Red rain 2.0 (35 page)

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"Tomorrow Annie's going to give you hers. Set it up so it's private, okay? Watch for tails."

"Can do. No problem."

"Day after tomorrow, can you catch a nine-thirty
a.m.
Metroliner out of Baltimore and get off in Philadelphia, with the packages in a duffle?"

"Yeah, sure."

"I'll find you there. I'll take the duffle, you take the next train back to Baltimore. Right?"

"Yeah, sure."

"You don't sound pleased. I'm hearing a definite lack of enthusiasm, big man."

"Hey, you were the best partner I ever had, so get fucked, all right? I'll be there. Just make sure you are too."

IB's there. We don't meet in the cavernous main hall of the station, with its hundred-foot-high ceiling and ornate arches and moldings. I catch him in the bowels below, on a half-lit platform, people hurrying for the stairs and escalators to get out of this claustrophobic place and up into the airy, bright hall.

IB carefully puts two black ballistic nylon packs down on the concrete at my feet, standing real close and looking hard at my eyes.

"Got a hinky feeling here, Five-O," he says. "Not liking what I think you're heading into."

"Just a little thing that's got to be done. No problems," I say, grinning. IB only scowls.

"That's what I figured. Means it's bad. Means you're going to be violating our oath. Oh, fuck the oath. What you got in mind just ain't right, man. It violates the whole reason we became cops."

"Maybe the reason you became a cop."

"So Five-O's above all that do right, do good shit, huh?" He's pissed now.

"No."

"Then what? What?"

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"I'm not up to it, IB. Psychologically. Morally. You're a great cop. I never was, never will be. I'm a mechanic, man. Good at just one thing."

"Fuck that, Luther," IB says. "Shit, I can't decide to go with you and watch your back, or arrest your skinny ass right here. I just know I got probable cause—those rucking bags."

"You can't do either. You know that. You know what you got to do. Get on back to Baltimore. Get home to MJ and the twins. If you absolutely can't keep from brooding about any of this, think what my poppa always said about shit happening in Nam."

"What's that?"

" 'Don't mean nothing. Walk on.' Just walk on, IB. I'll catch you later."

I take the bags, lope up the stairs into the hall, scoot down others to another platform, and in a little while catch a train to New York. Back at my hotel by midafternoon. I open up the bags, slit open the UPS packages, spread every item out on the chenille bedspread. Take a tally. It matches my list, not one damn thing missing. Even a little extra something I hadn't thought of, but JoeBoy was sharp enough to remember. In an orange plastic prescription vial, one crunchy— what we called the cyanide capsule we carried on missions, just in case we got captured and things got too bad to bear.

I'm cruising along Brighton Boulevard very late the next night, wearing the blue windbreaker with the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head. I'm real good to go, now. Clear and cold. I'll haunt the Palace night after night if I have to. But I won't, 'cause I got unbelievable luck, I got magic Comanche medicine on my side. The silver Mercedes is parked in front of the blue steel door. Ten paces away, hands in the kangaroo pocket of the sweatshirt, I syringe five-minute epoxy onto a palm-size slab of titanium. I stop when I reach the Merc, lean against the right rear side panel, facing the Palace. Immediately I hear the driver's door open. I

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turn, as I do slipping the slab tight up inside the rear wheel-well with my right hand. The driver never catches the move, he can only see me from the waist up as he comes around the car. "Get the fuck away, slob," he growls.

"I'm not touching your pretty car, man," I say. Then, when he keeps coming as if he wants to play muscle boy, I switch to Russian. "You better be carrying something very good. Something better than the .45 that's about to double-tap you in the belly."

He hesitates for a moment. "You just go to the door there, you tell whoever's just inside that Shooter wants to talk to Vassily," I say, hard. "You smart enough to do that? Vassily, he's going to be very pissed if you don't. You might wind up like Nick. You remember Nick, don't you?"

That flicks his switch. He goes to the blue steel door, raps a coded rap, whispers a few words to whoever cracks it open. Then he moves back to the front of the car, facing me.

The door swings wide suddenly and Vassily moves toward me very fast, while the driver starts to reach inside his suit jacket. Not so fast I couldn't have dropped him, but I'm not even carrying a gun. I let Vassily get me in a bearhug, lift me off my feet.

"I can snap your neck like twig," he whispers in my ear.

"But you won't, because you don't want to be the star in the movie those DEA guys across the street are making with their digital camcorder."

"You are too smart for your own good, little brother. I snap your neck some other time for sure," he hisses in my ear, then breaks the hug but keeps his hands on my shoulders, huge grin on his face. "Big balls you got. No HK under your arm tonight. Seriously crazy. Must be hole in your head."

"Nah, I was born this way."

"So little brother, nice trick you play with fire escape. Four of my guys. Four."

"Sorry about that. I set it up in plain sight, just a little joke, you know? I figured your Spetsnaz boys would have a

270

good laugh disabling it. Somebody trip on his dick or what?"

"Stupids walk right into it, they're in such big hurry to get to roof where they're going to find nobody anyway. Ah, my friend, why does it have to be this way? All these stupids. Think what we could do, you and me together. Why this way?"

"Because I'm a cop, Vassily."

"You're shitting me?" He scans my eyes, bursts into laughter. "You fuck. You did have me in crosshairs that night. But you don't pull trigger because you are fucking cop, and cops don't go around assassinating people. This I can't believe. Shooter a cop. My God, what's happening to world?"

"It turns once every twenty-four hours."

"That is fucking problem. Nothing stays same, always change, change, change. Makes me dizzy, this shit. I suppose your blackie friend, that Dog, he is cop too?"

"Yeah. Except he's not as scrupulous about the rules as I am. If it had been him on the roof, you would be dead."

"Long shot," Vassily says doubtfully. "But he is pretty good up close, the way he took down my guy in Baltimore that time. But hey, this is America, this why I love it. In Moscow those guys across street don't bother with any fucking video. Don't care they got nothing on me for any court. A big crowd of Moscow cops would just come into club and shoot me full of holes. I love America."

"Don't lose your head over it. Take some advice, brother. Stop hitting down there. Stop everything down there. You don't, the Dog, cop or not, will be coming only for you. You'll think you're back in Moscow. And a little warning. I'll be with him, and so will some very good friends of his from the Bronx, couple of them as good as me, maybe better. I know this because I know them from Iraq. And they aren't cops."

"Fuck that! Fuck you all!" Vassily's suddenly angry. "Nobody threatens me."

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"Hey, am I threatening you, brother? Like I said, some advice only. Some truth. Between you and me, it can be finished. We call it even, like you said the other night. You stop, I stop. All of it stops."

Vassily laughs, gets me into that hug again. "This is good, little brother. I give my word. All of it stops. Fuck me, the balls on you. No gun! But you walk away from here now, you don't need one, you don't need to look back. I won't see you again, which makes me sad. But that's the way it has to be, yes? You go back to Baltimore now?"

"Tomorrow morning. Go carefully, brother," I say. He kisses the top of my head. I walk off.

Amazing, the tech JoeBoy sent me. I get into it. I get deeply into it. I hardly leave my hotel for the next couple of days. I order a lot of Chinese and Thai takeout.

Because I'm so busy lying in bed watching every fucking move Vassily makes on a mega-cool handheld next-gen Global Positioning System. The latest and best GI, fully operational but not even issued yet, except to spook units. I've programmed the entire New York street grid into it, and that slab of titanium under Vassily's wheelwell is the next-gen model emergency beacon air force pilots just started carrying, so search-and-rescue guys can locate them if they go down behind enemy lines. I can pinpoint the Merc to within less than a city block.

I keep bursting into laughter over it. The signal's bouncing off a very secret military satellite, and I just know a bunch of air force tech geeks are running around completely insane and screaming over the glitch in their system. Huge fucking glitch, emergency beacon on the move along the streets of New York when they know damn well there cannot possibly be a downed pilot in fucking Brooklyn or Queens or anywhere in the vicinity.

One hitch—the battery's only good for ten days, tops.

Within three, I've got a pattern of movement. Vassily must be feeling easier in his mind now, must think I have

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gone home, 'cause he's moving pretty regularly at regular times. I even get a fix on where the fuck lives. A house on a block near the beach in Far Rockaway. I drive out there next dawn in a rented Taurus, cruise around until the GPS is screaming I'm almost on top of the beacon. I park the car, let the GPS guide me in on foot.

X-ring. The Merc's in the driveway of a small but very nice-looking brick house, half a block from the beach. All the houses well maintained, driveways full of good cars like 700-series BMWs, some Cadillacs, a Lincoln or two, one Audi A8. No obvious security anywhere, not even around Vassily's house.

I come back around midnight, the GPS telling me the Merc's at the Palace, prowl around wearing next-gen night vision goggles, another toy from JoeBoy. I spot some little security cameras very discreetly placed just under the rain gutters before I'm in their scan range. I circle, looking for a gap in their coverage. There's a large oak tree up close to the rear of the house, looks like it blinds the cameras in one line back to a corner of the backyard. I could come up that line, then crawl the last few meters to a window. I peer at the window. There's a guy there, lit only by the glow of a small bank of video monitors. He's asleep in his chair. I move in, check what's on the monitors. I'm right about the oak's video shadow. Very carefully I move around the house, checking out door and window security. Standard wired alarms, easy enough to disable. I can be in that house without anybody knowing.

I go back to my hotel. It's after two
a.m.,
but with twins that means IB's probably awake. I hit the worldwide cell.

"Yeah?" IB says. Wailing in the background.

"Almost done. Anything happening?"

Long silence.

"C'mon! Anything happening? Give."

"Luther, I don't want to be the one to ..."

"Give!"

"Dog got shot yesterday."

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Oh fuck. "Dead?"

"In a coma. They don't know if he's gonna make it."

"How?" I will away the rage that's tearing at me, fill the vacuum with determination.

"Two white guys. Dog's crew took 'em out. But one round from a three-round burst hit Dog in the cheek, just under the eye. Little bullet, like a .22."

"I know what kind of bullets."

"And Five-O, your apartment," IB says, hesitates again.

"What? It's just a fucking condo."

"They're calling it a gas explosion for the media. The walls are still standing and all, but somebody busted your windows with a couple fragmentation grenades. Everything inside is shredded. Looks like fifty guys with straight razors went berserk for a half-hour or so. You'd been in there when it happened, you'd be ground beef."

"Shit like that is why I
ain't
been there. Why I'm here. Later, big man."

Lie back on my bed, all the lights out. Chill and clear. Police sirens out on Broadway doppler past. I barely notice. I'm feeling lots of things. Surprise is most definitely not one of them.

30

Twenty hours.

That's Vassily's remaining lifespan. Or mine.

Twenty hours.

I sleep the first eight, go out to a diner for late breakfast, take a walk in Riverside Park. Pretty place, by New York standards. I pass a playground shaded by massive oaks that must be a hundred years old. It's full of white kids making a happy din, watched over by young black and Hispanic women. The kids are swarming all over monkey bars and slides and a bunch of big hippos half sunk in what looks like asphalt.

Late lunch—meat loaf, mashed potatoes and baby green beans at a place called French Roast on Broadway. Walk the streets for a couple of hours, then go back to my hotel and take a ninety-minute nap. That's a full sleep cycle; we just go through several of them when we sleep all night.