Chapter17
“We have them on screen,” one of the techs yelled, drawing Berkner’s attention to the main screen at the center of the room – the straight down view of the streets of Newark laid out in a distorted grid.
The dark Honda and its tinted windows looked like a speeding bug moving through a maze.
“Finally,” he grumbled. “Keep them in view. What about boots? Do we have them on the ground?”
“We have two units in place. One monitoring the Honda. The other is pursing a group that appears to be connected with them on the other side of town.”
“Good, good, are they moving towards each other?” Berkner asked.
“The Honda seems to be headed in the direction of several other vehicles. All seem to be moving towards the north side of town.”
“Do we have access to their mobile devices?”
“The Honda doesn’t seem to be carrying any or they have them turned off if they do.”
“And the other cars?”
“They seem to be using some kind of encryption.”
“Can we break it?”
“Not easily or soon. But we have other issues.”
“Such as?”
“Someone is still trying to hack into our system.”
“Any guess as to whom?”
“Could be anyone, but most likely the Russians or the Chinese. They’ve routed their ips through a number of alternate countries.”
“So you think they’re after the material?”
“I suspect they want it as much as we do.”
“Then we have to get it fast. Put more feet on the ground. Use whatever means are necessary to secure the package.”
*******************
Sara drove in silence, pulling into one of the downtown lanes which had become gridlocked with traffic. Behind each windshield of the other cars, drivers, young and old, rich and poor, blue collar and Yuppie, wore the same frustrated expressions, glaring ahead at the cars in front, but looking neither right or left at the decaying valley through which they traveled. Most the of the drivers were headed towards the glittering towers that rose above McCarter Highway or for the more distant highways that eventually brought them to the Emerald City of Manhattan. Some were students bound for the numerous colleges that occupied the area near Military Park.
But old and new Newark didn’t quite jive as if two planets had crashed into each other, leaving a crater of wreckage at whose center a new civilization was taking root. Like other towns, Ponci had seen, this new life would spread and eventually drive out those who previously lived here, casting this population adrift as cities became safer and more desirable for white kids who were bored and fed up with the suburban lives their white parents had fled to in order to avoid black and urban riots.
The faces of the youngest looked so innocent against the backdrop of the world to which they had returned, full of hope for something that they could not readily see, and perhaps, wasn’t even there. Ponci couldn’t see it, but the years of having lived in shadows of this kind of skewed him against seeing anything but shadows. It was all he saw even now.
“Why do you still live here?” Ponci asked Sara, breaking the silence that had filled the car since leaving the ally.
“Because it’s my home,” she said, glancing at him, her brows rising to emphasize her puzzled expression.
“But it’s so dismal.”
“It wasn’t always.”
“You mean before the riots?”
“Yes.”
“But they happened before you were born.”
“True, but we knew all about them. My brother was obsessed about them. That’s why when 9/11 happened, he was so upset. The attack made the riots more real to him. Before that, he only heard what the old timers used to tell him. They were always talking about the riots. And he would listen, even when he was very young. He was always looking at the ruins around us and wondering what happened and why nobody ever fixed up this place after the buildings burned down.
“`Are we bad people that everybody hates us?’ he asked my mother once.”
“What did your mother say?” Ponci asked.
“What could she say? We all had the same questions. We all saw the white people moving out, leaving us to live in ruined buildings, leaving us without jobs, and no prospects to get any – even the Jews left, although they stayed the longest. It got to the point where the only white faces we saw were cops and social workers.”
“What does all this have to do with 9/11?”
“In my brother’s mind, he saw it as more of the same,” Sara said. “And he said he was going to put a stop to it.”
“You mean he joined the army?”
“Yes.”
“And you see all this with the computer stuff as part of the same?”
“Yes.”
“And you intend to pick up where your brother left off?”
“If I can.”
“You’re nuts,” Ponci said, glancing again out the window at the sagging downtown buildings. “The rich always shit on the poor. It’s a fact of life. Just as the powerful always push the weak out of the way.”
“Then maybe it’s time we got some power of our own and pushed back,” Sara said.
“That’s a lot easier said than done. In this case, it’s like punching smoke.”
“Will they really kill my friends?”
“Without a doubt.”
“My friends aren’t pushovers.”
“As bad as they think they are, these people are worse. These people were born to kill – and have been trained to do it well. It is what they do best.”
“Then we’d better hurry,” Sara said, stepping harder on the gas pedal the moment an opening appeared in the traffic snarl ahead.
Ponci grabbed her arm.
“Slow down,” he said. “The last thing we need is to get pulled over by the police.”
Sara’s shoulders sagged. Her foot eased off the gas pedal.
“You’re right, of course,” she mumbled.
“When we get about a block from the place, pull over.”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t want the ghosts to see us coming.”
The street widened as they passed the park. The array of military tributes in the dim light made the place seem like a historic war zone, canons aimed south, as was the larger statue filled with the shapes from previous American wars.
This was a place that always haunted Ponci, even when far away, like a persistent nagging memory of violence he could not quite shed. Sometimes, he saw the ghosts of the dead in his head mounted in the same way, each one a shape frozen in stone, each at the pinnacle of pain and death.
He was glad when this gave way to the more ostentatious shape of the city’s Performing Arts Center – one of those elements the city desperately hoped would help restore Newark to its former glory, attracting the upper crust to help give balance to a city so separated by poverty. Unlike New York City which had already sold its soul, Newark still struggled to retain some sense of its humanity, hoping to rebuild its image so as to include those later generations that had struggled on after the whites had fled. But for years, it was a tale of two cities, of intense poverty around the edges, and intense wealth at its center, tall towers housing insurance and banking executives, and the even more odious characters associated with the state’s gas and electric industry.
Caught in-between were the colleges that struggled to attract people from both sides, as if serving a peace table in this perpetual war between rich and poor. But it was a frustrating and often losing battle.
The city fathers wanted to sell itself the way New York had, but couldn’t get over the scars of the past or the fierce resistance it faced among a population that had fought hard against the gentrification that had driven poor out of other cities. This population knew well the tricks that cities pulled, pretending to share the wealth when bringing in things like the arts – when in the end, such efforts were always designed to drive the poor elsewhere, and so Newark was stuck in a stalemate that would not allow it to move too quickly down the same path other cities had taken, and places like the PAC became islands under siege, rather than inspiration, and Ponci was glad when the car slid passed that as well.
The street narrowed again as the car drove into Newark’s north side, a precarious and deceptive landscape, full of hidden dangers the south side lacked. Here, fire had not swept through neighbors the way it had on the south side, and so the still standing buildings gave the place the look of normalcy, and deceived the uninitiated into believing it was a safer place to travel when it was not.
Clustered together, the buildings here remained untouched by the riots that had so devastated the south side, but offered haven to a more serious level of poverty and despair, a not-so-quiet threat of violence hanging over it like a storm cloud, waiting for an opportunity to erupt.
The banks that overwhelmed the center of the city had few if any branches here, and those that did exist, tended to exploit the already poor population with bad business practices, far worse than the old Mafia exploits that Ponci recalled during his hey day here, partly because banks pretended to be legitimate when they were not. People couldn’t cash welfare or unemployment checks, because checks no longer existed. They got bank cards instead, and paid a fee for each transaction in a fashion that might put any loan shark to shame. These banks rarely offered loans to the locals, and so day by day, week in and week out, month after month, the neighborhood decayed, unable to sustain itself and so died in a slow motion burn much more painful to watch than the fires that had ripped through the other side of town.
An archeologist might have had a field day sorting through the artifacts of changing cultures in this place: Jews, Irish, Portuguese, Germans, Italians mingling and fading away into variations of Latino, Black and Arab – Egyptians and Indians putting down roots in the same way Italians did, often sending whole or parts of families to establish little villages in big cities such as these.
But growth had become stifled by the threat of violence, people walked these streets like soldiers stumbling through a mine field, knowing that at any time, it might go off – or not.
Sara pulled the car over at a spot in front of a fire hydrant.
“This is it?” Ponci asked, still a little disoriented from the ride, and from the wound that had started to throb again.
“There,” Sara said, pointing down the street at a liquor store. “It’s a mail drop my friends often use when they don’t want people knowing where they live or work.”
“All right,” Ponci said, reaching up to turn off the globe light so that the interior of the car remained dark when he opened the door. “Come on.”
He pushed his legs out, but it was a painful maneuver, and rising worse, forcing him to hold onto the inner frame of the car until he could stand. Even then, he swayed, and only reluctantly stepped away from the car so he could close the door again.
Sara climbed out on her side, and then when her door closed, clicked the locks.
“Are you all right?” she asked across the top of the car.
“No,” Ponci admitted, breathing with great difficulty. “But I’ll have to be.”
He waited for to reach the curb, then began the grueling walk in the direction of the store.
A neon sign, straight out of the 1930s, cracked and glowed above the store, although in the growing daylight, the unlighted “Q” seemed less obvious. Plastered over its windows were paper posters advertising the lottery and various kinds of cheap booze. Old men, white and black, hovered just outside the door sucking on unfiltered cigarette as they scratched off the silver coating from the array of lottery tickets, grumbling at the outcome of each.
A cluster of black men stood out front of the barber shop next door, mostly younger men, talking loudly, smoking enough cigarettes among them to create a mist.
Something bothered Ponci about the scene. Perhaps because it seemed too normal, too complacent, as if staged, and at that moment, the old instincts told him things were not right, and perhaps had not been right since they had left the protection of the building on the south side. Somehow, he knew they were being watched, although he did not yet know by whom.
He grabbed Sara by the upper arm and pulled her into one of the darkened empty store front doorways.
“What is it?” she asked, looking as startled as he felt.
“I don’t know, but I know it’s not safe for us to just stroll up there like this,” he said, glancing around at the street, his gaze seeking details he should have looked for even before exiting the car.
The wound and its haze had made him careless – the kind of careless that got a person killed.
He noticed a car a little too new and a little too straight for this part of the city, not the new kind kids get off on, low to the ground, but a kind of ordinary that doesn’t seem ordinary in the hood. He saw a white plumbers van up the street with an array of electronics partly hidden by the ladders laid out across its roof. There were several other similar trucks parked at internals, all relatively inappropriate for one reason or another.
“We should leave,” Ponci said.
“But what about my friends and what we came for?”
Ponci stared, his thoughts filled with the debate as to which was worse, leaving without the package or trying to get it out of what appeared to be a trap. He took him a long moment to decide.
“All right, we have to go for it,” he said. “But we can’t both go walking up there. One of us going to have to go in their and tell your friends to get out”
“Which means me, right?”
“They aren’t like going to listen to me,” Ponci admitted. “But get them and anybody else you care about out of there before the Fed Ex truck arrives”
Sara shuddered.
“What about me? Am I going to survive?”
“If you do what I tell you, maybe,” Ponci said. “Get the package. That’s all that matters.”
“I’ll try,” she said, and stepped out of the dark doorway, although the growing light of day made the dark less dark, and less protection, each step making her feel as if she was going to her execution.
***************************
Berkner stared at the giant screen. The light of day showed the landscape better as the map overlay showed the streets, and small numbers indicated which building was which.
“Where did they stop?” Berkner asked.
One of the technicians pointed to the spot with a laser light.
“What’s there?”
“Several empty storefronts and then a liquor store,” the technician said. “The others are in the liquor store.”
“And our people?”
“We have several units on the ground, but not as many as we should.”
“Where are the others?”
“Trying to get there. But I suspect we’ll have to do with what we have for the moment.”
“I don’t like this,” Berkner said, shaking his head. “What are the other two doing?”
“They got out of the car. But only one is approaching the store.”
“No, I don’t like this. Which one?”
“The woman.”
“Damn it. The son of a bitch knows.”
“Well, we can’t do anything until the package comes out, and we don’t know if it is in the store or not.”
“Doesn’t the computer have a tracker?”
“Yes, but only if its turned on.”
“Damn. Get everybody ready. And make sure they know what they have to do. The package first, then clean up the rest.”
“They know, sir,” the technician said.
*****************************
Sara kept her head up, and her gaze straight ahead, even though she knew the younger men outside the barber shop had spotted her. One nudged another until they all looked at her approach, not quite speaking out yet, but full of that energy she had seen in the south side boys, all of them anxious to make her acquaintance. She knew she could not avoid them and still manage to get through to the liquor store just beyond. So she didn’t try, she marched straight at them, and dared them to try.
One of the taller men with shaved and tattooed head stepped towards her, grinning as cigarette smoke gushed out his mouth.
“Hey, sister,” he said. “You come to see us?”
“No,” she said, brushing him passed him.
He laughed, but another, shorter black man with a wicked grin, stepped up from the other side.
“You’re sweet, girl, why don’t you give us a…”
“Get out of my way,” she said, and brushed passed him as well. Her foot struck a bottle that rattled ahead of her along the curb, shattering of a little of her confidence which was shaking from the start.
“Hey, look sister, we’re not as bad as you think we are,” the tall man said. “We look out for each other here. We can look out for you.”
“I appreciate that, brother,” she said. “But I can take care of myself.”
By this time, she was beyond them, and near the entrance to the liquor store.
Then, she halted, a twinge of panic filling her head. She turned back to look at the men.
“Look, brother,” she said. “This corner is about to get very hot fast. It might be a good idea for you to vacate the place for a while.”
“Hot as in the man.”
“More than you can ever image.”
“No bullshit?”
“No,” she said. “As you said, we’ve got to look out for each other, and so I’m looking out for you.”
The tall man nodded at her, and then motioned with his head for his friends to move, and they moved, leaving only a trail of cigarette smoke behind.
Sara stared after them for a moment, then glanced back the other way to where she had left Ponci. She could almost see his eyes glinting in the doorway, and could make out just enough of his face to see that he was still there, looking at her, and at the layout of the street.
Something else moved in a doorway across the street. She caught the glint of blue light on what must have been metal, and heard a not too loud click.
She took a deep breath, then plunged into the liquor store doorway, shoving the door open ahead of her. A buzzer sounded. She heard voices, but at first could not see anyone because of a display case for beer.
As she came around this, she encountered a long counter, boxed in with bulletproof glass. This ran along the whole right wall, and was largely plastered over in most spots with advertising, some for the lottery, similar to what decorated the front windows, most of it for a variety of booze, the names of which were as familiar to her as her own.
While the ceiling had banks of florescent lights, many of the bulbs had burned out or were on the verge of doing to, blinking on and off in a way that made Sara’s eyes water. The store itself had about five narrow aisles so over crowded with bottle-filled boxes, it was difficult to navigate.
The brightest part of the store was the space just beyond where the caged counter ended, where a large round table stood, and a pack of black men sat, their dark faces glowing with sweat from the overheated room.
Several of them looked up as Sara came into view.
A squat, broad-faced black man in the corner looked up, then squinted.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked, his voice harsh from too many years smoking too many cigars, the latest of which smoldered in an ash tray on the table in front of him next to a glass half filled with amber liquid.
“I came to warn you,” Sara said, feeling the smoke and oppressiveness of the room’s heat fill her lungs. She could hardly breathe, although the fear didn’t help. Her heart pounded in her chest as she spoke.
“About what?” the squat man asked.
“Ponci said it’s not safe to be here.”
“Since when it is safe for a black man to be safe anywhere?”
“That’s not what I meant, Luis, and you know it,” Sara said, edging deeper into the room, feeling something bad happening behind her beyond the store windows and their parade of pealing paper advertisements, something stirring in the night she didn’t trust.
She distrusted even the door through which she had just come, expecting it to burst open and a flood of guns to flow in.
“Ponci said there is going to be a lot of fireworks here once that package comes,” she said.
Other men at the table grumbled, one glanced up at the clock.
“Tracking said it won’t be here until about nine,” one of the others said, a man with a long face, and a lot of stubble. She had seen him hanging out at the edges of the group. He had droopy eyes like a hound, but those eyes showed a little alarm this time.
“Then that gives you time to get out,” Sara said.
“Bullshit,” said a third man, a tall man they others called LeRoy, who was so thin he looked starved. He drew up an Oozy submachine gun from under the table. “We have our own fireworks.”
“Don’t be an ass, LeRoy,” Sara said. “The people who are coming are professional killers.”
“Can’t be worse than Newark cops,” mumbled another man whose back was to Sara, half in the dark cast by the uneven lighting.
“Yes, they can,” Sara said. “Since I’m the one who sent you here, I’m telling you to get the fuck out before the package comes. I couldn’t bear to lose any one of you.”
“And who said you’re going to lose any of us?” asked the hound dog man with the Oozy.
“Ponci.”
“You mean the motherfucker who off-ed David?” the man with his back to her asked. “You’re asking us to take his word about anything?”
“He knows his stuff, Gizmo,” Sara said.
“We’ll see what he knows when the package gets here,” Le Roy said. “But you ought not be here when it does. We wouldn’t want to see you caught in no cross fire.”
A squeal of brakes sounded from outside. Sara glanced at the clock -- which said quarter to nine – then at a gap in the advertising on the front window. The space was filled with part of the blue lettering of the Fed Ex truck, halted at the curb in front of the store.
Sara turned, her eyes dilating, as they narrowed, fear turning to a puzzled look.
Nothing moved – at first – except for the driver, who she saw through another gap in the paper stirring inside the truck. She could hear him whistling some off key version of a pop song from the radio.