Black Market

“Twenty-five seconds… come out of the garage…”

Walter Trentkamp leaned close. One of the things Carroll appreciated was that Walter was still basically a street cop. He still needed to be in on the action himself. “Suppose this is all bullshit? Suppose we've got the wrong men, the wrong messenger service? Something's not right here, Arch.”

Carroll still said nothing. He was watching and thinking.

“Twenty seconds… ”

“C'mon, Walter… come with me.”

Carroll suddenly stepped forward. Walter Trentkamp, somewhat reluctantly, followed him toward the garage doors. The police commissioner had stopped counting down.

Then FBI agents and city cops were everywhere, pushing through the jagged edges of the broken doors and into the darkened building itself. Somebody turned on a light, revealing a somewhat ordinary, gloomy, and cavernous garage.

Carroll, Browning in hand, froze. He could smell oil and grease, all the harsh odors left behind by sick and aging automobiles. Slick puddles of oil covered the concrete floor. There were mechanics' tools lying around.

And nothing else.

There were no vehicles of any kind.

There were no people, no Vietnam veterans. Colonel David Hudson was nowhere to be seen.

Carroll and Trentkamp wandered around the garage, their guns still drawn. They entered each small side room in a careful police crouch. They finally climbed the narrow, twisting stairs to the top floor.

And then they saw it.

It was taped to the grease-stained wall mocking them, mocking them all.

A green ribbon had been tied in a perfect bow, and it hung on a barren wall. They couldn't miss it.

Green Band had disappeared from the garage on Jane Street-still one frustrating jump ahead of them.

Caitlin Dillon carried a leather portfolio, overflowing with her notes, down the darkened hallway of an Upper West Side apartment building. The door to 12B was halfway open.

Anton Birnbaum was standing there, waiting. Caitlin wondered why he had called her so late at night.

They went to his library, a room crammed to its high ceiling with old books and periodicals.

“Thank you for coming right away,” he said. He seemed incredibly relieved to see her. “Coffee? Tea? I've been living on the unhealthy stuff lately.” He gestured to a tarnished espresso pot near the glowing fireplace.

Caitlin declined. She sat down on an antique sofa and lit as Du Maurier as the old financier poured himself a demitasse from the pot.

His hands were trembling slightly. This whole room, in its papery disarray, indicated that Anton Birnbaum had been feverishly burning the midnight oil.

“Let me go all the way back to Dallas, Caitlin. The tragic assassination of President John Ke

Caitlin crushed out her cigarette. Anton Birnbaum was very agitated now.

“Next comes Watergate, 1972. I think, I firmly believe, that Watergate was permitted to escalate. Its flames were purposely fa

“In 1945, the men who ran the OSS realized that the cloak of responsibility they had assumed in wartime was coming to an end. They were suddenly faced with giving their enormous power back to the same politicians who had almost managed to obliterate the human race a few years before… They had no desire to do so, Caitlin. None at all. In many ways, one can almost justify their actions.”

Birnbaum sipped his coffee. He made a sour face. “A high-ranking clique of these OSS men surrendered only some of their wartime powers to President Truman. They remained working behind the scenes in Washington. They began to maneuver a long series of political puppets. These men, and their protégés, the current Committee of Twelve, have gone so far as to select the presidential candidates for political parties. For both parties, Caitlin, in the same election.”

Caitlin stared at the old man. The Wise Men? The Committee of Twelve? A secret cabal with unlimited powers? She already knew a great deal about real and imagined government conspiracies. They had always seemed woven firmly into the tapestry of American history. Unconfirmable rumors; uncomfortable realities. Uncomfortable whispers in high places. “Who are these men, Anton?”

“My dear, they are not exactly faces familiar from Newsweek or Time magazine. But that's beside the point right now. What I am trying to tell you is that I have no doubt this group is somehow involved in the Green Band incident. Somehow they encouraged or caused the December fourth attack on Wall Street. They're behind whatever is happening right now.”

Caitlin didn't have the appropriate words to respond to what Birnbaum was saying. With any other person she might have dismissed this whole thing; but Birnbaum, she knew, wouldn't have told her any of this if he wasn't certain himself. Anton Birnbaum double- and triple-checked all of his information, no matter the source.

The financier stared at Caitlin, and there was a weary glaze over his eyes. She looked slightly European smoking Du Mauriers, not completely like herself, he thought. He started again.

“This veterans group-”

“You've heard of them already?” Caitlin was surprised, alarmed.

Birnbaum smiled. “My dear, information has always been the wellspring of my success. Of course I have heard of the veterans group. I have my sources inside number Thirteen. But what I don't know yet is whether the Committee of Twelve manipulated these poor misfits or whether the veterans are actually paid operatives… I do believe I know why the dangerous mission was undertaken… I think it can be traced directly to a dangerous Soviet-run provocateur called François Monserrat. A cold-blooded mass murderer. A killing machine that has to be destroyed.”

“But what is Monserrat's co

Anton Birnbaum smiled, but the smile was strangely tight. “I believe that I can, my dear. Are you sure you don't want some coffee or tea? I think you should have something warm against the cold.”

38

Queen's, New York City

Sunday morning, Colonel David Hudson patrolled the dimly lit corridors of the sprawling Queens VA hospital. The home of the brave, he thought bitterly.

The Queens VA extended-care section was situated at Linden Boulevard and 179th Street. It was a dismal red brick complex that purposely called no attention to itself. Eleven years before, David Hudson had been an outpatient there, one of tens of thousands who had been subjected to VA hospitals after the Vietnam War.

He felt a hollowness as he plunged deeper and deeper into the hospital complex. There were buzzing voices, but no people he could see. Ghosts, he thought. Voices of pain and madness.

He turned a corner-and he suddenly encountered a gruesome row of veterans. They were mostly pathetically emaciated wraiths, but a few were obscenely overweight. The odor in the still, dead air was overpowering: part industrial disinfectant, part urine, part human feces. A synthetic Christmas tree blinked spastically in the claustrophobic room.

Some of the patients had tiny metal radios pressed like cold packs to their heads. A black hussar in a torn pin-striped joh