Текст книги "Greed"

Автор книги: Dan O'Shea

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Six months earlier, he had been begging in the streets when this man walked into the house of the courier who worked for the Arabs who sold the diamonds. He had marched the courier and his wife and his two small children – a boy, maybe four, and a girl who could not yet walk – out into the street. The man made them all kneel there, except for the girl, who started to crawl away. The man shot the girl first, and then the boy, and then the woman. All in the head. And then he shot the man. First in both knees, then in both arms, and then in the stomach. He left the man to die slowly in the street with his dead family around him.

Now, the same man was standing on the cement path in front of the house in this strange city under these strange stars, and Saturday knew the man must have come for him. He could not think why, but why else would this man from Africa be here, with Saturday? The man had not yet seen Saturday in the darkness, but Saturday said, “Wetin mek? Wetin mek?” Why? Why? in Krio. He did not even know he had said it until he heard his own voice on the air. And then the man turned and pulled a pistol from inside his coat, and he shot Saturday.

Lynch was halfway through the people the uniforms had penned up in the next couple of suites. The rich and powerful and their friends, most of them not taking kindly to being detained. Nothing useful from any of them, most of them so self-absorbed that they probably never noticed anything that wasn’t going in or out of their own pockets.

McCord stepped out of the bathroom while the uniform went to fetch the next asshole. “You want the quick and dirty?”

“Sure,” said Lynch. “What’ve you got?”

“Three entrance wounds, small caliber, probably a .22. No exit wounds, so the slugs bounced around inside the skull like lotto balls, figured to puree the brain pretty good. Mob likes to do that, but it’s been on every CSI episode since the dawn of time, so it’s not like it’s a secret. No sign the body’s been moved. Perp made the victim kneel by the toilet and put his head down on the floor, then popped him. Evidence points to pretty much a contact wound, but we got less singeing in the hair than usual, which means something trapped some of the gas, so you’re probably looking at a suppressor. We’ll see what’s left of the slugs when we get him in to the shop, but they’ll be a mess.”

“Suppressors usually don’t work that good,” said Lynch. “Not to where you wouldn’t hear something in the next box.”

McCord shrugged. “With a .22, you can silence it up pretty good, especially if you load shorts. For this kind of work, you’d want shorts. Just enough to punch through the skull, not enough to punch back out again. Game going on, you’d have a fair amount of background noise here. I could see it.”

“Three shots? That over the top at all?”

Another shrug from McCord. “With a .22, you can put a lot of holes in somebody and leave ’em breathing. Better safe than sorry, I guess. What’s a .22 short cost you? A dime, maybe? Not like a little insurance is gonna break the bank.”

“So a pro. You got anything else?”

“Got a shitload of prints in there,” said McCord. “Some from the victim; mess of others. Got at least ten different sets in the can so far, who knows how many out here in the suite. It’ll take a while to sort that out. Have to get prints from whatever guests we can track down, from the staff. Gonna be a hairball.”

“Plus, if we got a pro who can get in and out of here without being seen, has a .22 with a suppressor that actually works, then he’s probably not leaving prints anyway.”

“Probably not,” said McCord. “But we’ll run it out. One other thing that’s a little weird. Stein’s got some kind of dirt rubbed into the right leg of his pants. His suit costs more than my car, so you gotta figure he keeps it clean. Dirt looks fresh. We’ll see what that’s about, just in case. Listen, I’m gonna have to let the techs wrap up here. Somebody popped some guy a couple of blocks west up Madison. Drive-by or something. I’m not gonna get any sleep tonight. You either, from the looks of it.”

“Job security, McCord.”

“Damn straight,” said McCord. “World ain’t ever gonna run out of evil.”

CHAPTER 3

Two days earlier, Dr Mark Heinz rode his horse on his New Mexico ranch, guiding it into the narrow arroyo that led from the higher country down toward the stables next to his home. He had purchased the land five years ago, built his dream house. Every morning, he rode the palomino for an hour, enjoying the early morning, the solitude, the views.

Time to think. He had always been a man of thought.

Today, he thought about whether his conscience should bother him. Well, not his conscience, he supposed. He’d realized long ago that he didn’t have one of those. Not didn’t have, really. Didn’t need. He was a creature of pure intellect and understood that one shouldn’t base ethical reasoning on feelings. One considered the facts of each situation, the causes and effects of each potential course of action, and one acted accordingly. Right or wrong should be the product of thought, not emotion. On the current matter, his thoughts were this:

Yes, the devices he had sold could, and in all likelihood would, result in great harm. And yes, selling those devices, even for the considerable sum he had received, would, by most standard definitions, be considered evil.

But he had invested the early part of his career in defining exactly this evil. In warning against its dangers. And he had been ignored.

And yes, those to whom he had sold the devices were agents of an anachronistic pox on the peace and order of the human society. They had repeatedly demonstrated their implacable intent to impose their horrid, backward barbarism on the rest of the world, to plunge mankind back into superstitious medieval suffering. And how had the world responded to this virulent threat? How had his own country responded? With half measures and the weak will of a society that elevated tolerance and political correctness to the level of policy.

So Heinz had acted for them. With his devices, these barbarians could finally commit an act of such magnitude and horror that the civilized world would have no choice but to respond decisively, in similar magnitude, as it should have long ago. The morally insane leaders who thought it God’s will that they infect the world with their inane philosophies would die, and those few adherents who remained would be so devastated that they would hide and quake in fear for generations.

In the end, Heinz’s act, one that those with no moral courage would consider evil, would preserve a millennium of human progress at the cost of a fraction of the number of human lives that its enemies would take in any event. By that calculus, by virtue of reason, he was not evil. He was a hero, if an anonymous one. And a rich one. Now a very rich one. That he would also profit from saving mankind, no thinking man would call that fault.

The horse shied, startled by something. Heinz sensed motion to his left, turned and saw just a blur of movement, the sense of a man, before he felt the blow to his forehead. Then he was on his back, on the ground. He had no memory of falling, and he was in no real pain, but he felt blood pouring from just under his hairline, down his face, down the sides of his head.

He heard footsteps and looked up.

It was the man who had paid him for the devices the day before. Heinz tried to rise, to turn, but his limbs were sluggish. Was the man after the money? He must know he would never get the money back with Heinz dead, not without the account numbers and the access codes. To ensure the secrecy of his mission? Surely this man and his masters must understand that Heinz could never reveal his actions. He would be jailed as a traitor, enshrined in the pantheon of evil with the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. Heinz was suddenly furious. To kill him? To still his facile mind? This act served no purposed, followed no logic.

But then he realized the flaw in his own argument. He was dealing with ignorant men who were driven not by reason but by fear. As they lived in fear of their own god, they also ruled by fear, acted from fear and sought to kill anything that made them afraid. Now they were afraid of him.

The man grabbed Heinz by the left shoulder and rolled him onto his stomach, and then pulled his head up by the collar of his jacket. Looking down, Heinz could see a large rock, perhaps a foot wide, with a sharp ridge running along its length. Heinz tried to resist, but could only weakly flail his arms. The man dragged Heinz forward positioned his head over the rock and drove it down onto the sharp, jagged edge.

Heinz didn’t think anything after that.

CHAPTER 4

Shamus Fenn sat in his suite at the Peninsula Hotel off Michigan Avenue and slammed another scotch. Just not working anymore; might as well be water. It had started out as a good night. He was in Chicago shooting the next film, Lakers in town; producers got him a courtside seat, so that was cool. And then he’d seen that fucker Hardin.

Goddamn Africa thing a few years back, Mooney and his charity shindig. Last place on earth Fenn had ever planned to go, fucking Darfur. But his publicist had kept riding his ass telling him this thing was sponging up all the press. Fenn was in the running for a couple big roles just then; last thing he needed was to be on the dark side of the moon all of a sudden, so he called Mooney up, said sure, he’d love to help out.

Then he ran into that fucker Hardin.

Leno and Letterman made him their steady punch for weeks after Darfur. The parts he was up for? Nothing. Then the producers on his next picture dropped him, everybody making all the right conciliatory noises, but Fenn knew what it smelled like when they started pushing you downhill. The part went to that Leo Harris punk, kid ten years younger than Fenn. Fucking Harris got an Oscar. Fenn’s goddamn Oscar.

Had to go under the knife for the nose twice, and it still wasn’t right. His agent kept telling him go with it, said it gave him some character. What the fuck did he know? When Fenn went to Darfur, he was People’s reigning Sexiest Man Alive, then his agent starts telling him to go with the Owen Wilson look?

Some scripts that used to come to him first didn’t come to him at all. Finally, a director who’d had a couple of arty films tank on him called Fenn in for a meeting. Guy needed another blockbuster so the studios would keep bankrolling his vanity projects. Fenn had played the lead in the guy’s two big paydays, so the man was reaching out. But the producers had written this anger management shit into Fenn’s contract – Fenn had to go see this shrink, had to get him to sign off that Fenn wasn’t going to bust anybody up.

Fenn figured he was an actor, right? He couldn’t convince some shrink he had his mind right, then he might as well hang it up. But at their first meeting, quack actually said one thing that made sense. Said that what you were angry at wasn’t why you were angry. Said you needed to reach down, find that main hurt and deal with it.

Just like that, Fenn saw a way out. Sat down that night, worked up a whole backstory – how some trusted family friend had abused him as a kid. Ran through the scenes in his head, even had a guy in mind, guy his dad used to know. Did his homework, and the guy had been dead better than a decade, no family left to dispute the story. And the guy’d gotten in some tax evasion trouble in the early Eighties, so nobody had him up for sainthood or anything. Once Fenn was sure he had it down, he dropped it in the session. Some of his best work – crying and furious all at once. Screaming at one point, tossing a chair. Curled up in a ball on the floor blubbering like a baby later. The shrink ate it up. Signed off, but not before priming his own pump, telling Fenn that they should continue therapy, that identifying the cause was just the start. Fenn figured what the fuck; it gets him back to work. So if he’s got to drop a few bills a month in this shrink’s lap, so be it.

Then Fenn’s agent cranked up the PR machine; started leaking the abuse shit to the right contacts, until finally they got the big cover story in the Enquirer – “The Dark Secret Behind Shamus Fenn’s Fury”. So the agent sets up a press conference, Fenn playing the reluctant hero – talking about how he had always been a private man, preferred to keep his business to himself, but then saying, maybe some other kid out there will know he can stand up, maybe some kid won’t let this eat him out from the inside the way it had with Fenn. Then they went on the charm offensive, even did the obligatory weepy gig with Oprah.

Fenn was back on top now. Nothing America liked better than a sinner come to his understanding, especially if you could throw in a little prurient sex in the back-story. Looked like he was finally going to get his Oscar, too. Oprah wasn’t daily anymore, but he had a sit-down with her a couple days back, her pre-Oscar special for that O network of hers. That interview was airing tomorrow. Meant he’d had to slip into his victim persona again, do the child abuse dance one more time. Old hat by now, had that down, even thought he sort of had a handle on the anger management thing.

Then he saw that fucker Hardin heading for the entrance to the luxury boxes. The one thing that had kept Fenn sleeping nights since the Darfur fiasco was knowing he’d fixed Hardin’s wagon. The studio types may not have been real pleased with Fenn after the Darfur thing, but the last thing they needed was this Hardin guy pissing on their parade. So the studios had leaned on the networks and the networks leaned on Hardin. What Fenn had heard, they had dried up that bastard’s pond but good. Fenn figured Hardin was over in some African shithole, begging for scraps. Now here he was in Chicago heading for the luxury boxes. The fucking shrink was right. You had to know what you were angry for, and Fenn was angry that this goddamn Hardin still had him doing the talk-show circuit, pretending he’d let some slimy bastard cornhole him all through junior high, while Hardin was upstairs playing footsie with the high rollers.

Fenn pulled out his cell and called Tony Corsco, mob guy who had consulted on Cal Sag Channel, the Chicago gangster pic Fenn had made maybe ten years back. Fenn got on with Corsco, and Corsco liked hanging with the stars. Helped out where he could, somebody needed a new coke connection or whatever. Hardin was the type of problem Corsco could solve.

CHAPTER 5

It was just past 11pm when Hardin checked into the downtown Hyatt on Wacker. Lots of rooms, lots of people coming and going, lots of exits, and it connected to some pedestrian tunnels. He’d stashed his rental in a huge public garage that stretched for several blocks under the fancy new park along Michigan. Short enough walk to the hotel, and he wouldn’t have to wait on a valet if he needed to get out quick.

Hardin had no illusions. It had been thirty-six hours since he bounced the couriers outside Kenema. He figured four, maybe five hours after that they were late in Freetown, and maybe another couple hours before their Hezbollah contacts had shit their pants. That meant some pretty bad guys had spent at least a day leaning on anybody who knew anything about the blood diamond trade – and those fuckers knew how to lean. Somebody would remember that Hardin had been nosing around. Hardin wouldn’t be the only name on their list, but he’d be on their list by now, so they’d be looking. For $150 million, they’d look hard.

At least he’d seen Stein. Stein set the meet at his luxury box at the Bulls game. Hardin waited until the game was almost over, watching Stein’s box for the crowd to clear out. When the Bulls went up big late and it looked like Stein was alone, Hardin made his way up to the suite.

Stein got up and shook Hardin’s hand as he came in.

“Long time,” Stein said.

“Yeah,” said Hardin.

“So, Hardin now?”

“My képi blanc name,” said Hardin. One of the perks of serving in the Legion – in fact maybe the only perk – was a new identity and French citizenship when you mustered out. Hardin had known Stein from his Marine days, riding shotgun on some weird-smelling Mossad deal in Kuwait (and well up into Iraq, though they weren’t supposed to have been there) just after Gulf War I.

“So, a drink? Some ribs?” Stein had quite a spread.

“Let’s just get to it.” Hardin had eaten breakfast at an IHOP somewhere on the way down from O’Hare earlier and still wasn’t hungry. His stomach was on Africa time, and the IHOP breakfast was more calories than your average African family might eat in a week.

“Straight to business with you, eh? OK, so you got some raw rocks, you got no Kimberley certificates on them, and you want to dump them on somebody who can cut them and get them papered up so they go from being useless gravel to being an actual asset. I’m straight on that?”

Hardin got up and started toward the door. “Didn’t realize I was wasting your time, Stein. Wouldn’t want to saddle you with any useless gravel. Maybe Hezbollah will want to buy them back.”

Stein laughed. “C’mon, Hardin. You really want to play footsie with that crowd, after what you pulled yesterday? I’d hate to fire up YouTube in a week or two and watch a video of you getting your head sawed off.”

Hardin shrugged. “Kimberley certs or not, you know I can find a buyer. And if these things make their way back to Al Qaeda, your buddies in Mossad aren’t going to be pleased with you.”

“Sit, sit,” Stein said, chuckling. “It’s a ballet. I say they’re worthless, you say they’re Solomon’s treasure. I say maybe a little, you say maybe a little more. We eat, we drink, we share the brotherly bonds of commerce–”

“Look, Stein, I was just a working-class kid before I went into the Corps, and I’ve spent that last couple decades bouncing around the less-civilized parts of the world, mostly with journalists. So what social skills I’ve got are rusty at best. I just wanna get this done.”

Stein held up his hands in surrender. “OK, OK. The customer is always right. So what have you got? A couple of ounces?”

“Eighteen.”

Stein’s eyes widened. “Eighteen ounces?”

Hardin nodded. “I would have been happier with two, if that makes you feel any better.”

Stein blew out a long breath. “How am I supposed to move that kind of weight? Dummying up the Kimberley certs on a smaller amount of carats is one thing, but this?”

“I know, OK? But I also know this is how you and your Mossad buddies keep the green out of Al Qaeda’s wallet.”

Stein was still for a minute. “You got a number in mind?”

“At $750 a carat retail? That’s $180 million and change. What I’d heard was you usually go ten percent.”

“I go ten percent when somebody brings me reasonable weight,” Stein said. “I’m gonna need a volume discount on this.”

“I just want my end. Give me a number.”

“Five million,” said Stein.

“You want me to get up and start toward the door again?”

“Ten.”

“Done,” Hardin said.

“You’ve got a sample, of course?”

Hardin had packed most of the stones into a compartment hidden in his bag. He’d left two stones in the canvas pouch he’d taken off the couriers. He handed it to Stein.

The pouch leaked some dirt onto Stein’s pants when he opened it. “Classy presentation,” said Stein, trying to brush off the dirt but just rubbing it in. He gave the stones a quick expert examination. “These representative?”

“Yeah.”

“And you want cash?”

“I don’t want a suitcase of it,” Hardin said. “Wire transfer.” Hardin pulled a slip of paper from the front pocket of his shirt and held it out toward Stein.

Stein shook him off. “A million or two I do out of pocket. Tel Aviv’s good for it. But they’re going to have to front the money this time. You can give me the account number when I get the cash.”

“How long?”

“Be a couple, three days,” said Stein. “How do I get in touch?”

“You don’t,” Hardin said. “Three days. I’ll call you.”

Hardin knew the Hyatt was really just an upper mid-level hotel in the States, but after a couple decades bouncing around the bush, it felt like the Alhambra. He’d been going pretty much nonstop for a day and a half since he hit the courier back in Sierra Leone. Flight from Lungi to Casablanca. Air France from Casablanca to New York, connection from Kennedy to O’Hare, then the meeting with Stein. He took a long, hot shower, made sure all the locks were set, put a chair up next to the door, and crashed.

Hardin woke up just after 9am and flicked on the set while he unpacked. Felt a little funny, his whole life crammed into one duffle. He’d grown up in America, understood the life-is-about-accumulating-shit gestalt, and yet everything he owned was stuffed into a four-foot canvas bag. He tried to think what he’d left behind that he’d miss. Nothing came to him. Well, his guns maybe. Had to leave those behind. So far as Hardin could tell, a nice weapon was the only thing that was easier to get in Ghana than it was here.

He took out his wallet, looked at the picture of the girl. Still had that. But he’d brought that to Africa with him, after the trouble with Hernandez. He thought for a minute about looking her up. Might still be in the area. She’d be forty, thereabouts, married probably, kids probably. And she’d invite him over because she owed him, and he’d come because he owed her. And there would be some husband trying to be the nice-guy host, wondering what this shit was about – or maybe knowing, if she’d told him – and her brother’s ghost in the room the whole time. Then Hardin would leave, and he’d know that picture was a just a picture now, not a possibility anymore. The picture was the only thing he’d brought from Africa he really cared about, so why fuck that up? If a dream is all you’ve got, why piss on it?

Hardin shook his head. Almost fifty and the only real relationship he’d had was with a wallet photo. Enough to make a guy think it was time to re-evaluate his life choices.

The TV droned on in the background; just white noise. Hardin dressed, ready to find some food. Just as he reached for the remote to turn off the set, the local station ran its teaser for the noon news show. Some spunky brunette trying to look serious. “This is Kathy McNally. Stay tuned for more details on the shocking murder of Chicago businessman Abraham Stein at last night’s Bulls game. That story, your Cubs spring training update, and the weekend forecast, all at noon.”

Hardin flicked off the set. Son of a bitch. Somebody’d offed Stein.

Hardin had no idea how Al Qaeda could be onto him this fast.

But maybe they weren’t. Stein had been killed at the stadium, and Hardin had been with him just a minute or two before the game ended. If Al Qaeda was looking for Hardin, why wouldn’t they have killed them both?

Either way, he had to figure his name was working its way up the hit parade. Fuck. This left him sitting on eighteen ounces of stones with no buyer and a short clock.