Chapter16
Berkner paced the space between the computer banks like an expectant father, pausing at one station or the next to get a more up to date report – everything appearing to move too slowly for his mood.
“Don’t we have something more current?” he shouted, but to no one in particular.
No one had an answer, except some vague voice far at the other end of the large room, which mumbled, “Working on it.”
“Don’t we have anybody on the ground yet?” Berkner asked.
“Yes, we caught up with the cab driver when he got back to Penn Station,” another voice said.
“And?”
“And he gave us the address where he dropped off the suspects.”
“Did you set up surveillance – satellite, remote listening?”
“We tried, sir,” still another voice said.
“What do you mean you tried?”
“It’s a dead spot. Anything we use seems unable to penetrate that block.”
“Are you telling me they have suppressing technology there – in the middle of the fucking ghetto?”
“It would seem so, sir.”
“Get some fucking agents in there. I want to know what the hell is going on.”
*************************
Ponci opened his eyes.
A streak of bright sunlight sliced across the ceiling like a blinding gash.
A shadowy shape came between and it. Sara’s sad face come into focus above him. She looked as weary as he felt, her gaze filled with mingled emotions: relief, concern, even rage – as if she had feared losing something valuable that had nothing to do with Ponci’s recovery so much as getting her revenge.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Like I’ve been run over by a train,” he said. “Where am I?”
“Some place safe.”
“No place is safe,” he mumbled. “I don’t even remember coming here.”
“What do you remember?”
“Getting on the bus, vaguely getting off again, and getting into a cab.”
“We’re in Newark. I got you here by cab from the train station.”
Ponci stiffened.
“Then we’re not safe,” He said, and tried to sit up, only to have the intense pain in his side drive him back down.
“Don’t move for awhile,” Sara said. “The doctor said you shouldn’t move.”
“We have to move. They know we are here, and they will come to get us.”
“You mean they know we are here?”
“If they saw us at the station, they do,” Ponci said.
“We don’t know anybody saw us.”
“We can’t afford to take that chance. You don’t know these people. They’re probably outside watching right now.”
“If they’re out there, why aren’t they coming in?”
“Because they need to know we have what they want.”
“But we don’t. Not yet.”
“True. But we can’t go get the stuff if they’re watching us.”
“Sleep a little,” Sara said, patting Ponci’s arm. “We still have some time before the delivery comes.”
“One question,” Ponci said.
“Just one, you need rest.”
“Why exactly are you doing all this?”
“All what?”
“Keeping me alive.”
“You know why,” she said. “I need you alive.”
“Like hell you do. You have the stuff they want. You can make your own deal without me.”
“I’ll have the package,” she said, settling slowly on the foot of the bed. “I’ve already send some of my friends to retrieve it.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Ponci said, struggling to sit up.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting up.”
“The doctor said you shouldn’t.”
“If I don’t, your friends are dead.”
“They know what they’re doing.”
“They’re no match for the ones that are looking for us,” Ponci said, finally managing to get his legs off the side of the bed. He felt cold and weak, but the pain in his side had subsided from before – no doubt due to pain killer the doctor had given him. “Now get me my clothing – and my gun.”
“If you go, I go.”
“No, it’s too dangerous.”
“If not, then you don’t go either. I need you.”
“For what?”
“To kill the people who ordered you to kill my brother.”
“That’s a tall order,” Ponci said. “We don’t know exactly who they are.”
“We know one, and we can make him tell us who the others are.”
“There are a lot of fingers in this pie,” Ponci said. “The best we can hope for now is to get out of this with our lives.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It might have to be,” Ponci said, then took a deep breath as he pushed himself off the bed and stood.
“I told you you’re not going without me,” Sara said, rising to confront him, her chest against his chest.
“All right,” he said. “But you’re going to do exactly what I tell you when I tell you.”
“That’s fine.”
“Now all we have to do is to get to that package before the fire works start.”
*************************
Berkner was furious.
Everything was going wrong, tracking satellites could not be reconfigured to focus on the area of Newark he needed to have them. More conventional resources did not exist in that part of Newark, except for those deployed at the train station, and these were slow to relocate to where the suspects were.
Access to private security cameras in the area also posed a problem, partly because there were too few of them, and partly because most of those that existed were in the business district or around the fortress-like college or wealthy development.
The blocks into which the suspects had gone remained as they had been since the 1967 riots, a wasteland of empty lots, or aging tenements – with a population hostile to police of any sort.
“We have to be careful when we move units into that area,” one of his people said. “Anything that remotely looks like a police operation triggers a lock down.”
“You make it sound like they have an organized military force in there,” Berkner said.
“In some ways, there is,” the man at the computer terminal said. “Many of these people are the children or grandchildren of the old Black Panther movement. They are very suspicious of police, and they’ve organized a kind of neighborhood guerilla movement. They watch out for what happens on their blocks and let others know when something isn’t right.”
“And we don’t have penetration? No undercover people we can rely on?”
“The local police might,” the man said. “But not any federal agencies. The DEA and ICE do operations there, but it’s more like Vietnam than an American city. We go in – based on some intelligence – and then we get out again.”
“Well, we need people in there,” Berkner said. “So tap whatever resources you need.”
“And what do I tell them?”
“That it’s a terrorist threat. Use Homeland Security as a cover.”
“That will trigger other things,” the man told Berkner. “Someone will report something to somebody.”
“But hopefully not until after we got what we want,” Berkner said. “Get our people in there, too, but keep them back, let them react only if there is movement. I want our people on them when and if those two come up with the package.”
“What then?”
“We verify the contents, and then clean it all up.”
“You mean kill them?”
“I mean do what we should have done already. Just do it.”
***************************
Sara pulled back the canvas cover from over the Honda Civic as Ponci – dressed in jeans, sneakers and a hooded sweat shirt – leaned against the alley wall.
Around them, old style metal trash cans from an age gone by rusted away into dust side by side with their plastic but already dilapidated replacements, trash spilling out from the tops. A dim light illuminated the alley door through which they had just come. A stream of slightly brighter light glowed from above, filtering down from the gap between buildings and the array of fire escapes that hung from each of the two buildings. At one end, the two buildings seemed to come together to form a back wall. At the other end, an old spike-topped metal gate blocked access from the street, a gate nearly as rusted as the trash cans but with a relatively new silver colored lock dangling from its hasp.
“Whose car is this?” Ponci asked.
“My brother’s,” Sara said, folding the canvas with the reverence she might have a flag dragged over a veteran’s coffin. “He left it behind when he joined the service. He told me I could use it. But I never had the heart to use it much. I guess I always figured he would need it when he came home. He just never came home, at least not to stay.”
She slid behind the wheel and motioned for Ponci to climb in the other side. He shook his head.
“I’d rather drive,” he said.
“You’re in no condition to drive. Besides, I know these streets. You don’t. Get in.”
For a moment, Ponci swayed, still too hazy to make sense of anything, yet this told him enough to suggest she was right. He nodded, and then staggered to the car, pulling at the car door handle until it opened, and then he slid into the plush low seat.
He squinted to see through the tinted windows. Above him, the fire escaped loomed like stiff strings to a mechanical spider’s web, covering brick face of buildings already nearly a century old.
In his haze, he imagined them floating in time, unable to fix any particular historic period – so little had changed from the view he had now. Latinos and blacks had settled where once Italians and Jews had been, and now, new ethnics from the Middle East were slowly filtering in, bringing with them customs as alien to America as the customs of his Italian ancestors had been way back when.
He closed the door. Sara turned the key. The engine rumbled and shook the car.
Then with clear experience, Sara engaged the gears and pulled the car through the opened gate and onto the street.
People decorated the corner like ornaments – young black men clustered around the front of the barber shop talking loudly in some long-standing debate that involved rapid fire curse words none of them seemed to take too seriously.
Two old men – one bald, the other with hair so white it might have been cotton – sat on lawn chairs despite the cold, speaking more slowly, stream coming out of their mouths with each word, both heavily bundled in cloth coats and cloth hats.
One of the old men lifted his hand towards the car as it passed, and Sara gave a single beep back before the men and the corner faced in the rear view mirror.
“We probably won’t be able to kill them all even if we find out who they all are,” Ponci said. “I would be suicide to try.”
“But you want to give them what they killed my brother to get?”
“They want it. We have it. I’m gambling that we can trade for our lives with it.”
“And if we decide to keep it?”
“Why would we want to do that?”
“To scare them, to keep them in doubt. Wouldn’t that work? Wouldn’t that keep us alive?”
“Only long enough for them to get the stuff, and they we would die.”
“We could hide the stuff.”
“No place would be safe,” Ponci said. “You don’t understand just how powerful these people are – and there are more than one if my guess is right – they will never stop pursuing us. The only way is to give them what they want and hope they go away.”
“Or we kill them.”
“We could never be sure we got them all. Giving them the material is the only sane solution.”
“I won’t do that,” Sara said. “Those things meant something to my brother. He kept saying this was something big when he talked to me on the phone, so big he was willing to throw away his career to get this out.”
“But he obviously knew how dangerous the information is,” Ponci said. “Otherwise, he would have brought the stuff directly here rather than have you meet him in New York.”
“I’m not going to let them get away with killing my brother, and God knows how many others.”
“They usually do.”
“Not this time.”
“Look, lady,” Ponci said, twisting in the seat so as to look more directly at Sara, the movement causing him to cringe with pain. “We’re fighting for our own lives here, your life, my life, and if we don’t reach your friends in time, their lives, too. We are all small fish in a very big pond. Lives mean nothing to these people. They are used to committing mass murder. It is what they do best, what they have always done, and what they will continue to do whether we’re alive or dead. We can’t stop them.”