A SUBTERRANEAN poolroom was buried somewhere in the lower depths of the city. The building was not on any postal route, and the surrounding area had never been assigned a ZIP code. All of that property had been claimed by the city under “Eminent Domain,” and was marked on a planning map as a potential bypass to a nearby thruway.
It would retain that status forever. In Chicago, politicians expect to be paid to “expedite” such projects, and not a dime had come their way since a developer had paid for the conversion to “Eminent Domain” status. That developer had conducted all his business over the phone, including the wire transfers. And had made no contact since.
A sloppily sprayed red “71” on the side of the concrete-block structure might look like gang graffiti to a tourist. But there are no tourists in this part of town. On the far side of the “71” a red arrow pointed down, like the blood trail of a cape buffalo recently shot by a hunter.
No experienced hunter would follow such a trail. The cape buffalo is the only animal which, when wounded, travels only a short distance … then turns and waits.
To reach the building, it was necessary to traverse a vacant lot littered with abandoned machinery of every kind, from refrigerators to flatbed tow trucks. Concertina wire was strung randomly about, as if whoever had been setting it in place had lost interest at some point. Various dogs roamed at will. So did feral cats—the two natural enemies seemed to have reached a détente of some kind.
There was no door at the outside of the building, just the red arrow leading to a dark, twisting flight of stairs.
In Chicago, many things are whispered about the joint known as Red 71, but the only one that never changes is the street soldier’s credo: “If you don’t know, you best not go.”
The owner of the apparently empty building was a corporation. Its officers had consistently refused all offers to sell during a prior real-estate boom. Word on the street was that the corporation had outsmarted itself, holding out for a bigger price during the long-since-gone “flip this house” mania.
Another developer had razed the other buildings, cleared the land for new construction … and promptly gone bankrupt. Now the sole remaining building was worthless, surrounded by a huge lot choked with refuse and debris, with only the occasional weed poking its way toward the sun. It had been enclosed with a chain-link fence during its construction, but now that fence guarded nothing but garbage, and kept nothing from leaving—the dangerous dogs who ranged free inside its walls were clearly there by their own choice.
The poolroom in the basement was the building’s only declared source of income, and that barely netted enough to pay the taxes … which it did, religiously.
“We have to own our base,” Cross had told the crew years ago. “Own it legit. That’s the only way we can protect every square inch.” The entire crew had chipped in to make the buy, but, on paper, Buddha owned the whole thing via a closely-held corporation.
Buddha was the only one with an above-ground identity, complete with an address in the suburbs and employment as a limo driver. He filed a tax return every year. Even collected a 20-percent disability pension from the VA, although it was paid to an individual who used another name. As per the corporate governance documents, half the building would go to his wife when he died. The other half would go to the children of a man known only as “Ace”—those two were the only crew members with “heirs” of any kind.
The poolroom was actually a subbasement. It stood at the foot of a winding stone staircase, and contained manicured green felt tables, spaced around the floor at a good distance from each other. Two corners of the room also featured small, round tables and empty chairs.
Although some of the inhabitants were shooting pool, others used the felt surface as a dice table, or played cards standing up. Red 71 guaranteed the safety and privacy of all who entered for the transaction of outlaw business, from dealing contraband to putting out contracts. That guarantee no longer had to be demonstrably enforced. Word had long since conveyed the message that those who entered with a wrong idea of what awaited were never going to leave.
The crowd was multi-ethnic, but there was no sense of rigid barriers, and the atmosphere was as non-violent as a Martin Luther King vision. No one entering the poolroom was searched for weapons—that would be equivalent to searching a street whore for condoms.
Nor were there signs saying ACT STUPID AT YOUR OWN RISK—they would be superfluous.
Red 71 was always kept well maintained, and usually stayed quiet. The similarity to a graveyard was too obvious to ignore.
There was a fee for this atmosphere, payable to the elderly man who sat behind a flip-up steel counter, with a green eyeshade covering most of his face.
The elderly man might be anyone at any given time. Looking too closely would be as absurd as asking him to make change. Or conversation.
Cross was seated at one of the side tables, talking to a young woman whose back was to the room. He was positioned so that the two men seated to his right and left were between him and anyone who might approach. Even though completely unnecessary inside Red 71, the positioning was a habitual characteristic of this ultra-pragmatic man-for-hire.
Cross, to quote a man who once did business with him, “don’t look like much,” but his economy of movement and hyper-vigilance marked him as a survival expert. There was a thick yellow lightning-bolt scar on his right hand, impossible to ignore. That hand held a smoldering cigarette. The woman was hunched forward, whispering urgently, studiously ignored by everyone present.
Two young Chinese were playing a game of nine-ball in one corner. They dressed in traditional Hong Kong gangster style: black leather jackets over neon shirts, the top buttons opened to better display their gold-chain collections. Their hair was long and slicked straight back. As one chalked his cue, the other stepped close and whispered, “You sure that’s him?”
“It’s him, all right. Just like Chang said. That scar on his hand, it’s like a brand—can’t miss it.”
“Yeah? Well, I still don’t like this much. All of a sudden, we got some weird-ass white man in a cheap suit for a boss?”
“That man ain’t our boss, man. It was Chang who told us what to do, not him. That’s our job, do what Chang tells us.”
“I still don’t like that bleached-out dude. I don’t like nothing about him.”
“Why tell me? You don’t want to do what some albino says, you know who you got to tell that to. Now go make a call, okay? Don’t matter to me who you dial. But if it’s not that blond guy, you on your own from then on out, brother.”
Thus chastised, the young Chinese moved away, walking toward a bank of pay phones against one wall.
INSIDE THE War Room, the blond man picked up a telephone and listened intently, his face a mask of concentration. When the speaker was finished, the blond man said, “Tell Chang, if this information was good, we’re all square. He’ll understand.”
The blond hung up and immediately barked, “We got a locate! Basement poolroom—the one they call ‘Red 71.’ Get a team out there. Go!”
“I don’t see why we can’t just bring him in,” Percy said. “I’ll bet I could make him a better listener.”
“We don’t have that much data on him,” the blond replied, “but what we have indicates we’ll need a different approach if we want him to sign on.”
“You spooks are all the same. ‘Data,’ my ass. He’s nothing but another mercenary, this Cross guy, right? If leaning on him don’t do the job, money will. One or the other always does.”
He didn’t notice Wanda sadly shaking her head as she caught the blond man’s eye. “Show him,” she said.
“Show me what?” Percy demanded.
“The ‘data,’ ” Wanda answered, smiling evilly.
WANDA THREW a toggle switch and the larger monitor came to life. An apparently abandoned building appeared, its status confirmed by a large sign proclaiming it an URBAN RENEWAL PROJECT.
The camera’s eye moved closer. It showed descending steps, then a close-up of a man’s hand, rapping a pattern on a steel door.
The door opened. A heavily muscled man with a circled black swastika on one biceps said, “Play or Watch?”
“Play,” a man’s voice responded.
“No charge, then. Players’ section is on the whole far side of the pit. See it?”
“Yeah.”
The camera panned to show several rows of unmatched chairs. Some looked more comfortable than others; most were already filled.
The camera turned and looked directly at the door through which it was entering.
“How’d we get all this?” Percy asked.
“Undercover. Packing a fiber-optic multi-cam,” Wanda answered, speaking to Percy as one would a child. A slow child.
“That’s a dogfighting setup.”
“Uh … we see that,” Tiger said, disgust clear in her voice.
“Oh, yeah; I forgot. You’re not just a psycho-killer dyke, you’re an animal lover, too.”
“Not all animals,” Tiger hissed at Percy, the disgust in her voice now replaced with unmistakable threat.
“Stop!” the blond man demanded. “You all signed on under the same conditions. What you’re looking at is the only footage we have of our subject, and—”
“I don’t see no ‘subject’ there.”
“Try some patience,” the blond man advised, wearily. His tone of voice clearly indicated this was not the first time he’d said that. To the same man. With the same results.
Several minutes rolled by as the cameras swept the room. Shown: a betting board with records and odds posted, men negotiating private cash wagers, dog handlers setting out their instruments.
And caged dogs. Some snarling, some in a near-frenzy, some eerily calm. All awaiting their turn in the just-constructed “pit” … which was nothing more than a square of piled railroad ties, with a white line spray-painted down its middle.
“What’s that?” Tiger asked, pointing to what looked like a thin thread of black slithering across the top of the monitor’s screen.
“Probably some little software glitch,” Wanda answered. “Not worth tracking down now. Besides, the show is about to start.”
The crowd was mostly male, with a few overdressed women, all visible through a faint haze of cigarette and cigar smoke.
A harsh white baby spot hit the center of the pit, illuminating a man wearing a short-sleeved red shirt over dark slacks. He brought a cordless microphone to his mouth and announced …
“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we—”
Suddenly, two men climbed into the pit area. One was white, thoroughly unremarkable in appearance except for a prominent lightning-bolt scar on his right hand; the other was black, with a triangular face defined by high cheekbones. He was immaculately and expensively dressed, his all-black outfit topped with a matching Zorro hat.
A moviegoer might mistake the black man for a pimp, except that, instead of gold around his neck, he wore a very sawed-off shotgun on a leather thong.
Before anyone could react to the intrusion, the black man swung the scattergun up and fired both barrels. The headless announcer’s body slumped to the floor as the black man calmly broke his shotgun, flicked his wrist to eject both spent shells, and reloaded both barrels using the same hand.
The stunned silence was broken when several men in the audience reached for weapons.
A high-pitched squeak—“No!”—momentarily froze those movements as a bunched group of spectators was torn apart by machine-gun fire.
The momentary freeze turned permanent. Some in the audience held their hands away from their bodies in a clear signal of surrender. Others just stared, stunned and immobile.
A large object sailed through the air and landed inside the pit. The camera moved in closer, showing that the object was a human body. Or, more accurately, was once a human body.
The unremarkable man picked up the handheld microphone in his right hand and said, “May I have your attention, please?”
If this was his idea of a joke, no trace of it appeared on his face, or in his voice.
“Thank you. Now, please listen carefully. These are your choices: You may get up and leave this place peacefully, or you may stay. Those who choose to stay will not be given a second opportunity to leave. Anyone not moving when I stop speaking will never move again.”
One of the dog handlers cupped his hands and called out: “Okay, man. Whatever you say. We’re out of here. Just give us a minute to grab up our dogs, okay?”
A red blotch suddenly blooming on the handler’s forehead was the answer. Unlike the other gunfire, this kill-shot had been silent.
“Nobody takes anything,” the unremarkable man said, in the same dry, flat voice.
The black squiggle Tiger had pointed out moved along with the crowd. The multi-cam unit’s sound system was not delicate enough to pick up the single word, this time in English:
“Hit.”
Everyone still alive stood up. Players and spectators filed out, moving slowly, every hand held open and away from the body it was attached to.
As the camera focused on the exit door, the voice of something close to human roared: “You started it!”
The camera caught only a brief view of what looked like a human leviathan, moving inexorably as it tore through the dog handlers as the dogs would have torn into each other, ripping off body parts as easily as if dismantling cardboard.
The multi-cam only had time to record that the monster’s head was shaved, and that he was wearing a banana-colored tank top. Then it went black.
“WHAT THE hell was—?”
“The man with the microphone, that’s the man we want,” the blond man said. “His name’s Cross. The man next to him is known only as ‘Ace.’ They’ve been partners since they came into hardball juvie on the same bus.”
“ ‘Hardball juvie’ …?”
“Illinois was the first state to differentiate between juvenile and adult offenders,” the blond man addressed his small audience somewhat pedantically. “It was still maintaining that façade at the time those two first met. That was an end-of-the-line stop for both of them—their crimes should have put them directly into adult corrections, and it was guaranteed their next ones would. And that there would be a next one.”
“The shaved-head guy?”
“Believe it or not, his name is ‘Princess.’ Off-the-charts insane. He dresses and speaks like a very gay man. Wears all kinds of makeup, minces his words … even flounces around waving his wrists. His delusion is that this will encourage others to attack him. In his deranged mind, he is not permitted to attack unless he can claim the other party ‘started it.’ ”
As he spoke, the blond man pushed a button. A full-body photo of Princess appeared on the screen.
“That’s him? Damn! Whatever he’s carrying in that monster shoulder holster—”
“That’s a .600 Nitro Express,” Percy snapped out, his voice a mix of anger and awe. “A .600 Nitro Express pistol. Only one I’ve ever heard about, never mind seen. That maniac actually carries a sawed-off, over-under elephant gun? A load like that, it’d snap a man’s wrist like a toothpick.”
“I’m no firearms expert,” Tracker said, deliberately ironic, “but do you have any idea why he would carry such a weapon?”
“It goes with his outfit,” Tiger half-giggled. “Très chic, non?”
Seeing Percy about to respond, the blond man cut him off with the universal “Halt!” signal, then said, “Three hundred and thirty pounds is our best guesstimate of his weight. All of it muscle.”
“Why guesstimate?” Wanda asked.
“He’s never been in custody,” the blond man answered. “We have various records on the others, but even those are spotty, if not outright fallacious.
“The machine-gunner—he was not shown on camera—is called ‘Rhino.’ Originally sentenced to an institution for the severely retarded, he was repeatedly tortured until he became—literally—anaesthetic to pain. That’s when they went to the Thorazine handcuffs. By the time Cross and Ace were sentenced, he had already been in that same institution for a couple of years.”
“But you said he was retarded.”
“That’s what it said on the first admission papers, Wanda. But he wasn’t too retarded to assault staff every time the drugs wore off, so …”
“So they locked him in that prison even though he never committed a crime?”
“That is what happened, Tiger. It’s not our job to judge.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes! Besides, that was years ago. What we do know is that this Cross individual—remember, he was just a kid himself at the time—figured out a way to detox the monster. But nobody knew this until Cross—again, I am speaking literally—actually sawed through cell window bars with nothing but dental floss which had been braided, coated with glue, and then rolled in drain-cleaner crystals. It must have taken months of backbreaking work.
“Then this ‘Rhino’ bent the bars, enabling Cross and Ace to escape. It was the belief of staff that Cross, a diagnosed sociopath, had simply used Rhino to achieve his own ends. However, somebody later broke him out of custody. No agency has gotten their hands on that monster since.”
“Monster?” Tiger persisted.
“See for yourself,” the blond man responded, flashing another photo on the monitor. “He’s almost seven feet tall and weighs nearly five hundred pounds. Again, those are only estimates—we don’t know his actual age, so we can’t know if he continued to grow after he escaped.
“By ‘monster,’ I was referring only to his size, not his disposition. In fact, we don’t even know his actual name. The records of his prior institutional ‘care’ seem to have disappeared.”
“I’ll just bet,” Tiger said. “Okay, that’s four men. Four men without one real name among them—is that what you’re telling us?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah? Well, someone took that shot with the silencer.”
“Our best guess was that was a man called Buddha. All we know about him is that he and Cross apparently met while serving in what is euphemistically called the ‘post-Vietnam’ era. His service records don’t indicate combat. Or anything else, for that matter. However, Military Intelligence informs us that the man is an expert shot, especially with handguns, a truly gifted driver, and a criminal to his core.”
As the blond man spoke, the photo on the monitor showed a slumped-shouldered man with a vaguely Oriental cast to his dark, cold eyes.
“We do know his wife is Korean. What she was doing somewhere around the Laos-Cambodian border is anybody’s guess. All we have for her is what we assume was a street name: ‘So Long Li.’ She is, however, reputed to be utterly absorbed in acquiring money, and quite skillful at doing so. Of the entire Cross gang, Buddha is the only one for whom we have an actual address—a freestanding house in the Uptown area. In his wife’s name, of course.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing is ‘wrong’ with that, Tiger. The point was simply to emphasize his wife’s obsession with materiality.”
“And what’s this ‘post-Vietnam’ designation …?”
“It’s the same for all of them, Wanda. Apparently, some sort of bargain was struck between the man we know as ‘Cross’ and one of the … agencies operating in the field at that time. All the records concerning Cross and Buddha have been death-wipe overwritten. How that came to include Ace—who never served in the military—is not information we have.”
“Not the first time that trick was pulled,” Percy said. “Who cares about names, anyway? What I want to know is what that … whatever we just saw … what was that all about?”
“The Cross gang was hired by person or persons unknown to shut down a dogfighting operation,” the blond man said, in the bored voice of a Mafia don taking the Fifth for the hundredth time.
“And for that they slaughtered a couple dozen people?” Percy responded, a faint note of admiration seeping into his deep voice.
“That’s how he came by his name.”
“Huh?”
“ ‘Cross.’ That’s not just the name he ‘enlisted’ under, it’s his reputation. He specializes in twofers, understand?”
“Kills the guy who hires him to kill another guy?”
“Nothing that simple, but that’s the idea. If he got paid to take out a couple of individuals inside that building by one person and put the dogfighting operation out of business by another, that would be more consistent with his reputation.”
“The cops,” Percy asked, “didn’t they lean on the others? The ones who walked out, I mean.”
“There were no survivors,” the blond man said, no trace of surprise in his voice. “The crowd that walked out walked into … something. They ended up exactly like the Canyon Killings, every one of them.”
“Good,” Tiger snarled.
“What are you, PETA on steroids?” Percy cracked.
“Anytime you want to find out—”
“Enough!” the blond man said, using his broken-record voice.
“All this … stuff,” Wanda complained. “We have names like ‘Cross’ and ‘Buddha’ and ‘Rhino’ and ‘Ace’ and ‘Princess.’ That’s it? Speaking of which, do we at least have a real name for this ‘Princess’?”
“Not even close,” the blond man told her. “All we know is that a crew Cross put together did some kind of ‘work’ in Central America. We don’t know who he did it for, but we do know two things: one, he lost a couple of men in that operation, and two, he brought Princess back with him.”
“Lost a couple of men?” Tiger mused aloud.
“Yeah, that’s another thing about this guy. He’s obsessed with revenge. You want to see the effects of real terrorism, just say his name around any of the local gang leaders. But if we don’t know the identities of the men he lost, we can’t know if he ever took care of whoever he held responsible.”
“That’s a good rep to have,” Tiger said. “Makes anyone thinking of pulling a fast one think again.”
“That’s not just his rep,” the blond man corrected her, “it’s part of a profile we commissioned. Outside his own crew, people are nothing but chess pieces to him. Like I said before, a sociopath.”
“Right. And he’s still with the same men he partnered up with a million years ago?”
“I’m not disagreeing. Any idiot would make that connection. I agree—that single fact contradicts the diagnosis. And we’ll confirm that with the doctor when the chance comes. We do know one thing which binds his crew completely. A question anyone who wants to join them has to answer. But it’s just a phrase, and we can’t translate it.”
“Well?” Wanda said, tapping the side of her keyboard with her fingernails to indicate her impatience.
“Here it is: ‘Do you hate them? Do you hate them all?’ ”
“Who’s ‘them’?”
“There are hundreds of pages of guesses. But that’s all they are—guesses.”
“Bunch of psychos,” Percy dismissed the “info” with his usual gift for analysis.
“Could be,” the blond agreed. “But our Mr. Cross has got one thing going for him that has always worked as a convincer.”
“Which is …?”
“He doesn’t care if he lives or dies. And it seems as though everybody in this city’s underground knows it.”
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.
“THERMAL’S GREAT for tracking,” the blond man said, three hours later. “But it’s not like we can show the footage to a lip-reader.”
“Try watching,” Tiger said. “You see that old Chinese man sitting opposite him now? You think this ‘Cross’ guy speaks Chinese?”
“In the field, to speak a language you are not expected to know is to discard a potent weapon,” Tracker added, supporting the one person on the team he regarded as an equal. “Their talk will all be in English.”
All eyes moved to the screen. The Chinese man was wearing some sort of heavily embroidered robe.
“Red,” Tracker said. “The color for gold.”
“Ssssh,” the blond man commanded.
Tiger and Tracker exchanged looks, but said nothing.
If their lip-reader was sufficiently skilled, the team would soon receive the following printout:
“The Japanese have short memories,” the Chinese man said.
“I don’t.”
“Yes. This well known, Mr. Cross.”
“Spare me the tea ceremony, Chang. There’s someone missing from this meeting.”
“And that would be—?”
“Mr. Green.”
“Ah. But that gentleman doesn’t know the cost of transportation to this place. Not yet.”
“Just spell it out. Then I’ll tell you what it costs.”
“The Japanese are our best market, by far. They will outbid anyone, and they will buy—”
“Yeah. Sure. Fine. Right. Okay.”
“I do not understand.”
“Then try this: I’m not getting paid to listen to parables. Get down to it. Now. Or I’m gone.”
Chang instantly comprehended that the circular negotiation tactics he had been taught since childhood would be futile with the empty-eyed man sitting across from him.
“On the Kamchatka Peninsula live the largest bears in the world. Their paws are worth a fortune—the Japanese will pay whatever is asked. The chain was simple enough to establish. The Russians have a man here in Chicago. His name is—”
“Viktor.”
“You do know him. This is most excellent. Viktor is a very greedy individual. We have great hopes that his successor will be more reasonable.”
“I like your robe, Chang. Very colorful. Powerful color. This insect that disturbs you? I could probably crush it under that robe of yours with only, perhaps, a twenty-pound weight.”
“That is—”
“Troy weight. Half on the table, right now. I take it and go. You won’t see me again until I come to collect the second payment.”
“That is a great deal of trust you ask, Mr. Cross.”
“You called. I came. You asked a price. I gave you one.”
“Still, there is always room for reasonable men to discuss such things, is there not?”
“I’m not a reasonable man, Chang. Only two choices on the menu today. And ‘maybe’ isn’t one of them.”
THE WINDOW of the large storefront was crudely painted over in a sun-faded shade of red. The only indication of its contents was a black-lettered sign:
Cross entered without knocking. The back wall was quite close to the window, indicating the storefront had been divided so that the majority of its space was behind that wall.
There was a single round table to the right, all but one of the eight chairs occupied. Cross took the empty chair.
Across from him, a square-faced, block-jawed man sat. He was missing most of one ear, his nose had been broken so many times that it was snouted into a blob with nostrils, and what appeared to be a steel ball bearing served as his right eye.
Although a freshly washed empty glass sat to the man’s right, he made no attempt to fill it. “Russian vodka is only real vodka. All else are weak pretenders: ours is the finest in the world. And—ah, you would say it like ‘Imperia’—our Imperia vodka is the best of that best. You enter our house unmolested, which means we recognize you as a legitimate criminal. And yet you still refuse to share a drink with your brothers, Cross?”
Cross nodded his head, so slightly that the movement would have been undetectable unless watched for.
“Hah! I am not insulted. Do you know why?”
Cross lit a cigarette.
“You do not drink. So it is not my hospitality you refuse; it is merely that you have a delicate stomach.”
Cross did not react. The man across from him translated what he himself had just said into Russian. The other men at the table chuckled—they had dealt with Cross before, and the idea of him having a “delicate stomach” was certainly worth a good laugh.
“Chang wants to buy some bear claws,” Cross said.
“And he sends you?”
“He pays me.”
“Chang is one of the cautious ones. That is why he is such an old man.”
Cross shrugged. “What do I tell him, Viktor?”
“Tell him … Cross, that tattoo on your hand, it was made in prison, yes?”
Cross nodded.
“What does it mean?”
Cross stared through Viktor, but he did not speak.
“Gah! In my country, you earn your marks. You see this?” Viktor rose to his feet and pulled up his sweater, revealing an elaborate devil-horned skull, with a snake slithering out of each empty eyeball. The skull was backed by an X-pattern, and surrounded by a strand of barbed wire. Underneath was printed KAYHAC. “Do you know what this means, Cross?”
“No.”
“It means ‘authority.’ How you say this in America? ‘Boss,’ maybe? But more important than just boss, boss in prison. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now you know more than most others do about me. So, that one on your hand …”
“It’s a bull’s-eye. A target.”
“This anyone can see. Like the paper circles the police recruits shoot at.”
Cross flexed his right hand slightly, then flattened his palm over his heart, as a child would recite the pledge of allegiance. “You see any hits on this one?”
Again, the big Russian translated. And, again, his crew joined him in laughter.
“Now we can talk as equals, yes? Okay, then. For Chang, because I admire that old man so much, only twenty-five thousand. That buys him one of what he wants—we have a virtually unlimited supply. And we are the only source.”
Cross pushed back his chair.
“You have nothing more to say?” Viktor asked.
“I only got paid to listen,” Cross answered. And walked to the door.
AS DARKNESS fell, Viktor was standing in front of his headquarters. Despite the weather, he was wearing a thick coat made of bear fur and a hat of the same material.
“Bolshe!” he barked into a satellite phone. He listened to the response, then said, “Ne vazhno!” into the mouthpiece, and thumbed off the phone.
He signaled to a group of men standing close by. A line of five identical midnight-blue Audi A8 sedans pulled to the empty curb. As Viktor prepared to enter the back seat of the middle car, the satellite phone in his hand seemed to change color, as if a shroud of shadow had been draped over it. A low sound, outside the human hearing threshold, came, short and sharp:
“!”