When she hauled herself up, she looked in disbelief as her Cool Customer lived up to his nickname. Instead of backtracking for his carbine, he turned his back on Nikki and strolled toward the waiting escape boat with out so much as a glance at her. He knew what they both knew. It was impossible to get off an accurate shot with the river tossing them about in a hurricane. But at the bottom of the gangplank, Heat braced and fired.
Zarek half turned but kept his stride. Another yaw of the dock as it strained against its pilings sent the HK skimming back her way. She grabbed it, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
It was empty.
The mercenary gave her a smug nod and laughed as he hopped into the black Zodiac. Nikki started weaving toward him with her Sig up. Braun pointed to something down inside the boat, and his accomplice, whom she recognized as the man she had shot with the nail gun in Chelsea, reached over with his unbandaged hand and brought up a fresh G36.
Proving she could be a cool one herself, Nikki stopped and holstered her weapon. That confused Zarek Braun as he took the HK from his partner. In the moment he hesitated to wonder what the hell that was about, Heat underhanded the flash-bang grenade she had brought along in the backpack and lobbed it into the Zodiac.
Back at the Twentieth Precinct, just before dawn, Heat stood in the faint light of Observation-One staring through the glass at her prisoner. The shiver she felt wasn’t from the still-damp hair tickling the back of her neck. It came from watching a paid assassin sit under the lunar wash of fluorescents with such inverted tranquility he resembled a wax replica of himself at Madame Tussauds.
She could have easily killed him hours before on that dock. Even with all the heaving and pitching, Nikki had the drop on him, and at that range, she had three nines left she could have parked in his head, with one left for his boat wrangler, if he’d gotten any ideas. Who knows? She might have worn a medal for it, cashing the chit of a double cop killer.
But Heat wanted this prick alive.
And she got him, flash, bang, boom.
Now came the harder part, and she knew it: trying to get a mercenary with psyops training to give up the man who hired him. Heat assessed him again and quietly composed herself, becoming mindful of her breathing. The room still had a tang from the old days when they allowed smoking in there, and her own clothes — the same ones that she had changed out of and balled into her file drawer the other day — weren’t the freshest, either. But they were dry.
Sandy had moved on in the overnight after making landfall near Atlantic City. The former hurricane was now somewhere over Pennsylvania, but the city was still reeling, and through the door behind her, Nikki heard the early-morning bustle of the precinct’s forces in response mode.
She had a different job to do. And it was time to jump in.
Zarek Braun’s concentration never left the spot he had chosen under the mirror. Not even when he heard the sucking sound as Heat came through the air lock that buffered the observation room from Interrogation-One. “Something different about you this morning, Mr. Braun.” She ducked her forehead toward his and squinted into a playful face. “What is it, now? Is it the orange jumpsuit? Not as flattering as your black phony SWAT outfit, is it? No, something else…Oh, I know. The manacles. You are incarcerated.” She tossed her files onto the tabletop and took her place. “Just as you will be for the rest of your life. Which may end up being shorter than you had planned.”
That brought his eyes off the wall. She winked. “That’s a topic yet to explore. First, I want to ask you some questions. Number-one is sort of a public safety issue. Are there any more members of your urban black ops cadre out there? Because I would sure like to get them off the street.” His gaze drifted front again. “That’s OK, because we’re finding out lots about that from your boat skipper in the other room. I just thought I’d give you a chance to get ahead of the rush for leniency from cooperative goodwill.”
She could have put Braun and his Zodiac captain, Seth Victor, in the same interrogation box together to play them off each other. Her decision, though, was that the Cool Customer would have intimidated his underling into silence. So she went with divide and conquer. Maybe Victor didn’t know as much as Braun, but his paranoia about getting sold out might loosen him up. This one would be a challenge, though; she knew that before she came in.
“Look, let’s keep it real. We both know you’re going to try to stonewall here. And, unlike you, we don’t go for torturing our prisoners. Although, I have thought of it, Zarek.” Addressing him by his first name brought a tiny flex to his mouth. “Not so much a thought, as a fantasy.” Heat brought up a hand to count off fingers. “Let’s see, you killed my captain. You killed a patrol officer. You killed Reese Cristóbal. You killed Fabian Beauvais, too, didn’t you?” She waited. The Cool Customer remained passive. “And you also killed Jeanne Capois. And the old man she kept house for. Look: out of fingers. Am I leaving anybody off?”
He seemed amused by some private joke. Then he spoke. “You have lovely eyes. Bedroom eyes.” His words came softly in a Polish accent, which, under other circumstances, Heat might have found sexy.
“And you know what they see ahead for you? Let me lay it out. New York does not have a death penalty, I’m sure you’ve thought that through. But guess what we’ve been busy doing. Letting our pals at Homeland Security do some checking on you. We like to cooperate. Not just with each other but with our allies in foreign lands. A little birdie told me about Operation Dream Catcher. You were a bad boy in the desert. A very bad boy. Let me ask you something. If our friends in Afghanistan want an extradition so they can repay you in all the ingenious ways they can imagine, what do you think I should tell them?”
A minuscule flare of his nostrils. A scalp flex that moved his ears. Small tells gave away his unease and let her know she’d had some impact. So Nikki tested it for the money. “I want you to tell me about Keith Gilbert. I want to know everything. I want you to tell me why Keith Gilbert wanted Fabian Beauvais dead. I want you to tell me how you killed Fabian Beauvais for Keith Gilbert.”
She gave him an opening to respond, but he didn’t take it. “Did you notice there’s a theme here? Keith Gilbert. Wealthy men have no problem hiring men like you to do their scut work. Keith Gilbert even told you to kill me, didn’t he? And you tried. Twice. Oh, and how did that work out for you, Zarek?”
Heat sat facing him, waiting. And waiting some more. She stood. “Fine. You keep it zipped like that, being all cool. Styling your orange duds and your bracelets and chains. Know what I’m going to do? Go Google the weather forecast for Kabul.”
When she left Interrogation, two and a half hours later, she found Rook waiting for her in the ob room. “These guys are hard core,” he said. They watched Seth Victor picking at his wrist bandage through the magic mirror. His face was still swollen from the broken nose Heat had given him in Chelsea. The effect made him appear even more stoic than his unit leader in the next box. “You know, in my prior, somewhat nutty ramblings about roving bands of rogue black ops mercs out on the streets, dishing out justice, I always figured it would be a little more satisfying to meet them. Like they’d have some swagger and élan.”
“You mean like an action figure?”
“Exactly.” And then he realized what she’d said and turned to her. “Was that a shot?”
“If the beard fits.”
Anyway, these guys are just punks with army-surplus gear. Lethal enough, I grant you, but swagger? Élan? I think not.” Inside the box, Victor turned toward Rook. Even though they both knew better, it seemed like a reaction. “I think we should find another room.”