The Warrior Code (10 page)

He looked uncomprehendingly at the book on the floor.

Book against gun.

His face darkened at the incongruity of it. He snarled and bent to retrieve his gun when the recipe book came flying, hitting him heavily on the forehead.

He lost his footing and fell, swearing unintelligibly as he scrambled for his gun.

Zeb reached him silently, kicked the gun away, and Cargill attacked him.

Cargill sprang at his legs. Zeb sidestepped and kneed him in the nose, which burst. The stream of blood became a river.

Cargill howled and launched his torso at Zeb, followed it with a head butt, which Zeb took on his chest, then wrapped his arms around Zeb tightly, sending both of them crashing backward.

Zeb twisted around and landed on his left shoulder, hitting Cargill between his shoulders with an elbow. He followed it with hammer fists to the temples and, as Cargill’s grip loosened, grabbed his hair and lifted his head. Zeb slapped him with the full weight of his shoulder behind the blow.

Zeb rolled to his feet swiftly and watched Cargill groan and struggle to get to his feet.

He hauled the gangster up by the collar and hurled him across the room at the couch, using the man’s dead weight to build momentum.

The couch rocked back once before settling heavily. Cargill pushed himself to a sitting position and wiped the blood off his face with the sleeve of his jacket.

‘I lost my front teeth, you dumb fuck. Who the hell are you?’ he shouted at Zeb.

Zeb slapped him twice, and the gangster fell back heavily on the couch.

‘I’ll ask the questions,’ Zeb told him mildly. ‘You know who I am?’

‘Who else could you be? You haven’t killed me yet, so you aren’t from the guys who are killing my gang. They sure as hell don’t want to spend time talking shit. You’re the bodyguard,’ Cargill replied sullenly after a while.

‘So you know why I’m here, don’t you?’

Cargill didn’t answer and glowered at Zeb. Zeb slapped him lightly, a blow that was more humiliating than hurtful. Cargill snarled, started to rise off the couch, and settled back heavily, all his breath whooshing out of him, as Zeb’s fist sank in his midriff.

‘We can sit here all night and end up disfiguring you. I might even kill you. I haven’t decided yet. Or you can give me what I want. Like telling me who put you up to grabbing those women? I know it wasn’t your idea. You guys are strictly small time.’ Zeb used the same mild tone he had used earlier.

Cargill thought about not replying but reconsidered when he felt Zeb’s dark eyes heavy on him.

‘I don’t know who the fuck they were, man. They contacted us through a cutout we have in Chicago. That cutout put good business our way when we had to move some product we had to other states. This guy told us that there was this heavy gang who wanted some girls grabbed quickly.’

‘So who are they?’

‘How the fuck would I know, man?’ Cargill whined. His bleeding had stopped, leaving the lower half of his face caked in red. ‘I never met them. I just spoke a few times to one of them. The cutout said a guy named John would contact me and give me further instructions. All this happened about five days or a week back. John, you can bet that’s not his real name, contacted me a day later and said he was arranging for a ten-percent payment and photographs of the women and where they were staying in Jackson.’

Cargill touched his lips and nose gingerly, felt his teeth with his tongue. ‘Prick, you’ve ruined my face.’ He jerked back when Zeb lifted a hand, relaxed when Zeb didn’t follow through.

‘I got a package with the cash, with the photographs of those cunts–’ He broke off and shrieked when Zeb applied force on a nerve point on his neck.

He sobbed in pain and rage when Zeb removed his hand.

‘Women,’ Zeb said mildly. ‘Don’t use any other word.’

He waited for a response and, when none came, stretched his hand.

‘Yes. Fucking hell yes, you freak,’ Cargill cried.

‘So you got the cash and the photographs,’ Zeb prompted him.

‘I got my team together in Jackson – I have a few people there always. They spotted the women, overheard them saying they would be heading to the park, and we decided to lift them there. It would be easier.’ Cargill sobbed through his pain. His breathing was loud and harsh in the silence of the room.

‘But that bi–’ He stopped himself in time when he saw Zeb’s eyes. ‘That Petersen girl gave us the slip, killed Bryce, and since then my life has turned to shit.’ Realization dawned in his eyes. ‘It was you who shot Bryce, wasn’t it? You’ve been with the women all along.’

Not all along
, Zeb thought, but didn’t bother to correct him. ‘How do you contact this John?’

He shook his head and winced as the movement sent a lance of pain through him. ‘Dude, you don’t get it. I don’t have a number for this John fucker. He contacts me, I don’t. He called me a few days back and said he didn’t like failures. I didn’t know what that meant. Next thing I know, Perez is dead and my other guys have disappeared. I’m sure they’re in some concrete mixer somewhere.’

‘I called the cutout, and he just said I was dead meat. I told him there was nothing I could reveal about John, and he said that didn’t matter. I checked in this place as soon as that call ended. And what do I find? You on my tail too!’

Zeb’s fingers itched as he considered taking his gun out and plugging the gangster as he heard his cry-me-a-river lament.
He’ll either be killed by those other guys, or the cops will get him.

He turned to leave when Cargill started laughing, a half-sobbing, half-guffaw sound that Zeb didn’t recognize initially.

Zeb’s look made Cargill laugh harder. ‘You stupid prick, you still don’t get it, do you?’

Which was the wrong reaction from a gangster who could soon be dead. Which meant–

Zeb leapt over Cargill’s head and dived behind the couch.

Just as the apartment door broke down.

Chapter 11

Three masked men rushed in, firing long bursts. They stood at the door and swept the room with their weapons.

They ducked suddenly and took a step back through the door as they encountered return fire from the corners of the room just as the apartment turned dark. The sounds of bullets whistling in the air, crashing into the walls and furniture, and breaking the windows filled the air.

A blast swept through the room as the wall-to-ceiling windows shattered, and through the darkness, a shadow detached itself from behind the couch and leapt outside in the dumbstruck night.

Zeb had known he could be stepping into a trap, since Cargill was the only remaining link to the UG, Unidentified Gang. That the gang leader was still alive while the rest of his gang had turned up dead or disappeared had registered on Broker and Zeb’s radar.

He had discussed various exit options with Broker and had rejected all of them. The apartment block had a fire escape and a freight elevator, but those ran into dead-ends. Not ideal for getaways, but he still mounted wireless cameras at their exits. The cameras fed to a storage disk in his SUV.

‘You remember the time my apartment got trashed?’ Broker had asked him finally, once they had run through all their escape ideas.

Zeb’s mind flashed back to the time when a New York crime gang had overpowered Broker and the rest of Zeb’s team and were on the verge of executing them. A masked man had rappelled down Broker’s apartment building and had detonated the glass windows to enable his entry. The detonation and unexpected entry point had provided the shock and surprise element that led to the taking down of the gang. The masked man had used the same abseiling gear for his exit.

Once he had surveyed Cargill’s apartment, he headed to the roof, secured one end of an abseiling rope to the air-conditioning unit, and let the other end, weighted with lead, drop to the street three hundred feet below.

He then returned to the apartment and placed radio-controlled, miniature, shaped-charge detonators at strategic points on the windows.

He expected the UG to come in hard, firing, maybe even tossing in a flash-bang. He could fire back at them, but he wanted them alive.

He looked around inside the apartment.
I can still ‘fire’ at them
.

He reached into his backpack and withdrew a couple of remote-controlled audio playback devices, selected audio files on them, audio files that were recordings of live gunfire in an apartment, and placed them in two corners of the room.

He had constructed the devices himself and had several recordings on them. Broker had whistled when he’d seen his devices. ‘These gizmos rival the best sound effects I’ve come across in Hollywood.’

His exit route was ready.

Zeb leapt in the night, his left hand outstretched, reaching out for the abseiling rope, which was a foot and a half away. He got a palm across it, pulled his body to the rope, and slithered down rapidly, his specially treated gloves protecting his palms from rope burn.

There was chaos on the street below, throngs of spectators crowding out the vehicle traffic. In the distance was the ever-rising scream of sirens. Some of the watchers were helping people streaming out of the apartment to relative safety. Some others handed out blankets from their cars. Zeb could see at least one coffee flask being passed around in the throng.

He landed in a small pocket of people.

‘Police. Give way,’ he roared in his command voice, and people fell away from him. It usually worked. Other than a few startled exclamations, no one reached a hand out to stop the masked man clad in black.

He ran behind the building and, once he was under cover, swiftly unzipped his jacket, turned it inside out, stuffed his gloves and mask deep inside, and zipped it back up again. The jacket now sported red and blue colors and featured the logo of a popular sportswear brand.

He completed the loop of the building and joined the throng of spectators, two minutes after he had leapt out in the night.

He took out his phone and aimed it at the entrance of the building and started recording.

Two minutes to remove their masks, wipe their weapons clean, throw them away or bag them, and tidy themselves up. Four minutes to run down the stairs. Stairs not the elevators. Elevators would be crowded. Someone might remember them. Someone might smell gun smoke around them. Six to eight minutes to exit the building, acting like terrified residents, and disappear in the night. Cops will take a couple of minutes more to come to the block, by then they will have gone.

The building continued disgorging its residents for a full half hour. There weren’t many men who matched the build of the attackers and fewer who wore dark clothing. About ten of them. Of the ten, half were high probables. There was something about the way those five moved.

Zeb recorded them all and slipped away in the darkness to his ride.

Once inside his SUV, he reached behind and detached a miniature camera he had attached to the window. The camera – a high-resolution, high-zoom one that could ‘see’ through dark windows – had been recording the entrance of the block all day long.

He stuffed the camera in his backpack, wiped the interiors clean, and exited swiftly.

He had a feeling the cops would be taking a healthy interest in all vehicles parked within a radius of half a mile from the block. He hiked a couple of miles to the bus station, where he spent the night on a bench, and in the morning, walked back to the city and rented a room in a high-end hotel.

‘Way to go, Zeb,’ Broker greeted him cheerfully when Zeb called him on their secure Internet voice and messaging service. He could see Broker on his webcam.

Broker’s shoulder-length blond hair, rugged looks and tall, lean physique did not fit the perception most people had when they thought
intelligence analyst
. He liked his clothes and shoes, and even now, at home in his office-apartment, he was attired in a blinding white Egyptian cotton shirt over khaki slacks. A dark brown leather belt around his waist complemented his attire.
Handmade
, Zeb thought.

Broker went to his Jura, filled his cup, and toasted Zeb silently when he approached his laptop.

‘Discretion, Zeb. A quick entry and a silent exit. We agreed on that, didn’t we?’ he chided Zeb.

Zeb ignored him. ‘Fill me in. What’ve the cops got?’

‘They’ve got jack so far. An apartment that’s junked, a landlord who’s desperately unhappy, a mayor who’s screaming blue murder, some vague descriptions of guys going in. And one dead Cargill. They aren’t unhappy about that development, but of course, they can’t advertise that.’

‘Cameras?’

‘Zilch again. Cameras in the dead-ends didn’t pick up anything. Cameras in the lobby or elevators weren’t working today. Some kind of network issue.’

‘You didn’t?’

‘Nope. If they were down because someone tampered with them, must have been the UG. I don’t tamper with third-party security cameras,’ Broker said piously. Those who didn’t know him would have believed him.

‘So what’ve
you
got?’ he asked Zeb.

Zeb updated him rapidly. ‘Check your mail.’

‘Got it,’ Broker said after a pause. ‘I’ll run all those faces against a tenant list I’ve got for the block. That’ll narrow it down, and I’ll run the rest of the males in a facial recognition program I’ve been toying with. It isn’t perfect, but with some luck, we might get somewhere.’

‘Let’s hunt the cutout too.’

‘On it already. There are ten Chicago numbers that I’m checking out. I got those numbers by hacking into Cargill’s phone records. There are many other numbers he called, but those ten are in the timeline. I’ve already got a few probables, but will be able to narrow it down further very soon.’

‘What if the cutout never met the UG?’

‘Not possible,’ Broker said immediately. ‘These fuckers take jobs only from known people. This middleman either knows the UG or knows someone who does.’

Zeb stayed one more day in the hotel and then hired a car and headed back to Jackson.

‘Krone,’ Broker shouted in his ear.