Blood Rites Read online

  “If you say so.”

  “I’ve already said it.”

  Sensing Reckford’s mood, the corporal retreated, saying, “Yes, sir. Right away.”

  Alone once more, Reckford hitched up his trousers, thinking for the hundredth time that he should wear suspenders to keep his Browning Hi-Power pistol from dragging them down on the right. He’d only fired his pistol twice on duty, in a dozen years, and neither of the men he’d shot had died, though one had lost a testicle.

  Bad luck.

  He peered into the lab again, determined that the cleanup might go on for hours yet, and turned away. He needed to confront the cutting plant’s survivors, in particular the women who described a white man as the author of this latest mayhem. It was an anomaly demanding resolution, and it might lead to something larger than a simple turf war.

  Might lead to trouble, if he didn’t handle the investigation tactfully.

  Indeed, might even get him killed.

  * * *

  Tinson Pen Aerodrome, Kingston

  THE FLIGHT FROM Ian Fleming International in Boscobel was running late. Such things were not unusual, particularly when the aircraft was a drug flight bound from Barranquilla, on the north shore of Colombia, to Kingston by a zigzag route designed to fool authorities. It could have flown directly into Kingston, but that might have been too obvious, inviting trouble, even though substantial bribes had certainly been paid to guarantee a safe delivery.

  Bolan was staked out on a 6th Street rooftop, with a clear view of the runway, end to end. He didn’t mind a little extra waiting, sheltered as he was from prying eyes, and he’d secured his exit route. The AS50 lay beside him, resting on its adjustable bipod. He’d topped off the magazine, but didn’t plan on using more than one or two rounds.

  His target was a Learjet 29, registered to a Colombian corporation that only existed on paper, owned in fact by a prominent cartel.

  Nothing could stop the flow of drugs, but tonight he would make a small dent in the trade.

  The Lear was nineteen minutes late when it swooped into view, circling the airfield, looping into its approach. It would be landing head-on to the Executioner, rolling directly into Bolan’s crosshairs from his rooftop stand, the next best thing to firing at a stationary.

  He confirmed the jet’s ID number, beginning with the “HK” prefix standard for Colombian aircraft, and settled into his AS50, lining up the shot. There was a moment when the Lear appeared to hover, just above the tarmac, with its landing gear deployed, and Bolan took his shot then, 750 grains of copper-jacketed annihilation ripping through the nose wheel, shredding rubber. It was nothing you’d notice from the cockpit, necessarily.

  At least, until the jet touched down.

  That was the moment all hell broke loose, the forty-eight-foot aircraft standing on its nose, kissing the asphalt, skidding that way for a hundred feet or so, before it flipped completely over onto its back. His second round drilled through one of the Learjet’s long-range fuel tanks, touching off a fireball that consumed the plane, even as it continued sliding, grinding down the runway, losing bits and pieces of itself along the way.

  How many men inside there? Two-man crews were standard on a Learjet 29; he couldn’t say if they’d brought any help along for loading and unloading cargo. Either way, the cartel’s hirelings knew what they were signing up for when they banked their pay. There were no heroes in the drug trade, only cannon fodder.

  Bolan bagged his rifle, left the rooftop and went back to find his war.

  * * *

  Windward Road, Kingston

  JEROME QUARRIE HADN’T FELT this close to panic since he was a small child, fighting to survive on Kingston’s brutal streets. He’d overcome those childhood fears and built an empire for himself, but now, within twelve hours, he’d seen it threatened on all fronts, in Florida and now his own backyard.

  Police were still investigating what had happened to the Learjet from Colombia. As slowly as the Jamaica Civil Aviation Authority worked, it could be weeks before they had a verdict on the crash, and even then it might be speculative, leaving vital questions glaringly unanswered.

  Never mind.

  Quarrie already knew why it had crashed. He couldn’t say exactly, couldn’t point to the weapon used, whether it was a bomb, a rocket, even sabotage, but it was clearly another in the series of attacks from an unknown enemy. The punishing assaults that would not stop until he’d identified his foes and crushed them into bloody, screaming pulp.

  Beyond that, there was more bad news.

  He was responsible for anything that happened to the Learjet and its cargo once it reached Jamaican soil. Quarrie had no contract with his suppliers, in the legal sense, but both sides understood the terms and they were carved in stone. His headstone, if he didn’t pay what he owed for the consignment, even though the cargo was reduced to stinking ash.

  He had a little breathing room, since no one was left to claim the money—after they were cooked on Tinson Pen’s runway—but someone would come to collect before the week was out.

  “Fire for you!” he bellowed, bringing two guards running. They stood gaping at him, until he turned on them and snarled, “What are you looking at? Get out of here!”

  They turned and fled, exchanging troubled glances. Quarrie went back to pondering the problems that confronted him. First, he had to find the cash to pay off his suppliers. Second, and by far the more important, he needed to learn who was attacking him and put a stop to it.

  Failure on either front would doubtless mean his death.

  “Trevor, get in here!” he shouted, fuming as he waited fifteen seconds for his chief lieutenant to appear.

  “What, Boss?” Trevor asked him, eyes sweeping the room as if in search of hidden enemies.

  “We need to get our hands on cash, before the damned Colombians come calling.”

  “How much?”

  Quarrie told him, watched his eyes go wide then narrow down to slits before he spoke again. “And find whoever’s doing this to us! You hear me? Find him now!”

  * * *

  Ministry of National Security, Oxford Road

  PERRY CAMPBELL HATED WORRYING. He hadn’t worked so long and so hard, running the maze of dirty politics, leaving his friends and enemies behind him, only to have some cheap yardie and a damned American undo him now. The trouble was that he couldn’t see a way to rid himself of either one, without doing some major damage to himself.

  Holbrook was CIA. He made no secret of it in their private conversations, even though he posed as some kind of attaché at the US embassy. Holbrook must know the facts of Campbell’s dealings with the Viper Posse, on behalf of the People’s National Party. That collaboration would raise few eyebrows in Kingston, but if broadcast internationally—say, on CNN, or worse yet, on Fox News—it could result in his removal. He’d be replaced with someone equally corrupt, if not more so, but Campbell could not live on irony.

  He needed cash and plenty of it, to maintain the lifestyle he cherished.

  And if Quarrie thought Campbell was failing him, hundreds of obliging candidates stood waiting in the wings for any government position they could grab. Campbell might get a warning, might lose a family member to an apparent accident or “random” shooting, and if that failed to correct his lapse, he would be killed.

  Sipping a glass of Wray & Nephew rum, letting it set his guts on fire, he saw two ways out of the snare that held him. One, the obvious, was to perform as Quarrie and the CIA expected, fielding constables, inspectors, whatever it took to solve the mystery of who was killing Quarrie’s men and why. It hardly mattered who got credit for the execution of their tormentors, as long as it was done and nothing leaked to the media that could embarrass either of his sponsors.

  That was the ideal solution to his misery.

  The other was to cut and run.

  First thing tomorrow morning, he could drop into his bank, empty his account, clean out his safe-deposit box, and catch the next flight out of
Kingston going—where?

  That was the point where Campbell’s backup plan broke down. He thought it might be possible to outrun Quarrie and his posse, somewhere halfway round the world, perhaps. But hiding from the CIA? That was a fantasy. They eavesdropped on the phones of billions, scoured emails by the terabyte per second, gleaning every secret on the planet. They could trace him anywhere and punish him for running out with debts unpaid, his duties unfulfilled.

  Campbell had issued orders to the JCF’s commissioner, resplendent in his uniform, a Cuban cigar protruding from his fleshy face. All other pending cases must immediately take a backseat to the search for this madman on the prowl.

  The bottom line: find him, or them, without further delay, or be prepared to sacrifice yourself, give up your cushy job and all its perks, to someone smarter, more efficient. And if that were not sufficient motivation, there was the matter of an offshore bank account bursting with cash that couldn’t be explained.

  The message was received. It stuck. But would it be enough?

  Campbell considered praying, but he’d forgotten how.

  And who would listen, anyway?

  * * *

  Greenwich Town, Kingston

  “YOU FOUND THESE HERE?”

  The corporal nodded. “Where you see the markers, Sergeant.”

  Two small plastic pyramids, bright red, like Lilliputian traffic cones, lay on the flat rooftop where Clancy Reckford stood, staring off toward the runway of Tinson Pen Aerodrome. In each hand, he held a plastic sandwich bag, labeled in Magic Marker with the date, address and case number. Inside each bag was an identical .50-caliber Browning Machine Gun cartridge. If he opened the bags, Reckford knew he would smell the gunpowder, a heady aroma of death.

  “Good shooting,” he observed. “What do you make the distance, Corporal? Eight hundred yards?”

  “At least, sir.”

  The Learjet’s wreckage had been doused with foam, then photographed before a crane hoisted it clear of the runway. Life went on, except for those inside the twisted, blackened aircraft, and Tinson Pen could not have other planes plummeting out of the sky as their fuel tanks ran dry from circling and waiting.

  Back to business as usual, more or less. Pay no attention to that black smudge on the runway.

  It must have been quite a show, though. Two shots had turned the Lear into a tumbling crematorium. They wouldn’t know how many people were inside for some time yet, until inspectors from the Civil Aviation Authority had studied it from every angle, hemming and hawing, snapping their photographs, scribbling on clipboards. Only then could firefighters employ their various hydraulic extrication tools to crack the fuselage and make their way inside.

  Reckford, meanwhile, already knew some things about the plane. The aerodrome’s control tower had given the make and model—an impressive Learjet 29—and had supplied the registration number that was burned off in the blaze. That led him to the corporation that held title to the aircraft, in Colombia, and there the trail stopped dead.

  Which told him something else.

  The plane had been transporting contraband, most likely drugs, but someone with a keen eye and a mighty weapon was determined that it should not land. The same person, he knew with perfect certainty, had executed two senior partners at Boothe, Cassells and Moncrief. There might be several .50-caliber sniper rifles floating around Kingston this night, but Reckford would have bet his pension that only one rested in such expert hands.

  And did those hands belong to a white man, by any chance? Was it a hopeless stretch to link these snipings with the earlier attacks on operations of the Viper Posse?

  Reckford didn’t think so.

  And if he was right, what did it mean? The easy answer was some kind of turf war, starting in South Florida and jumping to the islands when the rivals Quarrie had offended didn’t think he’d learned his lesson. White gangsters, then, or some cartel that would employ white killers, probably ex-military men.

  Russians or Chechens? Albanians or Serbs? Sicilians? Quarrie bought cocaine from a Colombian cartel, but was a rival outfit squeezing out his suppliers?

  All fair possibilities. And yet, none of them struck his mind as satisfactory.

  Dig deeper, then, he thought. Track down the weapon first.

  Another Herculean task, but he already had a few ideas.

  * * *

  Half Way Tree Road, Kingston

  THE POSH JAMAICA FLAME NIGHTCLUB was not a typical Viper Posse operation, but ownership traced back to Jerome Quarrie, all the same. The club was a cash cow, ignored by police while the payoffs kept coming, and none of the gamblers complained of a rigged game or rip-off. Most players took losses in stride—even expected them, in the case of degenerate gamblers—and anyone who complained too loudly could generally be dissuaded by Quarrie’s goon squad, out of sight from the good-time crowd.

  Bolan left his Camry at a restaurant on Chelsea Avenue and walked a short block to the club. He’d left most of his arsenal locked in the car, wearing the Glock 18 in its shoulder rig with a lone grenade clipped to his belt in back, as a last-ditch precaution. If all went well, he wouldn’t have to fire a shot this time.

  If not…

  The Jamaica Flame’s casino was a backroom operation, two stout guards on the door, but Bolan hadn’t come to place a bet or rob the players. A hostess met him in the foyer, offered him a table, then directed him toward the manager’s office instead when he showed her a fake business card from a liquor supply house. It meant nothing to her. She’d expect to see him leaving within minutes, having learned that the Jamaica Flame was well fixed for booze.

  He found the office, door marked “PRIVATE,” with another guard on station. No one else was close enough to see them as he pulled the Glock with its extended magazine and silencer, disarmed the guard and ordered him inside.

  Well trained, the sentry still took time to knock and wait until a gruff voice asked, “Who’s that?”

  “You have a visitor,” the guard said, and led Bolan inside, to find a lean man rising from behind a cluttered desk.

  “What’s this?” the manager demanded. “Are you crazy?”

  “I’ve heard it said,” Bolan replied, waggling his pistol toward a safe that occupied one corner of the office. “Open that and clean it out. You’re going broke tonight.”

  “You are crazy. The men who own this place aren’t ones to mess with.”

  “Just get on with it.”

  The manager opened the safe, revealing stacks of bundled currency. “What now?” he asked. “You gonna stuff your pockets?”

  “No. You’ll have a satchel for deliveries. Let’s see it. That, and nothing else.”

  Scowling, the man retreated to his desk, reached underneath it, and retrieved a Halliburton briefcase large enough to hold most of the money in the safe.

  “All right,” Bolan said. “Load it up. Start with the big bills. First trick you try will be your last.”

  When it was filled and latched, he took the case and nodded for the angry-looking guard to join his boss behind the desk. They stood two feet apart until he told them, “Closer. Don’t be shy.”

  The lookout shuffled closer to his manager, not liking it, and stopped just as their shoulders touched.

  “Where’s the alarm?” Bolan inquired.

  “There isn’t one,” the lean man lied.

  “Okay.”

  Almost regretfully, he knocked both men out—a swift crack to the forehead with the butt of the Glock—and bound their wrists with plastic ties. Bolan locked the office door behind him and passed the hostess on his way back to the street. He hadn’t counted what was in the briefcase, but knew it could be the equivalent of millions in American dollars.

  Enough to get Quarrie’s attention, at least.

  Enough to ramp his paranoia up another notch, and maybe put him on the run.

  10

  Tivoli Gardens, Kingston

  Jerome Quarrie was going back to his roots. It was depressing, but
he couldn’t think of any better place to hide, and the thought of fleeing the capital entirely, leaving all that he’d won and built, was more than he could bear. Tivoli Gardens had concealed men of his stature in the past, and could again.

  He traveled in the middle of a three-car caravan, his Lincoln MKS limousine sandwiched between two carbon-copy Lexus LX 570 sport utility vehicles, each seating five well-armed soldiers. With four in the limo, that made fourteen guards for his mobile escort, plus a dozen waiting at his fortified bunker, a house on Deece Avenue, two blocks from May-Pen Cemetery.

  Quarrie had contributed more than his share of customers to May-Pen over time, but he had no fear of their ghosts rising to trouble him while he was in the neighborhood. He’d already made the necessary sacrifice—although, in truth, it hadn’t helped him yet; another disappointment grating on his nerves—and on a chain around his neck he wore a talisman prepared by papaloi Usain Dalhouse. The amulet was simple, unobtrusive, hollow glass surrounded by a modest silver trim. Inside it lay a stub of dark material that might have been old leather, but wasn’t.

  The withered foreskin of a firstborn son, offered to the orishas within moments of his birth.

  Quarrie believed in the Obeah charm because it hadn’t failed him yet. Since he’d purchased it, a special order, Quarrie had survived seven attempts upon his life. On only one occasion was he injured, and the wound had been a graze, the only one of nineteen bullets fired to even touch his flesh. The amulet had been expensive, certainly, but what price could he place on life itself?

  The question made him smile, despite his sour mood. Quarrie regarded his own life as priceless. But the lives of others? Not so much.

  “Two minutes, Boss,” his driver said. The men around him shifted in their seats, holding their weapons ready. Quarrie watched the blocks of run-down flats and houses pass.

  “I hate this place,” he said, to no one in particular. Since it wasn’t a question, no one answered him.

  Thugs of all ages prowled the district’s streets, living off women, off the dole, from all varieties of crime. In every way that mattered, Tivoli had made him what he was today—a drug lord and a hunted man.