Black Market

“I know that. Mary doesn't know how you came to possess stolen stock market bonds in Beirut, then in Tel Aviv. You know, though.”

“Pleeze. Don-don-don hur' her…”

“I don't want to hurt her. So you tell me what you know, Sergeant. Everything that you know. You tell me right now. How did you get the stolen stock market bonds?”

Once again, that horrible smile from Monserrat.

It took another excessively cruel and gruesome fifteen minutes to get the information, to find out some, not all, of what Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky knew…

Information about the stolen bonds and Wall Street securities; about the bombing on December 4. Not where Colonel Hudson was right now. Not even precisely who the Vets leader was. But a start, a begi

François Monserrat stared down at a crippled Harry Stemkowsky and his wife. From Stemkowsky's perspective the terrorist leader seemed to be looking right through them, as if they were both totally insubstantial. The look on Monserrat's face was almost inhuman, frightening, sickening.

“You see now? None of your pain and none of poor Mary's suffering were necessary. It could have been five minutes of talking together, at most. Now, how's this for just rewards?”

A compact black Beretta appeared, paused so that the Stemkowskys could see what was coming, then fired twice.

The very last thing U.S. Army Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky ever thought was that he and Mary never got to enjoy their money. Over a million dollars, which he'd earned. It wasn't fair. Life wasn't ever fair, was it?

That night Arch Carroll went to his home in Riverdale. As he trudged up from the floodlit clapboard garage, the ground around him seemed to be spi

He climbed the creaky porch steps. Twinges of guilt struck painfully hard. He'd been neglecting the kids for too long this time.

Only the night-light was on downstairs. There was the soft electric buzz of kitchen appliances. Carroll took off his shoes and tiptoed upstairs.

He stopped and peeked inside the front bedroom where Elizabeth, AKA Lizzie, bunked with Mickey Kevin. Their tiny baby figures were delicately sprawled across twin beds.

He remembered buying the beds years before, at Klein's on Fourteenth Street. Just look at the little creepolas. Not a problem, not a care in the world. Life as it ought to be.

An ancient Buster Brown clock from Carroll's own childhood glowed and clicked softly on the far wall. It was next to posters of Def Leppard and the Police. Strange world for a little kid to grow up in.

Strange world for the big kids, too.

“Hi, you guys,” he whispered too low to be heard. “Your old dad's home from the salt mines.”

“Everybody's just fine, Archer,” Mary K. said.

“You scared the living shit out of me, Mary. I never heard you come in.”

“They understand all the problems you're having. We've been watching the news.”

Mary K. gave her big brother a hug. She'd been seventeen the year both their parents had died in Florida. Carroll had brought her up after that. He and Nora had always been around to talk to her about her boyfriends-about Mary Katherine wanting to be a serious painter, even if she couldn't make any decent money at it. They'd been there when she needed them, and now it was the other way around.

“Maybe they understand okay about my work. How about the other things? Caitlin?” Carroll's head turned slowly toward his sister.

Mary K. took his arm and draped it over her shoulder. She was such a softie, such a sweet, gentle, and good lady. It was time she found someone as terrific as she was, Carroll often thought. Probably she wasn't helping her cause, living with him and the kids.

“They trust your parental judgment. Within reasonable bounds, of course.”

“That's news.”

“Oh, you're the Word and the Light to them, and you know it. If you say they'll like Caitlin, they instinctively believe it-because you said it, Arch.”

“Well, they didn't show it the other morning. I think they'll like her. She's a terrific person.”

“I'm sure she is. You have good instincts about people. You always knew which of my beaux was worth a second look. You're a sucker for people who are full of life, full of love for other people. That's what Caitlin's like, isn't she?”

Arch Carroll looked down at his baby sister and shook his head gently. He gri

Carroll stretched his arms. The wound, that souvenir of a morning in France, still ached. “One day soon I'm going to take a week off. I swear it. I've got to get back in touch with the kids.”

“What about your friend, Caitlin? Could she take a week off, too?”

Carroll said nothing. He wasn't sure if that was such a good idea. He went off to bed, where he lay exhausted but unable to fall over the edge into sleep. The computer screens at 13 Wall were still ru

Arch Carroll snored quietly, slept dreamlessly, and when his bedside alarm went off, it was just before dawn and still dark.

31

Washington, D.C.

Washington, Carroll had always thought, was the ultimate Hitchcock movie location: so elegant, so quietly lovely and distinguished, yet paranoiac in all of its twisting, changing forms.

At 9:00 A.M. he squirmed out of a faded blue cab with a badly dented fender. His face was immediately slapped with raw cold and drizzle on Washington 's Tenth Street. He hiked up his jacket collar. He squinted through the thick, soupy morning haze that obscured the concrete box that was the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Once inside, he found the procedure at the escort desk mechanical and u

After several minutes of serious and pompous phone checks, he was granted a coded blue tag with the FBI's official insignia. He slid the plastic card into a metal entry gate and passed inside the hallowed halls.

An attractive woman agent, a researcher for FBI Data Analysis, was sitting outside the elevator on the fifth floor. She wore a man-tailored suit; her chestnut hair was wound back in a tight, formal chignon.

“Hello, I'm Arch Carroll.”

“I'm Samantha Hawes. People don't call me Sam. Nice to meet you. Why don't you come this way, please.”

She started to walk away, pleasant but efficient. “I've already collected as much material as I can for you to look at. When you told me what you were fishing for, I put in some hours of overtime. My material comes from the Pentagon and from our own classified files. Everything I could collect this quickly on your lists of names. It wasn't easy, I must say. Some of it I transcribed from material already on computer file. The rest-as you can smell-is contained in some really musty documents.”

Samantha Hawes escorted Carroll to a library-style carrel beside a silent row of gray metal copiers. The desk was completely covered with thick stacks of reports.

Carroll nearly groaned as he gazed at the mountainous stacks. Each report looked like every other. How was he supposed to find something unusual in this yawning heap of history?

He walked around the table, sizing up his task. Hidden among all the folders were co