Able Team (№8) - Army of Devils

"I don't know, sir. I'm only a messenger."

"Bring it in," Stevens told the unseen messenger.

"I'll get it," Towers said.

But before the detective could go to the door, a young Chicano man dressed in a suit and tie stepped across the small hospital room. The messenger slapped an envelope down on the bed. "You're served! You'll pay for murdering those brothers!"

Towers recognized the messenger. "You're one of the Youth Action lawyers. They let you in!"

Lyons started for the messenger. "What do you mean, he's served? Is that a lawsuit? For what?"

Towers shoved him back. Now the detective demanded, "What is that?"

As he went out the door, the lawyer turned and announced, "See you in court, you racist butcher!"

6

In 1969, a group of North American and Chicano social activists created the Los Angeles Youth Action Committee. Veterans of marches and riots against the undeclared Asian war, the activists had rejected the violence and fugitive existence of the more radical elements of the youthful counterculture. Unlike the Weatherman and the Black Panthers, the activists believed they could achieve greater social change through alliance with the progressive elements of their government.

They opened a storefront office in downtown Los Angeles. Though the faces and names changed as the activists returned to college or went to work or traveled the world, the committee never lacked idealistic volunteers for their programs of antidraft counseling, youth guidance, English instruction and Chicano-Native American history.

However, government programs — local, state, federal — never granted the committee the funding necessary to pay salaries. The committee survived on money solicited from students and local merchants to pay rent and office expenses. Fund-raising events provided money for the purchase of typewriters and public-address systems. Month after month, the committee struggled for every dollar as they delivered services to the poor and disadvantaged of Los Angeles.

Then Mario Silva joined the committee. A young second-generation Cuban American — his family had come to the United States when his father, a personal friend of President Batista of Cuba, fled with the deposed general when that nation fell to Fidel Castro — Silva had been graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1969. Though his liberal ideals conflicted with his family's conservative heritage, his father supported him throughout his university years. And the day after Mario passed the State of California Bar Exam his father presented him with an American Express credit card and an around-the-world airline ticket.

To his parents' surprise, after almost a year of travels through Central and South America, Africa and Asia, their son did not talk of his adventures. He did not show them photos or souvenirs purchased in the distant cities of the world. He returned changed, but silent. They would not have known he'd traveled at all except for the many postcards they received, and the year-long accumulation of American Express charges at exclusive hotels, expensive restaurants and auto-rental agencies around the world.

But his work with the Los Angeles Youth Action Committee suggested a compassionate transformation. Throughout his years as a student, he'd demonstrated an ability to master difficult subjects through intense periods of study — total immersion. He broke his discipline only to strut through the ranks of the young women in the college. This reassured his Hispanic father of his son's virility. The senior Silva had once carried a listing of Cuban and North American showgirls eager to advance their careers through "association" with a high-ranking Batista cabinet official. Silva could not imagine his son's not following in his Don Juan rhythms of lust and jilt, infidelity and jealousy.

As a young lawyer volunteering his services to the committee, Mario Silva continued in his discipline of intense work and quick romances. He also worked as a junior associate in the corporate law office of one of his father's friends from pre-Revolutionary Cuba. Often he left the law firm's elegant Wilshire Boulevard offices and drove directly to the dingy, crowded office of the committee to review immigration cases and the marijuana arrests of barrio "homeboys." In the late evenings, he dated young women from the law offices, speeding over the freeways from disco to disco in his Porsche.

Though he did not talk of his volunteer work, his investment of time and choice of cases told of his social concerns. At the expense of his practice of prestigious and lucrative corporate law, he spent hours every evening and weekend with the troubles of illegal aliens and teenage gang boys, poor Chicano families and minimum-wage workers wronged by their employers. His quiet dedication demonstrated what other activists only preached.

His commitment to social causes won the recognition of the other volunteers. A relationship with an attractive young Marxist novelist — she taught classes in English as a Second Language in the evening — assured an inside position with the leadership group despite his links with corporations and antisocialist Cubans. When his Marxist girl friend nominated him, her activist associates honored Mario Silva with the chairmanship of the committee.

As his first move as chairman, he proposed dissolving the committee and the restructuring of their organization as a nonprofit community-service corporation. He surprised his associates with a prepared book-thick proposal detailing the advantages and opportunities of operating a nonprofit corporation within a corporate capitalist society.

With the help of his law firm, Silva created the Los Angeles Youth Action Corporation. With secret aid from his family — strong supporters of President Richard Nixon — LAYAC contributed thousands of dollars to the Committee to Reelect the President. LAYAC organized hundreds of Hispanic youths to encourage registration of voters and knock on doors for the reelection of Richard Nixon.

After the inauguration, LAYAC received a grant of one million dollars from the reelected administration.

With the mandate of offering employment and services for the young people of Los Angeles, Silva invested the money in offices, staff and equipment. He also contributed some of the federal money to the campaigns of local and state leaders.

Merchants and businessmen and corporations found LAYAC particularly useful. When contractors needed ethnic faces and names to satisfy government requirements for minority participation in public projects, Silva established corporate subsidiaries headed by Chicanos or blacks. When national corporations wanted to demonstrate equal-opportunity policies, Silva financed franchises that were owned, managed and staffed by minorities. When manufacturers wanted to establish credibility as progressive employers, Silva gathered hundreds of unemployed teenagers and organized showcase job-training programs for the cameras of newsmen and journalists.

The joint ventures and the media events won the attention of politicians. They recognized flair and success. In the next few years, Silva and the Los Angeles Youth Action Corporation received ten million dollars in federal and state grants, Small Business Administration low-interest loans and private donations. In turn, Silva invested millions in the campaigns of his political friends.

To fully exploit his national connections, Silva created a real-estate subsidiary, which then bought a $500,000 condominium in Washington, D.C. He flew often to the capital to entertain legislators, administrators and foreign political and business leaders.

During the Nixon and Ford administrations, LAYAC expanded far beyond Los Angeles. Ventures in Central America and South America, Europe and the Middle East generated cash flow to the charitable organization. Though the subsidiaries did not show great profits, Silva told his associates he foresaw long-term dividends.

A calculated and cynical observation prompted Silva to decline to offer his staff and volunteers to the campaign to reelect President Ford. Silva knew Ford would lose. The LAYAC volunteers walked the precincts for Carter.

Though the Carter administration sent accountants to review the nonprofit corporation's records and charitable procedures, the federal investigators never actually entered the LAYAC offices. They visited Silva's luxury home in Bel Air to interview the selfless young entrepreneur and glance through a few volumes he had assembled for their reading.

Later, Silva received an award from the Carter administration for his charitable contributions to the underprivileged of Los Angeles and the United States.

Years later, another investigation followed an unfortunate and never-publicized incident involving terrorism. A joint task force of FBI, LAPD and "unknown" commandos found a group of terrorists in a garage financed with LAYAC funds. Though a vicious firefight exterminated the terrorists before they could spray thousands of gallons of binary nerve gas into the night sky of Los Angeles, the incident prompted a thorough check of the garage owner's links to LAYAC. Somehow, Silva learned of the probe and petitioned all his elected friends to support his plea of total ignorance and innocence.

Despite many coincidences and questionable links — LAYAC trucking subsidiaries in Mexico and Central America that might have carried the fifty-gallon drums of binary gas, dead terrorists who had been gang punks in LAYAC counseling programs and the fact that all LAYAC staff personnel and their families had been in San Francisco the night of the planned annihilation of Los Angeles — the federal investigators reported that they had no suspicion of Silva's involvement in the attempted mass murder of the city's people.

That investigation still made Silva's hands shake when he thought of it. His girl friends had noticed that he drank more, often lapsing into the silence of alcohol introspection.

In those times, he questioned the wisdom of his secret life. He had many fears. If his father knew the truth of his son's success and prosperity, he would murder his son. If the federal government learned the identity of the nation and the organization that sponsored LAYAC, Silva would spend the rest of his life in prison, or with the good luck of escape, exile. If the police learned of his role in the gangs' bloody rampages, Silva faced Death Row.

Silva thought back on the innumerable stories of corruption and easy millions his father told of the Batista regime, when the Silva family enjoyed the prestige of government position and the wealth flowing upward from the hotels and casinos and brothels of Havana. He had also heard the stories of the politics and secret deals necessary to win profits for American corporations. In the United States — his father an ex-fascist colonel, now a corporate attorney — he had become wealthy through the same corrupt techniques he had practiced in pre-Revolutionary Cuba.

Was young Silva to blame for seeking the same advantages?

His university education in business management and his law school's basic courses in tax law revealed to him the difficulties of legally gained success.

Therefore, he looked around him for opportunity. How could a twenty-three-year-old university graduate gain immediate entry into the world of high finance and polite corruption? With his father's law firm? Perhaps after ten years of faithful association, his father and his office partners might grant their junior partner a favor. In other firms? No.

Mario Silva crafted his own plan for immediate wealth. And he did as his father had done; he sold the plan to the general who ruled Cuba.

In his world travels, young Silva never went farther than Cuba. He presented his plan to the Cuban Direction General de Inteligencia (DGI) and their KGB advisors. When they accepted it, he then stayed the year in their military and intelligence schools while Cuban agents traveled the world with his American Express card, lavishing the wealth of the gusanocolonel on hotels and restaurants and tourist trinkets to prove that Mario Silva visited those foreign countries.

After his training, Silva returned to Los Angeles and did exactly as he had promised. With Communist dollars, he converted a charitable group to a secret Communist organization. He traveled the world expanding the Los Angeles Youth Action Corporation into a multinational conglomerate of companies. Each company — trucking operations in Mexico and Central America, airlines in the United States, real-estate partnerships in several North American cities — provided services to the Cuban DGI.

Silva's family provided money; LAYAC's many concerns sometimes provided profits. But the Cuban funds ensured success.

On the afternoon after the hideous wave of murders by psychopathic gang punks, Mario Silva paced in front of his wide-screen television, a tall glass of bourbon and ice chilling his hand as he watched the "alternative" evening news.

Broadcast by KMRX — pronounced K-Marx by the station screen personalities — the "alternative news" often featured videotape from Cuba, the Soviet Union and other "peace-loving nations." The station covered every radical community event, specializing in protests against police shootings and crowds of welfare recipients demanding increased benefits. Often K-Marx featured the accomplishments of LAYAC.

And tonight Silva waited for another civil-rights media coup to be announced. The station did not disappoint him. A young blond woman with a radiant California tan solemnly intoned, "Though a spokesman for the City Attorney's office indicated that the atrocity will be judged self-defense, the self-righteous butchery of the fascist vigilante Lou Stevens will not go unpunished.

"Today, the Los Angeles Youth Action Corporation, a volunteer nonprofit corporation dedicated to the service of the Greater Los Angeles community, announced they will provide unlimited legal services to the families of the executed and mutilated teenagers to prosecute a civil action against the madman. A LAYAC attorney served the madman with papers initiating a five-hundred-million-dollar wrongful-death lawsuit in thedeath-squad-style execution of the five young men.

"The Los Angeles Youth Action Corporation has a long history of social activism. Time and time again, the chairman of the corporation, Mario Silva, and his staff of volunteers, have proved what brothers and sisters in struggle can accomplish if they put their ideals into action. K-Marx salutes LAYAC on yet another demonstration of concern and commitment."

The screen flashed the station-identification logo, a red, white and blue upraised fist superimposed over a red star, then the station's UHF channel number. Mark Lannon reappeared on screen.

A bruise blackened one eye. A patch of white adhesive tape covered his nose. More tape covered the side of his face. He did not speak for a moment to allow his audience to view his injuries, then finally announced in his shrill nasal whine, "Los Angeles Police officers inflicted these injuries. In a brutal and unprovoked attack on myself and two of this station's news personnel, the plainclothes storm troopers beat us and smashed our equipment. Though we lost the videotape of the scene, they did not stop the truth. Though the forces of reaction and blue-suit fascism may inflict casualties, they cannot stop the truth. The truth shall prevail.

"As we revealed in our earlier broadcast, one of the police officers involved in the suburban butchery perpetrated by Lou Stevens went berserk with blood lust and attacked his partners. We went to the Medical Center Intensive Care Ward where the Los Angeles Police Department holds the psychopathic killer-cop incommunicado.

"I intended to announce a major break in the case against the police-state regime striking out against the people of Los Angeles. I intended to make the announcement with the closed door and the shoulder-to-shoulder guards as a symbol of the oppressive regime threatening our freedoms.

"As we began taping the phalanx of officers guarding the entry, one of the plainclothes pigs turned off the lights. In the nightmare that followed, I and my two technicians suffered numerous injuries. The pigs destroyed our equipment. After they fled the room, we heard laughter and jokes as they celebrated their victory over three newspeople of this city.

"We lost the symbolic image. But that is nothing.

"I will reveal the breakthrough now. I predict the national implication will shake the present cowboy administration from power.

"In the years following the defeat of United States imperialism and its fascist running-dog lackeys in Vietnam, the quote leaders unquote of our oppressed nation have repeatedly told the people of our country of the billions of dollars in weapons and munitions lost to the victorious liberators of South Vietnam. Generals and colonels and counterterrorist specialists have warned of the eventual use of the weapons against the world.

"Throughout the past two years, White House spokesmen have announced the capture in Central America of weapons supposedly bearing serial numbers indicating they came from stockpiles captured in Vietnam.

"We now know this to be a total fabrication.

"Information furnished to me by a person of conscience inside the federal government reveals an automatic weapon was found at the scene of the slaughter at the home of Lou Stevens. This weapon, with the military identification code of XM-177, later known as Colt Automatic Rifle or Colt Commando Rifle, bore no serial number. The serial number had been ground away."

Mario Silva dropped his bourbon. Wide-eyed, he stared at the screen as Mark Lannon continued his report.

"However, the advanced technology of the Federal Bureau of Investigation raised a latent image of the defaced number from the metal of the weapon.

"Defense Department records indicate the People's Army of Vietnam captured this weapon during the liberation of the South. But how did this weapon appear in the segregated suburb where Lou Stevens makes his home?

"Because this weapon had not been captured by the Vietnamese! Because this weapon has been warehoused for years in the armories of the United States! Because the fascist leadership of the United States had perpetrated a fraud upon the people of this country and the world!

"These weapons have appeared in Central America. Now we know who distributed the weapons! Not the People's Liberation Forces, but the Central Intelligence Agency!

"Now these weapons have appeared in Los Angeles! What fraud will the fascists now present to the gullible bourgeoisie? Communist conspiracy? International terrorism? Vietnamese infiltration?

"We know the truth. This is Mark Lannon, a man of the people speaking from K-Marx, the alternative to the fascist media, the voice of truth, wishing you good night and warning you.

"Lock your doors and shutter your windows. Arm yourselves. Stand ready. The fascist assault on our freedoms has already begun. Power to the people. Let the truth be known!"

As K-Marx switched to the weather report, Mario Silva went to his telephone. "Raphael? It's Mario. We have a problem with a shipment. I think one of our people released an article without authorization. Get your men and a truck. We need to check the inventory and ask some questions."

As he talked on the phone, the young playboy lawyer took a Beretta 92-S automatic from his office drawer. He slipped the pistol into his waistband at the small of his back.

Then he took out a folding straight razor. He flicked out the gleaming blade. "What if? No ifs! He will answer. He will tell us everything!"

The capture of the weapon linked LAYAC to a terrorist operation unknown even to Mario Silva's Cuban masters.

7

Fernando Ruiz put the silver tube to the black mirror of polished onyx.

A line of pure crystalline cocaine, finely chopped and sifted, sparkled on the onyx like a mountain of diamonds rising from a black ocean.

With a finger pressing his left nostril closed, he snorted half the line up his right nostril. Then he switched sides and put the other half up his left nostril.

Falling back on the leather-upholstered couch, Ruiz closed his eyes to the exhilaration racing through his nervous system. His body seemed to float and vibrate in space; his mind pulsed purple behind the stars of his eyes, his arms and legs became flashes of radiating light, his beating heart the spinning orb of a protogalaxy.

All the flesh and organs of his body seemed space-splendorous with cocaine, every cell a star in the infinite black of space.

Except for his nose, which was a black hole of darkness and absence of pleasure, the membranes numb from days of intense cocaine snorting.

But no blood yet, he thought, the image real yet distant, fear merely an abstract thought in his orbit of pleasure. The crystalline coke hadn't cut his membranes up that much. I'll snort till I bleed, then maybe…

Freebase. He'd never before had enough cocaine at one time to reverse the refining process and precipitate coca paste for smoking.

Oh, yeah, freebase. When I'm bleeding, I'll drop some 'ludes and crash for a day or so. Then I'll get myself a freebasing kit. Do this right. Go totally through the top. Hyper space!

In the silence of the condominium, he heard the click of his telephone-answering machine as it intercepted another call. Set to take the call and message without ringing, the machine kept his co-workers at LAYAC away. Even if they came to his complex, they had to call his phone number to buzz his condo. And then the machine would intercept the call. Without an electronic key-signal from the owner or occupant of the unit, the visitors could not enter.

Let them bust through the iron fences and test the guards. Oh, yeah. Boom-boom. That's the advantage of a security complex. Keep my riffraff friends at a distance.

While I go through a kilo of cocaine. Ohhhhhh…

Even as he thought of the plastic bag in his freezer, he did not believe it actually existed. He had traded the machine gun for it, he had tested the cocaine again, he had spooned out a handful, he had reseated it and put in the freezer, but he could not believe it was real.

A kilo.

Could he snort it all? Could he freebase it and smoke it? Would he need to buy some hypos and needles? Could he buy intravenous equipment and drip it into a vein? No…

He'd die.

Too much. If he divided the kilo in halves, kept one pound and sold the other pound, he'd get…

Working the mathematics, he came up with $32,000.

He could put a down payment on a condo of his own — instead of this LAYAC unit.

Or a Porsche? A Mercedes? Lamborghini?

What did he want?

His laughter answered. Cocaine. That's all.

"You watch the news, Fernando?"

The voice shocked him upright. Hands seized his shoulders, another hand pressed down on his mouth to silence him.

Mario Silva, the chairman of LAYAC, stood in the center of the living room. He jangled a set of keys.

As the chairman of LAYAC, Silva had the key to the security condominium complex.

Three "street workers," wide-shouldered hard-faced ex-cons supposedly hired to mediate gang disputes but who actually served as Silva's enforcers, gripped Fernando Ruiz, holding him silent and immobile on the couch.

"Did you see the news tonight, Fernando?" Silva repeated. He glanced to his hired ex-cons. "Let him answer. You make any noise, we'll cut your balls off right now, right here. Now answer me."

To emphasize his questions, Silva opened a straight razor.

His eyes going wide, Ruiz stared at the gleaming blade. "No, I..."

"Then let me tell you what I heard on the news tonight." With the toe of his handmade shoe, Silva swept aside the ivory cigarette lighter and cut-crystal flower vase. He sat on the onyx table directly in front of Ruiz, his knees touching the youth counselor's knees.

"What I heard on the news was that the police have an XM-177. You know, one of those little M-16s. Now why do the police have one of those?"

"How could the pigs have that?" Fernando asked, not comprehending.

"That's what I'm asking you. Last night, some of the brothers went crazy on the petty bourgeoisie. And one gang got wiped out. And what did the cops come up with? An XM-177. What I want to know is this: is it one of ours?"

Ruiz had dreamed up the answer when he traded the black punk for the rifle. Now, the story did not sound right. But he had no other story.

"Yeah. Right. He said Shabaka sent him over for a weapon. That they needed one and some ammo. That was what I was supposed to do, right?"

"Did I give you the order?"

"No..."

"Then why did you..."

"Shabaka told..."

"He didn't tell you anything. How many rifles did you give the gangs?"

"Only one. The brother who Shabaka sent over — I gave him..."

"Don't lie to me!"

"Only one. I thought..."

"You thought wrong."

Silva signaled to his "street workers."

The three hoods jerked him from the leather couch and marched him across the condo, one hood gripping each arm, one behind him. Ruiz felt steel press into his back.

A hood told him, "You're going with us. Make any noise and we kill you, you know? You gonna make any problems?"

"No. Not me. I'm cool."

The hoods laughed. Ruiz saw Silva smile at the remark and the laughter.

Fernando Ruiz knew they would kill him.

They don't want to do it here, he realized. They'll take me someplace. Someplace where they can kill me and dump me. But they're trying to make me think they won't. Dig it, you got to make them think you believe them!

"Shabaka sent them. Why don't you ask him?"

"We'll talk about that with him," Silva told him. "Now you're cooperating. You don't cooperate, we shoot you down, understand me?"

"Anything you want to know…"

Silva swung open the door. In the last minutes of the smoggy Hollywood afternoon, the sky gray, the air gray, the pool and landscaping of the complex grayed by the smoggy air, the five men left the condo. The three ex-con "streetworkers" stayed close, hands gripping his arms to restrain Ruiz. They went down the stairs to the underground garage.

The hoods released their grip on Ruiz as they descended. Silva and a hood walked ahead of him. The other two stomped down the stairs behind him. At the bottom of the stairwell, the first hood shoved open the fire door to the garage and held it open for the group.

Five steps in front of him, Ruiz saw a convertible waiting. The blond young man behind the wheel revved the engine impatiently as he waited to exit the underground structure. He eased forward, the Fiat's front bumper almost touching the steel security gate as it rolled aside.

Ruiz shoved past Silva and dived. As the hoods shouted, Ruiz opened the door and landed by the driver in the front seat. His legs screaming with pain where they hit the top of the convertible's door, his head jammed between the bucket seats, he reached down and pushed the gas pedal with his hand.

In the confusion and shouting, the driver popped the clutch. Tires squealing, the Fiat lurched up the ramp to the street.

"They want to kill me! Get me out of here. Get away from..."

The driver whipped through a screeching right turn. He slowed as he grabbed Ruiz.

"Get out of my car, you crazy!" the driver shouted into the cocaine freak's face.

When a bullet shattered the windshield, the driver screamed and swerved and floored the accelerator.

Fernando Ruiz had less than a minute of freedom. Then a black-and-white squad car stopped the careering sports car.

8

In a tobacco-stinking lounge of Los Angeles International Airport, Carl Lyons and Flor Trujillo watched a jet taxi to a passenger-loading bridge. To bring it the last hundred feet to the bridge, field technicians had coupled a tug's tow-bar to the jet's front landing-gear strut. The tug docked the jet.

For a moment, Lyons took his attention from the runway. His eyes focused on the plate glass in front of them, on the mirrored image of himself and Flor standing together, his arm over her shoulders, like lovers waiting for arriving friends.

Flor had been quiet in the hours since the horror of the morgue. Though her professional demeanor tended toward silence broken by incisive observations — in contrast to Lyons's thoughtless comments and brutal joking — neither of them approached their time together as "on-duty time." In contrast to Flor the professional, Flor the lover joked and teased and gossiped. Carl Lyons had always considered the time he enjoyed with Flor to be precious.

The past times together — in the Caribbean or Washington, D.C., or New York — in the few hours or days their schedules allowed them to be together, he escaped from the discipline of the hard-core fighter. Flor knew his work. She also understood his reflexes.

Once, at breakfast in New York, with early morning traffic racing past a small cafe, an incoming customer opened the front door exactly as a truck backfired three times, one-two-three, like the firing of a large-caliber autopistol or a battle rifle with a low cyclic rate.

Lyons, seated at a small chrome-and-vinyl cafe table, had jumped simultaneously up and to the side. However, the table, bolted to the floor, had stopped him. The impact of his legs and torso against the table had overturned the water and juice glasses. Their breakfast plates clattered across the vinyl tabletop. All the waitresses and other diners stared at the big tanned man.