Kingdom of the Seven (3 page)

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Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Kingdom of the Seven
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The switch complete, Ratansky started on again just as his pursuers stepped up on the curb in front of the fruit stand.
 
Ahmed El-Salarabi felt the slight nudge against his leg and thought at first his contact had made the pickup. Gazing furtively downward, he saw a man fidgeting with his shoes. Their eyes met and something about the man’s stare sent El-Salarabi’s well-honed defenses screaming. He was gone, on his way before the Arab could do anything other than enclose his briefcase between both legs. But the damage had been done, he was certain of it.
He had been made! The enemy was on to him!
A pair of well-dressed, dead-eyed men glided through patrons huddled before the fresh fruit. El-Salarabi dropped his bag of oranges and lurched away from the fruit stand.
The oranges tumbled to the sidewalk. The terrorist
grabbed a wooden crate full of them and flung it at the dead-eyed men. Not bothering to gauge the effects, he lunged off the sidewalk straight into the center of Lexington Avenue. Brakes squealed. One yellow cab slammed into another’s rear end, forcing it into a shuddering lurch forward. More cars screamed to a halt, and El-Salarabi rushed back down the street between them, briefcase in hand.
 
“What the fuck
…”
“Sal?”
“Our boy just jumped into the street, boss. Our boy’s running!”
“He made us!”
“No! It’s something else,
somebody
else! Bastard emptied a crate of oranges at a couple guys ’fore he bolted.”
“Indian, did the man you saw with the briefcase make the switch?”
“I couldn’t see, Blainey.”
“Stay with him in case. Sal, you stay on El-Salarabi.”
“Already am.”
“I’m on my way,” McCracken said, and launched himself into a dash east across the center of Lexington, precious seconds ticking off in his head.
“Boss!” Sal Belamo’s breathless voice cried.
“Here, Sal.”
“Salami’s off the street! Just ducked back inside.”
“Back inside
what
?”
“Bloomingdale’s,” replied Belamo.
Almost to Fifty-ninth Street, Benjamin Ratansky had turned to peer behind him when he felt the thump of impact against someone coming the other way down Lexington.
“Excuse me,” he started, turning his head all the way forward just as the abominable stink assaulted him.
He found himself eye level with the chest of a man draped in a black canvas coat half-open to reveal tattered and soiled clothes beneath it. Ratansky gazed up, stunned by the man’s stench, and nearly gagged. The giant’s huge face was bearded and filthy. He opened his mouth for a smile that revealed rows of brown, rotting teeth marred by several spaces. He chuckled and his breath nearly toppled Ratansky over.
“Hey,” Ratansky uttered when he felt the rank giant’s massive hand seize his elbow. “Hey!”
The giant’s hair hung in long, oily hanks across his face. The bushy clumps of his eyebrows topped yellow, jaundiced eyes; almond-shaped like a cat’s. His skin was dotted
with oozing boils, one of which hung at the very edge of his beaklike nose.
The giant squeezed harder, flashing what remained of his teeth.
And then Ratansky knew, felt his insides melt into powerless putty.
“No.” A mutter. “No!” A gasp.
He glimpsed the dull, rusty brown blade coming forward, as worn and decayed as the giant who was wielding it.
“
April is the cruelest month
.”
The opening line of T.S. Eliot’s famed poem “The Wasteland” was recited by the vagrant in a raspy voice as the knife swished into Ratansky’s stomach.
The huge figure’s eyes rolled upward. As his hand jerked up on the knife to finish the kill, he spotted the shape of an Indian slicing through the clutter of the sidewalk en route to the street. The Indian’s attention shifted suddenly from that path, drawn, it seemed, to the huge figure’s stare.
Their eyes locked briefly, before the huge figure slipped away with his victim’s briefcase clutched in his hand.
 
Johnny Wareagle froze for the briefest of moments, bewildered by the sight of the shapeless mass of a man twenty feet from him. He was looking into the sun and tried to blink away the impossible. In the scant few moments it took to recover his senses, the figure managed to vanish from the street.
Johnny bolted for the sidewalk, trying to determine in which direction the massive shape wrapped in filth and canvas had fled. He had caught enough of a glimpse to recognize who it was and to thus believe that his eyes must have deceived him.
Johnny was almost to the corner of Fifty-ninth Street when the bloodied figure of the man with the briefcase he had seen approaching El-Salarabi back at the fruit stand collapsed against him. Passersby lurched away, shrieking.
The man’s dying eyes found Johnny’s as his trembling grasp dug into the Indian’s forearms.
“Judgment Day,” he uttered, blood and entrails pouring from a tear straight down his abdomen. “Judgment Day.”
He started to collapse. Johnny crouched to ease his drop.
“Stop them,” the man rasped, eyes starting to fade as his clench on Johnny tightened. “You’ve got to stop—”
The man’s mouth locked open, a last puff of breath emerging in place of words. Wareagle lowered him gently to the pavement. He searched the area for the brown leather briefcase and lunged back to his feet when it was nowhere to be found. He darted through the gathering crowd down Fifty-ninth Street, hoping to find the monstrous, tattered figure who must have made off with it.
Nothing. Wareagle continued his dash east, defenses sharpening at every stoop, building break, and alley.
“Johnny!” Blaine McCracken’s voice shot into his ear.
“Johnny!”
Wareagle stopped. “Here, Blainey.”
“El-Salarabi just ducked back inside Bloomingdale’s. Did you find the other—”
“He’s dead, Blainey.”
“The case, what about the case?”
“Gone.”
Blaine pushed aside the confused disappointment that threatened his focus. “Well, we’ve still got this Arab son of a bitch, anyway. Get over here, Indian, fast as you can.”
 
The two well-dressed figures stopped in the Sixtieth Street alley two yards from the huge man. They were frozen as much by an aura of menace as by the stench coming off him. He crouched with his head lowered, yet his yellow eyes peered up at them like those of a predator ready to pounce.
“‘
Quoth the Raven,’
” the voice said through dried and cracking lips. “‘
Nevermore
.’”
His left hand came forward with the briefcase, and one
of the figures extended his right to accept it. Both men turned away from the giant instantly. The one holding the case pulled open its zipper and yanked out the pages contained inside.
Drawings and scribbles. Schemas and plans like some disorganized architect’s first draft. Utterly meaningless to them.
What had happened to the contents they had been sent to retrieve?
The two men looked at each other. At the same time they recalled the man who had without reason tossed the oranges at them back at the fruit stand and then fled with a briefcase that was a virtual twin of this one clutched in his hand. A chill surged through them.
Ratansky had managed to pull off a switch!
Whether the man who had fled the fruit stand was actually linked to him mattered not at all. What mattered was the contents of the briefcase he now possessed.
The two men scampered back to the head of Sixtieth Street in time to see some sort of commotion going on at the main entrance to Bloomingdale’s directly to their left. They eyed each other briefly and then rushed for the door.
 
El-Salarabi’s original intent upon bursting through Bloomingdale’s main entrance on Lexington was to escape his pursuers by swinging to the right, down the stairs leading to the subway station that lay beneath the building. But the huge cluster of people jammed on the steps forced him to dart straight into the store instead.
He dipped down a brief set of stairs into the wood-lined Ralph Lauren Polo section of the men’s department. On this and all the other floors, exits were plentiful and hiding places everywhere. He had spent the better part of the day walking the halls and aisles that separated the merchandise and individual departments. He knew every corner and crevice.
But his pursuers knew what he looked like, what he was wearing. Change those clothes and he would effectively change himself.
Yes …
Yes!
Briefcase dangling from a tight grip, El-Salarabi hurried for the Levi’s section, located on the far left. He had judged this to be the department’s busiest area and therefore the one where he’d be least likely bothered by store salesmen. Sure enough, it was teeming with shoppers ambling about the brightly lit stacks of jeans twenty pairs high in countless styles and colors. To El-Salarabi the whole scene typified American excessiveness. How ironic that this very attribute was now going to figure prominently in his escape.
The terrorist grabbed a pair of stonewashed jeans off one of the stacks and a plaid shirt from a rack squeezed tight with them. Recalling from his schema the alcove where the fitting rooms were located, he hurried over and ducked into a cubicle.
He closed and bolted the door behind him, then shed his clothes frantically. He pulled the jeans and shirt on in their place and wedged his Browning nine-millimeter pistol into the waistband, making sure the plaid shirt covered it. He had stooped to retrieve the briefcase when the thump of footsteps racing his way made him draw his hand away from the handle and reach for his gun.
 
Sal Belamo was waiting just inside Bloomingdale’s main entrance when Blaine McCracken charged through the door. Until less than two minutes ago, the operation had gone smooth as silk. Then, inexplicably, everything had turned into a jumble that had him fearing the worst was yet to come, his mind rife with memories of what had transpired in Luxor the last time he had crossed paths with El-Salarabi.
“Security guard saw a man looked like our boy head that way,” Sal reported, eyes gesturing toward the men’s department. “You ask me, he’s looking to change his wardrobe.”
Blaine nodded. “Let’s see if we can catch him with his pants down.”
He led the way through the Ralph Lauren Polo section of Bloomingdale’s men’s department, stopping next to Belamo just after the Joseph Abboud and Nautica displays.
“Where to now, boss?”
Blaine was about to suggest they split up when a trio of Bloomingdale’s security guards in blue blazers charged past the stacks of Calvin Klein underwear and socks on their left.
“What the fuck?” Sal wondered.
He and Blaine fell in behind the group of guards and raced with them toward the Levi’s section, where another three guards were approaching the alcove containing the fitting rooms.
“Shit,” Blaine muttered.
He sensed what was coming an instant before Ahmed El-Salarabi emerged from a cubicle with pistol blazing. Two of the store security guards fell instantly. The others managed to dive aside as the terrorist surged into the blitz of customers scattering in all directions.
Pistols out now, Blaine and Sal shoved forward through the clutter of panic in their path. El-Salarabi was starting to angle for the nearest escalator when he saw them coming. Desperately he jammed the handles of his briefcase over his left hand so it dangled from his wrist, then lunged forward and grabbed the long hair of a young man who had tripped over a spilled pile of denim shorts. In the next instant, El-Salarabi’s gun barrel was pressed against the youth’s temple.
McCracken and Belamo froze when they saw him jerk the kid’s head backward. The terrorist’s eyes locked on Blaine.
“
McCracken!
I should have guessed it was you … .”
Blaine’s SIG-Sauer was trained dead on him, no reluctance to use it shown in the black pools of his eyes.
“Let him go, El-Salarabi.”
The Arab had been about to drag his hostage a step sideways. Now he held his ground, yanked the hair closer to him.
“Stay where you are or he dies! I’ll do it, you know I will.”
McCracken shook his head. “This isn’t Luxor.”
“I’ll kill him!
”
McCracken held his ground and sighted down the SIG’s muzzle. “Not this time.”
In the instant before Blaine’s finger pulled the trigger, a burst of automatic fire rang out, stitching a jagged design across the entire Levi’s department. A mirror just to his right exploded, and Blaine dove to the floor. His first thought was that these unseen gunmen had come to the terrorist’s rescue. But as he looked up, he saw that El-Salarabi had barely managed to avoid the spray from the same barrage. The kid he had grabbed for a hostage had been able to spin out of the Arab’s grasp and dive to the side out of the line of fire. Clearly these gunmen weren’t allied with El-Salarabi.
Then who were they?
McCracken’s mind worked feverishly, assimilating his data. At the fruit stand, El-Salarabi had fled from two mystery men in a mad dash that had brought him back inside Bloomingdale’s. Then, barely seconds later, the man who had switched briefcases with the terrorist had been killed on the street by person or persons unknown. A third party was obviously at work here, then, not just Blaine’s and El-Salarabi’s. What, though, was their stake in this? Beyond that, why was El-Salarabi still clinging to a briefcase that should have been nothing more than a prop?
Blaine chanced a rise in search of a bead on El-Salarabi. But another burst of automatic fire forced him to duck once more. This burst was instantly followed by a quick series of shots from the Arab. Sal Belamo spun out from his position of cover to answer that fire, but a bullet from the new parties in the rear slammed into his shoulder and pitched him sideways. He went down and took a hanging display of cotton shirts with him.
The pair of mystery gunmen burst forward, heavy steps clumping against the wood floor. McCracken twisted away from the partition to cover Belamo.
His eyes found Johnny Wareagle rushing out behind the mystery men. Johnny fired at the same time Blaine did, taking them totally by surprise. One’s head snapped back
and then forward as bullets blew it apart. The other man twirled away and fired nonstop in a wide arc that sprayed fire from McCracken to Wareagle. Blaine and Johnny rolled toward fresh cover, opening up a path for El-Salarabi to charge toward a Tommy Hilfager display with the surviving mystery gunman in pursuit.
Instinctively both Blaine and Johnny rushed to Sal Belamo. His left shoulder was dripping blood, and a grimace of pain stretched across his features.
“Go get the fucks, boss,” Belamo huffed, kneeling in a splatter of his own blood to pop a fresh speed loader into his .44 magnum.
Blaine looked up at Wareagle. “Where’d they go, Indian?”
“Toward an escalator leading to the next level down, Blainey.”

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