Hard Road (14 page)

He recognised the green sign for the parking garage he had followed Magruder into and pulled up beside the elevator doors.

“Where's this?” Luntz asked.

Reznick turned and sprayed another dose of sedative in Luntz's ear. His eyes rolled back in his head and he was out of it again. “Sorry, Frank. I'll tell you later.” He got out of the car, popped open the trunk and shoved him inside, knowing he was going to be out of it for quite a while.

Reznick looked around the parking garage. At the far corner, he saw a brown UPS truck, its engine was idling. The driver was sitting filling out a log sheet, one arm out of his window. He walked over and knocked on the driver's window. The man wound down his window.

“Think you got a flat, buddy,” Reznick said.

“You gotta be kidding me.” The man got out of his truck frowning and cursing under his breath. Reznick pressed a gun to his head.

“Hey, what the fuck?!”

“In the back of your truck. Now!” He hustled the man into the back of the truck, alongside parcels and boxes. The man was shaking and terrified, cowering in the corner of the van. “I'm not going to hurt you. But I need your clothes.”

The guy didn't protest. He just stripped off and threw his clothes towards Reznick. He was then tied up with duct tape. “Not a sound for half an hour. If I hear a peep out of you, you get a bullet in your head.” The man nodded furiously, sweat beading his forehead.

Reznick took off his top and pulled on the brown UPS shirt (which was a bit tight, but would do) matching baseball cap. He picked up a parcel and the delivery clipboard. “Not a fucking word.” He stepped out of the truck and carefully locked the door. Then once he had made sure that there was no one around, he walked on over to the elevator and punched in the button for the forty-second floor.

He stepped into the empty elevator. The door closed and less than twenty seconds later he was on the forty-second floor. He walked up to the glass doors in the outer lobby. On closer inspection, the black metal buzzer on the metallic silver keypad had the name Norton & Weiss Inc engraved in small writing.

Behind the huge glass doors, a small bespectacled young man wearing a suit looked up from his computer.

Reznick pressed the buzzer as he smiled through at the guy.

The kid inside got up from his chair and ambled across to the intercom. “I'm sorry, sir,” he said. “Our firm doesn't accept visitors.”

“It's a delivery from Washington. Urgent.”

The man shook his head. “I'm not expecting any deliveries today.”

“Look, I need a signature, man,” Reznick said. “I've not got all day. Real urgent.”

The kid bit his lower lip as if he was thinking it over.

“Look, I ain't got all day, pal. You wanna sign?”

The kid cracked open the door.

Reznick barged inside and pressed a gun to the startled young man's temple. “Be very quiet.”

The kid stumbled backwards as the door clicked shut.

TWELVE

The outer office was mostly open-plan, a cool grey-blue interior, laptops and iPads on half a dozen desks. Reznick could see there were two other offices inside, their doors closed.

“Where's everyone else?”

“Please… I'm the only person in just now.”

Reznick pushed him back into one of the wood-paneled inner offices. Legal tomes and journals lined along the walls.

“What do you want?”

Reznick pressed the gun to the man's head. “Tell me about your company.”

“We're a law firm. What the hell is this?”

Reznick pulled back the slide of his Beretta. “Don't take me for a fool, son.”

The kid flushed crimson. “I work the back office stuff. That's all I can say.”

“What was Magruder doing here earlier?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Stop bullshitting me, son. If you want to do this the hard way, that's fine.”

“Please, we're a law firm. There must be some terrible mistake.”

Reznick slapped the man hard on the side of the face. Blood poured from his mouth, just like it had with Magruder. Then he pressed the gun to the man's head. “Now, if you don't tell me what you know, you'll be checking out of this world earlier than you thought.”

“Please! Please!”

“I want some fucking answers. Do you understand?”

“Please, don't…” He composed himself. “Please believe me, I have nothing to do with this.”

Reznick shook his head. “Wrong answer.” He pressed the gun hard up against the kid's forehead.

“Christ almighty!”

“He's not going to help you. No one is. Now tell me what Magruder was doing here.”

The kid began to whimper as he cowered. “I am… I am not what you're looking for.”

“Why can't you answer a simple fucking question? Tell me about Magruder.”

A long silence opened up before the kid spoke. “All I know is that he did a job for us. I don't get involved in that. Look at me. Do I look like I get involved in that end of things? I'm an analyst, OK?”

“So, what's this setup?”

“We are a private company. We receive commissions to do security consultancy for the government.”

“Stop the bullshit. What do you really do?”

The kid closed his eyes. “We sub-contract web jobs, satisfied? I'm logistics.”

“Who funds this operation?”

“I don't know anything about that. My boss does. He runs the show.”

Reznick grabbed the kid by the throat, gun still to his head. “Where's your boss?”

The kid's eyes were screwed up tight with the pain. “He's out of town.”

“I don't believe you.”

The young man's eyes filled with tears as he shook his head.

Reznick pressed his face right up to the kid's and smelled the fear. It was as if it was seeping through his pores. “I just killed Magruder.” The look on the kid's face was that of sheer terror. “Now I am not in the mood to discuss matters at length. I want answers. And I won't stop until I find my daughter. So, where is she?”

“I swear: I don't know anything about your daughter.”

Reznick stared down at the kid. “Magruder said he was going to kill me. So, how was he going to carry this out?”

“All I know is that you were going to be directed to the Sunset Hotel.”

“And then what?”

“Magruder was told to await instructions. You would then…”

“I would then what?”

“You would then receive a call saying to phone a cab. And Magruder would then be dispatched to pick you up before the official cab company and kill you. He was then to take the guy you have to the rendezvous point where they would be waiting.”

“Where's the rendezvous point?”

“Not a clue.”

Reznick kneeled down beside the young man. He lifted his gun and the kid recoiled. “Who's running this show?”

“Brewling. Mr Brewling.”

“Does he work for the
Company
?”

The man shook his head. “Used to. A lot of contacts there.”

“So, you sub-contract the dirty work?”

The man nodded.

“Will Brewling be at the rendezvous point?”

“I don't know. I just sit in this office all day. That's what I did at Langley. I never worked out in the field.”

“Figures. Who does Brewling use, apart from Magruder? Any Miami crew involved?”

“Some Haitians. I think they're all FRAPH.”

Reznick knew all about the feared paramilitary group, The Front for the Advancement and Progress in Haiti, set up in 1993 by the CIA. He was the operations chief for a Special Forces A-Detachment, which spearheaded Operation Restore Democracy in Haiti in 1994.

He saw first-hand what FRAPH were capable of. They broke into homes and tortured and killed their political enemies. Thousands were slaughtered. They left faceless bodies strewn in the back streets of slums. It was known as ‘facial scalping', in which a victim's face was peeled from ear-to-ear with a machete. In voodoo mythology, it was believed to be a way of torturing people in the afterlife, the mutilation denying them a proper burial.

Many of FRAPH were former members of the Tonton Macoutes, the infamous Duvalier gang, named after a child-snatching bogeyman from Haitian fairy tales.

Was that who had his daughter?

Reznick pressed his face up to the young man's. “How do you know for sure they were Haitians?”

“Look, that's what I know.”

“You got a name for these Haitians?”

The man shook his head and said nothing.

“Tell me where they are.”

“I think…”

“I don't want think or maybe, I want a precise location where they are.”

The man closed his eyes. “Somewhere in Miami Beach.”

Reznick stared out towards the outer office. At the desk where the young man had been sitting there was a Blackberry with a flashing red light. A recent message had been received. He went over to the desk and pulled the weeping kid with him. A trail of blood was left behind him.

He picked up the Blackberry and scrolled down. Nothing of any interest. But he was curious. So he scrolled through the applications and saw apps for Smart Wi-Fi, eOffice 4.6 and e-Mobile Contacts. Then he saw an app he didn't recognise or know anything about, Dexrex SMS.

“What the hell is this?”

He opened it up and saw it required a screen name and password.

The young man blinked away the tears as he stared at the Blackberry screen.

Reznick pressed his gun to the kid's head. “Screen name and password now, fucker!”

The kid began to shake. “Screen name is Lemonheart, password is Genesis. As in the Bible.”

“As in the shitty rock band,” Reznick spat.

Reznick pressed in the letters onto the tiny Qwerty keyboard. Then an extra security question was asked. “Childhood nickname.”

“Please… I am not authorised to–”

“Childhood nickname!”

“Droop.”

“Droop?”

The man flushed crimson. “I walked around with droopy drawers as a toddler.”

“Jesus Christ. And you used to work for the CIA?” Reznick shook his head as he keyed in Droop. Suddenly a huge archive of de-encrypted instant messages, which had been sent from the Blackberry, was downloaded.

The last message sent caught his eye. It said:

Proceed to 5131 North Bay Road for safe delivery of cargo after pick-up
.

Reznick showed the message to the man. “What's this address? I thought you said you didn't know.”

The man stared at the screen for a couple of seconds. He escrunched up his face as if trying to remember what the address meant, before he clutched his bloody knee. Then he reached out underneath the nearest desk.

“What the fuck are you touching?” Reznick said, pulling the kid back.

Reznick crouched down and saw a silver switch, underneath the table. The little bastard had set off an alarm.

Suddenly, the kid was scrambling across the floor to his jacket slung over a chair and reached inside. He pulled out a pistol and turned to point it at Reznick.

Reznick was already one step ahead. He stared down at the kid and fired two shots into his chest. He watched, as if in slow motion, as the kid crashed to the floor. Blood oozed out of the dead kid's chest, through his shirt and seeped into the carpet. He stared long and hard at the dead young man. He'd given Reznick no choice.

His mind was in freefall. He committed the North Bay Road address to memory. Then he headed down the stairwell for three floors, rode the elevator to the first floor, and then raced down the stairs to the basement garage to get back to Luntz.

Heart pounding, he pushed through the basement door and froze.

A huge black security guard was pointing a gun straight at him. “Don't move, motherfucker!”

THIRTEEN

In the control room of the FBI in Miami, Assistant Director Martha Meyerstein was staring grim-faced at a bank of screens all showing real-time CCTV footage from the Brickell Avenue tower, as the drama unfolded. Standing at her side was the Special Agent in Charge of Miami, Sam Clayton. His arms were folded and sleeves rolled up.

Her team was on phones either chasing down leads or reaching out to other intelligence agencies. But it was clear that the ongoing police incident, which had thrown up red flags as it matched Reznick's description, was the breakthrough her team needed.

She recognised Reznick's features as he stood, hands on head, with an ill fitting brown UPS uniform. The middle-aged black security guard was speaking into the radio attached to his shirt, gun fixed on Reznick.

“We've got the fucker,” Clayton said.

Meyerstein ignored the comment as Reznick was ordered to turn around to face the guard. He was now staring straight into the security camera. The dark circles around his eyes made it look like he hadn't slept in days. A heavy growth on his face, mouth turned down.

“What's the ETA?” she said, turning to look at Clayton.

“Approximately two minutes.”

“You mind me asking why it's taking them so long?”

Clayton sighed. “Some hip-hop convention. Miami-Dade police have to help out Miami Beach police who are swamped with calls. Tens of thousands of them are flooding the city hogging the beach, Ocean Drive, Washington Avenue. But there are two cars already downtown, and should be there real quick.”