The 500: A Novel (36 page)

I thought for a moment. “I will give you this evidence,” I said, tapping my finger on the envelope, “and guarantee that you will never have to worry about it again. In exchange, Rado goes away. The police leave me alone. I get my life back. And I become a full partner.”

“And from now on, you’re mine,” Henry said. “A full partner in the wet work too. When we find Rado, you’ll slit his throat.”

I nodded.

“Then we’re agreed,” Henry said. The devil held his hand out.

I shook it, and handed over my soul with the envelope.

Plink-plink.
The noise came from below. It had started a moment before, but now, in the silent room, it was impossible not to notice.

Henry stepped to the window, then circled around to the window on the other side of his office. Rado’s Range Rover, and another for his men, was parked outside the hillside entrance to the secure area of the mansion.

“Marcus,” Henry yelled. “Get in here.”

Marcus arrived, gun drawn and held beside his thigh, but my broken-down ass was the last thing he needed to worry about. The
plink-plink
s now sounded a lot more like the crack of gunfire.

Rado and his men were inside.

Henry pointed to me. “Tie him up,” he said.

Marcus swept me over his hip and slammed me onto my neck and shoulder blades on the ground before I realized what was happening. He hiked my arms behind my back and handcuffed the right wrist tightly. He ran the cuffs through the handle of Henry’s filing cabinets before clamping the other cuff on my left. I was stuck, arms behind me, sitting on the floor.

It could have been worse. After Rado’s rope work, I’d made it something of a personal rule never to walk into a likely hostage/torture scenario without swallowing a few pain pills first. It dulled the sharp edges of the encounter nicely. Add to that the numbness, the complete indifference to my fate I’d felt since my dad died, and it made getting tossed around a bit more, the repeat wrenching of an already busted shoulder, seem like no big deal.

Henry and Marcus were too smart to fall for me wearing a wire, but Henry, as a good former soldier for Nixon, should have known not to wire himself. He glanced up at the bookshelves, where the hidden camera I’m sure he’d used to blackmail dozens of politicians had finally captured him. I guess he’d never had to worry because he controlled it.

He pressed a button on his phone. “Gerald!” he barked into the speaker. But Gerald, I’m afraid, was unavailable.

Annie, when she’d first heard about my plan for today, was as pesky as a little sister about helping. I wasn’t going to let her risk her life. But after she’d said she would simply show up at this little office party, uninvited and uninformed about the dangers, the greater risk would have been keeping her in the dark.

After her performance in the woods with my father and me, taking a punch while chasing me down, she was very much in Henry’s good graces. As part of the crew searching for me, and a budding Davies dirty trickster, there would be nothing too extraordinary about her strolling into the secure areas of the mansion.

When I first told her about how Gerald had an omnipresent eye on the private lives of the Davies Group, Annie couldn’t place the name.

“Big guy, lots of Star Wars figurines.”

She replied with a nauseated look.

“Sorry.”

She had also noticed Gerald’s creepy attention around the office, and today all she had to do was play a little damsel in distress to get him to open the door to the room where he monitored the cameras around the mansion. The 100,000-volt stun gun I’d given her took care of the rest. She cuffed up Gerald (two pairs, double locked, just in case), then, via an off-the-shelf wireless intercom, piped the audio/video from Henry’s office to Rado in his car.

Sure, once I said yes and shook Henry’s hand, he finally owned me. But once he acknowledged killing Irin and Haskins when he thought I was just haggling over my price, I owned him. Rado was listening, and that’s all it took to redirect his vengeance to the proper target: Davies.

The gunshots picked up, closer now, answered by the distinct
rat-a-tat
of an assault rifle going full auto.

I certainly wasn’t a fan of Rado the war criminal. I’d told Annie to get out of the building as soon as Henry said the magic words that revealed to Rado that he’d killed Irin. Rado’s men advanced through the hidden stairs and corridors of the mansion, and I really didn’t have a dog in this fight. I wanted to make sure Henry’s men were wiped out, so I’d given Rado the basic layout, but not too easily, so I’d kept a few things from him. Mostly, to borrow a line from Kissinger, I was hoping both sides would lose: Henry and Rado. I wanted casualties more than anything else.

Henry wasn’t happy about the armed invasion. He walked over to the table, glowering at the envelope. I was sure he was angry at getting taken, but there was more to it than that, a sense of betrayal as well.

Behind all the posturing and power, he was a lonely guy. His wife he’d more or less purchased. No kids. Nothing in his life but work. Instead of friendships he had complicities, and the only trust he knew was the uneasy suicide pact that came when two men had the goods on each other. He wanted a protégé, a son, but I sure as fuck wasn’t going to join him in that hell.

He lifted the evidence.

The pig in a poke is one of the oldest and simplest cons. You sell someone a pig and give them a bag (known way back when as a poke) with something else inside.

It’s a risky play, typically a stupid move. But I had a few things going for me. My dad had held out under a fatal beating to protect the evidence, so Henry would assume I had something.

But that was only part of it. Henry was blindingly obvious about what he believed. We swindlers don’t believe in anything, really. But we can clue in pretty quickly to what someone else does. And if some mark believes unfailingly in one truth, you can bet your ass we’re going to find a way to use that truth against him. Henry wasn’t shy about trumpeting his one true maxim: everyone can be gotten to, everyone has a price. He had faith in one thing: treachery. It was his strength, sure, but I was going to make it his weakness. There was no such thing as honesty in Henry’s world. He had to believe he could own me, that I, like every other man, could be corrupted. So I let him. The envelope didn’t matter. I wasn’t playing my hand, I was playing Henry.

Now, as Marcus ducked through the false panel into the corridor that led to Henry’s vault, Davies picked up the envelope. He opened it and emptied it onto the table.

A slice of dried apricot slid out, and behind it, floating down, came a menu from the White Eagle. (Radomir, God bless him, had offered me an actual human ear to make the whole ruse more realistic. “It’s really no problem at all,” he’d said. I declined.)

“There is no evidence, Henry,” I said. “Marcus burned it at the DOJ.”

The gunfire was close now. A bullet exploded through the molding of the panel. Plaster dust and splinters sprayed through the room.

“Radomir heard everything.” I looked up toward the camera hidden in the bookshelves. “He knows you killed his daughter.”

I’d seen Rado’s old-world style on display in Colombia, of course. But it had been Henry who tipped me off to just how dangerous a man who lives only by blood and honor can be in Henry’s world of calculated greed and fear.

Back at the White Eagle, I stuck to my story even after Rado opened up my skin. I guess that was enough to convince him I wasn’t lying, and he was game to listen to my plan. If I could back up my claim that Henry had killed his daughter, if I could get Henry to admit to the crime, I could just let Rado’s charming brand of psychotic violence do the rest.

He may have been a war criminal, but he at least had a code, a thief’s honor, that in its way made him more honest than the seemingly respectable men Henry whored out every day.

Henry had fucked with Rado’s daughter, the same way Henry had fucked with my dad, and Henry was about to realize that the one truth that defined his world was false. Certain things were priceless. Certain men couldn’t be bargained with.

“You ingrate fuck,” Henry said. “I offered you everything. I offered you this city on a platter. And when you come at me, you don’t even have the decency to do it like a man. You hide behind Rado?”

I was still bound to the cabinet. He stood over me, seething.

“That cunt Annie.” He smiled. “I see. The two of you, still together. Now it all makes sense.”

He looked toward the door.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. She’ll suffer first. You’ll watch. And then it’s your turn. You think you’ve found a way out, Mike? Think I can’t get to you? No. You’ve only made it worse. You’ll beg me, plead for it to stop. You’ll give me everything I want and more.”

He kicked me hard in the face with his wingtip. The room briefly fuzzed out like an old TV, but I stayed conscious. By now gunfire and screams surrounded Henry’s suite.

Davies pulled a pistol from a drawer in his sideboard and stepped through the false panel in his wall into the corridor by the vault. I spit some blood out, trying for a nice long arc but succeeding only in dribbling it down my shirt.

The painkiller was wearing off. To keep a clear head, I’d  taken only one. So I had better be quick about it. The handcuffs hit right above the bones of my hand. They were too tight, double-locked, with the keyhole facing away from my fingers, so  I wouldn’t have been able to jimmy it even if Marcus hadn’t already taken everything off me I could have used as a pick.

The shots came louder now. Practically in the room. I heard a groan. The handcuffs weren’t getting any wider. My hand would just have to get smaller. I pried my left thumb back with my right hand, felt the pressure build, the bone flex, just barely. I let go. I was going to make myself pass out. It felt so creepy and wrong. The Band-Aid approach, then.

I jerked back my thumb. The bone cracked like kindling. The room went all wavy once more, and I squeezed the hand through, raking the cuff over the broken bones. I retched, tried not to throw up from the pain. My hand was free. I stood. The cuff dangled from my right wrist.

Searching the desk, I found that Henry had taken the only gun. I sidestepped to the open panel that led to his vault. The area immediately in front of the door was empty. I heard only labored breathing, no more gunshots.

I moved in deeper and glanced around a corner. There were four or five bodies: Marcus was down, and Rado. Henry had been right. Rado would defend his honor no matter what the cost. It’s what I’d been counting on, but Rado hadn’t gone far enough. Henry, with the pistol drawn in front of him, stepped over Marcus’s corpse, checking the far door for more gunmen. He’d survived massacres before. I couldn’t let him survive this. I would have to get behind him and get one of the guns off the bodies. The few pistols I could see, on the floor or in dead men’s hands, had their racks slid back, chambers open: out of bullets.

I didn’t even see the body stir; Rado played a good corpse. Only his hand moved as he lifted his gun and shot Henry twice through the back of his left shoulder. The old man turned around, grimacing, stumbled back into a trash bin, then sat straight down all the way to the floor, the way a toddler does. He slumped back against the door and, groaning through clenched teeth, emptied a nine-round clip into Rado’s prone body.

Nothing angered him so much as a man like Rado, a man he couldn’t control. I think the Serb was at least halfway dead before Henry shot him up, which meant he was good and dead now. As I moved past the bodies, Henry realized his anger had gotten the best of him. His gun was empty. He didn’t have a second clip.

Davies seemed to suffer with every breath. Rado’s round had opened a fist-size hole in his chest. I moved toward him slowly, stepped on his gun hand, and kicked his weapon away. I watched him for a moment.

“I knew you didn’t have the stomach for this, Mike,” Henry said in a gruff whisper. It sounded like blood was in his lungs. “Hiding away, hoping someone else will clean up your mess: your dad, or Rado, even Annie. You think you’re some good guy, so moral. But it’s cowardice, Mike. You can’t kill me.”

He lifted his right hand, beckoning me to help him. “The cavalry isn’t coming, Mike. Nice try, but they’re dead. Give me a hand. I’ll teach you. Behind that door”—he nodded his head toward the vault—“is every secret in Washington. It’s worth billions. You ran a nice play against me. Help me up. I’ll cut you in. Full partners.”

I took his hand and lifted him away from the door.

He smiled. “That’s it, Mike.”

I pulled the thick plastic trash bag out of the bin to my right. Henry looked at it, puzzled. He tried a new gambit.

“You can’t kill me in cold blood, Mike. Then you’ll be as bad as I am. Corrupt. A murderer. Part of my team in the end. You can’t win. Just help me up and we’ll run Washington together.”

Henry had a point. I recalled the flood of anger I’d felt when I’d stomped the cop, when I’d thought that Annie had betrayed me, when I’d watched Langford’s blood spin through that dialysis machine. I just wanted to give in, to let the rage run unchecked, to destroy everyone in my way. God, it would feel so good.

But now I knew that my father had been telling me the truth when he said he wasn’t a killer. No violence. We may have been thieves, but we weren’t murderers.

Henry watched me waver. I saw relief in his eyes.

I snapped the bag over his head, knocked him onto his stomach on the ground, and sat on his back while I tightened it over his face with my one good hand. As long as Henry was alive to work the strings, the corruption would never end. I’d never be free.

He clawed at the bag, at me, kicked against the tiles, the bodies beside him: a full three minutes of him moaning and writhing under the plastic. The whole thing was a lot nastier and more exhausting than I’d expected.

I’m sure I could have found a gun with a few rounds left or a clip among the downed men. There were more bodies in the outer corridors. But I needed Henry’s eyes. I held on for a long time after his feet made their last feeble kicks against the ground.