Stealing Flowers (41 page)

“I’ll get Lloyd for this,” I swore. “He
should be made to suffer, and The Family of Lies should be
destroyed for raping and killing Sally.”

“Shush,” Una said, sternly.

Susan came and hugged me. “I love you,” she
whispered. Una and Mary held my hands. I knew what kind of toll
that this took on everyone. I suspected that soon they’d have had
enough. I remember that day that I didn’t cry. I was done with
crying. I saw Brad readying to leave. “If you still think that I’m
innocent,” I said, “and are ready to fight, so am I.”

“We’ve just begun,” he returned with
enthusiasm. He stepped over and hugged me. “You’re innocent
Christian, remember that, and keep up your spirits.”

My guard came over and timidly stood behind
everyone. He was a quiet older man named Jonathan. “I love you
all,” I said softly. Jonathan handcuffed me and passed me over to
two guards I had never seen before. As I was led away, a feeling of
complete undefiled hatred for Lloyd and The Family of Truth came
over me. From my cell, where I was kept alone, one guard, and God
knows how much this cost Stan, let me use a Sursheita made cell
phone. I talked to Una as soon as she got home and made her promise
to have Peter Burgess come by the cell first thing in the morning.
“I’ll be damned if I sit around and do nothing,” I said to her.

Peter came to visit me. He looked in fine
decorum, but I could see Una had told him what I wanted and he’d
come to turn me down. “I’ve Josh if I need someone young and
foolish,” he said firmly when I asked to help, “and he has
training. For that matter, Ray and Marshal Veld are with us on this
one. Plus, my daughter is in town now.”

“I don’t know what you’re planning,” I
begged. “but let me help. This is my neck. Please! I can’t stay at
home and do nothing.”

“But this work is 90% boredom,” he returned.
I stared him down. “I’m not making any assurances that you can be
of any assistance,” he said at length. “We’ll just decide it as we
go. This is what Una wants as well, and I’ll try to live with
it.”

I thanked him and shook his hand. The two
nights that I spent in jail were the loneliest and longest ones of
my life, but the judge had ruled immediately on our motions for an
appeal and I was released on five million dollars bail. When I
arrived home Friday, it was nearly suppertime.

The next day at 11:00 a.m. at JFK
International, I found myself with Peter watching no other than
Grave Revelation. He was the one who Sally had called hollow and
lazy, “The one with the creepy smile,” she had said. He was now,
Blood Justice and belonged to The Hostility Branch of The Family of
Truth, but whose real name I had since learned was James Pup. His
beard was gone. He had a protruding stomach with a short balding
grey head of hair. It gave him an almost sleepy forlorn look, but
she was right, he had a creepy smile. I was quite close to him as
he waited for his bags on the luggage carousel. I wore a scraggly
fake beard and a baseball cap over my head. Ashe had disguised me
and had brought me along. No one would have recognized me. I
thought Ashe exceedingly pretty and her defined face had her
father’s intensity. She was tall like him too, and had a lovely
figure. She wore her black hair curled in elaborate folds to the
back of her head, it was wonderful. Without being detected, Peter
had flown in with Blood Justice and Swift Retribution from Los
Angeles. Swift Retribution was the former head-elder – Thought
Jacob – the blond lean young man with a sparse beard.

Peter had been spying on them for days.
Swift Retribution came over with a bag. He had changed even more,
and at first, I didn’t recognize him from the file pictures. His
head was completely shaven and his body had developed a muscular
form. Only his pale blue eyes gave away his age, but I must say, he
looked lethal, not at all like the former hippy-image of
himself.

Josh Burgess waited nearby in the arrival
area with a car. Peter had phoned him on his cell but there had
been no answer. Swift Retribution and Blood Justice both wore plain
white t-shirt and new blue jeans. Perhaps, because I knew what
they’d done, they both looked like real mean deals. Why they were
in New York City and who they were to meet with, remained to be
seen, but Silent Righteousness, the former Holy Truth, the fat
friendly squad leader, and Proud Punishment, the former Goodness
Tranquility, the burly enforcer who Sally had said meted out all
the physical punishment inside the Family at the Denver Location
and enjoyed it, were also arriving in New York City, but at La
Guardia from Denver. Ray and Marshal Veld trailed those two.

“Don’t let them get out of our sight,” Peter
whispered after they had received their bags.

He tried his cell again and this time spoke
with Josh. We followed them out. It was exciting and I was totally
focused on the job at hand. Swift Retribution hailed a taxicab and
we hastened after them in Peter’s car which Josh drove. “They’re
heading to La Guardia,” Peter said after a while.

“I wonder what’s up with the separate
airports?” Josh asked.

“Maybe there’s a loose end to clean up,”
Peter replied “We could get lucky and catch them in the act. They
think wonderboy here is still in jail and that we are no longer
working for the Tappets. Despite using two airports, they seem
awfully sloppy to me.”

Their taxicab pulled up in the arrival area
in La Guardia and waited. Peter tried to phone Ray but received no
answer. “Circle around once,” he said. “No, wait. Look who’s
heading this way.”

Proud Punishment and Silent Righteousness
stepped out from the large automatic sliding doors with their bags
in hand. They weren’t thirty paces from us. Proud Punishment, the
burly enforcer, was still a husky man whose eyes were full of hate,
but now he was clean-shaven and his hair was short. He looked like
a military man.

“I remember Sally telling me that the big
one on the right,” I said, “smiled the whole time that he raped
her, as though he was revenging himself against all women. It’s
Silent Righteousness who I don’t recognize,” I continued. “If he’s
supposed to be the former Holy Truth, then he’s lost major
weight.”

“The one with the red t-shirt?” Josh
asked.

“When I last saw him he was fat.”

“Look’s mean enough to me.”

“His real name is Rob Tuck,” Peter said,
“and yes, he has lost a ton of weight. He possibly weighed as much
as three hundred pounds at the time of the rape. He’s buff now. How
it’s possible? I don’t know.”

The four members of The Family’s Hostility
Branch sped off in a single cab. Ray jumped into the back seat and
Josh followed the taxi out of the arrival area. “Where’s Marshal?”
Peter asked.

“He’s already on their trail,” Ray said.
“Welcome on board, Christian.”

That had been the first time anyone had said
something positive about my presence. I could tell they weren’t
happy about it, but I was determined to be involved. Una told me to
ignore it and reminded me that the Tappets were paying the bills.
We followed the four suspects to The Algonquin Hotel at 3rd and
44th Streets.

“Four assassins dropped off in Midtown,
Manhattan,” Ray said, “now I call that exceptionally
interesting.”

We watched them enter the hotel and then
Peter turned to Ray. “Have Marshal book a room. This is where
watching four people gets hard. We don’t have much time and we need
two more cars. The one with the shaven head is the leader, Swift
Retribution, whatever happens, don’t lose him or our work is
toast.”

Ray phoned his son and gave him
instructions. “The office isn’t too far away,” Peter added.

Josh pulled out into the street and drove us
to The Clapper Building on Redmond Road in Chelsea. Peter and I
rushed back in his Mercedes just in time to see Swift Retribution
hop into a taxicab. “We just made it,” he said.

We followed Swift Retribution to Canton
Park. He got out and sat in the sunlight on the front steps of an
old apartment building, The Tanner Place, as though he owned it,
and just waited around. We sat on a cedar bench on Ninth Street no
more than seventy-five yards away. “I know this area,” Peter said.
“Stay here. I’m going to get us some coffee. I’ve got major jet-lag
kickin’ in.”

He walked north to a donut shop and came
back with a New York Times and two large coffees. “He’s waiting for
someone,” he whispered to me, “and he’s watching closely.”

Thirty feet behind us, Canton Park had a
sharp decline to a treed area on the east side, and on the other
side of the park, there were three small baseball diamonds.
Three-story old semidetached houses sandwiched The Tanner Place. A
man in the park was throwing a tennis ball for his well-groomed
Golden Retriever who fetched it at an amazing pace. Off to the west
side of the park, there were rundown public restrooms, and to the
right, a toddler’s playground. Peter read the first section of the
paper, peeking up now and then to keep his eyes on Swift
Retribution. The din of the traffic on Ninth Street remained
constant, never faltering. Two old ladies on the other side of the
street passed by very slowly.

“I walked this beat for a year or so when I
was with the force,” Peter said at length. “It was a playground for
white upper-middle-class teenagers back then. This building, if I
remember, was the sight of a double homicide in the spring of
`68.”

“That was the year the Tappets adopted me,”
I said.

He read the sports section and an hour
later, rose. “There’s a small pizza place at the corner, Benny’s.
I’ll see if they still make good pizza.”

I grabbed his arm. “There’s Lloyd Mills,” I
said, astounded.

Lloyd had just come out of the front of the
building with another man, possibly a Chinese man. We quickly
returned to the car and watched them from binoculars, hidden by
tinted windows half rolled up. Peter took pictures of them as they
shook hands. “There’s something familiar about that Chinese guy,” I
said.

“Looks Korean to me.”

Then I remembered. “He’s Kwong Katigbaki.
Lloyd knew him when he was on the streets.”

Peter wrote down the name. “Good going, my
man. I’m glad you came.”

They crossed the street and met with Swift
Retribution. “What does it mean?”

“It’s a hell of a breakthrough!” Peter
said.

I saw he was elated and in turn I grew
excited. Lloyd soon sped away in his Jaguar after talking to the
men only a few minutes. “At last, physical links from the Family to
Tappets. Now what to do?” He phoned Ashe and told her the news.
“Ashe said that it’s becoming clear that a multinational consortium
is engaged in an illegal plan to takeover Tappets and has used The
Family of Truth as partners. Doesn’t that sound ludicrous?”

“That doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.”

“Let’s find out.” We took the Midtown tunnel
to an area in Brooklyn, Kings Regency Heights, not far from Coney
Island where the offices of The Zortichii Group stood in The Wyn
Hewlett Complex. By then darkness was falling. “The security system
here’s a piece a cake,” Peter said after a moment of watching
people come and go.

He covered up his license plate number and
pulled the Mercedes close up to the building’s plastic-arm car stop
and waited. He left enough room for a car to pass between him and
the auto car attendant and pretended to be studying the newspaper
as though waiting for a resident. Not long afterwards, a car drove
up and we sped in behind it. Peter found an underground parking
spot and we waited for five minutes before leaving the car. From a
sports bag in his trunk, he put extra pistol clips into his jacket
pockets and took out a briefcase, then he put on thin black leather
gloves. My heart was racing.

“Are you okay with this?” he asked. I nodded
and he threw me a bag to carry. Truth was, I was having an almost
out-of-body experience, or something, and it felt great. All my
worries had left me. It was like a mini-holiday.

On the twenty-eighth floor, we stopped at
what should have been door number three. It was instead disguised
as a bathroom door. It had been padlocked and a smudged
hand-written sign, ‘Out of Order,’ was taped to it.

It looked almost funny. He knocked on the
door and waited a minute. I stood out of the line of vision. He
knocked harder the second time. I could see no electronic security.
He easily unlocked the padlock, but I noticed he was being careful.
He took a small tool and drilled out the door lock and peeked
inside through the hole. “Stacks of metal file-cabinets,” he said
happily, rubbing his hands together.

He put on a ski-mask and stepped inside at
once, stopping me from following him with a warning wave even
though I was still disguised. Opening his briefcase and working
rapidly, he took a receptor and quickly attached clamps into each
link of the security wires; one on the door and one on the
frame.

I could see that he’d done this sort of
thing before. He turned the device on and waited for a green light,
putting the handle back into the door. He signaled me to get inside
and then pulled the dangling wires inside with us. He turned on the
lights and scanned the place. It appeared no more than a retainer
for files and documents and not a working office at all.

The drywall hadn’t even been painted.
Slowly, systematically, we began going through the file drawers,
working quickly. They’d been filed in alphabetical order, but
hidden with a code of some sort, so that whoever had organized it,
knew by rote, or by some other method, the file-headers. I took a
quick count: at least one hundred metal file drawers in the file
cabinets.

“It’s not likely that someone knows the
specific order by heart,” I said.

Peter agreed and searched a desk at the
front near the door for a legend. He found a template word-chart
with corresponding Japanese symbols. I looked through the list for
the word Lloyd or Mills, or some other clue. With the chart at
hand, I opened the top file drawer, and started with the first
file, a dossier on a Company, Aaron Electronics. It comprised the
company profile, with pictures of executives, notations on any
particularities, also, it held the company’s performance on the
world stock markets, ideas on how to scandalize them, how to
manipulate their weak points, and many other confidential facts.
“This one,” I said, holding it up, “Aaron Electronics, is actually
an in-depth profile of The Sony Corporation. Zortichii spies on
huge conglomerates.”