Kingdom of the Seven (7 page)
Read Kingdom of the Seven Online
Authors: Jon Land
“It’s all right now,” Karen tried to soothe, wondering if it really was, as the Mercedes surged out of her driveway and onto the roadbed. “It’s over.”
Wondering that too.
“Doc says I’ll be good as new in no time,” Sal Belamo told McCracken and Wareagle from atop the bed in one of the Grand Hyatt’s suites.
Of course, that same doctor had told him to stay overnight at the hospital, advice to which Sal had nodded politely before he checked himself out.
“No way I’m cutting myself off from the action,” he’d said by way of explanation.
“Most of which took us by surprise today,” McCracken added. At the hospital he had given the doctor a number in Washington to call. As a result of the brief conversation that ensued, no report of Sal’s gunshot wound would be filed with the police and no record of his ever being treated would exist.
“Gonna need me to help sort things out, boss.”
“This one might be beyond even you, Sal.”
All told, Blaine could never recall a more confusing episode. Surprises were nothing new to him; usually they were simply the residue of incomplete planning. But today
was different. Today they could not possibly have planned for what ultimately confronted them, a fact that first came clearly to light when Blaine at last had an opportunity to inspect the contents of the briefcase Johnny Wareagle had salvaged from the subway platform beneath Bloomingdale’s. Each page contained names and addresses; single-spaced, sometimes taking two lines to get all the information down. McCracken recalled the apparent involvement of a third party: the pair of mystery gunmen and the man, dead now as well, whose briefcase El-Salarabi must have ended up with.
was different. Today they could not possibly have planned for what ultimately confronted them, a fact that first came clearly to light when Blaine at last had an opportunity to inspect the contents of the briefcase Johnny Wareagle had salvaged from the subway platform beneath Bloomingdale’s. Each page contained names and addresses; single-spaced, sometimes taking two lines to get all the information down. McCracken recalled the apparent involvement of a third party: the pair of mystery gunmen and the man, dead now as well, whose briefcase El-Salarabi must have ended up with.
The terrorist must not have realized the switch had been made! He thought he was still holding his plans for the destruction of Bloomingdale’s to the very end.
“Say what?” Belamo snapped, after Blaine had laid it out for Johnny and him once they were inside the suite’s bedroom, Sal resting as comfortably as he could manage atop the bed. “You’re telling me those two guys you whacked were after a guy with a briefcase at the same time the three of us were after
another
guy with a briefcase?”
another
guy with a briefcase?”
“And then the briefcases got switched.”
“Only Salami didn’t know it … .”
“While we figured everything was just going along as planned,” Blaine completed. “Now we know otherwise.”
“Enlighten me.”
“The man Johnny found dead in the street who pulled the switch knew he’d been made by the two gunmen we killed in Bloomingdale’s. He knew he couldn’t save himself but figured maybe he could salvage the contents of the case.”
Belamo was nodding. “So after the two shits he was running from realized they had the wrong case, they came after the right one.”
“Which ended up with El-Salarabi,” Blaine affirmed. “Inside Bloomingdale’s.”
“You ask me, they musta known exactly what was inside
it and wanted real bad to make sure nobody else got a look.”
it and wanted real bad to make sure nobody else got a look.”
“Only now we’ve got the pages.”
Belamo gazed at the stack of papers piled on his lap. “Goddamn mailing list what it looks like.”
“Three people died because of it today, Sal; four if you count El-Salarabi.”
Belamo nodded. “You get me a computer terminal, soon as I get off this bed, I’ll tie into the national database, see what I can learn ’bout the people who belong to these names. See what holds them together.” His face paled suddenly and his head lopped low toward his chest. “Uh-oh … Looks like those last painkillers are starting to kick in … .”
“Get some rest, Sal.”
He flapped the salvaged pages in his good hand. “Nod off having another look at these …”
Blaine led Johnny out of the suite’s bedroom into its living room.
“You were awful quiet in there, Indian. In fact, you’ve been awfully quiet since this afternoon.”
“There’s something I haven’t told you yet, Blainey.”
“That much I figured.”
“The man on the street spoke before he died.” Wareagle paused. “‘Judgment Day.’”
“That’s what he said?”
“There was more, but the words do not matter so much as what was in his eyes: fear, not of death, but of what life was going to become—for everyone.” Johnny’s eyes were full and cold. “He knew something, Blainey, something linked to that list of names.”
“In the Book of Revelation, Indian, Judgment Day refers to the end of the world.”
“I know, Blainey. So did he.”
“Then this list of names …” McCracken could see Wareagle’s expression was wavering between uncertainty and uneasiness, a stark contrast to his usually stoic self. “What else?”
“It … does not matter.”
“Who killed our mystery man with the briefcase? You saw him, didn’t you?”
“Yes and no, Blainey.”
“What do you mean, Indian?”
“I saw the killer … yet I couldn’t have. Because he is dead.” The uncertainty vanished from Johnny’s face, but the uneasiness remained. “I killed him.”
Wareagle moved to a window overlooking Forty-second Street more than thirty stories down. He spoke without turning away from it. “After the hellfire, Blainey …”
“We were both sent to Israel to lend a hand in the Yom Kippur War of seventy-three.”
“And then …”
“I went to Japan. You retired to the backwoods until I came calling again eight years ago.”
“No.” Johnny turned slowly, noncommittally. “There is something I have never shared with you, Blainey. When I returned from Israel, they were waiting for me.”
“They,” McCracken repeated.
He stared at Wareagle long and hard until the big Indian was ready to speak again.
“There was a mission … .”
The mind-control and altering experiments carried out in the late sixties and early seventies, mostly under the auspices of the CIA, were common knowledge now. Only the most clandestine experiments and their devastating results had somehow been kept secret. One of these concerned a variant of LSD designed to increase sensory perception that was tested on a number of willing volunteers from maximum security prisons all over the country. Full disclosure of what the prisoners were actually signing up for was never made. They were told simply it concerned brain enhancement testing.
Three of the volunteers died horribly within hours of the initial injection, another pair after the second and final
one. The surviving eleven were scrutinized minute by minute, put through a battery of tests to see whether the new drug could actually hone their senses of sight, hearing, and smell, too. Even a moderate improvement would be call for celebration in the search to provide an edge for the soldier in heavy combat.
one. The surviving eleven were scrutinized minute by minute, put through a battery of tests to see whether the new drug could actually hone their senses of sight, hearing, and smell, too. Even a moderate improvement would be call for celebration in the search to provide an edge for the soldier in heavy combat.
The experiment could not have been more of a disaster.
Not a single tangible, measurable improvement could be confirmed. Meanwhile, the minds of the test subjects were slowly and inexorably destroyed. Paranoid psychosis, schizophrenia, and sociopathic behavior were the most commonly observed results.
The plug was pulled on the project, but it was too late. Three of the surviving test subjects murdered their guards and escaped into the thick woods of Northern California containing the Redwood Forest, not far from where the research lab was tucked away. One of them was a hulking graduate student specializing in poetry and a conscientious objector to the war effort in Vietnam who’d been imprisoned for smashing a rock over the face of a policeman. At the time the cop had been trying to bodily remove the objector’s girlfriend from a protest at U-Cal Berkeley.
The man’s name was Earvin Early.
The blow broke every facial bone from the cop’s eye sockets across the underlayer of his cheeks. His nose had been flattened like a pancake, looking bulbous and squat beneath the flow of blood.
The cop ended up a virtual vegetable, and Early was ultimately sentenced to twenty years to life. The promise of early parole led him to volunteer for the experiment, but a more careful screening job by the overseers would have eliminated him from consideration. Earvin Early was a borderline psychotic even before voluntarily ingesting a mind-altering drug that turned normal men crazy.
“I killed him, Blainey, and today I saw him again.”
“Back up, Indian.”
“They asked me to track the three men down. They showed me pictures of what Early and the two others did
to a pair of families who were camping out in California’s north woods.” Johnny stopped, his eyes wide yet distant. “I wasn’t the first who tried to catch them. Another team had already failed. Some of its members were found. Some weren’t.”
to a pair of families who were camping out in California’s north woods.” Johnny stopped, his eyes wide yet distant. “I wasn’t the first who tried to catch them. Another team had already failed. Some of its members were found. Some weren’t.”
“They let you go in alone?”
“They wanted to give me a team, but a second team would have been as useless as the first.”
“You went in because of what Early and company did to those families.”
“Future deaths would be on my conscience if I refused. It was before I learned separation.”
“You found them.”
“At night, deeper in the same woods. The first one went fast, the second a little harder. Early was the last. I trapped him on the edge of a ravine. Put two arrows in him. He fell over. I saw him.”
“But today …”
“It was him, Blainey,” Wareagle insisted, thinking of the hulking shape of a vagrant cloaked in a patchwork canvas coat, face a nightmare of boils and grime.
“Resurrected.”
“I failed. He tricked me.”
“And now he’s joined the ranks of whatever our mystery man with the briefcase was running from … .”
“Judgment Day is coming, Blainey, and Early is a part of it. I will track him down again. Finish what I failed to finish all those years ago.”
“And maybe figure out where it leads?”
Johnny’s silence provided his answer. It continually amazed McCracken how similar they really were, taking different routes toward the same destination. That thought made him realize something now for the very first time.
“After what happened in the woods, Indian …”
Wareagle looked at him, nodded.
“That’s when you pulled out, withdrew. Gone, no forwarding. Not even rural free delivery in the Maine backwoods.”
“I had seen enough.”
“I know the feeling. You see results like Earvin Early and you wonder maybe if we had it wrong the whole time. If those above us could be that far off about one thing, maybe they could have been that far off about
everything
. Then you begin to believe that you and all you stand for were manufactured the same way Early was made into a monster. And that takes away the only thing they gave us, the only thing they left us: pride, dignity.”
everything
. Then you begin to believe that you and all you stand for were manufactured the same way Early was made into a monster. And that takes away the only thing they gave us, the only thing they left us: pride, dignity.”
Whatever reaction Blaine might have expected from Johnny Wareagle, the very slight but firm smile was not among them.
“Our roles have reversed, Blainey. The counselor has become the counseled.”
“It’s just that I know what it feels like, Indian. I was there too, remember? Just a different place. For me the reality check came in London … .”
McCracken, of course, was referring to the most infamous incident of his career. Back in 1980 the tempers of some very mean hijackers at Heathrow Airport were left to smolder while British officials argued and the Special Air Service twiddled their thumbs in sight of the tarmac. Blaine was working with the SAS at the time and was lying prone next to the commander when the plane turned into a fireball. No one was ever sure whether it occurred out of accident or exasperation over another deadline passing. The point was it happened, and the entire planeload of hostages was senselessly lost.
Blaine took out his frustration for the way the whole episode had been botched on Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square. Specifically, he shot out the section of it he was convinced the British were lacking. The incident won him instant ostracism and the nickname “McCracken-balls.” The nickname stuck for good, the ostracism for only five years.
“If they hadn’t buried me in France, Indian,” Blaine confessed, “I probably would have walked. Difference is,
if I had walked on my own, I’m not sure I would’ve ever come back.”
if I had walked on my own, I’m not sure I would’ve ever come back.”
“I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t called upon me, Blainey.”
“But getting out for a time made both of us see things clearer, for what they really are. We came back in, we weren’t doing it for the same reasons as before.”
“For ourselves, then?”
“For those who matter. We don’t cut into El-Salarabi’s network, how many people die when Bloomingdale’s becomes a parking lot? There’s a lot of shit in the world, Indian. Difference is, we used to be part of it. Now we sweep it aside.”
“Like I said,” Johnny followed, smile even tighter, “for ourselves. We are hunters, Blainey, preying on the vermin which thin the herd while the shepherds sleep. For us, the hunt is everything.”
“Better hope we haven’t lost the scent, Indian,” McCracken said, thinking of the force behind Earvin Early and the list of names Sal Belamo would soon be going to work on, “because this might be the most important one yet.”
Other books
Sorcerers of the Nightwing (Book One - The Ravenscliff Series) by Geoffrey Huntington
The Debt 4 by Kelly Favor
Wings in the Night by Robert E. Howard
No strings attached by Alison Kent
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Rock and Roll Fantasy by Isabelle Drake
The Courier's Tale by Peter Walker
The Rendition by Albert Ashforth
