BA Hammer History Ch. 03

An Interruption

This case was progressing smoothly. I had Stevie and Homer working from different angles and I went to lunch after I saw Ed. I was sitting at lunch when I got a call from Brick, my attorney. His name was Percy Blackstone, but everyone called him Brick. He never would tell me why that is. His office was in the same building I was in, just on the floor above me.

"BA, I need to see you immediately, please. Can you drop everything and come to my office now?"

"You know I will, Brick. I am at lunch, but I can be there in fifteen minutes."

"Fine, we'll wait for you." We? He was worried.

I knocked on his private door and he let me in. I saw someone sitting in his office.

"BA, this is Jesus Gonzales. He is in the theater business, and a friend of mine. He works on the crew of "The Lion King" as a sound engineer. He has a serious problem, and I will let him tell you."

"Mr. Hammer, I am aware of what you do for the theater industry. We are all thankful there is someone we can go to when we have a serious problem. This is as serious as it can be. Last night, my daughter, who attends NYU, went to a nightclub. She lives in an apartment with one of her friends. Her friend called me this morning because she didn't come home last night. Patty, her friend, told me she left with a young man. She said Nina, my daughter, never told her she was leaving. She just luckily saw him taking her out the side door. She is sure she didn't go willingly. I am desperate to find her."

He sat with his head in his hands. This was serious.

"Have you called the police?"

"Sure, they told me they could do nothing until 48 hours have passed. That would be too late."

I sat there thinking for a few minutes. "Do you have the name of the club?"

"Yes. The Flaming Onion." I knew that place. It didn't have a great reputation. College girls shouldn't be going there.

"Okay, I will need a picture of her. I will look into it right away."

"Thank you, Mr. Hammer, thank you. "He handed me a picture of a pretty black-haired young girl of Mexican descent. I made my exit and went downstairs to my office.

I knew I would have to call him. I didn't want to call him, but I needed the security tapes from that club, and there was only one man that could get them for me. Fat Tony. He was the head of one of the "families" in New York, and I have done a few favors for him.

He came to the phone after a few minutes. "Anthony, sorry for calling you, but you are the only person who can help."

"No problem, Hammer. I assume it's important."

"Yes, sir, it is. Do you have an association with the nightclub "Flaming Onion?"

"You know I do."

"I had a friend's daughter snatched there last night. I wasn't aware the slavers were going into your establishments."

"They damn well better not be."

"I'm sorry, but I have it on good authority she was taken last night. I would like to view their security tapes from last night so I can get a picture of the guy."

"I'll tell them to let you under one condition, you give me a copy of the picture. I will stop that from repeating."

"Of course, you may have anything you need. I'm going over there right now. Time is of the essence. I figure I only have until tomorrow to find her before she's gone."

"That sounds about right. I'll call them now. Thanks for bringing this to my attention." I hung up and headed for the Flaming Onion.

They were waiting for me when I arrived, and I was ushered into their security office.

"Mr. Hammer, I am to help you as much as I can. What do you need?"

"I need to see your tapes from last night. A girl was snatched here last night, and I need to see who did it."

The man looked like I had shot him. The look of a mixture of fear and anger was something.

"Oh my God, they wouldn't dare."

"Dare they did. Now we are going to make them pay and rescue my goddaughter." (I threw that in for effect, and it worked as intended.)

"Yes sir, the tapes are right there." He told his computer man to start running the tapes. "Do you have any idea what time this was?"

"I do. It was after ten last night, and before eleven. We will only have to view one hour's worth of tape."

We spent the next few minutes looking at five different angles of the club. They were serious about knowing what happened at their club. Within fifteen minutes we found Nina on the tape. We also had a clear view of the young man who had her by the arm and was guiding her out the side door. Maybe twenty-five, blond, good looking. I made copies of several angles, thanked the manager, and left.

Now, there were several ways I could work this. I could see Ed and have the police check on him, but I wasn't willing to wait. I knew a much more direct way. I would have to contact Zorro. He hated me contacting him, but I had given him the "Grey Ghost" program, a security program that is the gold standard of security. He had been trying to crack it for months and I just handed it to him. He will help me, no matter how much of a privacy freak he is. I sent the text to the number and waited for him to respond. He responded before I had gotten back to my office. He gave me an address to find him. He moves often, given the fact that the government would love to find him. He is one of the premier hackers in the world. I will have to throw the burner phone I use for him away now, but he will give me another. That phone is like the bat phone, only for him.

I found him at the warehouse address he had given me. He was in a bad mood. "What the fuck are you doing? You know I must move now, again. This had better be real serious emergency."

"It's life or death. You know I don't bother you with anything less."

"It's my life I care about, not anyone else."

"Yeah, but you'll help, and then I'll be gone. Here's the burner phone. You can burn it. I'll need another. This girl has been snatched by slavers, and I need to find her now. This is the man who took her, right out from under the mob, and they aren't happy about it. We find him, and they may help you one day when you really need it."

That seemed to calm him down a little. "Okay, okay, you made your point." He took the picture and put it in a scanner. After scanning it, his computer began searching. He could get into government files, police files, the DMV, anything he wanted. It took his computer about twenty minutes to identify him. His name was Jeffery C. Carlton. It printed out every address he had ever used, and all the pertinent details of his life. I knew more about him than I did my wife. This shit is scary.

He gave me a new phone and told me to leave. I gladly did so.

I needed muscle. On my way to the office, I called Frank Eisenhower. He was an old army buddy that has helped me in the past. He met me at my office. I filled him in. "I will need the guys who helped us in the past. I intend to take these slavers down. I don't know how many there will be, but they are going to pay for this. Please have as many as you can find here at dark."

"You know I will, Thor. (The army called me Thor, you know, Hammer and all, whatever.) I think I can get four or five good guys at short notice."

"Thanks, see you then." "Ike" left. Stevie was in the office and had heard everything.

"You want me to help, boss?"

"No, you need to work on this old case. This thing will be over by tomorrow."

I decided to watch his last known residence until the evening. He will probably be at the holding area soon. It may be too late now, but I needed to get lucky somewhere.

I found the address. It was an old apartment building in an older area. His address was "B2". I needed to see the floorplan, so I went into the building and walked around the first floor. "A2" was the corner apartment on the west side of the building. I must assume B2 would be right above it. I returned to my car. A light was on in his place. Maybe he was still there. If he is, he's dead. He will certainly go to the holding area, at least I pray he does. If he has already been paid, he may stay away, and I will lose Nina. Either way, this asshole is dead, and before he dies, he is going to explain a few things about his organization, whether he wants to or not. If he decides to spend a quiet night at home, he is going to have visitors.

Ike called me a couple of hours later. I laid out where I was and what I had in mind. Within an hour I had six hard-looking ex-military men sitting in a van with me. "He's on the second floor, western corner apartment. His lights are on. I hope he goes out tonight to the holding area. Otherwise, we are going to visit him and get a little information from him. Everyone okay with that?" I knew, but I needed them to know the extent we were going to go. Nobody moved. "Okay, if he goes out to another club, we will let him. He might grab someone else. That means he would have to take them to the holding area. Either way, we are hitting the holding area tonight." The men began checking their equipment they had brought. Ike and I went back to my car to talk.

"Are you okay with this?"

"Fuck, yeah. There is nothing lower than people who make money off kidnapping young girls and turning them into sex slaves. We are going to fuck them all up and rescue whomever they have now." He smiled at the thought. At that minute, Jeffry C. Carlton came out of the front door and climbed into his red sports car. Fortunately, some of the information Zorro had given me was his car and license plate number. I had put a tracker on it. We wouldn't have to follow him too closely to know where he is going. As it was dusk, we knew he wasn't going to a club. It was too early for that. I hoped he wasn't just getting something to eat. I didn't want to follow this guy around the city for half the night. I didn't want to, but that is what we did. He went to a small restaurant in the neighborhood. I sent one of the less sinister-looking guys in to order something. When he came back, he said he was talking to a big white man. He was calling him Sergie. Great, Russians. The one group that didn't care about the old families in New York. We may need more help. I called Fat Tony to ask him what he wanted me to do.

"Hammer, this changes nothing. I'm tired of these Russians coming into New York like they can take over anything they want. Do you want some more help?"

"I wouldn't turn down Burt and Kitty, if they were available."

"They are. Here is Burt's number. I will tell them to expect your call for some wet work."

"Thanks, Anthony. I owe you, again."

"No, this affects all New Yorkers. We need these people to know they can't come in here and start taking our girls at will. I will alert the other families what we are doing. They need to know to watch themselves."

Ike smiled. He liked those two. They knew what they were doing and were ruthless.

It was an hour later when Jeffery finally came out of the restaurant. He got in his car and headed downtown. He wasn't going to the holding area. I hoped he was hunting. He was. He stopped in front of a club called Nightingales. It was even more dangerous than the Flaming Onion. He certainly wasn't there for the ambiance. Sure enough, within an hour he and another man came out the side door carrying a young woman. They stuffed her into the front seat of his sports car and he headed off.

We got him. I made a mental note of the other man's face. We would have to deal with him later. We followed him out of downtown heading south. After crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, he continued south until he came to Brighton Beach. Of course, he did. BB was also known as "Little Odessa" because it was the largest concentration of Russians in New York. This gets harder and harder. I was going to need big league help. Ed wouldn't be able to help me there. I took out the phone number of "Bob Burger". That was the alias for an FBI agent that I had worked with before. He answered on the first ring.

"Burger, this is Hammer. I have a problem, and I think you will hear about it soon. I wanted to give you a heads up."

"I knew this wasn't a social call. Is this going to be a mess like last time?"

"No, there are no bad agents this time, just a bunch of bad Russians."

"Not Russians. They are a violent bunch."

"Yeah, and these are no different. It has to do with sex trafficking. We are about to rescue a few women we have been tracking. We know where they are, and they aren't leaving the country. It's likely to get messy. I'll call you went we find them. You will want to be ready with a team. I will tell you which city you will need to coordinate with once I know."

"I'll say one thing for you, Hammer, you are never dull. They are going to want to talk to you."

"Can't this be an anonymous tip? If my name gets in this, I will have to deal with Russians for the rest of my life."

"Okay, but I can't set anything up in advance. I will just have to deal with it once it happens."

"That's okay, Burger. I just must save these girls. One of them is a friend's daughter."

Burger sighed. "Just call me when you are clear."

"Thanks. I will owe you a big one for this."

Carlton pulled behind a dark warehouse near the beach. It was a neighborhood that was quiet at night. It only had warehouses, and no one was around late. We didn't follow him down that alley. There had to be watchmen on the roofs, so we went on down the road. It will take us a little time to clear the sentries before we hit the place. Ike chose a warehouse two over from theirs. It was the tallest of the buildings in the area. That would be where I would put my sentries. We would start there.

I called Burt and gave him the address. He told me it would take an hour to get there. I told him we'd wait.

Ike sent two men up a fire escape in the back. After they disappeared into the night, we gathered in the van to discuss how we would proceed. We had seen two guards at the door he had pulled up to. We would need to take them quietly. I had one man watching them to see how everyone got into the building. He came back to tell us he heard a special knock on the steel door. He thinks he can remember it. Our plan, if you wanted to call it one, was to just kill everyman we run into until there was no one left. We thought we'd keep one alive, just in case.

One of the two men sent up came back to report. There were no men on this building. He saw a sniper across the alley from where the guards were. None of the other buildings had anyone showing. I told him to return and tell our sniper to take theirs out when he sees the two guards go down. He did so and returned shortly.

We were now only waiting on Burt and Kitty. In thirty minutes, they arrived. With them we had eight people. Kitty and Burt had hoods on their heads. They said Tony insisted that no one see their faces. I agreed. It was time. It had been a little over an hour since Carlton had arrived. He was still inside.

We quietly moved to the alley and slipped in. Two of our men dropped the guards without a sound. I hoped our sniper got their sniper. We were going to be exposed in a couple of minutes. We made the door without a shot coming from the roof. Good so far. Our man made the special knock and the door opened. The look of surprise on the Russian's face was the last thing he ever did. We put him in a closet and waited for our eyes to adjust to the dark. We were in a hallway with several doors on each side. There was a door at the end of the hall. We would have to deal with that after we cleared these rooms. To see what we were up against, I had Ike open the first door. It wasn't locked. Inside was a young girl tied to a bed. She looked like she was drugged. There was no one guarding her. The other rooms were the same. Nina was in one of the rooms. She was out, just like the others, but she was breathing. Six girls. We could deal with them later. We had to find their captors first.

At the end of the hall, we carefully opened the door. It was a stairwell. Someone was walking our way. We closed the door and let him walk right into us. He died with a surprised look on his face. There was a door on one side of the stairwell. We opened it to find an entrance into the warehouse. It was full of boxes, and we could hear voices across the warehouse. Ike took three of his guys and went to deal with them. The rest went up the stairs. One flight up as another level. There was a guard standing on the other side of the door. Kitty told us to wait a minute. She went back down the stairs and returned with the hat the man coming down the stairs had on. She gave it to one of our guys, and he pulled it down over his face and opened the door. The confusion caused by the cap was all he needed. We were standing over him when all hell broke loose in the warehouse. A full-blown war was erupting. Three doors in the hall opened at once and several men came running out. A hail of bullets ended their rescue attempt. Now we had to clear the rooms. The first room was now empty. The second room had bullets flying through the doorway. I could have thrown a concussion grenade in the room, but we didn't know if any girls were in there, so we waited. After a minute, the shooting stopped. I put the hat we had borrowed on a stick and pushed it past the door jam. It was shot off the stick in a second.

Burt decided he was done waiting and dove over the doorway into the hallway past the door. The shots missed as he went by. He went to the next door and burst through it. We heard a couple of shots, and he reappeared in the hallway with a thumbs up. He returned to our problem and started firing into the room. I dove behind a desk before whomever in there could get a shot off.

Over the top of the desk, I could see a girl, probably the one they had snatched tonight sitting on a chair with her head hanging down. Behind her was one man with a gun over her left shoulder pointed at us. As I waited the man nervously looked over her shoulder. It was our old friend, Carlton. I smiled. I'm sure that asshole has never fired a gun in anger before.

"Jeffery, I am going to make this very clear for you. If anything happens to that girl, either by me or you, you will die a very slow, painful death. You understand me?" Silence. "Say you understand me, or I will shoot the both of you, you understand?"

"I... I understand."

"Good. Now, you are going to untie the girl and let her walk to me. You have no other option of getting out of here alive. I will count to three. One.... Two." I could see him shaking as he was thinking.

"Okay, okay. Don't shoot." He untied the girl and she fell to the floor. He stood behind her. I stood up and looked him in the eye.

"You are a disgusting human being. I should shoot you anyway." As I was saying that I heard a shot ring out from behind me. Carlton fell back with a bullet through the forehead. I turned around to see Burt standing there.

"I never promised the asshole I would let him go."

"Actually, I didn't either. I wasn't letting him out of here alive. Thanks."

There were no more men in any of the rooms on this floor. We could see out of a big picture window that the fight in the warehouse was almost over.

I went to check the girl he had used as a shield. She was out. He had drugged her, and she wasn't walking out of any room. Good. That means she didn't see us either. We carried her down the stairs to the other girls. I looked through Carlton's pockets until I found the vial of whatever they were giving the girls. We untied all the girls, but they weren't moving. They would be okay until the FBI could get here.

"Burger. It is over. You have six girls on the lower floor. They are drugged and unconscious." I gave him the address and the name of the drug they had been given.

"We have an office near there. Russians are Russians, and we have people there anyway. I will call the Brighton Beach police and have them meet us there."