"Man, we ain't got much used stuff. Anything we take in on trade, if it ain't a Porsche we wholesale it out, usually same day. Thing is, not many customers come in with a trade."
"Cash buyers?" Patrick asked, grinning.
"Mostly. Yup, looks we got one..." the kid said as a woman walked in the main door, and he even whistled his approval. "Yowza, man. See if you can get me her phone number, wouldya...?"
But Patrick was already walking across the showroom floor by the time the kid realized Chalmers was there by his side...watching Pat as he seemed to glide across the brightly polished white floor to the woman.
"How does he seem to you, Steve?" Paddy Chalmers asked, his arms crossed across his chest.
"Kinda stuck-up, man. Like a know-it-all...ya know what I mean?"
Paddy watched quietly as the new guy walked the woman around a white 911 Turbo, then over to a Guards Red 924, yet even from a distance, he could tell Patrick was steering her back to a 911.
Then Pat took the woman out to the lot and straight to a Prussian Blue Metallic 911 Targa, and Paddy could tell the new guy was a natural. "Get the keys to that one, Steve."
"Yes, boss."
By the time Pat walked back to the showroom for the keys, Chalmers had them in hand and met him at the door.
"If you get her there, tell her a thousand under sticker is the best we can do."
But Patrick simply stared at him for a moment before he spoke: "I already sold it. For sticker."
"You what?"
But Patrick was already walking back out to the Targa; he opened the driver's door and helped the woman get in, then walked around and got in the passenger's seat...
____________________________
"So, how am I doin'?" Bullitt asked the woman, grinning.
"Not bad," she said. "But I think you should loosen up a little. You might be scaring these guys a little too much..."
'She' was going by the name of Debra Kildare, though she was in fact a Mossad agent assigned to the Bennett team, and regarded as one of Colonel Goodman's best operatives...and Frank would be reporting to her during the team's opening moves. "Oh," she said as she opened her purse, "you'll need my license for the title, and here's my insurance card."
"We better take it for a quick drive."
"Keys, please," 'Debra' said, smiling as she started the Porsche and deliberately made a few jerky shifts on her way out of the lot.
"Anyone following," Bullitt asked as he watched her eyes scanning the mirrors.
"No...nothing yet."
They drove over to the park, and there they pulled into the aquarium and removed the top, stowing it upfront before returning to the dealership. They walked in together -- and straight over to Chalmers, who was still waiting by the door.
"So, how did you like it?" Paddy asked as he introduced himself to 'Debra.'
She nodded. "Any chance this young man could follow me home? I drove my car down this morning, and..."
"Of course. So, no trade-in?" Paddy asked.
"No. I'm getting this for my husband's birthday."
"I see. Shall we title it..."
"I have all the information here, Mr. Chalmers. We'll register it to our production company if that's okay with you."
"We'll take care of all that, and we can have your new car ready to go in a half-hour or so. Patrick, you have her papers?"
"Yes."
"Well Pat, let's get to it. M'am, we'll be back in a minute or two, if you'd like to wait..."
_________________________________
Goodman's team had done their homework, had put Callahan out on the street right before Nigel Danson drove from his mechanics job home to his place in Oakland. As the team had seen Danson pick up hitchers more than once, they figured it was even money he'd stop and pick up Callahan, and knowing Danson's background they'd figured -- rightfully, as it turned out -- that Callahan/Mason would be an easy recruit...
Danson worked a legit day job at the Hawthorne Municipal Airport, working as a mechanic on small general aviation aircraft five days a week. But he supplemented his income by working at a chop-shop in Oakland, an enterprise that took in freshly stolen cars and trucks, switched out VIN numbers and slapped a fresh coat of paint on the hot cars before pushing them through a shady dealer network all over northern California, providing unsuspecting new buyers with bogus salvage paperwork -- papers good enough to pass muster at their local DMV.
But the real beauty of the operation was the network of legitimate informants around the Bay Area providing precious intel to the thieves, because several salesmen at these dealerships, most often high-end foreign auto dealerships, were providing this growing network with the addresses of new purchasers -- as well as spare keys to the vehicles in question -- in exchange for a cut of the action. Cars were then lifted in the middle of the night and driven to nearby trucks -- that then covertly transported the stolen cars to one of the shops in the East Bay area. As soon as the fresh paint cured, within a few hours these lifted cars showed up in dealerships all over California, places like Sacramento, Stockton, and the Central Valley, and the profit margins made this new operation more than worthwhile financially. Yet, even so, the stolen car operation was just the tip of the iceberg...
And now Callahan was on the inside of the biggest chop-shop in the East Bay -- learning the ropes under Danson's tutelage -- while living in a small apartment Danson had miraculously provided, and at an impossibly low rent, too. After one week's work, Callahan took home over three thousand in cash, and this was in addition to his paycheck from his other job at a nearby helicopter maintenance facility Danson had hooked him up with. Harry figured he'd made more in one month doing this stuff than he would have in almost half a year at the department, and he found that more than a little humorous. At these wages, criminal operations would completely wipe-out legitimate businesses within a few years, and if you extrapolated these new, illegal synergies throughout the economy, organized crime would soon be the single most powerful entity in the region.
And this simply meant that organized crime rings would soon push aside more traditional political parties. After studying the nature of this trend with one of Colonel Goodman's Mossad instructors, Bennett's team knew this type of political collapse had already happened in Italy and Ireland, and even now Japan was suddenly at risk. If these organizations succeeded in the Bay Area, after already making real progress in New York and Boston, how long would the United States survive?
Yet the most important question remained unanswered: which nation-state, if any, was behind this operation?
And that, more than anything else, was what the Israelis wanted to know. And what Harry hoped to discover.
______________________________
Avi Rosenthal opened his eyes and looked around the room as best he could; banks of monitors winked and beeped his vitals; he could see two nurses in the room, one of them writing, the other injecting something into an IV hanging overhead...
He tried to talk but found his mouth taped shut, then he felt hard plastic on his tongue just as he realized his throat hurt like hell.
'I've been intubated, so I've already had surgery,' the said to himself, trying to assert control over his emotions by rationally cataloging the elements of his surroundings...
He tried to turn his head and moaned as the pain in his chest increased, but this caused one of the nurses to turn his way. When she saw his eyes were open this nurse came to him, told him they could remove the tube now that he was awake, then she scurried off and was soon out of sight.
Then he realized the nurse talked with a very strange accent...
But Physicians soon surrounded his bed, poking here and prodding there, one of them pinching his toenails and watching fluid rebound, another shining a blinding penlight in his eyes, yet a few moments later the tube was gone -- and in its place a searingly bad sore throat...
"Don't worry, Mr. Rosenthal," one of the voices said, "you'll soon be..."
But Avi was focused on the man's voice, the strange accent, and now he was growing very worried...
"Where...am I...?" he just managed to get out, his voice more a ragged, hoarse cracking sound.
"Houston. Texas. You're at Texas Heart, Mr. Rosenthal."
Avi's mind raced... Texas Heart...Denton Cooley's place in Houston. That could only mean one thing...he had a new heart...
The realization rocked him, left him feeling bereft of his senses.
"Are you -- Cooley?" he croaked, but his soul screamed when the physician nodded. "So, new heart?" he asked.
"Mr. Rosenthal, you've been through a lot the past week. I know you have a ton of questions but we'll go over everything after we get you through the next day or so. Try to calm down now, or we'll need to put you under again, and that means another intubation. Just take a few deep breaths and try to think about something less stressful, okay?"
Cooley looked at the man, then at a beeping monitor, and a moment later Avi felt himself falling into the darkest well imaginable...
_________________________________
Imogen sat at her piano, her fingers wandering through vague shadows, her eyes closed as old memories came to her unasked.
Colonel Goodman was with her now almost all the time, and Herbert von Karajan, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, had rarely left her side since news of her husband's heart attack reached the house.
She had dropped to the floor, crying at first but soon deep in conversation with another unseen voice. von Karajan hadn't known what to do, but Avi's security detail had. They carried her to bed and called her physicians, and the conductor had simply followed them inside her room -- and had rarely left her side since.
But von Karajan was a sympathetic soul. He understood the nature of music, the real purpose of the structures within a piece, and he realized that now was probably the most important time there was.
As soon as she could hear his voice, von Karajan had walked her to the piano and set her free.
And with pencil and paper in hand, he had scribbled down the symphony of memory that had burst free and come pouring from her soul. The music that came from this explosion shattered his soul, the beauty rendered him little more than a mute witness to the birth of something so utterly otherworldly...yet she seemed to be holding back one vital passage as she came to an obvious conclusion...
