Urban Renewal (35 page)
“I still don’t see—”
“One shot, one kill.”
“You mean, is that what people said about me?”
“If you will.”
“It’s what I was known for, but my name was never put out there.”
“There?”
“In the World.”
“We are not … ah, pardon me. Let me summarize, then. If you will, you had a certain reputation of … military service, but that reputation was only among your comrades. Certainly not … publicized, am I correct?”
“Pretty much,” a medium-sized man with heavily muscled forearms answered. The iris of his left eye was a very slim circle of a blue so pale it was almost white, making its
light-gathering black pupil appear greatly enlarged. “Only, how do you know anything like that? You’re not—”
“Surely you understand that not all military personnel wear uniforms.”
“What
I
understand is that I had a drink in a bar with a gorgeous woman. And I woke up here. Wherever this is.”
“Sometimes, it is necessary—”
“What’s necessary is that I see someone in the chain of command. Someone that I know—not someone who wears campaign ribbons, or talks right. Someone I know personally. Like my CO.”
“Unfortunately—”
“Linton, James Thomas. Sergeant. Seven oh seven four nine one one.”
“You are hardly a prisoner of war, Mr.—”
“Linton, James Thomas. Sergeant. Seven oh seven four nine one one.”
“There really is no point in this.”
“Yeah. Yeah, there is. See, I gave you my right name. And you act like you already knew my MOS. But if you did, you’d know the serial number I just gave you isn’t a match.”
“That isn’t our concern.”
“Your concern is that you want me to dial someone long-distance.”
“Well put.”
“Linton, James Thomas. Sergeant. Seven oh seven four nine one one.”
“I see. So an off-duty assignment, one that pays extremely well for less than a few hours’ work, that doesn’t interest you, Sergeant?”
“I know what ‘extreme’ means to people like you.”
“Like me?”
“Like you. I’m supposed to buy that you’re CIA or something like that. But with that accent … Never mind that if the spooks wanted me to do a job they’d just order me, not put money on the table.… You picked the wrong guy.”
“You are forcing me to … offer other inducements.”
“Save your breath. I already know I’m dead. So I figure, whoever you want dead, the best way to serve my country is to let you just get on with it.”
“There are worse things than death.”
“No, there’re not. Just longer ones. And you’re not going that route, anyway.”
“You know this … how?” the shadowed man asked.
“You can’t torture a man into the kind of shot you need made. Oh, you use enough of … whatever you’ve got, you could probably make me pull a trigger. But nothing you do, nothing you threaten to do, could make me hit the target. And you’d never know, would you? Maybe some of your torture tricks might damage some nerve endings, mess with my eyesight … something like that.”
“You are correct.”
“I get another medal for that?”
The faint light that shielded the shadowy man went black.
CROSS WALKED
past the man with the green eyeshade. As he reached the upper flight of steps leading to Red 71’s front door, the brand on his cheekbone burned so sharply he had to draw a breath.
He sat down.
The burning decreased.
He started to walk back down in the direction of the poolroom. With every step, the burning decreased again.
By the time he had pushed through the black-beaded curtain and was seated behind his makeshift desk in the back room, the burning was gone.
Even rubbing the spot where he’d first felt the warmth didn’t bring it back.
“
HE WAS
no use to us.” The voice of the man who had been shadowed when talking to the military sniper came through the Sat-phone’s speaker.
“So you …?”
“Eliminated any problem that might be associated with this,” the shadowy man finished the sentence, looking out through the bunker-slit of a thick-walled structure the same color as the sand on which it sat as he spoke.
“Always the best way,” the voice agreed, less than a second before the bunker was hit by a drone missile.
THE MAN
seated in the back of a strip joint in the Near North section of Chicago was the heir to an empire awarded to him by those with the power to do so. He hadn’t expected such an opportunity. Still, he had to be cleared by the National Commission of any complicity in the deaths of both Costanza and his boss before the prize was awarded. He had not been present when that decision was made.
“I don’t believe in luck,” one of those Commission members said.
“Nor do I,” a much older man agreed. “But that doesn’t mean one man cannot profit from the mistakes of others.”
“I still say—”
“All respect,” the older man interrupted. “But if Damiano was skilled enough to orchestrate the near-simultaneous deaths of Citelli and Costanza, and did so in such a way that nothing pointed to him, Damiano would be
molto pericoloso
, would he not?”
“How could he know he’d be the one we’d tap?”
“If we picked a different man, and something happened to him, that’d be Damiano’s suicide note,” another man added.
“Damiano asking to hit this Cross guy, may be the same thing? I mean, why come to us? Whoever he is, this Cross, he’s not part of our thing.”
“Damiano, he’ll have some story to tell, no matter what,” the younger man said.
“So. We are agreed, then?” the older man asked a question that none present took as such.
THE SEATED
man faced an audience of three men, who were also seated. Each of them had a man standing just to their right shoulder. The man in the center of the three had two men behind him. Neither of those men’s hands were visible—they weren’t there to light cigars or fetch drinks.
“This town’s been full of contract men since way before
I was born,” the man in the center said, softly. “But none of your people could find a single one willing to take on the job, is that what you’re telling me?”
“I wanted the job done a certain way,” the subordinate said. “
Only
that way. The closest anyone could get to the door of that Red 71 place is almost three-quarters of a mile away. And it’s not even a level shot—they’d have to be shooting down. That’s why I had to reach out so far.”
“To
Afghanistan?!?
”
“Yes. This guy, the one we wanted, we only knew about him because his spotter—that’s the guy with the range finder; he measures the wind, elevation … stuff like that—he talked too much. He was putting it around. The war was about to be dialed back, big-time, so him and his partner, they were, you know, looking for work.”
“So?”
“That guy, the shooter I mean, he couldn’t deliver.”
“Not a man to ever use again.”
“No one ever will.”
“Yes, I understand. So you are saying, we have made no progress?”
“I think we kind of have. This guy—Cross, he’s called—he’s a contract man. Best there is.”
“That’s the guy you asked permission to hit?”
“Yes. Because, see, we found out he already
had
a job. And the deal with this guy, he takes your money, you get what you paid for. Period. He’s strictly an outsider. He’d take money from anyone.”
“So?”
“So the guy he was paid to hit,” the subordinate paused for effect, “that was you.”
“
Me?
How could that be? Before all that … craziness started, why would I be on anyone’s list?”
“It was
after
,” the subordinate said. “But once we found he’d been hired, what I wanted to do was hit this guy—Cross, I’m saying—before he could make a move. That way, you’d be safe, no matter what. And we’d have plenty of time to deal with.…”
The room went silent. “You’re crazy!” the subordinate sneered, to no one in particular. “What am I now, a fortuneteller? How could I have—”
“Nobody said it was you, Damiano,” the man standing behind the left shoulder of the man sitting directly across from the subordinate said, very calmly.
“Until just now,” the man standing behind his right shoulder added.
“
WE KNOW
you already got paid,” the phone-voice said. “This is just to tell you, the man who paid you, he’s not going to need proof-of-performance.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
“I’ve got friends in high places, now?”
“People told me you had a strange sense of humor,” the phone-voice said, just before the connection was cut.
“
WHY THE
front door, boss?”
“Got to test something, Buddha.”
“You want me to go out first?”
“If this works, nobody’s going out at all,” Cross said, touching high on his right cheekbone as he spoke.