First Citizen (31 page)

“Do you have the ransom note here?” Robbi asked. “And the ear?”

Carlotta looked startled for a second, then went to her desk. She took a folded and refolded piece of paper out of her handbag. From a bottom drawer she took a sealed plastic bag with a blackened scrap in it. Randell accepted them both. She stared for two seconds at the ear, set it aside, and focused her attention on the letter. She was quiet for several minutes.

“It would have been better,” Randell said at last, “if you had kept the letter in the baggie and the ear in the open air. The paper’s been so handled we’ll never get fingerprints, and I can’t even find a watermark or tell much about the fiber structure. It’s definitely cellulose, not rag. And I’d guess it’s sulfate process, but that’s about all.

“Using word fragments out of newspapers is a corny old trick—easier to pull off when there were more papers and less screentext. The idea was to hide the sender’s identity. But scraps like these give us a lot more clues to go on than just using a new laser printer would. If we had a dozen tireless clerks—or two months with just me—we could scan and trace the fragments through media from all over to find out when this was put together and where. I’ll short-cut all that by guessing the
when
was after they took the general, the
where
is somewhere around Baltimore. Half this stuff looks like the Sun’s print edition and adwork. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re holding him here. Be a lot better if we could lift prints from this.”

“But where would we go to match them?” I asked. “We are not officially in this country. And we would have no legal standing if we were. … What about the ear?”

“It’s definitely starting to rot,” Randell said, “which makes identification harder.” She picked up the bag again and stared into it, kneading the scrap gently with her fingers. “No doubt that it’s a real ear and not a piece of leather or some other skin. I can feel the cartilage. It’s probably human—they’re easier to find around here than, say, chimpanzees or baboons. If I had a gas chromatograph with me, I’d run some of this residual liquid through. Bet we’d find traces of embalming fluid.”

“This is a dead person’s ear?” I asked.

“Easiest kind to get. It’s hard to find volunteers in your own cadre who’ll give up an ear for authenticity. And if you go around maiming innocent bystanders, it gets into the media and spoils your story.”

“But this ear is definitely
not
the General’s?”

“No. His lobes are longer.”

Carlotta let out a sigh. “Thank God for that!”

“So what do we know?” I asked the corporal.

“That General Corbin is probably not hurt,” Randell said. “Though he may be dead. And they could be holding him anywhere in the country.”

“Is that what you would do—take him out of the area?” I asked her. “Be difficult to buy a pair of plane tickets and march him down the jetway at gunpoint.”

“Of course you could. Masquerade as a State’s marshal with a prisoner. Or a doctor with a comatose patient. But look, speculating like this is useless. You want answers, you got to ask questions.”

“Where do we start?”

Randell looked over at Carlotta, who seemed to be listening to other music. “When was the last time he was seen?”

“Thursday night. Leaving the New Rotunda. By car.”

“Going where?”

“Our house, the Exchange, near the Inner Harbor.”

“His aides agree with that?”

“Yes, of course.”

“He have any favorite routes?”

Carlotta shook her head. “There aren’t many ways to go, but Gran and his people used them all, in random rotation. They had a convoy system that’s pretty complex because, riding with him, I’ve never spotted all the other vehicles.”

“We can check out the accident reports for that night. Should give us a lead to the route. And we can see how they took out his escort.”

“Check the reports where?” I asked. “With the police?”

“Look, Colonel.” Randell rolled her eyes up and counted ten mentally. “These’re public records. We go in under cover and make like civilians who have insurance claims on a fender bender.”

“You might be recognized by old friends.”

“So we send Stalk here. So relax, Colonel. … Now, once we’ve idee’d the route, which is still going to be in the east end, we get down on the street and start talking to people. I know some of the juvie gangs in the area. They talk tough, but they think a bicycle chain is a deadly weapon. When we go in, they’ll be sincerely impressed.”

“And what will they tell us?”

“What they saw.”

“Then what?”

“Then we take the next logical step. Detective work is a process of building knowledge, Colonel, not wild-ass theories. It takes time.”

“According to that note, we have three days, until Wednesday morning, to deliver half a gigabuck or they send us another piece of the General.”

“Or a piece of somebody else. Don’t worry. We’ll go pretty far in that time.”

Randell was right about almost everything. The accident reports showed a motorcycle and a bread truck in two closely timed incidents on the turnpike. Corbin’s Stateside security man was able to confirm both vehicles. That gave us the route. One witness described to the police a tight huddle of cars banging fenders as they left the turnpike. That gave us the deviation from the route. Somebody else, from an apartment window, had heard the squeal of tires and seen the same five cars go by, down near the water. That gave us the probable location where the kidnappers went to ground. In the Vice Lords’ territory. She was wrong about the gangs, though.

“I don’t recognize any of this,” Randell whispered to me as we crept down an alley early on Tuesday evening. We had less than twelve hours until the kidnappers’ next deadline.

It was just the two of us, Randell and me: a recon and negotiating team. But Stalk was flanking us with a squad of riflemen on either side, over the roofs, just in case.

In the shimmering heat, and with what little of the evening sun could penetrate the screen of storefronts and warehouses, we were reading the spray-painted walls beside us: “Whisper Fish.” Whatever that meant. It was in blue.

“Honkey Meat, US Govament Grade AA Choyce.”

“Otha Govament.”

“Outa Mexico, Outa Baltimo, Outa my Head.”

“Slim ‘n’ Lady Dee make it Right Here.”

A sting of jagged stars, exclamation points, and lightning bolts—like cartoon swearing. This was either a code or spray-paint doodling.

“PanTango Rules.” That one was heavily crossed out in several colors.

“Put yo guns down!” This was sprayed in yellow with a silver border.

“The sign mean it, Fish,” said a voice from a recessed doorway. This was followed by the muzzle of an old M-150, whose pronged flash suppressor looked like a spearpoint in the gloom. Other gun barrels poked out of windows and doors and around the corners ahead of us. I looked up at the roofline and saw three more pointing down at us from either side. There was not a bicycle chain in sight.

Randell and I laid our carbines on the cobblestones and I added my sidearm. Then we stood with hands loose at our sides.

The alley filled with young black men and women, all silent and staring. Their clothes were a patchwork of jeans and rainbow tee-shirts, but each had at least one piece of military apparel— fatigue blouse, web belt, beret, or jump boots. Like they were saving up for a complete set of uniforms and sharing the wealth until then.

Quickly, they bound our hands and blindfolded us. Then they led us on a tour of the neighborhood, spinning us around corners, ducking us under real or imaginary doorways, slapping our shins to make us step over unfelt door sills. Twice they jammed us up against the wall, as if waiting for a patrol car to pass, then jerked us along. There were no police patrols in that area—Randell had checked.

Finally they led us into a large, echoing space and sat us down on crates. The air was hot as an oven and I could feel my sweat sprouting immediately. The blindfolds came off with a snap and we were looking into a bank of klieg lights. On the floor in front of us, bound hand and foot and gagged, lay Stalk and his riflemen. For a “juvie gang,” these kids had made a clean sweep of my jungle veterans.

“What are you honku-racist-fascist-’cudas doing in
my
territory?” The voice was deep and mature. It came from behind the lights.

I gathered my spirit, my
chi
as Corbin had taught me, and set my voice deep to match this man’s. “We are looking for a friend of ours, Congressman Corbin, who disappeared in this area.”

“And you blame us?” Quick and sharp and proud.

“No. We
blame
no one. We only want to find him and take him home.”

Ten seconds of silence, then: “The black woman beside you, is she your prisoner? Bait for us?”

“Corporal Randell is a soldier.” I was about to add that she had fought for Corbin in Mexico, then I remembered the spray-painted slogans.

“A soldier! Another bottom fish of the white cesspool, hey lady?”

Randell curled up her face to say something, but I cut across her.

“We are hired mercenaries. We did not come for a fight, just to do our jobs and find the congressman.”

“Do you think we’ll help you?”

Ahh! “We have some operational funds. …”

“So you can buy off the Revolution?”

“I hope we can buy information. If you are not holding the man for some political reason, perhaps you saw, or know of, others who are. It would be fair for us to pay for such knowledge.”

Ten more seconds of silence. “What good is money to us? We can get all we need.”

“I can also negotiate for a certain amount of Congressman Corbin’s good will and—um—support.”

“Now what can a white blowfish politician do for me?”

“Well then …” I could feel the sweat coming down beside my ears and along my upper lip. “We could leave you our weapons.”

“Already got ’em, Red.”

“These are just carbines. We have heavier stuff, grenade launchers and rockets, such things you cannot buy in a sporting goods store. We could forget them in a convenient place—when we have retaken the congressman.”

Two seconds. “We could trade your living-and-breathing selves for those things.”

“Trade with who? And what says they want
us
back?”

“Too true. All right, your weapons—them and a free pardon, signed in the guy’s name, for any of the Vice Lords who might be caught in, like, an unjust ’cuda-police raid. Or something.”

“I have Corbin’s power of attorney,” I agreed. “I can sign a blanket release right now.” For what
that
might be worth, I added mentally.

“Then my chief scribe will just write it up.” He laughed.

I did not see anyone move to start writing, but the lights were too bright to see much of anything.

“And about the gen—er—congressman?”

“Five cars went roaring through the projects about a week ago,” he said simply.

“Last Thursday. We know that. What else?”

“Nothing else. We shot at them. Hit the center car straight on. Bullet bounced.”

“Where did they go?”

“West. To the river.”

“And then?”

“Disappeared.”

“What, with a flash of light and a puff of smoke?”

“Went into a warehouse.”

“Any name on it?”

“You are a pushy bastard, ain’t ya?”

“Part of my job. What name on the warehouse?”

“LaTiffe Fine Meats, used to be.”

“He still there?”

“Ah now, Red! That’s what you
don’t
know, is it?”

“Did I tell you, the rockets we will be carrying are 110s? Blow the door right off a warehouse like that … Blow out a D-block wall … Put an armored car over on its side and across the street …”

Another deep, lively laugh came from behind the lights. “Yeah, I’m just a pantin’ and a droolin’, huh? Don’t worry, Red, we’ll get everything you got. So you might as well know. The crew that took him were white, but done up blackface and for
that
shit, we’ll make an example of those fish ourselves. Want to play at Black politics and give us a bad name, they get the death sentence. We put the eye on that building. We see men, white men, come and go. But always in singles, always alone and looking around. … So you work it out for yourself.”

“The congressman is still inside.”

“Hey! You ain’t half dumb.”

“That’s what we came to find out,” I said, relaxing finally. “So, what happens now? I sign your release paper, you cut the lights, blindfold us, and take us out the way we came, right?”

“Yeah, sure, Red. All of you, except the girl. When we get the hard goods—and that pardon, signed on nice legal pa’chment by the man himself—we’ll let her go.”

I glanced at Randell. Her face was pinched, but she had the courage to nod at me.

“Deal,” I said.

“Ain’t no
deal,
Red. That’s the way it
is.”

Twenty minutes later, we were out on the street—with our carbines, but minus our intelligence operative. It was full dark, sometime after nine o’clock, or 2100 hours.

I sent one of our comm men back to the vehicles to get a dozen sets of talkies and all the IR gear we were carrying. I also told him to patch us into the nearest voice-and-data lines, making a relay that would connect us with the rest of the force back at the farm. Then Stalk and I dug out our city maps and traced the nearest route to the waterfront and the LaTiffe warehouse.

It was difficult to get near the building. The neighborhood was so densely overbuilt that sidewalls leaned against each other, with not even slither space between. A network of alleys wound their way to almost anonymous panel doors. We finally took up position in a recessed doorway, wide enough for a truck, a block and a half down the alley from the front of the warehouse.

Stalk wanted to go over the nearby roofs on a recon and I approved it. He and a squad, all wearing running shoes instead of boots, put on the IR goggles, tachpads, and harness and went up the walls across the alley.

The rest of the troop and I kept watch on the only entrance we had found to the LaTiffe building. The door next to us was a roll-up and, every couple of minutes, one of my men would lean on it or bang it with an elbow. The boom and rattle this caused was making us all jumpy.