Rising Phoenix Read online

  “So?” Swenson prompted.

  Hobart had spent most of the drive to the cabin trying to figure out a way to hedge on his offer to Swenson. Not to give too much away. He hadn’t been able to come up with anything practical. There seemed to be no alternative to jumping in with both feet.

  “I intend to stop the illegal narcotics trade in the U.S.”

  Swenson laughed and gnawed on the piece of bacon. “Don’t tell me the DEA’s taking you back.”

  “I’m serious, Bob. America’s being torn apart by drugs—you ought to know that better than anyone. I’ve decided to put a stop to it.”

  “Never knew you were such a patriot, John.”

  “I think of it more as an interesting challenge.” He wasn’t joking, and from Swenson’s expression, it looked like that was beginning to sink in.

  “Hey, I’m with you in theory, John, but let’s face it, the war on drugs is a joke. You and I devoted some of the best years of our lives to chasing our tails.”

  Hobart put his fork down and took a deep breath. “That’s true, we did. But now I think I’ve found a way to make up for that lost time.”

  “Planning on running for President? I don’t see you as the baby-kissing type.”

  “I’m going to poison the drug supply.”

  Swenson dropped what was left of the strip of bacon onto the table and stood. He walked back into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. Hobart went back to his breakfast.

  “You’re serious,” Swenson said from the kitchen. It was a statement and not a question. He came back around and took his seat, sipping at the steaming mug. A deep crease appeared in his forehead as he mulled over what he’d just heard.

  “Why not? I assume you agree that it would take care of the problem.”

  Swenson nodded. “Yeah. It’d work. Given the right scale.”

  Hobart had expected a more enthusiastic response than the blank stare he was getting. Had it not been for Swenson’s wife being killed by a narcotics user and his subsequent bitterness, Hobart wouldn’t have dreamed of trying to recruit him for this operation. If Helen were still alive, Swenson undoubtedly would have marched into the nearest FBI office and turned him in. She wasn’t alive though, she was lying in a coffin in two pieces somewhere in Chicago. And that made all the difference.

  Hobart reached discreetly under the table and closed his hand around a hard piece of wood. That morning he had sawed off a baseball bat to a two-foot length and taped it under the table. Robert Swenson was the closest thing to a friend that he had, but his friend either had to get on board or disappear.

  It wouldn’t be difficult. He would put Swenson’s body back into the Cadillac and run it off the edge of one of the winding mountain roads that crisscrossed the area. It was risky, but the local cops weren’t rocket scientists. And it was less of a hazard than having someone not involved in the operation running around knowing who was behind it.

  Swenson was silent for almost five minutes and Hobart’s hand began to sweat, making the handle of the bat damp and slippery.

  “I’m in,” he said finally. Hobart’s hand loosened on the handle.

  “But we’re gonna have to put together a decent amount of money to get something like this off the ground.”

  Hobart’s hand dropped completely from the handle at the word “we.” He wiped his wet palm on his slacks. “Already taken care of.”

  “Blake’s in on it, then?”

  “No.” Hobart’s tone and expression made it clear that Blake’s name should never be mentioned again. Swenson took the hint and changed the subject.

  “How many people do you figure we need?”

  “About eight more. I’ve already scheduled meetings with them here. The first one arrives at three.”

  “People you’ve known for a long time?”

  “For the most part,” he replied vaguely, beginning to clear the dishes off the table.

  “What if you ask them and they aren’t interested?”

  “That’s my problem. I’ll take care of the recruiting. You go tie up any loose ends you have in Baltimore.”

  “Just tell me one thing before I leave.”

  “Sure. What?”

  “How the hell are we gonna pull this off?”

  Three o’clock rolled around quickly. Swenson had gone less than an hour ago. They’d spent a productive day going over operational details. It was surprising how much it helped to have someone to bounce ideas off of. Things that seemed brilliant alone in front of the fire could sound stupid out loud.

  “Johnny! How you fuckin’ doing!”

  Hobart’s second recruit had arrived and was making his way to the house.

  Bill Karns had been a narcotics cop in Chicago when they’d first met. Since then he had quit the force and become a private investigator. His wife died a few years back, leaving him without any surviving family. Given the pick of the litter, Hobart probably wouldn’t have chosen him. In his opinion, the man was brainless and undisciplined. On the other hand, he knew that Karns would go for this plan in a big way. His bigotry ran deep. Almost as deep as Hobart’s own.

  “Looks like you put on a little weight since I was last in L.A.,” Hobart observed sternly, slapping the roll of fat adorning Karns’ waist.

  “You know how it is, Johnny.” Karns was the only person in the world who called him Johnny. He’d forgotten how irritating it was.

  “Come on in.”

  Karns was sweating profusely despite the damp cold of the woods. Hobart maneuvered him to the chair that Swenson had occupied earlier that day and got them both beers. Karns grunted his thanks and twisted the top off.

  “Good to see you, Johnny. It’s been too goddam long.”

  “You didn’t tell anybody you were coming up here, did you?”

  “Shit, no. In my business you understand the word ’confidential.’ He took a pull from the bottle, almost emptying it. “You needin’ a good private investigator?”

  “No. But I do have a job for you. Good pay, but you’d probably do it for free.”

  Karns looked interested, but not so interested that he didn’t finish the beer in one large gulp and begin looking woefully at the one across from him. Hobart got the hint and pushed it toward the still-perspiring man. Then he smoothly slipped his hand under the table and around the bat.

  “I’m putting together an organization that’s going to stop the use of illegal drugs in the U.S.,” he said simply.

  Karns laughed. “My ass. How the fuck you gonna do that?” He lifted the beer bottle.

  “I’m going to poison the narcotics supply.”

  The beer stopped about four inches from Karns’s mouth. “The fuck you are.”

  “The fuck I am.” He could see the wheels in Karns’s head slowly turning. It was their only speed.

  Karns scooted his chair back and slapped his knee, laughing. “Shit! That oughtta just about piss off all the niggers and the spics!”

  Hobart smiled. “I expect it will. So you’re in?”

  Karns banged his beer bottle down on the table. “You’re really serious?”

  Hobart pulled a briefcase from the floor next to him and laid it on the table. He opened it, exposing neatly bundled stacks of hundred-dollar bills. “That’s fifty thousand dollars. Your advance.”

  Karns’s eyes were glued to the briefcase. He reached blindly for the bottle of beer, almost knocking it over.

  “So are you in?”

  “Fuck, yeah!” He reached out and caressed the bundles, pulling one out and flipping the edge like a deck of cards. He looked up at Hobart. “You’re right, you know.”

  “About what?”

  “I would have done it for free.”

  He’d been luckier than he deserved. The bat was still taped to the bottom of the kitchen table at his cabin, unused. The remaining six recruits had come and gone over the last week. They had taken quite a bit more work than Karns, whose life could be summed up on a postcard. Hobart had served meals, hiked,
boated, and hunted with the rest. He’d probed deeply into their lives, looking for serious girlfriends, jobs, homes that they were attached to, sick relatives, set-in-stone future plans. Only when he was completely satisfied with their answers did he wrap his hand around the bat and pop the question.

  There had been a few tense moments of indecision and varying degrees of enthusiasm, but in the end they had all agreed. Hobart had counted on at least one of them having to disappear. Two was probably more likely. He had been dreading the added exposure.

  The remaining recruits were all of better quality than Karns, though they lacked his blind loyalty and single-mindedness. Karns would stay with him to the end, no matter what the circumstances. The rest would be wary of the FBI and dealers, and would get out when it got too hot. While they lacked Karns’s simple predictability, they made up for it with intelligence and experience. Every one of them was capable of running a top-notch undercover operation.

  Hobart slowed his car to match the speed limit as he closed in on Baltimore. He hoped to avoid the police completely over the next year.

  “Peter! Good to see you!” Hobart was sitting in his favorite chair by the door as Peter Manion walked into the dimly lit room. His .45 rested next to him on what passed for a table. Intimidation value.

  “Hi, John,” Manion mumbled. He squinted his glassy eyes to see his guest more clearly. His speech was a bit slurred.

  The fact that Manion hadn’t been startled by his presence confirmed in Hobart’s mind that he probably had fortified himself with a healthy dose of heroin in honor of their meeting. The ten thousand dollars that he had left behind on his first visit had been put to good use.

  “What have you got for me?”

  Manion walked over to a large pile of books that hadn’t been there the last time they had spoken. The jackets were free of the dust and drink rings that covered everything else in the house.

  “Orellanin,” Manion said, holding a book up as though Hobart could read it through the cover.

  “Come again?”

  “Orellanin. That’s what you’ve got to use, man.” Manion was starting to warm up to his subject. The combination of drugs and his fanatical interest in science appeared to have made him forget the real reason that they were speaking. To him, it had become nothing more than a conceptual exercise in biochemistry.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “I’m not surprised, man. It’s distilled from a mushroom that grows mostly in Poland. The Cortinarius orellanus.”

  Hobart was shocked. Manion was yanking his chain. For a moment-he wondered if the police were standing right outside the door, but quickly dismissed the idea. He’d reviewed the tapes from the bugs he’d planted and gone over the house with a fine-tooth comb before its owner had arrived. He picked up the .45 and aimed it at a surprised Peter Manion.

  “I’m not in a joking mood today, Petey my boy. Not at all.”

  Manion dropped the book and backed slowly into a corner, his hands out in front of him. “Don’t shoot, man. I am serious. This stuff’s perfect.”

  Hobart lowered the gun slightly. “I’m listening. But you damn well better dazzle me with your genius.”

  Manion moved slowly around to the ragged sofa, keeping his back against the wall the entire way. When he sat down, a cloud of dust rose around him. “Listen. The problem with poisoning coke and heroin when it’s being processed isn’t getting it into the drugs—that’s easy. The problems are in distribution.”

  Hobart leaned back and pulled a small pad from his jacket. He fished around for a pen. “Go on.”

  Manion, looking more comfortable, continued. “Let’s say you just dump a bunch of, say, arsenic into a vat of coke while it’s being refined. No problem, you’re done, right?”

  Hobart nodded.

  “But it wouldn’t get you anywhere. Distribution would totally fuck you up. Most times, when the stuff is sold, some dealer or another tries it, right? If not, they could just be getting twenty keys of baby powder. So, they try it and drop dead. Who’s gonna buy it then?”

  Hobart shrugged. It was a good point. “So what’s the answer?”

  “I already told you, man. Orellanin.” Manion picked up the book that he had dropped while looking down the barrel of Hobart’s .45, and held it to his chest. Hobart could just make out the picture of a mushroom on the front.

  “The beauty of this stuff is that it has like a two-week delayed reaction. Say you shoot it,” he pantomimed using a syringe on his arm. “You feel great, while the poison’s making its way to your liver and kidneys. By the time you start feeling shitty, you’re fucked. Your major organs are toast. The only way they’re gonna save you is a transplant—and there isn’t gonna be time for that.”

  “What if a doctor found out early? Could he give the patient an antidote then?”

  “Is none, man. I think a few people who’ve eaten the mushrooms have been saved by getting their stomachs pumped, like, right away. That wouldn’t really apply here, since you don’t eat coke and horse. Of course, a full blood transfusion might do it—totally change out the guy’s blood right after he’s been poisoned. I’m only guessing on that, though.”

  “So I need to crush up a bunch of mushrooms?”

  “Not exactly. The poison has to be extracted. It’s pretty much a no-brainer, though.”

  Hobart smiled. “I’m sure you won’t have any trouble at all.”

  “Hey man, I didn’t mean …”

  “I’ve got a nice warehouse,” Hobart cut in. “We’ll set you up with whatever you need. Hell, we’ll put together a lab that’ll put Hopkins to shame.”

  Manion perked up at that. The thought of being surrounded by steaming beakers, Bunsen burners, and microscopes seemed to agree with him. It had been a long time.

  “Okay, Peter, how many of these mushrooms do we need?”

  “Depends on how much stuff you want to hit.”

  “Say fifty keys.”

  Manion tapped his chin and did some quick calculations. “That’s gonna take a lot of ’shrooms, man. You’re in the neighborhood of a ton there.”

  Hobart took a deep breath and let it out loudly. “About a ton. Shit. Is there anything else I can use?” This was becoming more complicated than he’d bargained for. As was often the case, the concept had looked better without the details.

  “As far as hitting the stuff at the manufacturer, probably not. You need that delay, man. That’s what makes it all work. You could get a shorter delay out of paraquat.”

  That one rang a bell with Hobart. The DEA had used it back in the seventies. “The defoliant?”

  “Yeah, it’s a herbicide. Two-day delay—easy to get. I think they call it StarFire or something, now. Two days isn’t gonna get you far, though.”

  Hobart’s mind was racing. Manion was right, it wasn’t enough. It had to be the orellanin. “What about downstream stuff, Peter? The stuff we hit right before it makes it to the street?”

  “No need to get fancy on that. Go to Safeway and buy rat poison with cyanide in it.”

  Hobart nodded. “So how do I hit the stuff at the refinery?”

  Manion picked up a potato chip from a plate full of molding food and began munching on it. “Oh, shit, getting it into the stuff—that’s the easy part.”

  6

  Warsaw, Poland,

  November 21

  The Krolikarnia was considered a moderately nice hotel, though through the dirty glass of the car window it looked more like a Harlem boxing gym. Hobart eased himself out of the cramped interior of the cab and straightened his body out for the first time in what seemed like ages. He took a deep breath, cleansing his memory of the knuckle-whitening landing at the Okecie Airport, and even more nervewracking ride from airport to hotel.

  Hobart doled out twenty American dollars to the cabby and walked around to pull his bags from the trunk. The ex-communist cabbies hadn’t yet warmed to performing this service. He had barely begun to pull at his suitcase when, with an unintelligib
le shout, the driver merged the cab back into the heavy afternoon traffic. His sudden acceleration almost slammed the trunk shut on Hobart’s hand.

  An atmosphere of lawlessness pervaded Warsaw, and nowhere was it more evident than in the traffic patterns. It seemed the Poles felt that their newfound freedom extended to a considerable amount of artistic license on the road.

  The fumes expelled by the cars racing by were beginning to choke him, so Hobart hefted his bags and entered the hotel. A bored-looking woman sitting at the front desk watched him approach. Except for her, the small lobby was empty. She smiled wearily as he approached, but remained silent.

  “Hi, I’m Dr. John Stapleton,” Hobart said with a thick Southern drawl that was obviously lost on the desk clerk. “I think y’all have a reservation for me.”

  Still not uttering a sound, she flipped through a well-worn leather book lying on the equally worn desktop. Computers hadn’t found their way to the Krolikarnia yet.

  “I have it,” she said in a thickly accented voice. “Please, you sign your name here.”

  He obliged and she handed him a key attached to a six-inch-long piece of wood. The number 414 was burned into it.

  “Thank you,” she said, sitting back down and turning her eyes to the front door. Hobart got the feeling that he’d heard her entire repertoire of English.

  No eager bellhop materialized, so he hefted his luggage and walked into an old iron-gated elevator directly opposite the desk.

  The sun streamed through an open window in his room, illuminating the sheer white curtains blowing in the breeze. The space was so small that it was difficult to walk around the single twin bed in the middle of the room.

  Hobart pushed a Kleenex into the ancient keyhole from the inside and lay down on the lumpy bed. International travel always sapped his energy, and the effect was getting worse as the years passed.