The image of Lewis on the screen was not very new. It had been collected from the cameras of several strip clubs and bars Jenko had a stake in. The tapes couldn’t have been turned over to the police, even though Jenko would have liked nothing better than having the police solve this problem for him, protect his investment, his girls. They carried too much self-incriminating evidence for that.
They wouldn’t have been enough anyway. Lewis hadn’t been singled out by footage alone. It took the pooled capacities of a community of traders in contraband, sex most of all, steered by some of Jenko’s higher ups, to detect him. None of this data could be passed on to the police, for the same reasons the tapes couldn’t. The clubs would have been seized the next day and Jenko would have found himself a new home, in prison.
So he’d ordered his own investigation. Jenko’s men were all given simple instructions: whoever they talked to in the streets and clubs, whoever seemed like a candidate for the crimes, nudge things toward the dark, toward hookers and violence especially, and see what appeared. This came naturally to most of the men; the innuendo involved wasn’t so different from, say, selling drugs or girls. What made it even easier was that they shared in Lewis’s violent fantasies. Grittier versions, if anything.
The men could almost be themselves, then, so much so that sometimes they would forget that they were acting on orders at all. The difference was mainly one of restraint, namely, letting their own war stories be bested by the targets’. They had to let them emerge as the victors in recklessness, in contempt. This was more difficult than it sounded. They were used to winning that game. They were also told to convey a willingness to collude in whatever schemes the targets floated. This came much easier to them. Looking for an angle, that was just life.
They talked to dozens of false leads, men who seemed to have done plenty wrong, but not the particular wrong their boss was interested in: the beatings. Finally a promising incident occurred. One of Jenko’s men, Terry, got a strange reply to a standard question in a local dive. He tried to sell a bleary-eyed regular he recognized from the tapes on a hooker for the night. But the man didn’t just accept or decline. Instead he said he’d had his share of girls, and he couldn’t be less interested now. In whores? Terry asked him. Whores, yes, but more than that, the whole thing disgusted him now, sex itself. Which you really don’t hear.
“And what did Terry tell him?” Jenko asked.
“He let him rant for a while,” Aaron said, “about sex, money, porno. They got drunker. Eventually Terry got his name. So we checked him out.”
“Well?” Jenko ask.
“He rented a cargo van from our little fleet, out of Boston though, just a few months back. We had the girls look at that particular van, and Erin said, yeah, it had the same little dent in the door she remembered. Then we showed her the footage and said he looked right, though he’d had sunglasses and a baseball cap on then. She couldn’t be sure. But the other girls confirmed it was him.”
“So what will we do?” Jenko asked himself aloud.
“This is the thing. Terry kept encouraging him that night, about what he wished would happen to all those ‘disgusting’ people. Lewis started saying some strange stuff… He talked about wanting to give.”
Jenko laughed. “Give?”
“Give, yeah.”
Jenko peered at the image on screen, Lewis caught mid-stride, a leg hanging in the air. “He does have the look of money. Money hard done. His name, his father.”
“Leo, the trader.”
“I kept money with him at one time,” Jenko said. “He did well for me. Twenty-five percent, year on year. But I don’t think he or his son has anything much to give now. Everyone pulled out of that fund. Trust is everything — and Leo couldn’t be trusted anymore.”
“A half million is what he said.”
“That sounds like drunk talk to me. Bragging.”
“That’s not what we think.”
“Well, I suppose things could have improved for Leo. Sure. It’s possible. So then, how will the son ‘give’?”
“He didn’t know exactly,” Aaron said. “He kept talking about these porno awards—”
“In Vegas.”
“Yeah—”
“What about them?”
“He wished he could give those people something.”
“Not the money, I guess.”
“He wants them — I mean, the way he put it, he wants them to get some air.”
“Is that a joke? If it is, I don’t think I get it.”
“This is nuts, but Terry thinks he meant, like, halothane or BZ. Gas. At the ceremony. For the half mil.”
“Ah.” Jenko smiled and tapped the table twice with his middle and ring fingers. “You believe this.”
“Not to hurt anyone is what he said. Only to make them ‘see things.’”
“And exactly how gone was he when he said this? Or how gone was Terry, that’s what we should be asking.”
“I mean, it’s true, he did look like he hadn’t slept in a while.”
“The fantasies we have.”
“But he also sounded like he could mean what he said. Terry wouldn’t have bothered me with this otherwise.”
“And Terry’s very bright?”
“Look, we already know he kicked the shit out of all these whores. Isn’t that fucking crazy too? Why couldn’t he mean it?”
The two of them held a long look.
“So what did Terry say to him, after hearing all this?” Jenko asked finally.
“Nothing, of course. He just listened. Lewis had no idea he was basically talking to you. But we can get back to him. It’ll be easy to find him now, see if he’s really game to go through with this. And if it’s all bullshit, we’ll know. Nothing’s lost.”
“Five hundred thousand is actually not enough to fill an auditorium with an airborne agent, even just an incapacitator. There are the usual risks for us. Every incident, every event, brings another risk with it. And this one would be very large. The logistics, getting to all the vents without detection. But then, it is a life sentence for Lewis.”
“Probably.”
“And if you add the beatings, that’s more than life.”
“But we don’t want to touch those, right. A bunch of those whores are ours. It could lead them here.”
“Can you please stop calling them whores?”
“Girls, I mean.”
“Better. So then there’s the gas. Let’s talk to Leo’s little boy and check his nerve. Terry can handle it, if you feed him the information?”
“And if he’s looking for some time off.”
“Otherwise someone else. Somebody’s always looking.”
“So, halothane, BZ, what?”
“Do we actually need it? To make this work for us? If we have everything else set up and call in the anonymous tip just before, we could probably just pretend about the agent itself.”
“Oh. Well, I guess—”
“But check the labs. Talk to him first, of course, make sure this is real. And then, sure, we can think about doing exactly what we say this time. It would be easier to bury Lewis in a trial with everything being authentic. Trust, you know.”
29
Four tall steps and stagg was up on the dais, a maroon folio tied with raw leather string in his hand. Kames clasped Stagg’s shoulder and gave him a single deep nod as they passed each other near the lectern.
It surprised Stagg to see the auditorium as full as it was — at least three quarters — not just because of the arcane topic, or his lack of visibility in the field, but because of the tension surrounding the Institute lately, one he assumed would keep a crowd away. Maybe the turnout meant the full measure of that tension, great as it was, could only be felt by those with special knowledge. How many that was, he couldn’t tell.