Black Market

He couldn't think clearly. Everything was blurry. His forehead, his cheeks, and the back of his neck throbbed from the splinters of glass embedded in his flesh. He felt dizzy and sick. And he was filled with rage.

Gunshot explosions and horrible screams continued to echo through the Société Générale building. Then warbling police sirens shrieked and howled outside. They filled the air with the sudden news of terrifying disaster. Carroll finally took off his shirt and wrapped it tightly around his bleeding arm.

Michel Chevron would be telling nothing about the powerful black market in Europe and the Middle East now. Nothing about what Green Band might be.

Who was behind this horrifying noonday massacre? What could the French banker Michel Chevron have possibly known?

Carroll was too weak to stand. He slumped against a plaster wall, his head down between his knees.

What could Chevron have possibly known?

What could be worth this terrifying massacre?

What in the name of God could justify this?

14

Queens, New York

It was a magical moment, one that Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky knew he would never be able to forget. It was like a fantastic movie scene he'd been dreaming about for as long as he could remember.

As dawn edged through soiled, slate-gray skies, Stemkowsky rolled his wheelchair down the concrete ramp he'd built to get in and out of his house in Jackson Heights, Queens. His wife, Mary, a former nurse who was ten years older than Harry, sauntered close behind him.

“This is it, sweetheart,” she said in a whisper.

“This is definitely it,” Harry said brightly.

Mary Stemkowsky carefully set down Harry's two new Dunhill travel bags. She glanced at her husband. She couldn't believe how impressive and businesslike he looked in his dark pin-striped suit. His blond hair and beard were neatly trimmed and shaped. He held a soft leather attaché case that looked as if it cost big money, impossible money.

“Excited, Harry? I'll bet you are.” Mary Stemkowsky couldn't control a shy, softly blossoming grin as she spoke. She believed that Harry was truly a saint. You could ask any of his friends at the Vets Cab Company, any of the physical therapists who worked with him at the VA hospital, where she and Harry had originally met.

Mary Stemkowsky didn't know how he'd done it, but Harry seemed to completely accept what had happened to him more than a decade before in Vietnam. He almost never complained about the wounds or the constant pain. In fact, he seemed to live his life for other people, for their happiness, especially her own.

“Tell the truth, I'm a li-li-little scared. Nuh-nuh-nice scared.”

Harry tried to smile, but he looked pale around the gills, Mary thought. She immediately bent and kissed him on both cheeks, then on his slightly bloated lips. It was strange the way she loved him so much, what with his infirmities, his physical limitations. But she did. She truly loved Harry more than she loved the rest of the world combined.

“Sa-sorry you can't go, Muh-Mary.”

“Oh, I'll go next time, I guess. Sure, sure. You better believe I will.” Mary suddenly laughed, and her broad, horsey smile was close to radiant. “You look like the president of a bank or something. President of Chase Manhattan Bank. You do, Harry. I'm so proud of you.”

She stooped and kissed him again. She didn't want him to ruin one minute, not a single heartbeat, of his European trip just because she couldn't go with him this time.

“Oh, here he comes! Here comes Mitchell now.” She pointed up along the row of dull, virtually faceless tract houses.

A yellow cab had turned onto their street. Mary could make out Mitchell Cohen at the wheel, wearing his usual flap-eared Russian fur hat.

She knew that Mitchell and Harry had been working on their business scheme for almost two years. All they would tell her and Neva Cohen was that it had to do with arbitrage-which Mary loosely understood as trading currencies from country to country, making money on discrepancies in the exchange rates-and that this arbitrage scheme was their ticket out of hacking cabs for the rest of their lives.

“He takes two Dilantins before bedtime,” Mary said as she and Mitchell Cohen helped load Harry into the Vets cab.

Harry absolutely cracked up at that remark. He loved the way Mary continually worried about him, worried about dumb things like the Dilantin, which he took regularly every night and three times during the day.

“You have a wonderful trip over to Europe, Harry. Don't work too hard. Miss me a little.”

“Awhh, cah-cah-mon. I muh-muh-miss you already,” Harry Stemkowsky muttered, and he sincerely meant it.

He'd never really been able to understand why Mary had decided to live with a cripple in the first place. He was just happy that she had. Now he was going to do something for her, something that both of them deserved. Harry Stemkowsky was going to become an instant wi

Tears suddenly welled in his red-rimmed eyes. They continued to roll down his cheeks as the Vets cab slowly bumped up the deserted early morning Queens street. He had wanted desperately to take Mary along-it just wasn't possible. Among other complications, he wasn't going to Geneva, Switzerland, as he'd told her. He and Mitchell Cohen were flying to Tel Aviv, then to Tehran… They were going to be in considerable danger for the next thirty-six hours, danger they hadn't seen since Southeast Asia. But there was another side to the trip, too. There was a whole other perspective both men couldn't help considering…

Harry Stemkowsky and Mitchell Cohen were feeling alive for the first time in almost fifteen years.

The Green Band mission had brought them back to life.

While Stemkowsky and Cohen drove to Ke

Jimmy Holm was entertaining a first-class stewardess, skillfully recounting the true stories of how he had survived three years in a North Vietnamese prison, then two more years in a Bakersfield, California, VA hospital. Bakersfield, he said, had been much, much worse.

“And now, here I am. This high-and-mighty clipper-class life-style. Europe, the Far East.” Holm smiled and drained his glass of Moët & Chandon. “God bless America. With all the ugly warts we hear so much about, God bless our country. Isn't this the greatest?”

At approximately the same hour, Vets 15, Paul Melindez, and Vets 9, Steve Glickman, were enjoying similar first-class treatment on another Pan Am flight scheduled for Bangkok 's Don Muang Airport. Both Melindez and Glickman had recently worked as private rent-a-cops in Orlando, Florida. Today, December 9, they were personally in control of something over sixteen million dollars…

“Samples.”

Vets 5, Harold Freedman, had already arrived in London. Vets 12, Jimmy Cassio, was in Zurich. Vets 8, Gary Barr, was settled in Rome -where he was sitting on a classically beautiful stone terrazzo terrace that overlooked the dazzling Tiber.

Barr had most recently been a comedy nightclub bouncer for over four years on Sunset Drive in Los Angeles. Now he was thinking that this had to be a dream. Vets 8 finally closed his eyes. He blinked them open again… and Rome along the Tiber was still there.

So was the twenty-two million for his upcoming negotiations.

More “samples.”

Manhattan

In the West Village section of New York, Vets 3 wasn't flying or even living very first class. Nick Tricosas had no four-hundred-dollar Brooks Brothers suit. He had no leather Dunhill wallet full of fancy credit cards. Vets 3 was wearing a cut-off USMC T-shirt, a greaser's head banda