Blood Covenent, page 25
“Or the pair of terrorists who shot a couple of cops in Manhattan?” he whispered.
O’Toole furrowed his brow. “Yes, I recall, but—”
“Did you hear the news tonight about the Yankee’s game getting postponed due to a shooting incident?” continued the whisper.
The wolf stood just outside the light of the banker’s lamp. O’Toole was not certain it would matter if he saw the man’s face or not. The menace in his movements and voice suggested it might not do him any good.
“I saw the news tonight,” he stated carefully.
“Well, they had something in common,” explained Harvey from behind his chair.
O’Toole’s mind began to race through the possibilities. He wondered if these two were connected to the government. He decided to make his own threat. The kind he understood in an arena he could appreciate. “I’ll find out who you are.”
The wolf shifted his weight. His hands came to his sides, slowly opening and closing into fists.
“I’m afraid he’s beyond the law. You know, several people these days are beyond the law,” chided Harvey. “Aren’t you the least bit curious as to what those three events have in common?”
“I can come up with enough charges to make you two wish you’d never come here tonight,” he growled.
Harvey jerked the chair backward into the darkness and away from the illusory safety of the lamp. “I can come up with a couple myself. Let’s see, accessory to murdering a police office, accessory to assaulting a police officer and a federal officer, and then there is a myriad of weapons charges plus terrorism, and maybe even espionage. In addition, your firm has made fraudulent statements to banks, tax authorities, and insurance companies. I promise you ruin, and I can deliver it. Ever notice what happens to someone who becomes the target a federal probe? The government never goes away, and the government with its special prosecutors, Justice Department lawyers, and investigators from the alphabet soup floating inside the Beltway will spend billions going after you. You got billions to spend defending yourself?
“What do you think the news cameras, radio stations, newspapers, and who knows who else will do to your tidy little neighborhood and fancy estate? Think that will go down well with the class envy crowd? Think about the jokers running the Justice Department today, or think about what the White House could do to you?” Harvey paused before pushing the chair back to the desk.
For the first time O’Toole actually looked at the file. “I really don’t understand what this has to do with me,” he whispered.
The wolf paced sideways before his desk. “Those three incidents we spoke of are all connected to a car owned by the South Boston Commercial Property Corporation.”
O’Toole straightened himself into some more righteous posture. “There are ways to address such issues. Breaking into my home is not one of them.”
“Sure, for almost every other situation you’d be right and we wouldn’t be here,” whispered Harvey.
“But we don’t have time to spend going through the normal method of delay tactics and fighting subpoenas,” continued the pacing wolf.
“That’s what the law is for,” corrected O’Toole. He understood this game and he refused to play it.
“Besides the car they were all connected to, they had one other thing in common, counselor,” continued Harvey.
“I hardly think it matters.”
“Oh, it matters,” hissed the wolf. “It matters because each of these boys was trying to do a very nasty thing.”
O’Toole glowered at the pacing shadow. “And what was that?”
“Every last one of them was carting around a nuclear bomb, and they were either planning to, or were in the process of, trying to make it goboom . You want to be the rich lawyer protecting that? Do you think the standard rules of evidence might get tilted a bit if one of those babies goes off?”
O’Toole was quickly compiling everything he knew about South Boston Commercial Property Corporation. He remembered the file, and the odd manner it had been set up. There were accounts with a seemingly unending supply of money, but he never really knew where the money came from, and he had no idea who controlled the accounts. “But you caught those people,” he protested.
“Not all of them,” said the wolf.
O’Toole considered the shadow. “Not all of them?”
“Do you have any idea how many people will get killed if one of these things goes off inside New York City? What do you think the fallout will do to your nice lawn and trees? Think you’re immune from the radiation poisoning where your hair falls out and you go blind? They’ve tried to detonate three of them so far. We don’t know how many of them there are,” explained Harvey.
“Of course, if you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll come back and cut your heart out,” whispered the wolf. Both Harvey and O’Toole probed the darkness. Maybe Harper was a littletoo convincing.
O’Toole sat back in his chair. He fished through the pieces of paper on his desk. There was a paper and electronic trail that led nowhere. It was designed to run right into the attorney client relationship and its cloak of silence.
“You’ve been busy,” he muttered.
Harvey stood carefully back and continued. “Yes, I’ve been very busy. Now, you have a choice to make. You have a professional responsibility to your client, but you also have a responsibility as an officer of the court. There are four dead cops so far. There is maybe twice that number still in the hospital. We’ve been lucky.”
“So far,” echoed Harper.
“What do you want?” he snapped.
“The files on these scum bags,” replied Harvey.
“I can’t get that for you—”
“Sure you can,” said Harper sarcastically. “Turn on your PC and hook into your fancy DSL line. You should be connected to your office’s backbone in about thirty seconds.”
“There are passwords—”
“You’re using something like WestLaw’s lawyer manager? That’s based on Oracle or SQL Server. What are you running? NT or UNIX servers?” he snapped, quickly analyzing where the lies might lead.
“I’m not—”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know,” snapped Harper. “You’re the O’Toole in O’Toole, Masters and Associates. You don’t spend half a million bucks without running it by the money people. If someone wanted to spend half a million bucks of my money, I'd want to know why. Start logging in.”
Louis Edwards had told Harvey that Harper was the best. Behind the warrior façade, there was a mind speeding along. Harper easily picked apart the technical issues and developed a strategy to handle wavering problems. He understood the lies O’Toole began to spout with hesitation. The lies seemed to anger the man further. His fists clenched and unclenched with a rhythmic pulse. Harvey was not sure he controlled the situation anymore. Edwards had warned him,I’ve let a wolf loose amongst the sheep. Beware how you use him.
O’Toole opened his mouth to protest, only to find a finger flashing from the shadows into the light and white glint of teeth snapping from the darkness. “Do it!”
Harvey felt O’Toole startle in response to Harper’s rage. He held the chair steady.
The wolf was closer than ever. O’Toole was accustomed to fighting his battles with legal briefs, precedents and carefully crafted arguments. He could face judges in their chambers and public attorneys with reason and thought. He could expound about the law, dissect the weakness in his own arguments, and refute his opponent’s attacks. But his weapons were words and thought. The barely bridled animal prowling around his office would inflict whatever pain and terror necessary to achieve his goal.
The hand reached out and ripped the green shaded banker’s lamp away from the desk. The cord snapped from the outlet built onto the floor. The lamp tumbled though the air to smash into the wall. Now, only the muted lights from the stereo and the figurine cabinet accented the room. The wolf’s outline became murkier, and O’Toole wondered where he could run. From somewhere in the darkness came the definitivesnap of a lock-back knife locking open. He imagined he could see a glint from the serrated blade.
“You wouldn’t dare,” he hissed.
Harvey realized he had lost control of the situation. Harper was moving through the office, and he was unsure where he was headed. He considered stopping what he started, but it had gone too far. They were committed once they displayed the file on the South Boston Commercial Property Corporation. The breaking of the figurine cabinet’s glass was the next sound they heard.
“These must cost a lot of money,” came a ghostly voice from across the office. A dark hand reached into the cabinet and plucked a delicate looking deer carving from the royal blue velvet. “Would you like me to make enough noise to get your wife in here? Or should I visit your youngest daughter?” whispered the wolf. No one could see him close his eyes and ask forgiveness in the gloom.
Harvey felt his own blood run cold. He had no stomach for rough stuff. Assaulting women crossed a line he did not want to see. He remembered the first time he had dealt with Harper—five or six years ago. Harper had been hired to go after a kidnapper called Henderson. By the time he and Larry caught up to Harper, there was not enough left of Henderson to reasonably scrape off the pavement. It was the first time he had encountered Louis Edwards, and had run into immense the power behind a national security tag on a file found in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Edwards made a single phone call and walked away with Harper safely in his care.
“You wouldn’t dare,” snarled O’Toole. “You’re Federal law enforcement of some sort. You’re bluffing.”
The deer carving came to end with acrunch. Harper ground the carving into powder and shards beneath his boot’s heel. “I’m not a Federal officer,” Harper explained. “I don’t even exist. What’s your comfort compared to lives of thousands or even millions? Not much.”
O’Toole considered this new tidbit. “What are you?” he genuinely wondered. Harvey was beginning to ask the same question.
The answer came quickly and honestly. “I’m this country’s enemies’ worst nightmare. I was trained to accomplish one mission.”
“What mission?”
“The current one,” he replied quietly. The specter straightened. “What will it be? Shall I start making noise, or do you start working?”
“You’re bluffing.”
Harvey closed his eyes.
Harper streaked across the room performing the hardest kick in his inventory. An offensive sidekick can be compared to catching the blunt end of a battering ram. The figurine case shattered then sagged sideways. The cherry wood snapped like kindling and the thin glass splintered across the floor. The figurines slid, snapped and crashed across the room. The crash reverberated before the night’s silence rolled back into the room.
The intercom buzzed a few seconds later.
O’Toole flipped down the button and explained hastily. “I dropped something. Nothing to worry about, just go back to sleep. Something’s come up.” O’Toole pressed his lips together and turned to his computer terminal. A minute later, the screen leaped to life.
“Make sure we get everything,” cautioned Harper. “I wouldn’t want to have to come back.”
Fifteen minutes later they left Harrison Arnold O’Toole trussed to his office chair. His arms, hands, and legs pinioned by two-inch wide duct tape. They clambered into the car where Darby waited. Harvey tapped Harper on the shoulder. “You wouldn’t have—”
Harper knocked his hand aside and snarled, “You never know what I might do! I’m not even sure, but making war on women is not what I want to do. Don’tever put me in that situation again.”
* * * *
Feldman slammed his fist on the desk. Two televisions were silently replaying scenes from Yankee Stadium and illustrating the stark terror on people’s faces as they ran from the gunman. No one was asking why the NYPD seemed to be on the scene so fast, but eventually someone would begin to put it together. The lid was beginning to pop off their carefully crafted lies. It was only a matter of time before the White House decided to start leaking the story and position itself to assign blame.
“What were you thinking about?” he snapped.
Larry Wheeler sat in the other chair. It was late, his head throbbed, and a very ugly bruise worked its way down the side of his face.
“Harvey came to you—”
“I don’t want to hear about Randall!” He bit off the words.
Larry kept his head still. Just talking brought waves of pain through the Tylenol 3. He shifted in the chair. “That’s the whole problem, Lou. You don’t want to give him credit. But he was right.”
“I said I didn’t want to hear about him. The HRT could have taken those two down, and we would have had some prisoners. Buford was out for blood and he got it. Two more dead!”
Larry wondered if it would have been better off to let Yankee Stadium incinerate. “The HRT couldn’t have done any better. We had a whole stadium to cover. It’s a lot of real estate.”
“You would have had more people.”
“And no one in charge,” added Larry. “The HRT and the NYPD would have been at each other’s throats. Why don’t you just claim victory and forget about it?”
“You’re done for now Wheeler. I’m taking you off this case and putting you on medical leave. I expect people to be loyal, and you’ve embarrassed the Bureau. Turning over unproven theories to thelocals. ”
Larry shrugged. He had a concussion, a couple of stitches, and a headache that occasionally blurred his vision. He got to his feet. There was a police sergeant waiting for him by the elevators to drive him home. He staggered a moment as the room swam.
“One last thing,” said Feldman.
Larry cocked a crooked face in his direction. “What?”
“Where is Randall?”
Harvey was off on one his nighttime raids. He had always been scrupulous to shield Larry from his clandestine activities. He knew one thing—Harvey was pursuing a lead and no one would really care how he came to the evidence. The Bureau was not interested in prosecution. They wanted to stop this before something terrible happened.
Larry found his mouth suddenly dry. “I don’t know where he is.”
“You hear from him, you tell him to report in,” ordered Feldman.
“Sure, Lou, anything you say.”
CHAPTER 26
New York City
Friday, July 16, 1999
9:00 A.M. EDT
Harvey worked his way through scrambled eggs, sausage, toast, a short stack of pancakes, coffee, and juice. He had spent maybe two hours sleeping, the rest of time he went over the South Boston Commercial Property Corporation file. The legal pad next to his napkin was a maze of notes, doodles, and potato chip stains.
Harper managed some orange juice and a bagel. Sleep came hard once they returned to the hotel. He was too charged up from the day’s activities. He ended up watchingAdvise and Consent on the American Movie Classics channel and drifted off wonderingwhatever happened to shame?
Hayes ended up with an omelet and some pancakes. He was finishing off the last of his coffee. Of the three, only he had a sound sleep. A Marine Corps NCO learns to sleep whenever and wherever he can. The one-hundred-ten-dollar-per-day room at the taxpayer’s expense was certainly much more comfortable than some swamps he had visited.
Harvey had been through the file three times, and what he found did not intrigue him as much as what he failed to find. The condominiums at Trump Tower were not listed in the property sheet. There were five vehicles, three land parcels inside the five boroughs, and a couple of bank accounts, but Suite 5310 was missing. At first, he thought he missed it when he drifted off around four this morning. He looked up from his eggs and said, “It’s not here.”
“What’s that?” asked Hayes.
Harper’s anger had cooled since they left Harrison Arnold O’Toole bound like summer sausage. Someone should have found him by now and there would be a couple of police cars gathered along the half-moon drive. If the evidence technicians found physical evidence and checked it against the National Crime Information Center computers, they would run into the national security blockades established by Louis many years ago. Somewhere along the line Louis and Jonas would get an email indicating something happened.
“Trump Tower condo,” he replied reaching for his cell phone. He punched up Larry’s number and waited.
It rang a couple of times before switching over to his home phone.
“Hello,” came the female voice.
Harvey smiled across the table. “Cindy, Harvey Randall here.”
The tentative voice turned snowstorm cold. “What do you want?”
Harvey sighed. He had made another woman’s list. “Cindy, I need to talk to Larry. His cell phone switched over to your line.”
“Larry’s asleep,” she answered defensively. “He came home around three this morning. His jaw is stitched up and he’s been dropped off whatever he was working on. Somehow, whenever you show up my husband gets in trouble.”
“Cindy—” He closed his eyes. “Look, I didn’t do anything to Larry. I gave him some information and he acted on it.”
“Feldman—”
“Feldman’s an idiot!” snapped Harvey.
The phone crackled again and a groggy-sounding Larry said, “Hello?”
“Larry!”
“Harvey, eh, Cindy I’ll handle this.” The other receiver slammed down.
“Sorry about this,” mumbled Harvey.
“Don’t worry about it, Harvey. You saved a lot of people yesterday. We got in a lot of trouble doing it, but—” Larry sounded tired.
“Larry, I won’t keep you. I need a search warrant.”
“Can’t help you, Harvey. I’m as popular as you are right now. I’ve been sent home on medical leave. Feldman was really pissed off about not being included in the Yankee Stadium thing.”
Harvey looked across the table at Harper and Hayes. “That’s okay. I’ve got some other resources.”
“Harvey, Feldman is looking for you,” warned Larry.
