Target Response (17 page)

Steve sucked air, gasping for breath.

“Freeze, chum. Move an inch and you get another jolt,” Tan Raincoat said.

The thing that had hit Steve between the shoulder blades was a plug with two sharp-pointed metal prongs. They had penetrated his garments and lodged into his flesh.

At the far end of the prongs was a pair of electric wires fifteen feet long. Their opposite end was connected to a square-shaped, boxy device with a handgrip and trigger.

A Taser!

A nonlethal weapon employed by police to subdue violent, unruly suspects by immobolizing them with a paralyzing electric charge. The Taser fired the dartlike plug with its two flesh-piercing prongs into the suspect. The wires were connected to the Taser, whose massive batteries delivered the man-stopping charge to the victim.

The Taser was now cradled in the soft, fat hands of the no longer screaming matron, the one Steve had mistaken for an innocent passerby. She’d been part of the setup, undoubtedly hiding the Taser under the voluminous folds of her topcoat.

“Nice work, Mabel,” Tan Raincoat said.

“Gets ’em every time,” she said, smirking. “Want I should zap him again?”

“Why not? It’ll take some more of the starch out of him. Just don’t give him a heart attack and kill him. We need him alive—for now.”

“Too bad I can’t say the same for you,” a new voice announced.

It came from a dark figure who had entered the alley unobserved by Tan Raincoat and Mabel as they stood gloating over Steve.

“I don’t need you alive at all, not one little bit,” the stranger said.

He opened up with a pair of semiautomatic pistols, one held in each hand, pouring lead into Tan Raincoat and Mabel, filling the alley with gunfire.

Flashing muzzle flares created a strobe effect as the duo was blasted into oblivion.

The muzzle flares underlit the face of the shooter, revealing him as…

Kilroy!

The sights and sounds of Ward Thurlow being eaten alive by crocodiles filled the conference room of the penthouse suite at the top of the Imperium casino-hotel on the board-walk at Atlantic City, New Jersey.

It was a hell of a show.

The footage was being imaged on a massive flat-screen LED TV hanging on the wall at one end of the conference room.

It was five o’clock on a Friday night, two days after Steve had somehow escaped the trap set for him at the Gall Building.

The Imperium, once one of Atlantic City’s most stellar attractions, had recently fallen on hard times. It consisted of a shoebox-shaped casino building attached to a towering skyscraper hotel.

Like the rest of the gaming industry, the Imperium’s receipts had fallen off drastically due to the depressed economy. Its fiscal woes were compounded by the inept management of its owner, real estate magnate and obnoxious TV personality Dudley Crimp. Dangerously overextended and already in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Crimp had seen the recession ruin any last chances for him to recoup his fortune.

He had already been forced to take a loan from the White Tiger, a leading yakuza crime clan based in Osaka, Japan. The loan had long since been squandered, and the yakuza’s oyabun, or godfather, was most rudely insistent that Crimp repay the outstanding debt.

The yakuza don’t fool around. Crimp knew that if he wanted to retain possession of all his fingers and toes—and quite possibly his head—he’d better make full restitution to his White Tiger creditors, and quick.

Crimp had therefore been forced to sell his holdings in the Imperium for a song, for pennies not on the dollar but rather on the hundred-dollar bill.

The casino’s new owner had moved into the casino, setting up headquarters in the luxurious penthouse suite that Crimp had built for himself in happier times.

The Imperium’s new czar now sat in the penthouse conference room watching wide-eyed as rogue CIA agent Ward Thurlow was ripped to pieces by ravenous killer crocs.

The mighty master of capital, Simon E. Gunther, sat stiff-faced and motionless, eyes bulging as he watched the awesome carnage.

Gunther was in his late forties but looked ten years younger. A mop of brown curly hair topped a face with a high, bulging forehead, brown eyes, an upturned nose, and a neatly pursed Cupid’s-bow mouth. The snub nose and a scattering of pale freckles on his clean-shaven face added to his boyish aspect.

Gunther, one of Wall Street’s golden boys, had scored notable achievements in the worlds of both high finance and criminal securities fraud. An investment banker for the prestigious brokerage house of Saxbee Mangold, he’d amassed a towering fortune by dint of twenty years of screwing the investors and stealing them blind. His instrument for this massive transfer of wealth from its rightful owners to himself was his overlordship of the Transworld Capital Fund, a Saxbee mutual fund that until recently had numbered among its client union and government pension funds, numerous corporate employee IRA and 401(k) plans and investments from various state treasuries, as well as thousands of mom-and-pop investors who’d trusted their hard-won nest eggs to the fund in hopes of growing them into retirement bonanzas.

The investors had finished out of the money, their Transworld mutual fund holdings now worth only a fraction of what they had been. Most of it had been transferred into secret offshore banking accounts maintained by Gunther and the board of directors of Saxbee Mangold. The plundering had been accomplished with such complex sleight of hand and finesse that government investigators had no idea how and where the money had gone. Not that they were trying too hard to find it. The congressional legislators who’d taken office via huge campaign contributions from Saxbee pressured the investigators to cool it. The rot went clear up to the Oval Office of the White House.

By all rights Gunther should now have been sitting on top of the world. In a manner of speaking he was, occupying as he now did the palatial digs of the penthouse high atop the Imperium’s lofty tower.

But there was trouble in Paradise. Gunther had the fear on him.

A few hours earlier, a small package had been delivered to him at the Imperium by private courier.

The package had been handled according to procedures set down by George Knight, Gunther’s head of security. With hundreds of thousands of people having been defrauded of their life’s savings by Transworld, Gunther might well become the target of a vengeful sorehead who didn’t have the sense to go lie down and die.

Underlings had examined the package, inspecting it and its contents for an explosive device, even for indications that biological or chemical agents had been employed.

Once cleared, the package had been hand delivered by Knight to Gunther. Its contents consisted of a DVD in a hardened plastic case and, still more oddly, a picture postcard.

Puzzling…

The label had provided no clues to the sender’s identity. The sender was identified as one “Peter Collinson.” The name meant nothing to Gunther or Knight. The return address was a numbered room in Atlantic City’s main post office building. The room was revealed to be the dead letter office, the final resting place of letters that for some reason or another never reach their intended recipients and are returned to the postal system to be filed, forgotten, and ultimately destroyed.

The picture postcard held a still more ominous aspect. It was from Lagos, Nigeria, of a sort that could be picked up at the counter of any hotel gift shop. Considering Gunther’s recent shady dealings in that area and the setbacks he had suffered, he had summoned a business associate and partner in crime into the conference room for the first viewing of the DVD.

Blaise Carrollton was the founder and owner of the private security firm MYRMEX. He was middle-aged with wavy silver hair, a rosy, clean-shaven face, and the shiny, hard, dark eyes of a shark.

Only Gunther and a few trusted associates knew that rather than being safely ensconced in the tiny West European extradition-free principality of Lichtenstein, to which MYRMEX’s corporate headquarters had been relocated, Carrollton was back in the United States, in the Imperium penthouse, in fact. A number of Treasury Department agents and process servers would very much like to know that Carrollton was back in the States, where he could be subpeonaed and detained.

Gunther and Carrollton had sat down to view the DVD. Knight had loaded the DVD into the player. A big man built like a pro football lineman running slightly to fat, he had thinning, wispy blond hair and a jowly, hangdog face enlivened by shrewd blue eyes.

The DVD had started playing, the picture bursting into view on the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall.

The footage had opened without preamble, explanation, or opening credits. A handheld cell phone camera had apparently been used to capture the sequence. It depicted a scene on the water, where a screaming man secured to the end of a long rope thrashed about in a cloudy, greenish-brown river.

Now, Carrollton started in his chair at the sight. He leaned forward, goggling, his mouth hanging open.

“Stop! Freeze the image!” he cried.

Knight worked the remote, freezing the frame. Carrollton peered disbelievingly at the face of the man in the picture.

“My God! It’s Thurlow!” he said.

“Thurlow—that’s our man in Lagos, isn’t he?” Gunther asked.

“He
was,
” Carrollton said. “He disappeared two weeks ago during that business in the Vurukoo fields. He headed the mission to, er, neutralize the two survivors who’d escaped the crash of the DIA flight.”

“Let’s see the rest of it,” Gunther told Knight. Knight resumed playing the DVD.

The scene shifted for a moment as the camera panned to the black mud beach, showing the mass of crocodiles crowding it. The sound track was uninterrupted, Thurlow’s shrieks and sobbing pleas for help continuing unabated.

The crocodiles picked themselves up from where they were lolling around in the mud and began streaming down the shore into the water. They moved surprisingly fast.

The camera returned to imaging Thurlow thrashing and screaming in the water as the crocodiles closed in on him. Surprising, too, was the amount of blood contained in a human body, as demonstrated by the red clouds that tinted the water as the crocs took Thurlow apart piece by piece.

No less surprising was how long and loudly Thurlow continued to scream even when there was so little of him left. He kept bellowing right until a crocodile bit off his head.

The DVD ended, the flat-screen TV going blank.

“Want to see it again?” Knight asked, after a pause.

“No, thanks,” Carrollton said crisply, biting off the words.

Gunther, white-lipped and shaken, got up and crossed to a sideboard where a minibar had been set up. He was so upset that he got himself a drink instead of having Knight fetch it.

Gunther splashed some bourbon in a glass and tossed it back straight, shuddering. He poured another and gulped that down. Some of the color came back in his face. He went to his chair and sank into it, staring at the blank screen.

“Well, now we know where Thurlow disappeared to—into the belly of a bunch of crocodiles,” Carrollton said grimly.

“Who could have been responsible for that atrocity?” Gunther asked.

“Thurlow was hunting two men, Kilroy and Raynor. We know he got Raynor because he reported it in. Looks like Kilroy got him, though,” Carrollton said.

“And how!” Knight exclaimed.

“Kilroy—that’s the one who shot our Nigerian deal all to hell when he blew the head off of Derek Tayambo,” Gunther said.

“We think so. There’s no concrete proof but the circumstantial evidence certainly points to it,” Carrollton said.

Having recovered from his initial fright at viewing the snuff footage, Gunther began to get angry. When he was angry he looked like a sullen, pouty child; he looked that way now.

“That was sloppy work, Blaise, very sloppy! Your MYRMEX people in Nigeria were responsible for getting Kilroy and you failed, costing us a great deal of money!”

Carrollton’s face stiffened. “The preliminary intelligence failed to detect the fact that Kilroy was a member of the Army’s Dog Team unit, a trained professional killer. That was Thurlow’s fault. We were relying on him and his sources in the CIA for the background material. He was the one connected to the agency, not us. He made the mistake.”

“He paid for it,” Gunther said.

“Kilroy’s Dog Team involvement prompted us to contract the Moray family to eliminate as many active-duty members of the unit as possible. As you well know, Simon.”

“I ought to,” Gunther muttered, scowling. “I had to give them a solid minority shareholding in MYRMEX before they would accept the deal.”

“A small price to pay. You’re still the majority stockholder in the company. You control it outright with ownership of fifty-one percent of the shares. I’m the second largest single shareholder,” Carrollton said.

“Which is why you’re still MYRMEX’s chairman of the board. But remember, Blaise, that chairmanship is predicated on success.”

“I’ll stand on the record. Since contracting the Morays, they’ve managed to eliminate eighteen active-duty members of the Dog Team, out of twenty-five members whom we know of. Eleven members here in the States and seven members abroad. It’s a small unit and it’s been virtually decimated, effectively put out of business.”

Carrollton went on, “What’s more, by using our Washington connections to wield the threat of public exposure of the team’s activities, we’ve managed to checkmate the Army from retaliating in kind against us. What more do you want?”

“I want Kilroy dead!” Gunther said.

“We’re working on it, Simon.”

“How so, Blaise? By dangling me as live bait to flush him out into the open?”

“Frankly, yes. Here in the Imperium you’re safer than the president in the Oval Office.”

“That’s not saying much.”

“Well, maybe that was a bad choice of words,” Carrollton said, shrugging. “But you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re here at the top of the Imperium tower, guarded by a small army of MYRMEX’s finest—fifty heavily armed trigger-pullers. What’s more, as your own personal private bodyguards, you’ve got the Morays right here at your beck and call. And no one is better motivated to want to finish off the Dogs. Remember, they’ve lost family to the team.”

“Is that supposed to reassure me?” Gunther snapped. “I’d feel better if they were all hale and hearty and the last remaining Dogs were dead.”

“This is war, Simon. You can’t have a war without casualties. Besides, what do you care if some of your hired guns get smeared while protecting your interests? That’s what they get paid for,” Carrollton said.

That last comment caused Knight to look up from what he was doing at the DVD player and cut a hard side glance at Carrollton. Knight was unaffiliated with MYRMEX; he was directly in Gunther’s employ, and he had little love for Carrollton and his private army.

Neither Gunther nor Carrollton took any notice of Knight, any more than they did of the furniture.

Gunther picked up the picture postcard from Lagos and examined it. It depicted the pink and white Arabian Nights fantasia of the presidential palace. Written in block letters on the back of the card was the message:

WISH YOU WERE HERE.

“Kilroy sent this, didn’t he?” Gunther asked accusingly, as though Carrollton were responsible for the postcard and DVD.

“We think so,” Carrollton said.

“So he’s in the U.S.?”

“That’s a fair assumption.”

“Not just in the U.S. but near. Here—in Atlantic City. That’s where it was sent from,” Gunther said. “‘Wish you were here.’ That’s the palace in Lagos where Kilroy shot Tayambo dead with a sniper rifle.”

“Apparently.”

“When he says he wishes I was there, he means he wishes I was in the same spot as Tayambo so he could shoot me dead, too.”

Knight chimed in, “It could mean that he wishes you were where Ward Thurlow was.”

“That’s a cheery thought. He’d like to feed me alive to a bunch of crocodiles,” Gunther fumed.

Knight looked away in order not to betray the glimmer of pleasure that came into his eyes at the thought of his tempermental boss being devoured by killer reptiles.