‘Running a man deep inside is not like in the movies. There are no dead drops, no call signs, passwords… nothing of the sort. Some of that happens if we have a cop inside, but with a civilian, especially one who has a record, the protocol is decided by the detective and the insider.’
Bear raised his eyebrows in astonishment. ‘So Shattner just called when the mood struck him? Called him on Kirkus’s line?’
Rolando smiled thinly. ‘They had a secure protocol they followed. Calls at specific intervals, an untraceable number, safe words, danger words… but when a man is inside, his ability to communicate depends a lot on his circumstances.’
Broker eyed the journal that was now in front of the Deputy Commissioner. Bwana and Roger had been against informing the cops about the journal, but Broker had convinced them finally. ‘After all, we are helping Isakson, and they just might know something about his whereabouts.
‘Who had access to his intel?’
Chang stirred and fielded that question. ‘A secure network is established for those who need to know and it goes to all those. In this case, Kirkus’s reports went only to the boss.’ He nodded in Rolando’s direction.
Isakson shook his head when the other side of the table looked at him. ‘First time I’m hearing of Shattner. Bruce kept the JTF informed, but didn’t tell us the source.’ The rebuke in his voice was loud.
‘I’m sure the FBI doesn’t tell us everything it knows, Deputy Director,’ Rolando retorted. Isakson acknowledged this silently. Rolando and he got on well and the two of them had reduced the inevitable turf wars to a minimum.
Bwana brought the discussion back to Shattner. ‘So no one knows what happened to Shattner? Kirkus tell you anything? Surely some what-if scenarios were discussed with him.’
‘Kirkus told me he just dropped off the grid after the last bust. Didn’t respond to coded text messages, no calls, nothing. We had plans in place to extricate him and his kids if he was in danger, but that panic button never got pressed.’
‘He’s probably dead, isn’t he?’ Bear and Chloe spoke at the same time.
‘Yes. That’s a real possibility.’
‘Which means the gang knew he was a snitch… I wonder how they knew that?’ Roger mused.
Rolando glanced at Chang and Pizaka. ‘We’ve started looking into that. It won’t be quick and neither will it be clean.
‘Did he tell you anything else? How the gang was organized, their bases, how they communicated… all that stuff? My informants give me that kind of juice.’ Broker addressed his question to the cops.
Rolando shook his head. ‘We would have got to that, but all of us were under pressure to show results… and the focus was just on deals that we could bust.’
Pizaka spoke for the first time. ‘Of course the gang could have offed him just because they suspected he was a snitch. They don’t exactly follow due process.’
‘Kirkus, what about him?’
‘We’ll start there obviously,’ Rolando said with distaste. A dirty cop who fed the gang was his worst nightmare come true, and he hoped Kirkus wasn’t that.
‘Waste of time,’ grumbled Bwana when they’d left the meeting.
Broker shrugged. ‘We did what we had to and learnt that there was nothing to learn.’
He smiled suddenly. ‘Think Rog and you can go ask this Cruz and Diego?’
Cruz and Diego were no longer at the laundry.
Bwana and Roger had been watching it for three days, and they saw a lot of bruisers, but not the two they were seeking. The laundry had a regular clientele, most of them office workers, but for its location, it could have been busier.
Bwana yawned and worked the kinks out of his shoulders. ‘Those bruisers hanging about… if I was Office Man John Doe, I would stop coming to the laundry. Lots of other places in the city for laundry.’
Roger didn’t reply, just nodded, and they lapsed back to silence. On the fourth day, they were joined by Broker. ‘Making sure you aren’t sleeping on the job,’ was his comment, and he got flipped the bird by Bwana.
The laundry was in a long chain of stores, convenience stores, take-aways, exotic foods, salons, all of them busy but for the laundry. A week went by, and as the smell of a Chinese take-away filled the car, Roger broached it. ‘Doubt those guys are here. We’ve been watching 24/7, and we’ve seen all the gangbangers in the world but them!’
‘Mmm.’ Broker was thinking furiously. Soon after their meeting the cops, Cruz and Diego stopped using the laundry as their base. It was entirely possible that they had stopped using it long before, but Broker hated coincidences.
He looked at the Cyrillic lettering on a grocery store, its red-lighted signage casting a glow in the night sky. ‘Let’s do this another way,’ he said.
It took a couple of days to set up, two days when Chloe and Bear, itching for action, suggested hitting another 5Clubs business. Broker considered it; on the one hand, it would maintain the pressure on the gang who would be hurting now; on the other, a lull could relax their vigilance. ‘Let’s go with this first and see what comes of it.’
They met at a midtown hotel, its glass-fronted façade giving an air of respectability to the person they were meeting. That person had bought out all the rooms on the seventeenth floor and had his people stationed in the lobby, fire escapes and the service entrances. His people wore loose-fitting suits, looking like poorly dressed brawlers and bouncers, the bulges under their suits plain to see, but then they didn’t care if they blended in or not. Each floor had four elevators, but that day only one stopped on the seventeenth.
The four of them, Chloe staying back with Rocka and the kids, stepped out of the elevator and were accosted by six brawlers, three behind them, three in front. There were two more men at either end of the corridor, Uzis slung casually across their shoulders. Bwana and Bear were big, but each one of these men had at least a couple of inches and ten pounds on them. The bruisers in the front of them silently frisked them and led them down the corridor to a suite at the far end.
One of the Uzi-wearing gunmen knocked on the suite and, after precisely six minutes, swung it open and ushered them in.
The suite had a huge living room with floor-to-ceiling glass windows through which they could make out the spire of the Empire State Building. They didn’t have much time to dwell on the view because two more large men appeared and frisked them again silently and took away their phones.
Broker made himself comfortable on a sofa while the others ranged around the room, Bwana positioning himself next to one of the brawlers.
An Oriental girl came from an inner room carrying pots of tea, and went about making tea for them without asking their preference. He didn’t get to where he was by asking people politely, thought Broker.
Vasily Oborski made them wait for another half hour before making his entry. Dressed in a tan suit, his middle-aged but very fit form, thick brown hair and a lightly wrinkled face could have easily graced a men’s fashion magazine. The head of the Russian mob in the city seated himself opposite Broker and helped himself to a scone as the girl rushed to pour tea for him.
He regarded Broker over the rim of his cup, the wreaths of steam giving his face an otherworldly look. ‘Long time, Broker,’ he greeted him mildly.
Oborski had never been known to raise his voice.
His father had been sent to a Siberian prison for crimes against the state, leaving six-year-old Vasily to fend for a sick mother and four-year-old sister, in the bitter cold of Kodinsk.