The cruiser drove a block away and drew to a stop beside a Lincoln Town Car against which two figures were lounging, Tony and Eric. Roger and Bwana swapped vehicles with them and positioned themselves behind a row of parked cars, keeping the entrance to the street in view. At the far end, a similar-looking Town Car kept the exit in view, Bear and Chloe in it.
Broker did an initial pass of the grounds of the house, noting the armed guards with dogs patrolling the perimeter, swung the drone to the rear where the pool lay, its underwater lights splotches on the drone’s night vision, moved around the back, noting the garages, tennis courts, and then brought the drone to the front, to the large portico and tall wooden doors, not shut in the night.
He counted eight armed guards outside, four of them with dogs, and in the portico, three SUVs, the darkness hiding their make. He had seen a pickup truck in the rear standing alongside a tractor, both near a rear entrance, which he guessed was the service entrance and also a possible exit route for the gang boss.
He sent a text to Bwana and Roger, asking them to check the rear out, giving them directions to the exit.
‘The house seems to have twenty people in all, including Kelleher, a girlfriend — who seems to be seminude most of the time — house staff, and then the hitters. Ten of them, eight of whom patrol outside in the night, one acting as driver, and at any time there are three Porsche Cayennes that they use to ferry Kelleher to wherever he has to go to get his gang business done.’
Broker was reading from his notes in the late evening the next day as he grouped with the four of them, Tony and Eric relieving him on the drone, which was back in his truck.
They had spent the whole day monitoring the residence, Broker using the thick foliage of the trees as cover for the drone, Tony relieving him in spells while he rested.
Bear picked up the thread, ‘Kelleher went to a strip club at noon, an hour away, spent three hours and then returned and has been holed up in his house ever since. He took the three rides, him in the middle, and had six thugs with him in total.’ Chloe and he had followed the cavalcade once they’d exited the residence.
‘The interesting thing is he doesn’t use the phone much… he has incoming calls, but very few outgoing ones, and when he does, it’s all in monosyllables and one-liners. This is one paranoid SOB. They must have learnt something from Cruz and Hamm,’ Broker commented, stifling a yawn.
‘Let’s do this for two more days,’ Roger suggested. ‘Can your guys get us spare wheels? We don’t want to be having the same rides for three days.’
‘Do bears shit?’ Broker snorted. ‘He’s already got spares lined up.’
At the end of the third day, they had a few more variables in the picture; Kelleher spent a few hours at a small warehouse the second day, and on the third he went back to the strip joint. He randomly selected a Porsche to seat himself in each day, sometimes the lead vehicle, sometimes the rear, no particular pattern to his choosing. He was away from his residence for four hours a day, but those four hours began anytime from noon to mid-afternoon.
‘Those places are where he does business? A warehouse could be a neat cover for his drug distribution,’ Chloe thought aloud.
Bear rejected the idea. ‘Too obvious. Most likely the gang owns those joints, and he goes there to meet people or to put the fear of the gang in them.’
‘Right, question time,’ Broker announced. ‘Take him down at the residence or at one of those joints? Why not the street?’
They debated the options, keeping in mind that there would be non-principals about at all the locations and the size of the force at the other locations was an unknown.
Bwana gazed at an out-of-state Subaru passing them, the blonde in it giving him a second glance.
‘We don’t do the takedown,’ he said, staring at the Subaru’s plates.
They stared at him as if he’d sprouted wings and horns.
‘The Russians will do it for us.’
Chapter 42
Broker looked at him, dust particles bouncing off his dark skin, catching the sunlight, haloing him. He considered Bwana’s suggestion. Good idea. Why didn’t I think of it?
He mock-frowned at Bwana. ‘We thought you wanted to take them out yourself, grind them into fine powder, and blow that powder away. You sure you aren’t growing soft? How can we make it attractive to Oborski, though? While he disposed of Cruz for us, this will be like outright gang war, and while he’s not averse to it, he will need a sweetener.’
Chloe remembered the decoy cruiser they’d used. ‘If we tell him the cops will stand back? I guess they regard him as the lesser of the two evils?’
He acknowledged her with a salute. ‘What I was thinking. Of course, we will have to put it in a different way to the cops. The Russian mob is still a gang they have to go after. Let me make some calls. While the Commissioner has given us a free hand, I am sure he wants us to be as subtle as possible and not create mayhem and bloodbath on the streets.’
Getting the Russians to play a hand turned out to be easier than they thought.
Oborski met Broker and Bear in a car wash that wasn’t washing cars. It was thick with hard-eyed men with bulges under their shirts and jackets, who stared long at the two of them before a person called out from the office, allowing the two to progress.
Oborski was holding court in the shabby office, the gang boss relaxing in it as if it was the Great Kremlin Palace in Moscow, the Oriental girl incongruous in the surroundings, serving them tea. If you are surrounded by ex-Spetsnaz hard men, you can treat any place as a palace, Bear thought.
Oborski regarded them coolly over his cup, smiling sardonically. ‘You want us to do your dirty work, da?’
‘Just helping you get an edge, my boy,’ Broker replied in his plumiest accent. He, too, could posture.
‘Maybe we don’t need your help, tovarich,’ the Russian replied. They had been planning an attack on 5Clubs once Cruz had been eliminated, and Broker’s idea neatly fit in their plans, but he had to play hard to get. A gang boss wasn’t a yes-man.
They danced around for another hour before agreeing on a plan, Oborski shrugging when Broker warned him about innocents and collateral damage.
Oborski had wanted to mount an attack on the residence when Broker had shared the surveillance video with him, but Broker had dissuaded him from that. The girlfriend and house staff had no role to play and didn’t need to be endangered. Similarly the strip joint and the warehouse had been ruled out, at which Oborski had flung his hands up theatrically. ‘You want us to lift him in the air?’
‘Something like that.’
Broker nearly missed Kelleher’s departure from his residence the day of the takedown, his attention momentarily distracted by a young shapely woman — That must be New York’s Finest Bottom, he thought — walking past his window, and it was the growling of the engines on his laptop that brought his attention back.
Kelleher boarded the first Porsche and the other two swung behind him, scattering leaves and birds as they roared down the driveway, down the street, to the warehouse.
Behind them a tan Camry and a black Ford slipped in their wake and maintained a steady unobtrusive distance. A couple of lights later, four identical pickup trucks barreled past them, one split and cut in ahead of the lead Porsche, one slipped to their left, another to their right, in the neighboring lanes, and the last one slipped behind them.