Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [70]
Behind the looming shapes stood excessively bright lamps. Behind the lamps were still more shadowy, unidentifiable figures. Green Band?
She couldn’t see who the others were …. Not yet anyway.
“Welcome back among the living. You’re a brave one to accept our invitation. Probably a little scared right now. That’s natural enough.”
Caitlin still couldn’t see them very well, even the men standing closest to her.
“You do have authority to transfer the agreed-upon sum of money? You have the necessary bank codes, Ms. Dillon?”
Caitlin nodded. Her neck was stiff, her throat dry and itchy.
When she spoke her voice sounded hollow and lifeless to her, her words clumsily formed, as if she were being spoken through by a ventriloquist.
“Would you mind showing me … some of the stolen securities. I need some reassurance, as well. I need to see what we’re getting in the exchange.”
“You’ll be able to estimate the true value by yourself, aye? And you can tell counterfeit from the genuine article? You’ve that finely trained an eye?”
“Touch is more important than the eye,” Caitlin said, hiding any anger she felt. “I can tell a great deal by touching the securities. Enough to release the money in Geneva. Please? May I examine the goods?”
They finally brought the “sample” stolen stock certificates and bonds to Caitlin. She used most of her will to hold in a tiny gasp of amazement.
The look of the securities was certainly authentic. She read off the top names: IBM, General Motors, AT&T, Digital, Monsanto.
She played with the numbers in her mind. It was several thousand times the amount of the great train robbery. And who knew how much of the total stolen amount this was? What was coming still?
“You can touch the documents all you like, darling. They’re real though. We wouldn’t bring you all the way here for nothing. Just to chat, and admire your fine all American boobies.”
Chapter 50
THE BENTLEY SEDAN Carroll rode in barely slowed as it squeezed around a crumbling white brick wall in the inner city. The wall was blackened in places from petrol bombs. The car’s radial tires screeched above bustling city noises.
Suddenly a flatbed truck was in the same narrow, twisting lane as the Bentley. The truck’s engine roared and its horn blared loudly.
A blast of gunfire erupted from the cab of the onrushing truck. Spits of gunfire came from the flat tenement rooftops to the right of the threadneedle roadway.
“Ambush!” Patrick Frazier grunted.
Almost instantly, he slumped back hard against the car’s passenger door. A jagged hole appeared at the center of his forehead.
Carroll pushed open the door and followed the driver of the Bentley out. Then he lay pressed tightly against the side of the car. He looked up, staring at Patrick Frazier’s wound through the open Bentley doorway.
Carroll angrily swung his gun barrel out in the direction of the flatbed truck. Without any accompanying sound, the weapon opened rapid fire. Gaping bullet holes appeared everywhere on the truck’s already mottled surface.
One of the Irish gunsels, astonished because there had been no gun sound, blew back away from the faded red hood of the truck. Blood spurted from his black-bearded face and throat And then the body was rolling and rolling across the road like that of a man trapped in a barrel.
Carroll’s machine gun pistol had been developed and perfected by the Israeli Army. It fired automatically, up to two hundred and fifty rounds in six seconds. The bullets were attracted by body heat. Silent death, the Israelis and their enemies called it.
A stout, red-headed man’s forehead was angrily stitched straight across with bullet holes. The man performed a brief two-step then spun off a house’s steep-shingled roof.
Carroll was aware of movement on either side of him.
Crowds, mostly women and children, were streaming out of crumbling, low-slung tenement buildings. They mobbed forward instead of hiding away in the safer shadows. They had deep-red faces—anger coming from the heart.
The two remaining gunmen from the truck dodged back among