Blackjack (8 page)

THE MAN
called Cross got up and walked through a beaded curtain made up of ball bearings. He entered a back room, three other men behind him. His handprint unlocked a thick door. A blinking orange light alerted him that calls had been made from the pay phones in the poolroom since the system had last been checked.

Buddha tapped the “playback” key. He closed his eyes to concentrate on the tape.

Less than a minute later, he said: “It’s what we thought, boss. Reporting to Chang. Only surprise was the guy speaking Mandarin. You’d think Cantonese, coming from those boys. Must be Hong Kong, not mainland.”

“You know what to do,” Cross said.

Buddha pulled a throw-away cell phone from his field jacket, punched in a number, and had a brief conversation in a language none of the others understood.

“I just told the gray-tooth headman that Chang was working for the
federales
, boss. He said to tell you his ‘gratitude’ was on its way.”

“Chang was going, anyway. Bringing in those MS-13 boys was a mistake. Thinking he could control them, that made it a fatal one.”

“You got that right,” Buddha agreed. “That MS-13 crew’s crazy enough to do any damn thing, but crazy don’t beat crafty, and those Cambos are some
seriously
evil plotters.”

“They had to be.”

“To stay alive when Pol Pot was running that slaughterhouse? Amen to that.”

“Yeah,” Cross said, without much interest. “Time for me to move out, get this rolling.”

AS THE
others were re-entering the poolroom, Cross climbed a flight of stairs taking him out of the basement, opened a back door, and exited into the street.

Twenty steps later, he slid into an alley, walking behind an overflowing Dumpster which concealed a metal door. Then he began to climb a long flight of pebble-pocked steel steps.

At the first landing, he pulled out a pocket flash, illuminating a shelf. He took a small bottle off the shelf and sprayed a mist over his right hand. He then took a clean handkerchief and wiped the back of that hand, using only moderate force. The lightning-bolt scar disappeared.

Cross then removed a pre-moistened sheet of fibrous cloth from a slotted box and carefully draped it over his right hand. With his left, he ran a small hair dryer over the sheet for a few seconds. When the sheet was pulled away, the familiar bull’s-eye tattoo was back in place.

He then exchanged his leather jacket and T-shirt for an expensively cut charcoal alpaca suit, complete with a stylishly retro fedora. The same alligator boots he had worn when speaking with the woman in the poolroom remained
in place. Almost as an afterthought, he spit out the wads of spirit gum that had deformed his facial features while he had been inside the poolroom.

A quick glance in the polished-metal mirror satisfied him. He then resumed his climb.

CROSS STEPPED
out onto the rooftop, stopped to check a connected series of wooden boxes with an exit trap and air holes cut for entry-exit, noting it was empty. He didn’t bother to add seed to the empty bins—if the mated pair of kestrels were both out, they weren’t on a pleasure cruise. But he did refill the water trough, using bottled spring water.

By the time he returned to the alley, a big sedan was waiting.

“You know” was all Cross said to Buddha.

THE CITY-CAMO
car moved slowly through an alley. When it came to a full stop, Cross jumped out.

The back staircase of an anonymous building took Cross all the way to the roof. There, he draped a wood plank across the gap to move to the next building. When he reached the other side, he elevated the plank before shoving it effortlessly back across. The Teflon-coated edges of both rooftops had been tested and retested a hundred times. The only difficulty encountered had come when Princess demanded a turn. Rhino protested, Buddha encouraged him. Cross settled it: “If it’ll hold his weight, it’ll hold mine, right?”

The new building’s roof housed an electrical shack. Cross stepped inside. He moved down a flight of stairs to a hallway, where he rang for an elevator marked “Freight.”

The elevator car came up, driven by a short, squat Hispanic with a Zapata mustache. Cross got on. The car descended all the way to the basement. Both men got out. The Hispanic looked through a periscope device for a long minute.

“Clear,” he told Cross.

Cross stepped around the other man, exchanged a fist-pound for the other’s
“Viva la Raza!”
; the man’s cynical expression as he pocketed the tightly rolled bills clearly demonstrated that the political-solidarity verbiage had been pure sarcasm.

Neither man was as unseen as either of them believed. Inside what looked like an oversized van sat the blond man and another individual, the latter wearing a white lab coat and trifocal glasses.

The blond man was seated in a captain’s chair in the rear, watching the other one peer at a console.

“You got him?” the blond asked.

“Locked on. No place he can go now. He can change his clothes, but he can’t change his thermal image. Look.…” One of the round monitors flickered. On the screen, the image was the fluid outline of a man, with different areas of his body marked in different colors.

“Is this what … 
they
 … use?” the blond asked.

“Far as we can tell, yes. They’ve got some form of heat-seeker, that’s for sure. But it can differentiate better than anything we’ve ever seen. The technology was so superior that we don’t have anything to compare it to. Are you following me?”

“I believe.…”

“Just in case you’re not, I’ll spell it out: they can see us, but we can’t see … whatever they are. Which is about as bad as it gets. But we’ve just added something to
our
bag
of tricks. With these new instruments, we can pick up
when
they’re watching.”

“Watching us, you mean?”

“No,” the white-coated man said. “We’re nowhere near that stage. We can pick up a signal that says their system is activated, but that’s
all
we can do. We don’t know
who
it’s locked on to, just
when
it’s gone operational. And then only when it’s within our sweep area.”

Tiger moved just enough to announce her presence. She nodded in a gesture the blond man understood all too well: unlike Percy, Tiger relied on more than just her eyesight. But her basic premise was the same—if she could sense it, she could kill it.

AS THE
team reassembled in the War Room, they continued to track Cross making his way through the underground network of the city: from abandoned tunnels to subbase-ments of office buildings and finally to an apparently empty shack standing at the end of a shipping pier. The pier itself hadn’t been used in years—Cross carefully picked his way across the rotting timbers.

“You know what I can’t understand?” the blond man said to Wanda, forcing her to look up from a thick sheaf of computer printouts she had in her lap.

“What is it
this
time?” Wanda responded, her voice tinted with the waspish superiority she could not always restrain.

The blond ignored her attitude—human emotions were of no great interest to him.

“We’ve got locates on them all over the world. Whatever the hell they are, they don’t give a damn about climate.”

“So?”

“So look at this pattern. We have a series of kills near the Arctic Circle. Polar-bear hunters. Poachers, as it turns out. Same in Kenya.”

“Polar bears in Kenya?” Tiger asked, just short of giggling. “
That’s
your pattern?”

“
Poachers
, you stupid slut. In Kenya, they were after rhino horn.”

Tiger leaned forward, one fist clenched, her thumb pressing down on the topmost finger. She felt the light touch of the Indian’s hand on her arm. Tracker shook his head—not an order, one comrade cautioning another that the time to strike had not yet arrived. Tiger nodded, unclenched her fist, and sat back, crossing her long legs.

“And in Brazil,” the blond continued, oblivious to how close he had just come to serious injury, “the same damn thing, only
this
time the victims had been chasing some kind of rare parrot.”

Sensing he finally had everyone’s attention, the blond looked up. “I know. That’s the first thing we thought, some band of crazed environmentalists. Especially with the last one. I mean, it was in their sacred damn rain forest—that’s holy ground to those twits.”

The monitor showed a forensics team working over the ground in the jungle. Torn and gutted corpses were hanging from nearby trees—all missing some portion of their skeletons.

“But we found one thing in all those kills that eliminated our Green friends.…”

As if sync’ed to the blond’s words, the monitor zoomed in on what looked like a bloody pelt. This one wasn’t hanging, it was carelessly tossed to one side. But it was just as dead.

“Dogs,” the blond continued. “Huskies up north, Ridge-backs in Africa, and some kind of mongrel we’d never heard of in South America. All dead. No way the Greenies would
kill dogs. Especially like this. They look like they’ve been clawed into pieces by some ferocious giant cat.”

The Indian was lost in thought, concentrating on the data, reaching inside himself for information he knew was in there … somewhere.