Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [80]
CARROLL: Well, we couldn’t get an official bench warrant. We did talk to a judge off the record. He said, don’t get caught. We took it from there.
SAALAM: NO search warrant or nothing?
CARROLL: YOU know, this is really shocking. Didn’t anybody read the June 16, Tone magazine? Story on me? Little squared-off red box thing? Doesn’t anybody understand who I am? I’m a terrorist! Just like you guys … I don’t play by international Red Cross of Switzerland agreements. Mr. Saalam, you sold some M-23 squirrel-hunting guns, also some quail-hunting sniper rifles to a couple of fellas. About six weeks ago. Who… are…they?…
(Long pause)… Uh, oh. Uh, oh… Mr. Saalam, please let me explain something else to you. Explain this as clearly as I can….You’re a bright, U.S. college-educated terrorist. You went to Howard University for a year; you did a little time in Attica. You’re one of the Mark Rudd-El-dridge Cleaver-Kathy Boudin school…. Me, on the other hand, I’m a terrorist of the PLO-Red Brigade—Blow-away-anything-that-moves school Now then. You sold a full case of stolen M-23s on or about November first. That’s a fact we both know about. You say—”Yes, I did” or I’ll break your right hand. Just say “Yes, I did” …
SAALAM: Yeah, I did.
CARROLL: Good. Thank you for your forthrightness. Now, who did you sell the M-23s to? Wait. Before you answer. Remember that I’m the PLO. Don’t say anything you’d be afraid to say to a PLO investigator in Beirut.
SAALAM: I don’t know who they are.
CARROLL: Oh, Jesus Christ.
SAALAM: NO, wait a minute. They knew who I was. They; knew everything about me. I never saw nobody, I swear it. I felt like they had set me up.
CARROLL: I love former inmate sincerity. Unfortunately, I happen to believe you Because that’s what your current roommate, Mr. Rashad, said, too. Please get the hell out of here now…. Oh, by the way, Mr. Saalam. We had to rent your apartment up in Yonkers. We rented it to a very nice Welfare lady, with these three little kids.
SAALAM: You did what?
CARROLL: We rented the apartment you were selling guns out of. We rented it to a nice lady with a batch of kids, Skoal, brother.
Chapter 58
“IT’S ALL SO incredibly methodical. That’s what is mystifying. They keep evading all contact with this huge police dragnet How?”
Caitlin and eighty-three-year-old Anton Birnbaum, both red-eyed and exhausted, sat together on stiff leather Harvard chairs in Birnbaum’s lower Wall Street office. Caitlin was six inches taller than the birdlike, deceptively frail Financier. Earlier in her career, when she had worked for Birnbaum, he wouldn’t walk anywhere on Wall Street with her for that reason.
Now, Anton Birnbaum rubbed the small of his back as he talked. “Something so very methodical, so carefully orchestrated…. Something absolutely systematic is happening throughout Western Europe right now.”
Caitlin watched Birnbaum’s face. She waited for more to come. It usually did with Anton, who thought much faster than he could speak.
“There is a book…. The Real War, it’s called. The book’s central thesis—that Germany, Japan, have found an eminently reasonable road to further world conquest. Through commerce. That’s the real war. As a country, we’re losing that war spectacularly, don’t you think, Caitlin?”
The former chairman of the venerable investment house Birnbaum, Levitt was something of a prig, Caitlin knew. He could be savagely impatient with people he didn’t like or respect, but he was also brilliant.
“What do you think is happening in Western Europe? We’re having an impossible time piecing it together, Anton. Some important data is missing. One essential thread of logic that might explain who they are.” Caitlin wandered around the old man’s office as she talked.
She stopped with her back to the window, and looked at the photographs on the walls. There was Anton snapped in the company of statesmen, controversial industrialists, people from the entertainment industry…
Birnbaum scratched the bridge of his nose as he con-templated his choice of the next few words.