Red Right Hand (6 page)

“Are we all in the shot?” came the faint voice of a man from off camera.

“I dunno,” the old man replied—too loud, thanks to his proximity to the microphone. “I can't see shit.”

A child giggled. “I think you're holding it backward,” said the man off camera.

“What? Oh, hell.” The old man turned the phone around. A handsome family—mother, father, and three children ranging in age from baby to teenager—swung into view at the north edge of the trail. The Golden Gate Bridge was so close, it loomed impossibly tall behind them. A tugboat chugged across the bay toward the south tower. From this distance, its progress seemed unhurried, lackadaisical. With foreknowledge of what was to come, the cheery banality of the scene took on a perverse air. Thompson felt like she was watching a snuff film, or a car crash in slow motion. “There you are. Wait—does that mean I'm on your video now?”

“Don't worry—we can cut that bit when we get home. Ready, guys?”

His wife and children muttered noncommittally.

“Three…two…one…”

The image jerked slightly as the tugboat hit, as if the old man had realized at the last second what was happening and recoiled. The screen went white, then tumbled end over end in a blur of sky and fire and dirt.

When the CNN anchor reappeared, Thompson rewound the feed and played it again. Then O'Brien called Nakamura back in and had him put it up on the big screen.

They watched it through a second time, people from the bullpen drifting through the open conference-room door to watch, their faces slack with horror. When it finished, O'Brien said, “Is it possible to watch it frame by frame?”

“Sure,” Nakamura replied. He dragged the video's progress bar back to the beginning and began advancing manually. “This is gonna take forever,” he said. “You want me to skip ahead?”

“Yes,” said O'Brien, but at the same time, Thompson shouted, “No!”

Everybody in the room looked at her. Thompson felt her face go red. Her heart sped up like she'd just mainlined a double espresso. The physical reactions were due not to embarrassment but the thrill of discovery.

“Back it up a bit,” she said. “One frame at a time, just like you were doing before.”

Nakamura complied.

“Slower,” she instructed. “Slower.
There!
”

In the frame Nakamura'd stopped on, the old man's face was plainly visible. He was rawboned and deeply lined. His pale blue eyes glinted in the sunlight. O'Brien looked at him, then at Thompson, who was clearly impatient for her to see what she had seen.

When O'Brien looked at the screen again, it clicked.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “It can't be.”

“It
is,
” Thompson insisted. “I'd know him anywhere.”

“Who is he?” asked SAIC Russell, who'd come in while the video was playing.

“That,” Thompson said, “is Frank Segreti.”

F
RANK SEGRETI WAS
running blind. Damn near literally, thanks to that bomb blast. Fucking thing must've gone off at least a half an hour ago, and still the afterimage remained, an amorphous blob of green at the center of his vision, obscuring the world around him and forcing him to rely on his peripheral vision. It reminded him of that bank job back in '82 when he'd tried to cut through the vault door without a welding mask. His crew got the cash out okay, but when the cops showed up and everybody scattered, he nearly got pinched because he couldn't see a thing and tried to climb into the wrong fucking car.

At least he'd had a moment's warning before the tugboat detonated. He knew something was hinky when he noticed it was picking up speed the closer it got to the bridge support. At the moment of impact, he flinched, so his forearms were protecting his face when the bomb went off—which was probably the only reason he could see anything at all. The shock wave knocked him off his feet and into the brush that bordered the trail. If those hadn't cushioned his fall, he almost certainly would've broken something. When he came to, smoke tinted the sky the oily brown of an old sepia photograph. Ash rained down from above, gray-white and guttering red. Those poor young lovebirds who'd been perched at the far edge of the trail overlooking the bridge were shredded by debris, and the family who'd stopped him lay unconscious on the trail. Frank wanted to help them, but there was nothing he could do without risking capture, so he fled. He hoped they were okay.

Could the bomb have been meant for him? Frank was unable to discount the idea. If his enemies realized their previous attempt to blow him to kingdom come had failed, they might find a certain pleasing symmetry in another bomb attack. But it didn't strike him as likely. As far as anybody knew, Frank Segreti was long dead—and anyway, an attack like this was awfully imprecise. No, he thought, if they'd found him, they woulda probably popped him from afar with a high-powered rifle or grabbed him off the street and tossed him into a panel van to drive him someplace remote so they could work on him awhile in peace.

If the attack had nothing to do with him, that meant he had a chance—albeit slim—of getting out of this alive.

“Sir!
Sir!
”

The voice came from somewhere behind him. Male, tinny, distant. It took a moment for Frank to realize it was aimed at him.

Frank spun, head swimming as he did. A man in a U.S. Park Police uniform was standing a few feet behind him. How he'd escaped Frank's notice before, Frank had no idea. He didn't realize until this moment how profoundly the blast had affected him. His ears rang. His equilibrium was shot. His head was cloudy and slow to process information. Concussion, probably. Not Frank's first.

The officer placed a hand on Frank's shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked. It sounded as if he were shouting from the end of a railroad tunnel. Consonants were lost. Meaning dulled. Frank mostly discerned his words based on the movement of his lips.

“I'm fine.” His own words also sounded muffled to his ears, but the cop recoiled as if he'd shouted. The effort it took to speak set him coughing, a hoarse jag that ended with him spitting a wad of phlegm onto the path. “I'm fine,” he repeated, quieter, once his coughing subsided.

“We need to get you checked out. First responders are setting up a triage area in Crissy Field. Come with me—I'll take you.”

“No!” Frank said, alarmed. If he were held, counted, and cataloged, he was as good as dead. He eyed the man's sidearm. Handicapped the odds of wresting it free of its holster in his addled state. Decided they weren't in his favor. “I mean—you can't. There's a family down the path from here,” he said. “Two parents and three kids. They were closer to the blast than I was. I think they're hurt.”

The cop looked torn. It was clear to Frank he'd been instructed to bring anybody he encountered back for processing. But then he nodded. “Okay. I'll go check on them. See if they're all right. But you stay put until I get back.”

“Sure thing, Officer,” Frank said. “I ain't going anywhere.”

The cop took off down the path. As soon as he disappeared from sight, Frank fled.

Eager to avoid other first responders lest he be forced to do something he'd regret, he ignored the footpath, instead ducking into the scraggly underbrush and pushing upslope through the branches.

Small fires licked at trees where embers had caught. Debris littered the ground: Chunks of asphalt the size of Frank's fist. Twisted bits of metal in glossy automotive finishes. A single tasseled loafer. As soon as Frank identified the last, he looked away; he didn't want to know if anything was still inside.

Once he could no longer see the footpath, he felt as though he were in a forest that could easily stretch miles rather than in a narrow swath of trees boxed in by roads. But sirens wailed all around, competing with the ringing in his ears and belying his apparent isolation.

His aging muscles protested. His bum knee ached. His lungs burned. Now and then, he was racked with coughing fits, which forced him to stop until they subsided. Frank was only sixty-three—a decade younger than anyone who met him might've guessed—but they'd been sixty-three hard years. He'd spent a good forty of them drinking, smoking, and whoring around like he was still that young punk from Hoboken with something to prove to the big dogs across the Hudson in New York. Now he was paying the price for those transgressions—and it turned out the interest was steep.

Frank had been coming to the Presidio ever since he'd settled in San Francisco six years ago. A former U.S. Army base now designated as a national park—albeit an unusual one, given its location within an urban center and the fact that people lived and worked within its boundaries—the Presidio, with its rolling hills and half-wild campus, provided a welcome respite from the densely populated city that surrounded it. He liked to walk the footpaths through the forest groves or the dunes along the water's edge. He'd sit for hours on his favorite bench and watch the sailboats tack across the glimmering bay. It beat staring at the walls of his overpriced efficiency apartment on Nob Hill and made the life he'd left behind seem as distant and ephemeral as the hazy outline of Alcatraz in the distance.

Today, though, the Presidio might prove just as inescapable as that legendary prison—and as Frank's own past.

Frank was well versed in law enforcement procedures. He'd spent his life studying them so that he could exploit their weaknesses. No doubt the authorities were in the process of setting up a perimeter around the park; limiting access to and from the site so they could assist the wounded, process evidence, and sift for suspects among the witnesses made sense. But the place was huge—a little over 2.3 square miles—so there was no way they could have fully locked it down yet. If he could escape before they did that, there was a chance that he might live.

Frank came to a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. On the other side, a narrow roadway was cut into the overgrown slope. He heard a crunch of tires. A siren growing louder. He cursed and hit the ground. A white Dodge Charger with a blue stripe raced by, its light bar splashing red and blue across him. More Park Police, he thought, though the Feds were no doubt close behind.

Once the Charger passed, he rose clumsily, bracing himself on the chain link for support. Then he stripped off his argyle sweater and threw it over the barbed wire to protect him. His button-down snagged as he struggled over the sweater-draped fence. As he attempted to unhook it, a barb sank into the palm of his right hand. He gritted his teeth and fought the urge to howl in pain. A groan escaped him as he yanked his hand free and climbed back down. Blood pooled in the hollow of his palm. He wiped it on his shirt and made a fist to stanch the bleeding. Red seeped between his fingers and dripped onto the roadway.

Another car approached, its engine roaring. Frank crossed the road as quickly as his bum knee would allow, ducking out of sight a fraction of a second before the car sped by. Then he scurried once more upslope through the underbrush.

Not bad, old man,
he told himself.
Not bad. Just keep it up, and no one will ever know you were here.

I
N A DUSTY
corner of a sprawling English Tudor home in Clinton, New York—a quiet college town not far from the decaying industrial city of Utica—a phone began to ring.

Sal Lombino frowned. His daughter, Isabella, stopped plunking at the piano and looked at him. “Can I get it, Daddy?”

“Not this time, honey. What'd Ms. Malpica tell you?”

She rolled her eyes and said, “That I had to practice at least half an hour every day.”

“And how long's it been?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. Twenty minutes?” The sheepish smile on her face made it clear she knew damn well it hadn't been but was hoping her old man was too big a softie to call her on it.

“Try again,” he said, smiling himself. Sal hoped that Izzie never got any better at lying than she was today, midway through her seventh year. But he knew better. Lying was in her DNA. Her hateful bitch of a mother did it for sport. Sal did it for a living.

“It's been five minutes,” she singsonged low and melancholy, her face an exaggerated pout.

“That's more like it. Seems to me you should keep playing, then, and leave the phone to me.”

“Okay,” she said reluctantly and resumed clanking out her tune—a meandering version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with more wrong notes than right.

Truthfully, Sal didn't much care if she practiced—the lessons were his ex-wife's idea, no doubt intended to waste Sal's money and drive him batty when it was his weekend to take Izzie—but the phone ringing was not the house's primary line. It was his business line, the one that rarely rang, the one he never let his daughter answer.

Sal worked for the Council. He was, in fact, its only full-time employee. Council business was typically carried out by freelancers or members of its constituent organizations, but because those organizations were often rivals, the Council required someone unaffiliated with any of them to act as go-between.

That man was Sal. He was solely responsible for executing Council orders and looking after Council interests worldwide. It was a position that commanded fear and respect. He had no formal title, because he had no need of one—but thanks to his predecessor, who'd originated the role, those who whispered about him in dark corners of the underworld referred to him as the Devil's Red Right Hand.

Personally, Sal had never much cared for the sobriquet. For one, he'd been an altar boy growing up and didn't like the implication he was playing for the wrong team. For two, it was a little arch. And for three, it made him wonder if there was a counterpart on God's side who'd one day punish Sal for everything he'd done.

Sal's office was a cliché of a gentleman's study. Mahogany paneling. Built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with books he'd never read. A hinged, hand-painted globe that doubled as a bar cart. Burnished-leather armchairs. Banker's lamps. An antique Wooton desk on which sat a phone, a leather blotter, and a computer.

Sal walked by it without a glance. His office was for show. A rodeo clown, intended to distract. He never conducted any business of real import in it.

The ringing phone was in his second guest room, which was tucked behind the kitchen. The third floor of Sal's house comprised a guest suite—bedroom, bathroom, and sitting room—and that was where visitors typically stayed. Consequently, this bedroom was rarely used, and everything about it appeared to be an afterthought: The simple, metal-framed twin bed. The cheap floral comforter. The empty dresser. The prefab particleboard nightstand, upon which sat a lamp, a box of tissues, and an old rotary phone.

The phone wasn't registered in Sal's name. In fact, the line used to be connected to his neighbor's teenage daughter's room. When their house was foreclosed on years ago during the recession, he had surreptitiously had it rerouted and set the bill to auto-deduct from an online checking account opened for just that purpose. The former was a simple matter of redirecting a single wire; the latter, snatching a bill from his neighbor's mailbox and calling the phone company to update the payment method. Committing fraud to get money out of major corporations is a tricky business, but committing fraud to
give
them money is easy, because they never think to question getting paid.

Sal stepped into the bedroom and shut the door, muffling Izzie's halting notes but not silencing them entirely. The phone continued to ring, as he knew it would until he picked it up. He fished around inside the tissue box on the nightstand and pulled out a small electronic device the size of two stacked decks of cards: an audio jammer. Its textured black plastic surface was perforated at one end to accommodate an internal speaker, and its controls consisted of a single on/off/volume knob on the side. It was powered by a nine-volt battery and had cost him a little over a hundred bucks—from Amazon, if you can believe it.

He turned it on and cranked the volume up. The sound of static filled the room, not so loud as to be intolerable but loud enough to render useless any listening devices within a hundred and fifty feet. Then, finally, he picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”

“Sal, it's Bobby V. We gotta talk.” Bobby V. was the Council rep for the Ventura crime family.

“This better be fucking good, Bobby,” Sal replied. “It's my weekend with Izzie.”

“Ah. I take it you haven't seen, then.”

“Seen what?”

“If you'd seen, you wouldn't have to ask—you'd know. Turn on your TV.”

“What station?”

“Doesn't matter. Any of 'em.”

“Hang on.”

He grabbed the remote from the nightstand drawer and turned on the tiny flat-screen atop the dresser. The cable box defaulted to the local NBC affiliate. Under a
BREAKING NEWS
banner was an aerial shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, thick smoke billowing from beneath it. The portion of the bridge directly above the smoke was hard to see, but it appeared to be canting, and several of the vertical support cables swung free, their ends frayed. The span on either side was littered with overturned cars.

“Jesus Christ,” Sal muttered.

“Yeah, it don't look good.”

Sal cleared his throat. “Do they have any idea what happened yet?”

“If they do, they sure ain't saying, but it looks to me like a big-ass bomb went off.”

“Bobby, I hope you're not calling to ask if we had anything to do with it.”

Bobby scoffed. “Course not! I'm sure it was ISIS or some shit.”

“Then why'd you call? I assume you have a reason beyond torpedoing my fucking weekend.”

“They playing the video yet?”

“What video?”

“They got cell-phone video of the blast. Smiling family. Big boom.”

“No.”

“Keep watching. They will. And when they do, pay attention to the ugly mug that kicks the whole thing off.”

Sal sighed with frustration. “Listen, why don't you just cut the bullshit and tell me what this is all about?”

“Because some things gotta be seen to be believed.”

Sal kept watching. As promised, the aerial footage cut to a shaky cell-phone video, first of a footpath, then of an old man's blurry face. Sal tilted his head and squinted. “Holy shit. That's Frank Segreti.”

“Oh, thank God—you see it too. When he popped up on my TV, I thought I was losing my goddamn mind.”

“He looks like hell.”

“You think? I'd say he looks pretty fucking good for a dead man.”

“This doesn't make any sense. We blew up Segreti's ass seven years ago.”

“Did we?”

“C'mon, Bobby. The safe house the Feds stashed him in was leveled by the blast—no one coulda made it outta there alive. And besides, they found his DNA when they processed the wreckage, it said so in their report.”

“Yeah, well, that video tells a different story,” Bobby said. “We need to convene the Council and hold a vote to authorize the funds to send a hitter after Segreti.”

Sal's brow furrowed as he weighed his options. It'd take a couple days at least to organize a meeting, and even then, there was no guarantee they'd vote in favor of offing Segreti; they'd been reluctant to take action ever since the Engelmann job had gone sideways last year. “No. There isn't time. Every second we wait, Segreti gets a little farther away.”

“I hate to break it to you, Sal, but you don't have the clout to authorize an op without Council approval.”

“Of course I don't,” Sal snapped. “And neither do you. There's only one man who does.”

“You saying you're gonna take this to the chairman?”

“I don't see any other choice.”

“Do me a favor, then, and leave my name out of it.”

“Why, Bobby, you sound scared.”

“Scared? Hell, no. It's just—you know how he's been since the Feds announced Engelmann's death. Communicating by dead drop. Voting by proxy. A different burner twice a week whether he used the last one or not. He's goddamn paranoid, and for good reason. If Council business were ever linked to him, he—and everything we've been working toward—would be ruined. The last thing I need is to wind up on his bad side just because I put a bug in your ear.”

“How the fuck do you think I feel? I'm the one who hired Engelmann. The chairman blames me for his failure.”

“Aw, c'mon. You're his handpicked guy. He can't stay pissed at you forever. Hell, maybe putting Segreti in the ground will get you back into the chairman's good graces.”

“Maybe. But first, I gotta be the guy to tell him the shitheel's still alive. One thing's for sure, though.”

“What's that?”

“This time, I'm not leaving anything to chance. I wanna see him die with my own eyes. It's the only way we'll know that this time, the motherfucker stays dead.”