Under Siege (10 page)

“I have one question, Mr. Liarakos,” Yocke said. “Jack Yocke of the Post. his

“He with you, Ott?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“Are you satisfied that your client has arranged to pay your fee, which reportedly is very high, with money that is not the proceeds of any criminal activity?”

Liarakos frowned. “No comment,” he said crisply, and disappeared through one of the steel doors.

The TV man grinned broadly at Yocke. A trace of a smile flickered across Mergenthaler’s lips.

Time passed slowly. The TV man kept glancing at his watch.

After seven minutes, the door opened and two uniformed cops came out, then two men Jack Yocke took to be U.s. marshals. Liarakos followed them, then a Latin-looking man of medium height wearing a trim mustache. Other cops

and marshals followed, but this was the man who captured Yocke’s attention.

As he arranged himself in the chair and the television lights came on, Yocke stared. The man was pleasantly plump, with ftill cheeks that would turn into saggy jowls in a few more years. He looked like a middleaged banker who hadn’t raised a sweat since his school days. He was clad in slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt, no tie. He blinked at the glare of the lights and looked around warily as a technician hooked up the lapel mike.

When the technician was out of the way and one of the marshals had been waved out of camera-shot, the correspondent began. “I understand you have a statement to make, Seflor Aldana.”

Aldana looked straight at the camera.

“I am Chano Aidana,” he said with a noticeable Spanish accent. “I am your worst nightmare come to life. I am the faceless, starving masses whom you refused food. I am the slave you delivered in chains to the merciless altar of the moneylenders. I am the sick you refused to heal. I am the beggar you turned away from the feast. To me has been given the key to the bottomless pit. And I have opened it.”

The network correspondent stood for several seconds with his mouth ajar, his face slack.

“Seflor Aldana, are you guilty of the crimes of which you are accused?”

“You are the guilty ones. Not J.”

“Are you the head of the Medellin cocaine-smuggling cartel?”

“I am a Third World businessman.”

When it became obvious that was the whole answer, the correspondent persisted, “Are you a cocaine smuggler?”

“I have never smuggled cocaine.”

“Your statement seems to imply that people working for you will cause violence if you are not released. Is that what you mean?”

“I meant what I said. Precisely. The people who know of my reputation will tell you that I am a man of my word.”

When Mergenthaler’s turn came and the TV lights were if, he asked, “What did you mean, “To me has been given the key to the bottomless pit”?”

“I am He who was thrown out of Heaven. I am He you have kept away from the feast. To me has been given the key to the pit and I have opened it.

“How about one straight answer. Are you or are you not involved in the cocaine-smuggling business?”

“I have never smuggled cocaine.”

“Do you really have a net worth of four billion American dollars?”

“I am a wealthy man. I do not know just how wealthy.”

“At last, a straight answer.”

Aldana’s upper lip curled into a sneer and his eyes narrowed. His gaze locked on the journalist, he rose from the chair. As the marshals led him through the door that led back to his cell, he kept his eyes on Mergenthaler until the door cut off his view.

“He’s crazy as a bedbug,” Yocke said in the car.

Ottmar Mergenthaler sat motionless behind the wheel, the ignition key in his hand. “Too bad Geraldo Rivera missed this one.”

“He didn’t scare you with that staring act, did he?”

Mergenthaler glanced at the younger man. “Yeah. He did.”

The columnist examined the key and carefully placed it in the ignition switch. “He’s insane and has armies of hired killers that have murdered hundreds of politicians, judges, and police in Colombia. They’ve blown up airliners, bombed department stores and newspapers, and assassinated dozens of journalists who refused to be quiet. They don’t care who they kill. They truly don’t.”

The columnist started the car and engaged the transmission. “Yeah, Jack, that man scared me.”

An American’s enthusiasm for law and order is directly proportional to the degree to which he believes his personal safety or his livelihood is threatened. When the perceived threat recedes, so does his willingness to be policed. America is the most underpoliced nation on earth. The average American spends his life without any but casual contact with policemen-except for the ubiquitous traffic cops enforcing ridiculously low speed limits that Americans insist are necessary and yet almost universally ignore. Many law-abiding citizens have never in their lives spoken to a policeman, and the vast majority have never suffered the indignity of contact with policemen performing their duty.

No paramilitary police patrol American streets. No secret police monitor telephone conversations or scrutinize mail or hire neighbors to tattle. No policeman calls an American to account for slandering the government or the president or writing scurrilous letters to editors or politicians.

Regardless of the degree of his paranoia or hatred, an American will be left undisturbed unless and until his conduct crosses the threshold into violence, in which case he can expect to reside in a cell for a relatively short time, there to contemplate the error of his ways. No firing squad No political prison. No gulag. Though he be mad as a Afarch hare, no permanent commitment to an insane asylum. In America a man’s right to hate his neighbor is protected as it is nowhere else on earth.

In spite of repeated influxes of immigrants from every hate-soaked, war-torn corner of the earth, America has institutionalized personal freedom. The courts have zealously guarded it, perhaps unintentionally, by acting vigorously and jealiously on the oft-stated and highly dubious assumption that for every wrong there is a remedy. Not a remedy in the next life, but here, in America. Now! Never in all of the tragic, bloody course of human history has such a radical, illogical concept been routinely accepted and acted upon by so many supposedly rational beings.

So the social fabric remains intact. No group of any size sincerely believes no one will listen to its grievance. Everyone will listen. Newspapers will spill ink, the idle sympathize and donate money, politicians orate, judges fashion a remedy. And America will go on.

Jack Yocke stared at the words on the screen as he worried a fingernail. This was America as he saw it, a deliciously mad, pragmatic place. Americans want justice, but not too much. They want order, but not too much. They want laws, but not too many. Now, into this cauldron of free spirits had been introduced Chano Aldana and his four billion dollars.

$4,000,000,000. The amount of murder, mayhem, treachery, and treason that four billion dollars would buy was almost beyond comprehension. And Aldana was just the man to make the purchase. What did he care if the foundations cracked and the house came down? He had his. And he had served notice.

“Your style is atrocious.” Ott Megenthaler was reading over his shoulder. “Not right for the Post, eh?”

“Definitely not.”

“Aldana can’t win.”

“You know it and I know it, but apparently he doesn’t.”

“A little licentiousness, Americans enjoy that. A little illicit pleasure to apologize for on Sunday morning, what’s the harm? But Aidana will sooner or later be crushed like a gnat if he tries to intimidate people here like he did in Colombia.”

“No doubt Liarakos tried to tell him that.”

“His best defense is to play the underdog. David versus Goliath.”

“Chano Aldana is Goliath,” the columnist said dryly and pulled a nearby chair around. “He made that pretty plain this afternoon.”

“We’re going to have to legalize dope, Ott. Right now nobody wants to make it legal, yet nobody wants to live in an America that is so well policed that it can’t be sold.”

“If more-efficient police are what it takes, I’m for it,” Mergenthaler said. “Aww, bullshit. You haven’t thought this through. You despised J. Edgar Hoover. You thought the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was a cancer on the body politic.” When Mergenthaler tried to reply, Yocke raised his voice and overrode him. ‘7ve read some of your old columns. Don’t try to change your spots now.”

After making sure Yocke had really shut up, Mergenthaler said, “I’ve been to Holland and seen the kids lying in the public squares, whacked out on hash, scrambling their brains permanently while the police stand and watch, while the world walks around them. I’ve been to the Dutch morgues and seen the bodies. I’ve been to the D. C morgue and seen the bodies there too. This shit ain’t tobacco and it ain’t liquor. Two crack joints will make an average person an addict. Legalize it? No! A thousand times no. his

Jack Yocke threw up his hands. “Medellin had four thousand and fifteen murder victims delivered to the morgue in 1989. Those were the bodies they found. Medellfn has a population of two million. That’s a murder rate of over two hundred per hundred thousand people.” Yocke’s eyes narrowed. “Our rate here in the District is around eighteen or nineteen. That’s four hundred and thirty-eight murders in 1989. When our murder rate is ten times worse than it is now, Ott-ten times worse-then I’ll ask you how much sympathy you feel for all those addicts who knew better and took their first puff anyway.” coneaIt won’t get that bad here.” “You think the black militants and liberals who run this town are gonna fix things? You met Aldana this afternoon. Like hell it won’t get that bad!”

“Didn’t you just say that Aidana would get his sooner or later?”

“It isn’t Aldana I’m worried about. It’s all the other flies that kind of money will attract.” When Mergenthaler left and went back to his office, Jack Yocke tried to write some more and found he couldn’t. He was fuminand irritable. His eye fell on the front page of today’s paper with its photo of George Bush sailing off Kennebunkport, Maine. Bush was waving, wearing a wide grin. Jack Yocke threw the paper into the wastepaper basket.

Rock Creek Park is Washington’s attempt at Central Park. Unlike that vast expanse of trees and grass in New York City, Rock Creek Park is not a pedestrian’s paradise. Part of the reason is geography.

The park begins a dozen miles north of the Potomac River in Montgomery County, Maryland, as an undeveloped stretch along a modest creek meandering southward toward the river.

For several hundred yards after the creek flows under the eight-lane beltway, houses and yards come right to the edge of the water. The gentle trickle soon reaches the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Hospital, however, with its vast expanse of lawns. South of the hospital grounds the park is about a quarter mile wide for several miles. Here it is a pleasant oasis of trees and greenery on the steep banks of the creek ravine.

Crossing into the District, the green belt finally assumes park-like dimensions. For the next four miles the park is about a mile wide and provides a site for a golf course and numerous scenic stretches of two-lane blacktop that wind through the wooded, boulder-choked ravines of aptly named Rock Creek and its tributaries.

The park narrows at the National Zoological Park, which occupies its entire width. South of the zoo, the park along the creek drainage is only several hundred yards wide, merely the sides of the steep Rock Creek ravine, and is crisscrossed by bridges that carry the major streets and avenues of Washington. Two miles south of the zoo the creek deposits its saline solution of street and lawn runoff into the Potomac. The creek mouth is directly across the Georgetown Channe Theodore Roosevelt Island. The park there provides a from modest accent of green near the water, a mere foreground for the vast urban skyline behind it.

For most of its length the park consists of uncomfortably steep, rock-strewn hillsides densely covered with hardwood trees. In spite of the mild autumn, by early December the trees had lost all their leaves and transformed themselves into a semi-opaque wilderness of gray branches and trunks that gently muffled some of the city noise.

Henry Charon automatically adjusted the placement of his feet to avoid fallen branches an se rocks, yet the thick carpet of dead, dry leaves rustled loudly at every step. A good soaking rain, he knew, would leave the leaf carpet sodden and allow a man to walk silently across it. Not now, though.

Below him, on his right, cars hummed along Ross Drive, one of the scenic lanes along Rock Creek that functioned as an alternate commuter route during rush hour. Charon strode along the hillside in a tireless, swinging gait with his eyes moving. He paused occasionally to examine major outcrops of rock, then resumed his northward movements.

This type of terrain he knew well. It would be a wonderful area in which to hide, if he could find the right place. These sidewalk warriors would be on his turf if they hunted him here.

He consulted his map again, then changed course to top the ridge. This ridge wasn’t high, only a hundred feet or so, but it was far too steep for casual urban walkers and hikers. Accustomed as he was to scrambling up slopes in the Rockies, Henry Charon didn’t even draw a deep breath as he climbed to the top of the narrow ridgeline and paused to examine his surroundings.

Just before dusk he found it. He was exploring along the foot of an outcropping from the formation that formed the rock of the ridge. A gap in the rock led into a small eltered cave, more of an overhang, really. A large boulder red most of the opening. In the gloom he could see several pop cans and cigarette butts. The dirt of the floor was packed hard, no doubt from the feet of teenagers or derelicts. Many footprints and shoe marks. This place would do nicely, if he ever needed it.

He examined the place carefully, paying particular attention to the cracks and crevices that rose off to one side. He pulled some loose rock from one. Yes, he could put a gun and some other supplies in there and pile the rock back in, just in case.

Henry Charon left the cave and paused outside to examine the setting again. He was sure he could find it again. After a last look around in all directions, Henry Charon set off down the hillside.