Gamma Blade (18 page)

“You’ve got money on you? For a phone call?”

“Yes.” The solicitousness of the question caught her unawares.

“And your fiancé’s close by? You can reach him quickly?”

“Yes.”

He pressed a button and the door popped open.

Beth stumbled out and ran, without looking back.

Chapter 28

Venn hung around the lobby of the restaurant until he was satisfied Beth wasn’t there yet. He checked his phone. No message. She might be stuck in traffic, and she didn’t like using her phone while behind the wheel. Which he guessed was sensible.

He stepped outside to feel the last warmth of the day. A couple of patrol cars screamed past, sirens on full blast. Like always, as a cop himself, he was curious to know where they were headed.

Venn felt guilty, in a way, about still going ahead with his dinner with Beth. It felt dishonest, when there was so much else going down, to pretend everything was normal.

But he wanted to spend an hour with her, before... well, before whatever happened later. He’d tell her over dinner. Break it to her gently. Let her know that their evening was going to be cut short, because he was going to take a trip out to sea and enter into a hostage exchange situation which would be extremely dangerous, and potentially deadly.

He thought she might, just
might
, understand. Because he was doing it to try to save the life of a child.

Another cop car flashed past.

Venn and Estrada had spent the afternoon organizing the rendezvous that night. She’d been able to procure a boat, and a guy to skipper it. The only other passengers would be Estrada herself, and Venn.

There was no sharpshooter. Estrada didn’t have access to a marksman.

That was a bluff. And a hell of a risky one, as they both acknowledged.

Venn didn’t have an exit strategy. He assumed Brull himself wouldn’t be on the boat, and that his goons would collect Venn and take him to wherever Brull was waiting. He’d have to allow himself to be taken, and watch and wait for an opportunity to turn the tables.

It was an insanely reckless plan.

But it might free the kid.

Again, Venn felt a tug of guilt. Was it the right thing to do, to save this boy he didn’t know, while risking his own life and thereby potentially depriving his own unborn child of a father? Was it fair on Beth?

He didn’t know. But he kept thinking of the terrified little boy in the video clip Fuentes had shown him. And of how he couldn’t live with himself if he just walked away.

Go alone knew how he’d ever be able to let his own child out of his sight, once it was born.

It was when the fourth police car sped past that Venn realized something big was up nearby.

He checked his watch. Ten after eight. No sign of Beth yet.

He called her number. There was no reply, just the voicemail prompt.

Nightmare scenarios of Beth lying in the mangled wreckage of an auto crash tormented Venn’s mind. He pushed them away angrily. Even if there had been an accident nearby, Beth was most likely stuck in traffic, that was all.

Eight fifteen came, and went. Venn went back into the restaurant to make double sure he hadn’t missed her there, though he knew he was wasting his time.

And then his phone rang.

He said, “Yeah?” and it was Beth, her voice shaky, as though she was trying to maintain control but struggling.

“Venn,” she said. “Can you - can you come? Come get me?”

“What happened?” He found himself suppressing the urge to yell. “Beth,
what happened
? Are you okay?”

“Just come get me,” she said. “Please.”

*

He found her on the corner she’d directed him to, six blocks away. He’d raced through the streets, ignoring the blaring horns as he’d sprinted across streets displaying
Don’t Walk
signs, his eyes fixed on his phone and the GPS map there.

Beth was in a phone booth, huddled against the side, her head in her hands. She almost screamed when Venn appeared at the door, but when she saw it was him, she fell into his arms. They clung together like that for ten seconds. Venn could feel the shuddering of her body, the hammering of her heart.

He lifted his face away from her neck and looked into her eyes. She appeared unhurt.
Thank God.

“What happened?” he said.

And she told him. It came out a little disjointedly, but she retained her physician’s instinct for precision and succinctness, and within a few sentences Beth had sketched out a clear account of what had gone down in the last hour.

And Venn didn’t know what the hell to think.

He looked around, along the streets and the sidewalks, as if this Harris guy would be lurking nearby.

Who was he?

Venn said: “Tell me again about these men who came on the ward. The ones Harris shot.”

Beth described them as best as she could. There wasn’t much to say about them, except that they all had shaved heads and were Latino, possibly Cuban.

Brull’s men, thought Venn.

Bastards.

He wished he could have killed them himself. But there’d be more, where they came from.

And there was Brull himself.

Venn said, “You okay to walk a little?”

Beth nodded. She tried a smile, which didn’t quite work. “I guess dinner’s off for tonight, huh?”

“The place didn’t look all that great, anyhow,” said Venn.

He walked slowly, letting her lean against him for support, and he took out his phone and called Estrada.

Chapter 29

Brull rode the Challenger hard, treading on the gas pedal like it was a bug he was trying to crush.

He screamed into the phone: “What do you mean,
dead
?”

It wasn’t like him to raise his voice, and at the other end, Elon knew it. He paused, before saying, “Like I say, boss. We’re four guys down. Pedro and Ricky, plus the two that came to support  them.”

“How?” As soon as Pedro told him he’d seen the woman going into the hospital, Brull had headed for his car. He wanted to be mobile, hitting the streets, ready to move when he needed to.

But he’d gotten a call, a minute ago, from Elon, who’d in turn received a call from another guy who’d arrived at the hospital, and had seen the cops congregating outside, had heard the buzz of conversation.

Four armed men had been shot dead on the neurology ward. Four perps, plus a cop.

“Who killed them?” Brull demanded. “The cops?”

“Maybe,” Elon said. “Impossible to know, at this point. There was on cop killed on the ward. I’m guessing he was there, guarding the guy we’re looking for. Maybe there were more cops.”

“Shit,” said Brull. “This really screws us, you know?
Really
screws us. They connect Pedro and the guys to us, the cops will be all over me.”

He felt his sense of control beginning to slip. He’d never spoken like that to any of his underlings before, even Elon.

Elon said, “What you want to do, boss?”

Brull looked at his watch, the Patek Philippe. Eight thirty. He was RDVing with the Irishman, O’Reilly, at nine. In thirty minutes from now.

At ten, the cop, Venn, was going to hand himself over to Brull, out at sea, in exchange for the Fuentes kid. Supposedly.

Brull’s intention, up until a few minutes ago when Elon had called, had been to seal the deal with O’Reilly at nine o’clock, then take care of the Venn business, then send the shipment out in the early hours of the morning.

But now four of his guys had been killed, while starting a gunfight on a hospital ward. The net would begin to close in on Ernesto Justice Brull.

Which meant he needed to adjust the timeline. Bring forward the dispatch of the shipment, so that it would reach the Turkmenistan guys as soon as possible. So that he’d receive his payment, and be able to buy himself an escape strategy.

He needed to dispatch the goods tonight. In fact, if he timed it right, and if O’Reilly agreed, the merchandise could go out at the same time Venn was handing himself over.

Brull said to Elon, “Meet me at the warehouse at just before nine,” and he ended the call and punched in O’Reilly’s number.

*

It was a meeting like neither of them had expected.

This was supposed to be a solemn affair, a signing of a multi-million-dollar contract on the grand setting of a luxury boat, with each party sporting its own entourage of bodyguards. And that was how it was going to play out last night, before it had been interrupted.

Instead, Brull and O’Reilly both showed up with just two men each, at a grungy warehouse bathed in darkness with no night watchman. They shone flashlights on one another’s faces to verify their identities, then stood in the middle of the dusty floor, six feet apart, as there were no seats to be seen.

Brull hadn’t yet met O’Reilly, though he’d seen him from a distance when he’d spied on the guy’s boat. The Irishman was shorter than he’d expected, and a little older. He had the raw face of a veteran sea-dog.

Which was what he was, and what made him so useful as a potential business partner.

O’Reilly didn’t waste time with small talk. “So the terms are, five hundred thousand US dollars from you. For which I guarantee the unobstructed passage of your cargo through secure oceanic routes to your required destination on the Turkmenistan coast.”

“The terms are accepted,” said Brull.

“And I understand from your call a few minutes ago, that you wish the cargo to be dispatched tonight. Rather than at your originally proposed time of five a.m. Tomorrow.”

“That’s correct,” said Brull.

“I can do that,” said O’Reilly. “My cargo vessel is at present out beyond US coastal waters. If your own vessel can bring the goods to the co-ordinates I’ll provide, we can take it from there. Allowing time for transfer from one ship to the other, the cargo can be on its way to Central Asia by midnight.”

“Excellent,” said Brull.

He raised a hand, and Elon, one of the two men he’d brought along, stepped forward. He held a large, hard-shell suitcase in both hands.

He placed it on the ground between the two men. Stepped back.

One of O’Reilly’s guys came forward and took the suitcase and retreated. It was like some weirdly choreographed dance routine. The man popped the clasps, riffled through the stacks of notes, glanced away as if calculating. Then he said to O’Reilly: “Yeah. Five hundred K.”

O’Reilly took a step forward. He extended his hand.

“We have a deal, Mr Brull.”

Brull stepped forward himself.

Put out his own hand.

O’Reilly drew back, just a fraction, so that Brull’s hand was left stuck out in the air. Making him look stupid.

O’Reilly said: “On one further condition.”

“Condition?” said Brull.

“Yes.” O’Reilly kept his hand just out of reach, like a prize at a fair. “The condition is, that you do what you so far haven’t managed to do. That you kill the man from last night. The one who was watching my boat, and whom your men tracked to a hospital ward this evening, and who apparently succeeded in escaping and killing your men in the process.”

O’Reilly’s tone was neutral enough, but the undercurrent of contempt was unmistakable.

“The man named John Purkiss.”

Chapter 30

The boat looked like it had seen better days, but it appeared seaworthy. Venn hadn’t been out on the ocean since his days in the Marines, which was going back almost fifteen years now, and he wondered how it’d feel, what memories it would bring back.

The skipper was a guy named Brown, and he didn’t say much, just tipped his peaked cap at Venn and nodded. Estrada had told Venn that Brown was a former Miami PD cop who’d gotten kicked off the force aged forty-six because of a drink problem. Three years later, he was stone-cold sober, and plied a trade doing freelance work for Estrada and a couple of other detectives in the Department. He was trustworthy, she said, never touched drug money, and kept his mouth shut.

They launched the
Sea Stealer
at nine-forty p.m.

*

Estrada had collected Venn and Beth a little more than an hour earlier. She’d looked at Beth with concern, and Venn had given her a brief account about what had happened on the ward.

“We need to hit that ward,” said Estrada. “Find out what happened.”

“No time,” Venn said. “We got our thing in an hour.” He glanced at Beth, who was in the rear of Estrada’s station wagon. He’d intended to tell her what he was planning to do tonight, about the exchange for the Fuentes kid. But now, he decided that wasn’t a good idea.

So he’d told her, before Estrada had picked them up, that he was going to take down Brull that night, with Estrada’s assistance. He hadn’t gone into specifics, and Beth hadn’t asked.

They drove to Estrada’s office. On the way, she told Beth that she was assigning two cops, one male and one female, to take care of her until this was over.

“You can’t go back to the hotel,” Venn said to Beth. “If these guys on the ward really were after you, as this Harris guy said, then we can’t take the chance. We have to assume they know where you’re staying.”

The cops Estrada was assigning to guard Beth were ones she could trust. They’d accommodate Beth at an apartment round the corner from Estrada’s office.

Beth nodded. She seemed beyond any argument. Venn hoped the PTSD wasn’t going to become an issue again.

At the office, Venn hugged Beth tightly. She returned his embrace, hard, in a way that suggested she wasn’t doing it in a detached, going-through-the-motions kind of manner.

She looked up into his eyes.

“Take care, Venn,” she said. “Come back, will you? Come back to us?”

And she placed his hand on her belly, where he let it linger for the briefest moment.

“Yeah,” he said. “You bet I’ll be back.”

*

On the way to the docks where the Sea Stealer was berthed, Estrada said to Venn: “So this Harris guy. Sounds like kind of a pro.”

“Yeah,” Venn said. Beth had said Harris had shot all four of Brull’s men during their invasion of the ward. Put them down cleanly, as if he knew what he was doing, knew how to handle a gun.