The Darkness Part 31

"I'm glad to hear that. And if you do this for me, you'll 270.

get a hundred grand on the spot. I'll need you to sign one piece of paper, for tax purposes, but you'll have six figures to play with by the time you're hungry for dinner tonight."

"You're kidding me, right?"

"Yes, I'm kidding you. In fact, we never want to see you again. Goodbye, Morgan."

"Wait! I was kidding, too!"

"I know, stupid. Be on the corner of Thirteenth and Avenue A in half an hour."

"I'll be there."

"One more thing, Morgan."

"What's up?"

"Do you like the suit you're wearing?"

"I guess so. It was one of the first ones I bought when I got my job in banking."

"Too bad. Because you're never going to wear it again after today."

37.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Jack said. He was staring out the window of our cab as we sped uptown to meet William Hollinsworth.

Rather than responding, I studied Jack's face. For some reason it made me think about his clean desk, how for some reason there was something holding him back from returning fully to a normal life.

We'd never had a chance to have a real talk about Paulina's article and what it had done to him, and it was probably for the better. When a man's reputation, and maybe his soul, is nearly destroyed, the last thing he wants to do is revisit it. But it was clear that Jack hadn't quite gotten past it, that he was still between two worlds.

The wistful look on his face confirmed my thoughts.

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.

272.

The decrease in traffic was primarily due to a cutback in both taxis and hired car services, but also a ma.s.sive 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 ma.s.sive revenue drops, there was natural belt tightening in the quant.i.ty 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 273.

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 modic.u.m 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, 274.

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 gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses.

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 275.

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. 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 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.

"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 277.

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?"

278.

"Of course," Jack said. "His a.s.sa.s.sination 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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.