Chapter Text
In the interrogation room at the 8th precinct, NYPD Detective Dani Silva raised her eyes from the file she had just finished reading, and looked up at the handcuffed man sitting opposite her on the other side of the table.
“So, William Crane, two turns in Iraq, Special Forces. Disappeared from the grid three years ago, then this morning involved in a bank robbery which left two customers wounded … Good thing I was hanging around there, I was able to stop you before you could do more damage.“
“Yeah, okay, cut the crap and send me to Rykers … I am not afraid.”
“ … And there is something else, Bill, something you don’t know yet. See, one of my colleagues recognized you … “
The man raised an eyebrow interrogatively, and Dani called for an uniformed cop, who entered the room and stared at the villain thoroughly, then nodded “Yes, I am sure, it’s him. It happened two months ago, I was on patrol, I saw a six-member team of heavily armed men heading towards a building. They were wearing black combat uniforms, like those of the SWAT teams, only unmarked; and he was one of them.
Some minutes after that a missile hit the top of that building; still some more minutes, and this guy gets out, with an injured arm.”
Dani said: “Thank you, Bolden.” And the cop went out.
The female Detective addressed the robber: “You know who died on that rooftop, don’t you, Bill? Besides your teammates, I mean. One of our Detectives, John Riley. A man who saved my life. We found his remnants in the rubble.”
“You have no evidence I shot him!”
“You know what? You tell me anything you know about this paramilitary organization that hired you, and I won’t tell the judge that you wanted to kill the two people you only wounded … “
“I didn’t want to kill anyone! I shot them in the legs, because they were trying to escape.”
“So why did you approach them when they were lying on the ground, and pointed your gun to their heads saying: ‘Now I’m gonna kill you!’?”
Crane was dumbfounded “What? I didn’t say that … “
“And whom are the jurors believing, a cop or a robber?”
“Damned … but if I spill, I might be accused of other felonies … “
“Nobody else will know, only me. This is personal, Crane, and I need to know not only what happened to my friend, but also why he was killed.”
“Jesus … okay, why not? The organization I worked for is finished anyway, so I have no reason to hold back anything.”
“Okay then, let’s get started. First of all, when did they hire you? And what did you do for them, exactly?”
“I joined them three years ago. As a vet, it shouldn’t surprise you that I was part of security details for some high-rank executives of our company; meetings, conferences held by an old Briton; I didn’t know what they did, or why, I only followed orders.
About one year ago things changed. I was sent to Johannesburg and my team was entrusted to guard a prisoner, a woman … the scariest person I have ever met.”
Dani chuckled “Really? How was she like … ten feet tall, ugly and bearded?”
“No, she was short and beautiful, Middle-eastern, I think … and she killed six of the men that were supposed to hold her captive.”
Dani frowned “How could she? Wasn’t she restrained, tied … and unarmed, of course?”
Crane huffed “Nothing could restrain that woman; and she didn’t need any weapon to kill a trained operative … or six. Snapping their necks, or slashing their throats with a piece of glass … and doing all this without even flinching. I heard she was a sociopath.”
“And her name was … “
“They called her Shaw.”
“Why didn’t your bosses kill her?”
“They were trying to extract information from her, so her life was safe … not our lives, though. But she escaped, eventually. I have never heard about her after that.”
“Okay, then what happened to you?”
“Some days after, they sent me here in the city. One day, I was assigned to assist an agent who went to retrieve a wounded woman.”
“Not the same woman?”
“Another one, taller, Caucasian … she had a bullet wound, one of our snipers had shot her … lower abdomen, I think.”
“So, she was an enemy, and you went to kill her?”
“No, we went to catch her, but my boss wanted that her friends believed she was dead, so we went, disguised as paramedics, to the hospital we knew she had been taken to, the St. Mary, and injected her with something that made her still and pale, apparently dead. Then a cop showed up, and saw her. At that point, we took her away and our doctors intervened.”
“Do you know her name?”
“The boss said her name was Groves, I remember that, but she had lots of aliases.”
“Did she survive?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“This cop, can you describe him?”
“Late forties, chubby, curly-haired … and he knew her.”
“How do you know that?”
“He was affected by her death … well, fake death; he almost cried.”
“Okay. And back to that woman, what happened to her, after your organization fell?”
“I don’t know. About a week after that I went on that rooftop with a team; out task was to kill a man who was trying to do something with an antenna and a laptop, but don’t ask me what. I was the only one that got out of that mess alive. Then nobody contacted me anymore, and that virus was spreading worldwide. I was broke, so I went for that little bank robbery.”
“So, is this all?”
“Yes, Detective.”
“It’s not easy to believe that a powerful international criminal organization existed, and nobody knew about it. Any proof that your story is true?”
“God, no! How could I give you one? Everyone I knew in that organization is vanished.”
“Okay, now we go for a trip to your jail cell, I’ll try to check your tale.”
Det. Silva and Crane got out of the room, but after a moment the robber gasped. Dani looked at him; he was pale and was staring at two people speaking to each other at a desk: a short, beautiful, Middle-eastern woman and a chubby, curly-haired Detective in his late-forties. A man she knew well: Lionel Fusco.
A whisper escaped her lips “Holy crap!”