jersey plates, parked on 137th Street on the other side of the boulevard and within sight of the house. He walked to 138th and called in the coordinates.

“Them all right. Don't take all day.”

Then they walked back to McDonough's Grill.

7:04 P.M.

Six unmarked police vehicles converged at the prefab summerhouse on 137th Street in Rockaway, headlights and searchlights beamed directly on the front door and windows.

Two ambulances and an arrest wagon waited at the corner on Rockaway Boulevard.

Police in body-armor vests jumped from the cars, and Flo Ott, her voice as urgent as the wail of a banshee, shouted into a car megaphone, “Everyone in there. Out now. Unarmed. Hands raised. I count to five, you're out the front door. Or we open up.”

The killers' reply was quick in coming. Rapid rifle fire from two front windows.

The police were just as fast to respond. Waves of gunfire and four tear gas grenades crashed into the same front windows. A few seconds of continuous fusillade shattered the evening tranquillity as the summerhouse erupted in serial explosions.

Heat from the blasts kneaded at the policemen's faces. A sudden wall of flame burst about ten yards away from the police line, a blaze so fierce Flo felt her body swelter as if wrapped in liquefied lead. Glowing cinders soared up into the sky and garish lights cast rays deep into surrounding streets. At the foot of the block, across the sands and ocean surface, long fingers of yellow and red and orange flashes stretched out past the surf as though clawing to escape the land.

In seconds, wind whipped the fire engulfing the house, incinerating most of whatever the killers still had with them, a wall of flame pushing skyward, licking up toward clouds that sent back a mournful purple glow.

Sparks flew out over the beach and high, dry sea grass started to ignite in several spots.

Within minutes, most evidence of the killers inside would be carbonized, nothing but ash except for teeth, bones, and some molten weapons.

Policemen's faces, shadow-striped, caught a hellish illumination, an imprint of wildness, an image so fierce it made Flo feel even heaven itself couldn't stop these horrors now. This was their work and police gunfire went on and on.

Flo looked up at the red- and purple-streaked sky. Above the hellish scene, hundreds of seagulls filled the air, a sound storm of screeches and cries and furious flapping of wings.

She walked up to a police cruiser on the corner at the boulevard. She called Cecil King and reassured him the ordeal was over, and that there'd be no news announcements for as long as the police could hold back public statements about the events at Rockaway Beach. “But people around this neighborhood here,” she said, “they'll be phoning in about all the shooting and the fire, count on it.”

Flo called her husband, Eddie. “I'm running a little late, but I'll be there.”

“Dessert is waiting.”

And she settled into a police cruiser for the ride over to Emmons Avenue, Sheepshead Bay. She had no appetite for food, only an overwhelming need to hug her husband.

8:12 P.M.

“It's over?” Eddie Ott said, his voice a weak rasping sound, scarcely above a whisper.

Flo nodded. “Done.”

“Got them?”

She nodded again and sat closer to her husband, holding his hand.

“Arraigned,” he said, smiling. “About time those barbarians were in jail.”

Flo shook her head. “No, the morgue. Nice flowers here, who sent them?”

“From the guys. I woke up for supper and there they were.”

“Thoughtful of them.”

8:55 P.M.

Slowly, Zanonovich knelt down on one knee, almost as if genuflecting before the Blessed Sacrament, lowering himself and his weapon in between two of the dumpsters on the Sheepshead Bay harbor front near the Breezy Point ferry.

He repeatedly flexed his fingers and arm muscles so as not to stiffen up.

And he prayed.

The distance from his position to the window of nursing home room 2-G was no more than 120 yards. But if it had been five times as far, he was certain he'd still hit his target. The night-vision scope was a technical wonder. And the sound of a single shot would hardly be heard above the constant cacophony of car motors rumbling up and down four lanes of traffic between him and the nursing home.

In the past hour, the temperature had fallen at least fifteen degrees, typical New York weather, erratic, like the inhabitants' characters.

Zanonovich kept his coat's hood pulled up over the top of his head. He raised the rifle butt to his shoulder and sighted through the scope. He could risk only one shot if he wanted to escape immediately after.

Thanks be to God…
there she was standing, walking around, illuminated in clear light. He followed her movements with the scope. He placed his index finger inside the guard, barely touching the trigger. He relaxed his muscles, his body filling with a satisfying sensual warmth, the taste of roast pork and Gigondas still a fresh, comforting memory. His finger rested on the trigger without a tremble. He enjoyed the feeling of complete physical and mental self-control.

His target turned her face toward the window and her head filled the frame of his scope. Lovely. It was beauty who killed the beast. Except…
she looked like a kid.
Not at all his mental image of his police opponent. A female cop this slight was an impossibility; she had to be the wrong person. She couldn't be Lieutenant Florence Ott, homicide detective, his brainy nemesis. A daughter, maybe a niece, but definitely not the detective herself. Not the engineer of his single fiasco.

Zanonovich observed her through the scope and swore a Russian oath. It would be so easy to kill this wisp of a woman.

And then what…
How would the police react? They'd burn him at the stake if they could. They'd certainly torture him; they did that here now in this country, too, and he'd seen torture from the inquisitor's side. You'll say everything you're told to say, everything you've ever learned, everything you've ever seen or read, it all returns to your mind as if you're transported, not to heaven but straight to hell. And not only what your inquisitor wants, but anything you imagine might please him, because once he stops inflicting pain, a bond grows between you and him.

That kid's mother or the aunt or whoever the hell she was, that bitch cop must be up there in the room now, too. And of course she would act immediately. She was no crippled invalid. She had to be a brute. A bruiser. And he'd soon be trapped.

He dispassionately examined the small woman's temple, her dark brown hair tucked behind an earring-less ear. Her profile filled his field of vision. She had a lovely small nose.

Zanonovich lowered the rifle barrel a couple of inches and resolved to wait. Not wait for another chance at his intended target, but instead go back to the apartment, back to the professor's house, and wait for the organization's orders. No profit in giving himself away killing the wrong person.

He dismantled the rifle and replaced it in the tennis bag.

He had his chance and, in his confusion, the quality of mercy, so unstrained, unwittingly made him blow it.

9:50 P.M.

Flo Ott was riding home in a police cruiser when Frank Murphy called.

Affixed to the cruiser's dashboard was a copy of the drawing of the unnamed aristocratic-looking suspect. Every cruising police vehicle in the city was meant to have a similar copy, as were Homeland agents and the FBI at all US airports. The suspect who never showed up at the bar in Rockaway.

“Flo,” Frank said. “I just got a call. They spotted that other guy, walking from the Jay Street subway heading toward the Heights. Alone. I'm in a car going there now. You?”

“Same. Keep calling.” And Flo said to the driver, “Take the BQE to the Heights.”

She regarded the drawing on the dashboard and allowed herself a small smile as they headed to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

9:52 P.M.

The temperature rose again as quickly as it had dropped.

Stiflingly uncomfortable in the sudden warmth, Zanonovich left his coat unbuttoned and the hood down as he walked along Fulton Street from the subway station and into Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights.

This was his first mistake.

His second was taking a direct route to Professor McLaughlin's house on Garden Place. But of course he had no idea an image of his face was nearly ubiquitous within the confines of the New York police, and no inkling that his four Chechen comrades in arms were now carbonized corpses. Except for police units directly involved, no one else in the city had yet heard the details of that grisly news.

Likewise, Zanonovich was unaware that, from a minute or so after he left the subway, he was being observed by a series of police vehicles, passed from one to the next, and as he approached the stoop of 8 Garden Place, homicide detective Sergeant Frank Murphy, now on foot, was past the corner at the other end of the block. Frank picked up where the police cruisers left off.

As Zanonovich entered the professor's house from the top of the stoop, Frank was ringing the downstairs bell across the street at number 9.