Chapter 40

The shooter pumped two into Isakson, shifted slightly, and put another three into Rolando.

As Broker and the others dived, reaching for their guns, they were hit from behind by bellboys coming out of hiding, Tasering them to the role of helpless spectators. Bwana and Bear resisted longer, their big bodies absorbing the shock and weathering it, and just as their hands neared their guns, they were felled, the stock of a M16 crashing in their heads.

Bwana’s vision dimmed, and just before he faded into darkness, he saw the doorman, a narrow- faced man, teeth bared viciously, slashing down on Chloe.

He came to when his head banged against the side of the truck they were dumped in, jouncing on country roads. He lay still, and ran a mental check – his wrists and feet were cuffed, wrists behind his back, his head hurt, but nothing was broken. He raised his head and met Roger’s look.

‘How long have I been out?’ He tested his wrists and ankles and found no give.

Roger shrugged. ‘Woke up myself just seconds ago.’ The others stirred at the voices and raised themselves awkwardly, supporting themselves against the sides.

‘We’re in deep shit,’ Broker croaked, cleared his throat, and continued. ‘How did that happen?’

He answered his own question before the others could. ‘They must have followed Isakson or Rolando, and must have had some kind of bug on him or his vehicle.’ He thought for a while. ‘That was some organization at the hotel. They must have had gunmen inside keeping everyone at bay, and a rapid switch of personnel to give us the warm welcome.’

‘What about Isakson and Rolando?’ Chloe asked.

Bear’s voice was low and savage. ‘It’s likely they’re both dead. The shooter was just a few feet away from them.’

Roger smiled grimly. ‘Let’s focus on the here and now, else we won’t be around to figure out how they did it.’ He nodded at the truck they were in. ‘Middle-of-the-road Ford series, not new, suspension could do with a replacement, but sturdy. We won’t have much luck breaking through the floorboards. Any of you have any blades on you? Anything to cut through the plastic?’

They all shook their heads; the hoods had cleaned them when they were out.

The truck was bare, a thick rubber sheet between them and the floorboards, the side walls bereft of any upholstery, just metal covered by black rubber sheets running from floor to roof.

‘It’s to carry bodies.’ Broker divined Bear’s thoughts as he looked around inside. ‘The rubber sheets are easy to wash, also absorb any sound.’ He had to shout over the truck’s rumbling over the country roads.

Bear grunted, rolled around to have his feet against the wall, and kicked with both feet. He slid a foot back, colliding into Roger, the rubber beneath them slick with sweat, his feet losing purchase on the walls.

Roger rolled to lay beside him, joined by Bwana, Chloe and Broker lying at their heads, perpendicular to act as a stopper, and on the count of three, they all kicked.

After half an hour of vigorous kicking, the rubber and the side wall continued to mock them, the jostling of the truck robbing the power of their blows. In frustration, Bwana sat up and half crouched, looking for any sharp edges on the roof.

The truck swerved suddenly, throwing him on top of the others, and by the time he had rolled off them, the rear doors were jerked open.

They peered out and, against the dark sky, saw the barrels of automatic rifles appear first; then two dark shapes appeared, roughly hauled them out, and dumped them on the ground. They rolled over to absorb the impact and struggled to their feet.

They were in a small clearing surrounded by dense woods, with the tiniest patch of sky looking down on them, the cold light of the stars offering little comfort to them. Harriman Park. If we have to die here, it’ll be with the sky above my head, Bwana thought.

The two figures were joined by three others, all heavily armed, standing in front of them in a loose curve.

‘Why have you–’ Broker began and fell back as one of the men swung his rifle, hitting him on the side of the head. Broker, sensing the blow, turned along with it, softening the blow, but it was still hard enough to split his temple and bring him down.

He coughed, shook his head, a thin stream of blood flowing darkly down his face, slowly got to his feet, swayed and steadied.

‘Not in the face,’ came a calm, pleasant voice. Hamm stepped forward from the group and looked at them pityingly.

‘A good run while it lasted… and you caused us heavy losses.’

Broker’s heavy breathing broke the silence.

‘We found Cruz and Diego, severely tortured, dead, of course. By the time we found their bodies, the Russians had attacked and taken over a lot of our stashes. I guess you guys are responsible for that too.

‘No brave words from you guys? No pleading? Nothing? I guess when you’re facing death, you’re no different to anyone else.’

He came closer, a victor inspecting his spoils.

‘Now this one, maybe we won’t kill. We need some entertainment.’ He pointed his gun at Chloe.

Bear and Bwana launched themselves horizontally, their shoulders aiming for him, and fell heavily as Hamm took a long step back and two men clubbed them down hard. They crawled to their feet and fell again as the two again clubbed them between the shoulders.

They lay there for a while and then struggled to their feet, this time untouched, and then heard a heavy blow, and Roger fell gasping.

Roger had been moving to the right, inching away from them, but the hitters had seen his move and clubbed him.

‘The Warriors,’ Hamm mocked them, ‘reduced to this. You must be wondering why I want your faces intact.’

‘Not hard to figure out, asshole. You want us to be recognized,’ Bear snarled.

Hamm held a hand up to halt the advancing hitter, and nodded.

‘Why here? Why not in the city?’ Broker asked him in genuine curiosity.

‘This is my killing ground. I like my kills in the open.’ Hamm shrugged. ‘Enough talking. I have a chapter to run.’

He stepped back and raised his gun, pointing first at Bwana.

Bwana stared back at him, relaxing his body. This was always going to come one day. We weren’t meant to die in our beds.

Hamm sighted at him, his finger tightening on the trigger.

His body flopped to the ground as a bullet took his head out like a watermelon.

Before realization had set in, another hitter fell forward, then a third and a fourth. The last turned around, spraying blindly in the dark. His body jerked twice, and he fell and twitched a last time.

Silence fell in the woods, a deep silence that swallowed thought and logic, broken by Bwana’s deep sigh.

‘Guess that memo of yours reached an angel,’ he told Broker.

Broker held his hand up, gesturing him to be quiet, but they heard nothing, saw nothing. The tree line was thirty feet away, the trees tall and dense enough to hide an army in the dark. The shots could have come from anywhere, but Bwana worked out angles from how the bodies lay, and looked high and to his right.

He saw nothing and hadn’t expected to see anything. They hadn’t heard the shots, so not only was the shooter using a suppressor, he was a distance away.

He glanced at them and saw they were looking at him expectantly. He shook his head. ‘Too dark, too far.’

He grinned, his teeth flashing white in the night. ‘Looks like our time has not yet come. Maybe hell is too full, or even they’ve rejected us. There’s still time for me to land a girl.’

They waited in silence for another twenty minutes, but their rescuer hadn’t lost his shyness.

Chloe sagged against Bear, the adrenaline leaving her in a rush, her brain giving up processing their survival. ‘Is it him?’

‘Who knows? But who else could it be?’

Roger hopped to Hamm’s body and knelt beside it. ‘I don’t know about you guys, but a return to the city and a warm shower sounds great to me.’

They joined him, two of them turning the bodies over, the remaining searching the bodies for a knife, any sharp edge to cut through the ties. An hour of grunting later, they stood panting, flexing their wrists and ankles. Roger checked Broker’s head and temple, which was caked with blood, thin drops sliding down his face, parted the hair to see a horizontal gash, not deep enough to cause any damage, but would get infected if unattended.

They washed his face with a can of water they found in the truck, bandaged it using strips made from tearing Bear’s shirt, pocketed the phones and guns they found on the hitters, and set out on the rutted road back to the city. 

Bwana and Roger, having been to the forest several times, guided Broker back to the highway, where they joined the rush to the city, a magnet sucking up surrounding traffic.

‘Loads of numbers on this.’ Chloe looked up from Hamm’s phone. ‘It doesn’t have any names in the directory, just initials, and there aren’t many of them. There are several numbers in the recent call history.’ She frowned at Bear. ‘Make any sense to you?’ She thrust the phone at him.

Bear studied it and saw a pattern of incoming calls from a number, followed by one or two outgoing calls to that number, repeated every two days with a new originating number. He looked at the growing dawn, the traffic falling silently behind them as Broker cut a swathe through it.

‘Disposable numbers. They probably buy a batch and change the number regularly. Hamm knows the new number only when he gets a call. They probably have some rule about the number of calls made to the number.’

‘Has to be Scheafer. No one else would be this paranoid.’

‘Why can’t it be the mole?’ Roger argued.

‘It could,’ Broker replied, ‘but Scheafer is a control freak, and I would be surprised if his chapter heads had direct contact with the rat. Is there any number that looks like one of those messaging numbers?’

Bear read it off and got a nod from Broker. ‘Sounds like the number we got off the gangbangers in Arizona.’

A thought struck him. ‘How long ago was the last incoming call?’

‘Eight hours back. No other calls since then.’ Bear went through the text message folder and found it empty.

Broker turned on the radio, searched for a station, gave up and growled at Bwana, ‘Find a news station.’

They listened to the bulletins in silence, getting Broker’s drift. ‘Nothing. The cops must have hushed up the takedown. Now the million-dollar question is, will he call?’

No call came by the time they approached Central Park.

Broker used a hitter’s phone to call Pizaka. ‘Yes, obviously I’m alive,’ he replied, rolling his eyes. ‘Isakson, Rolando?’

‘That bad?’ We’ll be there in forty minutes.’

‘Fucker didn’t want to say anything about those two.’ He honked savagely at a trucker that cut in ahead of him. He overtook him and stuck his finger out, flooring the gas. ‘Says we should meet for a debrief. As if we were planning to fucking disappear in thin air. We called him, for crissakes.’

Bwana met the eyes of the others in the mirror and winked. Broker’s high regard for law enforcement, especially those who insisted on going by the book, was legendary.

One PP was crawling with cops when they arrived, many of them pushing paper, killing time, to have a look at them. Pizaka met them, his eyes going over them swiftly, lingering on the strips around Broker’s head. ‘You want to tidy up?’

They shook their heads impatiently, wanting to know the condition of the cop and the FBI man. Pizaka led the way to a conference room, which had three other occupants. Chang rose, greeted them, and introduced them to the other two.

Commissioner Forzini and Director Murphy looked like they hadn’t slept for a while. Sleep was a luxury they couldn’t afford, not when their respective number two men had been shot by a gang.

‘Tell us,’ Broker demanded, waving away their enquiries.

Forzini looked at Murphy, giving him the lead. ‘Isakson took two in the shoulder. He’s come out of surgery and should recover. Fully.

‘Rolando was less lucky. The three shots he took; one missed his heart, the other two went through his lung. He too was operated on; the doctors have done all that they could. Now it’s down to him, his body, his mind. He has a fighting chance, they say.’

Bwana’s eyes were on Forzini’s fists as he spoke, opening and clenching, his steady voice not masking his rage.

‘Why did you hush up the attack?’

‘We didn’t, but we didn’t share all the details either. The media and the public know there was a gang attack in a hotel. What they don’t know is who was involved, and we have managed to control that. Luckily no guest or onlooker was able to see what went down exactly. We were hoping you guys would perform a miracle and get back alive…’ Murphy replied. Murphy had come through the ranks, starting his career as a field agent, and little fazed him, but even he couldn’t conceal his pain and anger.

‘Lay it all out for us,’ he commanded.

Broker laid it out for them, Pizaka and Chang making extensive notes as he elaborated, stopping him several times, getting him to repeat.

He didn’t tell them everything.

They had come up with a plausible escape story, embellishing and glossing over some details on their way back, the least they could do to keep the ghost invisible. He saw Pizaka’s and Chang’s eyes go over them, assessing them, as he described how Bwana and Roger had launched themselves at their captors as soon as the truck doors had opened, and in the scuffle, Bear and Chloe had slipped out and overpowered the remaining. They were all martial arts experts in various disciplines – Broker wasn’t, he regarded himself as a gray matter expert – and their story held.

‘We’ll want to take separate statements from all of you.’ Pizaka’s shades tilted at them.

‘The shooter is dead?’ Forzini asked hopefully, his lips twisting briefly in a grim smile when Broker nodded.

‘Bodies are in the van in the parking lot below.’

Forzini looked at Chang, Broker tossed the keys to him, and once he’d left, Broker asked the Commissioner, ‘How did they do it?’

‘The gang probably owns the hotel through a shell company, to launder their money. We’re still sifting through the chain of ownership. They closed down the lobby and reception for the day on the pretext of a film shoot, and then it was like stealing candy from a child. We’ve taken the manager and other staff into custody and are questioning them, but we doubt any of them are involved.’

‘We suspected something like that might have happened, but how did they organize themselves so quickly? How did they know we were going there?’

Murphy sighed heavily. ‘Something we’ve been debating. We think they had a tail on Isakson, a tail so good that he didn’t spot it – remember these guys were the gang’s A-team. They could’ve had a bug on Isakson’s ride, but we took it apart and didn’t find it. The FBI vehicles are searched every day, so a bug is unlikely. Our money is on a tail.’

‘They might also be watching this place, and if they are, they’ll know you guys are back,’ Pizaka added.

Broker thought about the phone in his pocket and the possibility of a call and shook his head. ‘We thought about that too. But if they know we’ve been taken, it’s unlikely they’ll waste any gangbanger on any more surveillance.’

They fell silent as Chang re-entered the room, nodding at the Commissioner.

‘What exactly are you guys working on?’ Pizaka couldn’t direct this question to Director Murphy, so he smartly addressed it to Broker.

‘Need to know. Way above your pay grade,’ Broker growled, deliberately insulting him, telling him to shut up in his inimitable way.

Murphy scribbled something on his notepad and tilted it for Forzini to read, who nodded silently.

‘Tell them,’ Murphy looked at Broker. ‘Forzini should know.’

Broker launched into a second narrative, this time shorter, keeping many of the principals out of the picture, and gave them time to digest it, knowing exactly what the next question would be and who from.

Pizaka didn’t disappoint him.

‘This has worked?’

He looked at Murphy and got a nod in assent. He met Murphy’s gaze and recounted everything, right from the events in Arizona. He felt Chloe, sitting beside him, tense minutely and relax. I’ve held back mentioning the messaging system described by Shattner, and she noticed it. Until we know who the mole is, that bit is not becoming public knowledge.

‘We narrowed the thirty names to a smaller set, and then we found an anomaly. An agent whose pattern changed ever since he was working on this case.’

‘Who?’ Murphy had gone still, his eyes fierce and hard.

‘Floyd Wheat.’ Broker explained his habits and how they correlated to the dud busts.

‘These guys’ – nodding at Bwana and Roger – ‘were heading to the café when they were attacked. They got out of that jam, and then when Isakson told us about this ice deal, we put the café on hold to see how this deal panned out.’

‘We busted that deal, though.’ Chang being Mr. Obvious.

‘Yeah. But Wheat didn’t know you were planning to. He’s been away for a month due to some knee injury and has been cut off from the information flow.’

Broker could see the Director writing Wheat’s name on his pad, his pen digging deep in the paper, willing it to reach out and hurt him.

There was warm appreciation in his eyes when he’d composed himself. ‘Clare said she’d trust you with her life. Or her career. Now I know why.’ He nodded at himself. ‘Now we’ll get the bastard. We’ll pick this thread from here and tear him and his life apart.’

Chloe tapped her watch, looking at Broker. He brought out Hamm’s phone and placed it on the table. ‘There’s more,’ he said.

 

The call came an hour later, this time from another mobile number.

Broker put it on speaker and held the phone up for the NYPD geeks to note the number and start tracing it.

There was silence from the caller, dead silence, not even breathing. Broker allowed the silence to last for a minute before breaking it. ‘Yo, Scheafer, this is your friendly neighborhood Broker. I guess you’ve heard of me. You know this go-silent thing of yours was aped by Hamm. You must’ve been a real hero to him. Yeah, that’s right. Hamm was, not is. Guy’s rotting away in a NYPD morgue now. Overrated if you ask me. Oh, that was a neat trick at the hotel, but here we still are, and there he is.’

The silence continued. He looked at the tech guys, and they shook their head.

‘You’re down now how many chapter heads? Two, right? And the Russians are taking back territory. Didn’t Hamm tell you there was an easy way to end this? Just tell us who your inside guy is.’

Scheafer hung up.

‘Got anything?’ Forzini barked at his men.

They shook their heads in frustration. ‘One of those voice over IP calls.’

Forzini pounded the table in anger.

‘We’ve enough to crack this now,’ Murphy said mildly, calming him, knowing Forzini’s desire to strike back.

‘Director, did Isakson discuss the other matter with you?’ Broker asked Murphy softly.

‘Rocka and the kids?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘That’ll be taken care of,’ Murphy said, and Broker sighed in relief inside. They had demanded that Elaine Rocka and her wards be placed in witness protection and the damage to her house be compensated. ‘The danger to her doesn’t go away even after we nail the mole. The gang could come after them. New identities and a new start for them is the least you can do,’ he’d told Isakson.

‘What now for you guys?’ Murphy asked them a few hours later after they’d finished with Chang and Pizaka.

‘We’ll use our powers of persuasion on Scheafer.’

‘Broker.’ The Commissioner’s voice rang out as they headed out. Broker turned, saw Forzini glance at his companions, gave a slight nod to them, and stepped forward, walking alongside him deeper in the building.

‘Rolando’s a good friend of yours?’ Forzini asked him, fully knowing his answer. ‘I’m godfather to his daughter. Lovely girl, going to Stanford this year. His wife makes the best pasta, but don’t tell my better half.’

Broker kept silent, letting him take his time, form his words.

‘Pizaka and Chang are good cops. They know how modern policing works. They’ll go far.’ He stopped, looking up and down the corridor they were in, empty but for them. He placed a hand on Broker’s shoulder, a hand that had turned to a fist earlier. ‘Me, deep down, I’m old school.’ He looked searchingly in Broker’s eyes, nodded once, and walked away.

‘What?’ the others asked when Broker joined them.

‘We got carte blanche.’