He knew what would happen next, and sure enough, the tail half turned away from him, and Broker saw his lips move. Calling out to his counterpart and control, no doubt.
The black Suburban came by twenty minutes later. It rolled up a few feet from Broker, and a figure stepped out, followed by a couple of others behind him from the rear.
Broker knew him well.
Deputy Director of the FBI, Isakson.
Chapter 9
The two tails were FBI agents put on him by Isakson, Broker guessed. He kept quiet and let Isakson approach him.
‘We meet again, Broker,’ Isakson greeted him.
‘The General said you would call, but I had a feeling you wouldn’t. When nothing came from you in the last couple of days, I had to act, and hence these two.’ He indicated the two agents.
‘You realize they were tailing you noticeably so that you could spot them,’ Isakson continued after a slight pause when Broker still kept silent.
‘What do you want?’ Broker asked him finally after Isakson had run out of what passed for small talk, for him.
‘We need to talk.’
‘We have talked. All of five seconds. Five seconds too much. We’re done now.’
‘Broker, we need your help. I wouldn’t have reached out via the National Security Advisor if it wasn’t important.’
‘Say your piece.’
‘Not here. Let’s go to Federal Plaza.’
Broker thought about it for a moment and gave a short nod. He got into the second row of seats, and the agent sitting there moved to the rear, joining the other two. It was a silent ride back, and Broker made no attempt to break the uncomfortable silence.
It was Isakson who had requested this; it was he who had to make all the moves.
Broker turned down Isakson’s offer of a coffee when they reached Federal Plaza and sat silently in an expansive office bearing Isakson’s full title on the door, waiting for Isakson to get to it. Isakson took his time, helping himself to a drink from an expensive-looking coffee maker. My tax dollars at work, Broker thought silently.
‘How have you been?’ Isakson asked him politely when he had seated himself.
Broker waved him away impatiently, but still didn’t say anything.
‘I know what you think of me, and if I was in your shoes, I’d probably think the same. But I couldn’t have acted any differently in those circumstances,’ Isakson said, referring to the hostage situation in which Zeb was killed.
Broker took a deep breath and interrupted Isakson. ‘Let’s not go there. You have fifteen minutes to tell me what you want to tell me. You’d better make best use of those fifteen minutes.’
If Isakson had kept Zeb and Broker in the loop and worked with them, as Holt was sucking up to the FBI, the rescue attempt would have turned out differently; Zeb would still be alive. But Isakson did everything by the book and didn’t see life any other way.
A dull flush spread across Isakson’s face, but he held his temper.
‘We suspect a traitor in the FBI, and we need your help in finding him or her,’ he said bluntly.
Broker leant back in his seat and allowed it to sink in. ‘And why do you think you have one?’
Isakson laughed humorlessly. ‘Broker, we’re not as incompetent as you make us out to be. We can connect the dots when operations get sabotaged, or when a tightly controlled takedown returns empty-handed because the assholes got wind of it.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Let me start at the beginning.
‘The crime scene in New York has changed for the better over the last couple of decades. As you might well know, it peaked in the early nineties and then has been reducing each year. Not many people believe that crime is so low and seek various explanations when they see the statistics. The simple reason is better policing, better procedures and systems, such as the adoption of CompStat — a management process for improved policing — have led to crime reducing over the years.’
He paused to stand up and walk around in his office. Broker noticed it was bare. No family photographs, no awards, no photos with important people, no posters, no slogans, nothing. There was just one creased poster on a wall — Sherpa Tenzing Norqay atop Mount Everest, the date printed at the bottom: twenty-ninth of May in nineteen fifty-three.
‘Organized crime,’ continued Isakson, ‘also declined. There were many Mafia prosecutions in the late nineties. The clashes between the Bloods and the Latin Kings diminished. Everything was good. And then, five years back, a new gang turned up.
‘The thing with gangs is that most of them are based on some ethnic affiliation or some shared story. Bloods in New York had their origins on Rikers Island. Latin Kings have mostly Hispanic members.
‘This new gang has no ethnic affiliation. They have black members, white, Hispanic, East European, Asian… The shared story they have in common is military service. Many of their members have served in the US armed forces, South American forces, or NATO forces. Many are mercenaries who have seen action in Africa or Europe or the Middle East… obviously these guys are not your Pentagon four-star material. They are the dregs, the scum, court-martialed bastards. Several of them are deserters, some discharged from their forces under a cloud.’
‘You’re talking about 5Clubs, aren’t you?’
Isakson nodded grimly and leaned against the window overlooking the street below, thick glass separating sound and silence.
‘Their service experience gives them an advantage over every other New York gang. Organization and discipline. These guys just cut through the other gangs like a warm knife through butter and took over a sizeable part of the city in just five years. Oh, and they’re ruthless too. One Latin Kings’ chapter had its entire management wiped out one evening… their heads were adorning the gate of one of their offices.
‘Small businesses are acquired overnight. If a garage owner defies them, his wife and daughter are raped in front of him. And then shot. The hapless owner is left alive. As you can imagine, they’re in every conceivable illegal trade. Drugs, girls, gambling, protection, human trafficking… you name it, this gang owns a significant piece of it.
‘And that’s not all. Their genius lies in their invisibility. When you mention gang, Joe New Yorker immediately thinks of the Mafia or Latin Kings or Bloods… this gang has managed to stay out of the mainstream consciousness, yet they are the single, most organized, successful gang in the city today. They have managed to stay invisible by doing their dirty business most professionally. Even the ruthlessness hasn’t captured the public because they relied on us — the FBI, the NYPD — to hush up the gory details. And the fuckers were right about that. Why would we want to make public that organized crime, on a downward trend for so many years, has shot up again?’
Broker allowed impatience to show. ‘All this is most interesting, but what does it have to do with me? Or with you, for that matter?’
Isakson nodded. ‘This gang came to our attention because of the scale of their operations and the speed of their growth. The FBI went after this gang, and we used all our intel to bust them, but the funny thing was that most of the time we went to no-shows… a deal was supposed to go down; we put everything in place — people, wheels, tech — the deal never happened. The few busts we made were small; the guys we got were strictly small-time street dealers, nothing to connect them to the gang.’
He paused to allow that to sink in. ‘We wondered — shit does happen, but not as regularly as that — but we were nowhere close to pressing the panic button.
‘This went on for about eighteen months, and then we decided to change tactics. The NYPD and the FBI have a Joint Organized Crime Task Force, JOCTF, that goes after gangs, and 5Clubs was already on their plate, but we created a smaller cell, calling it 5JTF, within that task force to go after just them, headed by me. We figured the 5JTF, with an exclusive focus, backed up by resources of the JOCTF — more resources, more feet on the ground, different perspectives — would lead to better results.