“I know who Kaiser is. I know him from New Orleans.”
“Well, this time he didn’t turn tail. This time he read me the goddamn Patriot Act, chapter and verse. He was talking about seizing our personal phone and computer records, yours and mine. That son of a bitch is trouble, boss. He threatened to jail me on the spot. Quoted some new Patriot Act rules on meth production, which don’t sound good.”
“What about Mayor Cage and his girl?”
“They were there, but the girl headed back across the river to her newspaper. Kaiser’s wife went with her. Cage left with Kaiser. What you want I should do?”
Forrest looked down at his watch. Whatever Caitlin Masters knew about him and the Double Eagles was almost certain to appear in tomorrow’s Examiner, no matter what he did at this point. Unless . . . “We may need to mobilize the Black Team, Alphonse.”
The “Black Team” was a handpicked group of SWAT officers who occasionally functioned as Forrest’s private tactical unit. During Hurricane Katrina, the Black Team had done much more than help keep the peace. In the fetid darkness of poststorm New Orleans, they had ruthlessly winnowed the ranks of the Knox organization’s drug-dealing competition, using chaos and lawlessness as their cover.
“Sounds good to me,” Ozan said. “We can’t just sit and wait for the hammer to fall. You want me to make the call?”
Forrest weighed the risks of immediate action against those of watchful caution. “Not yet. Just find out where everybody is.”
“Got it.”
Forrest thought swiftly. HQ was the wrong place from which to direct tactical action. The best place was Valhalla, the family’s hunting camp halfway between Natchez and Baton Rouge. “Get your ass up to the camp, Alphonse. We don’t need to take this any further on the phone.”
“I can be there in forty minutes. You?”
“About the same.”
“Ten-four, Colonel. Any further orders in the meantime?”
“Gather all the intel you can, as quietly as you can. Use only contacts you trust. Talk to our man in Dennis’s department. Check Royal’s contact at the girl’s newspaper. Do you know who it was?”
“Yeah. What about the feds?”
“We’ll discuss that when I see you.”
Forrest hung up, then walked to the edge of the building and looked west toward LSU’s Tiger Stadium and the Mississippi River. From long practice, he’d developed the skill of descending into a state of calm in direct proportion to the scale of chaos. Though Ozan’s news had stunned him, his pulse had accelerated only slightly during the call, and it quickly returned to normal. Having honed his instincts in combat, where expediency ruled, Forrest was always first inclined to hit back, hard. In war, if someone attacked you, you counterattacked as quickly and viciously as possible. If someone on your own side screwed up and put your unit at risk, you transferred them out. If you couldn’t do that, you sent them home in a body bag. Forrest had once fragged a Yankee second lieutenant in the A Shau Valley who seemed to think he was on the set of a John Wayne movie. Nobody had missed him, either, not even MACV.
Such tactics were more complicated back in the world, of course. For one thing, nearly every death in civilian life brought about some sort of investigation, which meant attention. And attention was anathema to the moneymen in New Orleans. They wanted to remain invisible. Even more troubling, Brody Royal had been a member of their insulated elite. His death would profoundly unsettle men accustomed to feeling untouchable. Worst of all, there were probably traceable links between Royal and his New Orleans partners, and those men would be scrambling to eradicate those links wherever possible. Forrest himself was one. He needed to find a way to assure Royal’s partners that he was part of the solution, not the problem.
With a last look out over the city—his city—he headed for the stairs that would take him down to the elevator. It had been a long time since someone had challenged him in any meaningful way. Rival drug dealers were one thing; they could be killed without fear of recrimination. But a veteran FBI agent was something else. A former prosecutor like Penn Cage couldn’t be ignored either, much less a newspaper publisher like Masters. Those three together made a formidable alliance, one that violence alone could not counter. Violence would play a part, of course, but what Forrest really needed was a narrative that would shape the perception of recent events. Only in this way could he continue to bend the world to his will, which was all he had ever asked of life.
CHAPTER 10
TOM CAGE PULLED the stolen pickup off the dirt road into an empty cotton field and switched off the engine. He hadn’t seen a light for miles. The hit man in the backseat was still playing possum, and Tom decided to play along for another thirty seconds. Barren fields and scrub woods stretched into endless darkness and when Tom opened his door, he smelled the rot of a swamp on the air.
As best he could figure, they were five miles from a telephone, unless there was a farm around here he didn’t know about. Even if the hit man reached a phone within an hour, Tom figured he could be across the Mississippi River in less than that—if his brother-in-law was home. And being a farmer, John McCrae was never anywhere else. There was a chance that the state police might have staked out Peggy’s Louisiana relatives, but if they had, he’d figured a way around that.
“I know you’re awake,” Tom said, closing his hand around the butt of his .357 and sliding carefully out of the truck.
Grimsby held to his ruse and said nothing.
Tom felt unsteady on his feet, but after a few seconds, he regained his equilibrium. The pain in his shoulder had not relented, however.