Another Life (4 page)

* * *

“They’re so lucky,” Wolfe said, looking out at a tanker going up the Hudson.
“People with jobs?”
“No.” She laughed. “People who get to be on the water all the time.”
“You like that stuff?”
“I love it,” she said quietly. “If I had my way, I think I’d live on a boat.”
“Like a cruise ship?”
“No, a sailboat. A nice three-master that I could sail with a small crew.”
“You
could sail it?”
“Sure.” She grinned. “I captained a ship from Bermuda all the way back to Cape Cod once.”
“By yourself?”
“There were other people on board, but I was in charge.”
“Where’d you learn to do that?”
“I was a Sea Scout.”
“A what?”
“A Sea Scout. Like a Girl Scout, only we went out on boats instead of camping.”
“I’d be scared to death,” I told her. “The water…”
“You don’t know how to swim?”
“No. I mean, I guess I wouldn’t sink—we used to dive off piers when I was a kid. But it’s so, I don’t know…I mean, you don’t know what’s down there.”
“There’s worse things on land,” she said.
I knew she was right, but it didn’t comfort me. Once, when I was small, I went down to the river to see what I could hustle up. It was night—I always felt safer at night. A boat was there. Not a big one, some kind of sport-fishing rig. They had a shark up on a hoist. It was twitching wildly, like it was going to break loose. The men were laughing, drunk, celebrating their conquest. I looked out at the black water. I thought about more sharks being down there. Men hunt them for fun. I wondered if the sharks knew.
“Sure,” I said, getting back to it. “This Pryce, is he one of them?”
“Those worse things? I’ve run across his trail a few times over the years, but I only met him face-to-face once. He said he was with Justice, but when I tried a trace, it got lost in the maze they call ‘cooperation.’ By the time I finally found someone who’d talk to me, Pryce was gone again.
“That’s the way he works. Tells people he’s with the Company sometimes. Or DEA, ATF, you name it. And by the time anyone can actually check, he’s moved on again.”
“Transferred, maybe?”
“Not a chance. I think he’s sanctioned, but he’s on permanent-disavowal status.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Pretty much what it sounds like,” she said, combing both hands through her thick mane of dark hair as a river breeze came up. “He does contract work, but never on the books.”
“Hard work?”
“I don’t think so. He’s an information guy, not hands-on. What he is, I think, is kind of a super bounty hunter. A bounty spotter, if there’s any such thing. I never heard of him making a collar, or doing any wet stuff. He only works the edges. But he’s not just a
tracker; he manipulates situations, makes things happen. Like I said, he’s self-employed. So he doesn’t have to play by anyone’s rules.”
“Could he get favors done?”
“From the feds? I’m sure. At least he could from whatever agency he’s bird-dogging for at the time.”
“And he doesn’t play for headlines?”
“I remember one thing he said to me. ‘I never take credit. Only cash.’ I think that about sums him up.”
“You had a beef with him?”
“Not at all. He was very polite, very respectful. Said he knew about a pedophile ring. A new twist: online molestation, in real time.”
“What!?”
“One of the pedo-skells would get the little girl—they only used girls in this one—in his studio. Then he’d set up the cameras, notify the others, and flash her image over their modems. They could tell him what they wanted him to do to the little girl, and they could all watch as he did it.”
“And Pryce knew this how, exactly?”
“He didn’t say. But I got the impression that he had reached one of them. Had him in his pocket.”
“Was he trying to make a deal, have this one guy roll over on the rest in exchange for a walk-away?”
“No, it wasn’t anything like that. He doesn’t work for defense attorneys. As near as I could tell, he was willing to let the guy who tipped him go down with the rest.”
“So what was the problem?”
“Pryce wanted to get paid. He didn’t want a favor; he wanted cash.”
“How much?”
“He never said. But he made it clear we were talking six figures.”
“And you wouldn’t go for it?”
“I couldn’t. We don’t have a budget for anything like that, and neither does NYPD. Nobody ever posts a reward until there’s a victim, right?”
“And nobody knew—?”
“This was the first
I’d
even heard of any such thing, and I wasn’t even sure I believed him when he told me. I tried to put on some pressure. Told him if he didn’t turn over the information, not only was that one little girl going to continue to be gangraped over the Internet, there had to be others, too.”
“And…?”
“Didn’t faze him. In fact, he said that should make his info worth more. I even tried threatening him with obstruction. He just stood up, gave me this weird smile, and disappeared. Nobody remembered seeing him leave; the security cams didn’t pick up his image. I never saw him again.”
“So what they were doing to that girl, it just…kept going?”
“Actually, no. A week later, there was a huge bust. Federal. The FBI vamped down on the whole operation, took it all in one fell swoop. A beautiful case; even the first freak to roll pulled serious time. And the Bureau got major press, from the Director on down.”
“You think Pryce sold it to the Gee?”
“There’s no way to know. I asked a friend over there how they got word, and he said all he knew was that it came from a CI.”
“Pryce, you don’t think he was the confidential informant?”
“No. But he could have been running him, whoever he was. Or maybe there was no CI, just a bogus setup so they could get a search warrant. They knew what they’d find when they did.
That’s
the kind of thing Pryce gets paid for.”
“You got anything else on him?”
“No. But I know he’s out there. If I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

* * *

“You think I’m trying to scare you, Burke? After all the extras I just put on the table?”
“No,” I admitted. Pryce already had more than enough to bury me in the basement of some no-name prison if he ever wanted to go that way. I’d hovered outside the grasp of the law for years, but I knew the truth—my freedom was nothing but a tethered kite. “Anyway, you’ve already got the Prof.”
“Saving his life, not holding him as a hostage,” he responded tranquilly.
I sat there. I kept my face blank, but my mind was in warp drive. Risk-gain. Threat assessment. And all of that meant nothing, because I knew Pryce was telling the truth. Once he’d taken the Prof in his hands, he’d given himself lots of choices. All the extras he put on the table had to be there for a reason, but whatever it was, it didn’t matter.
“Tell me what you want,” I surrendered.

* * *

T
hat finally tripped his “on” switch. “You know who Prince Fazid el Kandal is?” he asked.
“No.”
“He’s a direct descendant of Abd al-Aziz.”
“No kidding?”
“A Saudi,” he continued, unruffled. “In 1902, Abd al-Aziz bin Abd al-Rahman al-Saud captured Riyadh, and spent the next three decades trying to conquer the Arabian Peninsula. One of his sons rules the country even today.”
“Awesome.”
He ignored me. “Saudi Arabia is governed by the Basic Law, which stipulates that the throne shall always remain in the hands of the kingdom’s founder.”
“Ah. So this guy’s in line for—”
“The Saudis don’t grow anything,” he cut me off. I was there to listen, not figure things out—Pryce had already done that for me. “And they don’t
make
anything. Most of their land is uninhabited. Their government makes North Korea look like the Berkeley city council. None of that matters to us. Tonga, Burma, Zimbabwe…‘Democracy’ is whatever we
say
it is. And oil is what we need.
“The Congo is lousy with untapped oil reserves. All of central Africa is, actually. But getting to it, that’s another story. Even close to the coast, there’s all kinds of interference: kidnappings, pipeline bombings, sabotage. Some of that’s just banditry, extortion masquerading as revolution. But some of it seems to be your old pals at work.”
“You lost me,” I said, knowing he’d done the opposite.
“Nigeria’s a military dictatorship, playing itself off as a democracy. That’s not a new script: the Brits colonize a country, and the minute they grant ‘independence,’ it goes up in flames.
“You remember?” he said in his ice-cored voice, twisting his lips just enough to tell me that he had
that
in his files, too. “The ‘rebels’ were Igbos and Yorubas. The ‘government’ was Hausa. Tribalism? Muslims versus Christians? Same difference. The breakaway group claimed some of the Niger Delta area for their own. They named it the Republic of Biafra before they were exterminated like termites in a Hollywood mansion. Nobody called it genocide, because…”
“There was oil under that ground, and only niggers were standing on it, anyway.”
“Yes,” he said, the way a teacher congratulates a slow student who
finally
solved the equation on the blackboard.
“So what’s with the history lesson? The Saudis don’t have a rebel movement to deal with. Any group who even
looks
like trouble, they just pay them to attack somewhere else. That’s why they financed 9/11.”
“Thanks for the insight,” Pryce said, drier than dead cactus. “Try and pay attention, all right? We can’t
rely
on the Saudis. If the pressure gets too strong, they’ll fold. We don’t need to develop new allies; we need to develop new sources for oil.”
“So I’ll drive a Prius, okay? Can you wrap this the fuck up? I know I’ve got work to do, and I’d like to know what it is.”
But Pryce’s river kept on rolling. “In Africa, all the natives are good for is grunt work, like diamond mining. For large-scale oil extraction, you need geologists, drilling experts, rig constructors, pipeline designers, CAD-CAM experts…. Understand? For that level of expertise, you need outsiders, and you need them to do more than just pay a visit, they have to
live
there.”
“Good luck with that one,” I said. “I don’t care who’s on the throne, warlords still rule the interior. You think that little sprinkling of blue helmets can keep anyone safe in the Congo? They’ve probably
sold
more weapons than they ever fired.”
Pryce shrugged that off, as excitable as a mortician. “That’s just a military problem—clear-cutting could get it solved in a few weeks.”
“Then what’s
your
problem?” I asked him, still just a raft drifting down Pryce’s river.
“What did you think all this ‘cure for malaria’ press-release slop was really about? Unless there’s a way to vaccinate against it, we can’t get personnel to remain there for the length of time we’d need. No amount of firepower will take out those damn mosquitoes. Malaria kills millions of Africans every year, but not half as many as it would if the indigenous people hadn’t developed
some
genetic resistance over the centuries.
“That’s why blacks get sickle-cell and other races don’t. You want non-native experts to
live
there, you have to guarantee them more than protection from the warlords. Human-borne disease isn’t a problem: we can fly in whores every week, certified clean. But those miserable little bugs…”
“So the people who are putting up all that money are just…?”
“Businessmen,” Pryce finished my sentence. “This is about money. Period, end of sentence. And they get a triple-return on their investment, too.”
I looked a question at him.
He held up a hand. Went back to his trick of ticking off points on his webbed fingers. “One, there’s all that recognition as saviors of humanity: prizes, great press, tax breaks…maybe even a goodwill barrier against hackers. Two, there’s the oil. Three, the drug companies get to experiment on humans.”
I remembered that one—it was the Mole’s theory of where HIV had actually been developed: in Haitian prisons, when Papa Doc was in charge. “No lab rats, no FDA, no…”
“Exactly. You could test
anything
on those sorry bastards. Africans don’t trust us. Why should they? Nigeria may be the richest country on the whole continent, but it has the highest rate of polio in the world. In South Africa, they think they can prevent AIDS with a good hot shower and lots of soap. Once we get deep enough into the Congo, all we have to do is pay off the warlords, and they’ll round up the cattle for us to brand.”
“To do real research, you have to keep records….”
“So? Even the Nazis kept records.”
“That got some of them hung.”
“You really believe
that
was the reason?” he said, shaking his head. “Hitler knew what was coming, so he hid in his bunker until he could make his hands stop trembling long enough to take the easy way out. All that ‘evidence’ was just a sales pitch, and Americans lapped it up with a spoon. I don’t mean there
wasn’t
hard evidence—those ‘Holocaust deniers’ are nothing but Nazis in suits. But the government had to keep the public’s eyes on the right spectacle. To this day, the average American doesn’t even know there were Japanese war-crimes trials, too.
“Think about that, just for a second,” he continued, in a suddenly professorial tone. “‘When his master dies, the true samurai performs ritual seppuku.’ What a crock. Those banzai pilots weren’t volunteers. And
their
master—the Emperor—wasn’t dead. No, he was safe inside his palace as those kids took off in their balsawood bombs. They weren’t following some ancient code of honor; they’d been ordered to their deaths. And the man who gave those orders? Hirohito himself never even went on trial.
“It was all symbolism. Pure Kabuki. If ‘just following orders’ was no defense to war crimes, how come only a few dozen Nazis had to pay the bill for killing so many millions? And how come the ones with skills we could use got a pass, so they could come over here and help us build our weapons? You know, the ones we’d need to deal with our ‘allies’ down the road.”
He tilted his head, inviting a challenge. Waited a beat, long enough to make sure I wasn’t going to say anything. Then he leaned closer, letting a lower harmonic into his voice. “This is supposed to be
your
city, Burke. Take a look around, why don’t you? Got any idea how many foster kids end up taking part in experimental drug trials?”
I shook my head “no,” but Pryce got the message: I didn’t know the number, but whatever it was, it wouldn’t surprise me.
“Besides,” Pryce said, his voice somewhere between bored and bitter, “it’s not like the people living in that jungle have street addresses; you just tag-and-release. Their average life expectancy is about fifteen years anyway. This way, you could end up with the oil
and
a cure for cancer at the same time. Here, researchers can’t even use stem cells. Over there, they can use humans. It’s perfect.”
Something lurked just beneath the way he said that last bit. Made me think about how he always made sure I could see his fingers. As though he was clinging to them as…what?
But now wasn’t the time to think that through; what I needed was to get him back on track, close the deal, and protect my father. So all I said was “Okay. You tell me what you want; I do it, period. For that, I get the Prof and Terry…and that other stuff you mentioned. Done?”
He nodded.
“What if I can’t pull off…whatever you want?”
“You still get everything I promised. But you have to go at it with everything you’ve—”
“This is a blood contract,” I cut him off. “I’ll do it, or I’ll die trying.” I gave him a few seconds to scan me, opening myself up to whatever truth-detecting skills he thought he had. “Deal?”
He held out his webbed right hand. I grasped it. Tight, like it was the Prof’s only chance to live.