Monkey in the Middle (2 page)

The late afternoon traffic is predictably heavy and Carter spends the next forty-five minutes staring through dirty glass at dirty cars, trucks and busses, dirty streets, dirty sidewalks. The driver curses occasionally, but spends most of his time on a cell phone, rattling away in Arabic. Carter has heard Arabic before; he can even speak a few words: raise your hands, shut-up, get on the ground, I'm gonna cut off your balls and eat them. These are phrases he picked up questioning foreign fighters in Afghanistan, then used to good effect while employed by Coldstream Military Options in Iraq.

Carter has never liked Arabic, the harsh consonants, the machine-gun speed, every word an assault. Even when they're happy, Arabs spit out their words. But he didn't much like Arabs in general. One minute they were your friend, the next your enemy. When he became a mercenary, he was told, by the man who hired him, to beware of the Iraqis in his company.

‘They'll call you their brother, share their food, drink from your bottle, then set you up a few months down the road. In their little world, if you're not family, clan or tribe, you're nothing.'

For Carter, who didn't trust the man offering the good advice, suspicion was not a problem.

The driver pulls to the curb at Avenue B and Fifth Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Carter pays him off, then hustles into the Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation. A security guard named Sam waves a hello. Sam is seated behind a desk, his eyes tracking a series of monitors while he mans a cell phone.

‘C'mon, Gloria, this bullshit has got to stop. So, the boy tore his pants. That's just how boys do.'

Carter returns Sam's wave, then sprints up two flights of stairs to room 306. The room contains a pair of beds. One of them is empty, its occupant currently in the hospital but expected to return. The other holds a woman named Jane Carter. Jane is Carter's sister.

‘You awake, Janie?'

Jane's eyelids part and she blinks once. She's a large woman, tall and broad enough to almost fill the narrow bed. Nevertheless, except for the rise and fall of her ribcage when a ventilator forces breath upon her, she lies unmoving beneath the blankets. Jane's face is slack as well, the muscles flaccid, but her cheeks are pink with color and rounded.

‘I been rushin' around all day.' Carter sighs. ‘Business as usual.'

Jane blinks once, in slow motion, eyelashes fluttering.

‘I had a client like you wouldn't believe. The client from hell.'

Carter goes on to create a day that never happened. He's become very good at this, inventing a life for his sister's benefit, an alternative to the life he lives. In this imaginary life, he sells high-end sporting goods for a French manufacturer, bouncing from client to client, and even from city to city.

‘I swear to you, Janie, I think the guy was on speed. He couldn't stop scratching himself and his left cheek would twitch every few seconds, like twice, twitch-twitch. Now, you should understand, I was pitching the guy a new line of sports bras, so in no way did I want to get on his bad side. But the twitch was coming so regular, I found my eyes jumping up to his cheek whenever it went off. Meanwhile, the poor bastard's scratching away, his knees, his chest, the side of his neck. He's wriggling in his chair like his pants are on fire.'

Sometimes, Carter believes that he'll just fly off when Janie dies. Like in the old spiritual. But not to God. Carter thinks he'll rise up through the atmosphere and out into space like somebody cut the guy lines anchoring a weather balloon.

‘You want me to read for a while?' Carter is standing by the side of the bed, speaking over the whoosh of the ventilator. Janie's eyes track his small movements, the tilt of his chin, the nod, the shrug.

Blink.

Carter pulls a chair to the edge of the bed. He takes a bible from the nightstand and opens it to a book-marked page: Proverbs, Chapter 1. The choice of material is Janie's.

Carter has read a number of books to his sister over the past two years and this is his second time through the bible. He's relieved to be finished with Psalms. Let's make a deal, that's what the poems were about. I'll do this for you, God, if you do that for me. The howl of outrage when God didn't come across was deafening. I said all the prayers, performed all the rituals. I kissed your ass from morning till night. Now my enemies are beating me into the ground and it's your fault?

‘The parables of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel. To know wisdom, and instruction; to understand the words of prudence, and to receive the instruction of doctrine, justice and judgment, and equity; to give subtlety to little ones, to the young man knowledge and understanding. A wise man shall hear and be wiser; and he that understandeth shall possess governments . . .'

The stench of human waste rises suddenly to Carter's nostrils. This is the second time in the last three days and he's not ready to go home. He closes the bible and stands. Janie is lying exactly as she was, only her eyes have turned away. She will not look at him now.

‘You want me to call the aide?'

Blink.

‘You want me to leave?'

Blink.

Three

C
arter boards the N Train at Eighth Street and settles in for the ride out to Newtown Avenue in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria. He finds a seat on a long bench, crosses his legs, folds his hands in his lap. Though Carter takes great care to present the world with an instantly forgettable persona, the man who is not there, his conscious aim is to be acutely aware of his surroundings. But this time his attention drifts as the train rumbles through Manhattan, describing a long arc that takes it as far west as Seventh Avenue.

Janie's shame has unsettled Carter. Her shame has become his guilt. Carter had been drifting through Africa when Janie's illness was first diagnosed. He continued to drift for two years afterward, first through Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast and Liberia, then south to Angola and the Congo. Working for anybody who'd have him, doing whatever he was told. He might have come back at any time. No shackles bound him to the carnage. Instead he chased . . . Chased what?

But that's just it. Carter can no longer answer this question. Diamonds, that's how he would have responded if asked even six months before, the pot of gold at the end of the bloodiest rainbow on the planet. And blood there was. An ocean of blood, the locals reduced to slavery, the women with no hands, no arms, no feet, twelve-year-old soldiers high on kaat wielding fully-automatic Kalishnikovs. Children mutilating children.

It was all a video game to the boy soldiers, right up until they squared off against battle-hardened professionals like Carter. Then they threw down their weapons and their young bodies trembled and their eyes turned inward. And when they finally realized there were no rules and the bloody-thirsty god they served would drink their blood as well, they cried like babies.

A rapping on the floor at the other end of the car jolts Carter's awareness. A man in his mid-twenties with a cane and no sign of a limp, glancing around before again jabbing the cane into the floor.

Bap, bap, bap.

Without looking directly at the man, Carter takes inventory. He registers a white male, five-ten, maybe 190 pounds, his greasy blond dreadlocks partially concealed by a baseball hat with a torn brim. Despite the cold, the man wears short pants that cover his knees, a hooded sweatshirt and low-top basketball shoes without socks. His face is big and square, his cheeks pitted. His fixed smirk, the mark of a bully, is instantly recognized by Carter.

Bap, bap, bap.

The passengers closest to the man huddle in their seats, eyes fixed to the ceiling or floor. His behavior diminishes them. He takes their space and awards it to himself. And if they don't like it . . .

Carter doesn't know when the man got on the train. An oversight, ha-ha. More slippage. There was a time when his own shadow couldn't sneak up on him.

Bap, bap, bap.

Dropping his elbows to his knees, Carter leans forward, drawing the attention of the man at the other end of the car. The man looks at Carter, then turns away, his smirk vanishing as if he's read Carter's mind in that brief moment.

How easy, Carter is thinking, how easy it would be to kill this man, how easy, easy, easy, easy, easy . . .

After locking the door to his apartment, Carter turns on his computer. When prompted, he enters a password that allows him access to the hard drive: @e4oIBn3o87y5()&. Memorizing this password took nearly a week, but the result is worth the effort. This level of encryption will frustrate any government agency short of NASA. Or so Thorpe claimed when he insisted that Carter install the program.

Thorpe is even more paranoid than Carter, which is the only thing Carter likes about him. Except for the money, of course, and the jobs that lead to the money.

Speaking of which . . .

Carter's e-mail is one sentence long:
The deed is done.
With a single click, he sends it off to a computer in Rumania. From there, it will find its way to Thorpe, who might be anywhere in the world, who might be living next door. Thorpe will respond by dropping $20,000 into Carter's bank account on the island of Jamaica. And promptly, too.

But not this time. As Carter goes to shut his computer down, the machine emits a sharp ding. Then a little envelope appears at the top right of the monitor. The envelope waves at him.

Thorpe's message is not as simple as Carter's:
The deed is NOT done, though perhaps well on its way to being done. Suggest you proceed to next stage. Also, FYI, contract terms are strict. Payment on closing only. Please advise as events transpire
.

Slippage? Carter closes his eyes for a moment, remembering the knife's arc, the blade punching through the soft flesh just below the sternum, the descending aorta only a few inches away. Cutting a vessel of this size results in more rapid blood loss than a similar injury to the heart, and there are no ribs to avoid.

So, he must have missed. To the right, the left, low, high? Carter goes online, to the homepage of the
Daily News
where he scans the longest of several stories on the ‘Macy's Mayhem'. The victim, he learns, is still alive, though in a critical condition, and the cops think it likely that he was targeted by a deranged man, perhaps one of the many homeless schizophrenics who roam the city. Nevertheless, the victim's room at Bellevue Hospital is being closely guarded, just in case.

Carter shuts down the computer, then swivels his chair in a half-circle to face a largely empty room. There's the computer station, a neatly-made bed, a nightstand bearing a small lamp, and that's it. The spotless walls are blank rectangles, while the gleaming parquet floors are without rugs. Carter's clothes are stored in labeled boxes in a closet, each item precisely folded.

Carter shrugs out of his shoes and walks over to the apartment's single bedroom. There is no bed here and the floor is covered by judo mats. At the doorway, he takes a moment to center himself, then strips to his shorts before approaching a table with a long wooden box on top. Here he again pauses, staring down.

The box's elaborate carvings include every large animal on the African savannah. The reproductions are crude by western standards, but Carter believes they are designed to illustrate the spirits that inhabit the creatures, not the creatures themselves. The box's maker was endowing his creation with power. The other part, a symmetry so exquisitely planned the overall design had seemed abstract the first time Carter saw it, was a secondary consideration. As was the wood chosen to construct the box, black ebony hard enough to ward off decay and termites both.

When Carter flicks a switch on the wall, two rows of tightly focused spotlights, mounted on tracks, throw small circles of light on the floor. Carter adjusts three of these lights, then opens the box to reveal a pair of Burmese daggers. Carved into fire-breathing dragons from blocks of white jade, the daggers are intended for ceremonial use and that is the way Carter has always used them. The dragons' arched heads and necks form the daggers' pommels, their bodies the handles, their wings the guards, their tails the blades. Though exquisitely crafted, the daggers are not antiques. Even so, in order to possess them, Carter had to surrender a big chunk of the pile he accumulated in Africa.

Carter takes the daggers and crosses them over his chest with the points to the sides of his throat. He turns slowly, his eyes moving to each of the little circles of light. These are the marks he will hit as he crisscrosses the room.

There are no stops in Carter's workout, no poses, no pauses. Taught to him in Freetown by a fellow mercenary, the techniques he will use are adapted from Sinawali, a martial arts system developed in the Philippines. Sinawali means woven, and this is what Carter accomplishes, effortlessly weaving defense and attack into a continuous movement, his footwork taking him across the floor. Carter is not a large man. His shoulders are not especially wide or his back especially broad. But he is heavily muscled and extremely graceful. In his hands, the jade daggers appear to liquefy, to leave a luminescent trail not unlike the glistening track left on wet grass by a passing snail.

Four

S
olly Epstein hesitates outside the crime scene tape. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his camel hair coat and hunches his shoulders against the wind. Epstein's shoulders are massive, seemingly misplaced on the body of a man five feet, eight inches tall. His back is outsized as well, his neck too. Except for the rounded gut, bandy legs and the rapidly balding dome, he might be a diminutive version of the Amazing Hulk.

Before him, the façade of Macy's flagship store spans the short block along Broadway between Thirty-Third and Thirty-Fourth Streets. Epstein is something of a New York buff and he considers Macy's, with its Thanksgiving Day Parade, Fourth of July fireworks and Christmas decorations, as much a part of the city's life as the Empire State Building or the Stock Exchange. The store's windows are especially renowned and no tourist in New York at Christmas passes up an opportunity to view them.