Civilian contractors. It was a term that had been all over the news lately. “Like who? Kellogg Brown and Root? Halliburton? They’re builders, right? Oil work, construction, cafeterias, dry cleaning, that kind of stuff.”
“I’d look more on the more active side of things. Security work. Bodyguards. Military trainers. You know the big players? Tidewater. Executive Resources. Milner Group. There are about twenty thousand of them over in the Middle East right now, providing security to our marines. Beefy guys in sunglasses and Kevlar vests. Weapons out the wazoo.” Franciscus shook his head. “Civilians looking after the military? Go figure that one out. Makes you wonder which side of the donkey his ass is.” Finally, he shrugged. “My question is, why are guys like this coming after you?”
Bolden hadn’t stopped asking himself the same thing since he’d been thrown into the back of the limo downtown. He decided he didn’t like Franciscus’s tone much. He was like the rest of the cops he’d known. One hand stuck out to help you up, the other to throw the cuffs on your wrists. “But you’re going to hold him?”
“That we are. Once his mouth’s cleaned up, we’ll ship him downtown to One PP, give him a B-number, take a picture of him that he can give to his mother. Like I said, illegal possession of a firearm in New York State draws a mandatory one-year sentence. Throw in the cell phone, he’ll get to know the Department of Corrections better than he’d like.” Franciscus looked at him a moment longer. “You aren’t afraid these men are going to come after you?”
“I can look after myself.”
“Sure? We’re here to help.”
“Yeah,” said Bolden, with more certainty than he felt. “They know they got the wrong guy. I don’t think they’ll be coming after me anymore.”
Franciscus pushed back his chair and stood. “If there’s nothing else you’d like to add to your statement, you’re free to go. One of the officers downstairs will give you a lift home. Anything else comes to mind, give me a call. Here.”
Bolden took the business card and slipped it into his pocket. He wasn’t sure whether to say thanks or screw you. All he knew was that he was happy to leave the police station.
“And Mr. Bolden,” said Franciscus, so quietly that he almost didn’t catch it. “Be careful. I don’t know what game you’re mixed up in. But it ain’t patty-cake.”
9
It was still night when Thomas Bolden left the Thirty-fourth Precinct. At six A.M., the sky was somber and dark, daylight not due for another hour. Seated in the front seat of a police cruiser, he rolled down the window. An icy gust lashed his cheeks, bracing him. The temperature had dropped since he’d been inside the station. The air had a bite to it. Scattered snowflakes drifted past. The long-promised storm was on its way.
They traveled down Columbus Avenue, then cut through the park at Ninety-fifth Street. Bolden stretched, then pulled his jacket tight around himself. His body was sore, his muscles groaning from the beating he’d taken. But his mind was alert, resilient, tracing a path back through the events of the night: the interrogation at the police station, the fight on 145th Street, Guilfoyle’s questioning, the ride with Wolf and Irish, all of it beginning with the attack itself. Somewhere a million years ago, he’d been standing on a podium inside a packed ballroom, accepting the most meaningful honor of his life. Closing his eyes, he could feel the audience’s applause-not hear it, but feel it. Three hundred pairs of hands. A tidal wave of appreciation.
Nothing happens without a reason, he was thinking.
Six years he’d worked for the Boys Club. In that time, he’d spent countless evenings and Saturdays at the facility. He’d raised over a million dollars in contributions. He’d started a successful gang-intervention program. It wasn’t in any way arrogant to say that he deserved to be named Man of the Year.
It was a rule of his that nothing happened of its own accord. That things happened that were meant to happen. It had nothing to do with fate or predestination or karma, and everything to do with cause and effect. A real-world application of Newton’s Third Law. There was no action without a reaction.
Conversely, there could be no reaction without an action.
If he was in trouble now, it was because he’d done something to deserve it.
And yet, he could think of nothing he’d done that might have brought him to the attention of Guilfoyle and the organization he worked for. Civilian contractors, Detective Franciscus had said, the more active side of things.
Several of Bolden’s clients were active in the defense industry, but they were hardly the type to send out armed crushers to do their bidding. They were large multinational investment firms peopled by the superstars of the financial world. Corporations whose boards of directors boasted former heads of state, Nobel laureates, and corporate chieftains of companies like IBM, GE, Procter & Gamble-companies that functioned as states within a state. In six years, he’d never known their conduct to be less than strenuously scrupulous. To the best of his knowledge, none owned any companies that could be labeled contractors.
Come on. Think.
Bolden sighed. They had the wrong man. That was all there was to it.
He sat up. He was no longer so tired. “Wired” was more like it. His eye wandered to the bank of hardware installed beneath the car’s dashboard. Some kind of computer equipped with a keyboard, a color touch screen, and a two-way radio that looked powerful enough to pick up the Reykjavík PD.
“Pretty nifty,” he said to his driver, a Sergeant Sharplin. “What do you got in here?”
“It’s a Triton Five-Fifty. She’s a sweet piece of work. A mobile data terminal’s the heart of the system. It connects me to whatever law-enforcement database I need. I can plug in a name, a vehicle-identification number, and see if my man’s got a warrant outstanding or if a vehicle is stolen.”
“Just local databases or does it go national?”
“We’re tapped in at the federal level, too. Just think of it as an Internet terminal. We got access to TECS, that’s the Treasury Department, DEA, even the National Crime Information Center. If you’ve got the right clearance, you can even tap into the FBI.”
“All from this car?” It was a far cry from the last time he’d ridden in a cop car. But then his view had been from the backseat.
“You betcha.”