Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [116]
Like an advance scout, Hudson checked and rechecked the squat, cheerless brick buildings as he drove closer to the meeting place. Hudson noted everything. A knot of youths was easing out of Turner’s Grill. Their voices carried—low, guttural sounds in syncopated street rhythms.
Hudson drove slowly on. He found a parking spot further down the slope-shouldered Bedford-Stuyvesant side street.
He parked and climbed out of the car. He continued to look around the quiet neighborhood chosen for the meeting. He finally popped open the cab’s dented and scarred trunk. The Wall Street securities were there in ordinary looking, gray vinyl suitcases.
Hudson hoisted up the bags, and he began to trudge as rapidly as he could toward a red brick factory at the next street corner.
He was almost certain he was being watched. Monserrat was nearby. All his senses and instincts corroborated that single message.
This was the moment of reckoning, then. All of Hudson’s Special Forces training to be matched against Monserrat’s experience, his deceit.
Hudson shouldered open the wood front door of a building which housed shabby apartments and a small Italian-American shoe factory, The Gino Company of Milano.
He pushed into a dark hallway, where trapped cooking smells immediately assaulted him. The musty scent of old winter clothes hung in the air. The meeting place seemed appropriately isolated.
“Don’t turn around, Colonel.”
Three men appeared in the dim corridor with Magnums and Berettas drawn.
“Move up against the wall. That’s good. Right there That will be fine, Colonel Hudson.”
The leader had a Spanish accent, more than likely Cuban. Monserrat ran the Caribbean, and most of the terrorist activities in South America. At the rate he was going, one day Monserrat was going to run the entire Third World.
“I’m not armed,” Hudson said.
“Have to search you anyway.”
One of the men positioned himself less than three feet away from Hudson. He pointed his gun at an imaginary spot between Hudson’s eyes. It was a popular gunman’s trick, one Hudson himself had been taught at Fort Bragg. At close range, shoot out the eyes.
The second man patted him down.
The third man searched the gray suitcases, slashing them with a knife, looking for false siding, a bottom that wasn’t actually a bottom.
“Upstairs!” The terrorist who held the gun finally commanded Hudson. He spoke like a military officer.
They began to climb a steep and creaking flight of stairs, then another flight. Were they leading him to Monserrat? Finally, the enigmatic Monserrat himself? Or would there be more deception?
“This is your floor, Colonel. That door straight ahead. You can just walk inside. You’re most definitely expected.”
“Point of information? I have a question for you, for all of you. Curiosity on my part.” David Hudson spoke without turning to face his escort group.
An impatient grunt came from behind…
The Lizard Man. Past interrogations. Special Army training. Hudson’s mind continued to churn at a furious rate.
All to prepare him for this very moment?
“Do they ever tell you what’s really happening? Has anyone bothered to tell you the truth about this operation? Do you know what this meeting really is? Do you know why?”
David Hudson was introducing some element of doubt into their minds, petty doubts and confusion, paranoid unease he could use later, if he needed to.
Deception.
Always deception.
“Don’t bother to knock, Colonel.” The man in charge calmly spoke again. “Just go right in; you’re expected. Everything you try to do is expected, Colonel.”
A slice of dull, yellow light emanated from within as David Hudson peered inside the fourth-floor tenement room.
Hudson paused at the doorway’s edge.
He was about to confront the mysterious and dangerous Monserrat. He was about to conclude Green Band’s appointed business, to end his mission.
The Viet Cong’s Lizard Man had taught Hudson an essential lesson in Viet