Greed: A Detective John Lynch Thriller (8 page)

 

Hardin dumped the room service tray from breakfast outside his door. He’d been staying in the hotel room as much as possible, keeping his head down. He’d taken the underground tunnel from the hotel over to the Macy’s on State Street, picked up some clothes. Everything he had he’d bought in Africa, and most of it came from Europe. He couldn’t put his finger on it exactly, but over here everybody else’s clothes looked just a little different. Different wasn’t what he needed just now. Macy’s had been a shock. Marshall Field’s was gone. He remembered when he was a kid, the Field’s out at Fox Valley Mall. Not where he shopped, of course. Sears was splurging in his family. But he remembered hanging around in Field’s, the rich people carrying around those dark green bags with the script on them, bags he always figured would smell like money. Field’s was the sort of thing that felt permanent when you were a kid, like Pluto being a planet. People liked to switch that shit out on you when you weren’t looking, remind you that nothing stuck, that the whole world and everything in it was circling the drain one way or the other.

He fired up his laptop, checked his e-mail. Nothing he needed. Reached for the remote. He’d watched more TV in the last day and a half than he had in the previous twenty years.

And there was that fucker Fenn, some
Oprah
special, tears in his eyes, running through that child abuse crap he started peddling a few years back. And then Oprah had to cue up the tape – the cell phone video from the damn Darfur party that had had a short run on YouTube back in the day.

“That’s really when I knew something was wrong with me,” said Fenn. “I’ve been doing the work in therapy, and I’ve been trying to make it right with people I’ve gone off on. But I look back at this, and I think of all the damage I did to the good work that Jerry Mooney was trying to do. And I worry about Nick Hardin – he’s the guy I’m taking the swing at here. I mean, this cost him his gig with Jerry, and who knows what else a guy like that has.”

Hardin noticed they’d cut the tape right after Fenn took his swing and Hardin took his fall. Didn’t show Hardin busting Fenn up.

Just great. All Hardin wanted to do was to keep his head down for a few days while Fouche put a deal together. Then he and his $10 million would find some place nice to live out their days. Now his face and his name were on
Oprah
.

Hardin suddenly remembered bivouacking in some pissant village in the ass-end of Benin maybe fifteen years ago, back in his Legion days. This old jou-jou insisted on throwing the bones for them. She threw Hardin’s, and her eyes got big, and she grabbed Hardin by the arm. “Beware the black woman with a million eyes. She will be your downfall.” It creeped Hardin out a little at the time, but he hadn’t thought about it in years. He never figured she meant Oprah.

Too many people had seen him at the Hyatt. If the bad guys didn’t have a line on him already, they would soon enough. Time to move. And time to find a fucking gun.

 

Beans Garbanzo and Snakes DeGetano were two hours into their second morning sitting on Hardin’s car when Snakes took a look down at his picture and nudged Beans. “Here he comes. Make the call and pull up behind him.”

Garbanzo pulled out his cell.

“Yeah?” the voice answered.

“It’s Beans. I’m working that thing for Tony Corsco. Kill the camera.”

“OK, you got ten minutes max. Ping me when you’re clear .Just remember, I don’t need anybody getting curious about convenient camera outages, so grab him and run. Don’t leave a mess there, give anybody a reason to start checking for pictures.”

CHAPTER 13

 

Dr Atash Javadi walked along the shore of Lake Michigan on the Northwestern University campus with a slight, olive-skinned man. Javadi had been a youth of twenty in 1979, the year the Shah fell. He had been the intellectual playboy scion of one of Iran’s wealthiest families. Now, with degrees from Cambridge, Yale, and Dartmouth, he was one of the West’s leading scholars on the Islamic world and the professor of Middle Eastern studies at Northwestern University. An ardent and frequent critic of Islam, he was a regular guest on various news programs and a long-time favorite of the American right.

He was also a devout Shiite and had, for his entire life in America, been an agent for MOIS, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security.

“The things that they hoard shall be tied to their necks like a collar on the day of resurrection,” said Javadi. “So sayeth the Holy Koran. Cling not to greed, my friend.”

“He must pay their wages in full,” replied the olive-skinned man, “and give them even more out of his grace. So also sayeth the Holy Koran. And my wages are late. Stein is dead. Heinz is dead. I have your devices. Yet Tehran has my money and I do not.”

Javadi smiled an ironic smile. “You quibble over money? Now? On the brink of a triumph that will forever secure in legend the name of Husam al Din?”

Al Din scowled. He had no use for legends and less for names.

He’d only been a few weeks old in 1978 when the Israelis bombed the refugee camp in Lebanon. His parents were killed, and he was just another orphan raised by the PLO. In the camp, they called him Ahmad, but his parents must have called him something. So far as Husam was concerned, Ahmad was just his first cover. A name was just another tool. In New Mexico, he had been Ricardo Orendain. Since arriving in Chicago, he had been Marco Pelligrino and then Dmitri Stavapopolus. With his fine features, light olive skin, and brown eyes, he could pass for everything from a Spaniard to an Indian.

In reality, he was Palestinian. He’d had the religious indoctrination as a boy, the feeble mullahs and their nonsense. There is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet, the United States is the Great Satan, all the rest of it. But Husam believed that reality was the best teacher.

And reality was this: Any time Israel wanted, the jets came and bombed the camps, and the Palestinians had to hide in the rubble like roaches. If Israel decided to destroy Beirut, they destroyed Beirut. If there was no God but Allah, why then did Yahweh get the F-16s and Abrams battle tanks, leaving Allah’s people to fight them with AK-47s and stones? Husam had no more faith in gods than he had in names.

But he had a talent for killing. He had been a very bright student, the brightest boy in any of the classes in the camp. And so the men in the keffiyehs had taught him as well. Pistols, rifles, explosives. How to fight with his hands and with knives. A Kalashnikov – this was a god he could believe in.

When he was fourteen, he had his first exam. He remembered crawling forward in the dark toward the Israeli roadblock. Watching for a long time to be sure. Two soldiers outside the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the armored personnel carrier that was another gift to Yahweh from America, Israel’s real god. After an hour, the doors to the Bradley opened, and the two soldiers traded places with two others inside. Four soldiers in all.

The instructions for this initiation were simple: Leave the camp, kill at least one Israeli, and return alive. The other boys had all chosen civilians, random killings of unsuspecting targets. And when they had returned to the camp after emptying a clip into some old woman driving back to some kibbutz, he would join in the celebration of their heroic acts. In truth, these cowards disgusted him with their weakness. He was determined to do better.

At any time, he could kill the two outside the Bradley, but the muzzle flash would give away his position. He was not interested in learning how good the soldiers inside the Bradley were with the 20mm cannon and 50mm machine gun. But these Israelis were complacent. It was a quiet sector, routine duty. He watched for an opportunity. It took him more than three hours to move to a slightly elevated position behind the Bradley, giving him a clear line of sight into the vehicle when the doors opened. At the next shift change, all four soldiers were within a narrow field of fire, the door to the vehicle directly in front of him. Ahmad was calm. Many of those he trained with would have cut loose with a long burst of automatic fire, sweeping the weapon back and forth. But Ahmad flicked the selector switch to semi-automatic. Three-round bursts, twenty rounds in the magazine, one spare magazine. Ahmad knew that if he had to switch magazines before the Israelis were down, he was as good as dead. Ahmad sighted on the Israeli standing in the door of the Bradley. If he could drop him in the doorway, the others might trip over him trying to get inside.

Ahmad fired, all three rounds hitting the Israeli in the torso, the soldier falling on the ramp. Ahmad swung the rifle a couple inches left and hit the second Israeli with a burst. The target went down, still moving, but down. The Israelis were well trained. The other two both dove to the ground, rolling apart so that they were separate targets. They had seen the muzzle flash. Both brought their Galils to bear, first one, then the other, raking the ground in front of Ahmad’s position with controlled bursts. Each moved further out as the other fired – fire and maneuver, looking to flank. Ahmad slid slowly down the small embankment and rolled to his left, timing his movements with the firing by the Israelis to cover the noise. As one of the Israelis fired at the spot where Ahmad had been, the other got up to run further right. Ahmad hit him in the back with a burst. The final Israeli turned his fire to Ahmad’s new position, but Ahmad still had the advantage of elevation. When he heard the Israeli stop to change clips, Ahmad sighted carefully, hitting the Israeli in the face and helmet.

Ahmad had fired four bursts – twelve rounds. He knew he still had eight rounds in his clip, but he swapped in his full clip and watched the scene for a moment. The second Israeli was still moving, trying to crawl toward the APC. Ahmad put a three-round burst into the soldier’s head. He then put a single round into the heads of each of the other Israelis, just to be sure. He walked down to the Bradley and looked inside. He knew he couldn’t loiter, but he wanted his first mission to cement his reputation. There were two large fuel cans in a rack on the outside of the APC. He moved them inside the vehicle. He cut both pant legs from the uniform of one of the dead Israelis, sliced them in sections, and tied the sections together to make a fuse. He opened the first fuel can, shoved the fabric inside, let it soak a moment, and then pulled most of it out, wadding the end of the fuse in the opening to the fuel can. He set the fuel can in the ammunition storage area inside the APC. He opened the second fuel can, pouring the fuel over the ammunition first, and then splashing it around the inside of the machine. He backed out of the vehicle, trailing the soaked cloth behind him until it ended a meter or two past the end of the ramp. He lit the cloth and ran. Ahmad knew the flame would race up the fuel-soaked cloth and that the fuel can at least would explode and ignite the rest of the fuel within the APC.

He was one hundred meters away when he heard the
whomp
of the fuel can and saw his shadow flash in front of him from the sudden light. Within another hundred meters, he heard the first of the 20mm shells go off, then another, then a staccato cacophony of exploding ordinance; then he was staggered by the force of the blast as the vehicles main fuel storage tanks blew.

Ahmad knew the Israeli combat patrols and helicopters would saturate the area between him and the camps. He ran south, toward Israel.

For two days, Ahmad dodged patrols, slowly making his way back to the camp. By the time he returned, he was a legend. The fourteen year-old boy sent out to kill a single Israeli who had instead wiped out an entire Bradley crew and their machine. And he had a new name, this one of his own choosing: Husam al Din – the sword of faith.

Just because he didn’t believe in names did not mean one could not serve his legend.

And his legend grew. As a youth, he became the most feared operative the PLO had. As the power of the PLO faded and Palestinian allegiance shifted to Hezbollah and to Iran, al Din shifted as well. But the movement’s increasing penchant for suicide bombings and the attendant promise of heavenly virgins held no attraction for al Din. He had, by then, sampled the earthly variety, and preferred them.

And so al Din struck out on his own. Sometimes, what was needed was a bus full of dead Jews – any bus, any Jews. But sometimes someone – Hezbollah, the Syrians, Iran – wanted one man dead. A well-guarded man. Or they wanted a secure, high-value target destroyed. And when they did, they hired al Din. And they paid al Din. When the New Mexico plan was designed, al Din had been the clear choice.

“Legend?” al Din said. “The Koran also says that he who has in his heart the weight of an atom of pride shall not enter Paradise. In the wisdom of my age, I now reject the legend of my youth and would be only Allah’s anonymous servant, who works for his wage alone, not his pride.”

Javadi shook his head. “The infidels claim that the devil can quote their Bible for his own purposes. I fear you do the same with our Holy Koran.”

“Payment within twenty-four hours to the account designated,” said al Din. “Those were the terms. Those always have been the terms. I cannot bring Stein back to life, or Heinz, but I have your devices, and I will not deploy them until I have been paid.”

They walked for a while in silence. The brutal cold from a few days before had abated, but the wind was still strong and out of the north, traveling the full length of the lake and driving tall waves into the breakwater along the edge of the path so that a cold spray flew into their faces. It was uncomfortable, but except for one solitary runner who had passed a few minutes earlier, it meant they were alone. And with the wind and spray there could be no audio surveillance.

“Recent events require postponing the final phase of the New Mexico project anyway,” said Javadi. “Stein’s death was meant to ensure the safe sale of a shipment of diamonds that were to recoup for us what we have spent funding this operation. Once we had the diamonds, we were going to arrange their liquidation in circles monitored by Mossad, circles with established ties to our Al Qaeda friends. The funds from that transaction would replenish the accounts out of which Heinz was paid, accounts we have always maintained through contacts with ties to Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda assets on our payroll then would release the appropriate celebratory videos to Al Jazeera.”