SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (30 page)

Jesus
, Brendan thought.
Oh Jesus.

“You’re part of a murder investigation now. They want you bad, but for the moment, they can’t have you. I don’t care who they are. Until we hear from the President, we’re keeping you.”

Brendan felt waves of nausea. It was impossible to separate fear from relief. There was nothing to be happy about here, but as he looked up at Kendall, he saw something good in the man – Kendall was on his side, and was working to keep Brendan here not because Heilshorn had died, but because some part of him had been affected by what Brendan had said.

My raving sermon
, he thought. And, on the heels of this:
I was born under the black smoke of September.

Maybe he was. Maybe he was, just like Forrester. A raving lunatic.

“Thank you,” is what he said to Kendall.

Kendall raised his eyebrows. Whatever humane thing Brendan had just glimpsed in the man, whatever connection, Kendall had gone back to being just a cop again, all business. “You’re now an accessory to Murder One. You go ahead and contact that lawyer.”

“What I want,” Brendan said, “is to speak to Jennifer Aiken.”

Kendall shook his head curtly. “Not gonna happen. Not here, anyway. You’re going to County. Finish your smoke. You want the CSS to keep off you? Jail will keep them at bay for a while.”

“I doubt it.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN / Tuesday, 12:11 AM

County Jail in New York City was the dumping ground of the city, as if massive trucks had scraped the streets and siphoned the alleyways and then offloaded their squalid catch here. Brendan’s holding cell was crowded with men, most of them black or Hispanic. They sat along the benches which lined the wall, or stood by the bars, or paced around in circles. It was just past midnight, and half of them were intoxicated by drink or drugs. On the bench next to Brendan sat a skinny pale man with a drain-clog hairdo and a star neck tattoo, his chin lolling on his chest. Occasionally he came to and mumbled to himself about Riker’s Island.

Riker’s
, thought Brendan. The idea of going to prison filled him with the most depthless terror he had ever known. He usually thought of himself as stoical, but maximum-security prison was something few people were able to really comprehend. Even corrections officers didn’t grasp the scope of it; over the years they had built up reality-retardant suits, insulating themselves from what prison was. To them, it was a job – keep the animals in line. To a man like Brendan, prison would be nothing short of hell. The kind of hell like having your wife and child ripped away from you forever.

After two hours in the first cell, the men were paraded into a long corridor where they emptied their pockets and took off any accessories. The COs walked up and down the length of the hall, with the prison’s overworked plumbing sounding its dismal cacophony. Brendan noticed two twenty-something dudes with spikey hair and nice shirts on. They’d probably been out for a night on the town. Maybe one of them had sparked a roach near Columbus Circle, at the bottom edge of Central Park, and before they knew it, plainclothes Narcs were whishing them away by the elbows.

The city hadn’t always been like this. Everybody knew that. People started getting smart ideas like cleaning up the graffiti, getting rid of the Times Square peep shows, cracking down on alcohol and drugs. There was a time when Brendan would leave Langone in the evening, papers piled on his desk, and take to the streets with a tallboy in a brown paper bag and just walk, getting drunk as he went. It seemed to be the type of place where you could truly be anonymous, free, alone, and yet the world laughed and rushed and beat its plastic drums all around you. Now Manhattan was Beverly Hills, and the soul of New York had relocated to Brooklyn. Those who refused to accept the change, ended up here.

Brendan lined up with the other guys to make a phone call. He left a voice message with Jennifer Aiken, recorded of course by the authorities. After that, they were moved to another holding pen. In the night they moved him three more times, until he was at last in a cell with a back wall that featured a row of booths with bullet-proof glass and antiquated classroom-style chairs. Places to sit and talk with your lawyer.

* * *

It was three in the morning. He was informed that lawyers might be in as early as six. He sat on the dirty floor, leaning back against a concrete wall. A man relieved himself in a toilet that was a few feet away – a man with enormous callouses on his bare feet. Time passed very slowly.

At five, his name was called, and his eyes fluttered open – he’d been drifting off.

“Brendan Healy,” the voice called again. A CO was peering in through the bars, checking the faces.

Brendan raised his hand and got up. “Over here.” His heart started pounding. He looked at the CO.

The CO’s face loomed on the other side of the cell bars and he pointed to the back of the enclosure.

“Right there, Healy.”

Brendan turned and looked back at the chairs and booths along the rear wall. A man Brendan had never seen before was sitting on the other side of the smudged glass. Though he had an idea who it was.

Brendan glanced at the CO again, then turned and walked to the back of the cell, drawing glances from other men who were lying around, unable to sleep. He took his seat across from the man, younger than him by a decade or so. Despite the late hour, he looked fresh. His lips formed a straight line. His eyes were filled with intelligence without compassion. He was handsome, too. Like Brad Pitt, maybe.

There was an old-school phone hooked into the wall, and the man was already on the other end.

“Mr. Healy,” he said when Brendan put the phone to his ear. “How do you like jail?”

“So far, so good,” he said. Wit was not his strong suit, particularly at five AM in County Jail.

“Want to stay? We can keep this going as long as necessary.”

Brendan swallowed. His saliva tasted as if his throat was lined with tallow; greasy, like he had been gradually ingesting the funk of the jail cell, the men in it, the foul molecules in the air. He’d been contemplating that if they’d wanted to press, they could have taken him right at Roosevelt, that Agent Persephone could have slapped that NYPD sergeant right across his indignant face with total impunity. Instead, she’d decided to let this all happen.

But the decision to let the NYPD keep him, question him, and arraign him with charges had provided a chance for him to talk. And he had. He’d told Kendall everything he knew – the two men had talked for another hour before Brendan had been cuffed again and taken fourteen blocks away to the County Jail. Had Kendall believed any of it? Maybe. Brendan had felt strongly that Kendall was inclined to believe him, even if some of his story might have seemed sensational. So why let him be debriefed? Why let him speak?

“When this stops is up to you,” the man said. Brendan tried to find something human in his eyes.

“Did you start out in the army? Or were you a marine?”

“You will be arraigned in less than an hour. We can make sure any and all of the charges stick. With the witnesses, video, and forensic evidence, you will get fifteen years. Maybe more; we’ll have the judge hand out the maximum sentence. Can you do twenty years in Federal Prison?”

“Or maybe you started out as an analyst,” Brendan said. “Graduated from a top-tier school, went to work for the CIA, and wound your way into the Central Security Service. But no, I don’t think so. I think you came out of the military. Looking for a good escort service? Maybe it’s been a while since you got any.”

“You’ll come out – if you live – an old man. And guess what, we’ll still be there waiting for you anyway. The world . . . the world will look very different then, Healy.”

“No doubt. Imagine what sort of new toys Google will have come out with. People will be shooting laser beams from their eyes.” He shifted in his seat and cocked an eyebrow at the man on the other side of the glass. The smart-aleck routine was the only thing his mind could handle. Blackness, despair, and fatigue were ready to engulf him. “When did the CSS start poisoning people, anyway? Why not just kill me? Dose me with thallium like Reginald Forrester. When did the U.S. government start threatening, torturing, killing its citizens on their own soil, anyway?”

“Half a century ago,” the man said without a moment’s hesitation. “Only now it’s legal and out in the open.”

He was forthcoming, you had to give him that. “At what loss?” But his question was perfunctory. He knew the answer.

“That’s irrelevant. There is no cost. The machine has to move forward. That’s it. You know this, everybody knows this, but they still cozy themselves up in denial. It’s a global economy. Period. There are no nationalities. There are entities. Sort of like Gods – like Titans you could say. Probably the only way the species survives is to get off the planet. Might as well blow it up from Space, too, because all that will be left are the people sitting in the cell behind you.”

“That’s comforting.”

The man shrugged. “You know what it costs for a month’s supply of air on a ship to Mars? You want to talk about money, and who gets money? Money is debt. Money is something owed to someone else. That’s all it is. A Federal Reserve Note is handed over for Government bonds – fancy I.O.U.s. The Federal Reserve can print banknotes until the third world war and after it. It’s paper. What’s real, what’s enforceable, is the debt. Something owed to someone else. The more you’re owed the more you have.”

Brendan was suddenly flooded with the memory of Santos and Irish Hank arguing in the basement of the Holy Rosary Church.

“The Fed doesn’t print money,” he said. “They do something worse. This whole quantitative easing strategy, allocating four trillion borrowed from banks, is supporting the very government and housing spending that got us into trouble in the first place. The Fed is financing ongoing economic hardship through its expanded borrowing of bank reserves. I think Heilshorn knew this, and Heilshorn got scared.”

This guy showed the smallest flicker of doubt across his features. “You want to spend the rest of your good years sitting in this filth?”

“Or what?”

“Or you come with me. I have the power to let you out right now, no questions asked.”

“What happens to Sloane?”

“We scoop her up, too.”

“What will you do with us?”

“She’ll get her own bargain. You’ll come to work for us.”

“And if I don’t . . . what? The thallous sulfate routine? You know – they say poison is a woman’s weapon.”

For the first time, the man displayed a touch of emotion when he rolled his eyes. “Poison was my father, Joseph Staryles’ thing. You might say I picked up the habit from him, really. You can understand a little something about the legacy of a father, can’t you, Healy?”

Staryles
, thought Brendan. Something seemed to loosen inside of him now that he was able to put a real name to the madness of the past three days. Was this the man who had been pursuing him all along? The point person for this little cadre within the CSS, tasked with orbiting Heilshorn and all of his backdoor dealings?

Driving his dark blue Cutlass around.

Cleaning up after Heilshorn. Taking the lives of people that got in the way.

Who else had he murdered?

Brendan stared through the thick glass. When had Staryles started working for the CSS? When had he begun turning tricks for Heilshorn? Because there was no way Alexander-the-fucking-great was going to get his hands dirty. Heilshorn had got someone else to kill Brendan’s wife and daughter.

Maybe, Brendan thought, smoldering, maybe Staryles was too young for that. He was about thirty, to look at him. Certainly he’d done a few tours before this, probably Iraq, Afghanistan. And black ops took place all over the world.

But he would know. Surely this man would know who Heilshorn had hired to plough into Brendan’s wife and child.

“No one is going to poison
you,” Staryles said in the kind of soothing tone reserved for upset toddlers. “You can tell your story all you want. To the men at Riker’s Island, who’ll kick in your teeth so you can give better blowjobs, lying on top of you in the night, breathing in your ear.”

Brendan’s heart was racing. “What about Lawrence Taber?”

“The Sheriff works for us. Delaney, Colinas, all your buddies. You know that. Eventually, everybody does.”

No, not everybody
, thought Brendan, realizing that Argon’s funeral was today. He felt a pinch in his chest, a sudden and profound sense of despair.

The whole thing was entirely too much to process. What constituted a national threat? Argon had been doing his own investigations into corrupt cops and politicians. What did the CSS care about some small-time executives and congressmen who were dabbling in prostitution or gambling for their own perverse pleasure? Did such minor transgressions really filter all the way up to effect the multinational corporations? Even in aggregate, the sins of local, regional, and state leaders couldn’t possibly penetrate the thick insulation of the billion-dollar companies, the IMF, the World Trade Organization. Something else had to have been at stake. Something that could threaten the stability of the entire country, and the expanding global empire.

Jesus.

It was right there – he only needed some more time, to clear his head, to look at the evidence, to digest the events of the past three days, the previous two years, and put it all together.

Prison loomed like a nuclear winter, threatening to devastate everything, to annihilate his very soul.

“What can I offer you? I don’t understand.”

Staryles came a little closer, Brendan could see the color of his eyes, the light blue irises and the perfectly white corneas of someone who started their days with Spirulina shakes and ended them with murder. Staryles showed no sign of fatigue, no trace of compassion, no hint of ever giving up. Brendan could see in his face the entire universe that was behind him. He was one of many, and he knew it, and it gave him supreme confidence. Staryles was on the winning team.

“You let me worry about that. You just make your decision. You have one hour.”

Staryles hung up and left.

Brendan set the phone down in the cradle on the wall beside him.