Black Brick - Part Three Read online

  “Forty three dead and over seventy wounded. That's a lot more than a single individual.”

  “I don't need to remind you of the considerable effort it’s taken to keep the lid on your involvement in the train bombing, Bruce Andrew’s murder, your rescue of Shannon, and the mess you guys made running from the cops! I protected you. All of you. On top of that, I now have your shooting at the mall to contend with which I wouldn’t mind so much if you would have killed him.”

  “Us?” I snorted, standing up. “You protected Black Brick. We're supposed to be saving lives, not ruining them.”

  “We make tough decisions that nobody else can.” Beltran stared at me. “Take some time. That woman dying in your arms. I get it. You need to sort this out. Just don't take too long. We need—” I didn't hear the rest because I slammed the door behind me.

  How could Beltran be so casual about death? I understood his rationale but he was wrong. How many parents had died today? I had signed up to fight people like the monster that had killed my own parents. No child should have their parents ripped away from them. The thought of all the dead and wounded made me want to punch a wall. Unfortunately, the closest wall was made of brick.

  As I left Black Brick and walked towards the arboretum on campus, I called Shannon but she didn't answer. I'd talked to her briefly after the mall and she was distant. Hopefully the growing distance between us would subside. I wasn't quite ready to admit that things between us might never be the same.

  She hadn’t talked yet about what Payne had done to her or why. The torture didn’t make sense because there wasn’t anything she knew that Martinez didn’t. Because of the pain and ordeal she’d been through, I’d been hesitant to push her and Beltran had been the same way. Knowing Shannon as I did, it wouldn’t do any good until she was ready to talk anyway.

  The sun went behind a cloud and it suited my gloomy thoughts. If I lost my job and Shannon, where would that leave me? I once tracked down my parent’s genealogy, hoping that I might find a relative but came up with nothing.

  How different my life would have been if I'd had a living grandparent, aunt or uncle. I'd never have gone to the orphanage and Beltran wouldn’t have recruited me. But I would never have known Shannon.

  It hadn't happened that way and thinking about it wouldn't change it. I tried to not let my jealousy overcome me as I observed the other students on campus going about their happy lives.

  I walked along the large pond of the arboretum and sat down at a bench on the eastern side where I could see the city. Ducks were playing around in the pond and several approached as if expecting food. The pond smelled but at the moment, I didn’t care.

  “Sorry little guys, I came empty handed.”

  There were footsteps from behind me. “Have some of mine,” Kris said. I didn't turn. I should have expected her to find me. She was developing an annoying habit of turning up whenever I was alone.

  When I didn’t acknowledge her presence, Kris sat beside me and begun tearing off pieces of bread for the ducks. She was wearing a light maroon sweater with black pants and a gold colored scarf. In her hand, she was holding half a bag of bread. There was a part of me that recognized she was looking really good, but the other much larger part of me that was bursting at the seams didn’t care.

  “I heard about the mall,” Kris said.

  “Who hasn’t? Look, I promised to listen and nothing else.”

  “How's Shannon?” Kris asked.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew where she was at the club? You would have saved me a lot of trouble.”

  “We’d have gotten there eventually.”

  I growled. “When?”

  “I don't blame you for not trusting me, but that needs to change. Have you ever wondered who Beltran reports to?”

  “If you think he’s lying about being with the government, he's remarkably well connected with law enforcement.”

  “There are corrupt officers on his payroll,” Kris said, “but most of what he does is smoke and mirrors. I bet if you think about it, you'll realize that the actual instances where he was able to pull strings are few and far in between.”

  “Where’s your proof?” I asked. When she didn’t respond, I figured that I’d listened long enough and stood to leave. Kris grabbed my hand.

  “Stay for the pictures.” She flashed a smile and handed me a heavy manila envelope. My first instinct was to throw the pictures back at her, but I had just asked her for proof.

  I sat back down, lifted the flap, and pulled out the photos. The first was of a younger Beltran standing in front of what looked like a bamboo house. I lifted an eyebrow.

  “Keep going,” Kris said, “that's just to set the scene.”

  I continued to flip through the pictures of Beltran and it turned out he was in a tropical village. Several photos showed him with people that looked to be of South American descent and others showed him walking through a field of plants. It took me several moments to realize I was looking at a marijuana field. The pictures continued to depict Beltran with various other people, illegal drugs, and related paraphernalia.

  One of the photographs depicted Beltran standing over a pit. I was unprepared for the next picture and dry heaved. It was the same pit at a better angle and I could tell that Beltran was surveying a mass grave of men, women, and children. The next several pictures showed men throwing bodies into the pit. The last photo was Beltran cracking a smile with a well dressed man in a dark suit while they surveyed the scene.

  “This can't be real,” I said, unable to look away from the picture. “They're fakes or Beltran was undercover.”

  “They aren't and he wasn't.”

  I flipped through the pictures of the pit again, even though it made me sick, and I tried to spot incongruities. If the pictures had been doctored, there would be something to give it away.

  When I came again to the picture of Beltran joking around with the man in the suit, I brought it closer and examined it. Of all the pictures, it was the one that stuck out to me as a fake. How depraved would two people have to be to make jokes at the site of a mass burial?

  “I am sorry,” Kris said.

  “How old are these pictures?”

  “Decade or more.”

  I looked more closely at the picture. “This proves nothing.”

  “No it doesn't. But what do you believe?”

  I thought back to Beltran's cowardly exit from the mall and the women and children he'd left to fend for themselves. I couldn’t help but make a connection between the two, but was that fair? Just because a man was a coward, that didn’t mean he did evil things like this.

  “I don't know what to believe and I certainly won't be able to decide today.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “What do you want from me?”

  Kris took out another piece of bread and tore it into pieces for the ducks. The sour smell of the pond combined with the heat of the day was making the air pungent. She continued to study the ducks playing in the pond. To the casual observer, it was supposed to look like she was struggling with what came next. I figured it was an act.

  “I want to help you,” Kris said, “but I'm not going to lie. I'd gladly step over your dead mutilated corpse to bring Beltran down. I hope it doesn't come to that though.”

  I laughed. “That’s the first thing you've said that I believe.” I reached for the bread bag, took a slice and began to shred it, tossing the pieces into the pond. Kris smiled.

  “Before we go further, you need to decide what you believe.”

  “There won't be anything further. I listened and that's it.”

  “That man that killed your father, Stanley Redder, the one you left alive. You ever wonder who he was working with?”

  I paused. The change in direction took me off guard but it wasn’t particularly startling. She’d been talking about my parents that night at the club. I wondered about where she was getting her information. Not many people knew that I’d killed one o
f my parent’s murderers. “No. He's rotting in jail. I read the police report, but it didn’t have anything useful.

  I remembered very clearly the man talking on his cell phone while looking over the body of my dead mother after he’d secured me to a chair with duct tape.

  “What if I told you I had evidence of who was really behind the death of your parents?”

  I bit my lip. The other day, she’d said my mother was still alive. Had she got the facts wrong or was she hiding something?

  “You don’t.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Ya.”

  “Are you sure that the right man is sitting in jail? You ever been back?”

  “Course not,” I said, standing. She was going too far.

  “Make the trip. I promise you'll be interested with what you find.”

  Shaking my head, I left without another word. The pictures and her claims were disturbing but I was far more bothered by her attempt to leverage the deaths of my parents for her own purposes.

  I didn’t know where she was going with all this or how she’d found out about my actions on the day my parents died, but one thing was certain, I wasn’t going to become her pawn. She could play her games with somebody else.

  Chapter 6

  I looked up from my tablet and noted that I still had ten minutes before I needed to get off the train. I had too many questions and what Kris had said to me about my parent’s killer was eating away at me. Beltran had insisted everybody take the day off and I’d been only too happy to have a break.

  I’d looked for pictures of Stanley Redder online but the only one I'd found had been of him being led from the courthouse. His face had been covered. I should have been able to find his mug shots and it bothered me that I hadn't.

  Had my parents been killed so Beltran and Peck could recruit me? I didn’t know of a single agent who didn’t come from a background like mine. Redder had called somebody else the day he and his partner had murdered my parents. Who? Peck? Beltran?

  If I'd learned anything during the last couple of weeks, coincidences shouldn't be ignored. When Kris turned up while I was alone in the library wanting to talk, I should have seen through that right away. Something in the back of my mind told me that this led to paranoia but I refused to pay it heed. Paranoia was a useful asset in this business.

  After the incident with my parents, I’d never been interviewed by the police about what had happened. As an adult I’d just chalked it up to shoddy police work, but I couldn’t deny that it was yet another coincidence tied to that day.

  I shook my head. This was taking me nowhere. And to what end would that serve? It was unthinkable that Peck and Beltran had been involved in the murder of my parents but the coincidence nagged at me like a hanging nail.

  There was somebody reading the paper on the other side of the car, a picture of the train bombing was on the cover. The headline read, “Government Conspiracy?”

  I wondered if maybe somebody had finally been tipped to our involvement, but then I noticed that I was looking at the front page of a gossip rag.

  “Terrible shame,” said a woman said who sat beside me. She’d noticed me staring at the paper. “I have a friend whose son died in that explosion.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said, trying to avoid eye contact and hoping that she would not feel inclined to further engage in conversation.

  “Ten years old. I've a good mind to march down to the Philly Tattle Tale and give them a piece of my mind. Trying to exploit a terrible strategy like this. Have they no respect for the dead?” She sputtered and paused. “Sure, I suppose it's possible a rogue government agency could have had something to do with it. Sometimes fingers on the same hand have no idea what the others are up to.”

  “You're one of those?” I asked “Buying into the idea that the government somehow benefits from bringing tragedy to its citizens.”

  “Not the government in general, corrupt individuals maybe, but I wouldn't believe it unless I saw iron clad evidence of guilt.”

  Lady you have no idea, I thought. I wondered what she'd do if I confessed to my involvement.

  She handed me a flier. It was titled “In Memory of Jerry Cala.” I stared at the large picture of the young boy and struggled to keep my face straight. Below were other smaller pictures depicting the boy with a soccer ball, at the beach, and at a birthday party with friends.

  “That’s a terrible shame,” I said. “Mind if I keep this?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I thanked her, folded it up and put it away. I’m not sure what made me ask for it, but I figured remembering him was the least I could do for a life that had ended because of a decision I'd made.

  When it came time for my stop, I almost didn't get off. But I'd come this far and I wanted to know if there was something to Kris' implication that Redder was somehow innocent. I got off the train at the last possible second.

  An hour later, when I looked up as Redder walked into the room and sat down in front of me, I knew that Kris had been right. This wasn't the man who killed my parents. If she was right about this, what should I think of her assertions that I didn’t work for the government?

  “What you want?” the man asked from the other side of the glass.

  I looked into the face of the wrongfully imprisoned man and couldn't find the right words to say. “Sorry, it sucks to be you,” didn't seem adequate and I didn't want to give the man hope that I could somehow free him. Jake Ramsey was officially dead and would be able to do nothing for this man. That had been part of the deal when Beltran had recruited me.

  “Made a mistake. Thought you were somebody else.” I stood and tried to avoid looking back into the man's eyes. I felt bad for this innocent man serving a life sentence with no hope of exoneration. I wished I could do something for him, but at the moment I had too many other problems to deal with.

  An hour later, I was on the train and almost to my stop when Beltran called. When I answered, I had a hard time paying attention as he told me that Martinez had been spotted by the surveillance team we kept on Vargo. He ordered me back to Black Brick so we could prepare to capture Martinez when he came out of the new Diggon headquarters. I found myself telling him I was ten minutes away before hanging up.

  Chapter 7

  Shannon was in the driver seat of our Dodge Charger and I sat on the passenger side. I wasn’t certain, but I suspected that Beltran had a thing for this type of car because Black Brick had a fleet of the Chargers. After our botched rescue attempt the other day when we abandoned the Charger, he’d almost been more concerned about the loss of the Charger than the fact we’d spent all day evading the police.

  I had my rifle, the F2000 on my lap and it was covered with my jacket. It wasn't my favorite weapon, but the bull pup design was easier to work with in many of the situations we encountered. We’d already been waiting for close to an hour, during which time, Shannon and I had barely spoken.

  After trying several times to start a conversation with her, I’d given up and resigned myself to the awkward silence. I missed the way that Shannon had been before the kidnapping.

  I should have been able to talk to her about the fact that the wrong man was in jail for killing my parents, but I didn’t know that I could trust her anymore because she’d changed.

  Shaking my head, I surveyed the area. We were parked on a road that ran parallel to Diggon’s new headquarters. Cherry and Tom were several cars ahead of us. The space between us and the new building was nothing short of ostentatious. There were flower gardens, art exhibits, and a large amphitheater. My eyes stopped on the zoo.

  While the zoo had its own place beside the tower, there were several impressive wildlife exhibits that led up to the massive complex. The closest to us, featured grizzly bears in a sprawling habitat. I doubted most captive grizzly bears had it so lucky.

  From here, although our heavily tinted windows made it hard to get a good view of them, I could make out several of the bears moving arou
nd. It had warmed up in the last few days and I wondered how recently the bears had come out of hibernation.

  I looked past the habitat, and beyond the wide expanse of gardens to the tower rising into the sky. It was my first time getting this close to the new Diggon building. I’d seen it go up from a distance while the construction had been underway because it was impossible to miss the building as it towered over most of the others in the city, but I’d never bothered to get closer.

  Martinez was inside the Diggon headquarters and apparently already causing a scene because people in yellow jackets—Diggon Security—were milling around the entrance and had the place on lockdown. Originally, our orders had been to go in after Martinez, but we'd arrived too late and were now watching from a distance.

  There was a flurry of activity near the entrance and several humvees arrived with more armed guards. Even though there weren’t any roads close to the front of the building, the sidewalks were wide enough to function as such. Diggon was quickly amassing a small army outside.

  Had Martinez gone suicidal?

  If he had, then nothing we did here would make a difference and I'd have a better and safer view of it from a couch once the media caught wind of this. I looked at my watch and sighed.

  I didn’t really know what Beltran expected us to do. Whatever was happening inside, the Diggon security force had a lot more firepower than we did. There weren’t any police on the scene yet, but that wouldn't last for long. If they showed up, we’d need to get out of the way quickly in case some of the officers recognized us.

  “I want Martinez and Payne dead.” It was the first Shannon had spoken since we’d arrived here.

  “So kill them,” I said. “Cherry will probably help with Martinez if you ask.”

  There had been a change in Cherry since the mall bombing. She’d barely been able to veil her struggle with her feelings for Martinez before. Now there was a quiet rage to her. I hoped for her sake it would pass soon.