“
There was an uncomfortable silence after the difficult question and emotional answer. David Hudson's intense green eyes slowly surveyed the Vets' dressing room one more time. He wanted them to feel in their guts that he was sure about everything he'd just said. The way he
“If any one of you wants to leave, though, this is the time… Right now, gentlemen. This afternoon… Anybody?… Anybody who wants to leave us?…”
One Vet slowly started to clap. Then the rest of them. Finally all the Vets were solemnly clapping their hands. Whatever was going to happen, they were in it together now.
Colonel Hudson slowly nodded; the cocksure military commander once again took control.
“I've saved the foreign travel assignments, the specific assignments, until last. I'm not going to entertain any discussion, any disagreement at all, over these assignments. The operational environment is already confused. We will not be confused. That's another reason we're going to win this war.”
Hudson walked to a long wooden table, from which he began to pass out thick, official-looking portfolios. Each one had a white tag pasted carefully on the front. Inside the envelopes were counterfeit U.S. passports and visas, first-class airplane tickets, extremely generous expense monies, and copies of elaborate topographical maps from the briefing. The genius was in the details.
“Cassio will go to Zurich,” Hudson began to announce.
“Stemkowsky and Cohen have Israel and Iran… Scully will go to Paris. Harold Freedman to London, then on to Toronto. Jimmy Holm to Tokyo. Vic Fahey to Belfast. The rest of us stay put right here in New York.”
A schoolboy's groan went up. Hudson silenced it instantly with a short, chopping hand motion.
“Gentlemen. I'll say this one time only, so you have to remember it… While you're in Europe, in Asia, in South America, it is absolutely essential that you act, that you groom and dress yourselves, in the particular style we've laid out for you. Remember the catch phrase: Nothing succeeds like excess…
“All of your air travel arrangements are first class. All of your clothing and restaurant expense money is meant to be spent. Spend that money. Throw it around. Be more extravagant than you've ever been in your lives. Have fun, if you can under the circumstances. That's an order!”
Hudson eased up. “For the next few days you have to be self-assured, successful American business types. You have to be like the people we've been studying on Wall Street for the past year.
“At oh-four-thirty, you'll be given self-respecting corporate haircuts, shaves, and-believe it or not-manicures. Your wardrobes have been carefully selected for you, too. They're Brooks Brothers and Paul Stuart-your favorite shops, gentlemen. Your shirts and ties are Turnbull & Asser. Your billfolds are from Dunhill. They contain credit cards and plenty of cash in the appropriate denominations you'll need in your respective countries.”
He paused, and his eyes roamed slowly across the room. “I think that's all I have to say… except one important thing. I wish you all the very best luck possible. I wish you the best, in the future after this mission… I believe in you. Believe in yourselves.”
Colonel David Hudson shut his eyes briefly, then opened them. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. His face gave nothing away. It was a blank mask staring at the handful of men gathered in the dressing room.
He raised his arm, and in a tone that sounded almost religious, he said, “Now, our rendezvous with destiny.”
10
It was two-thirty on Sunday afternoon when Arch Carroll kicked both weathered Timberland work boots up on his desk inside number 13. He yawned until his jaw cracked; it felt as if it had just been dislocated.
He'd already finished four absolutely draining and futile interrogations. He'd been lied to by the very best-the most dangerous provocateurs and terrorists from all around New York.
Carroll had purposely chosen a cramped office for himself, tucked away at the back of the Wall Street building. His small but hearty DIA group, a half-dozen unorthodox police renegades and two efficient and extremely resilient secretaries, surrounded the uninspiring office in a satellite of Wall Street-style cubicles.
Like burned skin, paint peeled from the walls of Carroll's office. The windowpane had been shattered, courtesy of Green Band. He'd tacked a square of brown paper to the hole, but rain soaked through, anyway. It was a depressing working space for a depressing task. Even the light that managed to fall inside was oppressive, mangy brown, dim, and hopeless.
The first four suspects Carroll had interviewed were known terrorists who lived in the New York City area: two FALN, a PLO, and an IRA fund-raiser. Unfortunately the four were no more knowledgeable about the Wall Street mystery than Carroll was himself. There was nothing circulating on the street. Each of them convincingly swore to that after exhaustively long sessions.
Carroll wondered how it could be possible.
The scarred and rusted wooden door into his office opened again. He watched the door over the steamy lid of his coffee container.
Mike Caruso, who worked for Carroll at the DIA, peeked inside. Caruso was a small, skinny, ex-office cop with a black fifties pompadour pushed up high over his forehead. He habitually wore wretched Hawaiian shirts outside his baggy pants, attempting to create a splash of colorful identity in the usually drab police world. Carroll liked him immensely for his dedicated lack of style.
“We got Isabella Marqueza up next. She's already screaming for her fancy Park Avenue lawyer. I mean the lady is fucking screaming out there.”
“That sounds promising. Somebody's upset, at least. Why don't you bring her right in?”
Moments later the Brazilian woman appeared like a sudden tropical windstorm. “You can't do this to me! I'm a citizen of Brazil!”
“Excuse me. You must be mistaking me for somebody who gives a shit. Why don't you please sit down.” Carroll spoke without getting up from his cluttered work desk.
“Why? Who do you think you are?”
“I said sit down, Marqueza. I ask the questions here, not you.”
Arch Carroll leaned back in his chair and studied Isabella Marqueza. The woman had shoulder-length gleaming black hair. Her lips were full and painted very red. There was an arrogant tilt to her chin. Her hair, her clothes, even her skin looked expensive and cosmopolitan. She had on tight gray velvet riding pants, a silk shirt, cowboy boots, a half-length fur jacket. Terrorist chic, Carroll thought.
“You dress like a very wealthy Che Guevara.” He finally smiled.
“I don't appreciate your attempt of humor, senhor.”
“No, well, join the crowd.” His smile broadened. “I don't appreciate your attempts at mass murder.”
Carroll already knew this striking woman by reputation, at least. Isabella Marqueza was an internationally renowned journalist and newsmagazine photographer. She was the daughter of a wealthy man who owned tire factories in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Though it couldn't be legally proved, Isabella Marqueza had sanctioned at least four American deaths in the past twelve months.
She was responsible, Carroll knew, for the disappearance, then the cold-blooded, heartless murders of a Shell Oil executive and his family. The American businessman, his wife, and their two small girls had vanished that past June in Rio. Their pitiful, mutilated bodies had been found in a sewer ditch inside the
She tossed Carroll a cold, indignant look. Her dark, sullen eyes smoldered as she stared him down in practiced silence.
Arch Carroll shook his head wearily. He set aside the steaming coffee container. The impression he got from Isabella was that of a tempest about to unleash its force. He watched as she leaned forward and thumped her hands on the desk-the fiery light in her dark eyes was really something.
“I want to see my lawyer! Right now! I want my lawyer! You get my lawyer.
“Nobody even knows you're here.” Carroll spoke in a purposely soft, polite voice. Whatever she did, however she acted-he would do the exact opposite, he'd decided. Step one of his interrogation technique.
He said nothing further for the first uncomfortable moments. He'd learned his interrogation technique from the very best-Walter Trentkamp.
Carroll knew that two of his DIA agents had illegally intercepted Isabella Marqueza as she'd walked down East Seventieth Street after leaving her Upper East Side apartment that morning. She'd screamed out, struggled, and fought as they'd grabbed her off the street. “Murder! Somebody please help me!”
Half a dozen East Side New Yorkers, with the anesthetized look of people observing a distant event that interested but didn't particularly involve them, had watched the terrifying scene. One of them had finally yelled as Isabella Marqueza was dragged, fighting and sobbing, into a waiting station wagon. The rest did nothing to help.
“You people kidnap me off the street,” Isabella Marqueza complained angrily. Her red mouth pouted, part of her routine interrogation act.
“Let me confess to you. Let me be honest, and kind of frank,” Carroll said, still going gently. “In the last few years I've had to kidnap a few people like yourself. Call it the new justice. Call it anything you like. Kidnapping's lost most of its glitter for me.”
The louder Isabella Marqueza got, the softer Carroll's speaking voice became. “I kind of like the idea of being a kidnapper. I kidnap terrorists. It's got a nice ring to it, you know? Don't you think?”
“I demand to see my lawyer! Goddamn you! My lawyer is Daniel Curzon. You know that name?”
Arch Carroll nodded and shrugged. Daniel Curzon worked for both the PLO and Castro's Cubans in New York.
“Daniel Curzon's a piece of sorry shit. I don't want to hear his name again. I'm serious about that.”
Carroll eyed a manila package on his littered desk, a plain-looking folder wrapped in brown string. Inside was his moral justification to do whatever he needed to do right now.
Inside the envelope were a dozen or so black-and-white and color 35-mm photographs of the Shell Oil executive, Jason Miller, and his family, formerly of Rio, all of
