The Sweeney 02 Page 9

  Regan nodded slowly.

  “Okay. First I ask about the Dibouti letters. In London when the English police arrested everybody, one of the arrested had four letters in Arabic—yes? On the headed paper, Tunis Hilton, laying out the deal?”

  Regan’s mind in top gear sorting out the equation between the need to deal with the acute problem of his and Christa’s personal safety and an equally desperate need to acquire information from the man. One of the obvious elements in the equation would be to keep talking, and keep the man talking, which would delay possible execution. There was no question in Regan’s mind that this guy was waiting to kill him, had already tried in the Plaza and missed, but was unlikely to make that mistake again with a gun pressed hard into his victim’s neck.

  “There were four single-page letters headmarked Tunis Hilton, which we believe were written in Arabic, which came into police possession in London,” Regan replied.

  “Then why did you bring all the papers but only three of the letters to New York?” the big man snapped.

  “I brought all four letters to New York.”

  “You lying shit!” The guy went apoplectic and jammed the barrel of the gun harder into Regan’s neck so the thrust of it crossed the pain barrier into real hurt, and his head went forward and his feet hit the brakes which made it worse.

  He slowed the car down, in the blare of the horns of following cars, and pulled it onto the side of the road. The gun, which had wavered, was now back in his neck but this time not pressed so heavily.

  “You’re going to break my fucking spine with that gun. What d’you want?” Regan shouted at the guy. “I brought four letters to New York. Give me one reason I should lie about that?”

  “You know reasons. Because the fourth letter contained the names of Africans who could screw up the deal. You knew that as soon as you translated the letters, you bastard.” The big man started to screw the gun barrel harder into Regan’s neck again.

  It now looked certain the guy was going to shoot him— Regan started to talk fast. “Those Arabic letters were never translated in London. For two reasons. One, Scotland Yard is as inefficient as any of your detective bureaus. Two, check this with any lawyer, you Sicilian pervert, the case of you and your asshole friends was a de jure case, property of the FBI. I told my people to translate the documents, but they said that technically that was publishing and circulating information confidential to the FBI prosecution, and added to that it was none of our fucking business...”

  The big guy was heaving in some full lungs of breath, like he was trying to get some control over his mounting fury. “You. You listen to me. You tell me the truth. Maybe I won’t kill you. Or maybe I kill you, but save your fucking girl. You think about her.” He swung the gun for a moment, just to prove that she was as easy to shoot as Regan. “Now who did you show, or maybe sell, the Arabic letter with the names in it to?”

  “I don’t know the buyer’s name,” Regan said, stalling and lying, and now entering into uncharted waters where a web of untruth might give him a few more minutes but might also somehow work against him and Christa. When the guy realized he was lying he might shoot them out of hand immediately.

  “Where did he contact you?”

  “London,” Regan tried. “And stop pushing that fucking thing in my neck!”

  The pressure on the gun relented. The guy was satisfied with the answer.

  “He was African, yes? Is that why you can’t remember his name?”

  “Right,” Regan said.

  “Was it a name like Eti Awolwe?” the man asked.

  “It could’ve been.”

  “How much did he pay you?”

  Pay for what? Regan wondered. How much did he pay for a letter? “Twenty thousand pounds,” Regan said.

  The guys lungs exploded. “Jesus Christ, you know how much that information is worth? Maybe a million bucks, you stupid fucker. And since the killings, maybe more.”

  “What killings? I don’t know about any killings.”

  “Maybe you know about one. Maybe not. You arrive in New York. My associates take your papers from you. Later that night, one of my colleagues is shot dead, your papers stolen from him—”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Shut up. I’m telling you. I think you are a crooked cop —you take bribes—but I don’t see why you have reason to kill my colleague. But maybe you know the killers, maybe friends of yours, or maybe men who were following you.”

  “What killers? What are you talking about?”

  “The killers. The ones who are killing all of us, you shit hawk, everyone in the deal! They’re wiping us out one by one because you sold that fucking letter! And you know something, we don’t know who the fuck these killers are—” The guy stopped there suddenly, an instant decision, suddenly realizing his explanation to Regan was redundant and unnecessary as he proposed to kill the English cop shortly. “Okay, bastard, last question. This black guy who bought the letter in London, d’you know if he came from Dibouti? Did he say anything about knowing the Finance Minister Dr. Barundi? Or did he give the impression of maybe representing the police either in Africa or the United States? D’you have observations?”

  Regan did. He had been observing for the last twenty seconds the car, headlights off, which had been coasting down the road behind them. It needed the headlights of a car approaching from the opposite direction to flick across the front of the rolling Buick and reveal the face of Lieutenant Ciales alone in the Buick, one hand on the wheel, one hand holding up his service Smith & Wesson .38.

  “I ask you for answers,” the man demanded. “What do you say?”

  Regan said it quietly. “There’s a police officer twenty yards to the rear, with a gun in his hand.”

  The man said nothing, nor did he turn. He was not going to be fooled into turning his head away from Regan.

  “I’ll show you in the mirror.” Regan reached up slowly and angled the mirror so that the man could see. “Lieutenant Ciales, Fifty-ninth Precinct Detectives Bureau.”

  The silence at the back of the car lasted ten seconds. Then back came a hard prod with the gun in the neck. “Drive. Slow.”

  Regan put the car into gear and eased it away from the curb. He let two cars pass him, and then he pulled out into the middle of the road and headed off in the general direction of Peekskill. Ciales’s car followed.

  The man behind Regan was silent, expression intense, working out alternatives. Then he ordered Regan. “Brake. Make a U-turn.”

  Regan slowed the car and turned it over the crown of the road and made the U-turn. Ciales followed suit.

  “Keep moving at thirty,” the man said.

  Regan pulled the car up to thirty and went up the road, passed the entrance to the bungalow, and then felt the gun tap his shoulder. “Stop,” the man said.

  Regan stopped the Pontiac, easing it in behind a green Buick parked without lights at the curb.

  The man turned and pointed his gun at Christa. “You drive?” And he warned, “It had better be yes.”

  “I drive,” she said quietly.

  “You, Englishman, do as you’re told. One wrong move, the girl gets hit. Right?”

  Regan said nothing. A sleeve of the raglan coat came over his shoulder and he felt a set of car keys drop into his lap.

  “Get into the Buick; follow us.” The man turned to the girl. “Slide across the seat and drive this fucking car.”

  Regan got out of the car, turned around and looked into Ciales’s headlights, and lifted his shoulders in a shrug. Ciales didn’t get out of the car.

  Regan walked to the Buick, unlocked the driver’s door, and left the door half open a second so he could see the instruments and pull the headlights on. He noticed the Hertz folder on the passenger seat. Also a driver’s ashtray, which Hertz would have emptied, filled with cigarette butts, which meant the guy in the raglan coat had filled it and there should be some fingerprints on it. He pulled the door closed, took out a handkerchief, and
in the darkness removed the ashtray and wrapped it and its cigarette butts in the handkerchief and stowed them in his pocket. He started the engine. The Pontiac pulled out and passed him. He put the car in gear and followed. He checked the rearview mirror. Ciales began to trail the two cars.

  He should have read the mileage indicator. If somehow or other Ciales got assassinated somewhere along this ride and Regan survived, he’d have no idea of the route or the length of the drive from Croton.

  At one point they went through a small town called Hawthorne, then the direction seemed to change and three or four miles on and they were back at the Hudson. Then the car in front found what it was looking for, a narrow lane leading off the riverside high road steeply down into a pool of darkness alongside the river below. No streetlights at all. Then the paving of the lane gave out just as it narrowed in a long ravine through rocks, into a muddy passage that could only take the width of one car. Christa, presumably on instructions from the man, braked the Pontiac to a halt. She got out and, presumably again following instructions, went around to the other side of the car. Then the guy got out, using her as a shield. “Bring the Buick right up. Bring it to touch the rear fenders.” The man pointed to the back of the Pontiac.

  Regan coasted the car forward and braked and touched the rear fender. He looked in the mirror. Ciales’s car was ten yards behind.

  “Out,” the man commanded. “Give me the Buick keys.”

  Regan got out, approached the guy slowly, and handed him the keys. He was aware of Christa’s eyes on him, and the fear in the eyes.

  The guy took the Buick keys and threw them up in the air and out into the night, into the scrub, brush grass, and rocks.

  “Back up with me,” the man commanded Christa. Again he used her body as a shield from Ciales and the gun he wielded in his right hand.

  Christa moved back with the guy to the Pontiac. Then the guy dropped into the Pontiac and the car roared off, and before Ciales could spring from his Chevrolet, the Pontiac had disappeared down the narrow ravine and out of sight. Ciales had moved out; now he moved back into his car.

  The Buick, minus ignition keys, immobilized, blocked Ciales from pursuing the man. Regan and Christa were already running up to Ciales. Ciales had grabbed the police walkie-talkie microphone. “Center west car two hundred, location Rye River Lane, remake car-to-car link Lieutenant Cassidy car four-oh-one north of Tarrytown. Over.” Then he turned and shouted to Regan and Christa, “Get in.”

  Christa and Regan piled into the back of the car.

  The headquarters’ radio voice replied. “We have you, car two hundred. On channel seven, over.”

  Ciales arched forward and turned the select to channel seven. “Don Cassidy, your location?”

  “What’s the buzz now?” Cassidy’s voice came back.

  “We lost the cunt, location Rye River Lane between the upper and lower roads, ‘bout four miles north of Tarrytown.”

  “I’m on the lower, north of Tarrytown, heading north.”

  Regan could hear on the radio the howl of engine as Cassidy’s moving car accelerated sharply.

  “Okay,” said Ciales. “Leave this channel open. Are you there, information room? Leave these lines wide, okay?”

  The information room came back with an affirmative.

  Ciales revved the engine, put it in reverse, and bulleted the car backward up the narrow defile to where the road widened. He slewed it around, straightened it, and burned off in a trail of flying mud up to meet the upper road.

  It was a mile of motoring covered in less than a minute before Ciales found a small road on the right of the upper road which pointed down to the lower river road. He shot the car off the ramp and accelerated down through the trees to the fluorescent streetlights that followed the bend of the river. Then they were heading along a good road signposted to Tarrytown, with the lights of Nyack puncturing the night across the river.

  “How come Cassidy was in the vicinity? He told me tonight he was in New York.” Regan raised his voice hard against the engine noise.

  But he didn’t get an answer. Cassidy’s voice came over the car radio. “I see him,” Cassidy said. “Red GTO, right?”

  Ciales took up the hand mike. “That’s the one,” he said into the mike.

  “He moves like a son of a bitch,” Cassidy observed. Then the transmit was drowned out as he hurled the car around in a complete circle, tires, shocks, and bodywork protesting. Then the sound of hard acceleration again. “I’m now faced the other way, in pursuit. He has a half mile on me. I’m two miles, maybe, out of Tarrytown.”

  “We must be nearly up your ass,” Ciales noted.

  “Hey, he’s left the river road!” Cassidy shouted, his voice sounding puzzled.

  “A left or a right?” Ciales asked.

  “Get this. Strip-metal fencing. Maybe fifty yards of it. A gateway, no gate. A notice: PRIVATE. Just inside, another notice: YACHT CITY MARINA COMPLETION 1976. Unmade road. Slow down. Bad potholes in the road. I see his brights two hundred yards ahead. I see a marina, half built. Boats parked at quays. And boats parked out in the river. I see his brake lights. The car’s stopped. He’s out and running.”

  “Don, he’s armed. Wait for us. We’re almost there.”

  “Fuck off,” the voice of Cassidy said levelly.

  The three of them in Ciales’s car could hear Cassidy’s car engine slow and cut, then the sound of his door opening and slamming closed.

  “There,” Regan said. But Ciales had already spotted the chain-link fencing and the gap. Christa was almost hurled over the front seat by the force of Ciales’s braking as he slewed the big car through the gap and thumped and smashed across the first potholes. They saw in the distance the twin sets of rear lights of the GTO and Cassidy’s car.

  The marina was half completed. It consisted of huge concrete blocks like submarine pens, and desolation made even more gaunt by the lack of moonlight. The two cars’ headlights played white over the hundred yards of construction. Some concrete fingers of quays were complete, and boats, maybe about fifty, both power and sail, were already moored in position. Out there bobbing ghostly in the dark trench of the river around a semicircle of buoys were another dozen boats. There was no quayside lighting or lighting on any of the boats.

  Ciales accelerated the last fifty yards, braked in a lurching slide on the contractor’s mud, and was out of the car and sprinting toward the nearest quay before Regan and Christa had disentangled the heap of their bodies.

  Regan heard three shots. He shouted at Christa. “Stay in the car!” And he was out and running after Ciales.

  He changed direction. Cassidy came running out from the steel-girder superstructures at the shore end of the nearest quay heading down the concrete incline to the next quay. Ciales was on Cassidy’s heels. No sign of the raglan-coated man, but obviously his disappearance was connected to the sound of an outboard motor fading into the murk of night, which Regan now heard as the wind turned in his direction, bringing also the smell of the river. It was not a pleasant smell. It was like an extract of marshland and paint factory.

  Suddenly a shot sailed over Regan’s head with a hornet sound. He went down flat on his face as he realized he was in silhouette against the headlights of Ciales’s car. Christa realized this and reacted fast; she fell over the front seat and snapped off the lights.

  Regan was up and running for the second quay. The raglan-coated man had got the dinghy and outboard to its destination, a forty-foot yacht moored a hundred yards offshore. Regan ran down the concrete ramp and in the darkness nearly went off the end of it into the river.

  “Hey!” Ciales’s voice gave him the direction.

  Regan lurched around and through an alley of bales and bags of sand and cement, and reached some steps that led down to the water.

  Cassidy held the twelve-foot rowboat to the quay. He was cursing, but not at Regan, Ciales, or himself, but at the darkness, the river, and the quarry. Ciales gave Regan an arm and Regan stepped abo
ard.

  “You row?” Cassidy barked at the London cop.

  “Yes,” Regan answered, and got the two oars pushed into his chest.

  “Get us out to that white yacht. Keep your head down. That guy has firepower and he nearly got you.”

  “He took the Magnum off me.”

  “Jesus,” Ciales said. “Bad news.”

  Regan got the oars into the oarlocks. “There’s no other outboard around?”

  “Row,” Cassidy said. “There’s no other outboard around, and if there was, people immobilize them so we wouldn’t get it started.”

  Regan pulled at the oars. The wooden dinghy, Cassidy bent low in the bow, Ciales down and curled up in the stern, both cops with guns at the ready, pulled out into the river. Regan had to sit up to row hard and counter the current. If that guy now on the yacht has a flashlight, I’m a sitting target, he thought.