The Fanatics of Al Asad Read online

  "That's it, Salvatore."

  "So if I don't give you no help, you gonna come after me?"

  "Personally," I said.

  He sighed. "You're a crazy son-of-a-bitch, Carter. I wish to hell you was my man. Gimme a hit man as good as you, I'll make us both rich. Okay, you got my help. Whadda you want?"

  I told him about Al Asad. Not all, just that I needed to find them fast and that they were in Manhattan. "I want to know where," I said.

  "They the ones that did it? The Arabs?"

  "They're the ones."

  He shook his head again. "A President, a Vice-President, a couple of Cabinet members — Jesus! What the fuck's the country comin' to? Nobody's safe no morel"

  I didn't answer.

  "What kind of help do you think I can give you, Carter?"

  "You reach down into every comer of Manhattan," I said. "Between your loan shark collectors and your numbers runners in every bar and cigar store, you got your fingers into every neighborhood in town. I want to know what's going on in the East Side. Nobody blows his nose without you knowing how many pieces of Kleenex he used. I want that information. I want you to pass down the word that anybody hears anything about this group of Arabs, he picks up the telephone and lets you know as fast as he can get a dime out of his pocket!"

  "And I pass it on to you?"

  "That's the idea."

  Big Sal ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. He sucked on a tooth. Finally, he nodded. "Okay."

  I got to my feet. "That's it, Sal."

  Big Sal sat where he was.

  "You're not going to walk me to the door?"

  "You come in by yourself, you make it out by yourself."

  I paused at the door. "Don't be too hard on DeGiullio," I said.

  Big Sal made an obscene gesture at me with his middle finger, so I shut the door behind me and walked out through the factory. No one even as much as looked at me.

  Chapter Five

  Thursday 4:47 p.m. The Georgian Hotel. Park Avenue

  The FBI contact was waiting for me in the lobby when I came in. I'd known him before. His name was Clement Taylor. He was one of their best. We went up to my suite. Taylor looked tired; there were dark circles under his eyes and his face had a drawn, taut look to it.

  He handed me a sheet of paper. "This list might be of help to you," he said. "We got Immigration into the act. We've been working on it since last night, all night long. First, we pulled a computer print-out on everyone entering the country from the Middle East for the last three months. That included "tourist visas, student visas — the whole works. Subtracting those who left the country, we still had a few thousand names. Early this morning, we instigated the most massive manhunt this country's ever seen. Every Federal and State law enforcement agency has been involved. Counting the local police forces, I'd say there were several hundred thousand men working on this assignment today."

  He touched the paper in my hand.

  "So far, we've located every one of the names on our original list — except for these. As for the rest, they're clean so far as we can check them out."

  "You're not telling me that all of these names are involved, are you?"

  Taylor shook his head. "No. Just that we either can't find them or that they can't prove they're clean. Personally, I'd say that most of them are not involved in Al Asad. I've put an asterisk next to the names of those in the New York area — or who have dropped from sight."

  "What if they used European passports?" I asked.

  Taylor shrugged resignedly. "Then we're out of luck."

  I scrutinized the names on the list. One leaped out at me immediately: Yousef Khatib. And then another: Sharif al Sallal.

  I pointed the names out to Taylor. "These two. Concentrate on them. I want to know when they came into the country, where they went, who they saw, what they did. Everything!"

  Taylor wrote down the names. Still writing, he asked, "Are they in it?"

  "Sallal is top man," I told him.

  "They have gall," Taylor commented. "They used their real names, right?"

  "It's more than gall," I said, thinking about the implications. "It shows that they're proud of what they've done. They want the world to know about them. No skulking around. No masks, no faceless terrorists. They're out to make it big or die in the attempt."

  Taylor got to his feet and went over to the telephone. His whole body was stooped with exhaustion.

  He came back to me. "We're on it," he said. "Every man in the New York office as well as the New York Police. If there's anything to find, we'll find it."

  They would, but how long would it take them, I wondered. We had precious little time! Well, it wouldn't hurt. Let them do their best. Even one clue would help.

  Taylor rubbed at his bloodshot eyes.

  "No sleep?" I asked him.

  "Not even a nap," he said wearily.

  I didn't tell him I'd been up all night, too. It wouldn't have been fair. Taylor had been working his ass off while I had been holding Tamar's golden body in my arms.

  "That's the way it goes," I commented noncommittally.

  "Yeah."

  Tamar came in less than five minutes after Taylor had left. She was followed by two bellhops carrying cardboard boxes and packages. She gave me a quick kiss. In two minutes, the bedroom was a swirling mass of torn tissue paper and clothes scattered around on the bed. Henri Bendel, Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue and a dozen exclusive boutiques were represented by the labels on the clothes and the printing on the boxes.

  "These were all I could get in so short a time," she said to me over her shoulder. "The rest will be coming in later. Thank God, I can get away with clothes that need practically no alterations."

  I started to reply when the phone rang.

  It was Duane.

  "You be at Riverside Drive at 88th Street," he said. "You be there in forty-five minutes. That cat Wesley, he don't like to wait, you dig?"

  "How will I know him?" I asked.

  "He drives a white Lincoln Mark IV. You ain't gonna miss it, man. Not unless you're blind."

  He hung up before I could ask him anything more.

  * * *

  Thursday. 5:53 p.m. Riverside Drive.

  The Lincoln Continental Mark IV was brand-new and white and freshly washed and polished. There was gold pin-stripe scroll work along the sides, across the hood and around the tire hump of the trunk that makes the Mark IV so distinctive. The windows were tinted glass. The interior was upholstered in white imitation fur, even to the steering wheel cover. The car announced to anyone looking at it that it belonged to a pimp and that he was doing well.

  Wesley was as black as the car was white. He was dressed in a white, Ultrasuede bush jacket and flare bottomed slacks cut and stitched to resemble bleached, natural denim. His shirt was flame red raw silk with extra-long collar points. Perched at the rakish angle atop his carefully coiffed Afro hairdo was a white safari hat with a wide, gold moiré cloth band. A matching red feather stuck up jauntily out of the left side of the band. Wesley was rangy with wide shoulders and a narrow waist. He was good looking, and he knew it, but the mean hardness of him came through the surface.

  And he was suspicious of me.

  A block away, on Henry Hudson Parkway, the homeward bound traffic was crawling along bumper to bumper. We sat in the car, smoking. I smoked one of my gold-tipped cigarettes. Wesley smoked a joint. The slightly acrid smell of his marijuana filled the interior of the car, even though he had the air conditioner going. It was an act of defiance on his part.

  "Duane says you want to rap with me," he said, finally. "Start rappin'."

  I could feel the antagonism emanating from him. Antagonism, suspicion and resentment. I was white. He didn't like me, and he didn't try to hide it. It was as simple as that.

  Wesley was tough. He didn't get to be a top pimp in a tough world without being tougher than his competition.

  I knew immediately that I could have talked myself blue in th
e face and his answer would have been, "Bug off!" I decided to cut to the core of the matter. Action speaks a hell of a lot louder than words.

  "Let's take a short walk," I said.

  He eyed me. "Where to?"

  "Just to the corner."

  He took a minute to make up his mind, wondering what the hell I wanted to do that for. Then, he opened the door on his side of the car and stepped out into the road. He slammed it shut. I waited until he was in front of the car radiator before I reached into the breast pocket of my jacket. I took out a slim ball-point pen. While it would actually write, the ink tube was less than an eighth of an inch long. The rest of the barrel was crammed with a special compound the AXE "specialty" boys had rigged up for me.

  I pressed down the plunger on the end and dropped the pen on the floor behind the front seat as I swung open the door. Shutting it firmly behind me, I joined Wesley on the sidewalk and started to walk down to the corner.

  Wesley fell into step beside me. Uneasily, he looked around. The block was empty except for the two of us and the cars driving past.

  "You looking for the fuzz?" I asked.

  "Yeah."

  "There's no fuzz," I told him. "Just you and me."

  Wesley stopped in his tracks.

  "How come we're takin' this walk?" he asked.

  I didn't answer. I just kept on walking. Grudgingly, Wesley caught up with me and fell into step, moving in a rhythmic strut. We went about two-thirds of the way down to the corner before I stopped and turned around. Wesley did the same. I looked back at the car.

  "Man, what is it with you?" he demanded. He was street-wise and street-smart and the situation was one that he instinctively felt was all wrong. He was getting bad vibes and that meant danger but he couldn't put his finger on exactly what it was. What made him most uncomfortable was being in a situation in which he felt he was losing control. He didn't like that. It made him uneasy.

  "That's some car you got there," I said.

  "It sure is. Just got it last week. Goin' to be the fanciest set of wheels in town when I get through."

  "I don't think so," I said.

  Wesley looked puzzled. "What you talkin' about?"

  "Look at the car," I said. He turned his head just in time to hear the soft whoo-oof of the explosion and to see the huge, bright, orange and yellow-red burst of flame that welled up, filling the interior and blowing out the glass of the windows, engulfing the car in a deadly embrace of fire. Up and down the street, traffic came to a halt.

  Wesley was stunned. He stared at the flames and then turned his head toward me. He looked back at the car again as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Then he looked at me and said, "Man…"

  The gas tank went up with a roar that lifted the rear end of the car, slewing it around and dropping it back heavily to the pavement at an angle. The flames leaped higher.

  "You mother…" said Wesley, hatred filling his voice with acid.

  "Don't finish it," I warned him. "I hate that word."

  Wesley shut up. Swiftly, his right hand swung back to his hip pocket.

  "If you take out that knife, I'll tear your balls off," I told him, without making a move. His hand froze.

  Wesley's narrowed eyes measured me. I hadn't made a move. He took me in from head to toe and measured me a second time and his mind went jumping back and forth. He'd tested other men and been tested by them from the days when he was a kid on the streets of the black ghetto. Most of the time, his life depended on his judgment. He made up his mind about me.

  "You carryin' iron?" he asked slowly.

  I nodded. "But I won't need it," I said. "I'll do it with my hands."

  He believed me because he knew it was true.

  "You goddamn honky son-of-a-bitch," he said, his voice thick with rage. "You white bastards are all alike!"

  "I don't like you either," I said coldly. "Now that we got that out of the way…"

  "…just because I'm black…"

  "…because you're a pimp," I told him, cutting him off in mid-sentence. "I hate pimps. Black, white, pink or yellow, I hate pimps. You dig?"

  Wesley stared at me.

  "Then what you want with me, man?"

  "Before I tell you that," I said, knowing I couldn't trust Wesley's rebelliousness and that he'd turn on me the first chance he had, "I'm going to tell you what will happen to you if you so much as even think of crossing me!"

  In words of one syllable, using street language, I told him. When I got through, I asked, "How many girls you think you're going to pick up looking like that?"

  Wesley's face was impassive. He didn't move a muscle.

  "None, I guess," he said stoically, but I knew that he was churning inside.

  "You think you're going to be able to keep the girls you have now?"

  "No."

  "You believe I can do it, Wesley?"

  That was the crucial question. I could see his mind carefully weighing every aspect of the problem. He eyed me again. I don't think he was afraid. If he was, he hid it. Like anyone who grew up on the streets and fought and clawed his way to the top, he was a realist. You've got to be tough to be a pimp of Wesley's caliber. If you're not, the others will take away your girls. No pimp can afford to have that happen to him even one time. Word gets around. The pimp fives in a peer group that has no mercy on the weak. They don't call Harlem "the jungle" for nothing.

  Wesley made lip his mind.

  "Yeah, I think you can do it." The admission came reluctantly. It was a painful thing for him to acknowledge.

  "You're going to help me?"

  "Depends if I can," he said.

  "How many girls you got in your stable?"

  "Five real top chicks," he said.

  "What land of trade do they have?"

  "Only first-class," he said, a glimmer of pride coming through his voice. "The best. Some of them got three- and five-hundred-dollar Johns, that's what they've got. They're all white chicks, too, 'cept one. She passes for South American."

  "Who's your old lady?"

  He told me.

  "You got her working, too?"

  "Man, all my chicks work! I got big expenses."

  "This is what I want, Wesley." I told him about Al Asad. "I want to hear about them. I want you to pass the word around to the other pimps you know. I want every one of their girls — she hears something, she passes back the word. Arab. If she's got an Arab John, or knows about one — I want to hear about it. You got that, Wesley? Arab is the word."

  He nodded his head. "I dig, man."

  He took a deep breath and stared into my eyes. "You one tough honky," he said, forcing himself to say the words. "I guess you're really not puttin' me on about what you'd do if I cross you?"

  I didn't answer.

  "I don't like what that cat Duane did to me," Wesley said softly.

  "Duane's my man," I answered. "Anything happens to him, I come after you."

  Wesley just stared at me. I locked eyes with him. A long minute passed.

  "Damn!" He swore without taking his eyes away from me. "You jus' don' give a man a chance, do you?"

  "Not if I can help it."

  He turned away from me more in disgust at his own helplessness than at me. He'd thought he was tough. And he was — in his own world. But his universe wasn't mine. He hadn't ever dealt with professional assassins — the best in the world — and beaten them again and again. He wasn't Killmaster N3. I was.

  Wesley swore quietly for a moment, but he wasn't going to let a white man see how much it had affected him. In his own way, he had a fierce pride in himself. I had trampled it into the ground.

  If he were to be any good to me, I had to restore it, so he could be as tough with the other pimps as I had been with him.

  "Wesley?"

  Reluctantly, he turned back to me.

  "I get paid to kill," I said quietly.

  His mind took in the words, turned them over and around and squeezed out the full meaning of what I'd said.
<
br />   "I never did have a chance with you, did I?" he finally said.

  "No."

  "Okay," he said. "I'll pass the word."

  By this time, the crowd that had collected around the burning car was ten deep, all standing at a safe distance across the street. From several blocks away, we heard the whining, high pitched, rising and falling wheep-wheep of police car sirens and the wailing, imperative, hysterical squawking of fire engines.

  "Let's get the hell out of here," I said. We cut diagonally across the street and around the corner, picking up a cab on West End Avenue.

  "Where we goin'?" Wesley asked.

  I leaned forward and gave the driver an address. Wesley sat back in his corner of the seat as far from me as he could get, not looking at me, staring out the window on his side of the cab. The shock of losing his Mark IV was beginning to hit him fully.

  It took us almost thirty-five minutes to get across town to the auto dealership. I got out of the taxi, paid the driver and crossed the sidewalk to the show window, with Wesley beside me.

  The showroom was huge — and plush. There were eight or nine Rolls-Royces on the floor; some the latest model, other were classics of their kind: Silver Ghosts and Phantom IVs.

  I had used the stick on Wesley. Now it was time to use the carrot.

  "You see that white Rolls?" I asked. He could hardly miss it. It stood elegantly proud in the middle of the floor.

  "Real leather on the inside," I said. "Right hand drive, too."

  "Right hand drive?"

  "Yeah. And brand-new. They put your initials on it in 24 carat gold leaf right under the window."

  Wesley didn't say anything. I could sense his imagination beginning to run away with him. I could almost feel the desire build up in him, it was so palpable. Wesley would have given his soul for that car. I knew that in his mind he was picturing himself driving around town in that white Rolls-Royce with his old lady beside him. There wouldn't be a pimp in town who wouldn't burn with envy. And he knew it.

  "What's your last name, Wesley?"

  "Henderson."

  "W. H. That's what they'll put on it."