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“That,” Osterbach said, “I don’t know. But I can tell you where some of the money’s been flowing on the streets.”

  Scuderi nodded. Wilson had already pointed out that the probability of turning up a quick lead would be in the area of financing the site. From what they’d learned in state police files and NCIC (National Crime Information Center) records, a lot of the grunt work at the meat dump was done by local talent. “Who?”

  Brakes screeched out on the street.

  Turning toward the sound, Scuderi saw a black van with the lights off fishtail out of control for a moment, then line up and speed into the alley. As it roared into the mouth of the passageway, the driver flicked on fog lights mounted under the front bumper and on the roof. The alley flared to a painful incandescence. There was no more than six feet of space on either side of the vehicle.

  A muzzle flash sparked outside the passenger window as the van bore down on them. Hennessey went down, driven back by two or three rounds.

  “Stay clear!” January yelled as he grabbed Osterbach’s shirtfront in both hands. The stoolie was frozen in place. January shoved Osterbach out into the middle of the alley and held him in place as the van rushed forward. The snitch tried to break and run, but the FBI agent held him fast.

  Reaching into her purse, Scuderi freed her 10mm and flicked off the safety. January was taking a big risk, but she knew it was the only chance they had. She brought the Delta Elite up and touched the button behind her jawline to activate the SeekNFire system wired into her reflexes. Her adrenaline level pushed the circuitry into operation in a heartbeat. She controlled her fear, becoming a gun sight as her palm read the pistol’s familiar specs. She fired three rounds with pinpoint accuracy through the van’s windshield on the passenger side and into the shadow just beyond.

  Glass shattered and broke, opening up a black hole. The muzzle flashes died away.

  Carris had his heavier Magnum out now, and the detonations sounded like cannon fire trapped between the buildings.

  January waited till the last minute, almost lifting Osterbach off his feet, feinted right, then pivoted left as the van’s driver reacted. He uncoiled, throwing both of them into a sprawling tumble that took them hard up against the alley wall.

  As the van rushed by her, Scuderi moved out into the clear.

  The double doors in back opened and a man stepped into view wearing an Uzi on a combat sling.

  Going with the flow of the SeekNFire programming, Scuderi put two rounds into the elbow of the man’s gun arm, then another round through his left knee.

  The gunner fell forward and landed off balance on the pavement. The van didn’t hesitate as the driver roared around the corner of the alley into the flow of traffic. Horns blew in anger and fear as it fishtailed across the two oncoming lanes and raced toward Peachtree Street.

  Scuderi dumped the empty magazine and slipped a fresh one into the butt of the 10mm. She tripped the slide release and the first round was automatically loaded. Taking a two-handed grip on her weapon, she moved on the downed man.

  The gunner shifted feebly, then reached for the Uzi lying only inches away.

  Scuderi fired twice, and the 170-grain jacketed hollowpoints kicked the machine pistol away. “Darnell.” She never took her eyes from the gunner on the pavement.

  “We’re here, Maggie,” January called. “We’re in good shape.”

  The man glared up at Scuderi with hate in his dark eyes. For the first time she noticed that he was Asian. Then his hand slipped behind his neck and his body convulsed.

  “Oh, crap,” Carris said beside Scuderi. “He’s wired with an endo-skel.”

  Scuderi glanced at the gunner’s wounded knee and saw the wire-thin tensile steel rods in the flesh and blood and bone ruin of his knees.

  With a harsh yell of pain and rage, the Asian flipped himself to a standing position and remained standing on a leg that shouldn’t have held his weight.

  Scuderi knew about endo-skels. For a time they’d been considered for Omega Blue members. Once wired for an endo-skel, a person could be mobile despite grievous wounds that would normally be crippling. The system also took over the central nervous system and fed the body adrenaline and pain-killing endorphins as deemed necessary by the on-board biocomputer.

  The drawbacks were numerous, however. If used, endo-skels drew mercilessly on a body’s resources and required a huge payback later, sometimes lasting days.

  The man pulled out a pair of matte-finish nunchuks. He started whirling them in vicious arcs with his uninjured arm as he threw himself at Scuderi.

  She didn’t hesitate. Her finger tightened on the trigger and she put three rounds through the man’s chest, rupturing his heart and ripping through his spinal cord.

  With the adrenaline pump gone and the endo-skel’s messages no longer being received, the gunner collapsed in a loose-jointed heap that didn’t move again. He was three feet from Scuderi’s smoking gun.

  Placing her pistol on the ground beside her, Scuderi started going through the dead man’s pockets for ID. She glanced up at Carris, said, “Get on the phone and call this in,” then went back to work. She took a pair of disposable surgical gloves from her purse and handled everything gingerly.

  “Hennessey didn’t make it,” January said.

  Scuderi nodded. She’d got that from the way the man had fallen.

  “I recruited some of the security people for him.” January’s face remained impassive as he turned to the snitch. “Where do we find Aikman?”

  Osterbach gave an address.

  Scuderi memorized the address and asked, “Where do the Asians fit in?”

  Looking at the corpse, Osterbach shook his head. “I don’t know anything about them.”

  Scuderi grabbed the dead man’s shoulder and rolled him over on his back with effort. The exploded chest cavity gleamed wetly. “They fit in somewhere.”

  “Oh, man,” Osterbach said as he put a hand over his mouth and doubled over. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  January yanked the snitch back. “Not there, you’re not.”

  The paperback book tumbled free of his pocket and splatted down on the pavement near the pooled blood.

  Scuderi retrieved it and glanced at the front cover. It was a science-fiction novel by Isaac Asimov called The Caves of Steel. Her older brother had been a fan when they were both teenagers. She handed the novel to Osterbach, who nodded his thanks. “The future didn’t exactly turn out to be robots and rocketships the way they thought it would, did it?”

  4

  “In case they didn’t tell you,” Slade Wilson said in a hard voice designed to bounce off the walls of the interrogation room and intimidate the man sitting across the folding table from him, “a federal cop was killed at that site last night. That means you can count on not doing your bit in your hometown. You’ll be under federal lockup, and parole’s not so convenient.”

  “I didn’t kill nobody.” The prisoner was Dewayne Ogburn. NCIC had confirmed that he’d served a four-year stretch in the Georgia state penitentiary for jackal work, and had gotten out less than eighteen months ago. “I didn’t even have a gun. You guys came in, I gave myself up.”

  It might have been true. In the confusion, Wilson didn’t know and the Atlanta PD and state units hadn’t kept track. He hadn’t expected much from Ogburn. The man was obviously a career criminal. Prison didn’t scare him, and outside of harvesting stolen organs for a jackal network, employment prospects looked grim. He was thin, sallow, and fair haired, early thirties. For a while he’d worked in a state-sponsored hospital, then discovered the fast money that could be made in jackal work.

  “Who does the meat dump belong to?” Earl Vache asked. He sat quietly in a chair next to Wilson with his hands folded on the tabletop.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who did you work for?”

  “Eddie Roth. He was my immediate supervisor. I know you already interviewed him. Whatever he told you, that’s more than I know.”

&nb
sp; Wilson surged up out of his seat and kicked it aside. The folding metal chair slammed up against the wall and made the prisoner flinch. Roth hadn’t told them anything. The Bureau agent crossed the room to the manila folder sitting on a chair in the corner. “What do you know about the Miami end of things?” he demanded.

  “Nothing. I stay away from the media. It can make my job complicated if I know too much.”

  “You knew the latest shipment was coming up from Florida?”

  “Somebody mentioned it, but I didn’t check into it.”

  Wilson grabbed the color stills he wanted and walked back to the table on Ogburn’s side. The jackal tightened up on himself but didn’t move away from the implied physical threat. “A jackal team husked thirty-one people in Miami.” He scattered the pictures across the tabletop. “Eight of them were just kids. Look at them.”

  Ogburn seemed frozen.

  Wilson grabbed the collar of the man’s orange county-jail jumpsuit and shoved his face within inches of the pictures. “Look at them,” he repeated. Wilson put his face so close to the jackal that he could feel the man’s breath on his cheek.

  Ogburn closed his eyes. “Man, I swear to you, I had nothing to do with that.”

  “You were waiting on them,” Wilson accused. “You were waiting on the pieces that remained of these kids. They say that jackals are grave robbers before the earth even gets turned, that jackals don’t have hearts because if they did they’d find a way to cut them out and sell them.”

  Ogburn’s fingers trembled when he reached out and touched one of the pictures. “Okay, man. I don’t kill them. If I didn’t do what I do, somebody else would.”

  “Give us the guy behind it,” Vache coaxed.

  “I can’t. I don’t know him.”

  Releasing the man’s collar, Wilson stepped back and took the pair of handcuffs he’d removed from Ogburn earlier. “Stand up.”

  Not facing Wilson, Ogburn pushed himself out of the chair and put his hands behind his back.

  Wilson clicked the cuffs into place, then propelled the man toward the door. Ogburn slammed up against it, not hard, but with enough force to make him close his eyes. Wilson rapped on the door.

  Vache turned in his chair, his face placid. “Ogburn.”

  The jackal looked at the Omega Blue liaison.

  “Good cop/bad cop aside, guy, a federal pen is no place to spend your bit. You keep that in mind. A lot of other guys on your team went down with you. It could be one of them will opt out before you do. And we only need the information once.”

  Ogburn shook his head. “I tell you anything, I’m a dead man. Even if I knew for sure. The juice on this operation is pure platinum. You might keep that in mind.”

  The door opened and Wilson shoved the man through to the waiting uniformed policeman. Closing the door, he ran his fingers through his hair in exasperation and let his anger hiss out between his teeth along with his breath. He thought about Newkirk lying cold and alone on a morgue slab downtown.

  Vache took out a fresh stick of gum, unwrapped it, and shoved it into his mouth. He rolled the paper between his palms, then put it into the unused ashtray in the middle of the table. “Getting nowhere fast with this thing.”

  “Yeah.” Wilson crossed the room and took his coffee from its place on the windowsill, between the steel bars crosshatched over the glass. It was cold, but he sipped it anyway. Cold or hot, the taste didn’t really matter. All his body wanted was the caffeine.

  “So where do you go from here?”

  “Something will break. This was a big network.”

  Vache shifted in his chair, and it squeaked under his weight. “It might be better to leave it alone for a while. You’ve made some headway here. Maybe you should just be glad of that.”

  “Jackal work is getting to be like fighting jungle growth. What we chop away today will be regrown tomorrow. They can have another team on the streets by morning.” Giving in to the headache pounding at his temples, he shook two analgesics into his palm and swallowed them with his coffee.

  “You’re going to be drawing a lot of political heat after tonight.”

  “That’s fine. It means the media will be keeping up with this thing too. At least, the media groups that aren’t owned by people wanting to keep it swept under the nearest carpet.”

  “You’re turning into a cynic.”

  Wilson gave him a mirthless smile. “Earl, that’s something you warned me would happen the day I took this job. I didn’t believe you then.”

  “All I’m saying here is that it might be in the best interests of the team to let this thing settle before the House subcommittee chooses to make an issue out of it. If you stir up a hornet’s nest, the least sensible thing to do would be to take a whack at it with a stick.”

  “If I let it go, I lose whatever ground Emmett Newkirk gave his life to help us gain.” Wilson shook his head. “I’m not about to do that.”

  “You think getting the Omega Blue unit shut down is going to help?”

  Wilson looked away from the man and tried to believe his own words. “That won’t happen.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because after almost four years I know how the political game is played. We have a certain autonomy within the Omega Blue charter, but we also cover special interests for the politicians. Remember when we were assigned to the armored-car hijackers in Wisconsin in February? Senator Kiernan was up for reelection, and a firm stance on law and order was a big part of his platform. We went into the State because they wanted to get Kiernan more media coverage. We took the hijackers down through leads we developed. And Wisconsin isn’t the only example I can cite. They won’t get rid of me as long as the job still needs doing and I can get it done.”

  “I was wrong. You’re not cynical. You’re still optimistic as all get-out.”

  “This country needs us,” Wilson said. “Somebody has to cut out the rot and decay before there’s nothing left to save. If regular law-enforcement people could get it done, they would. But there are too many criminals out there now, with big organizations of their own. As long as we keep the unit small, we can keep it clean. That’s why we’ve resisted expanding.”

  “You can stand there and say that, not knowing anymore about Rawley than you do?”

  Wilson sipped his coffee and locked eyes with Vache. “I know everything about Lee Rawley that I need to know. For now.”

  The phone mounted on the wall rang.

  Wilson crossed the room and picked it up. “Wilson.”

  “Me,” Mac said. “Lee and I are about to do our pigeon now. I checked in on him through the cell security vid. Guy looks like he’s just about done in. Thought you might want to catch the show.”

  “Bring him in.” Wilson turned out the interrogation room’s lights and switched on the special one-way glass filling up the adjoining wall. On the other side of the viewing area, the glass was camouflaged to look like the remaining walls.

  The glass camou faded in patches, clearing for a view of the adjoining room. Lee Rawley stood in one corner, lean and hard, his dark hair spilling down his neck under his chocolate brown Stetson. The mirror sunglasses hid his thoughts. His wore faded jeans and a belt with a large buckle that concealed at least two deadly weapons. The sleeves of his chambray work shirt were rolled to mid-forearm, and a silver-and-turquoise arrowhead gleamed from the necklace at his throat. He was clean shaven and Wilson knew he would smell of sandalwood cologne.

  By contrast, Bob McDonald looked like he’d been through the trenches. His blue eyes were bloodshot and his dress shirt was open to mid-chest with his tie at half-mast. His corduroy jacket was draped haphazardly over one of the three chairs in the room. He took the jackal’s cuffs off and waved the man to a chair.

  The jackal sat. Worry lines showed in his handsome, youthful face. His hair was cut in a punk style prevalent on the streets, and he was slender.

  Wilson adjusted the audio part of the wall.

  Mac picked
up a clipboard from the table and quickly leafed through it, pretending that he hadn’t really taken the time to study it before. “Well now, it looks like you’ve been a busy guy these last five years, Mr. Wiar. In addition to the charges you’re facing this morning, you’re wanted for arrest in South Carolina for forging government checks while working as a groundskeeper in a senior citizens home. Add to that a history of burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, theft, and several counts of public intoxication, and I’d say you’re facing time. Maybe a lot of it.”

  A nerve ticked high on Wiar’s forehead.

  “They play him right,” Vache whispered, “they can break this guy and hope he knows something.”

  Wilson nodded. He’d already gone over Wiar’s arrest record and knew the man had never been in trouble like the kind he was presently facing, but had had enough of a taste of prison to know he wouldn’t like it. Of the prisoners that had been taken, he and Mac had agreed that Wiar would be the one most likely to break.

  Mac tossed the clipboard back on the table.

  Wiar jumped and broke eye contact.

  Taking a cigarette from his pocket, Mac cupped his palms and took his time lighting up. “First thing I want to tell you, Jimmy,” he said in a soft voice, “is how much trouble you’re in.”

  Wilson listened as Mac unrolled the spiel. The man was good. Before joining the Bureau, Mac had spent some time working out of the district attorney’s office in Oklahoma City. He’d developed a good presentation style and knew the law intimately.

  “Slade.”

  Wilson noticed the change in Vache’s tone at once. The big man looked uncomfortable. He exhaled with real feeling. “There’s not going to be a better time to deal with this, or a better way to bring it up.”

  “I know.” Wilson turned back to watch the interrogation process. He tried to think of the team, and not Emmett Newkirk.

  “I’ve got four people who could qualify for Omega Blue. However this thing goes, you people can’t operate one member short.”

  “Yeah.” Wilson’s throat felt tight. He watched as the color drained from Jimmy Wiar’s face.