The Reluctant Warrior (Warriors Series Book 2) (28 page)

‘Who had access to his intel?’

Chang stirred and fielded that question. ‘A secure network is established for those who need to know and it goes to all those. In this case, Kirkus’s reports went only to the boss.’ He nodded in Rolando’s direction.

Isakson shook his head when the other side of the table looked at him. ‘First time I’m hearing of Shattner. Bruce kept the JTF informed, but didn’t tell us the source.’ The rebuke in his voice was loud.

‘I’m sure the FBI doesn’t tell us everything it knows, Deputy Director,’ Rolando retorted. Isakson acknowledged this silently. Rolando and he got on well and the two of them had reduced the inevitable turf wars to a minimum.

Bwana brought the discussion back to Shattner. ‘So no one knows what happened to Shattner? Kirkus tell you anything? Surely some
what-if
scenarios were discussed with him.’

‘Kirkus told me he just dropped off the grid after the last bust. Didn’t respond to coded text messages, no calls, nothing. We had plans in place to extricate him and his kids if he was in danger, but that panic button never got pressed.’

‘He’s probably dead, isn’t he?’ Bear and Chloe spoke at the same time.

‘Yes. That’s a real possibility.’

‘Which means the gang knew he was a snitch… I wonder how they knew that?’ Roger mused.

Rolando glanced at Chang and Pizaka. ‘We’ve started looking into that. It won’t be quick and neither will it be clean.

‘Did he tell you anything else? How the gang was organized, their bases, how they communicated… all that stuff? My informants give me that kind of juice.’ Broker addressed his question to the cops.

Rolando shook his head. ‘We would have got to that, but all of us were under pressure to show results… and the focus was just on deals that we could bust.’

Pizaka spoke for the first time. ‘Of course the gang could have offed him just because they suspected he was a snitch. They don’t exactly follow due process.’

‘Kirkus, what about him?’

‘We’ll start there obviously,’ Rolando said with distaste. A dirty cop who fed the gang was his worst nightmare come true, and he hoped Kirkus wasn’t that.

‘Waste of time,’ grumbled Bwana when they’d left the meeting.

Broker shrugged. ‘We did what we had to and learnt that there was nothing to learn.’

He smiled suddenly. ‘Think Rog and you can go ask this Cruz and Diego?’

Cruz and Diego were no longer at the laundry.

Bwana and Roger had been watching it for three days, and they saw a lot of bruisers, but not the two they were seeking. The laundry had a regular clientele, most of them office workers, but for its location, it could have been busier.

Bwana yawned and worked the kinks out of his shoulders. ‘Those bruisers hanging about… if I was Office Man John Doe, I would stop coming to the laundry. Lots of other places in the city for laundry.’

Roger didn’t reply, just nodded, and they lapsed back to silence. On the fourth day, they were joined by Broker. ‘Making sure you aren’t sleeping on the job,’ was his comment, and he got flipped the bird by Bwana.

The laundry was in a long chain of stores, convenience stores, take-aways, exotic foods, salons, all of them busy but for the laundry. A week went by, and as the smell of a Chinese take-away filled the car, Roger broached it. ‘Doubt those guys are here. We’ve been watching 24/7, and we’ve seen all the gangbangers in the world but them!’

‘Mmm.’ Broker was thinking furiously. Soon after their meeting the cops, Cruz and Diego stopped using the laundry as their base. It was entirely possible that they had stopped using it long before, but Broker hated coincidences.

He looked at the Cyrillic lettering on a grocery store, its red-lighted signage casting a glow in the night sky. ‘Let’s do this another way,’ he said.

It took a couple of days to set up, two days when Chloe and Bear, itching for action, suggested hitting another 5Clubs business. Broker considered it; on the one hand, it would maintain the pressure on the gang who would be hurting now; on the other, a lull could relax their vigilance. ‘Let’s go with this first and see what comes of it.’

They met at a midtown hotel, its glass-fronted façade giving an air of respectability to the person they were meeting. That person had bought out all the rooms on the seventeenth floor and had his people stationed in the lobby, fire escapes and the service entrances. His people wore loose-fitting suits, looking like poorly dressed brawlers and bouncers, the bulges under their suits plain to see, but then they didn’t care if they blended in or not. Each floor had four elevators, but that day only one stopped on the seventeenth.

The four of them, Chloe staying back with Rocka and the kids, stepped out of the elevator and were accosted by six brawlers, three behind them, three in front. There were two more men at either end of the corridor, Uzis slung casually across their shoulders. Bwana and Bear were big, but each one of these men had at least a couple of inches and ten pounds on them. The bruisers in the front of them silently frisked them and led them down the corridor to a suite at the far end.

One of the Uzi-wearing gunmen knocked on the suite and, after precisely six minutes, swung it open and ushered them in.

The suite had a huge living room with floor-to-ceiling glass windows through which they could make out the spire of the Empire State Building. They didn’t have much time to dwell on the view because two more large men appeared and frisked them again silently and took away their phones.

Broker made himself comfortable on a sofa while the others ranged around the room, Bwana positioning himself next to one of the brawlers.

An Oriental girl came from an inner room carrying pots of tea, and went about making tea for them without asking their preference.
He didn’t get to where he was by asking people politely
, thought Broker.

Vasily Oborski made them wait for another half hour before making his entry. Dressed in a tan suit, his middle-aged but very fit form, thick brown hair and a lightly wrinkled face could have easily graced a men’s fashion magazine. The head of the Russian mob in the city seated himself opposite Broker and helped himself to a scone as the girl rushed to pour tea for him.

He regarded Broker over the rim of his cup, the wreaths of steam giving his face an otherworldly look. ‘Long time, Broker,’ he greeted him mildly.

Oborski had never been known to raise his voice.

His father had been sent to a Siberian prison for crimes against the state, leaving six-year-old Vasily to fend for a sick mother and four-year-old sister, in the bitter cold of Kodinsk.

Five years on, the mother had passed away, and the sister had died in a brutal attack by a rapist. Vasily, mature and tough beyond his years, had spent three months hunting the rapist down and one cold morning had left his insides steaming in the snow. Vasily fled Kodinsk when the rapist’s friends turned the heat on him and, after a tortuous journey by cart, farm tractor and truck, reached Moscow.

The journey expanded Vasily’s mind, and while Moscow was three thousand miles from Kodinsk, it was nowhere far enough for him. He roamed the city for a week and finally stowed away in a freight vessel to New York. The city got a new immigrant that year, a battle-hardened criminal, young in years and hardened by the Russian cold. Ten years later he was a gang leader and, thirty years later, was heading the city’s Russian mafia.

Over the years, Oborski had eschewed the crudity of his peers and adopted a refined patina that smoothed his way to the top. The hand was no less iron just because it was in velvet; in fact, it had more of an impact when it was revealed.

Broker had found him heavily bleeding, lying in a restroom cubicle in Penn Station late one night when Oborski was still a gang leader. Shrugging off his jacket, Broker had stripped down to the waist and, tearing his Egyptian cotton shirt to narrow strips, had tightly bound Oborski’s stomach. Knife wounds, he had dimly noted before rushing off to find help. When he had returned, the cubicle was empty save for bloodied footprints that led outside and disappeared in the walkway. It was months before he realized who he had saved.

The Russian mob had its hand in all criminal activities, including arms dealing, but Oborski steered it clear of one: nuclear arms trading. Russian enriched uranium, technical expertise, and nuclear weapons found their way to the underground market, and were highly sought after by rogue states and terrorist organizations. Oborski wasn’t a patriot, he was a businessman, and he realized early on that such arms trading came with too much unwanted attention and had issued a diktat against such trading.

His rule had been broken once, unknown to him.

A few years back, the FBI had intercepted chatter that the Russian Mob had acquired enriched uranium and was in active discussions with a rogue state the US State Department had blacklisted. Clare had sat in the President’s daily briefing and come away with the terse message, ‘Find it. Finish them,’ and had asked Broker to verify the chatter.

Broker had gone with his gut instinct and had orchestrated a highly unusual and clandestine meeting between Clare, the Director of the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence, and Oborski. He still guffawed loudly when he recalled that day, the most powerful law enforcers in the world and one of the most dangerous criminals in the same room.

Oborski, a master at talking obtusely, had asked for twenty-four hours. It didn’t take him that long. Early in the dawn, Broker went to a warehouse where he found a gangbanger bound and gagged and naked. Broker delivered him to Clare, and he was never seen or heard again. Neither was the uranium.

Broker reined in his wandering mind and said simply, ‘I need your help.’

Oborski raised his eyebrows, urging Broker to continue.

‘5Clubs have taken a significant market share from you, haven’t they?’

Oborski placed his cup back in its saucer carefully, aligning the handle to an angle he was satisfied with, and leaned back. ‘Let’s say we were doing better before they arrived on the scene. But tell me about your problem. You are generally solving other people’s problems.’

‘I need to know where Jose Cruz and Diego are.’

Broker saw the flicker in his eyes.
He knows them. You wouldn’t head this outfit if you didn’t know who your competition was.

‘Why?’

Broker grinned widely. ‘Come on, Vasily. We both know how this game is played. Surely you don’t expect me to answer that.’

‘What’s in it for me?’ Oborski asked, ignoring Broker’s disarming grin.

Broker shook his head reprovingly. ‘You’re a businessman, Vasily. What harm does it do you to tell me about your rivals?’

‘Tomorrow, you might ask other gangs about me.’

Broker shrugged. ‘If I have to, I will. If I have to go against you, I will.’ The grin flashed again. ‘I know you’ll be a worthy foe.’

Oborski looked at him long and coolly. ‘You sit in my presence, surrounded by my men, and say that. You’ve some balls, Broker. I’ll grant that.’ He looked over Broker’s shoulder at Bwana, Roger, and Bear, an assessing glance. ‘Those… mishaps 5Clubs are experiencing? That’s your doing?’

‘I just trade information, Vasily, as you know. You give me too much credit.’

Oborski smiled thinly. ‘Maybe they gave you too little.’ He continued regarding him for a long time and then looked at one of the bruisers behind them. The man went across and whispered something in Oborski’s ear, staying bent, awaiting instructions till Oborski nodded once in dismissal.

‘There’s a warehouse in the Meatpacking District. We’ve been watching it for some time, and my men tell me the two you mention have been seen there recently. Seen there a lot. Of course, there’s no saying that they’ll continue to frequent that place.’ He gave them an address, and his face took on the appearance of a lean, hungry wolf. ‘You’ll do damage to them?’

Broker threw up his hands in exasperation. ‘Vasily. Read my lips. I deal in research.’

Vasily brushed his comment away and stood up, the meeting was over.

‘Broker.’

Broker turned as he was just leaving. Vasily was looking at him, something deep and unfathomable in his eyes. ‘You’d make a worthy foe too.’

Chapter 34

‘You have interesting friends, Broker.’ Bear broke the silence on the way down in the elevator. ‘This Oborski… think even we would find it tough to go against him. Yet 5Clubs have encroached their business. Doesn’t figure.’

‘Oborski has rules; this new gang doesn’t. That’s the difference. Eventually their lack of rules will also be their downfall; surviving in a jungle needs rules.’

Broker smiled inwardly while they digested Roger’s take. They were a unique bunch, not just exceptional operatives, but they also brought very high intelligence and reasoning skills to the mix. Roger read philosophy in his spare time while Chloe was a science nut and Bwana and Bear were Mensa members, a fact they guarded more zealously than their weapons.

Bwana looked admiringly at Roger. ‘Always knew it. You’re the complete package, bro. Brawn, beauty
and
brains.’ He ducked the punch Roger threw at him.

The Meatpacking District was a twenty-square block in Manhattan, with Chelsea Market on the North and Horatio Street in the south. In the early twentieth century, the neighborhood had close to two hundred and fifty slaughterhouses and packing plants, which delivered a third of the country’s dressed meat. With the improvement in transportation and distribution, the building of the interstate system, and the decline of shipping in the Hudson, several of the meat-associated businesses moved out to the Bronx or New Jersey, and the neighborhood declined. Neighborhoods don’t die in New York, they transform, and replacing the meat businesses came nightclubs, restaurants, high-end boutiques, and the district got its makeover to become one of the trendiest hoods in the city.

There were still a few meat businesses remaining in the hood, and it was one of those warehouses that Bear and Chloe watched that night. Chloe had glared at Bwana and Broker when they picked up the key to another Chevy and had snatched it from them. ‘Why do
you
get to do all the fun stuff?’