“Are you Gregorio McDonald?”
“What the fock? Who the fock…?”
“Are you Gregorio McDonald?”
“I am Gregorio McDonald! Now get the fock...”
“You can’t come in. Please leave, and tell your boys in the Chevy to get out of the parking lot.”
“You get out of my fockin’ way, gringo. I wanna see Peter. He expectin’ me and when I tell him...”
“You have to leave.”
His face was crimson by now and he waved a finger in my face. “I gotta see Peter Rusanov! I got a business proposition for him! You let me in! Nobody tell me I can’t...”
“For the last time, Mr. McDonald. You have to leave.”
He screamed and screwed up his eyes. “Step aside or I fockin’...”
He got no further. He had come too close. I slammed the heel of my right hand into the tip of his jaw. He staggered one step back and fell, but by that time I was past him and running.
I knew I had three, maximum four seconds for the boys in the van to react. I got there as the side-panel door was sliding open. I could just make out a guy in denim with bare arms and an AK47 climbing out. I didn’t stop to think. I grabbed the door and put all my two hundred twenty pounds into slamming it closed again, biting deep into his forearms and his knee. He screamed with pain and dropped the assault rifle. I caught it before it hit the ground, took a large step to my right and emptied a short burst into the cab. Another step to my left took me back to the side door, which was six inches open with a denim leg and a disfigured bare arm hanging out. Inside I could hear raised, panicking voices. I shoved the cannon in and emptied the magazine. It took about three seconds, which when you count them out is a long time.
Like I said, you can do that in enclosed places.
When I was done I wiped my prints off the weapon and used the man in denim’s hands to smother it in his prints. Then I pulled him out and dumped him on the ground beside his rifle, and walked back to the entrance. The Botox Babe was standing by her man, rigid with terror and botulinum toxin. I hauled McDonald to his feet by the scruff of his neck and snarled at his woman, “Go away. Now.”
She reached in McDonald’s pocket, grabbed the keys to his Ferrari and ran. I dragged him inside and shoved him through the padded doors into the throbbing, flashing nightmare that was the bar. I escorted him through the manic, shouting, grinning crowds and up the wooden stairs to where I knew Rusanov would be sitting.
He watched me approach with McDonald and scowled.
“I toll you, no disturb. No let this piece of Mexican shit in.”
I nodded. “Yeah, but I thought you’d like to know that his boys just committed mass suicide in their Chevy van in the parking lot. One guy with an AK47 killed the five in the back, the two in the front and himself. This clown tried to force his way in and I had to break his jaw. I thought you might want to talk to him.”
For a long while Rusanov was as expressionless as the Botox Babe downstairs. Then he said, “All dead? In van?”
“Yeah.”
“Fingerprints?”
“All his.”
If volcanoes could laugh they’d laugh like Peter Rusanov. He roared, then exploded, turned to the guy on his right and spoke to him in Russian. Two of them got up and took McDonald away. Rusanov gestured at me.
“Sit! Sit here, near me, have drink, woman, you want coke? We talk. We talk about future for you. You have big future.”
He laughed a lot again and I sat beside him and told a girl with no more than a tray and a G-string that I’d have a whisky, straight up, no coke. He leaned forward and slapped my shoulder with a huge hand and glared at me.
“Tell truth, detail, what happen?”
I told him truth with detail and he listened carefully. The naked waitress came and placed a tumbler of whisky in front of me and went away with blushing cheeks. When I’d finished and pulled off half of my drink he signaled to one of his boys, said something in Russian and sent him away. Then he leaned over to me and spoke above the noise of the music.
“You are good boy, Special Ops. I like this. I have good job for you. You go home now. Take Clara if you like, or Zoe...” He laughed. “Or both! Have some party, relax. You been good boy tonight. Tomorrow you come back six PM. No more door for you. I have nice job for you. Nice job.”
“What about my pay?”
He looked away from me, like he wasn’t going to answer. I followed the direction of his gaze and saw his guy in the suit returning. He handed Rusanov a manila envelope. Rusanov looked inside and handed it to me.
“Special bonus, my thanks for your services tonight. Ten grand. Now go, rest, relax, have fun. I see you here tomorrow, in my office upstairs. Go. I go talk to Señor McDonald.”
I drained my drink and left, with ten grand in my pocket and a sick hollow feeling in my gut. I had no problem with killing the guys in the van, or what was going to happen to Gregorio McDonald, for that matter. I was pretty sure it was no worse than what he had done to many others. What was making me sick was my employer. I was working for evil, and that was bad.
Chapter Four
I didn’t take Clara or Zoe home. It’s not that they weren’t cute. They were. But I like to choose my own sleeping partners. And when I do, I like them to have a slightly wider vocabulary than, “Yes baby, right there, just like that baby.” Clara and Zoe were sweet kids, but I had a feeling that was about the reach of their conversation. Who knows though? Maybe they had complex views on world peace.
I drove my beat-up VW Golf home, slept four hours and rose at seven thirty. I spent the day training and doing some research into Bronx gangs, Russian and Albanian mobs and offshore accounts. At four PM I showered and changed my clothes, and drove back to the Mescal Club, thinking about something Sergeant Bradley had said to me one night in the Lacandon Jungle, on the border between Mexico and Guatemala.
We’d been lying among ferns on the banks of the Usumacinta River, eight miles northwest of Frontera Corozal. We were waiting for a riverboat. We had intel it was loaded with five hundred K of pure coke, a wholesale value in the States of about ten million bucks, but a street value of five times that.
We were there because Her Majesty’s MoD was doing a favor for their friends in the Pentagon, and their friends in the Pentagon were doing a favor for their friends in the Distrito Federal. We had no legal status there and what we were about to do amounted to murder, discretely sanctioned by governments who believed themselves above the rule of law.
When I said this to Sergeant Bradley, he’d snorted something like a laugh and said, “There are two things you need to remember in this world, Bauer: one, the most valuable commodity on this planet is not oil and it is not heroin. It is violence. He who has the most violence available to him, is the most powerful man on Earth. And the reason for that is the second thing you need to remember: the law we hold so dear is nothing more nor less than rules supported by the threat of violence. He who controls the violence, makes the law.”
Five minutes later we had strafed the decks of the riverboat with automatic fire and breached its hull with RPGs, killing a dozen men and sending fifty million bucks worth of cocaine to the bottom of the river.
That day, we were the law.