Rivers of Gold (23 page)

Subject's psychological evaluation suggests a highly systemic thought process, combined with a shallowness of affect and a degree of self-discipline almost frightening in its intensity (a conclusion supported by the Subject's ability to assimilate new languages even well into adulthood). Subject's ability to blend into new environments and fluid situations recommend him highly for this mission.

EQUIPMENT/WEAPONS QUALIFICATIONS: Subject is well versed in the following communications systems: AN/PRC-150; DCT; AN/PRC-148; MPLI and MBITR; AN/PRC-117F; AN/PRC-138. Subject is also trained in the use of the following surveillance/TGO systems: SIDS; AN-PVS-14;AN/PVQ-4; ANP/PEQ-1A SOFLAM;MS-2000(M).

Aside from advanced unarmed combat training, Subject has displayed an unusually high degree of proficiency with the following small arms: 5.56mm M4A1 (all SOPMOD configurations); 7.62mm M40A1 and M40A3; 7.62mm M14 Mod 0 and Mk 11 Mod 0; 12-gauge JSCS; 9mm M9; and .45 MEU(SOC). Subject also qualified with M82 and M107 long-range .50 caliber sniper rifles, as well as the 25mm M109 AMPR. (NOTE: Subject also became familiar with a number of undocumented weapons systems while serving in mixed SOF units in Afghanistan.)

Subject is combat dive- and jump-qualified, FAC-certified, E&E-driving certified, and fixed-wing solo pilot certified for both
and
aircraft. (NOTE: Subject's flight certification is civilian.)

MISC.: Any references to the unit known as “More's Machine,” or to the Subject's alleged nickname “Ever,” are wholly unsubstantiated.

P A R T  III

(agnikand)

C O N F L A G R A T I O N

“P U T   S O M E   T A L C
I N  Y O U R  T A I N T”

S
antiago felt like he'd been dropped into a mobile switchboard manned by speed freaks. More was working his phone, calling in air surveillance on the chase car behind them, while telling Santiago to call the Traffic Ops dispatcher to get some uniforms to block downtown Second Avenue traffic at East Sixtieth Street, on the Manhattan side of the Queensboro Bridge, and then to position some ALPR cars along the Sixtieth Street corridor between Second and Fifth avenues in case the stationary cameras mounted on the traffic signals at key chokepoint intersections missed the tags on the chase car.

“Identifying your target's as important as taking it out,” More explained in his command voice. “The ALPRs are for backup in case whoever's behind us gets away. Maybe the computer guys can dig up something from the fake plates. But I've got a faster way to find out who's in that car.” He outlined his plan in broad strokes as they rolled toward the city.

Santiago listened, thinking it through. When he could visualize More's plan, it brought a smile to his face.

“Hell, yeah,” he said half to himself, the radio mike in one hand, his phone in the other, grinning like a kid being let in on a devious prank. “Oh hell, yeah.”

They used the highway time coordinating between Aviation, Traffic, and other NYPD units. Santiago started wondering exactly what the fuck More was up to when More told him to raise Central on the radio and have them scramble a surge patrol from the Police Academy on East Twentieth straight up Third Avenue. Surge patrols were blocks-long motorcades of police cruisers cobbled together from various precincts in a mass emergency CT response. It was mostly for show and a pain in the ass for all other drivers; even the cops hated them. After having a shouting match with the dispatcher on the radio, Santiago got McKeutchen on the phone. Wherever More was taking this, Santiago wanted his ass covered.

He noticed More using his left-foot braking while simultaneously goosing the gas, expertly weaving the old taxicab in and out of traffic along the expressway. He held his speed to about fifty and used his signals. Santiago noticed two more things as they took the Northern Boulevard exit off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway: More was driving like he hadn't made the tail yet; and one of Aviation's birds, an Agusta A-119 Koala in NYPD blue and white, popped up over Long Island City, hovering over the Costco on Vernon Boulevard. The first part of More's trap was in place.

Wherever More had learned to drive, he was no slouch. He hit every light on the green or yellow, never stopping as they sailed down Northern Boulevard to Thirty-sixth Avenue, then cut left down Crescent Street. It took them a little out of the way, but also kept them out of Queens Plaza gridlock; Santiago saw the speedo creeping towards sixty as they headed for the entrance to the lower roadway ramp for the Queensboro Bridge.

The
lower
roadway?

“Yo, why you takin' the lower roadway, it's commercial, it empties onto—OH, SHIT!” Santiago put a death grip on his overhead safety strap.

If More noticed the red light at the ramp entrance on Queensborough Plaza, he paid it no mind as he put the cab into a perfect forty-five-degree drift from the outer left lane on the street all the way onto the inner right lane of the ramp access, tires shrieking. Santiago cursed More in two languages as he struggled to lock in his seatbelt, his knees bouncing up into his chest as they climbed the ramp onto the bridge, accelerating between a cable company van and a UPS truck.

“Feet wet,” More quacked as they soared out over the East River.

Juggling the radio, his phone, and constant checks of both mirrors, half-blinded by the dappling sunlight hammering in on them through the bridge's massive steel latticework, Santiago realized that More had now cast off any semblance of stealth, hitting the siren and lights masked in the cab's grille. Their taxi was the bait, and the tail was the prey. It was a car chase in reverse. Santiago cursed again. Why did shit like this have to happen to him? Being trapped in a dirty fucking taxicab piloted by an ESU psycho, barreling across one of the busiest bridges in the city, toward one of the worst intersections in midtown Manhattan during mid-morning traffic? It was almost like—

“You ever watch
Lethal Weapon
?” Santiago asked, his right hand white on the safety strap.

“Wazzat lahk oan de teevee?” replied More in a spuddy, soyish cornpone drawl.

Santiago felt like shooting More again. Or maybe throwing up. “Just—just—” he stammered in exasperation, flailing his huge left paw, the one gripping the radio handset.

More was really pushing the old Crown Vic now, the speedo touching seventy as they slalomed between vans and trucks. The tail had to work hard at it, but it was keeping up. Their pursuers, Santiago noticed, drove more like cops than More did. He thought he caught a whiff of a burnt odor, maybe leaking exhaust fumes or smoldering transmission fluid, and silently prayed that More wouldn't blow up or crash the old cab before he, Santiago, had a fighting chance to get clear of it.

Santiago's stomach was doing strange maneuvers as More slammed the cab between vehicles, all the while gaining speed on the downward incline toward the off-ramp. The Roosevelt Island tram, which ran parallel to the bridge's north side, would be passing overhead any minute. Santiago imagined the looks on the faces of tourists and commuters as they watched a runaway taxicab plow head-on into the side of a slow-moving bus. He looked down the off-ramp in horror and saw that the two uniformed Traffic cops, visible from afar in their fluorescent yellow vests, had apparently not been notified of the situation and were nonchalantly waving on southbound traffic along Second Avenue, with no clue that More was guiding a two-ton missile down on them at seventy-five miles per hour.

“More,” Santiago began.

Who showed no response. The speedo cleared seventy-five and kept moving. Santiago could see a woman with a stroller crossing Sixtieth, yakking away on her phone, the kid, too old and fat to be wheeled around, contentedly lazing with one arm draped over his head, both oblivious to the danger.

“More, slow down,” Santiago attempted.

One of the uniformed cops finally noticed the Crown Vic hurtling toward him, and frantically threw up his arms, trying to stop oncoming traffic and clear the ramp, and yelling at the woman with the stroller on the phone, who paid him no mind, lost in her conversation.

“MORE, YOU CRAZY FUCK!” Santiago conceded.

The Crown Vic hit the intersection at eighty miles an hour, More drifting the cab slightly to the right of the tramway terminus to shoot across Sixtieth Street. Santiago briefly heard the woman's scream as they smashed her stroller all the way down the street to the stairs of the old Serendipity, now long buried in a sea of trash; on the right-hand periphery of his vision Santiago glimpsed the stroller kid setting a new land speed record sprinting up Second Avenue. More kept accelerating; the burning smell in the cabin intensified. The elastic central articulation of an uptown-bound M101 loomed up directly in front of them. Santiago screamed and time truncated for him again; they missed the rear of the bus by inches and Santiago, looking south past the Fish Face, saw sixteen NYPD cruisers heading broadside at them for a second, before being blocked out by the ruin of the old Bloomingdale's, now little more than a public latrine. The surge patrol crossed the T of their rear bumper and Santiago heard the screech of their pursuers' brakes, trapped on the east side of the avenue with cops all over them.

More finally reduced their speed. He turned and offered the soft, childlike smile often associated with the hopelessly insane and asked, “Was it good for you, too?”

“Watch the fucking road!” Santiago yelled as they bounced over cavernous potholes, left unrepaired for years, bleeding off speed. More put the car in a controlled skid at the corner of Madison and fishtailed them northbound as Santiago's phone went off. McKeutchen.

“Congratulations, assholes,” he growled into Santiago's ear. “You two just turned the whole fucking city upside down. Meet me at the CPP.
Now
.”

Santiago cut the connection and relayed the orders to More. “If I lose my shield over this, I'm going to kill you.”

“Take a number,” More replied wetly.

The Central Park Precinct was a relic from the days when horsepower was measured in feed and dung. A row of stables converted to mixed garage/office/storage/junk space lay nestled on the south side of the Eighty-sixth Street traverse, across from the reservoir. Here cops on cushy patrol beats parked their three-wheeled ATVs along footpaths designed nearly two centuries earlier, the great green gift of Olmstead and Vaux, now peopled with joggers, dog-walkers, bird-watchers, tourists lost in their maps, homeless lost in their minds, and the occasional contraband entrepreneurs doing business under cover of the Ramble.

Which was none too peaceable at the moment. With the cab safely out of sight behind a row of NYPD vans, Santiago stood in a huddle with McKeutchen, two deputy commissioners (Operations and CT), the Chief of Detectives, and, just for laughs, the Chief of Organized Crime Control, in whose bailiwick lay the OCID command that Santiago coveted. At this particular moment, however, his prospects for a detail to OCID looked tenuous at best.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” barked the OCC chief, an ursine brute named Randazzo, who looked as though he wanted to pull one of Santiago's arms off and gnaw on it like a buffalo wing. “A drug ring that uses
cabs
? The TLC has every hack in the fleet wired. There's cameras inside half of them now, there's the GPS meters, there's cameras on every major intersection traffic signal and TLC enforcement in unmarked cars. The cabbies can't take a piss without somebody knowing.”

“And you say they're connected to these, what,
speakeasies
? We haven't had those in almost a hundred years,” pointed out the DC Ops, a sullen, barrel-chested pug named Devaney, who looked like he wanted to break Santiago's kneecaps. “Back then, the cabs were for getting johns to hookers. A cabbie serving drug customers today would be rolling in cash. So where's the money?”

“Why'd you call in air and a surge patrol?” asked the Counterterrorism chief, a quiet umber slab of a man named Derricks, who never took his eyes off More.

“And why the fuck were you guys playing cat-and-mouse with a fuckin'
Treasury
car?” moaned the Chief of Detectives, a tiny saffron-colored dweeb named Saffran, who squirmed and fidgeted as he spoke. The day had turned sultry and humid, the kind where New Yorkers blasted the AC and threatened the power grid and prayed for rain, and the chief was clearly uncomfortable with his clothes and with the situation.

The Automatic License Plate Recognition cars Santiago had called in had transmitted the tail car's plates to the Real Time Crime Center, a hive of supercomputers on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza. It had taken longer than usual to get a hit, because of all the cutouts, but the wonks had finally turned up Feds. The big surprise was that the tail car was from Treasury, not the FBI as everyone had suspected at first. Nobody knew why the Treasury Department would want to spy on a CAB team. Between that and More's joyride, the hornet's nest at One PP had been sufficiently stirred up. Hence the unusual and unofficial powwow of pissed-off police chiefs in the park. McKeutchen was doing his best to run interference for his men, but he was outranked and outflanked. That pissed
him
off.

And, of course, Santiago was the focal point for the whole group's enmity.

McKeutchen stood just behind Santiago's right shoulder, stolid in the armor of his fat. More, for his part, was ignoring everybody, poring over the taxi looking for damage.

Santiago had the bizarre feeling of being summoned to the principal's office to explain a troublesome sibling's urinating in a school water fountain. He saw his gold shield and OCID assignment shimmering like a desert mirage, his Plan swaying on feet of clay, yet in the midst of it all, he noticed something different in himself; he did not blame More. His partner, gurgling psychopath though he was, had called it and played it through, and Santiago no longer felt like shooting him. This revelation notwithstanding, however, Santiago knew he was going to have to find out once and for all just who he was rolling with. He resolved to do just that, and just how he'd go about it, if he ever got out of this mess.

He was working up an eloquent line of bullshit when a second taxicab squealed into the CPP's lot, blaring speed metal through its gaping windows (from the radio, a low screeching voice full of ball bearings screamed, “
Sto-o-o-p the SQUIRTS
!”). Subtle, Santiago thought disgustedly. If their pursuers hadn't been able to find them before, they'd have no trouble now. His mood darkened further when the cab's doors opened and Liesl and Turse, the Narc Sharks, clambered out, grinning all over themselves.

“
Mierda
,” Santiago said under his breath. Tilting his head toward McKeutchen, he asked, “What're
they
doing here?”

“I told them to come,” McKeutchen replied in his best Shadowy and Inscrutable. “If you guys are gonna crack this thing, you're gonna have to learn to work together. No,” he said quickly, cutting off Santiago's broiling response, “More's in this too. You guys pull this off and you're a team. We all pull this off we're a
unit
. Sabby?”