The Guardian (18 page)

The screaming in the background continued, and through her fog she realized that it was not just she who was yelling.

‘Cianna! Stop!’ Saunders shouted, pulling at her arms. ‘Cianna! You’ll kill him! Get her off him!’ She fought to keep throwing punches.

Then she heard Nick’s voice. ‘Cianna, it’s me! It’s Nick! Stop! You’ve got to get out of here!’

Slowly the fog lifted. She looked around at Nick and Saunders, and saw the worry in their faces. Looking down at Gruden, she could see the blood pouring from his head. She thought he was still
breathing, but couldn’t be sure.

She surveyed the bar, and saw Carlos lying in a dark puddle of his own blood, unconscious. At the far end of the room, one of Gruden’s bodyguards was in a ball under a table. The only one
of the four who seemed conscious was the first bodyguard who had grabbed her, but he was curled into a fetal position, gasping for breath, and Nick had a gun loosely pointed at him.

Cianna looked down at Gruden and spat in what was left of his face. She saw Nick and Saunders exchange a glance.

‘You need to get her out of here,’ Nick said to Saunders.

Saunders nodded. ‘You’ll be all right dealing with these people?’

‘I’ll call the cops,’ he said. ‘It’s a little much for a Wednesday night, but it’s nothing they haven’t seen before in this neighborhood. Gruden and his
boys will keep their mouths shut. It’s our way. Besides, you think they want to admit that a girl did this to them?’

‘
I
shot that guy,’ Saunders pointed out. He reached down and picked up the gun that had fallen from Carlos McSorlly’s hand, slipped it into his jacket pocket.

‘Fair enough. The point still stands. I’ll be fine. You get moving before anyone shows up.’

Cianna stood up, but her legs felt weak as the massive rush of adrenaline deserted her. Nick held her by the shoulders. ‘You take care of yourself, got it?’ he ordered her.
‘And get your brother out of this.’

She nodded weakly. Nick kissed her on the forehead, then let go of her.

‘Off with you now.’

Saunders put an arm around her shoulder and started leading her toward the door. At the threshold, she gave one last look at the destruction wrought behind her and shuddered.

Saunders said nothing for a while as they drove back toward Cianna’s apartment. South Boston rolled by, its clapboard houses flush to the street, its residents shuffling
along the narrow sidewalks. Halfway up the hill from the water, they passed The L Street Pub, and they could hear the subdued revelry from inside. Saunders marveled at the way the world continued
to march on for most of those in it, even as events that could alter the course of nations unfolded within earshot.

He looked over at Cianna, leaning back in the passenger seat. Her shoulders were square, thrown back into the seat. Her head was up, and though her eyes focused straight ahead, her face had a
look of defiance.

‘You want to tell me what happened back there?’ Saunders probed.

She didn’t look at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean. You did a lot of damage.’

‘You’d rather it turned out differently?’

‘No,’ Saunders said. ‘But I’m still wondering where that came from. You incapacitated three armed men. Some would consider that impressive.’

She looked at him. He was sure it was the first time she had met his eyes without evasion, and he saw a fire in them that was magnetic. After a moment, she turned back toward the front
windshield and closed her eyes again. ‘That’s just training,’ she said.

‘What exactly did you do when you were in the service?’

She didn’t open her eyes. ‘It’s classified.’

‘I have clearance,’ he said.

‘If you had clearance, you would have been told more about me before they sent you out to find my brother.’

She was right about that, though he was loath to admit it to her. ‘I didn’t ask the questions,’ he lied. ‘Maybe I should have.’

‘Maybe.’ It was clear she was saying nothing more on the subject.

After a moment, he said, ‘I have one more question.’

‘Feel free to ask,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether I can answer it.’

‘There was something more than training working for you at the bar.’

‘Yeah? Like what?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Rage,’ he said.

She looked at him again. ‘This is my brother’s life,’ she said. She gestured toward the dagger wrapped in Nick’s shirt. ‘That dagger may be the only thing keeping
him alive, and Gruden didn’t give a shit about what would happen to Charlie if he took it. That pissed me off.’

‘Remind me not to piss you off,’ Saunders said.

‘Just don’t mess with anyone I care about,’ she said. She looked away from him, out her window, as the new buildings along the waterfront rolled by.

Boston Police Detective Harvey Morrell was exhausted and annoyed. At fifty-nine years old, he wondered for how much longer he could put up with his job. It probably would have
been for longer if he wasn’t carrying more than 250 pounds on his five-foot, ten inch frame. He should have taken early retirement as soon as he hit his twenty years back in his forties,
lived off his pension. More to the point, he should have stayed married to his first wife. Or his second. Without alimony and child support, he could have gotten by on a bartender’s salary.
That ship had sailed, though, and there was little that he could do to escape the daily grind now.

Few days recently had ground as painfully as this one. He’d spent the first half of it chasing down leads on a case involving the disappearance of Sal Decanta, a wise guy in Boston’s
North End. ‘Sal the Fish’, as he was known, had gone missing a week earlier. Well, most of him had gone missing. An ear had been found in his apartment by his landlady, and DNA testing
had identified it as Decanta’s. Morrell’s best guess was that, wherever Decanta’s remaining body parts were, they weren’t breathing.

By all accounts, Decanta had been high up in Boston’s La Cosa Nostra, which meant that no one would ever admit to knowing anything about his whereabouts. So many doors had been slammed in
Morrell’s face throughout the day that he was beginning to think
Vaffanculo
was Italian for ‘watch your toes’. The investigation had gone nowhere, which would surprise no
one. And yet his name was the one that would be on the report, so when the press and public and politicians came with their outcry, his would be the phone line they would call, and his would be the
name mentioned in the newspapers.

As if that was not injustice enough for one day, he was now stuck on a call in Southie after dark, chasing down a phantom shooting. He had two uniforms with him, going door to door, rousting
people to see whether they had any information. Information about what, exactly, Morrell wasn’t sure. The emergency lines had received three calls late that afternoon, jabbering away
unintelligibly about a shooting. As usual, no one was willing to give their names, or even their exact locations, lest they be identified. All three calls left the impression, though, that the area
near the Old Colony projects was under siege. Uniforms had been dispatched to the block in question, but when they arrived all was quiet. No bodies lay in the streets, and no shop windows had been
smashed. The officers had been unable to locate the people who had called in. In more rational times, the matter would have been closed. But it was an election year, and those whose employment
depended on the electoral whims of the public insisted that the BPD feign concern for the special interests within the underprivileged communities. As a result, here he was in the middle of the
evening, knocking on doors. The absurdity of it all soured the phlegm in the back of Morrell’s throat.

He was contemplating his misery when he saw Ayden McMurphy walking towards him, shaking his head. In almost all respects, it was hard to imagine a police officer better cut for the job than
McMurphy. He was tall and well-built, with a mellow way about him that put people on the streets at ease, even in difficult situations. He was ethically straight enough to avoid trouble, but
flexible enough to be trusted in a department that still had the old way of doing things in its DNA. And then there was the name. Few names belonged so readily on a force that traced more of its
roots to County Kerry than to any borough in Massachusetts; a nominal fit made ironic only by the fact that Ayden McMurphy was black and had grown up in Roxbury.
Who knows
, Morrell thought,
maybe that just makes him the perfect police officer for the modern force
.

He didn’t mind. For all his old-school ways, Morrell’s view was that a good cop was a good cop. And Ayden McMurphy was that if nothing else.

‘We learn anything?’ Morrell asked him as the officer approached.

‘Yeah,’ McMurphy responded. ‘We learned the Irish are deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to anything that reeks of local crime.’

‘I thought you were Irish.’

‘I kept trying to point that out to the townies,’ McMurphy said in an exaggerated brogue. ‘I even showed them my name tag, but they seem to think I’m taking black-Irish
too far. It’s not hard to see why bussing never really caught on here.’

‘You can’t expect everyone to be as enlightened as me,’ Morrell said.

‘I can’t?’ McMurphy shook his head. ‘Fuck me then, I guess.’

‘Got that right.’ Morrell chuckled in spite of himself. ‘You find out anything useful?’

‘Depends on your definition. Three people were willing to talk to me for long enough to say they heard gunshots. All of them agreed it came from the other side of the street. Two of them
thought they came from that building.’ McMurphy pointed toward a rundown three-story building with a narrow front, set off from the two rows of townhouses on either side of it. ‘The
third thought they came from farther up the street. None of them saw anything, and no one is sure what actually happened. A couple of them thought maybe it was fireworks.’

‘That falls short of my definition of useful,’ Morrell said.

McMurphy pointed to the large stain on the front of the shirt struggling to contain Morrell’s prodigious gut. ‘Yeah, but you’re a perfectionist, Detective.’

‘Only in the ways that matter.’ Morrell took a deep breath, and caught a whiff of the hardscrabble mixture of soot and salt and fish that linger in Southie like the hint of open
revolt. ‘Probably nothing more than fireworks,’ he said with a sigh. After another deep breath, he said, ‘Okay, we’ll do a quick door-to-door in that building and call it a
day.’

As he spoke the words, a car pulled up ten yards in front of the building and parked on the street. Morrell watched it without particular interest, noticing it only in the way that cops who have
been around for long enough tend to notice everything. It wasn’t until the driver and passenger exited the car that his instincts truly perked up.

He would have zeroed in on the girl under any circumstances. Her appearance commanded male attention. She was fit and attractive, and had the look of a wild animal in her eyes.

The man looked in all respects her opposite. He was of average height and build, and he wore the nondescript suit of an accountant. His hair was short enough that it didn’t need a brush.
Notwithstanding the rigidity of his appearance, though, he moved fluidly as he and the girl headed through the door of the clapboard building across the street.

Morrell and McMurphy shared a look.

‘Make sure we talk to them,’ Morrell said.

‘You got a feeling?’ McMurphy asked.

Morrell nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I got a feeling.’

Ahmad Fasil was on his knees in the little house in Cambridge. He brought his hands to his cheeks and raised his face in supplication, then bent forward, letting his forehead
touch the prayer mat. He stayed in that position for several moments, beseeching Allah; begging for the patience to carry through with what he had started, and for the strength to suffer the
incompetence that surrounded him.

When he felt that he had conveyed his supplication sufficiently, he rose and went to his black bag. Reaching in, he pulled out a satellite phone. He had been told that the line was secure, and
that the transmissions were untraceable. He didn’t fully believe it, but then again, he wasn’t really the one at risk.

He dialed the number and waited. The line rang twice before it was picked up.

‘Do you have it?’ the man on the other end of the line asked as soon as the call was connected.

‘Not yet,’ Fasil said, working to keep the contempt out of his tone.

‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ Fasil said slowly, ‘my assets are inadequate. I was told that you were in control of the situation. That does not appear to be the case. I was told that the relic
would already have been recovered before I arrived.’

‘That was supposed to be the case,’ the man said. ‘Sirus failed us.’

‘He did. And now there is another party involved.’

‘Another party?’ The voice on the other end of the line sounded calm. ‘Who?’

‘I do not know. That is what I need for you to find out. He claimed to Sirus that he was with the police, but I suspect that was a lie. Do you know who this person is?’

The line was silent for a moment. ‘You don’t need to worry. I can take care of him if necessary.’

‘It is necessary now,’ Fasil said. ‘You will take care of him now, or I will. I assume I do not need to remind you what would happen if people were to discover your role in
this. It would cause great damage. For everyone.’

‘Is that a threat?’ the man on the other end of the line demanded. ‘Are you threatening me?’

Fasil remained calm. He was used to American bullying. ‘I am merely reminding you of the information I have, and the consequences for all of us if I fail.’

‘No one understands that better than I do,’ the man said. ‘But you should remember that we’re not friends and we’re not allies. Our short-term interests are
complementary, but we will always be enemies, and in the end I will destroy you. Do you understand that?’

Fasil clicked off the satellite phone and put it back into his bag. ‘I understand that, too, better than anyone.’