Chapter21

 

 

“They have the package, why aren’t they opening it?” Berkner growled, speaking mostly to himself since none of the technicians knew more than he did about what was going on. They had lost track of the car despite the full resources of the agency, claiming that there were too many like it in the area.

The driver had weaved so much through so many streets, the drones kept losing it, some picking up on other cars without knowing it until they had gone totally in the wrong direction, others simply unable to penetrate certain blocks where taller buildings got in the way. Satellite images when they finally became available did not help either.

So they were back to the start, checking surveillance cameras and other sources for a possible glimpse of the car or their targets. But their best hope remained in the laptop itself. If they turned the thing on, then they would reveal where they were.

Why in hell weren’t they turning the damned thing on?

This was worse than a nightmare, and Berkner expected to hear about it all from upper management shortly.

They were not a patient crew.

“We don’t want another Snowden,” they’d told Berkner.

Was that what this was? Even he didn’t know what the computer contained, although he knew it was sensitive enough to put this whole branch on high alert.

Sensitive enough for the order to go out to kill anyone necessary in order to get it back or destroy it.

“This is out in the open,” they’d told him. “We need to get to it before it gets to its destination.”

This, too, was unclear.

There was another party, a buyer, who had set this all in motion.

“We wouldn’t even know about it had the soldier not deviated from his original plan,” they’d said. “That’s how close to disaster we’ve come. Get it back or destroy it, by any means necessary.”

“And what about those involved?”

“We want no trace,” they said.

Even Berkner knew what that meant.

“Come on, people, get me some information,” he shouted. “I need to get these people back on our radar, and I need it to happen now.”

 

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A strange kind of panic seized people during the evening rush hour that was no evident in the morning compute.

Although gentrification had its ugly fingers into the heart of Newark, the grip was not yet so tight as to keep those who worked in the business district from fearing the dark, fleeing their offices precisely at five to get onto the roads or into their trains so as to keep the deep shadows from devouring them.

Not all of these panicking people were white (although most were), social changes had elevated enough people of color to a new possessive class, just successful enough to believe someone – if not the government or some official body, then the pack of poor out which they themselves climbed – would take away their privileges or hurt them out of the same jealously they themselves would feel if they were still poor.

These fools carried the same pack mentality that cave men must have had in seeking to protect the questionable treasures in their caves so many centuries earlier. With progress, people should have known better, but they did not, fearing everything the way children did the dark, always coming to the worst and most wrongheaded conclusions possible, presuming that every act of violence, ever terrorist attack, would target them as individuals. So they constantly looked over their shoulders, constantly feared boogie men that often did not exist.

Their corporate masters and others in the government often played off this fear, while at the same time, building whole new and protective infrastructures that kept many of these same people from ever having to come into contact with the real population, tunnels and bridges that connected this glass tower with another, complete with store fronts and eateries where they could shop and feed without having to rub shoulders with the common man.

Yet for all of the walls and bridges, private security and other protections provided, there were moments came when this population could not avoid contact with the real world,  and like packs of lemmings, they rushed out of their cocoons as fast as possible, filling the highways with bumper to bumper luxury vehicles, or the hallowed halls of Penn Station with their suits, ties and notepads for the shoulder to shoulder combat that would bring them back to some supposedly safe place again.

Inside the train station, this was a frantic dash that would have made the rabbit in Alice and Wonderland proud, people forced into an uneasy truce inside a place that seemed more like a cathedral than a place of transport, one more icon to the past and to the excesses of American culture that had contributed to the bringing down of the World Trade Center.

In some ways, this felt like that last dash many similar people took when the towers started to fall, lacking only the dust and the total sense of doom, each needing to reach this or that next stage in their journey home to feel safe. But not all the faces showed the deep seeded fear they felt, many painted on expressions of indifference or adopted cold, and nearly inhuman responses to the perceived danger, shoving their way through the humbled masses like petty dictators, or heartless robots, trying desperately not to look or feel or act like savage beasts they resembled in mass.

Newark – not New York – had once served as the center of the American industrial revolution, known as “The Brick City,” it had taken advantage of its location near the Meadowlands swamps and layers of clay to help constructed much of the northeast. Beer companies had started here, and inventors from Tesla to Thomas Edison had tested out their wares here, many of the players in what was a Silicone Valley before ever such a place existed. But labor strikes just prior to America’s entrance into World War I undermined the city in a way it was unable to recover from, despite all the efforts of bankers and insurance companies, utility networks and political prestige. It was a city under siege from inside out, a dangerous place if not quite the horror movie white fear tended to paint it.

Whites, whose parents had felt before or after the riots, endowed their children with their own nightmares, mostly based on unfounded fear of blacks, and the great migration from the south after World War II. Blacks, coming north to find a better life and escape the poverty and bigotry of the south, found the north a less welcoming place than they had assumed. A different more subtle prejudice emerged, and a different kind of segregation. Whites moved to the suburbs, building new schools, new roads, new public structures, and highways that often did not have exits that allowed easy access to blacks. White police forces prowled quite streets looking for anyone suspicious which often meant anyone other than white.

Much of this flight left the cities in ruin. Jobs fled with the whites. Money that might have been used to keep up city infrastructure was redirected to the suburbs, leaving blacks and other minorities to live with crumbling schools, roads, public buildings and often corrupt officials. When state officials attempted to fix the cities from afar, white communities protested the rise in taxes that resulted, taxes that largely rose because they needed state and federal money to maintain their white enclaves, and did not want to waste money on the cities they had abandoned in the first place.

In an inner city filled with intense poverty, young men and women turned to crime. A culture of crime rose within the ghetto, and became the excuse for white leadership elsewhere to pass stringent new laws that imprisoned many young blacks. Over time, more blacks were behind bars than in the streets, and when enough blacks were in jail and the streets became safer, whites began to move back in, clearing out the slums to construct new housing and better schools, a kind of new plantation mentality of super wealthy.

Newark was still on the brink of this resettling, and so things remained unsettled. Newark, which also had been on the forefront of the original fight in the 1960s for social justice, wasn’t going to simply roll over and allow the new rich population to sweep them out of neighborhoods where generations of blacks had lived. Unlike Manhattan, Brooklyn and some other northeastern cities, Newark wasn’t going to surrender, and its population wasn’t going to repeat the trail of tears Native Americans had taken when the whites did the same thing to them.

 

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Ponci insisted on taking a convention cab from Ferry Street to the train station. He would have walked had it been slightly shorter in distance and he’d felt stronger. Local cabs were harder to come by than the up and coming Uber cabs, but far less easily tracked. The most difficult part was finding a conventional public phone to call one.

Sara asked one of the bartenders to make the call for them, and they waited until the cab pulled up front before they left the warmth of the bar.

The cab struggled through traffic to get to Penn Station and left them off at the curb amid the panic of the rush hour crowds, a condition Ponci normally would have hated, but at this moment felt protected by.

“This is crazy,” Sara said as white people in business clothing shoved her aside on their way to the various trains. “How the hell do you expect to have a secret meeting in chaos like this? This is like an outgoing tide and we’re caught in the backwash.”

“It’s why I picked this time of day,” Ponci told her, holding his side as he walked, moving so slowly that from above he looked like a slowly rolling stone or a stick caught up in the rush of the tide. “Our soldier friend can’t do here what he did back at the motel.”

“And the others?”

Ponci didn’t know what to tell her. Cops on that level weren’t cops, but mass murderers of a different breed, resorting to targeted killings in which some collateral damage was acceptable, the slaughter of innocents tolerated as long as they could get at the one they wanted.

The world of law enforcement had altered radically, so it became more and more difficult to tell the good guys from the bad, or to expect a certain level of civilized behavior that even professional killers like Ponci abided by.

“Even monsters like them wouldn’t slaughter this many Americans even to get at us,” Ponci told her.

“And after we make the exchange?”

“We get on a train,” Ponci said, steering himself towards a ticket counter.

“A train? To where?” Sara said, struggling to follow him as the crowd of zombie like commuters pushed between them.

“Washington,” Ponci told her, his breathing coming hard as if he was climbing a hill or had run a mile.

“Why Washington?”

“It’s a direction they would least expect us to go,” Ponci said. “I also have connections there, people I might be able to tap for cover. We need to get the tickets now so we can just hop on board when we’re done. The timing is going to be tricky. But I think we can pull it off.”
Ponci handed Sara his wallet.

“You buy the tickets – one one-way, one round trip.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re going to need the round trip to get back.”

“What about you?”

“I keep going south from there.”

“And so we’re just going to let them get away with killing my brother?”

“I told you. It’s this way or we’re both dead, too. Just do it and stop giving me a hard time about it. You want your revenge, get it later when I’m not around.”

Sara glared for a moment, then snapped the wallet out of from between Ponci’s fingers. Streak of blood showed on the fingers and the wallet.

She got on line, while Ponci leaned against the wall nearby, partly out of sight behind one of the large pillars. He looked more like a hobo, then a hired killer, sagging at the shoulders, keeping his head low. She couldn’t tell how much was a deliberate attempt to avoid detection or how worn he felt. She couldn’t afford for him to die on her.

When she got up to the front of the line, she ordered the tickets he’d suggested, but in the back of her head she knew she wasn’t coming back without finding the people who ordered the killing, no matter how much Ponci protested.

As weary as Ponci was, he was still conscious, studying the huge station to pinpoint places of danger.

Uniformed police officers stood at every door, their gazes working over the room as if in search of particular faces – clearly on the look out for someone, most likely Ponci and Sara. But these were merely the most obvious ones. Other darker, and less obvious figured hovered in the corners, police-like if not dressed like police, staring around at the crowd with the same vigilance.

Both groups looked frustrated by the volume, looking for faces and shapes, defied by the amazing variety of people passing through each door and through the mausoleum like canyons of the waiting room.

Ponci also looked in the direction of the security cameras, which moved this way and that like robotic heads, software somewhere in some remote office attempting to unscramble these same images with face recognition that sheer volume made nearly impossible to conduct. But Ponci knew that the moment the computers came up with a positive ID all hell would reign down.

Sara returned clutching the tickets.

“Timing is going to be tricky,” Ponci told her. We don’t want to be seen waiting on the platform. So we’ll have to slip onto the train the last minute.”

“That won’t be easy in your condition.”

“I’ll do what I have to. If we miss the train, all this will have been for nothing. Meanwhile, we should get somewhere out of sight.”

“Where?”

“Off to the side somewhere, but not so remote we can’t see, or that we look too much like we’re hiding. Perhaps under one of the camera banks. Those things have blind spots, and can’t look straight down.”

“Okay,” she said, taking his arm. “Just tell me where we need to go.”

She led him into one of the side caverns, keeping – as he directed – close to one wall, cameras turning this way and that above them and across the room. But as good as these cameras were, they were less effective farther away from a subject, especially in a crowd.

Ponci cursed himself for not thinking ahead and finding some kind of disguise for them both. There were ways to fool even the most sophisticated programs, simple things such as a pair of glasses, a knit hat or hood. None were fool proof, but each gave the computer conflicting information that delayed recognition. And in this instance, each second they remained undetected was an advantage.

But each step was a torture, and Ponci could not travel fast, wincing often, of which Sara took notice.

“Are you in that much pain?” she asked.

“Yeah, but it’s more than that.”

“What else.”

“It’s the people.”

“You said people were a good thing.”

“Not these people, the other people, the ones inside my head.”

“You mean the ghosts?”

“I’ve forgotten how many there were and how this place eventually stirs them out of their sleep.”

“Why? What’s different about this place?”

“I passed through here a lot in the old days,” Ponci said, stumbling over a suitcase someone had left protruding from between two seats. “So did many of my targets.”

“So this becomes a kind of terminal for the dead?”

“That’s the way it seems to me.”

“And you can see them?”

“No directly. In the corner of my eyes.”

“What do they want?”

“They’re waiting for me to die.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Ponci said, then pointed to a small alcove. “There. We’ll wait over there.”