Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [37]
She was responsible, Carroll knew, for the disappearance, then the cold-blooded, heartless murders of a Shell Oil executive and his family. The American businessman, his wife, their two small girls had vanished that past June in Rio. Their pitiful, mutilated bodies had been found in a sewer ditch inside the favelos.
Marqueza reportedly worked for the GRU through Francois Monserrat. According to rumors, Isabella had also been Monserrat’s lover.
She tossed Carroll the coldest, most indignant look he could imagine. Her dark, sullen eyes smoldered as she stared him down.
Arch Carroll wearily shook his head. He set aside the steaming coffee container. The impression he got from Isabella was that of a tempest about to unleash its force. He watched as she leaned forward and thumped her hands on the desk: the fiery light, the gleam in her dark eyes was something.
“I want to see my lawyer! Right now! I want my lawyer! You get my lawyer. Now, senhor!”
“Nobody even knows you’re here.” Carroll spoke in a purposely soft, polite voice. Whatever she did, however she acted—he would do the exact opposite, he’d decided.
Carroll knew that two of his agents had intercepted Isabella Marqueza as she walked down East 70th Street after leaving her apartment that morning. She’d screamed out, struggled and fought as they grabbed her off the streets. “Somebody please help me!”
Half a dozen East Side New Yorkers, with the anesthetized look of people observing a distant event which interests but doesn’t particularly involve them, had watched the scene. One of them had finally yelled as Isabella Marqueza was dragged, fighting and sobbing, into a waiting station wagon. The rest did nothing at all.
“You people kidnap me off the streets,” Isabella Marqueza complained. Her red mouth pouted.
“Let me confess to you. Let me be honest, and kind of frank,” Carroll said, still going gently. “In the last few years, I’ve had to kidnap a few people like yourself. Call it the new justice. Call it anything you like. Kidnapping’s lost most of its glitter for me.”
The louder Isabella Marqueza got, the softer Carroll’s speaking voice became. “I kind of like the idea of being a kidnapper. I kidnap terrorists. It’s got a nice ring to it, you know. Don’t you think?”
“I demand to see my lawyer! Goddam you! My lawyer is Daniel Curzon. You know that name?”
Arch Carroll nodded and shrugged. He knew Daniel Curzon.
“Daniel Curzon’s a piece of sorry shit. I don’t want to hear Curzon’s name again. I’m serious about that.”
Carroll’s eyes now fell to a manila package, a plain-looking folder wrapped in brown string on his desk. Inside was his moral justification to do whatever he needed to do right now.
Inside the tan envelope were a dozen or so black-and-white and 35-millimeter color photographs of the Jason Miller family, formerly of Rio: the murdered family of the Shell Oil executive. There were also grainy photographs of an American couple who had disappeared in Jamaica, pictures of a Unilever accountant from Colombia, a man named Jordan who had disappeared last spring.
Carroll continued softly. “My name’s Arch Carroll. Born right here in New York City. Local boy makes good.… Son of a cop who was the son of a cop. Not a lot of imagination at work in our family, I’ll admit.”
Carroll paused briefly. He lit up a leftover cigarette stub, Crusader Rabbit style.
“My job is to locate terrorists who threaten the security of the United States. Then, if they’re not too strongly politically connected, protected, I try my best to put a stop to them…
“Put it another way, you could say I’m a terrorist for the United States. I play by the same rules you do.… No rules. So stop talking about Park Avenue lawyers. Lawyers are for nice, civilized people who play by the rules. Not for us.”
Carroll slowly untied the string bow on the manila envelope. Then he slid out the handful of photographs inside.
He casually passed them to Isabella Marqueza.
“Jason Miller’s body. Miller was an engineer for Shell Oil. He was also