‘Guess that memo of yours reached an angel,’ he told Broker.
Broker held his hand up, gesturing him to be quiet, but they heard nothing, saw nothing. The tree line was thirty feet away, the trees tall and dense enough to hide an army in the dark. The shots could have come from anywhere, but Bwana worked out angles from how the bodies lay, and looked high and to his right.
He saw nothing and hadn’t expected to see anything. They hadn’t heard the shots, so not only was the shooter using a suppressor, he was a distance away.
He glanced at them and saw they were looking at him expectantly. He shook his head. ‘Too dark, too far.’
He grinned, his teeth flashing white in the night. ‘Looks like our time has not yet come. Maybe hell is too full, or even they’ve rejected us. There’s still time for me to land a girl.’
They waited in silence for another twenty minutes, but their rescuer hadn’t lost his shyness.
Chloe sagged against Bear, the adrenaline leaving her in a rush, her brain giving up processing their survival. ‘Is it him?’
‘Who knows? But who else could it be?’
Roger hopped to Hamm’s body and knelt beside it. ‘I don’t know about you guys, but a return to the city and a warm shower sounds great to me.’
They joined him, two of them turning the bodies over, the remaining searching the bodies for a knife, any sharp edge to cut through the ties. An hour of grunting later, they stood panting, flexing their wrists and ankles. Roger checked Broker’s head and temple, which was caked with blood, thin drops sliding down his face, parted the hair to see a horizontal gash, not deep enough to cause any damage, but would get infected if unattended.
They washed his face with a can of water they found in the truck, bandaged it using strips made from tearing Bear’s shirt, pocketed the phones and guns they found on the hitters, and set out on the rutted road back to the city.
Bwana and Roger, having been to the forest several times, guided Broker back to the highway, where they joined the rush to the city, a magnet sucking up surrounding traffic.
‘Loads of numbers on this.’ Chloe looked up from Hamm’s phone. ‘It doesn’t have any names in the directory, just initials, and there aren’t many of them. There are several numbers in the recent call history.’ She frowned at Bear. ‘Make any sense to you?’ She thrust the phone at him.
Bear studied it and saw a pattern of incoming calls from a number, followed by one or two outgoing calls to that number, repeated every two days with a new originating number. He looked at the growing dawn, the traffic falling silently behind them as Broker cut a swathe through it.
‘Disposable numbers. They probably buy a batch and change the number regularly. Hamm knows the new number only when he gets a call. They probably have some rule about the number of calls made to the number.’
‘Has to be Scheafer. No one else would be this paranoid.’
‘Why can’t it be the mole?’ Roger argued.
‘It could,’ Broker replied, ‘but Scheafer is a control freak, and I would be surprised if his chapter heads had direct contact with the rat. Is there any number that looks like one of those messaging numbers?’
Bear read it off and got a nod from Broker. ‘Sounds like the number we got off the gangbangers in Arizona.’
A thought struck him. ‘How long ago was the last incoming call?’
‘Eight hours back. No other calls since then.’ Bear went through the text message folder and found it empty.
Broker turned on the radio, searched for a station, gave up and growled at Bwana, ‘Find a news station.’
They listened to the bulletins in silence, getting Broker’s drift. ‘Nothing. The cops must have hushed up the takedown. Now the million-dollar question is, will he call?’
No call came by the time they approached Central Park.
Broker used a hitter’s phone to call Pizaka. ‘Yes, obviously I’m alive,’ he replied, rolling his eyes. ‘Isakson, Rolando?’
‘That bad?’ We’ll be there in forty minutes.’
‘Fucker didn’t want to say anything about those two.’ He honked savagely at a trucker that cut in ahead of him. He overtook him and stuck his finger out, flooring the gas. ‘Says we should meet for a debrief. As if we were planning to fucking disappear in thin air. We called him, for crissakes.’
Bwana met the eyes of the others in the mirror and winked. Broker’s high regard for law enforcement, especially those who insisted on going by the book, was legendary.
One PP was crawling with cops when they arrived, many of them pushing paper, killing time, to have a look at them. Pizaka met them, his eyes going over them swiftly, lingering on the strips around Broker’s head. ‘You want to tidy up?’
They shook their heads impatiently, wanting to know the condition of the cop and the FBI man. Pizaka led the way to a conference room, which had three other occupants. Chang rose, greeted them, and introduced them to the other two.
Commissioner Forzini and Director Murphy looked like they hadn’t slept for a while. Sleep was a luxury they couldn’t afford, not when their respective number two men had been shot by a gang.
‘Tell us,’ Broker demanded, waving away their enquiries.
Forzini looked at Murphy, giving him the lead. ‘Isakson took two in the shoulder. He’s come out of surgery and should recover. Fully.
‘Rolando was less lucky. The three shots he took; one missed his heart, the other two went through his lung. He too was operated on; the doctors have done all that they could. Now it’s down to him, his body, his mind. He has a fighting chance, they say.’
Bwana’s eyes were on Forzini’s fists as he spoke, opening and clenching, his steady voice not masking his rage.
‘Why did you hush up the attack?’
‘We didn’t, but we didn’t share all the details either. The media and the public know there was a gang attack in a hotel. What they don’t know is who was involved, and we have managed to control that. Luckily no guest or onlooker was able to see what went down exactly. We were hoping you guys would perform a miracle and get back alive…’ Murphy replied. Murphy had come through the ranks, starting his career as a field agent, and little fazed him, but even he couldn’t conceal his pain and anger.
‘Lay it all out for us,’ he commanded.
Broker laid it out for them, Pizaka and Chang making extensive notes as he elaborated, stopping him several times, getting him to repeat.
He didn’t tell them everything.
They had come up with a plausible escape story, embellishing and glossing over some details on their way back, the least they could do to keep the ghost invisible. He saw Pizaka’s and Chang’s eyes go over them, assessing them, as he described how Bwana and Roger had launched themselves at their captors as soon as the truck doors had opened, and in the scuffle, Bear and Chloe had slipped out and overpowered the remaining. They were all martial arts experts in various disciplines — Broker wasn’t, he regarded himself as a gray matter expert — and their story held.
‘We’ll want to take separate statements from all of you.’ Pizaka’s shades tilted at them.
‘The shooter is dead?’ Forzini asked hopefully, his lips twisting briefly in a grim smile when Broker nodded.
‘Bodies are in the van in the parking lot below.’
Forzini looked at Chang, Broker tossed the keys to him, and once he’d left, Broker asked the Commissioner, ‘How did they do it?’
‘The gang probably owns the hotel through a shell company, to launder their money. We’re still sifting through the chain of ownership. They closed down the lobby and reception for the day on the pretext of a film shoot, and then it was like stealing candy from a child. We’ve taken the manager and other staff into custody and are questioning them, but we doubt any of them are involved.’