Invisible Evil (Harry Bauer Book 9)

  INVISIBLE EVIL

  Copyright © 2021 by Blake Banner

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  For neither man nor angel can discern

  Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks

  Invisible, except to God alone.

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  One

  The moon, ever a liar, pretended to smile. To me it looked like the smile of a radiant corpse. She was suspended, apparently weightless, over dense trees and bushes at the end of the garden; a fall moon, the trickiest of them all.

  It was an early September night. We sat at a round table on the lawn at the back of the Cobra HQ, near Pleasantville, where nothing is what it seems. The table was set with white linen, the candles stood in eighteenth-century silver candlesticks that once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte, the knives and forks and spoons had allegedly been used by Thomas Jefferson while he was plotting to secede from the British Crown, and the eight flaming bamboo torches that squared the circle around us, keeping the bugs at bay, were from Amazon, at forty-two bucks ninety-nine per set.

  The food and the wine were not from Amazon. Brigadier Alexander “Buddy” Byrd had a chef who’d been with him for twenty years or more and was to sauces and roasting what Mozart was to flutes and pianos. Nobody knew his name, nobody had ever seen him, but he was a legend to those who had dined with the brigadier.

  The brigadier managed to sit at the head of the table, even though the table was round. It was not so much a case of where he sat, but the way he sat there. I guess he carried so much gravitas he distorted space so that round became oval. He was in a black dinner suit that probable cost as much as my TVR Griffith. The bow tie alone was so exquisitely understated it was all you could look at.

  Unless you happened to be looking at the colonel. The colonel was in a black, sleeveless, strapless number I kept hoping would obey the laws of gravity and drop to the lawn. But it just clung tight to her body and smirked at me. She had a thin string of diamonds around her throat that, especially by candlelight, was distracting because it made me want to gnaw on her throat the way trolls were supposed to gnaw on bones.

  A man in a white dinner jacket emerged from the house followed by two very pretty girls in French maid uniforms. The maids delivered plates of avocado and smoked Norwegian salmon to us and the man in the dinner jacket, whose name was Aitor, poured the wine, a Marques de Murrieta, Castillo de Ygay, 1986, which I knew came in at around six hundred and thirty bucks a bottle, plus tax.

  The brigadier was saying, “You need a full-bodied white with a strong, oily fish like salmon. The whites from Rioja are greatly underrated.”

  “Because they’re full-bodied,” added the colonel, and I stifled a yawn by reaching for my whisky. “And, call me a philistine,” she went on, “but that allows you to have it that little bit colder.”

  “I agree.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I think you’re a philistine.”

  She stared at me a moment, in shock, but when I smiled she laughed. I turned to the brigadier, who was spearing a piece of salmon and trying to skewer a piece of avocado with it.

  “If we were at a restaurant in New York,” I said, “I might convince myself that you’d invited me here because no sparkling dinner would be complete without me. But the fact that we are doing this at Cobra HQ makes me suspect you have some other reason, like a job.”

  He looked at the colonel, eyebrows arched and smiling, like she’d said something surprising. She smiled at her food and scooped a piece of salmon and avocado without piercing either of them, which just goes to show that women are smarter than men.

  “I wish,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Jane and I were discussing a job just last week. We were saying it would be right up your street. Unfortunately it is completely outside Cobra’s remit. There would be absolutely no justification for giving you that job.”

  I carefully folded a piece of salmon, pierced it and put it in my mouth, then picked up a piece of avocado with my fingers and popped that in too. When I’d chewed, swallowed and sipped my wine, I raised an eyebrow at him.

  “So your intention was to get my interest. You have it. Now you are going to have to explain.”

  He dabbed his mouth. “Some might say that what we do is technically illegal. On the other hand, I would argue, if I had to, that we are instructed by the executives of the Five: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, on matters of national security which are beyond the jurisdiction of the courts, and, technically, it is not illegal. So, we occupy an ambiguous, gray area on the fringes of legality, because it is in the interests of national security of the Five. And all of that is for a simple reason—we deal in assassination, as opposed to murder.”

  “Meaning it’s politically motivated.”

  It was the colonel who answered. “Political in the sense that our targets affect, or are capable of affecting, the balance of world power. Politics,” she gestured at the brigadier, “as Alex is always saying, is the practice of accruing and retaining power. We are tolerated and retained by the Five precisely because we help to maintain the balance of power. We are in effect a covert, political weapon.”

  She reached for her glass and the brigadier took over, as though they were a couple of well-rehearsed TV presenters.

  “But if we once started taking out targets because we had a vendetta, because they were standing in the way of the political ambitions of one of our clients, or indeed because we personally disapproved of them in some way, then we would be on the very slippery slope toward perdition.”

  “Who is this person, and what have they done?”

  The colonel had her glass halfway to her mouth. She paused and set it down again.

  “You have to understand, Harry, that we cannot ask you to do this job. And if you were to decide to do it, we could not pay you or bail you out if you got in trouble. You could not contact the brigadier or me for the duration of the job. As far as we are concerned, you would be on holiday somewhere.”

  “You make it sound so attractive. What’s the downside?”

  The brigadier took a deep breath and sat back in his chair.

  “I am not a religious man, Harry. I try to take a philosophical, empirical view of the world. But this man…” He stopped, frowning at one of the torches that flickered in the September breeze, casting moving firelight across his face. “This man is evil. There is no other word for it. One can try to understand him from a psychologist’s point of view, one can argue that good and evil are human constructs that do not exist in nature…” He shook his head. “I don’t care. Whatever the circumstances that created and conditioned this man, he is now the incarnation of evil. He is evil made human, flesh and blood.”

  “What’s his name?”

  The colonel said, “I doubt you’ve ever heard of him. He is not famous. He is an American citizen, and killing him would be murder, plain and simple.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “His name is Oscar Larsen, known as Oz. In his youth he was a member of the Hell’s Angels, but,” she started to laugh, and by candlelight that was a nice thing to watch, “they asked him to leave because he was out of control!”

  The brigadier laughed quietly and continued. “For the last few years, nobody is really sure how long, he has had his own gang. The basic requirement for joining seems to be that you are either a psychopath or a sociopath, and that you find ordinary organized crime too restrictive.”

  “Gang,” I said, “what kind of numbers are we talking about?”

  The brigadier looked at the colonel, who was mopping her plate with a slice of bread. She finished, sipped her wine and sighed. “It is very hard to be precise. He has ten to twelve men who seem to go with him everywhere. By which I mean, he might go to the bar down the road with all of them, or two of them, or four or six of them, but the others will be at home or within a couple of minutes if he calls them. But in addition to those twelve, he has a number of,” she looked at the brigadier, “what would you call them?”

  “Fol
lowers, disciples? It’s very much like a cult. There are maybe twenty of them, fifty, a hundred? We don’t know.”

  “Do they have a name?”

  The colonel replied. “Apparently they call themselves simply Free Men. They have acquired a few nicknames in the local underworld, Ozwalds, Ozones…”

  “How come I’ve never heard of these guys?”

  “Because they keep a very low profile, and they are on the other side of the continent.”

  “California?”

  “Not quite, southern New Mexico.”

  “Halfway across.”

  “It was a manner of speaking, Harry. The reason you have not come across them is because they keep to themselves, the press tends to steer clear of them, much like everybody else, and they are located halfway across the continent.”

  Aitor appeared again with his two pretty maids. They took away our empty plates, and the empty bottle of wine, and returned shortly afterwards with a large steak and kidney pie, a bowl of roast potatoes, Vichy carrots and buttered broccoli. To accompany this feast there were two bottles of red Marques de Murrieta, Castillo de Ygay 2001, which came in at a very modest two hundred and fifty bucks a bottle, excluding tax. It was like drinking ripe plums and whipped, full fat cream, with the added benefit of alcohol. It seemed a shame to spoil it talking about Oz, so we ate in silence till our plates were almost empty, and out stomachs were in a stupor of distended pleasure.

  Then I sat back and sipped and sighed and said, “So, what has Oz done that has singled him out as the only human on Earth Cobra would stoop to murder for?”

  The brigadier arched an eyebrow at his last remaining potato. “Nicely put. I’ll tell you.”

  He put the potato in his mouth, set his knife and fork at six o’clock, the way Brits do, wiped his mouth with his napkin and concluded operations by sipping his wine.

  “Oscar Larsen was born in Nogales, in Arizona, in November of 1981, which makes him forty years old. His mother was a prostitute and, without the benefit of DNA testing and a great deal of patience, his father’s identity must remain a mystery. He, Oscar, was in and out of foster homes throughout his childhood and, at sixteen, he left home and became a prospect for the Hell’s Angels.”

  He swirled his wine for a moment, sniffed it and then sipped it. After quietly smacking his lips he went on.

  “As you probably know, when you are a prospect for the Hell’s Angels you are required to do absolutely whatever you are told to do, even if that means taking the fall for a member and going to prison.” He paused and smiled. “Oz did not take the fall for anyone. He was told by one of the senior members of his chapter that he, the senior member, was going to kill a member of the Chupacabras, a Mexican motorcycle gang not dissimilar to the Angels, and that Oz was going to have to take the fall and go to prison. This would involve serving a sentence of at least sixteen years.”

  The colonel took over while Aitor and the pretty maids cleared the table and delivered a cheeseboard, a bottle of twenty-year-old Courvoisier and another of the Macallan.

  “Of course, if that senior member was caught and tried he could face the death penalty. But a boy of sixteen, his first offense, a good defense lawyer paid for by the Angels and good behavior, Oscar’s sentence could be as little as sixteen years, of which he would probably serve thirteen.

  “However, what Oz did was to tell the senior member to go to hell. If he was going down for a murder, he said, he would go down for a murder he had committed, not for one somebody else had committed. So he went to a bar where he knew the Chupacabras hung out, found the intended victim, stuck him with a ten-inch blade and disemboweled him right there in the middle of the bar.

  “In court he pleaded guilty, contrary to his attorney’s advice, but said that he had heard on the grapevine that this man planned to kill him, and he decided on a preemptive strike.”

  The brigadier poured me a glass of whisky and as I cut myself a slice of Stilton he continued the story.

  “Oz served thirteen of the sixteen years. His first two years he got into several fights with the most feared and dangerous gang leaders in the prison. I assume he did that deliberately. He knew he had the backing of the Angels, but apparently he didn’t care either way. What he wanted was to make sure everybody inside feared him, even the screws. And by the time he was eighteen he was universally feared. Nothing went down without his say-so, and he took a percentage of everything that came into the prison, booze, tobacco, drugs.

  “By his third year he had settled down to an apparent life of good behavior. But this was in reality because anything he needed done, he got one of his boys to do it for him. So after eleven years of living like a king and running the biggest organized crime ring in the history of the prison, he was released early for good behavior.”

  The colonel balanced a piece of brie on a cracker and slipped it in her mouth, then picked up her glass.

  “Two weeks after he was released, the Angel he was supposed to take the fall for was found dead, disemboweled in his house. He had been castrated and had his eyes gouged out. The Angels never managed to prove it was Oz who had done it, but they revoked his membership and made him leave.

  “He soon surrounded himself, however, with the worst and most psychotic members of the Tucson underworld and, within a year, he had taken over the drug importation racket north of the border. He agreed terms with the Sinaloa cartel and secured exclusive distribution rights for anything coming into Arizona from Mexico.”

  The brigadier was nodding. “But that was not enough for Oz. For him, you see, it was not really about the money or the expensive cars or any of that. For him it was all about sticking it to the authorities. More even that that, I would say it was a challenge to himself to see just how evil he could be, just how far he could push the limits of his own inhumanity before anybody tried to stop him.

  “He never challenged Sinaloa, because they were a source of enormous wealth and power for him. As the Angels had in their day, Sinaloa gave him a very valuable backing. But what he did do was to go far beyond simple drugs trafficking. Pretty soon he had moved into the prostitution and pornography industry, and within five years, using the money he was making from distributing for Sinaloa, he had moved into white slaves, not just from Mexico, but from Poland, Russia, the Philippines and Brazil. He owned a string of discreet, luxurious gentlemen’s clubs in San Diego, Yuma, Phoenix and Tucson and that was where he exploited these girls.

  “He was good, and he had disposed of at least half a dozen rivals. He was thorough and meticulous, and nobody was ever able to pin anything on him.”

  I was steadily working my way through the Stilton and the whisky, enjoying the little act they had prepared for me, but asking myself what was so special about this guy. In the end I interrupted.

  “This guy, I agree, he’s a son of a bitch and the world would be a better place without him. But there are thousands of guys like him. We can’t just take it upon ourselves to start eliminating them all, one by one, much as I would like to.”

  The colonel shook her head. “That’s what we said to you in the beginning. But what we are telling you here is just a little background so you understand how he got started. By the time he was thirty-seven, in 2018 or thereabouts, he had established himself as the most dangerous gangster in Arizona and Southern California, and nobody, outside the FBI and the local PDs, had ever heard of him.”

  The brigadier nodded, then looked at me. “But what he did next was what eventually put him on our radar.”

  Two

  The temperature had dropped and there was a slight, agreeable chill in the air. The colonel had wrapped a light stole around her shoulders and was holding her glass of cognac in both hands, watching the brigadier, apparently content to let him take over the story for now. He helped himself to a little more cheese.

  “As I said, Oz was making enormous amounts of money, but the thing for him was never the cash. What motivated him, what excited him, was breaking the rules, pushing the boundaries and going as far beyond what was acceptable to any normal human being as he possibly could. So what he did was to set up a website, offering child pornography. He employed a couple of geeks to run the site and, I am no expert in these matters, but apparently, by using several VPNs, they were able to make it almost impossible to locate the server from which the site was hosted. In other words, for anyone trying to track them, they might have been in China, Russia, Mexico or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in international waters. At this point all Oz did was to buy videos from stock that was available on the web.