Black Friday

  “Your mum’s name is Margaret?” Cleverly timed.

  “My mother’s name is Anna. Her maiden name is Reardon.”

  “No tracking device anywhere on your person?”

  “No.”

  Caitlin had answered a little too quickly, she thought. Her skin went cold. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe at all.

  There was no apparent reaction, nothing she could perceive as wrong from the Irish men. They seemed to believe her, not even to question what she’d said about the tracking device.

  “I have to check you all the same. Pat you down. All right, here goes.”

  Clumsy, male hands (Mechanic? Some kind of working man?) groped all over her body. Caitlin stiffly tensed her legs as a man’s hand wedged up between. The intruding hand felt very harsh and rude. The worst part so far. Probably not the worst she was going to experience today though.

  “If you have a transmitter, we have orders to kill you ….If you don’t tell us right now. Don’t he about this, dearie. Don’t lie, missy. I’m quite serious. Do you? Do you have any tracking device? We’ll check you thoroughly, as soon as we’re out of here. Please tell me the truth.”

  “I have no tracking device on me.” Inside me. Could they really find that?

  There was no more talking after that. The body search ended abruptly.

  Caitlin’s ears stayed plugged, as if she were trapped in a vacuum. Her heart lodged very high up in her throat. The car’s engine coughed and came alive.

  Someone suddenly wiped her face with a dripping-wet hand cloth.

  Jesus. The fumes were everywhere. The fumes wouldn’t let her breathe.

  “No, I—”

  Chapter 49

  “OH, BUGGER IT. Look at this hopeless mess,” Patrick Frazier exclaimed.

  Torrents of water jackhammered the Bentley that Carroll and Inspector Patrick Frazier were riding in. Rain blasted the steamy windshields, hitting with the solid force of a firehose.

  It had begun to spit rain at five minutes to six. Then suddenly it was coming down heavily, piercing the mist, making it near impossible to see the road ahead.

  “They’re on the Falls Road now. That’s in the rough and tumble part of Belfast,” Frazier said. “The Provisional Irish Republican Army owns it …. It’s your basic urban ghetto where they regularly ambush our soldiers. Hit and run snipers in there, mostly. Urban guerrilla warfare at its best.”

  Both Carroll and Frazier were hunched forward in the front seat of the Bentley. The transmitter-beeper tracking Caitlin was coming over loud and clear. It sounded a little like a sequence of radar blips, all originating somewhere deep in Caitlin’s stomach.

  Carroll couldn’t help thinking of a heart-monitoring device in an intensive care unit, something that registered one’s hold on life. Poor Caitlin. But he couldn’t have done anything to stop her from going—he couldn’t have offered himself as a substitute messenger, the instructions had been specific and final.

  The monitoring blip blip blip was becoming louder now, and more stubbornly insistent.

  The car with Caitlin inside was apparently slowing down. Maybe it was temporarily stopped at a street light? In heavy traffic? What now?

  “Range closing fast, sir,” reported the driver.

  “Hang it. They’re at the home base,” Patrick Frazier sharply pronounced. His driver immediately stepped down on the gas. The Bentley leaned forward with a thrusting surge of power.

  “Either that, or they’re switching transportation,” Carroll had another thought.

  Carroll’s mind cocooned tightly around the thought of Caitlin in serious danger. He was both angry and afraid.

  “Let’s get in closer to her. Come on! Come on, let’s move it now!” Carroll snapped at the British Special Service driver.

  Less than two miles away, the black cloth hood was raised up over Caitlin’s head; she reeled away as acrid smelling salts were passed under her nose. Her watering eyes rolled backward.

  “Unhh?”

  Focus. There were dull-edged silhouettes rather than faces clustered all around her. Three of them.

  Behind the looming shapes stood excessively bright lamps. Behind the lamps were still more shadowy, unidentifiable figures. Green Band?

  She couldn’t see who the others were …. Not yet anyway.

  “Welcome back among the living. You’re a brave one to accept our invitation. Probably a little scared right now. That’s natural enough.”

  Caitlin still couldn’t see them very well, even the men standing closest to her.

  “You do have authority to transfer the agreed-upon sum of money? You have the necessary bank codes, Ms. Dillon?”

  Caitlin nodded. Her neck was stiff, her throat dry and itchy.

  When she spoke her voice sounded hollow and lifeless to her, her words clumsily formed, as if she were being spoken through by a ventriloquist.

  “Would you mind showing me … some of the stolen securities. I need some reassurance, as well. I need to see what we’re getting in the exchange.”

  “You’ll be able to estimate the true value by yourself, aye? And you can tell counterfeit from the genuine article? You’ve that finely trained an eye?”

  “Touch is more important than the eye,” Caitlin said, hiding any anger she felt. “I can tell a great deal by touching the securities. Enough to release the money in Geneva. Please? May I examine the goods?”

  They finally brought the “sample” stolen stock certificates and bonds to Caitlin. She used most of her will to hold in a tiny gasp of amazement.

  The look of the securities was certainly authentic. She read off the top names: IBM, General Motors, AT&T, Digital, Monsanto.

  She played with the numbers in her mind. It was several thousand times the amount of the great train robbery. And who knew how much of the total stolen amount this was? What was coming still?

  “You can touch the documents all you like, darling. They’re real though. We wouldn’t bring you all the way here for nothing. Just to chat, and admire your fine all American boobies.”

  Chapter 50

  THE BENTLEY SEDAN Carroll rode in barely slowed as it squeezed around a crumbling white brick wall in the inner city. The wall was blackened in places from petrol bombs. The car’s radial tires screeched above bustling city noises.

  Suddenly a flatbed truck was in the same narrow, twisting lane as the Bentley. The truck’s engine roared and its horn blared loudly.

  A blast of gunfire erupted from the cab of the onrushing truck. Spits of gunfire came from the flat tenement rooftops to the right of the threadneedle roadway.

  “Ambush!” Patrick Frazier grunted.

  Almost instantly, he slumped back hard against the car’s passenger door. A jagged hole appeared at the center of his forehead.

  Carroll pushed open the door and followed the driver of the Bentley out. Then he lay pressed tightly against the side of the car. He looked up, staring at Patrick Frazier’s wound through the open Bentley doorway.

  Carroll angrily swung his gun barrel out in the direction of the flatbed truck. Without any accompanying sound, the weapon opened rapid fire. Gaping bullet holes appeared everywhere on the truck’s already mottled surface.

  One of the Irish gunsels, astonished because there had been no gun sound, blew back away from the faded red hood of the truck. Blood spurted from his black-bearded face and throat And then the body was rolling and rolling across the road like that of a man trapped in a barrel.

  Carroll’s machine gun pistol had been developed and perfected by the Israeli Army. It fired automatically, up to two hundred and fifty rounds in six seconds. The bullets were attracted by body heat. Silent death, the Israelis and their enemies called it.

  A stout, red-headed man’s forehead was angrily stitched straight across with bullet holes. The man performed a brief two-step then spun off a house’s steep-shingled roof.

  Carroll was aware of movement on either side of him.

  Crowds, mostly women and children, we
re streaming out of crumbling, low-slung tenement buildings. They mobbed forward instead of hiding away in the safer shadows. They had deep-red faces—anger coming from the heart.

  The two remaining gunmen from the truck dodged back among the women in their plaid bathrobes and tattered men’s jackets. They crouched among the dirty faced children, many of whom were still in their pajamas, dragged out of the innocence of sleep and made to confront still another horror in their young, sad lives.

  Carroll clicked the machine gun off automatic, so it wouldn’t fire into the covering crowds.

  “British spies!” The Irish people had suddenly begun to jeer, protecting their revolutionary soldiers, some of whom were immediate family members, some less close relatives and friends.

  “Damn British spies! Damn you British!”

  “Go home, damn Brits!”

  Carroll cautiously ran forward anyway. He threw himself into the fierce, snarling faces, the threatening, murderous shouts. His machine gun jutted out, the ugly black snout just menacing enough to keep them off him for the moment. Who was the real terrorist here? his mind rambled.

  “Big man with yer gun,” someone taunted.

  “Fookin’ coward with your machine gun. Dirty Brit turd! Filthy Brit bastard!”

  Carroll almost didn’t hear the angry shouts. He had one thought only—follow the beeper, follow the radar blips. Find Caitlin right now.

  Caitlin covered her head with both arms. She was trying to squirm and struggle away from the IRA men. The air in the tenement room was like liquid mold, almost impossible for her to breathe.

  “You filthy whore, you! You swine!” The head man screeched at the top of his voice; he screamed inches from Caitlin’s face. A contact radio was crackling nearby, blaring the latest street reports into the IRA hideout.

  “It’s a trap! Infuckingsane. She’s carryin’ some kind of signal, Dermot! Police cars, Brit soldiers are swarming the street out there. Soldiers’re everywhere!”

  It was the most helpless moment Caitlin could have imagined. She knew what they were going to do to her. She knew she was going to be shot, murdered. She wondered when that moment of resigned calm would come, that transcendental moment you were supposed to experience when you understood you were facing death.

  The IRA group leader continued to scream; his black masked face was up close to her. “You bloody knew!”

  “No, I didn’t know. Please. I don’t understand now.”

  The terrorist suddenly lunged forward, propelling himself out of the blinding white floodlights. He ripped off his mask. She saw a dirty, reddish-blond beard; black holes for eyes. She saw the close-up, gaping mouth of a Russian SKS assault rifle …

  Tears flooded Caitlin’s eyes. She tried to tell the terrorist not to fire, to stop. Her senses were overwhelmed with horrifying impressions. She wondered if this was the way it was going to be, one burst of crazy clarity and then you’re dead: that solitary, heightened moment the last thing you take with you.

  There were police sirens and ambulances and gunfire outside; the air was pierced with maddening chaos.

  She watched the door of the apartment burst open. Somebody she’d never seen before stood poised with a drawn pistol—

  A volley of automatic gunfire flared out of the gun aimed into Caitlin’s face. It made a rrrrrurrr sound, like a mundane dentist’s drill. Oh, no! Oh God no …

  Caitlin tried to twist and turn away. That one, urgent thought stuck in her mind—get away now! Get away! Get away!

  Only she couldn’t move as fast as the sudden automatic rifle fire. She didn’t move an inch off her chair.

  Then Caitlin simply fell away from it.

  Chapter 51

  “GET OUT OF MY WAY!Out of the way, you bastards!”

  Carroll screamed at three men standing in his path. The Irish hoods were stubbornly posted between him and the tenement house stairway. They were waving Gaelic football bats in the dimly lit hallway.

  “Why dontcha make us move? Come on now. Make us move. See if you can?”

  The tracking beeper was singing desperately, actually vibrating in his jacket vest pocket. Caitlin had to be upstairs. She was right in this building.

  Police sirens, emergency Army sirens were shrieking. Sniper gunfire was still raining down on the Falls Road. Move! Now! Move!

  Carroll leapt between the three surprised youths. They wisely side-stepped the charging, bull-shouldered American.

  Carroll crashed two and three steps at a time up a twisty flight of darkened stairs. Please God no!

  He was fighting against rage, and an even worse fear building inside him. He kept the machine gun cupped off automatic fire. There were civilians swarming inside the tenement house.

  Apartment doors kept opening, then rapidly slamming shut. Carroll felt their wind in his face. There were hostile looks and abusive screams.

  As Carroll finally reached the top landing, the fourth floor of the building, he saw the dingy yellow door of an apartment thrown open.

  His brain clenched unbelievably tight, filled to exploding with unnatural heat. Suddenly he knew what he was going to find there. Carroll knew it.

  He could see inside the doorway already. Then he could see her lying there, still in her overcoat. Her striped muffler was off casually to one side. She lay thrown up against a fallen wooden chair where she had apparently been questioned.

  The IRA henchmen were gone, up to the roof, up over other roofs, gone, escaped somewhere.

  “Oh God no.” Carroll choked back a sob, a desperate, hopeless prayer. He experienced that awful, hollow bitterness of death all over again. He felt terrible hurt, from some infinite store of pain.

  Slowly then, Caitlin rolled over. She rolled just a few inches. Then Caitlin struggled to sit up and Carroll ran for ward …. Her face was a blank, dazed stare …. But she was alive.

  Carroll held Caitlin. He cradled her like an injured child in his arms.

  Then she suddenly drew her face away from him; she stared at something that terrified her across the room.

  Carroll followed the line of her eyes to an inert shape that lay on the other side of the barren room. The body seemed to be that of a young man, except you couldn’t really tell. Half the head had been blown away. The darkish hair was matted with blood. The figure was shrouded with the dark blue uniform of a Belfast policeman.

  “Who is he?” Carroll asked.

  Caitlin slowly shook her head. “I don’t know. I only know that if it hadn’t been for him coming when he did, I’d be dead. He came through that doorway. He started shooting at them.”

  Carroll couldn’t take his eyes away from the murdered policeman. A hero, Carroll thought A hero with no name or face anymore. Police work in all its glory.

  Caitlin was sobbing, almost without any sound.

  “Shhh, now, shhh,” Carroll whispered.

  Then Caitlin couldn’t help herself anymore. The sobbing became uncontrollable. She cried into Carroll’s chest. She held him with her remaining strength.

  They were enfolded that way, holding one another, when the teams of British Special Branch men and Irish police arrived.

  Once again, Green Band was nowhere to be found.

  Chapter 52

  BY THE EVENING of December 12, the letters, stuffed inside eight-by-eleven manila envelopes, had finally arrived. Over three thousand bulky letters had been mailed to every region across the United States.

  The letters had come to the strangest, the most unlikely places. To Sedona, Arizona; to Dohren, Alabama; Totowa, New Jersey; Buena Vista, California; Iowa City, Iowa; Stowe, Vermont; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Boulder, Colorado; Scarborough, New York.

  Kenny Sherwood in Erie, Pennsylvania, was one of the chosen few.

  Sherwood was home from work that day, because if he went to the mill, he’d just say something dumb and get his ass either chewed out, or fired. For nine years he’d been a machine operator with Hammond Tool and Dye.

  He made almost twenty-nine thou
sand, thirty-five hundred of which went for shrink sessions with a psychologist in Pittsburgh, little goateed fellow who treated him for his recurrent war dreams.

  There was a neatly typed cover letter inside the envelope; it looked official, a little scary even.

  Dear Mr. Sherwood,

  During the years 1968 to 1972, you served your country proudly as a Specialist in the U.S. Army. You were a POW from January 1970 to June of 1972. You received a purple heart in Viet Nam.

  Please consider the enclosed, a token of our appreciation for your services, a chance for your country to serve you.

  Kenny Sherwood cautiously slid a piece of parchment paper out of the envelope.

  Now what the hell was this?

  There was some kind of chained woman, holding a globe of the world at the top of the parchment paper.

  Further down, the certificate said General Motors common stock.

  The legend went on: “This certifies Kenneth H. Sherwood is the owner of five thousand shares.”

  Tied around the parchment paper was a shiny green ribbon, a kind of green band.

  PART TWO

  Black Market

  Chapter 53

  DAVID HUDSON WOKE with a headache in his room in the Washington-Jefferson Hotel. It was snowing outside, the satiny whiteness evenly blanketing West 51st Street.

  Hudson pinched his wristwatch off the wobbling night-stand. It was just past two.

  He sat upright and yielded to an uncharacteristic moment of panic. His throat was dry, his hands clammy. His body felt fevered.

  It wasn’t Green Band troubling him this time.

  Green Band was hurtling along without an apparent hitch. Even at its psychological core, Green Band was moving beautifully, creating uncertainty in all the places where Hudson wanted to create it.

  It wasn’t the time he’d spent in a North Vietnamese prison camp, either. The memories of the taunting Lizard Man had stayed out of his dreams that night.

  None of these things bothered David Hudson right now. It was something else …. Something unexpected and un-planned.