Pablo's Ghost (Strike Force X Book 1), page 2
None of that concerned Natalie Karpin as she stood on Strada Anghel Dogaru, directly opposite the misnamed Paradise Hotel. She had no interest in drugs or gangs today, much less in sanitation.
She was looking for a tourist—an American, from New York City—who had traveled some five thousand miles at great expense to wallow in debauchery.
No prude herself, Karpin had certain lines she would not cross, nor tolerate the felonies of others when she had an opportunity to cut them short.
One such offender was Stuart Delaney, a successful Wall Street lawyer living on his own in the Dakota Apartments on Central Park West, in Manhattan's Upper West Side. He was unmarried, seldom entertained at home, and kept his nose clean on the public record—no small feat, considering that he was what psychiatrists would call a pedophile.
Natalie Karpin had no patience with the jargon tossed around by shrinks and lawyers representing clients who found it impossible to stop molesting, raping, sometimes even killing children in pursuit of psychopathic sexual release. She knew the textbook definition of pedophilia called it "a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or adolescent experiences a primary sexual attraction to prepubescent children," but she was not concerned with anyone's attraction to another person, animal or some inanimate object.
When they crossed the line from lusting into predatory action there could be no turning back.
Police did what they could to keep that plague in check, but some transgressors were simply beyond their league. Stuart Delaney earned an average four million dollars yearly from his legal practice, without adding in the laundered dividends received from offshore banks. He took six weeks' vacation during most years, traveling the world to visit nations where sex with children had been banned by law but government corruption meant such crimes were tolerated with a wink and nod if tourists and rich locals amply greased local authorities.
Delaney alternated jet-set traveling between Cuzco in Peru, Bangkok, Thailand and Bucharest, depending on the season and prevailing weather. This time he was in Romania and booked into the Paradise, a long way down the social scale from Manhattan co-op overlooking Central Park.
If Karpin had her way, this would be the attorney's final trip abroad and his next transatlantic flight would find him in a Boeing 747's cargo hold, securely bolted in a casket.
She knew Delaney was inside the Paradise, a spartan room on the third floor, waiting for Iosif Brâncuși, a scumbag pimp, to make delivery of one boy in the range of six to eight years old. For two hours alone with his intended victim, the attorney would be shelling out 62,000 Romanian leu, equivalent to $15,000 U.S.
That was no small fortune in a country where the average worker with a college degree earned just over $500 per year before taxes.
But today, with any luck, Delaney and Brâncuși would be going out of business. Back in Gotham, IRS agents would pick over Delaney's leavings, while in Bucharest, surviving bottom-feeders would carve up Brâncuși's trade and any cash he hadn't spent feeding his methamphetamine habit.
Again, Natalie Karpin didn't give a damn.
She crossed the street, waded through garbage in an alley on the north side of the Paradise, and entered through the hotel's backdoor once she lockpicked its cheap deadbolt. Inside, she put the pick away and drew a Glock 17M pistol, the same model issued to FBI agents stateside, chambered in 9×19mm Parabellum, with seventeen rounds in the mag and one in the chamber. Unlike the Bureau's guns, this one had an extended muzzle, threaded to accommodate a sound suppressor that added one-third to the gun's loaded weight of two pounds.
Natalie climbed the service stairs and found room 313 halfway along a dingy corridor with half the ceiling lights burned out. That seemed to fit, given the kind of business normally conducted at the Paradise. There was no peephole in the door that would permit its tenant to observe her in the hall.
Natalie knocked and waited. The door opened to reveal Stuart Delaney, forty-four years old and looking every second of it, blinking at her in surprise. "Wrong room," he said, mangling the tourist guidebook phrase, and was about to shut the door when Karpin raised her Glock and shot him in the face.
No fuss and very little muss.
She dragged him toward the middle of a living room whose central feature was a double bed. The other furniture consisted of a small, chipped dresser and a single straight-backed wooden chair. She closed and latched the door, ignored Delaney's leaking corpse, and sat down in the chair to wait.
The best part of an hour passed before another visitor knocked on the door to 313 It had to be Iosif Brâncuși, since the Paradise had no room service and a maid would not appear until the tenant had checked out, no matter how long he or she remained. The no-frills dump provided handy crime scenes, charging by the hour what a reputable place downtown might charge per night, and few of those who used its services were overly concerned with hygiene.
Rising, Karpin stepped around Delaney's body to the door, released its deadbolt, opened it and edged back to remain concealed from the latest arrivals.
Brâncuși entered first, leading a small boy by the hand. The pimp saw Natalie, blanched at the pistol in her hand, his client on the floor, then died with an amazed expression on his sallow face, blood pumping from a vent above his left eyebrow. The child fled and she made no effort to restrain him, heard him pounding down the stairs as she wiped down the inner doorknob to remove her fingerprints.
Romanian police weren't much on scientific crime-fighting, but even they knew basic methods and attempted the solution of a felony from time to time, if that seemed feasible.
As for the boy, Natalie reckoned she'd done all that she could do under the circumstances. Each year, some 1.2 million children were trafficked worldwide. Nearly one-fifth of those were smuggled out of Eastern Europe, a "significant proportion" from Romania, according to United Nations documents. Her work today would not have solved that problem, obviously, but it was a baby-step. Investigation of Brâncuși's murder, if police applied themselves at all, might turn over some larger stones and bare the maggots wriggling underneath.
Karpin had nearly reached her rental car when her roam phone buzzed on her hip. She recognized the caller's number, answered on the second ring. "What's up?"
"Are you available?"
"I can be. Where and when?"
"Same place. Tomorrow suit you?"
"On my way," she said, and cut the link.
Houston, Texas
The sports arena was not average, nothing on par with the Sam Houston Coliseum, the Toyota Center or the Alexander Durley Sports Complex. It was, in fact, a renovated warehouse in Galena Park, a couple blocks from Buffalo Bayou.
The kind of place you might expect to watch an MMA cage match with no holds barred.
Blake Mahoney wasn't rated as a headliner. In fact, he wasn't on the card at all, per se. When he pursued mixed martial arts for profit or simply for the excitement of it, he appeared as "Michael Blake," no fixed address that any of the bettors and spectators knew or cared about. He'd been approached on one occasion by a bookie, offering a grand if he would throw a fight where he was favored as the winner, but he'd punched the asshole into traction and advised him to report it as a traffic hit-and-run.
If anyone had ever tried to follow up on that, no word of it had reached Mahoney at his home in San Diego. Woe betide whoever tried to track him down for that, or any indiscretion from his past, unconscious of the Hell they would bring down upon themselves.
His opposition on the undercard tonight was Clemente Arredando out of Dallas, shorter than Mahoney at five foot eleven but nearly equal in weight at one-ninety. His body was a canvas of tattoos, something like The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury or demigod Maui in that Walt Disney animated film where Dwayne Johnson proved that he could sing. Each time he flexed, it seemed as if a painter's sketchbook came alive, and that could be distracting in the cage.
If his opponent paid attention, anyway.
Mahoney ducked distractions, concentrating on the other grappler's eyes, his hands and feet. Most fighters telegraphed their moves somehow, whether intending to or not, and if you trained yourself to spot those tells, it went a long way toward a knockout.
Arredando held black belts in Shotokan karate, Taekwando and Aikido, but none of that made him invincible. He bled and suffered pain like anybody else. The trick was to deliver more than he could handle in as short a time as possible and get the whole thing over with.
They shook hands, Arredondo tossing in a sneer he meant to be intimidating, then backed off from one another, waiting for the first round's bell to sound. It rang, and Blake Mahoney flew toward Arredondo with a storm of kicks and punches that were swift enough to drive his enemy backward, on the defensive, landing blows on either of Mahoney's shoulders that would bruise but cause no lasting damage. When he put his weight behind the final one-two punch that blacked out Arredondo's lights, a hush fell on the audience, then broke into a wave of cheers from those who'd put their money on the white guy.
From the others, not so much.
Mahoney's phone was buzzing when he got back to his locker. Opening the padlock, he reached in and fished it out. "Good timing, Bro," he said.
"You want in on a job?" the caller asked.
"Will there be traveling?"
"Oh, yeah."
"Not nowhere cold?"
"Not this time."
"When?"
"Tomorrow at the usual?"
"Okay. I'm in."
Las Vegas, Nevada
"Las Vegas" is a Spanish phrase that translated into English as "the meadows, as its state—Nevada—means "snow-clad." Both were derived from first impressions of late 18th-century explorers from New Spain, later rechristened Mexico. Prospectors came along in time, sank shafts, and dubbed the territory that they called their own the "Silver State."
Successive waves of interlopers had been looting the Nevada desert ever since.
Las Vegas was a tawdry wide spot in the road until the end of World War II, when mobsters from the New York and elsewhere realized that back in 1931, state legislators tried to save their state from the Depression by legalizing gambling and granting quickie divorces. Drug money poured in, building lavish "carpet joints" to squeeze out mom-and-pop casinos catering to cowboys who spent more time playing cards or shooting craps than showering or polishing their boots. The first pirates to land were mostly Jewish or Italian—men like Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello and Sam Giancana.
Nowadays, they might be anyone from anywhere on Earth.
Money still talked in Vegas, and most inhabitants were good at listening. Most also had their hands out, one way or another, for whatever scraps the "whales" might leave behind.
It was a whole new Mob these days—or mobs, more properly—from Russia, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, all over the globe, in fact. Tonight there was a merger in the making, fat cats gathered in the penthouse of the King's Ransom resort downtown, on Glitter Gulch, an alias for Fremont Street.
The rivalry amounting to a blood feud had persisted between China and Japan over two millennia and change, as far back as reliable recorded history. That's gotten worse since World War II, with China going Red while Washington remade Japan in its own capitalist image. That discord had also been reflected in their separate crime syndicates. The Yakuza, with four dominant families, was subdivided into some 300 smaller clans with forty thousand members estimated globally. The Chinese Triads, ruled by seven families, also claimed roughly forty thousand oath-bound members, working in conjunction with at least nineteen affiliated gangs worldwide.
Both had their outposts in Las Vegas, had been present in "Sin City" since the 1980s if not earlier, but from reports Dartnell had recently obtained, tonight would be their first attempt to merge—unless, somehow, it all went suddenly, disastrously wrong.
He meant to see it do exactly that.
Security was tight at the King's Ransom, as at all legal casinos in Nevada. Guards in uniform were supplemented by an equal number in plainclothes, all armed, while video surveillance teams—the gaming industry's famous "eyes in the sky" peered down from mirrored ceilings, equally alert for cheaters, random thieves, minors intruding on the glitzy world with fake I.D.s, and armed invaders from outside who might try anything from holdups to a targeted assassination.
Nothing had been left to chance, but those in charge had failed to take account of Stan Dartnell.
He knew when and where the meeting would be held, at 8:00 p.m. in the hotel's executive conference room, one floor below the presidential suite that hadn't seen a chief executive check in so far. Security would be divided up between the Yakuza and Triad factions, but Dartnell had no concerns about making his way inside.
Whether he left the room alive, however, was another question altogether.
He was well armed for the sortie, starting with a Mini-Uzi submachine gun and a dozen magazines loaded with forty rounds of 9×19mm Parabellum ammunition each. The sleek Beretta M9 semiautomatic pistol in his horizontal Jackass shoulder holster fed the same ammo from magazines containing fifteen rounds apiece. Clipped to his belt beneath his jacket, just in case it all went south, Dartnell had four M67 fragmentation hand grenades, each with a lethal radius of sixteen feet and wounding range three times that distance.
He was good to go.
Stan rode the elevator up to level nine and left it there, using the fire stairs to complete his journey without tipping off the guards too soon. Once they accosted him, the shit would then become extremely real and there would be no turning back. He'd either pull it off and slip away, or else he'd leave the King's Ransom zipped up inside a rubber body bag.
He'd been unable to devise a third alternative.
On level ten, he cracked the metal fire door, peeked into the corridor, and found four guards on duty there, two Japanese, the other pair Chinese. Not being one of those benighted souls who claimed all Asians "look alike," he had no trouble differentiating them.
He double-checked the Uzi without needing to and was about to show himself when buzzing in his jacket's right-hand pocket made him hesitate. He checked the roam phone, mouthed a silent curse, and answered, "What?"
"I catch you at a bad time?"
"Just a little busy," he replied.
"I've got a job lined up, you want to come on board?"
"When would it start?"
"Meeting tomorrow with the team, same place as usual."
"I'll be there if I can," Dartnell agreed. "But if I miss it, go ahead without me."
"Right. Okay. We'll hope to see you there."
Dartnell switched off the phone without goodbyes, replaced it in his pocket, and stepped out into the hotel corridor. Four pairs of eyes immediately locked upon him and the automatic weapon in his hands.
"Yo, boys!" he called out cheerily. "Am I too late for appetizers?"
All four went for hidden pistols and he held the Uzi's trigger down.
3
Gaslamp District, San Diego, California
The headquarters of SFX Corporation stands on the east side of Fifth Avenue between Broadway and E Street, two and one-half miles southwest of San Diego's famous zoo in Balboa Park. On quiet nights, if one of those should roll around, locals claim they can hear the big cats roaring in their various enclosures.
Or perhaps that's only wishful thinking.
SFX is something of a mystery to other business owners on the block. Most casually know or recognize on sight its CEO, one Grant Mahoney, and they've seen his younger brother come and go from time to time, but none could tell you what the corporation does to stay in business and support its pricey digs.
Some speculate that SFX is in the movie business, possibly computer-generated imagery, since "SFX" is Hollywood-speak for special effects, but none can say they've ever seen a film or TV star hanging around the premises. The firm solicits no inquiries from potential customers, and no one can recall it ever advertising for employee applications. People come and go, of course, but they are generally nondescript and readily forgettable.
The Gaslamp Quarter—or the Gaslamp District, as locals insist, defying public presentation on its entry arch and all official city signage—covers sixteen and one-half blocks downtown, boasting several entertainment and nightlife venues, plus various seasonal festivals. Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres, stands one block outside the district in San Diego's East Village. Developed from 1867 onward, the Quarter includes ninety-four buildings erected during the Victorian Era, earning the neighborhood's listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Tourists flock there, and to San Diego generally, but you'll find no visitors in gaudy clothes or school bus tours stopping off at SFX.
Sitting behind his desk, inside the headquarters, CEO and cofounder Grant Mahoney frowned over his copy of the San Diego Tribune, finishing an article whose headline read "Asian Gang Shootout in Las Vegas." The details were sparse, aside from a report of seven dead and four in custody, detained as material witnesses to multiple murders. None were named, but the Tribune's anonymous reporter wrote that all involved were either Japanese or Chinese, theoretically connected to the Yakuza or Triads operating out of Hong Kong.
This appeared to be one time when what happened in Vegas wasn't staying there.
"Something catch your attention?" asked his visitor.
"Nothing to do with me," Mahoney answered, keeping to himself the thought that followed: But it may be tied to somebody I know.
Someone who ought to be arriving soon.
Mahoney had selected San Diego as the home for SFX in part because the city's climate ranked as second-best in the United States according to the Weather Channel and among America's top ten from Farmer's Almanac. Its temperature rarely dipped below 50° Fahrenheit in January or exceeded 78° in mid-August. Granted, there were times when thick "marine air" clouds besieged the coast, imposing "May gray/June gloom" interludes, but nothing that unduly troubled zoo inhabitants or tourists.
