Tom Barber - One Way

‘Who was the guy you killed upstairs?’

‘His name was Taylor. First Team’s point man when they went in through the door. Real asshole.’

‘You knew right then what this is really about.’

She nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘So why didn’t you say anything?’

‘I’ve been sworn to secrecy and I was shocked. Besides, it wouldn’t make any difference if they were after me or Isabel; we’d all still be in this situation. And I thought back up would get to us before I’d have to explain.’ She saw the look on his face. ‘Try to understand, Archer. I’ve spent the last thirteen months keeping a huge part of my life a secret; it’s hard to shake that habit. Especially when there are a group of highly trained men searching for you and wanting to kill you.’

He thought for a moment.

‘Well now we know for a fact who they are, we need to tell the people outside,’ he said. ‘This changes everything. They’re wearing those balaclavas and using code-names for a damn good reason. Without them, their alibis count for shit.’

He grunted and rose, pulling the bloodied towel from his torso and pushing himself back to his feet. She joined him.

‘So how do we contact them? The phones are down and they’ll be guarding the lobby.’

‘One phone isn’t dead.’

She realised what he was thinking. ‘The emergency line on 22.’

He nodded. ‘We need to get back up there.’

Downstairs, King, Bishop, Spades, Knight and Diamonds had reconvened on the 1st floor, near some sort of manager’s office, having come back down from the laundry room on 6. Braeten had joined them, two of his guys elsewhere in the building hunting for Vargas. The man armed with the AK-47 was holding the front door.

Standing in the corridor with the surviving members of his team, King leant against the wall, his mood thunderous, going over the events of the evening in his head and wondering just how the hell everything that could have gone wrong, had.

His real name and rank was Master Sergeant Seth Calvin. Born and raised on South Beach and thirty three years old, he’d been a member of Miami-Dade Police Department for eleven years.

He’d been dirty for ten years and eleven months of them.

Most people in the United States didn’t fully comprehend the amount of narcotics that flowed through the Florida Keys every day. Those old enough to remember Reagan’s speech declaring war on the cartels figured the US Coastguard, Miami PD and the DEA had immediately leapt on the issue and had crushed the illegal trafficking in the thirty five or so years since that declaration. Back in the 1970s, Miami had become the drug gateway to the entire country. Pilots had flown in fresh product from Colombia and Cuba every day, huge quantities of cocaine and heroin that would sell for absurd amounts of cash. Once the cops wised up and started lying in wait, the pilots improvised, dropping the cargo in floatable bags into the sea. Runner speedboats would follow the flight path, scooping up the coke, and get it out of the water before the Coastguard showed up. South Florida had 8,000 miles of coastline; no matter how big the security operation or bold Reagan’s statements had been, there were always cracks in the system and opportunities for drug cartels. To this day, they still ruthlessly exploited them.

The drugs flowed onto the streets to the dealers and junkies. Out of the Academy all those years back, Calvin and his partner Denton had been assigned a beat in West Grove, a rough part of town that offered way more in the way of risk than it did reward for a rookie police officer just starting out. Cop shootings in Miami were common, especially by drug dealers. One month into their partnership, the two men had answered a neighbour complaint call and ended up finding a man shot dead inside a house, two rounds in his forehead and the sitting room torn to pieces, the killer obviously searching for something. Checking the rest of the house, they’d found three keys of dope and ten thousand dollars taped to the inside of a shelf in the kitchen. Neither of them had ever held that much money in their hands in their entire lives.

It was at that very moment that the two men realised they could make this work to their advantage. When back-up arrived, the body was removed and the drugs and cash were booked, three keys and eight thousand dollars of drug money. Calvin and Denton had given their reports and left the scene with a stack of bills tucked inside their waistband under their uniform. The two cops had popped their cherries.

And they liked the way it felt.

They’d started out small and subtle, keeping their records and their reputations clean whilst learning the ropes and working the beat, familiarising themselves with the players and the drug trade. Detectives and officers on busts all over the city would seize large quantities of powder and all of it ended up going through the Miami PD lock up, the money eventually parlayed back into circulation, the drugs taken to a lab and destroyed. Calvin got to know two of the guys running a shift down there, Markowski and Fowler, two men who had millions of dollars worth of dope within arm’s reach and who, Calvin soon discovered, shared his and Denton’s sentiments on capitalising on their privileged position. They couldn’t touch the money that had been booked, but they sure as hell could go after the powder. The four men started to take a key here or there and replace it with a substitute, selling it back on the street at a jacked up price. No-one around them was ever the wiser; they had so much of the shit going through the cages at the Department that none of their superior officers ever noticed.

They also knew for a fact that they weren’t the only ones doing it.

That was almost eleven years ago. Since then, Calvin and Denton had done their time in West Grove then applied, trained and been accepted to SRT, joining one of their entry teams and getting a slight rise in pay. Despite their secret doings, both men were proficient, intelligent officers and had quickly risen through the ranks, Calvin making Master Sergeant in the First Team of SRT three years ago and Denton Sergeant below him. They kept up their racket along the way but they’d had to be ever more subtle and on their toes, scores of clean officers around them who could never be swayed and were therefore treated with utmost caution. On occasion, after clearing a residence during a bust, the two men had found dope or cash and left it where it was hidden. If it was discovered by any detectives or CSU, no-one would know they were aware of it. If it wasn’t, they would come back for it later.

As Calvin grew more senior in SRT, so did his influence on who made his team. Markowski and Fowler had applied and joined the task force, followed by more guys whom Markowski had recommended, assuring them they were reliable and up to extracurricular activities outside of official police business. Each man was pissed off watching the criminals they were trying to bust living movie-star lifestyles whilst they put their lives on the line for little reward, and they all wanted a share of it, any good intentions they’d ever had as cops erased like chalk on an old school blackboard. Calvin developed a system. Whenever one of the older guys moved on or retired, he would handpick a carefully vetted newbie from the candidates who he knew he and his men could trust.

Slowly and surely, the percentage of officers on the First Team who were corrupt grew from 20 per cent to 40, from 60 to 80. Soon, it was all but one man. Being SRT, they were the smash and grab teams that came in through the front door, fully armed and with warrants to search wherever the hell they wanted before any detectives and forensic teams got there. Many of the police seizures and drug busts were monumental. Miami was still ground zero for most of the cocaine coming into the United States, and Calvin and his peers constantly had the shit running through their fingers, like putting their hands under a huge tap of powder that never stopped flowing. They stole large amounts of cash and product, finding fifty keys and only reporting forty, discovering half a million dollars and handing over four hundred thousand, taking vast quantities of blow and selling it back to the cartels or dealers at a hiked-up price. If anyone the other side threatened to talk, they were taken care of. Police raids were as common as knocks on front doors in Miami and not all of them went peacefully.