Internecine (34 page)

Back in my old life, I had heard people bitching about politics in the normal, air-filling, useless way most citizens prattle on about food or the weather, and more than once I overheard the assertion that maybe the United States wasn’t such a swell place to live, anymore, what with basic rights being whittled away almost one per day. Some people groused about becoming expatriates. All I know is, Shanghai sounded pretty good to me, right now, and that place was full of
communists.

I wasn’t taking a political stance, though. I was defaulting to a skin-saving stance.

The Bradley Terminal is the largest at LAX. The booking section is an open area consisting of three enormous free corridors lined with ticket counters. At the far west end, escalators bleed up to bars and restaurants, prior to the gauntlet of gates and X-ray machines. But out in the main booking area there is no overlook, no mezzanine access to customers. If you’re looking for a wide-open space in which you’d rather not be caught in the middle, T-4 was ideal.

Picture me and my new friend, Cody Conejo, trying to appear casual as we walked down the slanted ramp and into the main terminal,
no different from ordinary citizens, merely two more of the walking dead. My teeth were grinding, and the rest of my body gently urged me to run like hell.

Zetts held a visual on us from the parking garage. We left Dandine next to him, cellphone at the ready.

Cody had to run a lap in place before he had sounded breathless enough to place the call to the
NORCO
relay line, his next step toward getting paid. I think he may have had a few overdue bills, because he seemed piqued at having to barter his deal upward (or at least, laterally) in order to keep wearing his skin.

Cryptically, Dandine had specified that Cody
not
use a scrambled cellphone. He made the call from a pay phone near baggage claim. When everyone went askance at that, Dandine merely said, “I want to check something.” The rest of his instruction menu was pretty pinpoint.

“Tell Gerardis the op got compromised,” Dandine instructed. “Tell them the bug was lost and you were forced to grab the principal in a public place, but you can’t leverage him out, because a gun in the terminal would expose the op. That’s pretty thin ice, but they may skate on it if they believe you were just doing your job, and now you need their help for an extraction. But—this is the important part—tell them you know about Jenks, and that the take-out order could not possibly have come from him. Therefore, the whole delivery is tainted, because something stinks at
NORCO
. They’re always eager to hit their own internal affairs button. Tell them you will only surrender the principal to Gerardis, who is the only guy you know at
NORCO
.”

“Shit, man,” said Cody. “He’s the only guy
left
at
NORCO
that I
used
to know . . . before he got promoted.”

“I’m laying odds that Gerardis is the guy who pulled your name out of the dormant file,” said Dandine. “Because if
NORCO
had been able to triangulate on Connie’s bug,
you’d
be dead right now, too.”

Cody pinched the bridge of his broad nose, hard. “They weren’t gonna pay me? I don’t
believe
this crap. You can’t depend on nobody, anymore.”

“It’s nothing new,” I said. “They work you like a pirate on a galleon, then abandon you when they downsize. No future, no benefits.”

“Remind me again what we pay taxes for?” piped up Zetts.

Dandine rounded on him with a grunt. “Like you’ve ever paid taxes in your life,
dude.
”

“Look who’s talking,” Zetts said, mock-aggressive. “Kidding. I’m kidding. Christ . . . Mr. Sensitive.”

I was still wearing Zetts’s much-cursed
GAY MAFIA MEMBER
T-shirt—inside out, under my jacket—and wanted very much to just take a nap.

“I hate to ask,” said Cody, “but if Gerardis shows—what then?” He was still a little skittish with contriteness.

“We take him,” said Dandine. “But that’s jumping ahead.”

“Oh, yeah. That’ll be easy.”

According to what I could glean about the mysterious Mr. Gerardis, he was one of
NORCO
’s favored, fair-haired subjects, rather akin to an executive vice president, the kind you can never get directly on the phone. I, too, had begun to enjoy the insulation of the VP mantle at Kroeger, which gave me the right, for example, to text Danielle at the office and have her arrange for a rental car, as I was flying back from Pittsburgh.

Yeah,
that
had worked out like gangbusters.

Easy: Pull
NORCO
’s officer-on-deck out of the press of a posse of handpicked samurai, without pulling a gun, in the middle of an airport bristling with security. Yep, pie.

“I’m counting on them having guns,” Dandine said. “Be aware.”

“Yes, and what if one of them successfully
shoots
one of us before he’s, y’know, detained and searched?”

“They’ll know about all the cameras on you, Connie. It’d have to be an irresolvable situation for them to go public with gunfire. Not their style. Gerardis won’t risk bringing an army—”

“ ‘Cos he doesn’t know
you’re
here,” said Cody.

I tried my best to nail Dandine directly, “Tell me, in your experience . . . does this have a hope in hell of even working a little bit?”

“I’ll admit I have some issues with
NORCO
right now,” Dandine said evenly. “But I am not going to let them simply erase you, and move on.” He let his gaze go abstract. “It’s the best I’ve got.”

It was no longer a case of
what would you do?
It was now
What the hell else was
I
going to do?

I swallowed the boulder on the back of my tongue. “Alternatives?”

“We go to
NORCO
, fight our way in, and force them to deal with us. You know where they are, Connie—right there on that piece of paper the Sisters gave you.”

“What about Ripkin? Couldn’t he help us, I don’t know . . . expose them?”

“Expose them how? Go to the
Times?
To
Rolling Stone?
Out them on the Internet? That shit only works in the movies, Connie.”

It was true. Unveiling a conspiracy was not the same thing as
eliminating
the conspiracy. It was like pleading injustice to a bribed cop.
NORCO
was one of those chameleonic malefactors that simply adapted in response to threat, changing its cellular structure to render any irritant subpotent . . . until the truth would not set the stoutest of heroes free. The truth didn’t cut it anymore. You also needed backstops, armament, allies, evack, safe houses, cash drops, and bogus identities. Today, Woodward and Bernstein would be eaten alive—discredited, defrocked, unmanned, professionally ridiculed, and cinder-blocked into a drowning pool of disinformation.

As Alicia had sniped at me, right before her death,
Why, Mr. Maddox—they couldn’t put it on TV if it wasn’t
real.

Which put Cody and I in the middle of the terminal, in the middle of the night, feeling stupid and sore-thumb obvious because we had no suitcases, no props. I confess I wanted to look the enemy right in the eye, to at least see these
NORCO
drones, these bad-boy enforcers. They had been shadow figures, these past few eventful days, always seen at a distance maddening for its imprecision. When the enemy is  faceless and remote, you tend to credit them with superhuman abilities—that’s one significator of true paranoia, as a medical condition. The kind for which you take medication . . . so you won’t see the enemy anymore.

The entrance of the
NORCO
phalanx stirred no notice among the forty or so travelers in the terminal at this hour. To me, from my newly enlightened vantage, they seemed as obvious as if they’d come decked out in Roman battle armor and plumed helmets, fanfare guard and all.

“Gerardis was bald the last time I saw him,” said Cody. (So much for “fair-haired!”)

My heartbeat began to redline. “There’s at least
ten
of them.”

“Oh, fuck
us,
” muttered Cody. “Dandine said he wouldn’t bring an army.”

“Guess a
platoon
is okay, though,” I said.

They had dismounted from two vans still in the loading zone, hazard flashers blinking. Add two drivers to their number. They were all clad in casual clothing—chinos, Banana Republic shirts, Bass Weejuns, windbreakers—but each of them had the hard-ass carriage of an ex-Ranger or bulky prison guard. Four were women, walking arm-in-arm with their mock partners. They had sling bags, briefcases, and rucksacks. But the way they scanned the perimeter and casually fanned to cover each other, moving all the time, betrayed them. This, then, was where all social mutants, decommissioned Berets, psychos, and Visigoths wound up when there was no juicy war on which to feed. They wound up under the wing of
NORCO
, which cherished your thousand-yard stare; saw it as an asset.

“Stay or go?” said Cody. “I say abort.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Let’s see what they’ve got.”

Their “principal”—as Dandine would say—was a large bald man in a business suit whose own passage vectored the movements of the entire team. He was clean-bald, probably shaven, practically polished. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and was at least six two, but the dramatic profile of his shiny head was adulterated by his lack of an equally strong jawline. His chin seemed to curve softly into his neck, and surplus flesh bulged from his tight, high collar. His head hung forward, rather than projecting up from his backbone; he had what is called a “dowager’s hump” below the back of his neck. His sharp eyes seemed silver behind his glasses, and he made Cody and I the instant he saw us. He wasted no time, walking directly to within discreet speaking distance while his hunter-killers arranged themselves into a rough semicircle of protection.

This, then, was the face of
NORCO
. It didn’t seem very compassionate.

“Mr. Conejo,” he said, smiling. “And you would be Mr. Maddox, is that correct? My name is Thorvald Gerardis.”

“No, it ain’t,” whispered Cody, to me. We both startled at the tinkle of breaking glass.

Then the bald man’s inadequate jaw ripped free of his head and flew away like a home run, in a spray of blood.

Cody swept me back with a forearm as the
NORCO
team unlimbered their hardware from all the breakaway sling bags, briefcases, and rucksacks—an instant arsenal of weapons with extralarge mags and obnoxiously protuberant silencers. They moved to employ available cover while trying to fix the trajectory from which had come the high-velocity shot that took the bald man’s face off.

It was surreal. No one screamed, but all the ordinary citizens scattered or kissed the floor. I fell on my ass and Cody dragged me up, to hug the Northwest ticketing counter next to a businesswoman who looked ready for a coronary . . . but that was not going to make her put down her mobile device, by god. Her fingers trembled as she tried to capture images of the action to send to . . . somebody . . . from her phone’s tiny screen.

The average person now appears on a minimum of a thousand cameras per week, just in the course of a normal day. Cash register video. Security cams. Traffic lights. Everybody else’s cellphones. I recalled Zetts’s archaic mention of Big Brother—an outmoded fear, now, since most people accepted that they were being watched all the time, usually by each other.

A lot of insistent, no-nonsense voices were yelling now.
Weapons down, surrender immediately, lace your fingers behind your heads.
Not us. The
NORCO
crew wasn’t even aiming at us, because we were unarmed. No. I saw an M16 muzzle snake out from behind the counter, just above our heads. Across the way I could see a lot of men in fatigues, drawing down alongside uniformed cops and airport police. More guys on the second level, with guns.
Now! Now! Now!

I’m sure Dandine, in the car, was laughing his ass off.

The
NORCO
shooters looked to each other like befuddled lab animals, trying to intuit a group consensus on whether they should exit our realm in a blaze of glory. Then, collectively, they laid down their guns with almost reverent exactitude. Went to knees. Open palms. Laced fingers. Trusted Dad to make bail. As they flattened out, as the soldiers and cops crept toward them (using that one-two advance step so ingrained for people with tactical training—never crossing one leg in front of the other), one of them scooted laterally to avoid the spreading amoeba of crimson pumping from the dead man’s shattered skull.

People were talking now, and watching, raising the noise level to a cafeteria fusillade while the various authority figures yelled louder to make their orders heard. Cody was crab-walking, against the counter; back another step, back another step, always nudging me ahead of him. We totally fumbled our attempt at nonchalance once the downward escalators were in sight. A minute later, we were piling into the GTO at baggage claim—our prearranged pickup—trusting Zetts to magick us from harm’s blast radius.

First we’d experienced a car chase with only one car; now we had just foxed out of a gunfight with no shooting—except that single, surgical discharge. There was only one other partial casualty resulting from our trip to the airport.