Safe House (19 page)

“And you’ll keep working him, right? He changes his mind, you’ve got the hammer over his head.”

“That’s right,” Pryce said, refrigerator-voiced.

“And he keeps his kid?”

“That’s the part I thought we were going to negotiate. That’s all you want, isn’t it? Believe me, there’s no way he’s going to bother his wife ever again. He’s going to vanish. New name, new face, the whole works.”

“They’re going to do plastic surgery on the boy too?”

“It’s been done,” he said calmly. “The pedophile rings have been doing it to kidnapped children for years. But I believe you already know about that . . . ?”

I ignored the opening. It hadn’t really been a question anyway, just bait. Any pro interrogator knows that trick—you make the subject think you approve of whatever he did, show some empathy, get him bragging about it . . . and you’ve got him locked. He probably knew about some of the things I’d done in the past, had me tapped as a vigilante. Maybe he thought I’d welcome the chance to unburden myself to a kindred spirit.

Or maybe it was
his
chance—to show off, the info-warrior flexing his muscles.

“How come you don’t just tell him not to show up for the divorce thing? That it’s a trap?” I asked, like I’d never heard him mention pedophiles.

“I don’t have complete . . . control,” Pryce said. “His son has always been part of the deal. I told him we might be able to . . . obtain the child at a later date, but he’s afraid his wife will just vanish. There’s more than one underground operating in America. His Nazi friends don’t have the resources to find one woman and one child in some safehouse. I don’t even know where the woman is now. Only your . . . friend knows that.”

“So it’s her you threaten?”

He shrugged, dismissing the accusation. “The only thing holding his wife close is legal jurisdiction,” he said. “She has to bring the divorce and the custody in New York, where they both live. She won’t run until that’s over with. But he doesn’t have everything I . . . need yet. Do you understand my dilemma?”

“What if you had another man in there?” I asked, flipping my trump card on the table. “Someone who could get you the information?”

“Forget it,” he said. “Believe me, you are quite well known to those people, Mr. Burke. They don’t have my sources, and they certainly don’t have the . . . extent of my information. You may have some . . . credentials that they would respect. But this isn’t some racist prison gang we’re talking about. If one of them you’ve . . . done business with recognized you, you’d be dead. Right then. And so would the man who brought you into the group.”

“I’ve never done business with—”

“Don’t insult me,” Pryce said softly. “You sold a bunch of original tapes of one of Hitler’s early speeches to some idiot Nazis a number of years ago, remember?”

“No.”

“That was a long time ago, before you became so . . . sophisticated in your operations,” he said, ignoring my denial like I’d never spoken. “It was very easy to trace. How do you think those morons felt when they learned what those original, authentic tapes really were? Oh, they were revolutionary speeches, all right. A call for armed resistance in support of the homeland. Only it was Menachem Begin, exhorting the Irgun to violence.”

I had to laugh. Couldn’t help it. Yiddish sounds like German if you don’t speak either language. I used to do a lot of stuff like that. Not for politics, for the easy score. Freaks are always easy. And they never go to the law.

“I doubt they’d see the humor,” Pryce said dryly. “There’s also the little matter of selling them a few crates of machine guns. Funny how the ATF showed up a few minutes after the money changed hands. And after you’d left.”

I didn’t laugh at that one. And if he said anything about some fake mercenary recruiters who ended up dead in a shabby little Manhattan office, I was going to take something besides tobacco out of the pack of cigarettes I’d left on the dash after I’d smoked the last one.

“There’s a long list,” he said ambiguously, letting me wonder what else he knew. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t work.”

“I didn’t mean me,” I told him. “I got somebody else. Somebody perfect.”

He sat quietly, wrapped around himself. If he was thinking, it didn’t show on his face.

“ ‘Perfect’ is a big word,” he finally said.

“Let’s leave that for a minute,” I told him. “Say I’m right. Say I’ve got a man you could put in there. That means Lothar goes too, you care about that?”

“No.”

“And this other guy, he gets the same deal?”

“If he’s not involved with the . . . if he’s only going in to pipeline back to me, he wouldn’t need the same deal.”

“New face, new ID, full immunity,” I said like I hadn’t heard him.

“Immunity for what? For whatever he had to do to prove himself to the cell?”

“
Full
immunity. Not ‘use’ immunity, not ‘transactional’ immunity. No-testimony, walk-away-clear, no-arrest, no-prosecute, dis-a-fucking-
peer
immunity. You can do that?”

“Yes,” he said, like I’d asked him a stupid question.

“And you can make this Lothar bring someone in? Even this late?”

“If that person had the right bona fides. But they’d have to be good.”

“How much time are they looking at?” I asked him, thinking about how even a double-crossed Lothar could be out in a few years. And go looking for his son.

Pryce held up his webbed hands, ticking off the counts on his fingers. “Conspiracy to commit mass murder, possession of the means to do it, dozens of assorted felonies—mostly armed robbery—in furtherance,” he said. “Plus a load of individual crimes committed by individual members for which they’ve never been arrested. Yet. Homicides, rapes, firebombings . . .

“A couple of thousand years apiece,” Pryce concluded. “Enough to make any of them resist arrest.”

“Okay. This Lothar, he’s not the only one you got, right?”

“I’m not sure what you mean. The only what?”

“The only Nazi. No way you just stumbled on him blind. You’re running some others, maybe in different spots around the country.”

“And if I was?”

“You wanted a credential. I’m gonna give you one. The best. Gilt-edged. Can you get word of a contract put out on someone? Call him a race-mixer, a closet Jew . . . I don’t give a damn.”

“A contract?”

“Don’t be cute,” I told him. “We’re both over the line now. Don’t worry. Your guy doesn’t have to
do
anything. Just say he heard about this contract, that’s all.”

“When would that have to start?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“I don’t under——”

“Something already . . . happened, okay? Let’s say this guy I’m talking about, he’s gonna say
he
did it. If he did it off a contract, if he whacked someone for the cause, that’d ace him up, right?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding at the truth. “That would do it.”

“And you can put that together?”

“I can. But I’m still not—”

“I got two things that’ll convince you,” I said. “Number one: You get to meet the guy. Face-to-face. Ask him any questions you want. Satisfy yourself. You like it, he goes in. Deal?”

“You said two things,” he reminded me.

“You think you know me,” I said, my voice as intimate as a caress. “You parked this big white target of a Taurus out here, all by itself. And then you stood aside, waiting in the shadows. Just in case I decided to lob a bazooka round into it, right? One big bang, you’re gone and the problem’s solved. That’s why you wanted me to get in this car with you. You’re a puppeteer, Pryce. Information is your strings. Before you pull them, you better be sure they’re connected.”

“Which means what?” he said, only boredom in his voice.

I tapped the pack of cigarettes to take one out. A tiny black cylinder fell into my hand. “This is a flashlight,” I said in the same gentle tone of voice I’d been using. “If I had taken it out, shined it in your face at any time, we’d be done talking.”

“Nobody’s that good a shot,” he said. “Even with the window—”

I touched the flashlight, but I didn’t aim it at his face. A tiny dot of red light showed in the windshield. And then Max the Silent touched the back of his neck.

“Don’t turn around,” I told him. “Don’t do anything stupid. You’re not gonna get hurt, understand?”

“Yes,” he said, holding his head rigid.

“It wouldn’t take a bullet,” I said. “And it wouldn’t have to make any noise. Or it could make a
lot
of noise. But one thing would always be the same. You know what that would be?”

“No.”

“You’d never see it coming,” I told him.

H
e sat there without moving for a couple of minutes after Max pulled his hands away and went back into the night.

“This is a battlefield friendship,” I said quietly. “You and me. Your enemies are my enemies, that makes us friends, right? Or allies, anyway.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to do my piece. Do it right. Like I promised. You too. No more threats. You already did your threats, and you’re gonna get what you want. Don’t do them anymore, okay?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to have to meet again. You’re going to need to see the man I have. You’re going to have to know some things about him. That’s the only way we can play this, you and me. Together. The way I scan it, you’re a lone wolf. Whatever you know, you’re the only one. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s be clear. You want this cell. Lothar’s a chip. You’re going to ante that chip. I’m going to put up my man. He goes in. Lothar
brings
him in. You take care of that. I take care of getting you the information. I make sure the information is right. I guarantee you keep getting it even if Lothar turns unreliable. Information, that’s what you get from me. You cash that information when they all go. That about cover it?”

“Yes.”

“And when you get paid, I get paid.”

That got his attention. He shifted position for the first time since Max took hold of him, his lipless mouth twitching to match the muscle under his eye. “We never discussed that,” he said.

“Yeah we did. In the restaurant. Only thing we didn’t agree on was the price. How much is ZOG paying for hard-core terrorist cells these days?”

“It . . . depends. On a number of factors out of my control.”

“Sure. Look, I know we’re not fifty-fifty on this. All I could do is take a wild guess. And I’m not gonna do that. But I don’t think I’d be much off if I was thinking seven figures. . . .“

“That’s—”

“Sure, I know. Let’s just pretend I’m an agent. Your agent. Agents get a cut. Ten percent, right?”

“You want a hundred thousand dollars?”

“Yeah.”

“Done,” he said, no expression on his face.

I
handed the parking ticket to the drone at the gate. He made an impatient gesture, waving his hands in aggravation. A small TV set flicked in his booth.

“What?” I asked him. Not friendly—people tend to remember anything unusual.

He pointed at a slot on the outside of the booth. I fed the ticket into the slot. A panel lit up: $4.00. I handed him a five-dollar bill. He managed to overcome his annoyance at me not having exact change long enough to hand me a single. Compared to him, the toll-takers on the bridges were complex mathematicians.

I exited the airport, taking the highway east toward Long Island. Did the same double-back I’d done coming in and picked Max up where I’d dropped him off.

On the way back, he made a series of gestures I hadn’t seen before. It took me a few tries before I got what he was telling me.

I
n the country, the morning sound of early spring is birds calling. Down here, it’s car alarms screaming their impotence. In either place, only the tourists pay attention.

The sun was bright and strong when I got up, spring’s promise closer to truth now. The refrigerator was empty, so I trudged over to one of those all-night Korean bodegas that pop up so often down here. They usually close just as quick, soon as they find out all the working people disappear after dark. Even the strip bars do most of their business in daylight.

I loaded up heavy on provisions, but Pansy scarfed most of it in one sitting.

When I called in, Mama said, “Girl call. Late.” Meaning earlier that morning.

“Vyra?”

“No. Other girl.”

“Okay. She say what she wanted?”

“Talk to you.”

“
D
id it go all right?” Crystal Beth asked as soon as she heard my voice on the phone.

“I’ll tell you all about it. Later, okay?”

“When later?”

“Tonight. Around . . . nine?”

“Good. Are you—?”

“You got room there?”

“Room?”

“For a . . . guest. Part of what we’re doing.”

“Sure. As long as she’s—”

“See you then,” I said, thumbing the cellular into silence.

“
Y
ou wanted another chance,” I told him. “This is it.”

“Be a rat?
That’s
your fucking idea of another chance?”

“This isn’t being a rat, Herk. It’s like being a . . .” I searched for the word “. . . spy. Like behind enemy lines, during a war.”

“Dropping a dime is still—”

“This
isn’t
dropping a dime, okay? What we got is a bunch of lunatic motherfuckers planning to blow up some buildings, kill a whole bunch of people. The Man
already
knows about them. They been penetrated to the max. The Man
already
has a guy inside. Only thing is, he’s one of them, see?”

“One of who?” Herk asked. A reasonable question.

“One of the Nazis. Now,
he’s
a rat, see what I’m saying? Those are
his
boys. And he’s gonna dime them, just like you said. You know how it works. The Man’s gonna give him a free pass. New face, new ID, new everything. We play this right, that’s yours. Instead of his, yours.”

“Oh man, I ain’t doing no Witness Protection—”

“You’re not gonna
be
a witness, Herk. This isn’t about testimony. And you’re not gonna be in the Program either. You’re not gonna have a PO, nobody to report to. You get all the new stuff, a little bit of cash to get you started, and then you’re on your own.”