“You lied to me.”
“Well… yes. But what would you have said if I told you I was still living with him, but that I was seriously thinking about ending it?”
“I’d have told you to call me when you got your act together.”
“See? You’re too passive.”
“I don’t take other people’s wives.”
A big semi rolled by, and I couldn’t hear what she said. “What?”
“You did the same thing in Brussels!”
“Never heard of the place.”
“Capital of Belgium.”
“What about Panama?”
“I told Kiefer to tell you that to get you to do something.”
“You lied again.”
“Right. Why do I bother?”
A state trooper pulled over and got out of his car. He touched his hat to Cynthia and asked, “Everything okay, ma’am?”
“No. This man is an idiot.”
He looked at me. “What’s your problem, fella?”
“She’s following me.”
He looked back at Cynthia.
Cynthia said to him, “What do you think of a man who spends three days with a woman and doesn’t even say good-bye?”
“Well… that’s mighty low…”
“I never touched her. We only shared a bathroom.”
“Oh… well…”
“He invited me to his house in Virginia for the weekend and never bothered to give me his phone number or address.”
The state trooper looked at me. “That true?”
I said to him, “I just found out she’s still married.”
The trooper nodded. “Don’t need that kind of trouble.”
Cynthia asked him, “Don’t you think a man should fight for what he wants?”
“Sure do.”
I said, “So does her husband. He tried to kill me.”
“Gotta watch that.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” Cynthia said. “I’m going to Benning to tell him it’s over.”
The trooper said to her, “You he careful, now.”
“Make him give me his phone number.”
“Well… I don’t…” He turned to me. “Why don’t you just give her your phone number and we can all get out of the sun, here.”
“Oh, all right. Do you have a pencil?”
He took a pad and pencil out of his pocket, and I told him my phone number and address. He ripped off the page and handed it to Cynthia. “There you are, ma’am. Now, let’s everybody get in their cars and go off to where they got to be. Okay?”
I walked back to my Blazer, and Cynthia went to her Mustang. She called out to me, “Saturday.”
I waved, got into my Blazer, and headed north. I watched her in my rearview mirror making an illegal U-turn across the center divide, then heading for the exit that would take her to Fort Benning.
Passive? Paul Brenner, the tiger of Falls Church, passive? I crossed into the outside lane, cut the wheel hard left, and drove across the center divide through a line of bushes, then spun the Blazer around into the southbound lanes. “We’ll see who’s passive.”
I caught up with her on the highway to Fort Benning and stayed with her all the way.
More
Nelson DeMille!
Please see the next page
for a
bonus excerpt from
The Lion’s Game
coming soon in hardcover
from Warner Books
We are happy to include here a chapter of Nelson DeMille’s next novel, THE LION’S GAME, which will be published soon by Warner Books. The main character in THE LION’S GAME is John Corey, NYPD, who first appeared in Nelson DeMille’s bestseller, PLUM ISLAND.
You’d think that anyone who’d been capped three times and almost became an organ donor would try to avoid dangerous situations in the future. But, no, I must have this unconscious wish to take myself out of the gene pool or something.
Anyway, I’m John Corey, formerly of the NYPD, now working as a Special Contract Agent for the Anti-Terrorist Task Force. I was sitting in the back of a yellow cab on my way from Twenty-Six Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan to John F. Kennedy International Airport. The trip meter was spinning like an out-of-control one-armed bandit, and I wondered if I had enough bucks to pay the Pakistani suicide driver behind the wheel.
I still couldn’t get used to the fact that the Feds would actually reimburse me for things like a fifty-buck cab ride. Even in my former exalted position as an NYPD homicide detective, the department questioned twenty-five-cent phone calls.
It was a nice spring day, a Saturday, moderate traffic on the Belt Parkway, late afternoon, and seagulls from a nearby landfill—formerly known as a garbage dump—were crapping on the taxi’s windshield. I love spring.
I wasn’t headed off on vacation or anything like that—I was reporting for work with the Anti-Terrorist Task Force. This is sort of a weird organization that not too many people know about, which is just as well. The ATTF is divided into sections which focus on specific bunches of troublemakers and bomb chuckers, like the Irish Republican Army, Puerto Rican Independence Movement, Black Radicals, and other groups that will go unnamed. I’m in the Mideastern section, which is the biggest group and maybe the most important, though to be honest, I don’t know much about Mideastern terrorists. But I was supposed to be learning on the job.
So, to practice my skills, I started up a conversation with the Pakistani guy, whose name was Fasid, and who for all I know is a terrorist, though he looked and talked like an okay guy. I asked him, “What was that place you came from?”
“Islamabad. The capital.”
“Really? How long have you been here?”
“Ten years.”
“You like it here?”
“Sure. Who doesn’t?”
“Well, my ex-brother-in-law, Gary, for one. He’s always bad-mouthing America. Wants to move to New Zealand.”
“I have an uncle in New Zealand.”
“No kidding? Anybody left in Islamabad?”
He laughed, then asked me, “You meeting somebody at the airport?”
“Why do you ask?”
“No luggage.”
“Hey, you’re good.”
“So, you’re meeting somebody? I could hang around and take you back to the city.”
Fasid’s English was pretty good—slang, idioms, and all that. I replied, “I’m meeting somebody, but we have a ride back.”
“You sure? I could hang around.”
Actually, I was meeting an alleged terrorist who’d surrendered himself to the U.S. Embassy in Paris, but I didn’t think that was information I needed to share with the taxi driver. I said, “You a Yankee fan?”
“Not anymore.” Whereupon he launched into a tirade against Steinbrenner, Yankee Stadium, the price of tickets, the salaries of the players, and so forth. These terrorists are clever, sounding just like loyal citizens.
Anyway, I tuned the guy out and thought about how I’d wound up here. As I indicated, I was a homicide detective, one of New York’s finest, if I do say so. A year ago this month, I was playing dodge-the-bullets with two Hispanic gentlemen up on West 102nd Street in what was probably a case of mistaken identity, since there seemed to be no reason for the attempted rub-out. Life is funny sometimes. Anyway, the perps were still at large, though I had my eye out for them, as you might imagine.
After my near-death experience and upon release from the hospital, I accepted my Uncle Harry’s offer to stay at his summer house on Long Island to convalesce. The house is located about a hundred road miles from West 102nd Street, which was fine. Anyway, while I was out there, I got involved with this double murder of a husband and wife, fell in love twice, almost got killed again, and wound up being forcibly retired from the NYPD on a three-quarter disability pension. It’s a long story and kind of a sad one. And the ending is still to come. The perp who did the murders hasn’t been tried yet, and I hope my testimony gets him fried, or whatever the great s
tate of New York decides is the most humane and cheapest way to avoid overcrowding on Death Row. Also, one of the women I fell in love with, Beth Penrose by name, is still sort of in my life. Maybe more on that later.
While all this was going on out on eastern Long Island, my divorce became final. And as if I wasn’t already having a bad R&R out at the beach, I wound up making the professional acquaintance of a schmuck on the double homicide case named Ted Nash of the Central Intelligence Agency who I took a big dislike to, and who hated my guts in return, and who, lo and behold, was now part of my ATTF team. It’s a small world, but not that small, and I don’t believe in coincidence.
There was also another guy involved with that case, George Foster, an FBI agent, who was okay, but not my cup of tea either. Funny how all these Federal types got involved with this local double homicide for what turned out to be the wrong reasons, to wit: The husband and wife who were murdered were U.S. government biologists at Plum Island, not far from where I was supposed to be convalescing. This island is a sort of secret government facility, so when this couple got iced, in come the FBI and the CIA. Ted Nash at first put out this bullshit that he was with the Department of Agriculture, which theoretically runs this Plum Island laboratory that maybe does work with biowarfare stuff. But later, under some pressure from yours truly, he admitted he was CIA, but never mentioned the Anti-Terrorist Task Force, and even if he had, it wouldn’t have meant much to me then. Now it means I’m his partner. Cruel fate. Or something else.
Anyway, it turns out that this double homicide was not a Federal case and Nash and Foster disappeared, only to reappear in my life a few weeks ago when I got assigned to this ATTF Mideastern team. But no sweat, I’ve put in for a transfer to the ATTF’s Irish Republican Army section, which I will probably get. I don’t have any real feelings about the IRA either way, but at least the IRA babes are easy to look at, the guys are more fun than your average Arab terrorist, and the Irish pubs are primo. I could do some real good in the anti-IRA section. Really.
But to backtrack, the two biologists that got murdered out near Plum Island, Tom and Judy Gordon, were actually friends of mine, which is one reason I got involved with that case. The other reason is that I’m stupid.
Anyway, after all this mess out on Long Island, I get offered this great choice of being hauled in front of the NYPD disciplinary board for moonlighting or whatever, or taking a medical disability and going away. So I took the medical, but also negotiated a job at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan where I live. Before I got shot and before the Plum Island mess, I’d taught a class at John Jay as an adjunct professor, so I wasn’t asking for much and I got it.
Starting in January, I was teaching two night classes at JJ and one day class, and I was getting bored out of my mind, so my ex-partner, Dom Fanelli, knows about this Special Contract Agent program with the Feds where they hire former law-enforcement types to work with ATTF. I apply, I’m accepted, probably for all the wrong reasons, and here I am. The pay’s good, the perks are okay, the assignments sound like they could be interesting, and the Federal types are mostly schmucks. I have this problem with Feds, like most cops do, and not even sensitivity training would help.
But as I say, the work seems interesting. The ATTF is a sort of unique and, I may say, elite group (despite the schmucks) that only exists in New York City and environs. It’s made up mostly of NYPD detectives who are great guys, FBI, and some quasi-civilian guys like me hired to round out the team, so to speak. Also, on some teams, when needed, are CIA prima donnas, and also some DEA—Drug Enforcement Agency people who know their business, and know about connections between the drug trade and the terrorist world. There are other Federal types from agencies I can’t mention, and last but not least, we have some Port Authority detectives assigned to some teams. These guys are helpful at airports, bus terminals, train stations, docks, some bridges and tunnels under their control, and other places where their little empire extends. We have it all pretty much covered, but even if we didn’t, it sounds really impressive.
The idea of the ATTF is to put together all these agencies and contract civilians with their expertise in specialized areas to combat domestic terrorism. The ATTF, for instance, was one of the main investigating groups in the World Trade Center bombing and the TWA 800 crash as well as the African Embassy bombings, though the name ATTF was hardly mentioned in the news, which is how they like it.
The reason the almighty Feds decided to team up with the NYPD, by the way, is that your average FBI guy is from Kansas and doesn’t know a pastrami sandwich from the Lexington Avenue subway. The CIA guys are a little slicker and talk about cafés in Prague and the night train to Istanbul and all that crap, but New York is not their favorite place to be. The NYPD has street smarts, and that’s what you need to keep track of Abdul Salami-Salami and Paddy O’Bad and Pedro Viva Puerto Rico and so on. Not only are the Feds clueless about the streets and subways and buses and all, but they don’t really understand the types they’re watching.
Your average Fed is Wendell Wasp from West Jesus, Iowa; whereas the NYPD has mucho Hispanics, lots of blacks, a million Irish, and even a few Muslims now, so you get this cultural diversity on the force that is not only politically cool and correct, but actually useful and effective. And when the ATTF can’t steal active duty NYPD people, they hire ex-NYPD like me. Despite my so-called disability, I’m armed, dangerous, and nasty. So there it is.
We were approaching JFK, and I said to Fasid, “So, what do you do for Easter?”
“Easter? I don’t celebrate Easter. I’m Muslim.”
See how clever I am? The Feds would’ve sweated this guy for an hour to make him admit he was a Muslim. I got it out of him in two seconds. Just kidding. But, you know, I really have to get out of the Mideast section and into the IRA bunch. I’m part Irish and part English, and I could work both sides of that street. Please, God, get me out of the Mideast and into Clancy’s Pub on Third Avenue.
Fasid exited the Belt Parkway and got on the Van Wyck Expressway heading south. These huge planes were sort of floating overhead making whining noises, and Fasid called out to me, “Where you going?”
“International Arrivals.”
“Which airline?”
“There’s more than one?”
“Yeah. There’s twenty, thirty, forty—”
“No kidding? Just drive.”
Fasid shrugged, just like an Israeli cabbie. I was starting to think that maybe he was a Mossad agent posing as a Pakistani. Or maybe the job was getting to me.
There’s all these colored and numbered signs along the expressway, and I let the guy go to the International Arrival building, a huge structure with all the airline logos, one after the other out front, and he asked again, “Which airline?”
“I don’t like any of these. Keep going.”
Again he shrugged.
I directed him on to another road, then another, and we were now going to the other side of the big airport. This is good tradecraft, to see if anybody’s following you. I learned this in some spy novel or maybe a James Bond movie. I was trying to get into this antiterrorist thing, but the meter was past fifty bucks already, so I got Fasid pointed in the right direction and told him to stop in front of a big office-type building on the west side of JFK that was used for this and that. I paid the guy, tipped him, and asked for a receipt in the exact amount. Honesty is one of my few faults.
Fasid gave me a bunch of blank receipts and asked again, “You want me to hang around?”
“I wouldn’t if I were you.”
I went into the lobby of the building, a 1960s sort of crap modern architecture, and instead of an armed guard with an Uzi like they have all over the world, except maybe England, there’s just a sign that says, RESTRICTED AREA—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. So, assuming you read English, you know if you’re welcome or not.
I went up a staircase and down a long corridor of gray-steel doors, some marked, some numbered, some neither. At the e
nd of the corridor was a door with a nice blue-and-white sign that said, CONQUISTADOR CLUB—PRIVATE—MEMBERS ONLY.
There was this electronic key-card scanner alongside the door, but like everything else about the Conquistador Club, it was a phony. What I had to do was to press my right thumb on the translucent face of the scanner, which I did. About two seconds later, the electronic genie said to itself, “Hey, that’s John Corey’s thumb—let’s open the door for John.”
And did the door swing open? No, it slid into the wall as far as its dummy doorknob. Do I need this nonsense?
Anyway, there’s also a video scanner overhead, in case your thumbprint got screwed up with a chocolate bar or something, and if they recognize your face, they also open the door, though in my case they might make an exception.
So I went in, and the door slid closed automatically behind me. I was now in what appeared to be the reception area of an airline travelers’ club. Why there’d be such a club in a building that’s not a passenger terminal is, you can be sure, a question I’d asked, and I’m still waiting for an answer. But I know the answer, which is that when the CIA culture is present, you get this kind of smoke-and-mirrors silliness. These clowns waste time and money on stagecraft and such, just like in the old days when they were trying to impress the KGB. What the door needed was a simple sign that said, KEEP THE FUCK OUT.
Anyway, behind the counter was Nancy Tate, the receptionist, a sort of Miss Moneypenny, the model of efficiency and repressed sexuality, and all that. She liked me for some reason, and greeted me cheerily, “Good afternoon, Mr. Corey.”
“Good afternoon, Ms. Tate.”
“Everyone has arrived.”
“I was delayed by traffic.”
“Actually, you’re ten minutes early.”
“Oh…”
“I like your tie.”
“I took it off a dead Bulgarian on the night train to Istanbul.”
She giggled.
Anyway, the reception area was all leather and burled wood, plush blue carpet, and so forth, and on the wall directly behind Nancy was another marquee of the fictitious Conquistador Club. And for all I knew, Ms. Tate was a hologram.