Once a Spy (5 page)

Halfway up the deserted sidewalk, Smith’s stocky friend MacKenzie wobbled, no longer like a drunk, but rather, a concussion victim. A chute of blood from his nose glowed as he staggered past a streetlamp. Drummond must have started on him, Charlie figured, but hadn’t had time to finish in his rush to stop Smith. In MacKenzie’s hand was the paper bag Charlie had imagined concealed a liquor bottle. Protruding from it now was a silenced gun just like Smith’s.

Charlie stood in place on the sidewalk and watched him advance. Fear jammed everything, not least of which was Charlie’s mechanism for deciding what to do. The next thing he knew, he was falling.

He hit the sidewalk between the stoop and a trio of steel trash cans. Drummond, he realized, had reached through the banister spindles and pulled him down.

Another bullet hissed from MacKenzie’s silenced barrel, stinging the sidewalk inches from Charlie’s knees.

The most rudimentary survival mechanism enabled him to bunch himself so that the trash cans at least blocked him from MacKenzie’s sight. From there he eyed the rest of the block. There were no pedestrians or motorists to provide help. Still, he thought, the neighbors would
be deluging the 911 switchboard, as he would have himself if his cell phone, along with his coat, hadn’t been a casualty of the blast. Then he considered, with a wave of nausea, that the neighbors had been given no reason to glance out their windows. There had been no roar of guns, no noise at all as cities go. And if someone happened to raise a blind, what would he see now? The shadows concealed MacKenzie’s gun if the open lapels of his overcoat didn’t. It would appear a clean-cut yuppie was ambling home.

Every part of Charlie trembled at the dull patter of MacKenzie’s soles, the volume increasing as he neared.

Within thirty yards, or close enough that he was unlikely to miss, MacKenzie fired again. The bullet bored into a steel trash can on a direct course for Charlie’s head. It exited on his side of the can and hit the stoop, ricocheting harmlessly away. Because Charlie was in flight, his elbow in his father’s firm grip.

12

Nostrand was
a still life, save the yellow cab idling in a parking spot halfway down the block. Drummond ripped open the rear driver’s side door and dove in with Charlie in hand like a suitcase. A plump Middle Eastern man of perhaps forty-five sat behind the wheel, munching a kabob to “Jingle Bells” on the radio. “Where to?” he asked, as if their means of arrival were nothing out of the ordinary, which, Charlie thought, probably was the case in late-night Brooklyn.

Charlie turned to Drummond with the expectation that he would announce a destination. Indeed, Drummond pointed straight ahead and opened his mouth. But nothing came out. It seemed the words had stumbled along the way or gotten lost. And the glow in his eyes was fading, as if his power cord had been yanked.

“How about the police?” Charlie said.

Drummond appeared to think about it. Or he just sat there and said nothing. Charlie wasn’t sure which.

Charlie’s eyes flew to the movement in the rearview mirror. He whirled around to find MacKenzie in a crouch at the corner of Prospect and Nostrand, a hundred feet behind them, using the top of a
Daily News
vending machine to steady his gun.

A chunk of the rear window burst apart. Bits of glass sprayed inward, stinging Charlie’s neck, ears, and scalp. A slug imbedded itself behind the driver’s head in the inch-thick sheet of Plexiglas dividing the cab.

Drummond ducked beneath the window line. If PlayStation games represented reality with any accuracy, Charlie knew the car’s chassis offered little protection against a full-metal-jacketed round traveling at
near the speed of sound, and the seat essentially provided no additional defense. Nevertheless he dropped all the way to the floor and lay there, petrified.

“Just go anywhere,” he managed to call to the driver.

Ibrahim Wallid was the driver’s name, according to the ID rubber banded to his sun visor. He tried to reply, but no sound would come. He gripped the wheel and stomped on the accelerator, bringing the engine to a throaty roar.

But the taxi was still in park.

Drummond’s headrest burst into particles of foam. Again a bullet bashed into the Plexiglas behind Wallid.

Trembling, the driver flailed at the gearshift arm. He clipped it with his wrist, snapping it into drive. With the accelerator already flush against the floor, the cab lurched forward like a dragster, laying half-block-long stripes of rubber. Another bullet sparked the top of a parking meter behind them.

Wallid ratcheted the wheel, turning the taxi at almost a right angle onto a clear Carroll Street block. Centrifugal force hurled Drummond into Charlie’s spine. While explosive, the pain was a minor consideration because they were safely away.

Climbing back onto his seat, Charlie asked—shock had thrown off his governor so that it came out as a scream—“Who the hell were they?”

Drummond brushed bits of glass and foam from his hair. “Who?”

“The guys who tried to murder us a minute ago!”

“Oh, right, right, right.” Some of the light returned to Drummond’s eyes. “Tell me something? What’s today’s date?”

“The twenty-sixth.”

“Of?”

“December.”

“The last time I recall checking the calendar, the leaves had just begun to fall.”

“So about two, three months.” Charlie hoped this was leading somewhere.

Drummond waved at the shattered rear window. “This probably has to do with work.” As if drained by the thinking, he sagged into a reclining position.

Charlie needed more. “I never thought of the appliance business as quite so deadly.”

Drummond nodded vaguely.

“How about the way you knew how to handle yourself back there?” Charlie asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t pick that up at the repair and maintenance refreshers?”

With a shrug, Drummond leaned against his window, content to use it as a pillow despite the cold and the rattling of the glass. His eyelids appeared to grow heavy.

“At least tell me how you knew that the first guy had a gun?” Charlie said.

Drummond sat up an inch or two. “Yes, the key was …” He stopped. He’d fumbled the thought. He recovered it: “The fellow lured you down the block with the thing they knew would most entice you, a monitor scheme.”

“You mean a
monetary
scheme?”

“As I recall, the
Monitor
was a ship.”

“I know. What does it have to do with anything?”

“The
Monitor
battled the
Merrimac.”

“Civil War, I know, I know. Was there a particular scheme the
Monitor
used?”

“The Merrimack is a hundred-ten-mile-long river that begins at the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers.”

“You’re losing me.” Charlie suspected Drummond himself was lost.

“Franklin, New Hampshire,” Drummond said, as if that settled it.

13

The precinct
house was quiet. “It’s so cold out there tonight, the pickpockets are keeping their hands in their own pockets,” explained the duty officer as he led Charlie and Drummond down an empty, characterless corridor of mostly dark offices. The place had the same coarse, sour smell as all the municipal buildings Charlie had been to. He wondered whether the odor of all the humanity massed into these places was too strong for any cleaning compound, or whether all the places simply used the same inadequate cleaning compound. Either way, all things considered, he felt as if he and Drummond had reached an oasis.

They came to the squad room, a big, open space painted a drab beige with few of the wanted posters or softball trophies Charlie had expected and none of the chaos. Three detectives doing paperwork was it for action.

The duty officer directed Charlie and Drummond to Detective Howard Beckman, a man well into his fifties who looked to have been a bruiser back in his day. His thatchy gray hair was now parted ruler straight. Like his sport coat, his oxford shirt was crisp. His silk tie, knotted with precision, was of the quality usually seen on a cop only if he were commissioner. Charlie took Beckman for a warrior forced to the sidelines by age restrictions, striving to soften his edges with couture—though
couture
probably wouldn’t be his term for it.

“So Murph says you fellas’ve got a good one for me,” Beckman said with a smile as he gestured Charlie and Drummond into the chairs before him. Charlie liked the old cop right out of the gate.

Battling his own incredulity, Charlie delivered what felt like a thorough rendition of events. Drummond sat quietly, occasionally nodding in corroboration, mostly gazing at his slippers.

Afterward, Beckman cupped his solid jaw in a hand, evoking a general pondering a battlefield map. “Quite a day,” he said. His tone was pure sympathy. Unfortunately his eyes divulged skepticism. He disappeared behind a giant computer terminal. “Let’s start with the fire,” he said, picking up the pace. “I see Chief Morris of Company two oh four ordered plywood over your windows and doorways to keep out looters, which is standard. He requested stepped-up police patrol—same reason, also standard. But there’s no request for a look-see by a fire marshal, nothing like that. If he’d thought anything was fishy …”

“At that time the gas man and the boiler blowing up seemed like coincidence,” Charlie said. “The two guys trying to shoot us made for a pattern.”

The detective slurped hot coffee from a tall Styrofoam cup. “I’ve also got the report from the patrol car that the duty officer sent by.” He dipped behind the terminal again and read aloud, “‘Resident officer saw and heard nothing out of ordinary. Officer observed no signs of gunplay, no casings, nothing out of ordinary.’”

Charlie had the same creeping, itchy sensation he did when a horse he’d bet began to let the lead slip away. “These guys, though, they clearly weren’t amateurs.”

“Then they would’ve tidied up, yeah. Understand this wasn’t a full forensics team Murph sent over.”

“What about the bullets in the Plexiglas divider in the cab?”

Beckman brightened. “That could be something, yeah.” A burst of right and left index finger pecks at his keyboard and he relayed, with disappointment, “No new incident reports from Transit on the system.”

“How long does it take for them to show up?”

“Not this long. It’s the cab companies’ first priority, if only so they can put in for insurance.”

“Wallid said he was going straight to his garage, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he stopped to get a drink first. My luck, the cab was stolen while he was in the bar.”

“A lot of times, especially late night, the guy’s an illegal with a borrowed
hack license. Shelling out for the body work himself beats dealing with Immigration, you know?”

“Great,” Charlie said. So the cab getting stolen would actually be better luck.

“We can still get to him,” Beckman said. “I show three licensed cabbies named Ibrahim Wallid in the metro directory, plus a Wallid Ibrahim. We’ll call ’em tomorrow, find out if one of their vehicles is out of service.” He returned his attention to his coffee.

Charlie’s anxiety escalated into a feeling like that of a cold coming on. “So I guess, from a procedural standpoint, this doesn’t rate any more immediate action than a purse snatching?”

Beckman smoothed his tie. “The thing you gotta understand is, even on a slow night like this, we’re gonna have half a dozen complaints where somebody’s actually been shot. What the department would need to sink its teeth into yours is the
why. Why
would a sixty-four-year-old appliance salesman, even one who’s surprisingly good with his fists, have professional hit men after him?”

All Charlie could come up with was, “That’s the question of the night.”

With an outstretched palm, Beckman put it to Drummond.

Drummond raised his shoulders.

Beckman massaged the bags under his eyes. “The best thing’d be if you fellas come back tomorrow when the flip-chart lady’s here so she can sketch composites of your guys. They match anything in the system, we’re off to the races.”

“What do we do in the meantime?” Charlie asked.

“I’ll put the write-up into play on the double. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the name Kermit Smith, even if it’s fake—or Smith in some combination with MacKenzie—will click somewhere in the system. Or, you never know, maybe a call will come in from an old lady on Prospect Place who was up late watching the Shopping Channel, saw two young male Caucasians in business suits pile into a car, thought it was suspicious that one of them had a bloody nose
or a gun
, and wrote down the tag number.” Beckman plucked an ornately monogrammed leather card holder from his top drawer and dealt a pair of business cards across the desk. “Till then, if anything comes up, or if there’s anything else I can do—”

The bulky dot-matrix printer on the stand behind him sputtered type onto tractor-fed paper, giving him pause and halting the activities of the other detectives.

“I’ll get it in a sec,” he told them. He was also telling Charlie and Drummond that their interview was over.

Charlie saw no remaining choice but to plead. “What if MacKenzie used the taxi’s tag number to track us here? Or what if Smith followed us in his own car—like that new BMW, which, come to think of it, no one in his right mind would have left on the street overnight?”

Beside the printer stand was a window with a view of the street in front of the precinct house. With a tilt of the head that way, Beckman said, “Be my guest.”

Approaching the glass, Charlie was irked by the reflection: The detective was rolling his eyes. All Charlie saw outside that he hadn’t before was a
Daily News
truck delivering tomorrow’s copies to the sidewalk vending machines. Nothing else even moved. Beckman’s reaction no longer seemed unwarranted.

What the hell were you expecting? Charlie asked himself. MacKenzie lying in wait with a sniper’s rifle? Smith revving the black BMW in preparation to mow you down?

As he stepped away from the glass, the message on the tractor-fed paper grabbed his attention.