Touch of the White Tiger (22 page)

“That part was easy. Our society has always sanctioned killing for a good cause. It’s called war, whether it involves defending our country or freeing the oppressed. For wars,
even religious fundamentalists are willing to abandon their God-given creeds against killing. So I did not have to wrestle long with morality to conclude that the death of a few retributionists was a small price to pay for civil order and the resurgence of the government-sanctified police force. Surely, Detective, even you can see the logic in that.”

“No, I don’t. A death by any other name is death,” Marco growled. “And justify it as we may try, we’ll still have to answer to God for every life we take.”

Townsend smiled wanly. “That doesn’t worry me, Detective. I’ve logically considered the matter of a divine being and concluded that there is none.”

“Then you won’t have to say your prayers when I kill you,” Gorky said in a merry tone. “Boys, take him down to the lake.”

The two thugs, who had been lingering in the doorway, came into the room and started to roll the cage toward the flight of internal stairs that led down to the surface of Lake Michigan.

For one long moment, no one said a word. Townsend, Marco and I all seemed to realize in the same instant what Gorky was planning to do. He was going to drown Townsend by dumping the cage out of the door that opened to the lake. The cage would sink instantly.

“You can’t get away with this,” Marco hissed, turning on Gorky. “Authorities will dredge the entire lake if they have to to find the head of Q.E.D. And when they do, you’ll go down, Gorky. I don’t care how many politicians you’ve bought, you won’t get a pass on this one.”

Gorky smiled coyly. “Marik, you have no imagination. We will lower the cage into the lake until he drowns, then we will hoist him up, like a deep sea diver, extract the body and dump it somewhere else. No one will ever tie the crime to me. Townsend, you weren’t stupid enough to tell anyone else about your plot, were you?”

The lieutenant, gripping the bars, tersely shook his head.

“See?” Gorky said. “It’s a done deal.”

“But we need a confession from Townsend in order to clear Angel of suspicion.”

“Already done,” Gorky replied. “He signed it just before you arrived. I’ll send it to the media. Townsend has served his purpose.”

“But why kill him?” I cried out, sickened by this perverse carnival of violence and amorality. “Let him spend the rest of his life in jail.”

Gorky stood and came toward me, so serious and quietly furious that I actually began to tremble. “Because,” he said, “he tried to kill you.”

“Me?” I repeated. “What difference does that make? He killed lots of people.”

“You, Angel
moy
, he tried to kill
you
. Today. And he almost succeeded.”

“It wasn’t personal!” Townsend shouted. “I was trying to kill Detective Marco because he was snooping around, talking to people he shouldn’t. I was afraid he’d connect the dots and expose my plans. The only way I knew to get him to the museum was by using his lover.”

“You mimicked our voices,” I said.

“Yes,” Townsend readily admitted.

“And Roy’s as well. And Victor’s.”

“Yes.”

“How?” Marco said. Townsend had the audacity to stare at him with a smug I’ll-never-tell look. Marco lunged at him, grabbing the bars and rattling the cage. “Look, you inhuman SOB, you’d better start talking or I’ll throw this cage in the water myself. You have no hope of survival with Gorky. But I just might have mercy on you.
If
you talk.”

Townsend cleared his throat. “I had your voices recorded,
analyzed and synthesized for pliable audio reproduction. Quad techs recorded your phone calls at the station, Marco.”

“And you recorded mine through my Personal Listening Device,” I said.

He nodded. “Q.E.D. purchased a large order of PLDs wholesale and donated them to the Victims’ Rights Association on the condition that they be given out at the CRS convention last year.”

“So you’ve been planning this for some time,” Marco remarked.

Gorky waved a hand impatiently. “Forget this. It is unimportant. What I want to know is, didn’t you know that if you killed Marik in that blast that Angel would die, too?”

“Of course, but I didn’t know she was important to you. If you had only told me—”

“Bastard,” Gorky muttered.

“Why!” I cried in frustration. “Why am I so important to you?”

“My biggest mistake,” Townsend continued, looking at no one in particular, “was involving Angel Baker in the first place. But I thought she needed to learn a lesson. I thought it inappropriate that she had taken the law into her own hands and rescued those kidnapped orphans. And I thought it was the height of poor taste for her to brag about it on the nightly news. Her success weakened the morale and reputation of the police force.”

“I didn’t brag,” I countered. “The press hounded me. Besides, people needed to know what happened to those poor girls and just how cancerous these crime syndicates are.”

“I wanted to bring you down,” Townsend said, his eyes finally gleaming at me with something akin to genuine emotion. If I had to guess, I’d say it was hatred. “I wanted Q.E.D. to be the saving grace of this great city. At the last minute, I
changed my plans and called you to the Cloisters so that you would be charged and humbled in the public eye.”

“That decision doesn’t sound very logical to me,” Marco said slyly. “Sounds downright emotional.”

Townsend gave him a droll look. “Pride is the hardest emotion to extricate. It burrows deep in the human heart.”

“I didn’t know you still had one,” Marco replied.

“Pride is also one of the seven deadly sins, if I recall my Bible lessons,” Gorky said. “Lower the cage, boys. It’s time for the lieutenant to drink his fill.”

One of the bodyguard-thugs—the shorter and stockier of the pair—pushed the cage toward the inner stairwell while his sinewy cohort pushed a button on the railing surrounding the stairs. With a hum of hydraulic motion, the steps flattened into a ramp.

“No!” I hurried to Gorky’s side. “Please, Vladimir, don’t do this. I have more reason than any to want vengeance against Townsend, but I can’t let you do this.”

“You can’t stop me,” he said, clearly amused.

“But I can,” Marco barked. He dashed to the upper level and punched the guard who guided the cage hard in the liver. When the guard doubled over, his partner pulled out a large, ballooned-shaped pistol from the storage pockets on his Army-green pants, pointing it at Marco’s heart.

“Freeze!” the thug said.

I recognized the weapon immediately. It was a smaller version of the Radioart Marco and I had confiscated a month ago outside Lola’s apartment. Instead of shooting bullets, it dispensed deadly radiation. Hence, the name, which was short for radiation artillery.

“Don’t move, Marco,” I called out.

I could see the choice warring in his tortured expression: save Townsend or myself.

“Go ahead, Marik,” Gorky said. “Try to save the lieutenant. If you die of radiation poisoning, that can’t be traced back to me, either.”

I whirled on Gorky. “You are a horrible, evil person who doesn’t deserve to live. Why are you doing this? Is it just because my mother saved your life? Is this your creepy, perverse way of paying her back, by gruesomely killing anyone who tries to hurt me? Do I have to suffer because she made the mistake of rescuing a despicable human being?”

“No, Angel
moy,”
he said, tears filling his eyes. He lurched forward and clasped my upper arms in his massive hands, overwhelming me with the force of his emotion and presence. “I do this because you are my daughter. And I always protect my own.”

Do or Die

T
his revelation hit me like a mallet in the stomach. I was Vladimir Gorky’s daughter. He was my father.

“You and Lola….” I couldn’t complete the sentence.

“Yes, Angel.” He swallowed loudly and blinked back his tears. “We were lovers in those days. Later she told me she’d had a child, but she insisted the father was someone else.”

I vaguely heard the clatter of the cage being wheeled down the ramp. The guard must have recovered from Marco’s blow. I tried hard to catch my breath, but my entire system was rigid with shock.
Breathe deep, Angel
, I told myself.
Breathe
.

I slowly but firmly pulled my arms from his hands, stepping back and hugging myself. “She told me that my father abandoned us shortly after I was born,” I whispered, not looking at him. As if I were quickly laying out the cards in a game of Sol
itaire that I already knew I’d won, my mind raced through the past, sorting my life in light of this stunning revelation. “She must not have wanted you and I to have a…relationship.”

“And that made me angry,” he said. “When I found out—”

I looked up at him. “When did you find out?”

“Last month. When Lola called to tell me you wanted to meet me to discuss the missing girls, she told me that you were mine. She was afraid I’d figure it out on my own once you and I met face-to-face.”

“Angel!” Marco shouted from where he stood by the stairwell, still being held at gunpoint.

I tore my gaze from Gorky and looked at Marco.

“Save him!” Marco shouted. “They can’t kill us both at the same time.”

Trusting that Marco had scoped out the other thug for weapons and found him lacking, I made a mad dash toward the stairs.

“Angel!” Gorky yelled. “Stop!”

When I reached the top of the ramp and saw that the stocky guard had hooked Townsend’s cage and was hoisting it over the water, I forget about my own dismay.

“Leave him!” I shouted. But before I could scramble down to Townsend’s rescue, the guy holding Marco turned the Radioart on me.

“Don’t aim that at her, you idiot!” Gorky roared.

Marco took advantage of the confusion and socked his lanky opponent hard in the jaw. The weapon fell to the ground as the two men embraced in hand-to-hand combat. I ran down the ramp, ready to knock the hoist operator out the door and into the murky depths of Lake Michigan, but by the time I reached him, he’d already pushed a button and the chain dangling Townsend a foot above the choppy water was suddenly loosed.
The cage dropped like a ton of bricks, splashing into the cold lake.

“Help me!” Townsend cried out as the water swirled into his cage, reaching for my hand through the bars.

The guard who’d pushed the button lumbered back up the ramp, apparently content that he had done his job. I knelt in the doorway, barely aware of the waves lapping up on my knees, and stretched out my hand to Townsend, clinging to the door frame so I wouldn’t go over.

“Take my hand!” I shouted. It was a fool’s quest. Neither of us would be strong enough to resist the weight of the cage that was quickly dragging him down.

“Angel!” Gorky shouted from the top of the ramp. “Come away from there. You might fall in.”

Like a many-faceted diamond, my mind raced with dozens of hard-cut realizations—that Gorky sounded genuinely, almost touchingly afraid for my well-being, that Townsend’s only hope of survival rested with me, that Marco might be dead by now, that my life would never, ever be the same regardless of how any of this turned out.

All this I realized in the instant it took for me to turn toward the hoist’s control panel. I jabbed my fingers at every button I could find, but nothing worked.

“Come on, damn you!” I cursed. “Lift up. Lift!”

This last word was muted by the sound of bubbles bursting up from the water as the cage sank well below the surface. Desperate, I still tried to work the hoist, finally punching the panel in frustration.

“Angel,” Gorky called down, not without sympathy, “give up. You cannot operate that hoist without a special code.”

I stopped, still not wanting to accept the reality. I looked at the chain that fed into the water, knowing that in another
minute—maybe two—Townsend would be dead. Then I looked up at Gorky. “Please.
Father
, please raise him up.”

Gorky stared at me a long time, as if seriously considering my request, then shook his head slowly. “No. Not even for you.”

I collapsed in the doorway, knowing that Townsend was already dead.
What a horrific way to die
, I thought, and I imprinted the moment deep in my psyche so I would never, ever forget just how wicked my own father really was.

By the time I had recovered the ability to ascend the ramp with some semblance of composure, Marco was once again being held at gunpoint, though this time the thin guard wielding the Radioart was, like Marco, panting and half doubled over in pain after their bruising tussle. The guard held the gun steady in one hand and with the other nursed his nose, which was spewing a copious amount of blood.

“Get out of here,” Gorky barked. “You’ll ruin the wood floor. Take the detective with you.”

In an instant, I knew what that meant. Marco would die, perhaps not as horribly as Townsend just had, but he would see no mercy from this monster who called himself a human being.

I saw my chance and with sharpened focus noticed something that Marco had earlier overlooked—the flash of a traditional metal pistol sticking out of the back pocket of the stocky guard, who bent over to clean up the blood. I reached for his gun, faster than a State Street pickpocket, and when he shot upright, grabbing at his empty pocket, turning to retrieve it, I pressed its snubbed nose to his forehead.

“Drop the Radioart or your friend dies,” I hissed at the guard holding Marco, though my eyes never left the repugnant ape who had lowered Townsend into the water. We were so close I could smell putrid sweat, which began to pour from
his temples. He scowled at me like a bulldog who had just been pissed on by the neighbor’s poodle, but he didn’t dare move.

“Boss?” asked the guard holding the weapon. “What should I do?”

My heart pounded so hard I thought it would explode. This was do or die time. I knew it. And I was ready. If Gorky didn’t give orders to disarm, I had to act.

“I don’t think she will kill him,” Gorky said, like someone speculating on whether the stock market would make a gain on any particular day.

I pulled the trigger. Townsend’s killer dropped to the floor, flopping on his back. His lifeless eyes stared at the ceiling. A clean, red bullet hole marked his forehead like a caste mark. I aimed the pistol at the remaining guard.

“You’re next,” I said savagely. “Drop the Radioart.”

Both the guard and Marco were staring wide-eyed at the man I’d just killed, then they looked at me in a way I’d never been regarded before—with a weird combination of awe and dismay.

“Boss?” the guard said nervously.

“Leave us,” Gorky said. “Take the Radioart with you.”

The guard hightailed it out of the room and Gorky turned to his fireplace, leaning with one hand on the mantel, the other tucked behind his back. Facing the flickering flames, he looked as if he were carrying the weight of the world. I suspected he was trying to find an appropriate way to punish me. The question was, how? And how would I respond?

I didn’t think Gorky was armed. But likewise, I wasn’t sure I was ready to shoot my own father. No matter how much I hated him, this was the man I had been missing my whole life. Could I find this lost figure and kill him on the same ill-fated day?

Marco came to my side and bolstered me with an arm
around my shoulder. Apparently sensing my ambivalence, he took the small pistol out of my hand and aimed it at Gorky.

The strapping older man’s shoulders began to shake, then a rumble sounded in his broad chest, then he turned and I saw that he was smiling, laughing. He raised his arms up in a welcome gesture and came toward me, his gravelly voice booming with mirth and joy.

“You make me so proud, Angel. You killed him! I didn’t think you had it in you, but you did it! Good girl!” He clapped his hands together and collapsed into his favorite chair, wiping the joy from his eyes. Quieting, he regarded me more soberly, but still with great pride. “You’re a killer now. Just like your old man.”

If I’d still had the pistol in my hand, I would have shot him then and there, I despised him that much. I would gladly have burned an eternity in hell just to have the pleasure of pulling the trigger. But when Marco said, “Do you want me to kill him?” I shook my head.

“No,” I replied. “You already have enough blood on your hands.”

Marco looked down sharply, trying to read the meaning in my closeted, grim features. Realizing that Gorky had shown me the photos of Rayenko’s butchered body, Marco paled.

“Yo!” came a loud, dissonantly chipper voice from the bottom of the stairwell, which was followed by the jangly clamor of metal spurs and boots sounding on the aluminum ramp. The sound grew louder until Brad suddenly appeared.

He was a blinding sight, with his spiked, bleached white hair, white sunglasses, white facial scar, white everything—including a white floor-length Victorian smoking jacket that traipsed elegantly around his pointy, white snakeskin cowboy boots. It was John Wayne meets the Scarlet Pimpernel. And I’d never in my life been so happy to be greeted by such an incongruous sight.

“Hey, Vlad,” he said, tipping his forefinger and thumb at Gorky as if his hand held an invisible gun.

“Hello, Brad,” Gorky said dubiously. “What are you doing here?”

Brad shrugged, as if his flowing jacket was too tight around the shoulders. “Just happened to be in the neighborhood.” He reached into his tight, front pants pocket and pulled out a money chip, then tossed it toward Gorky. “Catch.”

Gorky caught the chip in midair, impressing me with his quick reflexes. “What’s this?”

“The money you gave me to watch over Angel. Even though my job was to keep her safe, I started to feel like Judas, so I’m giving back the blood money.”

He turned to me with a punky grin. “Hey, babe, you ready to book? Is this your boyfriend?”

“Marco,” I managed to spit out, “meet Brad.”

“Hey, Marco,” Brad said, slapping his palm into Marco’s in a fluid move. “I’m Brad the Impaler.”

“Great.” Marco grinned, knowing a good—albeit incomprehensible—thing when he saw it. “That’s great.”

“Let’s go.” Brad motioned us toward the ramp. “I have a boat waiting downstairs.”

“Brad,” Gorky said, shaking his head sympathetically, “you poor dumb shit, don’t you know you’ll never escape? I have three men whose only job is to patrol the water around my house.”

Brad shrugged apologetically. “I’m afraid I had to take them out, Mr. Gorky, I’m sorry.” He pulled open both sides of his jacket, revealing an impressive array of compact semiautomatic machine guns tucked into various pockets and straps. “A bit old-fashioned, I know, but damned effective.” He nodded toward the door. “Let’s go.”

As we made our escape, I looked back only once at Gorky. He returned my gaze with a distinct glimmer of affection. And
I knew that despite the bravo performance Brad had just given, if we escaped with our lives, it would only be because Gorky allowed it.

Psychologists will tell you that when children are infants and, unlike most other mammals, are completely dependent on Mom and Dad for food and protection, they make the false assumption that their parents are godlike—all powerful. Part of the maturing process involves coming to the realization that your parents aren’t omnipotent.

But in my case, it was all too true.

With Marco and I seated in the back of the cigarette boat, along with the unflappable Keshon stretched out by our feet, Brad drove over the ragged waves far offshore like a bat out of hell, which was a comparison he’d probably find flattering. Every time the boat skipped into the air and crashed down into one of the bigger waves, a spray of cold water hit my face. It felt good. It reminded me that I was alive.

But Townsend wasn’t. He’d done terrible things, but no one deserved to die as he had. Marco had once warned me that I didn’t really understand the meaning, or the pain and consequences, of death. I did now. I understood more than I ever wanted to.

Marco called into police headquarters to report Townsend’s murder, so by the time Brad pulled into Navy Pier, there was a hive of officials and law-enforcement officers waiting to take our statements and work the case, which they already knew was huge.

In my mind, the murder of the director of Q.E.D. would be comparable to Al Capone knocking off FBI Elliot Ness. This was a major wrinkle in the fabric of law and order. No matter how corrupt many of Chicago’s twenty-second-century
officials might be, they surely couldn’t deny that this was a crime that had to be punished.

I think I answered a million questions by a half-dozen different detectives and agents before I was allowed to go home. Marco and I agreed that we had a lot to talk about, but that it could wait until we bathed and changed, so we set a time for a later rendezvous.

We went our separate ways, and I wandered back down to the dock just before Brad took off with Chicago PD’s water patrol for a return trip to Gorky’s lakeside compound. Brad was clearly enjoying his role as hero of the day. I called out to him, and he met me halfway on the diagonal boardwalk.

Mindless of time or place, he took me into his arms and pressed me close, baring his fangs with an audacious smile.

“Hello, Brad. Is that an automatic weapon in your pocket,” I murmured as lustfully as I could, “or are you glad to see me?”

“This time it really is a weapon.” He laughed and released me, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Hey, babe, it’s been real.”

“Real what?”

“I’m not sure, but I had a hell of a good time.”

“Are you going back to New Orleans?”

He nodded, eyeing me up and down as if I were stark naked. “You wanna come?”

I shook my head. “No.”