The Manuscript (18 page)

“So he was quiet, and you didn’t see him much. Does that pretty much sum it up?” Chuck interjected impatiently.

“Yup.”

“How do you like living here? Are the walls pretty thin, do you hear everything? My place, you can hear my neighbor drop a quarter at the other end of the building,” Chuck asked, apparently curious about acoustics.

“Nah, this place is built outta brick and rebar. You could shoot a gun off next door and not hear a sound, except for the traffic outside. That you hear twenty-four seven,” Sam complained.

“Nice. So, again, back to the routine, did you hear anything last night…anything unusual or unexpected?” Ken queried.

“Like what?” Sam fired back, unsure of what answer they were looking for.

Ken tried again. “I don’t know. Anything at all. Did you hear anything last night you can remember as being odd or out of the ordinary?”

“Chief–”

“Detective, Sam.”

“Er, Detective, I tend to get to sleep early, and I’m a sound sleeper with my medication and all. So I didn’t hear nuthin’ last night, or any other night. I was snoozing like a baby till morning.” Sam grinned a barfly’s smirk, his eyes recessed in their sockets, yellowing from jaundice.

“So for the record, you heard nothing last night,” Ken summarized.

“That’s right. Not a thing. Sorry I can’t help you on that. Now, mind tellin’ me what happened in there? I overheard one a your guys say it was a dope thing?” Sam probed.

Ken’s cell phone rang. He extricated it from his jacket pocket and looked at the number. “I have to take this. Detective Barron will finish this up,” he told Sam, and moved to the landing to descend the stairs to the street.

“Ken, this is Michael. What did you find out? Is Koshi okay? Did you find him?” Michael asked.

“Yeah, we found him, but no, he’s not okay. Did Koshi have a drug problem, Michael?” Ken inquired.

“Did he? Past tense…no, I don’t think so, beyond the usual booze and weed thing, although I’m guessing on the pot. What happened, Ken? Why is Koshi past tense?”

Ken explained the situation. Michael listened in silence.

“Ken, you can’t possibly believe that this is an accident or a genuine OD, right? I mean, Jim ends it all, and Koshi ODs within hours?” Michael blurted, frustrated with what he was hearing.

“Do I seem like a rookie to you, Michael? Am I giving off the first day on the force vibe? I hate it when I do that…”

“Sorry, Ken. Really. It’s just…it just wasn’t what I was expecting to hear, I guess,” Michael said.

“Are you sure you’re that surprised? I mean, you seem like you were pretty worked up about making sure Koshi was safe, so that tells me you had a better than fair idea he could be in real danger…” Ken observed.

“I…I assumed the worst when you told me about Jim. Someone’s taking out my security group, one by one…” Michael explained.

“Not just your team, Michael. I called your agent buddy’s office again, and nobody’s heard from the receptionist since the day you saw her. Want to bet a dollar that she’s gone missing? Look, I don’t have a lot of time here, but I’ll give you some free advice. Stay gone until we figure out what the hell is going on here, because otherwise I have a feeling I’m going to be putting a tag on your toe next,” Ken advised.

“Thanks. I get it. But it’s not looking good, Ken. I think you’ll find that there are no leads on any of these, at the end of the day. If this is a covert ops team doing this, they’ll be ghosts and you’ll never get within a mile of them. That’s my best guess given what I know so far, and it scares the hell out of me,” Michael admitted.

“It should. I’ll tell you what. I don’t want to know where you are. And I don’t want to hear any more half-truths. Two of your team are dead, for doing nothing but a routine security sweep. That doesn’t add up. People don’t get killed for trying to recover a file or checking phone lines. So either there’s way more going on here than you’re telling me, and you know what it is, and are keeping me in the dark for some reason, or you don’t know, which is almost worse. Either way, though, you need to stay gone indefinitely. And if you call me, do so from a line that can’t be traced, because this is scary shit and I’m out of my depth on it,” Ken finished.

“This line’s clean. I’ll check back in a day or two, Ken. I wish I could tell you something that would help you nail whoever is doing this, but I don’t have anything that will get you any closer,” Michael said.

“Meaning you either don’t know, or you’re sure that these will never get solved because of what you do know.” Ken was astute, and was losing patience with Michael.

“Either way, sounds like I’m fucked,” Michael muttered.

“At least you’re alive. That’s more than Jim and Koshi can say,” Ken reminded him and then terminated the call. It wasn’t going anywhere, and he wasn’t feeling chatty. Michael sounded scared, and worse, resigned. Like he was facing certain death. Ken didn’t envy him.

Although given what he knew of Michael’s background, it wouldn’t be so easy to take him off the board. He was one tough bastard, Ken knew firsthand. His brother had been a marine and had told him stories about the SEALs, so he understood that Michael was a capable adversary and wouldn’t go down without a fight. He just hoped that whatever it was he’d gotten involved in would eventually die down so Michael didn’t have to have a showdown he could never win.

What a cluster fuck.

He turned and made his way back up the stairs to the apartment. Chuck was waiting for him in the hall, the interview concluded. They compared notes. There wasn’t a lot to go on, and their best hope was that CSI would be able to find something, some trace, to point them in a direction.

Ken doubted that was going to happen, but he still had a trick or two at his disposal.

********

“Sir, we just intercepted a cell call at one of the active sites. The target was communicating with the detective who is investigating the overdose of the computer hacker. We have confirmation that he’s gone to ground and is probably not in the city any longer. Couldn’t trace the calling number, unfortunately, but we were able to record the discussion,” the voice recounted evenly.

“I don’t need to hear it. Just give me the top level,” Sid instructed.

“The detective believes the OD is a homicide and is handling it as such, treating it as linked to the book agent and the surveillance technician’s fall from grace. He sounds sharp, so we should assume he’ll continue to investigate them as a related set of deaths,” the voice said.

“Do we particularly care?”

“No, not really. We’ve taken steps to ensure these incidents will never be solved and I’m confident there are no loose ends. But I would advise that, from this point on, there’s no reason to continue working the literary agent’s staff. The risks now outweigh any possible reward.”

“Fair enough. I’m not sure there’s a lot more to do now other than monitor the detective’s communications and maintain a watch on the target’s apartment, on the off chance he’s stupid enough to stop by. I think that’s a long shot, but you never know. And of course, implement the usual database monitoring so that whenever he accesses funds or uses a credit card, we’re pinged. Am I missing anything?” Sid asked.

“That’s about all we can do. I understand this is less than an optimum solution, but as of now, there’s nothing to do other than be prepared for whenever the target surfaces. I’m sure he will. It’s inevitable. There’s no evidence of the kind of financial resources he would need to disappear indefinitely, so worst scenario, we have to wait for his cash to run out. The moment he uses an ATM, we’ll know. Just a matter of when.”

“I hope you’re right. So far this man has managed to elude your team with little apparent effort and has now vanished without a trace. Given his background, it would be foolish to underestimate him, or his ingenuity. It’s theoretically impossible he would have made it this long without tripping up, and yet here we are, holding our dicks in our hands hoping he makes a rookie mistake,” Sid warned.

“I agree, and your input is noted. He obviously went dark almost immediately upon discovering the agent was dead, which shows above-average paranoia, as well as significant stagecraft. Then again, his business is security, and it pays to be paranoid in that field. So we can expect him to be difficult to trace. But not impossible. Nobody’s that good.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to modify that statement to, ‘Nobody’s ever been that good before’. What about the source of the document – the author? Any leads?” Sid shifted gears.

“No, we’ve analyzed it, and there’s nothing to go on, other than an e-mail address. But it’s hosted in Austria, and not only do we not have a lot of reach there, but given the depth of knowledge of our operations and capabilities, we can expect that the Austrian address was set up using a blind account somewhere like the Ukraine, so we won’t be able to get anything on it. We’re still working the issue, but for now it’s a non-starter.”

“Until we discover the source, we’re exposed in much greater way than acceptable. I want all available resources committed to tracking down who drafted this, and terminating him. I can’t underscore enough the importance of us putting an end to this misadventure, with extreme prejudice,” Sid stated, slamming the table top with his hand for emphasis.

“I understand. I’ll report in when I have something more,” the voice said and then disconnected.

Sid paced the floor, furious at the way things had developed. They were exposed. Secrets that could bring the power structure of the greatest nation on the planet to its knees were now out in the world, where they could potentially surface at the worst possible moment. Everything he’d worked so hard to build and to protect, his entire life, was jeopardized. The honor of every administration for decades would be called into question and regardless of how much spin and rationalization they brought to bear, the nation’s allies would know the truth, as would the rest of the world. It would be the end of the empire, with a who’s who of the most important dynasties in the country brought to disgrace and ruin.

On Sid’s watch.

The secrets had to stay silenced; the world could never know the truth – too much would be destroyed, too many of the country’s powerful would be humiliated and revealed to be monsters and thugs. Whatever it took, whatever the cost, that unthinkable outcome could never be allowed to happen. He would scorch the earth and crush whatever stood in his way, but the unspeakable realities of history would stay hidden.

The ghosts of the past and the sins of necessity needed to stay buried, no matter what it took to keep them in the grave.

Excerpt From King of Swords by Russell Blake

(c) 2011

Copyright © 2011 by Russell Blake

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.  For information, contact
[email protected].

King of Swords is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters and real people, living or dead, is coincidental. Having said that, the backdrop and historical context of the novel is based in fact. The drug war in Mexico has been an ongoing confrontation between government forces and the ever-strengthening cartels – now the largest illegal drug trafficking networks in the world, whose primary target market is the United States.

Thousands of police and soldiers have been killed in the last decade, as the war has intensified due to a crackdown by pro-U.S. administrations. Cartel members slaughter one another by the thousands every year, as well as huge numbers of innocent bystanders. The brutality of the turf wars that are a constant and ongoing facet of the trade is stunning; well over a thousand children have been butchered during Mexico’s ‘lost decade’, as have countless family members of traffickers, killed in retribution or as a deterrent.

The last two Secretaries of the Interior for Mexico died in suspicious air crashes. The Mexican cartels are now the largest narcotics trafficking networks in the world, with revenues that exceed those of many nation states. Roughly ten thousand people per year die as a direct result of cartel violence in Mexico.

The Sinaloa cartel is real. The Knights Templar cartel is also real, as is the Gulf cartel, the Tijuana cartel, and the Zeta cartel. New cartels pop up when the heads of the old groups die, and the names change with some frequency. The only constant is the bloodshed; the natural consequence of the economics of trafficking in an illegal substance that generates in excess of fifty billion dollars a year, wholesale, for the cartels in Mexico; a country where the average person makes a hundred and sixty dollars a month.

A Description of the Tarot Card, ‘The King of Swords’

In full regalia, the King of Swords sits proudly on his throne – with a long, upward-pointing, double-edged sword clutched in his right hand, and his left hand resting lightly on his lap. A ring adorns his left Saturn finger – representing power and commitment to responsibility. The King’s blue tunic symbolizes a desire for spiritual enlightenment; his purple cape symbolizes empathy, compassion and intellect. The backrest of his throne is embellished with butterflies, signifying transformation, and crescent moons orbit around an angel situated by his left ear, positioned, perhaps, to
lend a delicate guidance. The backdrop of the sky has very few clouds, signifying pragmatic mental clarity. The trees dotting the landscape stand still, with not a rustle – reflecting the King of Swords’ stern judgment.