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Page 18.
Scene 5. Evening at the History Club
 A proper New England autumn evening had just fallen as Dr. Jack Gray drove toward the university to give a history lecture. With him was his gorgeous, dark-haired friend, Dr. Dominica Albrisi. They rode together in the sporty comfort of a dark, glossy blue Ferrari in.
Darkness spread like spilled ink around the cloistered walks and gargoyled entry ways of the university. As night fell on the neo-Gothic campus, brown leaves rustled crisply in circles, driven with a light, fingernail touch by ghostly breezes. A full moon rode among a fleet of smoky cloud galleons. Otherwise, the night sky was clear and dry. Sprinkled stars framed the night sky's darker edges.
Jack Gray drove contentedly, unaware that another, far darker drama was beginning off-stage, which would soon ensnare him in a deadly drama traceable back to Madame Zhang.
The former Ministry of State Security chief, now a hunted criminal, was a Fury in her own right, who never quit when enraged, until she tasted revenge in her blood-dripping mouth. She had gambled her career in MSS away on her stake with Big Yang—and lost everything. Tonight’s target was Jack Gray, the man who had taken everything from her.
While the Dragon Lady had been a key spider in the MSS web, a thousand tangled skeins had crossed before her wary eyes. She was now a wanted person, headed for a PRC firing squad if caught. She’d lost her pension, her contacts—everything, except one thing. She had a Swiss-Chinese daughter by her first husband, a businessman from Geneva. The daughter was an attractive, deadly fixer and martial artist named Alex Nolenta.
Of the tangled skeins and black market operations, which had caught her eye while Madame Zhang was still in a position of power, one was an odd one. Alex had hooked her up with a money stream in the Shanghai underworld, involving a shell company called Project David. It belonged to a subsidiary of Global Anaconda, with a shadowy prime mover attached to it: George Blechstein. According to her sources before they dried up, Project David involved the manufacture of a powerful new sniper rifle of unknown technology.
Madame Zhang, shuttling among underworld locations—every major city in the world had its Tong or Mafia or similar brotherhood—learned from sources that this Blechstein was a ghost. He was a shadow, belonging to a man murdered years earlier in South Africa. Someone, for some reason, was using his identity. That was the sort of information Madame Zhang was expert at parlaying into an income stream among the world’s many stupid crooks.
Digging deeper, beyond even her daughter’s impressive new connections, Madam Zhang learned that an unknown brokerage of some sort, a global crime syndicate, named Blum was moving vast sums and countless players around on a shadow stage, under the noses of the world’s governments and corponations. Whatever Blum was, Alex was in tight with them, and while there was no love lost for her mother, Alex felt an obligation to take care of her parent.
So Zhang once again had a stream of money coming in, more than enough to stay alive. It was more than enough to send a man after the arrogant and destructive Mr. Gray who had caused her so much irritation. Mr. Gray must die. She would have preferred time and torture—but she was on the run, and a swift bullet would have to do, close up, direct to the head, and a second bullet as a follow-up to make double sure. Through Alex and the money, she had stayed alive and bought enough time to start following her many leads to their dark origins, and to start making money and connections for starting a new life in the world’s underbelly. She already had her first inklings of the kind of knowledge that was worth gold. She knew Blum was an acronym for Black Umbrella, and that its prime mover was a powerful and elusive player named Dr. Night. She would find out who he was, and what his strategy was so she could capture part of it for herself. She instantly understood what he was after: power. That much was easy to tell, since she’d been a key player in one of the world’s major intelligence services, and rubbed shoulders with many such men who were naturally attracted to the dark services. With her experience, she was sure she could line up a new position of influence to feather her a new nest for herself.
On the borderland between worlds—quiet university campus versus noisy, secular city beyond—a man with a gun under his jacket stepped from a rented, plum-colored sedan he had just parked at the curb on a city street.
He peered about with a reluctant furtiveness tempered with a natural arrogance. Letting the car door slam shut, the man walked around to its trunk. Amid wan trunk light, he removed a paper shopping bag. Slamming the trunk lid, he glanced left and right. Then he walked across the sidewalk, carrying the bag. He stepped onto university property, climbing slightly on grassy soil, and disappeared amid dusky trees—a man on a mission, not to be stopped, with murder in his eyes.
On the opposite side of campus, expensive cars began arriving in time for a 7:00 p.m. lecture. Depending on the driver's age and status, each car was either luxury or sporting in nature, and colorful or not, depending on age and personal taste of the owner.
Students, professors, and staff had gone home. Even the dormitories were silent, with their underclassmen either away at the library studying, or in taverns around the Green.
Most campus rooms were dark, except one hall that stood open and was brightly lit for an evening lecture. Windows were framed in ogives of gray travertine. Their leaded glass panes reflected distant light, enlivened with insets of stained glass with pictures and mottoes. The insets would glow almost magically with daytime sunlight, but in the moonlight seemed duller than the thick, plain glass around them.
Lecture goers approached along modestly illumined paths and corners amid thickly ivied, Victorian brick buildings and neo-Gothic towers. Men and women in fine evening wear—formal, but casual, not quite gowns and tuxes—passed closed courtyards and hidden gardens. Some were alumni or alumnae, while most others were active or retired faculty. Some were young, socially climbing assistant professors with pretty young wives or girlfriends on their arm. Their walk was punctuated by soft laughter and conversation of the financially secure and career-assured, the crunch of men's wingtips and the clicking of women's heels. Along with the occasional whiff of cigarette smoke, the mild, cool evening air was tinged with hints of perfume and cologne, even a hint of mothballs; not from the matrons themselves, but from their rarely unearthed legacy fur wraps of a bygone age—however insensitive on environmental principles, ironically fitting for a lecture on ancient history.
The university campus was a world unto itself, while across gray-limbed groves of trees, the city glowed amid its haze of ambient light colored up with the mixed neons of pizzerias, pool halls, laundromats, and cheap inner-city hotels.
In the cloistered and guarded world of the university—in only one modest sized lecture hall that opened directly on a small faculty parking lot—fluorescent lights blazed whitish-blue and cold for the evening's two learned talks.
Surrounding lawns and tree-lined walks were full of a dusky silence, as if time stood still.
Across a darkened lawn, barely visible, the man with the gun walked. He paused amid an especially gloomy copse of trees to put down his shopping bag. He took a rouge jacket from the bag, and laid the jacket across the back-rest of a park bench next to a steel-wire trash receptacle. He unzipped his light, cotton wind jacket, took it off, and folded it into the shopping bag, which he crushed shut and stuffed into the trash receptacle for later retrieval, along the escape route after his job was done. He put on the dark red jacket of a university docent, and made sure the name tag was straight across his left breast. He checked the automatic once more—holding it up to catch the ambient light, as he pulled back the breach and closed it again—and stuffed the semi-automatic into his belt at back. Making sure his jacket hung fully down to conceal the grip, he strode on his way.
He headed toward one of the open doors and three lighted windows on slightly higher ground about 100 yards away. All other windows around him on campus brimmed pregnantly with night, as if bursting with secrets in their silence. The windows were lit only with distant city and lunar reflections.
The man's face had the hardened cheekbones, the morally slack expression, of a professional killer who did what he came to do, and left, neither with the slightest preamble or epilog of self-doubt or moral indecision. His eyes had a flat affect as they glanced about. He seemed to be awash in his own telemetry, gauging and assessing, in a constant stream of calculations to optimize the execution of his plan, and to minimize any chance of getting caught. If he had done any hard time, the casual angle of his shoulders and the loose swing of his limbs did not suggest it.
He wore an official university docent's and greeter's uniform—maroon blazer, dark trousers, dark shoes, none of which fit perfectly. And fit they shouldn't, having recently been acquired for this purpose from a retired, deceased university employee who had owed money to a certain local cash broker with connections to people who broke limbs to hasten repayment, or outright terminated the debtor if satisfaction was not to be gotten. Tonight's man even wore a gleaming brass name tag, as all such employees must, which read Antonio, which was not his name or even a pseudonym, but the birth name of the recently deceased employee (whom he had personally dispatched to the underworld, while leaving the old man's earthly remains in a Providence, Rhode Island canal about two hours' drive up the coast.
As the fake Antonio walked, he paused a moment. He screwed a matte-black suppressor onto the muzzle of his noir handgun. If he were to be intercepted by campus police, this upped the ante a thousand-fold. It was one thing to carry a gun—no matter if it was a standard US or NATO police and military semi-automatic. It was another to carry that same weapon with a silencer screwed on, loaded, and ready to rock and roll. The mercenary—who came out of nowhere, and would vanish back into thin air—tucked his newly silenced U.S. Army M9A1 Beretta under his jacket. Its magazine was loaded with nine hollow point bullets that would shred a man's insides. He kept walking at a steady, mechanical pace.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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