The Darkness hp-5 Read online

  It was not the look of a face simply admiring the beauty of a city, but the look of a man who wasn’t sure if he’d ever see these sights again.

  Sixth Avenue was crowded, full of taxis, livery cabs and black company cars carrying executives and bluecollar workers alike home from a long day’s work. Traffic in the city had actually gotten better over the last few months, but it was a wolf wrapped in sheep’s clothing.

  The decrease in traffic was primarily due to a cutback in both taxis and hired car services, but also a massive drop in truck deliveries that ordinarily clogged up New

  York’s arteries during the early morning. With so many stores and restaurants closing due to massive revenue drops, there was natural belt tightening in the quantity and frequency of transports it took to ship in new supplies.

  Nevertheless, traveling through the city during the seemingly endless rush hour times was still a harrowing proposition, and the fact that it took forty-five minutes rather than an hour to go from midtown to upper Manhattan was a small victory at best.

  We eked past taxis crawling slower than they needed to, trying to squeeze out a few extra pennies from their charges. Businessmen who would normally be glued to their BlackBerries in the backseat, blissfully unaware of this common practice, now stared at the rising fare ready to berate the driver for taking his sweet time.

  Prior to leaving, I left Curt Sheffield a message filling him in on where we were headed. He needed to know what was going on. Like Paulina said, I didn’t know who to trust, but I wanted to leave a trail just in case. I could trust Curt to follow it if something bad happened.

  We merged onto Central Park West, and several minutes later arrived at the Columbia campus. Jack paid the driver and tucked the receipt into his wallet. We got out, checking our pockets to make sure all our belongings had arrived with us.

  A few months back, I’d forgotten my wallet in a taxi, and was dismayed to think I’d have to spend the whole day in line at the DMV while explaining the situation to my credit card companies and, worst of all, Wallace

  Langston, who would need to order me a new corporate card. Yet just half an hour after realizing the gaffe, I received an e-mail from a Mr. Alex Kolodej, the kindly driver who’d found my wallet in the backseat of his cab, put two and two together between my driver’s license and business card, and even drove by my office to drop the wallet off.

  He refused any sort of reward, and drove off with the plain smile of a Good Samaritan.

  Amanda, on the other hand, had forgotten her purse at a bar just a few weeks ago, and returned home later that night to find no less than twenty-five hundred dollars in charges racked up. Ironically they were not at jewelry or electronic stores, the bastion of people looking to make a quick splurge with a stolen card, but rather from places like

  Home Depot and Ace Hardware. A sign that whoever had taken her bag was way behind on their home renovations.

  A small thing perhaps, but I considered it a sign of the times. For years, after the mayor and cops had cleaned the city up, New York was known as one of the safest big cities in the world. Like any city, of course you needed a modicum of common sense, the knowledge that despite this change if you wandered into the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time you were playing Russian roulette.

  But now, New York didn’t feel quite as safe. There was a constant tension, a thickness in the air, that something combustible could ignite at any moment. There were too many people out of work, too many people unable to afford their homes, too many businesses hanging on for dear life.

  And when a city is being stretched like a piece of taffy, just the slightest bit of tension will cause it to snap.

  The Columbia University department of history was located in a building called Fayerweather Hall. It looked like a building transported from Victorian England, redbrick and laced with intricate scrollwork. It felt as out of place in Manhattan as I did several years ago.

  We entered the building and the receptionist, a middleaged woman whose nameplate read Carolyn, directed us to William Hollinsworth’s office on the first floor. The door to William Hollinsworth’s office was wide open. I entered first, Jack following me.

  Hollinsworth was about forty years old, with a severe crew cut and intense green eyes. His hair was specked with gray, and he wore a pair of square-rimmed reading glasses that sat on the tip of his nose. He wore a well-cut gray suit jacket that did little to hide the taut frame underneath.

  I’d met many athletes, cops and military personnel over the years, and they fell into one of two categories.

  Either they continued their fitness routines to a T after leaving their vocation, or let themselves go entirely. Bill

  Hollinsworth clearly had not let his post-military career become a detriment to his fitness.

  “Professor Hollinsworth?” I said.

  He stood up, removed his glasses.

  Hollinsworth was not a tall man, maybe five-ten or eleven, but he stood up straight as an arrow and held his shoulders back like he was expecting a salute.

  “You must be Parker,” he said. Jack had followed behind me, and peeked his head out. “And Jack O’Donnell.”

  “It’s a pleasure, sir.” Jack extended his hand. Hollinsworth took it, shook it, then motioned for us to sit down.

  Jack took his seat, and I noticed him rubbing his hand and grimacing.

  I closed the door to the professor’s office, took a seat as well, and glanced around the room.

  The former Special Forces officer kept his office as clean and free from excess debris as he kept his body. The bookshelves were all neatly aligned, every paper neatly arranged. Even his in-and out-boxes, which were full, somehow managed to be perfect examples of immaculate care. There were no picture frames, no trinkets, no souvenirs, posters, awards or plaques. Nothing that led you to believe that William Hollinsworth had anything in his life but his work.

  If the sign of a sick mind was a clean desk, then

  William Hollinsworth was Hannibal Lecter.

  The professor sat back down, folded his hands and crossed his legs.

  “Mr. Parker. Mr. O’Donnell. What can I do for you, sirs?”

  “Professor Hollinsworth,” I said.

  “Bill,” he said with a smile. “I ask my students to call me Professor Hollinsworth, so unless you’ve just applied here to be an undergraduate I don’t expect the same formalities from you, Mr. Parker.”

  “All right then, Bill, as we told your secretary, we’re here from the New York Gazette. ”

  “Carolyn did mention that to me, yes. What can I do for you?”

  “Twenty years ago, you were a member of a Special

  Forces unit in Panama. Is that correct?”

  Hollinsworth shifted in his chair. He clearly wasn’t expecting this line of questioning.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I was there for a little over a year.”

  “You were with Operational Detachment Bravo, along with ten other men and women. Correct?”

  “That’s correct,” he said, a hint of agitation dipping into his voice. “Did you just come here to confirm things we both already know?”

  “Sorry to waste your time,” I said, “but Mr. O’Don-276

  Jason Pinter nell and I did some background research on you and your squad before we came here. But we both know that what you read in the newspapers and what you experience in actual life can differ greatly.”

  “That’s true. Fair enough.”

  “According to military records, you and three other members of your squad were attacked by members of

  Manuel Noriega’s military deployment, the PDF, on

  January sixth, nineteen-ninety. Is that right?”

  Hollinsworth’s eyes narrowed. He was no longer shifting but staring straight at me. I couldn’t tell if he was angry that I was dredging up old memories, glad that his near-death experience was still a topic of discussion, or furious to the point where he might rip my head off with his bare hands.

&
nbsp; “That’s right.”

  “One man was killed that day. Chester Malloy.” Hollinsworth nodded slowly, as his eyes softened.

  “Were you close with Major Malloy?” Jack said suddenly. I turned to face him, but he was looking at Hollinsworth.

  “I was,” the man said. “Our whole unit, Bravo, we trained together, fought together. I would have died for any one of them. And I wish I had been able to. But…”

  Then Hollinsworth trailed off.

  “But what?” Jack said.

  “I have no problem giving my life for my country, or for one of my countrymen. But that day, we shouldn’t have been in a position for anyone to lose their life.”

  “Why not?” Jack said.

  “We knew not to mess around with the PDF,” Hollinsworth said. “A few weeks earlier, Second Lieutenant

  Robert Paz was coming out of a restaurant in Panama City. He came across a PDF squad. He was alone. Now, any smart man or woman would have had the common sense to know when the right time is to fight, and that was most certainly the wrong time. We never got an official number, but civilian reports said that Lieutenant Paz was outnumbered at least eight to one.”

  “He decided to fight,” I said.

  “Not fight,” Hollinsworth said. “See, Paz was a member of a special unit nicknamed the ‘Hard Chargers.’

  Their job was to actively provoke the PDF, to incite them either to violence against American troops or Panamanian civilians.”

  “Why would they do that?” I asked.

  “Because until then, we had no reason to go after

  Noriega. Nothing official, anyway. Lots of innuendo, and we knew for certain he was trafficking in enough drugs to fill the Grand Canyon fifty times over. But you can’t overthrow every dictator that’s dabbling in illegal goods.

  If that was the case we’d be at war with half the known world. No, we needed something more tangible. Something we could sell to citizens back home.”

  “That’s where Paz came in.”

  Hollinsworth nodded slowly.

  “It wasn’t supposed to go like that, though. Hard

  Chargers were never supposed to travel alone. Paz just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they recognized him.”

  “So they killed him,” I said.

  “Not immediately. Paz quickly realized that things were going to get out of hand, so he tried to run. But because the PDF had set up a legitimate roadblock, they felt they were justified in killing him. That’s the way

  Noriega spun it. Have you heard of Franz Ferdinand?”

  “Of course,” Jack said. “His assassination in Sarajevo was the primary catalyst for World War I.”

  “That’s right. Well, Robert Paz was our Archduke Ferdinand. Until December sixteenth, nineteen eighty-nine, no members of the United States military had been killed by Panamanian forces. When Lieutenant Paz was killed, suddenly we had all the cause in the world. And on

  December twentieth, the floodgates opened. We went into Panama with a vengeance, and we took Noriega out of power and that bastard has been rotting in prison ever since.”

  “So how does this all play into Chester Malloy getting killed?”

  Hollinsworth said, “Why are you so interested in this?

  All of this happened almost twenty years ago and suddenly you want to know about it? I’m not buying it. What else are you looking for, Mr. Parker?”

  I looked at Jack. He said to Hollinsworth, “We finish our interview, you can start interviewing us.”

  He pursed his lips, said, “Fair enough.”

  38

  Morgan couldn’t believe how fast his heart was pounding. Even when he used to snort a few lines at a club then dance until his blood felt like lava, he couldn’t remember ever feeling quite like this. Those nights when he was high, there was always a sense of floating above the world, that the Morgan who was doing those things, saying those things, would wake up the next morning a different person.

  The world didn’t really count when you were out of it. Everything you did could be explained. This, though, there was no explaining it. No justifying it. If he accepted what was being proposed right now, he would wake up tomorrow the same Morgan Isaacs, remembering every detail and never be able to wash it away.

  Which is, perhaps, to his great surprise, the reason he didn’t feel the slightest hesitation.

  The gun was heavier than he expected it to be. You always saw movies where guys swung guns around like they were made of tissue paper, aiming them sideways and backward and doing cool tricks. Not this gun, though.

  He held it in his hand, and it felt just fine.

  “This is a Glock 36,. 45 caliber handgun,” Chester said. He was looking at Morgan with dead seriousness in his face. Chester had been nice to him during the short time he’d known the man. A good conversationalist, even jokey at times, but right now Morgan got the feeling that if he even cracked a smile Chester would throw him out of the car.

  They were driving uptown, passing by the glistening

  Time Warner Center, the natural beauty of Central Park on the right as they drove up Central Park West. Morgan never spent a whole lot of time in the Park, or in any sort of nature. When he wasn’t behind a desk, he was at home with a beer or at a club throwing back martinis like they were iced tea. At first the idea of traveling all over the city to hawk his wares worried him. What if he didn’t like it? What if he couldn’t take all the time on the subway, didn’t want to deal with the asshole who often paid with crinkled twenties and smelled like dirty socks?

  But when that money started rolling in, when he saw the smile on Chester’s face, Morgan knew he could hack it, and hack it quite easily.

  “You sure you can do this?” Chester said. His eyes betrayed no sympathy; he was simply making sure that

  Morgan was up to the task.

  “Yes,” he said emphatically. “I am.”

  “Well, all right then. Once we pull up to the building, the office is number A17. You’re going to walk straight past the receptionist. If she gives you a hard time, just tell her you’re going to the bathroom. Her name is Carolyn.

  Don’t look at her, just walk right past and say, ‘Just going to the bathroom, Carolyn, thanks.’”

  “Got it.”

  “Once you enter the hallway past her desk, make a quick left, and it’s the third office on your right. You know who your target is.”

  “I do. Why…”

  “No whys,” Chester said. “Once it’s done, you run as fast as you can back here. The car will be idling in front of the entrance. The door will be open. You just climb in, hand me the gun, and we’re gone. The gun will be disposed of before the police arrive on the scene. And we want you to wear this,” he said.

  Chester handed Morgan a baseball cap, underneath which and sewn in to the cap was a blond wig. Morgan put it on his head, and Chester adjusted it so that none of

  Morgan’s black hair could be seen.

  “Anything to throw them off a little bit. Carolyn will be the only witness, and she’s an old lady. They’ll be looking for a young blond guy wearing a baseball cap.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll drop you off near the subway after we ditch the car. Call your girlfriend. Have her come over, get her good and drunk and screw the shit out of her. She’ll be another layer of protection, so to speak. Then wake up tomorrow, come to work and act like this never happened.”

  Chester handed Morgan a folded piece of paper. The young man opened it. It was a money order for $50,000, made out to him.

  “Just in case anyone asks, you’ve been doing some contracting work on the side,” he said with a grin. “You’ll get the second half once it’s done. And Morgan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Make sure nobody asks.”

  Morgan nodded, then folded the slip back up and slipped it into the inside of his coat pocket. It felt good to have it there, and it would feel even better tomorrow when he deposited a hundred thousa
nd dollars into his bank account.

  Those debts, the ones that had nearly crippled him for so long, would be wiped clean by the end of the month.

  “You ready?” Chester said.

  “Ready?” Morgan said with a smile. “I’m bored. Let’s do this.”

  39

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Our troops invaded Panama because of Paz’s death, but because he ran from a PDF blockade the Panamanian government claimed they did nothing wrong. So folks back home in the States began to feel the same way, especially when more people started dying on both sides of the conflict. Two weeks after Paz’s death, a marine unit was supposed to infiltrate a Noriega drug lab, but instead they found themselves trapped in an alleyway where they were ambushed by the PDF. They all managed to get out alive, but there were some on our side that wondered if they were given the wrong directions on purpose.”

  I said, “That they were led into a trap in the hopes they’d be killed to strengthen the cause for the invasion.”

  “Exactly,” Hollinsworth said. “Nobody knew for sure.”

  “That day in January,” Jack said, “when your squad was attacked…the same thing happened, didn’t it?”

  I could see Hollinsworth struggling to remain passive, remain calm, but there was something behind those eyes that he was unable to hide. It wasn’t grief or sadness; it was rage.

  “I know we were set up,” Hollinsworth said. “We were scheduled to join up with a Ranger regiment. I was given directions, instructions on when and where we’d meet. But by the time we got there, it was just us and the armed guard.

  By the time the survivors got back to the base, Chester was dead. And the Rangers had no idea what the hell I was talking about. The military discharged me a month after that, and I went back to school to get my master’s degree.

  I never saw anyone else from our squad again.”

  “So Chester Malloy was killed that day,” Jack said,

  “but Rex Malloy and Eve Ramos lived.”

  “Rex, Chester and Eve were close,” Hollinsworth continued. “The whole squad was like a family, but those three were the tightest. When Chester died, it hit Rex and