Rivers of Gold (27 page)

“We are.”

“So why'd you ask me to sign out an M4 for you? Don't you have your own? And couldn't you just get one from ESU anyway?”

More made a sound that might have been a sigh. “Detective, try to keep up. I'm not supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be inconspicuous.”

“You call what you did to that drag
inconspicuous
? Lemme tell you something, if
I
could make you, anyone on the force with half a brain probably could, if they cared enough. The only reason I cared enough is 'cause I gotta
work
with you.”

More frowned. “How
did
you make me?”

Santiago explained about the speeding ticket he'd dug up through RTCC. More listened, looking out into the tank, and nodded once. Santiago could almost see him mentally giving himself a demerit for carelessness. “Hey, it was a year old. Anyone else would've missed it.”

“You didn't.”

“Like I said, I have to work with you. And you know, whatever you did in Afghanistan, that shit won't play here. You want to look like a cop, you gotta think and act like one, not like you're goin' out every shift to smoke some Taliban motherfucker shootin' RPGs and shit. They may be drags, but they're still people; they got rights.”

From More, a noncommittal grunt.

They were quiet for a time, watching the shark follow its ancient circle. “They'll be releasing Carl in a few days,” More said with a uvular rattle. “Captive white sharks die if they're not released soon after capture. They weren't made to be cooped up.” Santiago wondered if More was trying to tell him something.

“When we start rolling up the network, you won't always see me,” More continued, as though they were discussing shoelace colors. “We'll have to keep our comms clear. I need a handle for you, something nobody else knows, in case the guys we're after can monitor NYPD signal traffic.”

Santiago thought about this. Where it came from, he didn't know, but somehow it fit. “When I was a kid, I played a lot of basketball. I used to get in pick-up games at the park with the older kids,” he mused, picturing them in his mind, nineteen or twenty, impossibly tall and bulked up, fresh out of jail. No fouls. “They called me Six.”

More nodded. “Six. I like it. Short and easy to remember.”

Santiago dreaded asking it. “So what did they call you?”

More did his impression of a smile forming in geologic time. “They called me Ever. Ever More. Get it?”

Ever More.

Christ help us.

Nuts. Completely fucking nuts. That was his impression of it, but here he was behind the wheel of the Crown Vic, holding a laptop far more expensive than anything he'd ever worked on. Baijanti Divya sat in the passenger seat beside him. They were parked in a bus lane on Twenty-sixth between Fifth and Madison, on the northern border of Madison Square Park. More was on the roof of the Flatiron Building, with a camera that had an obscenely large telephoto lens. Once he had the eyeball on Arun Ladhani, high-resolution images would be sent to Santiago's laptop, from which he could beam them to the phones of the half-dozen CAB volunteers that the Narc Sharks had asked, cajoled, or threatened into being part of this lunacy. More called the photo-transfer system SIDS. McKeutchen had said hell, why not, the department sure didn't have the equipment for this kind of stunt, but he said they'd have to have an independent confirmation of the eyeball before they took the burnout down. Hence Santiago's present companion.

They were on a ridiculous schedule. Baijanti Divya had organized a massive driver protest after the identity of the third cabdriver victim, Raghuram Rajan, was released, which was already starting to cohere in Harlem. Santiago had pointed out to the CAB force that while victim number three had been summarily executed, shot twice in the head, the postmortem showed no indications of torture, as with the first two cabbies. This looked more like a straight hit-and-run. They'd kicked it around a CAB Group One huddle before rolling out.

“Maybe they didn't have time to break out the toolbox,” Turse proposed.

“Maybe somebody saw them jack the cab,” Liesl suggested.

“Maybe it was someone else,” More expectorated.

“Enough fucking maybes. Pick up the burnout and the other one, see if we can get one to roll on the other. But do it fast. Three dead cabbies and a big fucking protest drive is
not
helping our cause any, gentlemen.” In spite of the long odds and short shot clock, McKeutchen was visibly pleased at the progress they were making, and at the fact that they were finally working together, albeit grudgingly. He no longer held More in his office for private meetings, yet he had seemed able to keep the rest of the department from sharing More's secret. Santiago did not press his CO on the state of things with One PP vis-à-vis More.

Baijanti Divya agreed to confirm More's recon of the burnout cabbie, but she had stressed that the other one was to be treated with care. When Santiago asked why, she made a point of looking at More.

“This man, detectives, is a refugee from one of the worst conflicts raging on the planet. He is from a town near Goma, on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He has lost his entire family to the ongoing proxy wars there, and was repeatedly victimized as he struggled to make his way here, where becoming a cabdriver was one of the only occupations open to him. All cabdrivers have difficult lives, but his is an extreme case, even for the industry. He has no relatives here, and there are few people with whom he can communicate in his native language. If he can make enough money and learn enough English, he may be able to assimilate, assuming he can survive. For now, driving a cab is all that he has. Becoming involved in your investigation will likely jeopardize his standing with the TLC, which of course will inform both the FBI and ICE, which will ultimately decide his fate. This man's life has been a violent, dangerous river. Now that he has found a reasonably calm eddy I would like to see him stay here, as long as he likes.” Baijanti Divya crossed her arms. No gold or traditional dress for her today, Santiago noted. Today was an olive-green one-piece garment covered with pockets and zippers. She looked like Che Guevara in drag on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

“We'll try to make things as easy as we can for him,” Santiago assured her, though he wondered how they'd pull it off.

That was before the cabs had started massing for the protest at the north end of Central Park, near where his sister was working. She had taken some shots with her phone and sent them to him; the lush green of the northeast corner of the park clashed sharply with the bright yellow blob that seemed to stretch from 110th and Fifth all the way to the East River bridges. Santiago had never seen anything like it. This was much, much bigger than the taxi lot at the airport. This was a seething yellow mass, and it was made up of angry, frightened cabdrivers. The NYPD had mobilized auxiliaries in riot gear and staged a dozen motor cops at the corner of each major crosstown artery from Ninety-sixth to Twenty-third. There were three mobile command posts parked along the route and two choppers from Aviation hovering motionless over the park, along with half a dozen helicopters from various news agencies. Santiago had idly wondered aloud if there weren't one or two high-altitude drones up there as well, their cameras sending high-resolution feeds back to Washington that just might be useful to their investigation, and maybe More could make a call. More had given him the Fish Face and Santiago had skulked off to the cab in disgust. His mood only lifted when Baijanti Divya joined him.

It occurred to him that while he would admit to no
man
what he thought or felt about More, Baijanti Divya did not technically qualify. Despite having had his earlier impressions sufficiently shattered, he had to admit there was something about her that went beyond the sort of intuitive female radar he had been subject to in the course of his life, from his mother and sister on. Baijanti Divya had something the women of his experience did not. He did not believe in psychics, ESP, spiritual mediums, or any of the other pop-psych garbage littering cable television. While he accompanied his family to church for the usual occasions, he himself felt no connection to the divine, nor did he hold much faith in his fellow man. His upbringing and vocation had thoroughly cured him of that. Still, there was something ethereal about Baijanti Divya that he couldn't put his finger on. And while he couldn't quite read her interest in More, he was absolutely convinced that she knew
what
More was, and had known since their first meeting at the airport. This was all gut, no rational explanation at all.

Cabdrivers all over were making for the staging area uptown, their dome lights reading
OFF DUTY
. Several of them appeared to be listening to the same Punjabi radio station, with the same Bhangra tune pumping out of their lowered windows. Even Santiago thought it was a pretty good beat.

“It's ‘Sonne da Challa' by Vikrant Singh,” Baijanti Divya informed him.

How the fuck does she know what I'm thinking? Santiago ranted to himself. More had said she was some kind of tranny, intersexual, whatever. Said there was a tradition of them over there. How did
he
know about that? Were there people like Baijanti Divya in Pakistan as well as India? Why would a crazy motherfucker like More know about them? Maybe the whole cross-dressing thing helped with Deep Recon.

And why had she decided to help them, anyway?

He had just decided to sound her out on this when she said, “You and your partner haven't worked together long, have you?”

Santiago was caught off guard, a feeling he'd had entirely enough of lately. “What? Uh, about six months or so, give or take,” he sputtered.

She smiled, a lovely sight, especially compared with the looks he usually got these days. “I'm confirming an observation. I don't suppose you know his background?”

She knew
. But she couldn't know. McKeutchen had kept More under wraps and trusted Santiago to do the same. Was it the Narc Sharks? DC Derricks, or maybe that dweeb Saffran? What the fuck?

“What, you want his phone number?”

“What I want is of little consequence in this context. If the government sees fit to spy on cabdrivers, all it needs to do is look to the regulatory agencies overseeing the industry. But I fear this matter is deeper and more serious, with cabdrivers being caught in the middle of a dangerous game between extremely dangerous opponents. I want to protect those in the industry from what promises to be an ugly confrontation between your department and men in cabs who are not cabdrivers, although both sides are using them for their own purposes. What I want, detective, is a safe and decent taxi industry, which has historically been anything but. The taxi business is an integral part of the city's infrastructure, and it has provided a starting point for generations of immigrants who come to this country to help build and support families the world over. The man you seek is an exception, one whose corrupt ways are well known to those in the trade. The time of his reckoning is long overdue, like your investigation. I want the livelihood of the rest, the decent, hard-working majority of the industry's labor pool, protected for as much time as it has left.”

Santiago was in over his head. “Left?”

Baijanti Divya sighed, looking through the windscreen. “They say that some
hijra
can predict the future. I don't know if I can, but I sense the time is coming when the occupation of cabdriver will be rendered extinct, replaced by automation. The amount of overregulation, health hazards, cost overruns, insurance, and whipsawing fuel charges has reached a zenith. It won't be long before someone creates a cost-effective robot cabdriver that doesn't sleep, doesn't eat, doesn't get kidney trouble sitting behind the wheel for days at a time, doesn't speed, doesn't get lost, and maybe even doesn't get into accidents. It will constantly broadcast its location to the TLC, never talk back to customers, and never stage a protest like this one today. That's him,” she said, pointing to the screen. Santiago looked down. The image of a young Indian man standing beside a cab stared back at him. The man had disheveled hair, mirrored sunglasses, and an easy smile, and he was gesturing to a small group of cabdrivers parked in the plaza. More's photos indicated the man was pointing to the side of an abandoned building on Twenty-fourth, and laughing.

The passenger door slammed. Baijanti Divya was already heading for the corner of Twenty-sixth and Madison, where a cab idled in front of a boarded-up restaurant behind the Federal Courthouse, a dark-skinned man with a bushy white beard and dark turban behind the wheel. She slid into the passenger side, and they were gone.

It was too bad, Santiago thought as he keyed the transmission sequence out to the CAB team's phones, that he wouldn't be there to watch her go by standing in the bed of a pickup at the head of ten thousand cabs bisecting Manhattan lengthwise along a golden filament two miles long. It really was too bad. He hoped More would take a long-view shot, just for the record. Maybe it would end up in some book somewhere, someday.

The CAB station hadn't seen this much activity since the riots. Three interrogation rooms were booked, one for the cabdriver known as Arun Ladhani, an Indian national, and one for a second cabdriver, named Wiliad Ngala, in from the Democratic Republic of the Congo on a shaky work permit. Working from the Narc Sharks' analysis of the taxi trip sheets surrounding past speak locations (with More's rooftop observations thrown in), the drivers of those cabs on duty during the corresponding shifts were quickly identified. Baijanti Divya had made positive visual ID just to be sure, and here they all were. Somewhere along the way, CAB Group One had become an effective police unit. McKeutchen was so happy he forgot to replenish his supply of apple gum, to Santiago's relief.