The Furies (7 page)

John rested Ariel in the Kia's bloodstained backseat. “We got a two-minute head start,” he said. “Have any ideas about where to go?”

He didn't expect an answer but Ariel nodded. “Go west, young man,” she said. “Take the Roosevelt Expressway to I-76.”

“You have a destination in mind?”

“I do. But I have to warn you. It's a long drive.”

FOUR

Agent Larson heard the motorcycle coming long before he saw it. The noise of its engine echoed against the concrete pillars that supported the New Jersey Turnpike above the Meadowlands. Although hundreds of cars and trucks sped along the turnpike every minute, the parking lots and rail yards below the causeway were almost always deserted. Larson had been standing beside his SUV for half an hour before he heard the rumble of the Harley-Davidson. A minute later Van came in sight, slaloming his bike between the pillars.

Larson hated this part of his job. Six years ago he'd transferred to the FBI's field office in New York, where he'd hoped to rise through the ranks of the counterterrorism division. Instead, he got assigned to the Violent Gangs Task Force, specifically the squad that monitored motorcycle gangs in New York and New Jersey. Although the biker gangs were involved in drug dealing and gun trafficking, the assignment was a lot less prestigious than tracking down terrorists. Larson spent most of his time looking for informants who were willing to rat out their friends. He couldn't stand dealing with the scumbags. They were, for the most part, outrageous bullshit artists.

Van, though, was an exception to the rule. A few weeks ago he told Larson about an upcoming heroin shipment, and that tip resulted in one of the biggest drug busts of the year. So when Van called the field office this morning, saying he had information about the shootings in Brooklyn last night, Larson was willing to listen. He agreed to meet the biker in the Meadowlands.

Van coasted to a stop but stayed on his Harley. He was tall and solid, in his late forties or early fifties but still in good shape. He had a face like a drill sergeant's, hard and lined and angular, but it was topped with long, messy hair that had turned dirty gray. His clothes were a mess too: ripped jeans, scuffed boots, and a grease-stained bomber jacket. All in all, he looked like an aging veteran who'd decided to spend his retirement on a long, debauched joyride. And for all Larson knew, that's exactly who Van was. The biker had refused to reveal his last name or any other particulars. He belonged to a gang called the Riflemen, which was a new club, much smaller than the established ones—the Hell's Angels, the Pagans, the Outlaws, and so on. Still, he had a lot of connections in the other gangs and seemed to know everything that was going on.

Larson stepped away from his SUV and cautiously approached the motorcycle. He'd met Van in person before and knew that he carried an old pistol in a shoulder holster. To defuse the tension, Larson grinned and put a jaunty tone in his voice.

“You're late,” he said. “You get stuck in traffic?”

Van didn't smile back at him. “What are the cops saying about Bushwick?”

He was all business today. And that was all right with Larson. No sense in dragging it out. “They found six dead at the scene. One was the night clerk at the hotel, the other five are John Does. But there's evidence of more casualties. It looks like whoever attacked the place pulled out their wounded.” For a moment he pictured the scene on Evergreen Avenue, which he'd visited earlier that morning at the request of the New York police, who'd discovered motorcycle tracks on the streets near the hotel. Blood and gore were spattered all over the hotel's roof and in the alley below. “The crime-scene techs collected a shitload of shells. There was a hell of a lot of shooting, that's all they know for sure.”

“That's because it's a war. This was the first battle.”

Larson waited for more, but Van fell silent. He looked up and stared at the concrete underside of the turnpike.

“You want to explain that?” Larson asked. “Who's fighting this war?”

The biker didn't answer right away. He seemed to be lost in some profound meditation. Finally he stopped staring at the highway and lowered his head. “They're connected to methamphetamine dealers in the Midwest. One gang is based in Michigan, the other in Ohio. Both of them are branching out, trying to sell their shit farther east. They already got operations in Philadelphia, and now they're coming to New York.”

“So this is a turf war?”

He nodded. “Yeah, and both sides have plenty of soldiers. Some are gangbangers from Philly, but most are white dudes from the sticks. For the past year or so, they've been loading up on weapons. They got some military hardware, M16s, M4s.”

Larson perked up when he heard this. Most of the shells collected at the scene were from 5.56-millimeter M4 cartridges. This fact hadn't been revealed to the news media, so Van couldn't have learned it from watching TV or reading the paper. “How do you know about these guys?”

“The gang from Michigan did some business with the Pagans in upstate New York. They bought a few dozen assault rifles that the Pagans had smuggled out of Fort Drum. Ammunition, too. If you check the headstamp codes on those shells you found, I bet you'll find they came from Drum.”

By this point Larson was
very
interested. This kind of activity went way beyond the usual gang crimes. If midwestern drug cartels were stealing M4s from U.S. Army bases, that was pretty damn close to domestic terrorism. And if Agent Larson uncovered a terrorist plot, it could definitely resuscitate his career. “Well, that's interesting,” he said, trying to sound casual. “So who won the battle last night?”

Van shrugged. “Hey, I don't know everything. I'm just telling you what I heard on the street. What people are saying.”

“Do you know how they got out of Bushwick so quickly? By the time the NYPD got to the scene, only the corpses were still there.”

“Well, a lot of these fuckers are ex-army. So they have some training.” He raised his eyebrows, which were as gray as his hair. “But the word on the street is that one of them screwed up. He parked his car right in front of the hotel, then took off once the shooting stopped. He was in a beat-up old Kia with Pennsylvania plates. Some neighborhood kid saw the license plate and remembered the number.”

“Did he tell the police about it?”

“Are you kidding?” Van looked askance. “The kids in Bushwick aren't big fans of the cops. But he told his friends, and it spread from there.”

Larson felt a rush of adrenaline. “Do you know the plate number?”

The biker reached into the pocket of his bomber jacket and pulled out a folded slip of paper. “It wasn't easy to get. I had to talk to a lot of people. Ask a lot of questions. It was a fair amount of work.”

“So I guess you're looking for some compensation?” Larson had to be careful. If he sounded too eager, the price would go up. “What do you want?”

Van thought it over. He looked up again and scrutinized the underside of the highway. It looked like he was doing some arithmetic in his head. “Five hundred,” he finally replied.

The price was steep but not prohibitive. Larson went to his SUV, opened the passenger-side door and reached into the glove compartment. That's where he kept his petty cash envelope, which held a stack of twenty-dollar bills. Larson removed twenty-five of them, then returned to Van. “Here you go.”

The biker handed him the slip of paper and took the money. “They're vanity plates,” he added. “That's what made it easy for the kid to remember the number.”

As Van turned his bike around and gunned the engine, Agent Larson unfolded the paper. The plate number was written in pencil:
IVY4EVR

FIVE

The first thing Ariel did in the car was prepare her dose of herbal medicine. While John drove across North Philly toward the Roosevelt Expressway, she mixed the crushed leaves and powders in a half-full bottle of Poland Spring water she'd found in the backseat. He watched her in the rearview mirror as she raised the bottle to her lips and drank the concoction. She made a face, closing her eyes and twisting her mouth in disgust, but she downed the whole thing. Then she looked at him in the mirror.

“I owe you an explanation,” she said. “But I'm afraid you won't like it.”

She got right to the point, as always. John liked her directness. It was one of the first things he'd noticed about her. And now it convinced him to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though she'd led him into a shitload of trouble, He should've been fuming at Ariel—he was on the run because of this girl, his apartment had been trashed—but he couldn't get angry at her. Despite everything that had happened, he sensed she was innocent. “Give it a shot,” he said. “Go ahead and try me.”

Ariel shifted to a more comfortable position, stretching her injured legs across the backseat. “Meeting you in the bar last night wasn't an accident. I chose you two months ago. Then I came up with a plan for introducing myself to you.”

“Chose me? For what?”

“To father my child. I want to have a child.”

John was so startled, he almost missed the on-ramp for the expressway. The Kia fishtailed as he made the turn. “What?” he shouted. “Father your—?”

“Let me explain. The truth is, I'm not from Connecticut. Not even close. I come from an isolated community in northern Michigan, a place called Haven. You know about the Amish communities? Or the Mennonites?”

He stared at her in the rearview mirror. “You're Amish?”

“No, no. We're not a Christian community. But like the Amish, we have different customs from the rest of the society. And we have very strict rules. Most important, we're not allowed to marry and have children in the usual way. When a woman in our community wants to have a child, she has to seek permission from our Council of Elders.”

John was thoroughly confused. “Elders?”

“They're our leaders. If they give the woman permission, she has to go outside our community to find her paramour, which is our name for the man she chooses. But she can't stay with the man after he impregnates her. She has to come back to Haven to raise the child. She can never see the father again.”

He heard what she said but didn't understand a word of it. His hands trembled as he steered the car onto the expressway, which luckily wasn't too busy at that hour. He was more afraid now than he'd been during the shootout last night. “A cult? Is that what you're talking about? You belong to a cult?”

Ariel shook her head. “I wouldn't use that term. Yes, we operate in secrecy, but really we're a family. A very large extended family.”

John remembered her bodyguards, the brawny guys with auburn crew cuts. When he saw them in the bar for the first time he'd assumed they were her brothers. “Hal and Richard, they were part of this family, too?”

“They were my cousins.” She bit her lower lip. “Their job was to keep me safe during my encounter with you. They gave their lives to protect me.”

It was a real struggle just to keep the Kia in its lane. John wanted to stop the car on the side of the highway, but instead he tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “So you planned the whole thing ahead of time? Meeting me at the bar, wearing sexy clothes?”

She nodded. “It took some preparation. I knew you might get suspicious if I approached you from out of the blue. So I went to the job fair and made sure you saw me there.” Ariel reddened and turned away from the mirror. “I apologize for lying to you. I never went to college or studied social work. And I lied about the birth-control pills. I'm obviously not using any contraceptives.”

This was too much. John was finally getting angry at her. “You were going to get pregnant and then disappear? And never even tell me about my own child?”

“We have good reasons for our rules. We have to protect our community.”

“Protect you from what? I don't get this at all. How many people have you tricked this way?”

Ariel looked at him in the mirror again. Her eyes were wet. “I'm sorry, John. In most cases it isn't this painful. We carefully plan these encounters to ensure that they're casual and quick. The contact with the paramours is brief, so they usually don't become too emotionally attached.”

“But something went wrong in
my
case, didn't it? Who the hell were the people shooting at us?”

She raised her hand and wiped her eyes. When she looked at him again, her face was composed and businesslike. “They were once members of our community, but they turned against us. They left Haven and formed a new group, with its own rules and goals. Over the past year they've instigated several violent confrontations. But I promise you, we weren't expecting an attack last night.”

John remembered a name he'd heard during the gunfight. “And the leader of this group is someone named Sullivan?”

She frowned. The name seemed to make her uncomfortable. “That's enough. We shouldn't talk about this any further.”

“Why not? I need to know what's going on. What are you fighting over?”

“Trust me, John. I'd be putting you in danger if I said too much.”

“Really? I don't see how my situation could get any worse.”

“You still have a chance of surviving. I'm trying to keep you alive. You need to drive me to Michigan as quickly as possible. Once I've returned to Haven, the men who attacked us in Brooklyn will no longer have any interest in pursuing you.”

John let out an exasperated grunt. “So you expect me to drive you across the country, but you won't tell me who's chasing us? Or why?”

“If you don't like it, stop the car and let me out.” Her eyes narrowed and her voice turned harsh. “I'll find another way to get home.”

“Come on, that's ridiculous. You have two broken legs. How will you—”