Whistler's Angel (11 page)

His father, by then, had also seen Alicia. He came to the holding cell, his eyes cold and distant. His eyes eventually fell on Whistler’s hands. One was
bandaged; one was in a plaster cast.

Quietly, he said, “Adam, never use your fists. Heads, as you now realize, are harder than fists. But many things are harder than heads.”

Whistler glared. “Alicia’s dead.”

“I’m aware of that, Adam.”

“And you want to talk about my hands?”

“No, Adam, the subject is not being foolish. I will leave you to give it some thought.”

His father left him in custody, declined to post bail, and flew back to Europe by himself. While he was in Geneva, and could prove that he was, the brother whom Whistler had hurt the less severely was released from the hospital and vanished. The second brother, whose facial bones he’d shattered, would face months of reconstructive surgery. That one, being kept, was the luckier of the two. A day later, the two drug dealers were found, both suspended from a pipe in their basement. The brother who had vanished was also found dead. He’d been left to bake in the trunk of a car that was parked near the drug dealers’ house.

The police questioned Whistler to ask him what he knew. That was the first that he’d heard of it. They declined to give details of how the drug dealers died, but the newspapers said that the scene was horrific. They had choked
to death after being multilated in a way that was meant to send a message. Whistler could guess what the mutilations were. He guessed that they’d choked on the same body part that they’d used to take their pleasure with Alicia.

The second brother soon vanished as well, but as far as Whistler knew, he might have survived. His wealthy parents had put guards on his room until they could arrange to have him airlifted elsewhere. They went with him, but they wouldn’t have had much to come back to. Their Brentwood home, where those parties had been held, was burned to the ground in their absence.

These reprisals, their brutality, had shocked Whistler at first. Well, not shocked, perhaps, but surprised. Of course he knew who and what his father was by that time, but he’d never known his father to be cruel. He’d once heard his father reprimand an associate for maiming, then killing a man who’d betrayed him. “If you have to kill, kill. Don’t get personal about it. Do it quick, do it clean and be done with it.”

He could not imagine that his father had specified a painful and horrifying death. Not even for what had been done to Alicia. But the twins, who had also watched Alicia grow up, might have had ideas of their own. Donald, especially, had been fond of Alicia. He had built her a dollhouse made entirely of wine corks when she was about eight years old. And as Whistler learned later, leaving people in car trunks was something of a signature of the twins. All this, however, was again just a guess. Neither they nor his father would speak of it again. All his father would say was, “It’s done with.”

Whistler, at the time, was still sitting in a jail cell. He had, as he was sure that his father intended, an incontestable alibi. But he was still charged with felonious assault, with intent to commit grievous harm. Other charges were added. Another assault. An inmate had attacked him while he was in custody; tried to stab him with a prison-made shank. That time, of necessity, Whistler used his feet and he used his plaster cast as a club. He took a few cuts as he went for the man’s knees. He managed to connect and when he had the man down, he crushed the man’s knife hand with his heel.

His father, at last, arranged for his bail. His father said he’d try to get the charges thrown out. The complainant had, after all, disappeared and the jail fight was clearly self-defense. The prosecutor, however, would not let him off, but he had a proposal of his own. If Whistler would enter the military service for an enlistment of not less than three years, all of the charges would be dropped.

Whistler learned, much later, that he could have gotten off. The enlistment condition was his father’s idea. His father had thought that it would help him grow up. He thought that it might also keep him out of harm’s way until the twins, or whomever, cleaned up some loose ends. The attack by that inmate was no jailhouse brawl. The father of the two who raped Alicia had arranged it.

“
Not much of a story
,” he’d told Claudia’s mother. “
One thing leading to another
,” he’d said.

Where it led, at the outset, was him learning how to kill. His father never taught him. The Army did that. It might not have been what his father had intended, but it’s something that the Army does well. If Whistler had to do three years in the service, he decided that he ought to make the most of it. He spent his first year making up his college credits. He considered Officers’
Candidate School, but opted for another kind of education at the Ranger School at Fort Benning. He became an Airborne Ranger. He was in the Gulf War. His team spent three weeks behind Iraqi lines during the chaos of the allied air attacks. His team’s mission was recon until it was ordered to “disrupt the Iraqi chain of command.” In plain English, that meant killing generals.

His team used Iraqi weapons for the task. This was to make the ambush scene appear to be the work of mutinous troops, most of whom were there under duress. The Iraqis, in reprisal, executed whole units that had merely been in the vicinity. That in turn, however, led to hundreds of desertions. They probably saved more lives than they took. That, at least, was what their own general told them.

After that, the Army found other ways to make sure that his training was usefully employed. Several of these involved little foreign wars that the public never heard much about. Some were incursions to extract personnel, but most of them were punitive raids against foreign-based terrorist groups. After that, increasingly, they went after drug barons.

Every branch of the service and many federal agencies had a role in the policy of drug interdiction. Most of these were set up to try to stem the supply. A hopeless task. They made almost no difference. At best, they interdicted one shipment in twenty and many of those shipments were decoys.

The first punitive raids were authorized in response to the murder of government operatives in several of the trafficking countries. Well, not authorized, maybe. Such incursions were illegal. The teams that went in were made up of volunteers. They did what the law could not do. These raids were soon expanded to avenge other murders such as those of reporters and honest officials, and even, in one case, a Catholic Archbishop who’d become an annoyance to the traffickers. There were also raids that were made to appear the work of rival drug factions. The idea of those, as it was in Iraq, was to set them all killing each other.

That butchered family, those photos shown to Claudia, might possibly have been a retaliatory hit that grew out of one of his missions. Kate Geller had told him that the family looked Mexican and he’d certainly done work against the Mexican traffickers. The Mexicans had been known to wipe out whole families
including grandparents and children. But that family, much more likely, had nothing to do with him. Such a slaughter was a punishment that was usually reserved for one of their own who’d informed or had gone over to a rival. The people who did it would take photos and distribute them. If the victim had informed, they would send a copy to whatever competitor had enticed the betrayal. Briggs and Lockwood must have merely taken one from their files. Anyone could dig up a murder scene photo and claim that so and so was responsible.

For a while, what he’d been doing had seemed right and just. His targets were all the most vicious of men and, in one case, a woman who was worse. He felt no ambivalence about it. The missions were exciting, a test of his skills, and the targets that he took out would claim no more victims. Again, as in Iraq, he told himself that he was saving lives in the long run. And by taking out targets who’d been killing too readily, he was sending a message to those who replaced them. In that sense, he served as a deterrent.

But as with interdiction, no lasting good came of it. Drug traffic, if anything, was increasing. The government was not about to admit that its policy of strict prohibition had failed. They looked for other weapons, other punitive measures. They took aim at the wealth of the traffickers. Laws were passed that permitted the wholesale seizure of property that was bought with drug money. Or alleged to have been bought. Or even rumored to have been bought. Although it took Whistler a while to see it, such distinctions were quickly ignored.

The seizure business had become a bonanza. At first it was only the DEA that had statutory forfeiture power. Well…that’s not counting the IRS and Customs. Those agencies had always had that power. But then came the FBI, the FDA, the SEC, the Postal Service, even the Fish and Wildlife Bureau. This was not to mention some 3,000 jurisdictions that set about looking for property to seize. Nor were drug-related gains a requirement. Almost any crime could result in a seizure. That included soliciting a hooker from your car. That’s how some jurisdictions were getting new vehicles. And it’s why so many more female cops were suddenly out working as decoys. This had nothing to do with surpressing vice. It had more to do with the value of your car. If you drove a Ford Pinto, you were safe.

As the seizure business became a major industry, a number of special units were formed. Stanton Poole’s unit, as Whistler understood it, was tasked

to go after “respectable” people who’d amassed their wealth not by trafficking, per se, but either by financing those who did or by helping to launder their profits. Stanton Poole had somehow heard about him and had put in a request for his services. Whistler suddenly found himself transferred.

His father didn’t like the idea from the start. He’d also been saying that enough was enough. His father wanted him to come back to Geneva, take his place in the family business.

“Now it’s a family business? Since when?”

“It will be if you join it. And it’s more than a business. It’s a way of life that answers to no one. I’d have thought that you’d miss it by now.”

Yes, he did. From time to time. Sometimes he did have to answer to people whom his father would have ignored. But in the service, his achievements were his own. He wasn’t just Harry Whistler’s son.

“Adam, what’s it called when your team goes in somewhere?”

“You know what it’s called. It’s called a punitive action.”

“And the British army calls it ‘remedial redress.’ What would it be called if civilians went in?”

“We’ve been through this. I am not an assassin.”

“If it quacks like a duck…never mind, I won’t say it. But Adam, don’t you see what a fine line you’re straddling?”

“An assassin doesn’t care who the target is. I reject far more than I accept.”

“You reject or accept based on what you’re told about them. Don’t assume that you’re always told the truth.”

“Now you’re saying I’ve been lied to. I don’t think so.”

“I’m saying it will happen sooner or later. Tell me about this new unit you’ve started with. You say it’s run by civilians?”

“They’re appointed by the National Security Council. I’m sure they’ve been thoroughly vetted…” He paused. “Unless you know something I don’t.”

“Not at the moment. I’ll look into it, though.”

“Yeah, you will, and then you’ll tell me they’re up to no good and that I’m just a pawn that they’ll use and discard.”

“They will have their own agenda. Can you doubt that?”

“I have mine.”

“If you’re…speaking of Alicia, you must let that go, Adam. I think she’s been sufficiently avenged.”