The Black Knight

XXXV

Nicola Lopez sat in a pool car on the corner of Lexington and 75th and waited patiently for her mark to arrive. The windows of the sedan were lightly tinted, sufficiently so that she knew she could not easily be observed or identified by passers-by on the street. Beside her sat Vaughn, likewise watching a single vehicle parked along the sidewalk further down the street.

The take down would have to be swift and slick to avoid detection, but Lopez already knew exactly how she would do it. Most agents would have attempted a risky grab and run from an apartment, an elevator or some other concealed location where there would be no witnesses to the hit. Lopez knew better. The more normal something looked, the less likely it was to attract attention.

What she didn’t like was the fact that Mitchell had arranged the take down and was calling the shots. She didn’t trust Mitchell as far as she could throw him, and she would rather he was locked up in…

‘I’ve got him.’

Vaughn was looking across the street at a man walking in a long, dark coat buttoned up against the brisk winds buffeting the sidewalk. Lopez spotted him immediately and checked his appearance against a screenshot from her drone’s camera.

‘That’s him,’ she confirmed, ‘that’s Wilms.’

‘He’s going to run,’ Vaughn observed with interest. ‘But he’s not in much of a hurry.’

‘Trust me,’ Lopez said as she reached for her door handle, ‘when people have this much power they become convinced that they’re above the law, above everybody else. This guy’s got the bug all right, what I don’t know is whether we can trust Mitchell with what he’s got in mind.’

‘We’ve got no choice now,’ Vaughn said. ‘Grab him while you can.’

Lopez stepped out of the car and pulled a baseball cap down low over her eyes, her black hair tied in a pony-tail behind her head, her leather jacket zipped up with the collar popped as she thrust her hands into her pockets and strode toward Wilms. She aimed to his right, not wanting to alert him to her presence too early, and saw him heading for a glossy black limousine parked near the hotel from which he had emerged.

‘Now, Michael,’ she whispered into her microphone.

She crossed the street, dodging the traffic as she hopped up onto the sidewalk a few paces behind Wilms. The Majestic Twelve agent reached his vehicle and reached out for the rear door handle.

‘Victor!’

Lopez’s delighted cry made several heads turn, including Wilms’. The old man stared directly at her from less than two yards away, and to her genuine delight Lopez saw a brief tremor of panic flicker behind his eyes. The momentary lapse revealed a powerful man who was weak within, cosseted and protected from the vengeance of those he controlled and victimized.

The panic dissolved as Wilms straightened from the door, Lopez knowing that he could not get into the vehicle faster than Lopez could tackle him.

‘Nicola,’ Wilms replied with a smile devoid of warmth. ‘Good to see you up and about.’

Lopez closed to within a couple of feet of Wilms, her hands still in her pockets as she fought the urge to swing a right hook across this asshole’s jaw.

‘No thanks to you,’ she hissed back. ‘How much did the assassin cost you, Victor?’

‘Me? Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Don’t worry yourself, Nicola. You’re not worth an expensive hit, and before you even think about it we can’t be recorded. There are enough digital distortion devices in this vehicle to prevent any external monitoring.’

Lopez wasn’t interested in Wilms’ ride.

‘We got you,’ she said simply. ‘Got Majestic Twelve on film, right here in the city and in the company of none other than Gordon LeMay, Director of the FBI. That’ll look good on the evening news, don’t you think? Federal boss cavorting with billionaires in Manhattan Penthouse suite, being drugged by them and abducted.’

Wilms did not shift an inch.

‘You have footage of a man in the company of friends, Nicola, nothing more.’

‘Then where is he?’

‘Somewhere safe,’ Wilms replied, ‘a private hospital. Not one of the grubby halls that you and your kind fester in, believe me.’

‘My kind?’

‘The unwashed masses,’ Wilms sneered.

‘We’re coming for you,’ Lopez said. ‘One at a time, we’re going to bring every last one of you down to our level and see how long you last, starting with you.’

‘Is that so?’ Wilms taunted as he looked about them. ‘And how are you going to do that, Nicola? You have no power of arrest over me, and even if you did I would be out within hours. I have friends so powerful the President of this country would piss his pants if they so much as looked at him.’

‘And where are they, right now?’ Lopez asked casually as she too looked about the street.

‘Go ahead,’ Wilms challenged her as he thrust his wrists in her direction and scowled. ‘Arrest me and see how long it is before I’m out and your life as you know it is over. I can have your face all over the media within hours, arrested for crimes you haven’t even heard of. You’ll spend the rest of your life rotting in some forgotten cell and nobody will give a damn about you.’

Lopez smiled but said nothing as she turned and walked away, Wilms shouting behind her.

‘You’re nothing, Lopez! You’re not even history because you’re not important enough!’

Wilms climbed into his vehicle and slammed the door shut, enveloped in a cloud of anger as he snapped at the drive.

‘JFK, right now! My jet is waiting.’

The driver slipped the vehicle into drive and pulled out into the flow of traffic as they headed north out of Manhattan. It was only moments before Wilms noted that they were headed in the wrong direction.

There was no need to scold the driver, no sense in arguing about which direction they were taking, for Wilms knew that he would not be taken to JFK in this car. He did not know how it had been done, but he did know that this vehicle could not be the one in which he had arrived at the hotel.

Wilms dove for the door handle but it was already locked. He reached for his pistol, concealed as it always was beneath his coat, but it was already too late for that as he saw the driver point a pistol over his shoulder at Wilms.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ the driver snapped. ‘Sit still.’

The driver pulled into the sidewalk again and the door opposite Wilms opened. A large form climbed into the vehicle and slammed the door shut, and Wilms’ guts contracted involuntarily as he looked into the eyes of Aaron Mitchell.

‘I did what you said,’ Wilms uttered in feeble defiance. ‘I gave you MJ-12!’

Mitchell reached out with one giant hand and retrieved the pistol from Wilms’ hand, then passed it to the driver who stashed the weapons before he drove back into the flow of traffic and headed north.

‘You’re making a mistake,’ Wilms uttered to Mitchell, masking the dread in his belly with a thin veil of defiance. ‘I’ll be free within hours.’

Aaron Mitchell sat with his hands folded in his lap as he considered his reply for what felt to Wilms to be hours. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and yet seemed as threatening as ever.

‘No, you will not,’ he rumbled. ‘You will tell me where Gordon LeMay has been taken.’

Wilms scowled.

‘You think that I know that? You think that even if I did I’d tell you? This is a game far too big for you to handle, Aaron. You’re a spent force, too weak to be of any value. MJ-12 will find you no matter what you do to me, and when they do they will crush you without mercy.’

Aaron smiled and looked across at Wilms.

‘So much for the idea of an MJ-12 family,’ he replied.

‘You walked away from us.’

‘You betrayed me,’ Aaron countered as his voice dropped to a growl. ‘And now you’ll pay the price.’

Wilms scoffed and sat back in his seat.

‘Thumb screws and electricity?’ he snapped. ‘None of it will do you any good Aaron, I don’t know where LeMay is and I don’t give a damn. The fat ass had it coming and if I’d had my way we’d have liquidized him years ago.’

Aaron inclined his head.

‘I don’t doubt it, Victor,’ he said. ‘Of course, you do understand that this vehicle is not being driven by your normal driver and that all of the distortion devices have been deactivated, so in fact every word you’ve been saying to me and to Nicola Lopez has been recorded.’

Wilms’ features paled, outrage quivering like sheet lightning behind his eyes.

‘It doesn’t matter!’ he spat back. ‘You can’t touch me!’

‘No, we can’t,’ Aaron replied. ‘But we can touch Timothy Morris.’

Wilms stared blankly at Aaron. ‘Who? What the hell are you talking about?’

The vehicle was leaving the city, and with a sudden jolt of fear he spotted the signs heading out of the Upper East Side that the driver was following.

‘What are you doing?!’ he demanded.

Aaron smiled, his eyes as cold and black as oil as he leaned closer to Wilms and replied.

‘You’re coming back down to Earth with a thump,’ he growled, ‘and you’re going to spend the rest of your life where you should have been all along. With the scum of the Earth.’

Wilms looked at the signs passing them by, his blood running cold in his veins.

‘Timothy Morris,’ Aaron said, ‘sixty two years old, a convicted pedophile and murderer. You were arrested in the company of two pre-adolescent girls trafficked from Lithuania, both of whom were strapped to your bed in your apartment, the victims of repeated rapes. Your fourth arrest across several states, which means that you’re going down for life without parole, although it’ll take at least a year for your trial to be heard.’

Wilms’ stared in horror at Mitchell.

‘That’s insane! MJ-12 will not tolerate such a…’

‘They’ll drop you just as they dropped me,’ Aaron growled back, ‘because like you said to Lopez, you’re not important enough. Besides, they won’t even know where you are. As we speak your vehicle is being driven to JFK and your jet will depart on time. You just won’t be on it, Victor. The jet will experience a fatal accident half way through its flight and you will be recorded by the Air Accident and Investigation Board as having died in the crash, the pilots exonerated of any responsibility for your demise.’

Wilms realized that Aaron had executed the perfect abduction and concocted a suitable fate for him, one where nobody would be searching for him and nobody would listen to his cause or his pleas that he had been set up.

Located on an island in the East River between Queens and the Bronx, Riker’s Island was a city of jails, with a population of fourteen thousand inmates, all awaiting trial. As a new arrival, Wilms would be housed in the New Admissions Cells where he would be kept in a sort of quarantine until the results of tests for tuberculosis and other diseases came back from dedicated labs. Then, he would be incarcerated into one of the most dangerous and feared facilities in the entire United States. Wilms swallowed thickly. Rikers was a ferocious jail packed with murderers and drug addicts, hardened killers bought up on the mean streets of New York City. As a supposedly convicted pedophile, he knew what would happen to him.

‘This will never work,’ Wilms spat at Aaron. ‘I’ll never talk.’

‘I don’t give a damn,’ Aaron replied. ‘We don’t need you either, Victor. All we needed was the faces of MJ-12, and the chance to lock you up for good while we start in on them. Your time is done. You’re not getting out of this, either your jail time or your prison sentence, and I look forward to you screaming out loud to a judge that you’re actually a member of a secret organisation called Majestic Twelve and that you’ll be sprung anytime soon. They’ll add an insanity plea, probably, which we’ll make sure doesn’t get through.’ Aaron smiled at Wilms. ‘You’re not the one with powerful friends any more, Victor. Tell me where LeMay is.’

Wilms’ face twisted in frustration and he cursed.

‘Larchmont.’

Mitchell nodded once, and then looked at the driver. ‘Continue to Rikers.’

‘I just gave you LeMay!’ Wilms screamed.

‘You just saved your own life,’ Mitchell said, ‘nothing more. Life’s going to get tough for you from now on, get over it.’

Wilms heard a scream erupt from his own throat as he lunged at Aaron, his fury and frustration unleashed in one terrible burst. The big man was too quick, however, and both Wilms’ arms were batted aside as one thick fist ploughed into his skull and Victor’s world dimmed to blackness and silence.