Jerry Kilpatrick entered his ground-floor apartment in Murray Hill near the Empire State Building. He snapped on a lamp that sat on a coffee table beside the worn couch. He moved into the kitchenette and pulled out a beer. He unclipped his holster with the Glock 19 gun in it and dropped it on the coffee table. He sat on the couch, took a swallow of the Budweiser and let his head rest back. It had been a long shift of duty and Jerry was tired. He had a migraine that had started in his temples and got worse. He had been getting a lot of them these days.
He did not hear the small sound behind him.
It had not fully registered with him, but it should have. He knew that most cops had a sense of jeopardy installed in them, but he thought that was just a myth. He had not heard anyone entering his apartment. The front door was locked and latched.
An arm snaked around Jerry’s throat. Before the young detective could even move the intruder had him in a headlock, pressing down tightly against his forehead. Jerry writhed under the choking hold, but he was completely incapacitated. His eyes flicked to the coffee table where his Glock 19 sat in its holster.
McCall said softly: “Don’t even think about it. You’d be dead before you got as far as the end of the couch.”
For emphasis, McCall jammed the headlock tighter. Jerry would lose conscious quickly if he did not ease up on him. McCall noted Jerry’s pale eyebrows, quite startling in the shadows. Another detail that Alexa Kokinas had nailed for him when she had described her attackers.
“I am going to talk to you,” McCall said quietly, “and you’re going to listen. Or I can snap your neck. Your choice.”
Jerry writhed some more, but there was no way of breaking the stranglehold on his throat. He stopped struggling, breathing hard.
“I’m going to ease off on you now,” McCall said, “but you won’t be able to move. If you do, I will tighten the hold and you will pass out. Do you understand? Just nodded if you do.”
Jerry nodded. McCall eased up on the pressure on Jerry’s throat. He made sure the young detective was breathing again. “Deep breaths. Calm your nerves. Can you do that?”
Jerry nodded again. He found his voice, which was raspy with his throat constricted.
“Who the hell are you?”
“No one you would want to know. Here is the part when I talk. I know that you are a police officer at the 16th Precinct in Manhattan. Transferred there maybe six months ago. You come from a long line of Police Officers. Your father was a cop for thirty-six years and your grandfather as well. That is a proud tradition. You were the newest recruit of Frank Macamber’s elite force. But there was nothing elite about them. They are dirty cops who take graft and are dealing drugs and paybacks. But maybe not you. You were along for the ride. Would that be true to say?”
Jerry Kilpatrick did not respond, just listened the sound of McCall’s soft voice, as if he were telling a child a bedtime story. “There was a new recruit who joined your squad. Alexa Kokinas. An attractive, no-sense kind of Peace Officer who followed the rules. She suffered from a handicap that left her virtually deaf, but that did not slow her down at all. She was sassy and spirited and you probably liked her for that. But that did not matter. Frank Macamber had plans for this rookie cop. You and your fellow Officers cornered her in an abandoned warehouse on the Lower East Side and raped her. You left her battered on the floor barely clinging to life. Her partner found her and called for an ambulance that took her to Bellevue. She came out of ICU a couple of days ago. That was where I talked to her. She gave me a description of the Elite as best she could. Which was quite a lot, even though they wore black clothing and had on ski masks. My question to you Jerry is this: Did you rape Officer Alexa Kokinas, or were you there in that warehouse and you allowed it to happen? This is where you can answer.”
McCall knew that young detective was dealing with the guilt and shame he felt. He was also probably intimated by Frank Macamber. Finally Jerry said: “I can’t betray the trust of my fellow Police Officers.”
“I know all about the thin blue line.” McCall told him.“So we will try this again. You need to tell me if you were in that warehouse, wearing a black ski mask, the night that Alexa Kokinas was attacked?”
It took Jerry another moment to answer. McCall increased the pressure on his throat a little, but not too much. Finally the young detective said, his voice barely audible: “I let it happen. There was nothing I could do to stop it.”McCall thought that is was quite an admission for him to make, but it was only his word against McCall’s, nothing that would stand up in court.
But it was a start.
“And you couldn’t go to your Captain at the precinct about the corruption you have witnessed out in the streets.”
“No.”
“Wrong answer, Jerry.” McCall increased the pressure on his throat another notch. “Were you intimated by Frank Macamber?”
“Yes.”
“That was the answer I was hoping to get from you.”
McCall eased off on him. Jerry started to breathe again. McCall said: “Frank Macamber has quite a hold on these cops.”
“He keeps them in line,” Jerry said. “I can’t go against him. Frank talked about you. Robert McCall. He called you ‘The Equalizer’, or some name like that. You are out of your league. Macamber will hunt you down. He will handcuff you and throw you into the back of an unmarked car somewhere in the city and take you out to Long Island. It is a killing ground that Macamber sometimes uses. Even the other cops do not know where it is. He’ll bury you in the gravel pits out there.”
McCall felt that the young detective had been wanting to get that off his chest for a long time. He said: “Macamber might want to do that, but he won’t.”
“Frank won’t let this go.”
“Neither will I. I can deal with him. You have to decide is what you’re going to do about Alexa Kokinas.”
“I know that Officer Kokinas’s career with the NYPD is finished.”
“Not if I have a say in it.”
Jerry looked down at the floor. He shook his head again, anguish clearly in his voice. “I couldn’t stop it.”
“I know that. But this is the decision you have to make. Do the right thing, Jerry.”
McCall did not say anything else. Jerry Kilpatrick waited for him to move away from the couch, but there was no sound. In a sudden rush, Jerry reached out for his Glock 19 in its holster on the coffee table and whirled around.
McCall’s figure was gone.
Jerry leapt up to his feet and ran to his front door. The latch and been lifted off. Jerry opened the door and moved out into the street. There was some light traffic past the Empire State Building and a few pedestrians. There was no sign of McCall. Jerry shut his front door, still with his gun in his hand, moved to the kitchenette and picked up his cell phone. He jabbed at the buttons, then paused. Slowly he disconnected the line. He picked up a bottle of Jim Beam whisky on the kitchen counter and poured himself a stiff drink. He sat back down on the couch. His hands were shaking.
But the words that Robert McCall had said to him had resonated.
On the terrace of the Tangiers Al Havara Hotel, Samantha Gregson had directed the Memento Mori mercenaries at the marble-topped tables to open their folders. Inside were innocuous travel brochures, maps and detailed descriptions.
Samantha said: “Your mission is to infiltrate three ‘concert sites’ in three different countries. The free concerts are being given to raise awareness of the refugee problem throughout the world. All of you will travel to these countries. Each of you will be given impeccable documentation to become part of these events without raising any suspicions. You will be contacted by the terrorists at these rock concerts. That part of the plan was initiated while Matthew Goddard was still alive.”
One of the mercenaries looked up from his travel folder. His name was Jaak Olesk. Samantha knew his reputation was as a merciless killer and she did not trust him. She did not trust any of them, but Jaak Olesk had a way of hooding his eyes that reminded Samantha of a languid cobra. The image sent a shiver down her spine.
She knew she was in the company of dangerous men.
Jaak Olesk asked: “How many innocent civilians will be killed at each venue?”
Samantha did not hesitate with her answer. “Maybe fifteen thousand. Maybe more.”
If Jaak Olesk had a comment on that, he kept it to himself.
Scott Renquist sorted through the various travel brochures in his folder. “Which countries do we travel to?”
Samantha said: “The sites of the rock concerts will be at the Rockwave Festival in Malakasa, Athens, the Terme di Caracalla baths and ruins in Rome and at the Royal Albert Hall in London. It will take a lot of organizing to pull this mission off. I will be meeting with the Taliban in the next three days. All of you will all be traitors to the United States of America if you are caught. Which you will not be. The five of you will walk away with ten million dollars each which will be wired to your bank accounts in the Grand Cayman Islands.”
She had been holding her breath throughout her speech. She needed not have worried. The mercenaries exchanged glances.
They were in.
Sam Kinney came around the reception counter at the Liberty Belle Hotel as soon as McCall walked into the hotel. He grabbed McCall’s hand and steered him around a throng of people who were waiting to check in. Chloe and Lisa, a languid blonde, were handing the weary and fractious mob with aplomb.
Sam said: “Who have you pissed off this time?”
McCall smiled. He was used to Sam’s bombastic moods. “There’s probably a long list.”
“A couple of off-duty cops were in here about 7:00 P.M looking for you.”
That stopped McCall. “How do you know they were off-duty cops?”
“I’m an old spymaster. They had that cop aura about them.”
“What did they look like?”
“The skinny cop had lost most of his hair and squinted a lot. The heavyset cop called him the Rat Catcher. The heavyset cop sweated a lot and kept wiping his face with a handkerchief.”
“They did ask for me specially?”
“They kept a low profile. They hung around here for a while, then they left, but they did go far. They are parked out on 66th Street. What do they want with you?”
“Nothing good. Thanks, Sam.”
“You know I’ve always got your back.”
“What would I do without you?”
“You might live a little longer,” Sam muttered, but the crowd surging in the lobby had swallowed McCall up.
McCall walked out of the Liberty Belle Hotel and hailed a cab. He did not look down the street to where the off-duty caps were sitting in an unmarked Silver Honda parked at the curb. He climbed in and gave the cabbie a destination. The cab pulled away and the Silver Honda followed behind them.
McCall had the cabbie take him down to the garment district on Thirty-First Street. Tall cranes towered into the sky near Penn Station. McCall had the cabbie take a side street and then pull over. He paid him and got out and strode through a narrow alleyway until he was at a construction site. The Silver Honda drove fast down a side street, but it could not turn there and had to go to 30th Street and turn around. By the time the cops had pulled over to where the streets were cordoned off, McCall’s figure had disappeared. Detectives Graves and Rabinski got out and hustled after him.
The site was cordoned off with temporary high fences and barricades. McCall broke the lock off one of the wooden doors and slipped through. A sliver of moon hung in the sky. A six-story building was going up with the framework in place. There was another smaller building under construction next door to it. The construction site was littered with steel pipes, oil/waste drums, mesh lockers, cinder blocks, piles of dirt, huge orange cones and platform ladders. Three huge construction cranes towered into the sky. A backhoe lay beside the first six-story building with a smaller crane. There were two works lights rigged up across at the construction site, but their radiance did not spill into the myriad shadows.
McCall felt like he was entering an intricate maze in the darkness.
He heard the detectives entering the construction site behind him. The cops had drawn their weapons. They split up, giving them a better chance to cover the area they were searching. McCall shook his head. Not a good idea. They were better off staying together. But they were after one man. They had had guns and purpose. They had McCall cornered and there was no help coming for him.
Marvin Rabinski was unnerved by the silence and the sense of dread that had come over him. McCall’s figure was a shadow among the other shadows. He had no shape, no substance, a wraith who merged in and out of the darkness. The moon had gone behind the cloud cover.
When McCall came at him he no idea where he had come from.
McCall slammed a length of pipe against the big detective’s back. He folded up like an accordion. McCall checked to see if he was still breathing. He was, but barely. McCall dragged the big man behind some oil drums. Tom Graves ran from the side of the construction site, but there was no sign of his partner. The Rat Catcher moved closer to the six-story building under construction. All he could hear were the small sounds of traffic around the site.
One of the immense cranes, a hydraulic crawler, swung around almost on top of him. Detective Graves whirled but the boom of the hoist slammed into him, sending him down to the concrete. McCall climbed out of the immense crane and knelt beside him. He was out cold. McCall dragged him over to the oil drums where he had left his partner.
McCall moved back through the overlapping shadows and let himself out of the construction site. He moved back toward Penn Station, dialing his cell phone.
Jimmy was in O’Grady’s Tavern on the Lower East Side. He was sitting at the bar nursing a beer. The place was hopping. The four pool tables were all in use. Jimmy was keeping an eye on a couple of cops that McCall had wanted him to watch. He did not ask why. If McCall had called in the favor, there was a damn good reason. That was good enough for him.
Jimmy could see Detective Frank Macamber in the gilt mirror over the bar. He was shooting pool with one of his detectives attached to the 16th Precinct, Pete Hightower. They were in high spirits. Jimmy’s cell rang in the noisy bar. He picked it up. He looked at the text message, deleted it and wrote a message on the back of a beer coaster. He passed it to the female bartender who was mixing cocktails as fast as the waitresses ordered them. Jimmy had already established a rapport with her, having been in the place several times that week for McCall.
“You know which one of these cops in here is Detective Frank Macamber?” he asked.
The bartender, whose name was Mary Lynn, looked over at the pool table with a sour expression. “Uh huh, I know him.”
“Can you give him this note? Just wait until I have gone, okay?”
Mary Lynn shrugged. “Sure. But you do not want to have anything to do with Detective Macamber, Jimmy.”
“Just delivering a note for a friend.”
Jimmy finished his beer and made his way to the door of the bar and restaurant. He glanced back once and saw that Mary Lynn had gotten one of her waitresses to deliver the note. Jimmy watched Frank Macamber’s reaction.
All of the color had drained out of his face. It was almost white with rage.
Jimmy nodded. Time for him to leave before Macamber had time to look around to see who had delivered the message.
Robert McCall sat down at the bar area at the Liberty Belle Hotel. Sam Kinney immediately put a Glenfiddich in front of him.
“What happened to the two cops?”
“They ran into trouble when they came after me,” McCall said. “I left them in a deserted construction site in Chelsea. The EMT’s were called and transported them to Lennox Hill Hospital with severe headaches. Frank Macamber is going to think twice before he sends any of his Officers after me.”
“What happens now?”
McCall shrugged. “I’ll wait until Macamber plans his next move.”
“Which may be lethal.”
“Possibly, but I don’t think so. I bought myself a little breathing room. One member of the Elite is conflicted about what he has done. I am betting he will get in touch with me.”
“Without Frank Macamber knowing about it?”
“That would be the idea.”
The old Spymaster shook his head. “You’re playing with fire, McCall.”
“I’m trying the save two people’s lives,” he said, quietly. “Alexa Kokinas and Jerry Kirkpatrick. They’re worth the risk.”
“As if you’d ever listen to me,” Sam muttered.
McCall looked at him fondly. “Would I do without you, Sam?”
“You might live a little longer.”
McCall finished his Glenfiddich and got to his feet. “I’ve got a date.”
That brightened Sam up. “With that babe from the Dolls Nightclub? What was her name?”
“Melody.”
“That was it. A voice like spring rain. Marilyn Monroe kind of curves.”
McCall smiled. “She’s a very special girl. But it was not that kind of a date. If any more cops come looking for me, let me know.”
He exited the bar. Sam watched him walk across the lobby toward the hotel doors. “One of these days you’re going to skate a little close to the edge. McCall.”
But McCall had already left the lobby.