Brainquake Read online

  For an hour he walked through forest. He didn’t know where he was or how far from the drop. Lightning bolts illuminated a huge billboard that said GARDEN STATE. Good. At least he was in the right state.

  He fought the rain until he found a wide field and crossed it and came upon a dirt road. Again in the glare of lightning bolts he saw the steeple of a church. He had found his landmark.

  * * *

  Matt Menkin’s smiling face was on a mammoth wall poster: DUMPED WASTE POISONS OUR KIDS. Below the poster, Menkin was watching the wet, exhausted Paul transfer the final stack of cash from his bag into a brown suitcase on a long table piled with campaign flyers and telephones. Finished, Paul closed the bag and, half-conscious, walked back out through the big deserted campaign headquarters, passing posters that said VOTE MENKIN, SAVE A KID’S LIFE…MENKIN FOR GOVERNOR… MENKIN WILL SAVE NEW JERSEY.

  Paul found the Grand View Motel, unlocked the door to room four, collapsed on the bed. Persistent buzzing opened his eyes. Still in his raincoat, his empty bag on the floor, he got to his feet, glanced at his watch. 8:30. He opened the door.

  She came in like a shot. So did the sunlight. The rain had stopped. He started to close the door.

  “Don’t shut it. Leave it open an inch.” She dropped the shoulder bag she was carrying on the bed, checked her gun with silencer, then began to remove rubber-banded bundles of cash from the bag. Paul opened his on the bed beside hers. She began to transfer the cash. “A pirate’s on my ass. Spent half an hour trying to lose him. Couldn’t.” They heard a car approaching, stopping, footsteps on stone walk. She aimed her gun at the door just an instant before it was kicked open. The man in the doorway had a semiautomatic half raised, his finger on the trigger. She fired two muffled shots, dragged the body into the room, shut the door, locked it, frisked the body for ID, found one, tossed it to Paul and resumed transferring cash from one bag to the other. Paul was startled by her casualness, her efficiency.

  “My camera’s fucked up,” she said. “Take one for me.”

  Paul dug out his Polaroid, aimed it at the dead pirate’s face and thought it was strange. The man looked like the pirate he shot in the river. The resemblance confused him. He began to sweat, heard the flute.

  The brainquake came in pink. Michelle’s baby was alone in the baby carriage on the river. The baby was holding a gun and there was a shot—

  His camera flash stopped the brainquake. Gone was the color pink. He took a second picture, gave it to her. She opened the door.

  “Where’s your wheels?” she asked.

  “Boat.”

  She drove him to the river bank. He spotted Captain Blood a few hundred yards away, tied to the tree. Twenty minutes later he was crossing the Hudson, his mind bursting with: What made the pink vanish when you took the flash photo of the dead pirate? He tried to piece together the connection. He would ask Dr. Adson. He would not tell him about what really happened, of course, just that when he took a picture of something, a flash picture, the quake stopped. He thought it was a good sign. Dr. Adson would know.

  He tied up Captain Blood near the river café, and drove his van slowly, carefully through traffic. He wondered how many bagwomen there were. Did they have the same rules as bagmen?

  He parked the van in one of the private little garages not far from the Pegasus truck pool. He got out with his bag, passed his taxi and motorcycle, walked out of the garage. Doors closed by remote control. Down the alley to the Pegasus side door, where he pushed a button.

  He knew the Boss was looking at him on the monitor. There was a click. He opened the door, stepped into the small entrance. The alley door shut behind him. He got into the elevator, pushed the sole button on the opposite wall, got out on the tenth floor, stepped into a small office, pushed the green wall button. The steel door slid open.

  The Boss was pleased. He had scored 100% in the triple play. He showed her the two photos. One showed the river pirate. The other was the pirate in the Jersey motel. They could have been brothers.

  He took out the Atlantic City cash and placed all the bundles on her desk. The Boss was still studying the two photos.

  “I’ll phone you later in the afternoon for the next drop, Paul.”

  Paul left with his empty bag.

  The Boss glanced at the Laundry crew on the monitor, dialed. Hendrix picked up the phone.

  “Yes, Boss?”

  “Where’s Mr. Grigor?”

  “Day off, Boss. He’s at his beach house.”

  The Boss hung up, phoned Max.

  15

  Eyes shut, meerschaum in mouth, Mr. Grigor in bright blue trunks enjoyed the warm sand under his back. No day to be at work. Especially not with all the hijackings raising everyone’s blood pressure. Let the Boss hold his people’s feet to the fire if she wanted to—wouldn’t do any good, and he just as soon preferred not to be there for it.

  His tilted ground umbrella protected him from the sight of the three young girls down the beach tossing an inflatable ball around. He preferred to ignore them, and be ignored by them. Not that he’d never been tempted, in his younger days. But he loved his wife, his family, and didn’t need temptation at this point in his life. Not that sort, anyway.

  He enjoyed the feeling of the sun beating down on his face. It made him look and feel younger.

  He sighed. Tomorrow, back to the Laundry. Lie detector tests! They were obsolete—like the Boss. She was smart, sure, but he was smarter. It had taken him sixteen years but he had outsmarted her. He felt no guilt about betraying her. She was a sucker for having chosen him, for having trusted him. Over the previous two years he had devised a foolproof plan for how to launder his own heist, how to filter it through cunning outlets. It all had to be done very gradually so that when he was old enough to retire, and that would be years from now, he could bask in the sun for the rest of his days, with security for his family and no trace of sudden wealth.

  He had meticulously planned the string of hijacks. By now they were over, the last of the money safely stashed, and no one the wiser…

  The corner of a Polaroid photo tapped against the bowl of his pipe. His eyes opened in anger that changed to shock. Held up, side by side in front of his eyes, were the two photos of the dead pirates.

  “You thought we couldn’t trace the Griff brothers back to you?” The voice behind the photos was soft.

  Father Flanagan, on his knees, tossed the photos on the sand, pushed the pipe deep into Mr. Grigor’s mouth to the bowl, twisted Mr. Grigor’s head around and slammed his face into the sand. Mr. Grigor’s body struggled, his feet kicked sand into the air, but the steel hands of the priest kept the suffocation process going smoothly.

  Humming very softly, Father Flanagan caught a flash of the lovely movements of an 18-year-old beneath the edge of the umbrella. Her legs, then her hands as she bent to pick up the ball. Mr. Grigor stopped struggling and kicking.

  The priest felt the pulse on Mr. Grigor’s neck behind the ear. Twisting Mr. Grigor’s sand-smudged head around, the priest couldn’t understand why his victim had arranged the umbrella to block off his view of those girls. If it had been him… But then, if Mr. Grigor hadn’t blocked the view he’d have had to find someplace else to carry out his assignment, so in that sense it was just as well. Producing a handkerchief, which he shook out, he brushed off all the sand from Mr. Grigor’s face. He gently closed the eyes, brushed off more sand. Then he brushed off sand from the pipe, pulled it out until it was in a more natural-looking position in the dead man’s mouth. Still humming, he slowly looked behind the umbrella. The girls were tossing the ball, laughing. He rose to his feet and walked off.

  He didn’t really like making the hit on a beach.

  Suffocation was amateurish. Degrading. He missed his hammer, his spikes, a good solid wall. But this hit was an emergency, and when, in an emergency, an opportunity this good presented itself, one did what one had to.

  Father Flanagan disliked emergency hits. They always altered his modus op
erandi.

  But Mr. Grigor was a major hit, and it had been clear when the instructions came down that it had to be completed the same day.

  He reached the parking lot, climbed into his car.

  Well, it was completed now.

  * * *

  Father Flanagan was just one of the names he used. Others included Father Rafferty and Father O’Rourke. Forty-five, handsome, medium height, physically fit. In his profession, the priest’s uniform was a godsend. More than once he had been asked by cops to say a prayer over the man he had just hit. No outfit made you more invisible, more clearly beyond suspicion, than a clerical collar. Only those he hit knew seconds before meeting God—or Satan—that their killer was a priest.

  He had never hit a wrong victim or an innocent bystander. He was professional to the bone. The only notion the police had was that his hits were killings by a religious fanatic using the same method over and over: crucifying the target on the wall, driving spikes through palms and feet. It couldn’t help but send investigators off in the wrong direction.

  Only one person in the entire organization knew what Father Flanagan looked like. That was Cornelius Hampshire. Father Flanagan chuckled softly to himself. Maybe there was a costume even better than that of a priest—being America’s second-mosthonored philanthropist, mascot of crusading causes, darling of political circles, that tended to put you beyond suspicion as well. Father Flanagan worked exclusively for Cornelius Hampshire. Ten years ago, Hampshire had hired him to remove a business competitor. Hampshire didn’t seem shocked when he read the newspaper clipping Father Flanagan handed him a few days later. Hampshire never asked why he had chosen crucifixion for the hit. Hampshire minded his own business. Father Flanagan liked it that way.

  The removal of the crucified competitor made it possible for Hampshire to form the powerful amalgam of four dozen entities, onshore and off, that was Galaxy Inc., the parent of Pegasus.

  Father Flanagan was assigned only to major hits. A major hit meant an internal one—a target who knew a name, nickname, AKA, a code, a scrambled fax number. Any piece of knowledge that would give the police, the FBI, the CIA, a Congressional committee a hook, a way in. Any of those pieces could detonate a small bomb that would trigger a cascade of dominos. Explosion after explosion would climb the ladder until it reached the highest domino, in the clouds were Hampshire ruled.

  Hampshire paid the priest $200,000 a hit.

  Father Flanagan wasn’t greedy. Money enough rolled in to satisfy him. And he was worth every dollar to Hampshire. The priest didn’t drink or do dope. He never gambled. He lived a simple life. He was on the move quite a lot, not only in the United States, but in Europe and Asia…wherever the target fled.

  His only vice was blessed sex. He had a perpetual erection for young beautiful girls. But he only acted on it when he knew it was safe, and rarely slept with the same one twice.

  After his first hit for Hampshire, when they had met face-toface, Father Flanagan never saw Hampshire again. All their business was done on the phone. Hampshire was the only one who had the priest’s number. The phone was in a small apartment the priest didn’t live in. His link with Hampshire was the answering machine on the phone. Father Flanagan would find a message to call. No name left. He would phone Hampshire at a certain number, get instructions, hang up.

  Father Flanagan’s cash buildup was kept in a bank’s safety deposit box. He had no bank account, paid everything in cash, or with money orders purchased at a succession of post offices.

  Given the business Hampshire trafficked in, he could afford a hundred pro hit men, but he trusted none of them until he met Father Flanagan. When the priest was on a job, Hampshire slept like a baby.

  Father Flanagan was aware of Hampshire’s trust in him and would never do anything to squander it. Trust was precious, worth more than money. In the end, a man’s reputation, a man’s name and what it stood for, was all a man had.

  Father Flanagan was raised in a New York City orphanage from the time he was a nameless baby, abandoned there in a cardboard box. Years later he learned there were all kinds of orphanages. His was the worst throwback to Dickens’ Victorian orphanages. From the time he could walk, he was punished round the clock. When he was six, he began to realize that the sick men and women assigned to care for him enjoyed beating him. He hadn’t yet learned the word, but he had learned what a sadist was.

  At fourteen, he escaped from the orphanage, became a street hustler, was repeatedly raped, turned to petty thievery, was never caught. At eighteen, and hungry, he enlisted as a rifleman in Vietnam, was honorably discharged with a bullet in his kneecap, and was briefly guided by a priest while the war was still going on.

  It brought back memories for Father Flanagan, and not welcome ones. He was haunted by the hollowness of priests, ministers and rabbis praying over his dead comrades after firefights in Nam. It was all one big vacuum to him. He had never seen a prayer bring a dying soldier back to life. It made him sick to think of all those poor dead bastards being prayed over. So many of them.

  Back stateside, while futilely seeking employment, he struck gold when he accidentally ran into a buddy of his from infantry squad who had become a hit man. His buddy said it was a good racket, like in the war. Only you got real loot when you killed somebody.

  His buddy had a $10,000 contract to blow a narcotics importer. But his buddy’s shoulder wound was hurting again, and cocaine didn’t help. He was afraid he’d fuck up the job. He offered to split the fee if the priest made the hit.

  In cold blood? No way.

  Like knocking off Vietcong in cold blood, his buddy pointed out. Uncle Sam called the shots and for what? What the hell was it all about? What was it for?

  Now it was for $5,000. Take it or leave it.

  His buddy said it wouldn’t be hard to find a guy who wanted to make a quick $5,000.

  So he agreed. It was the day Nixon ordered full bombing of North Vietnam, and the idea of dressing as a priest made sense to him. It was also his twisted sense of humor that appealed to him.

  He became a hit man. A hit man survived on performance. A record had to be built up. A name. Those who did the hiring had a list. To get on that list was Flanagan’s obsession.

  When he made the list, he was sent for by Hampshire of Galaxy Inc. It was then that he got the idea. As long as he impersonated a priest, why not go hell for broke and crucify the target? It appealed to him. He didn’t think it was insane.

  Who gave a damn how you killed a target? The result was what mattered. But he had stumbled on a homicidal trademark that was original.

  Some people in the news business, writing about his hits, called him a psycho. But that was just to sell newspapers.

  He never thought of himself as a psycho, since he was sane enough to know that psychos never analyzed their acts. And didn’t he analyze everything he did? Didn’t he?

  16

  The helicopter approached the yacht anchored off Manhattan, gently set down on the deck constructed for it. The pilot hopped out. Wearing a baseball cap, leather windbreaker over tan polo shirt, levis and cowboy boots, he glanced at the skyscrapers and could see on top of one of them the enormous sign GALAXY INC. He looked at it with pride, as well he might. The pilot was Cornelius Hampshire.

  His steel czar grandfather had financed a couple of revolutions. His father had floated Allied loans in the United States during World War II. And now, at 75, their heir sat atop an empire they couldn’t have imagined. He was the most powerful man throughout the civilized and uncivilized world of crime.

  In the conference room below the aft deck, four lieutenants were waiting for him around a circular mahogany table. On it, besides drinks and coffee, was one book: the Congressional Directory.

  There was no one else in the room. The lieutenants made their own drinks.

  A phone sat by each chair. Wall clocks showed world time. Screens with figures gliding by showed the world’s latest trades, currency rates, interest rates.

&nbs
p; On a television screen mounted in the center of one wall, Senator Orlando was giving a speech emphasizing the importance of supporting Hampshire’s battle against narcotics. It was a recording, and Orlando froze in the middle of his sentence as Cornelius pressed the Pause button on a remote control. He set the control down.

  One of the lieutenants, a graying man in his fifties with worry lines deeply etched in his forehead, said, “Just decoded from Miley, U.S. ground jets wiped out Field 59 and downed our plane flying semi-refined coca base to the lab for processing.”

  “Save Field 68,” Hampshire said. “Have Peters deliver antiaircraft guns to it. Round up every mercenary specializing in ack-ack.”

  His eyes were on Senator Orlando, mouth agape, pointing index finger poised in mid-gesture. “Where do things stand with our friend there?”

  Another lieutenant spoke up: “Orlando can’t be bought.”

  “We’ve found nothing on him?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nothing on his wife?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’ve got to be able to get something on the bastard.”

  “If we did, he’d give it to the press and resign. He’s that kind.”

  “He’s holding up our deal with Atlantic.”

  The third lieutenant: “He’s killed our deal with Atlantic.”

  Hampshire digested the news, accepted it, moved on. No point getting angry. It was only money.

  But they’d find a way to make Orlando pay for it.

  He turned to the last lieutenant: “What’s the latest on that L.A. piracy last week?”

  “Grapevine points at the bagman.”

  “No bagman engineers his own death.”

  “Piracy last night on the Hudson and in Jersey were aborted. Both hijackers dead. Brothers.”

  “I know,” Hampshire said. “There was a mole in the Manhattan laundry.”

  “And…?”

  “There isn’t anymore. What about Menkin?”