Countdown to Mecca Read online

  “Sam!” she gulped in her charming Russian accent. “They are after me!”

  “Who is?” Sammy asked.

  “Very bad men!” she said, shaking. Her eyes, normally alert as those as a Nordic wolf, seemed wary, frightened.

  Sammy’s Marine training was a little rusty. He hadn’t worn a uniform for years, not since he was on one of his motorcycles when a teen driver had hit him, sending him into a year of physical therapy and paving the way for a handsome settlement with the insurance company. Still, as the saying goes, Once a Marine, Always a Marine. Sammy was up and moving past her in an instant. He slammed his apartment door shut behind her, rattling the painting he’d bought at a flea market showing a shipwreck in the Farallon Islands, out in the Bay. Then he locked and bolted the door and turned toward her.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re safe now.”

  Her Arctic eyes locked on his. “Are you sure?”

  He wasn’t, but he said, “Absolutely. No one would ever expect to find a beautiful girl in my apartment.”

  She smiled halfheartedly. “You are making a joke.”

  “I wish. Now, relax and tell me what’s going on,” Sammy coaxed.

  She began to calm. He maneuvered her to the sofa and sat next to her, looking intently into her eyes. It was easy. They were the brightest, lightest blue he had ever seen. But he kept one ear trained on the door, on the steps outside. They were old wooden steps and they creaked. It would be difficult for anyone to sneak up on him.

  Anastasia Vincent was a strong, very special girl. Within weeks of her moving here from Moscow he had learned she was a high-class call girl. That was probably how she got into this country, paying her way with favors, but that didn’t matter. If there was one thing he’d learned in his thirty-seven years, people did what they had to do. Hell, he was a professional party clown. Not a party animal, but a bona fide clown: big red wig, big red nose, big red slippers, and lots of polka dots in between. Who was he to judge others? Ana had character, wisdom, and she had seen more in her twenty-seven years than most women see in a lifetime. He figured she was on the lam from an angry john, someone he could handle.

  “You want a drink? Water? Something stronger?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Thank you, though.” Once Ana caught her breath it all came out in a rush. “I met a military officer six months ago at a party hosted by a wealthy armament manufacturer. He introduced himself as General Montgomery Morton. He seemed very taken by me.”

  Sammy smiled. “That doesn’t exactly put General Montgomery Morton in the genius class for pickers.”

  “You are very sweet,” she replied graciously.

  Ow. Sammy was used to hearing that from women, which is why there weren’t many of them trying to get in to see him. They wanted the younger, the studlier, the wealthier. Even in San Francisco, there were still enough straight guys like that to shrink the dating pool for guys like him to zero.

  “So you met this general,” Sammy said.

  “Yes. Soon he was calling me every week and paying very well,” she said. “We were always staying in the city’s best hotels, ordering room service, expensive champagne.” She smiled wryly. “No gifts, though. Nothing that could be traced. But that was all right. His money was good. The last time we met he asked me to bring other women to party with his friends. That was today. He said it was a special occasion.”

  “A birthday? A promotion? An appointment?”

  “He did not tell me,” Ana said. “We met at a Tower Suite of the Fairmont Hotel.”

  She was right about him spending lavishly: a suite like that, high on Nob Hill, cost more each night than he made in a couple of weeks.

  Anastasia explained that she had brought along Ritu, a voluptuous girl from India, and Miwa, an ethereal Japanese girl. The oldest man, whom she mentally named “Pallor” for the whiteness of his skin, lit up at the sight of Miwa. The youngest man—whom Anastasia nicknamed “Kid”—immediately put his arm around Ritu’s shoulder and drew her toward the bedroom.

  “The general took me to the couch,” she said. “He seemed to be thinking about something far away. But I had gone there to do a job and—I did.”

  She said that for the next hour the general was rougher than usual, though it was nothing she couldn’t handle.

  “Still, I was relieved when it was over,” she said. “The two other girls left but I stayed to get ready for my next engagement. I went to dress and fix my makeup in the bathroom and was about to step out when the general’s smartphone rang. As he answered he jumped over and slammed the bathroom door but didn’t realize there was a towel on the floor. The door did not shut all the way.”

  Ana decided to wait until he was done. There was a short silence and then the general uttered a single word. “Good.” The next pause was longer, so long that she thought the call was over. But just as she placed her hand on the doorknob she heard him again.

  “He said, ‘Firebird moves to stage two,’” Ana told Sammy. “It was spoken softly, almost like a prayer.”

  “Military code?” Sammy wondered.

  “That was what I thought,” Ana told him.

  When the call was finished, she said she shook her hair, opened the door, and froze. The general’s eyes were on the rumpled towel, on the open door. And then they were on her.

  “His expression was dark and very, very angry,” Ana said. “He demanded to know what I had heard. I told him I hadn’t heard anything. He just stared at me with those evil eyes. “‘What did you hear?’ he shrieked, this time rising from the bed and coming toward me. I repeated that I had heard nothing, but he didn’t believe me. He lunged for me, like he wanted to grab my hair, but I got around him because he was still tangled in a sheet. I ran toward the door.”

  “Wow,” Sammy marveled. “That’s quite an extreme reaction, especially for a high-ranking military officer.” He shook his head after considering the matter. “He must be under enormous pressure to go off like that.”

  “No, he wasn’t under pressure once we finished,” Ana said innocently.

  Sammy stifled a grin; he knew she meant it as a professional observation.

  There were tears in the girl’s eyes as she recounted how he had shouted for the others to stop her. Pallor and the Kid tried to grab her, but Ana said that she had spent a lifetime escaping—from local bureaucrats who wanted favors when she was sixteen to border dogs when she was eighteen and left the country without permission. The next thing she knew she was out in the hall, running.

  “You ran here from the Fairmont?” Sammy asked. He glanced at her legs, following their shapely curve down.

  She raised her luminous eyes to the face of a man she had come to like, to trust. She nodded.

  “That’s nearly a mile, most of it up hill!” Sammy said incredulously.

  She nodded. “I have run farther.”

  “Barefoot?”

  She seemed surprised when he said that. She looked at her feet. Her stockings were torn, the bottoms bloody. “Oh. I could not run in those heels and I dared not stop. I just left them in the lobby.”

  “A regular Cinderella,” he said, trying to inject some levity. It didn’t seem to work. Her eyes were still full of fear. “Did they follow you?”

  “I do not know,” she admitted.

  Even if they had, Sammy did not think a group of officers would go after her in broad daylight. “Well, it’s over now. Relax and we’ll see what we can find out about this General Morton and Firebird.”

  He walked around the kitchen table and moved the clown suit that was stretched out there to dry after he had sprayed it with fabric freshener. He had come back from a gig just an hour before and, as usual, the costume was damp with sweat, along with splashes from excited kids holding cups full of juice. Anyone who thought making balloon animals, doing magic tricks, honking a horn on his belt, and talking in a funny voice was easy should walk a mile in his oversize shoes.

  He grabbed his laptop from the table and b
rought it back to the sofa. He pressed the ON button and looked at Ana.

  “I have never seen and heard a man so frantic,” she said.

  “When men take chances, and those chances bite them in the posterior, they are already a little on edge or guilty or both,” Sammy said.

  “He never worried about that before,” she said.

  “Maybe he was afraid you heard someone’s name and would blackmail him, threaten to tell a wife or superior.”

  She shook her head. “I only heard ‘Firebird,’” she insisted. “No names.”

  “Well, we’re gonna get through this,” he assured her as he tapped in the word ‘Firebird.’ “Sammy Michaels doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘retreat.’”

  “You can look that up after ‘Firebird,’” she joked.

  He grinned. That was actually pretty funny coming from a woman who was afraid for her life.

  The first cite on the search engine was from that day, just ninety minutes earlier. He clicked on it as Ana sat and hugged his arm. It felt good.

  “I feel safe with you,” she said. “I always have.”

  “Really?”

  “Even if it was just talking at the mailbox, you made me feel like I had a neighbor, a home, a friend.”

  Those weren’t exactly the words Sammy had wanted to hear, though it was a start.

  “But who is—what did you call her?” Ana asked. “Sindrella?”

  He grinned. “Cinderella. A fairy tale character. A poor girl with a fairy godmother, loses her glass slipper at the prince’s ball—”

  “Ah, Zalushka!” she said. “It is a Russian story.”

  “Of course it is,” he said as her cell phone beeped. “The Russians came up with everything.”

  She didn’t seem to have heard him, her expression souring as she retrieved her phone from her purse.

  “You expecting any calls?” Sammy asked. She shook her head as she looked at the text message. Sammy started reading the Firebird reference on the computer then heard Ana gasp. “What is it?”

  Her breathing sped again as she handed Sammy the phone. We know where you are. Come back now.

  “How could they know?” she asked.

  Sammy felt a chill but remained composed. “With the NSA spying on every American, you ask how the military knows something?” he asked. “He probably cloned the GPS signal from your phone the first time he met you.”

  “He what?”

  “Copied your data, just in case you ever tried to blackmail him.”

  “Chyort voz’mi!” she said and rose suddenly.

  Sammy didn’t know any Russian, but that sounded like something you wouldn’t say or hear in polite company.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but my father taught me that waiting for the executioner was the worst way to live. It is better to keep one step ahead. I’ll have to go.”

  “You mean—for good?”

  “What choice do I have?”

  “I don’t know, but there has to be one.”

  “An escort cannot go to the police—”

  “No,” he said firmly. “But I have another idea.”

  He took his own cell phone from the end table beside the couch.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I’m calling the one man in this town who can help.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone I thought I’d never call again,” he responded hollowly. “My big brother.”

  2

  Before going to the hotel for a press conference, Jack Hatfield walked around the park atop Russian Hill, the prime real estate location in the Gilded City. As he did, he wondered about exclusion. How the uber-liberal city “leaders” excluded all but their sycophants from any and all recognition. Jack had long ago accepted his status as an outcast and wore it as a measure of pride in a corrupt and soulless place. The top families were filled with whores, thieves, drug addicts, alcoholics, and sex maniacs. Of course there was the Petty family, living off the old man’s oil fortune while espousing “green” nonsense, cashing in on fraudulent solar contracts. Then there were the two politicians. One whose husband did deals with China that crossed the borderline of treason and the other whose husband and son did land deals that violated zoning codes while appearing on the boards of other “green” groups. Then there was Mr. Berkowitz, one of the chief donors to socialist causes the single largest recipient being the ACLU. His money was made by selling his savings and loan chain to a major bank just before the housing crash of ’08. He made billions while the bank that bought his junk mortgages went under. Jack could only ask how a city, let alone a nation, could survive with such abject thieves running the show.

  Yet, of the many species of liars Jack Hatfield dealt with, no one topped a CEO. This was not because they were particularly skilled at lying; their techniques were obvious and predictable: deny, deny, deny. Jack’s interest was entirely philosophical. He wondered if having renounced their moral compass as they climbed the corporate ladder, they could no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood. He suspected that they believed every word they spoke was the truth.

  Not that all CEOs were liars. It was just that he had personally dealt with quite a few: those who had appeared on his cable TV series Truth Tellers, and those who had pressured the station to cancel his controversial show because of an hypothetical question: “If it came down to it, would you rather see a hundred million of us killed, or kill a hundred million Muslims?” Jack lamented the fact that in the old days—the very old days, the time of the Continental Congress—one delegate, he forgot who, seconded the debate on Independence because he felt there wasn’t a topic so dangerous you couldn’t at least talk about it.

  Now, if talk wasn’t all about political correctness and spin, the mainstream media and CEOs shunned it.

  Take the man standing at the podium across the Hyatt Hotel’s meeting room, holding forth to a group of eager news stringers and bloggers for a cross section of business websites. As CEO of Der Warheit Unternehmen, Helmut Schoenberg represented a German multinational company with a wide array of products and interests from coal mining to health care, with high tech and textile manufacturing thrown in on the side. It was German in name only; like many internationals, it had long ago located its corporate offices in a tax haven.

  Jack wasn’t here to talk to Helmut about DWU’s pledge to donate several million dollars to a Silicon Valley fund aimed at finding jobs for the homeless. The press already knew that the real purpose of the donation was to burnish Der Warheit Unternehmen’s image after a horrendous fire in one of its computer chip factories in Manila where hundreds of poor Filipinos perished. They were lobbing softballs, since DWU was a major advertiser in print and on the web.

  Finally, Jack raised his hand. “Jack Hatfield, Hatfield Independent News,” he said when the German nodded in his direction.

  There were muffled groans among the assemblage. They actually made Jack smile. A reporter who didn’t piss people off wasn’t doing his job.

  “Sir,” Jack said, “I was struck by the speech you gave last year, denouncing the work by Der Schlauch on the Iranian-Pakistani pipeline. It was quite courageous. You were criticizing a brother German company.”

  Schoenberg smiled superciliously. “Any trade at all helps Iran build a bomb.”

  “Right.” Jack looked down at his tablet, which was also recording the press conference. “Yet earlier this year, one of your subsidiaries, Der Große Kreis, shipped two hundred centrifuges to France, supposedly for medical use. But they never got to the institute in Nice. Instead, another company owned by DWU picked them up at a warehouse in Dresden, took them directly to the airport, and flew them to Tehran over a period of ten days.”

  Jack was quoting almost verbatim from the summary of a CIA document assessing how close Iran was to getting the bomb. Apparently Herr Schoenberg had read the report because he denied the charge, criticized Washington for its program of anti-Eur
opean propaganda, yet offered no facts to refute it.

  Not that he tried very hard. Schoenberg’s answer was brief and it was also his last. He thanked the group and left.

  Jack called the man’s name, was ignored, and rose to plan his next move. That was not a lot to form the basis of a syndicated radio piece. But Jack was not one to be deterred by a man’s back, handlers, or hasty departure. European nations were doing more to prop up Iran’s sanctioned economy than Russia and China combined. The only reason the United States had turned to diplomacy to deal with Tehran’s nuclear ambitions was to get a piece of that, too.

  Jack intended to break that story like a brick over the heads of the perpetrators.

  None of the other reporters came over to chat with Jack. Even though he had saved San Francisco from destruction, associating with an accused Islamophobe—or gay basher or climate change denier or any of the dozens of other politically charged landmines that crippled free speech in America—was tantamount to professional destruction.

  However, one man did come over to talk to the journalist. Someone who was an even bigger pariah.

  Standing between Jack Hatfield and the door toward which his quarry was headed was a short, powerfully built, wide-shouldered man. He had thinning, swept-back gray hair, a broken nose, a jutting chin, no neck, and piercing gray eyes. His gray sport coat was bulging under the arm. It was Sol Minsky, one of the West Coast’s most notorious and elusive mobsters. He wasn’t just Teflon: this guy was porous. Criminal charges sailed through him and hit other people, stooges he had carefully put in place—often without their knowledge.

  He approached Jack casually as the reporter headed from the meeting room of the Hyatt Hotel. Jack’s manner became just as casual, but he couldn’t contain a slight, thin grin of bemused respect. Sol was a strange breed. Of all the big-time criminals he had tracked over the years, Jack had never come across one who was as staunchly patriotic as Sol—and less hypocritical. Sol did not pretend to be anything other than what he was, yet he also worked hard to make sure there was never collateral damage among the general public. He didn’t deal in drugs, didn’t deal in human trafficking, mostly shilled for corporate clients and their money laundering. That didn’t merit a Nobel Peace Prize, but he wasn’t as bad as the Vietnamese, the Russians, and other local urban gangs.