Sullivan's Justice (42 page)

His eyes went to the crucifix mounted over her bed. Dropping to his knees, he made the sign of the cross and begged God to forgive him. If he hadn’t shot the man, he would be dead. Then who would care for his family? He knew protecting them would not buy him redemption. When he died, he would burn in hell. His eyes came to rest on his mother. At thirty-six, she looked more like fifty. Her lovely dark hair had turned gray, and her once-shapely body was emaciated. Suffering and hardship were etched on her face. She’d given birth to two boys before him, but both of them had lived only a few months. The village his parents lived in had no work. His mother told him they were so poor, without God’s help, they would have all died. Despite all she’d gone through, she had never complained. Until the accident, she had gone to mass every day, praying for the souls of the lost and damned. How did the son of a saint become a murderer? He knew that now that he had killed, he would do it again. He had disgraced his God, his church, and his family. He was the one who had smashed the window out with a gun and threatened to shoot the driver. The man had acted in self-defense. What if he was arrested and sent to prison? How would his mother and sister get by without him? Since they were illegal immigrants, they would be deported to Mexico.

Closing his mother’s door, Raphael rushed out to his ten-year-old black Mustang, then headed to St. Agnes’s to pick up Maria. His mother and sister were used to seeing fancy cars in the garage. He covered his occupation as a criminal by telling them that he detailed expensive cars for rich people.

After dinner, he went to the garage and scrubbed down the Ferrari. Once he told his mother that she would have to go to the hospital in the morning, he tucked Maria into bed and headed out to Malibu. He had driven a Ferrari before, but the Barchetta was fantastic. His problems were momentarily forgotten as he whipped around the curves, the city lights nothing more than a blur.

Angel was officially the caretaker of a twelve-acre parcel of wooded real estate. The property had been in probate for seven years, and the courts had erected high fences to keep people out. He’d started out small, receiving stolen cars and selling off the parts, working out of a double-wide trailer and a few metal sheds. Three years ago, he’d moved up to luxury cars, hiring guys to steal them and then delivering them to brokers throughout the country. His people never stole anything until Angel told them he had a buyer. The only work he had to do was to remove the VIN numbers and replace them with new ones so the car could be legally registered. On cars like the Barchetta, this was far more difficult. The new VIN number had to come back to a Barchetta. Angel had contacts with salvage companies throughout the world. When a luxury car was totaled, Angel would purchase the VIN plates. He had five file cabinets crammed full of clean VIN plates that could be placed on a vehicle whenever it came in.

Angel was still laughing when Raphael drove off in the spare car he kept at the shop, a Volkswagen bug, with five grand tucked in his pocket. Cops didn’t stop you when you drove a Volkswagen, particularly in Oxnard. Gangsters, even run-of-the-mill hoodlums, wouldn’t be caught dead in a Beetle.

 

 

 

 

 

L
awrence Van Buren inserted his gold key into the brass lock, securing the double glass doors, and disengaged the alarm. Navcon International was located on the twelfth floor of a high-rise office building in Los Angeles. He stepped several feet back and gazed at the gold lettering on the door, knowing it would soon be gone if he didn’t deliver the Ferrari.

Entering and turning on the master switch for the lights, his eyes swept over the opulent furnishings in the lobby. His life was a sham. He had been born John Hidayah, the only son of a wealthy Egyptian family. He had changed his name so his father in Egypt wouldn’t be able to find him. He’d selected the name Van Buren after the American president. Although his hair and eyes were dark, his skin was fair. He told people he was born in New York. Everyone trusted Lawrence Van Buren. His honest face and impeccable manners served him well.

Taking a seat behind his leather-topped Louis XVI desk, he unlocked a drawer and removed a small phone book. His cover of brokering exotic cars to overseas buyers had once been legitimate. Some of his best clients resided in Saudi Arabia. The only thing that was an outright lie was telling his wife he was a CIA agent. Women weren’t that concerned with the truth, particularly if you gave them everything they wanted.

Van Buren used his established history of shipping exotic cars overseas to avoid suspicion. His organization used tankers sailing out of Port Hueneme, a small city with a naval base and shipping yards a short distance from Ventura. They altered the car so no one outside of the Ferrari plant in Italy would be able to tell that it was carrying illegal cargo. In addition to those cars, they shipped at least four cars a month that were clean. Another reason they passed undetected was geography. No major players in the arms market operated in this particular area. Criminal activity in Oxnard, a sister city to Port Hueneme, centered around gang activity, murders, and local drug-trafficking. These types of criminals might be vicious, but they didn’t possess the funding or sophistication needed to broker weapons to foreign entities.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, Van Buren had lain low for two years before resuming trade in the arms market. He had, however, continued to export exotic cars. Americans were big talkers with short memories. Politicians yapped all the time about airport safety, yet security guards continued to be individuals with no education and a minimum level of training. To prove his point, he’d had one of his most trusted men smuggle a suitcase full of automatic weapons on board a Delta flight to New York.

His best recruits were former police officers and disgruntled FBI and CIA agents. Of course they weren’t aware of what was inside the vehicles. Only a few international criminals knew the truth.

Each day, he searched the newspapers for cops who had been fired for using excessive force, dealing drugs, or receiving payoffs. Such men were willing to sell their souls for the right amount of money. The bonus of working with pros was that they knew not to ask questions.

Van Buren pushed the button for the speaker phone, then stood behind his desk. He could never talk with his North Korean contact sitting down, particularly when he was seven weeks late on a delivery of plutonium. His three earlier shipments had gone perfectly. The cars were shipped to Saudi Arabia, then to Shanghai. For security reasons, he wasn’t informed as to how they reached their final destination. As it was, he knew more than he wanted.

He sucked in a deep breath, then punched in the number. His contact had been waiting in Shanghai for delivery. There was a sixteen-hour time difference, and he refused to accept calls during business hours. Although it was a few minutes past four-thirty in the afternoon, it was eight at night in Shanghai. To avoid wiretaps, his call was transferred electronically to an unknown number. A recognizable voice finally came on the line. The code name the Korean had chosen was Bill Clinton. He doubted if the former president would be held accountable if the situation ever came to light.

“How are you doing, Bill?” he said, sweating inside his Valentino sport jacket. When the Korean answered, his accent was so thick, Van Buren had to strain to figure out what the man was saying.

“How do you think we doing?” he shouted. “Your company fail to deliver goods. I wait six weeks in crappy hotel in Shanghai. Boss say you no good. If not get it by next week, he send someone to kill you and your family.”

“There’s no reason to panic,” Van Buren told him, pacing in a small circle. “We got a lead today on the car. By tomorrow afternoon, it will be on a ship headed to Shanghai.”

“How we know you tell truth?” the Korean said, his voice rising. “Maybe you sell goods to other country. Boss not get proof of shipment by tomorrow, you dead.”

“Do you want the U.S. government to know you’re procuring nuclear materials from independent sources?” Van Buren tossed back, “Hold tight and everything will be fine. I delivered the three other shipments, didn’t I?”

When he heard the dial tone, he yanked the multiline phone out of the wall and hurled it across the room. It struck an original drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The glass shattered and the frame fell to the floor. The drawing had been given to him by a client who’d purchased three hundred assault rifles. He later learned it had been stolen from a museum in Amsterdam. So no one realized it was an original instead of a print, he’d covered the signature with tape, then made certain it wasn’t visible.

He ripped off his jacket and wadded it up in a ball, stuffing it in the trash can. How could his men fail to track down a one-of-a-kind 550 Barchetta Pininfarina Ferrari?

He’d already wired thirty million dollars to his unnumbered bank account in Zurich. Each of the three cars he’d successfully shipped had contained ten pounds of plutonium. One pound of plutonium was the size of a baseball. His mechanic had been ingenious. He’d constructed a lead compartment that contained a half-pound ingot of plutonium in each of its twenty sections. This enclosure went into an aluminum case, which was hermetically sealed and mounted on the modified radiator inside the engine cavity.

He knew North Korea intended to use the material in an attempt to construct a nuclear bomb. It was their backup plan in case they weren’t able to get the plutonium from their nuclear reactor, which was closely monitored by the international community. Van Buren believed nuclear weapons were more for leverage than for their explosive capabilities.

Even if they built the bomb, he didn’t think they would ever use it. On the off chance that they did, he hoped the United States wasn’t their intended target. As soon as he made his last shipment and pocketed his remaining ten million, unknown to Eliza, he had made arrangements to relocate her and his children to his seven-thousand-square-foot winter home in the Virgin Islands. No country on earth would nuke the Virgin Islands. The beaches were pristine, and the landscape so lush and beautiful, even terrorists loved it.

After chugging down three cups of coffee, Van Buren glanced at his watch and saw it was almost six. Time to wake up his men and tell them they had twenty-four hours to bring in the Ferrari. He laughed, thinking how easily they’d deceived the Ventura police. Van Buren’s source inside the department had informed him that the cops thought the chain of murders had been committed by a serial killer, exactly what he wanted them to believe.

When you brokered arms, you had to be prepared to take down anyone who got in your way. When the car had disappeared en route to the shipyard, the situation had instantly became volatile. They’d already killed nine people in their attempt to find the Ferrari. If not for the Mexican punk who had carjacked the vehicle after the flatbed truck they’d used had broken down in Oxnard, Van Buren would already have his ten mil and the car would be on its way to Shanghai.

Raphael Moreno had killed one of his men and injured Dante Gilbiati. Dante had gone on a hideous killing spree, fearing what Van Buren would do to him when he learned he had allowed someone to steal the Ferrari. Having worked for the mob, Dante had been trained never to leave a witness alive. He had murdered the Hartfield family because Moreno hadn’t come out of the house to tell him the Ferrari wasn’t there, and when Dante had gone inside, the people had seen his face.

The Koreans had insisted that he remove the GPS system so no one could track their plutonium. Otherwise, the material would already be in the hands of the man he had spoken to in Shanghai. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. His men had been instructed to attach a magnetic GPS to the car as soon as they located it.

At that point, Van Buren had no choice but to call in a professional.

Claire Mellinger, the woman he’d met at the Biltmore Hotel, was one of the top female assassins in the world. She killed by means of a lethal injection. She’d never been apprehended. Like Dante, she killed every witness.

Before the hit woman had arrived, Van Buren had personally executed Dante Gilbiati. This was the kind of situation that caused even an arms dealer to have nightmares.

Van Buren did not condone killing children. He had to draw the line somewhere. His greatest mistake had been to underestimate Raphael Moreno. If things had gone down differently, he would have offered the kid a job. Barely twenty, Moreno had outwitted Dante Gilbiati, a hardened criminal, by hiding in the Hartfields’ Cadillac and waiting for the police to arrest him. His family had not been as fortunate. Dante decapitated Moreno’s disabled mother, then later returned to kill his sister.

He wondered if Moreno had found out where the plutonium was hidden and was attempting to sell it from inside the jail. Could a petty-ass car thief possess connections of that magnitude? Van Buren had placed three men inside the jail to beat the truth out of Moreno and recover the Ferrari. The three men had left the jail in an ambulance.

As soon as Moreno was placed on a bus to prison, Van Buren would have him snatched and brought to him immediately. The Ferrari had been sighted, then disappeared again. The twenty-year-old appeared to be playing cat and mouse with him. Right now, the only game Van Buren was willing to play was target practice.

 

 

 

 

 

C
arolyn’s voice pulled Moreno back to the present. He had been speaking so low that she’d moved her chair only a few inches away. Many times his words were slurred, almost garbled, so much so that she couldn’t make out what he was saying. It was all being recorded on tape by the PD, to be played over and analyzed by scores of law enforcement officers and criminal psychologists.