The Inquisition

By Marc Olden

Kidnappers have the ex-president’s daughter, and only Sand can save her

When Robert Sand’s sensei was murdered, William Baron Clarke helped him take revenge. The former president of the United States, Clarke is a rich man who uses his wealth to combat evil around the world. Since they first met, Sand has become his chief enforcer—a killer with samurai skills and American style. Once, Clarke saved Sand. Now it’s time to return the favor.

A fringe militia called the Inquisition kidnaps Clarke’s daughter, a brilliant college student. Their leader goes by the name Dessalines, and his cruelty is exceeded only by his madness. Before he executes his prisoners, Dessalines always stages a drumhead trial. Sand has three days before the verdict comes in—time enough to perform some executions of his own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Jul 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781453259856

Marc Olden

Marc Olden (1933–2003) was the author of forty mystery and suspense novels. Born in Baltimore, he began writing while working in New York as a Broadway publicist. His first book, Angela Davis (1973), was a nonfiction study of the controversial Black Panther. In 1973 he also published Narc, under the name Robert Hawke, beginning a hard-boiled nine-book series about a federal narcotics agent. A year later, Black Samurai introduced Robert Sand, a martial arts expert who becomes the first non-Japanese student of a samurai master. Based on Olden’s own interest in martial arts, which led him to the advanced ranks of karate and aikido, the novel spawned a successful eight-book series. Olden continued writing for the next three decades, often drawing on his fascination with Japanese culture and history. 

Book preview

The Inquisition

Black Samurai (Book Five)

Marc Olden

A MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media

Ebook

For my grandmother, Mrs. Maceo Dumas, Sr.

Contents

Part I

CHAPTER 1: DESSALINES

CHAPTER 2: THREE KILLINGS

CHAPTER 3: A CHALLENGE

CHAPTER 4: RANSOM TERMS: TRIAL

Part II

CHAPTER 5: OPENING MOVE

CHAPTER 6: GUNS FOR SALE

CHAPTER 7: STEP INTO DANGER

CHAPTER 8: PISCES: FOXY LOU

CHAPTER 9: SAN FRANCISCO: BLACKMAIL

CHAPTER 10: SAND: FOXY LOU

CHAPTER 11: REVENGE

Part III

CHAPTER 12: THE BLACK SAMURAI: WOUNDED; CAPTURED

CHAPTER 13: THE BARON: DEATH NEWS

CHAPTER 14: ESCAPE

CHAPTER 15: QUESTIONS

Part IV

CHAPTER 16: TELEPHONE CALL

CHAPTER 17: NIGHT KILL

CHAPTER 18: FINISH

Preview: The Warlock

Part I

CHAPTER 1

DESSALINES

THEY WAITED TO KILL the two bodyguards who would come walking toward them soon across the snow-covered parking lot. The bodyguards would be on either side of a twenty-three-year old girl, the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the world.

In bitter February cold, the killers hid in a rented car and in a small wooden booth at the parking-lot entrance. Five of them. Young men and women. White and black.

They were members of the Inquisition, a California-based terrorist organization of white and black radicals, and the girl they intended to kidnap was a student at the New York college behind the parking lot. Her name was Mary.

She was to be used in one of the most daring ransom schemes ever attempted by a radical group in America.

The terrorists’ leader was a black man calling himself Dessalines.

In the cold, he flexed his thick fingers inside tan woolen gloves, then rolled them into bone-hard fists, pressing them against his ears to warm that stinging flesh.

As Dessalines, he was the most hunted and feared terrorist in America. Since this made him important and gave him power, he enjoyed his role in life and was willing to do anything to prolong it.

The black man, murderous and shrewd, had come into the world as Julian Jeffrey Turner. In thirty years of living he’d been arrested fifteen times, acquiring a police record for dealing in drugs and stolen guns, for bank robbery, for jailbreak, and for murder. He was also mentally ill.

He’d taken the name Dessalines from an eighteenth-century Haitian slave, a man who had become a superb military leader, driving the French from that island and becoming one of its first black emperors.

As Dessalines, this twentieth-century black man was an expert at urban guerrilla warfare. This also meant craftily using the media for self-publicizing. He did this often and well.

Under his leadership, the Inquisition was front-page news across America, becoming feared, hated, and hunted in the process. After today, he and his organization would be front-page news around the world. He smiled at the thought, and for an instant his plan for power and propaganda made him feel warmer.

Inside a yellow-and-green-painted wooden booth at the parking-lot entrance, Dessalines stood beside Corley Zachery, a quiet twenty-six-year-old white man with damp blond hair covering most of his forehead. Corley was one of the best marksmen to come out of the Vietnam war.

Both he and Dessalines wore the ill-fitting, impressed dark green uniform and black cap of the college’s parking-lot attendants. Twenty minutes ago the uniforms had been taken at gunpoint from two men now unconscious on the oil-smeared, cold steel floor of a rented red panel truck parked fifteen feet away.

The attendants, a pair of Puerto Rican brothers who spoke little English, lay wrapped in lice-ridden, piss-smelling Army blankets.

Don’t want to waste them people, Dessalines said about the Puerto Ricans. They what we tryin’ to help, dig?

Corley nodded once, showing he understood. He would obey Dessalines without question. Corley wasn’t overly bright. He was just a Georgia boy who handled a gun with an extraordinary and deadly skill.

That’s all he had to do. Keep quiet, do what Dessalines told him to do, and use a gun when the time came.

A battered green heater glowed bright orange at their feet. It fell far short of heating up the booth. All it did was harden their snow-wet shoes into stiff ugliness and warm the wet cuffs of their uniforms.

The girl was special. So the college was letting her take end-term graduate exams in medieval literature by herself. She sat alone, her two bodyguards reading newspapers in the back of a barely heated classroom, the course instructor sitting head-down at a desk in front of her, grading papers from other students.

Dessalines knew her schedule. Much of it was no secret. She was world-famous, and her temporary graduate study in New York had been highly publicized. The rest had been easy.

He knew that when she finished the exam she and the two United States Secret Service men, who never left her side, would come out into the cold and hurry across the snow-covered parking lot to a dark blue Chevrolet. The car was always parked in the same place, right by this booth, where the attendants could watch it.

Dessalines was watching it now. He smiled, his cruel eyes bright with his power over anybody in front of his gun. Brother Mao Tse-tung is right, he thought. All power comes from the barrel of a gun.

His fingers, stiff with cold, rubbed his newly grown beard. Fucking thing itches the shit out of me, he thought, listening to the harsh sound of the hairs rubbing against his woolen gloves.

Growing it and cutting his afro short at the same time made getting around a lot easier. Cops. Them fucking pigs were hot to blow him away, shoot his ass off, until there wasn’t enough of it left to hide under a postage stamp.

Well, let ’em try, Jim. So far, the pigs hadn’t done shit. And the Inquisition, his people, had carried out eleven executions. They had sent death warrants to seven people, told ’em they was gonna die, and sho’ nuff, Jack, that’s just how it went down.

Enemies of the people. They had to die. Cops, judges, informers, newspapermen. Anybody responsible for blacks and poor whites going to jail under white man’s justice, that person was going to die.

Sometimes a death warrant, a warning. At other times, Dessalines and the Inquisition handled it differently. A kidnapping. Grab the son-of-a-bitch, haul him off somewhere, and hold trial by inquisition.

Shit, it wasn’t really a trial. Dessalines knew that. So did his white and black brothers and sisters in the Inquisition. You don’t hold a trial for somebody you know is your sworn enemy, out to destroy you.

But the trial went down anyway. And the verdict was always the same. Guilty. And the result was the same. Death.

Kidnap, then trial by the Inquisition, and death. They had killed four people this way.

That’s how you handle enemies of the people; that’s how you let them know that putting the poor in jail—black or white—was not going to go unpunished.

Yeah, Dessalines had heard some shit about poor people actually having done the crimes they went to jail for, but so what?

This was a white man’s country, and that meant white man’s justice. Niggers grew up knowing that if you’re white, you’re right. If you’re brown, step down. And if you’re black, step back. Well, later for that shit, as far as Dessalines was concerned.

He was gonna turn America’s prison system upside down, inside out, and every way but loose. It wasn’t enough to kill judges, cops, and anybody else turning the key and locking the bars. Oh, no, baby, even though the Inquisition was getting its name in the papers a lot.

Much more had to be done. And that took money. Which is where this white bitch Mary came in. Money. Daddy had plenty of it, more bread than God, and since her daddy was white, Dessalines and the Inquisition knew that meant he was getting rich by putting his goddamn foot on a poor man’s throat.

Yeah, well, Dessalines was going to break that fucking foot off and shove it up white America’s ass.

Two members of the Inquisition—Mojo and Barry—had gotten captured in Oakland last month. A fucking informant, a goddamn strung-out junky who needed dope to keep on living, had made a deal with cops, and that was it for Barry and Mo.

Not quite, baby, not quite, thought Dessalines.

Just as soon as we get our hands on Miss Rich Bitch, things are gonna be different, a whole lot different. Not just for Barry and Mo, but for everybody in America’s funky-ass jails. Every goddamn body.

Fifteen million dollars. And that was just the beginning of Dessalines’ plan. After this morning, he was going to be one of the most important men in America, the one man who was going to do what no one else had been able to do.

He was going to close the doors of every prison in this country.

Every single one. Shut tight. No more poor people going inside.

That’s why he had slipped out of California to come to New York. This deal was too important to fuck up. Sure, out of twelve or so brothers and sisters in the Inquisition, maybe two, could have planned this raid and carried it out. Maybe.

But it had to be done right the first time. That meant only one person running the show. Dessalines.

Anybody trying to grab the girl and missing out wouldn’t get a second chance. Hit her in the head with a paperclip, and from that point on, big daddy would wrap her in a tank every time she went to piss.

No second chances on this raid. Do it right the first time, or forget it.

That’s why he was here in person, putting his life on the line, freezing his ass off. The girl was important.

His breathing was even, but inside he was excited. As Julian Jeffrey Turner, he wasn’t anybody but a badass nigger. As Dessalines, he had power, and men wrote about him and feared him.

In the cold and silence, with his piercing dark brown eyes on the path leading from the college building to the dark blue Chevy parked in front of his booth, his voice was soft as he spoke to Corley. The talk was to underscore the importance of what they were doing. Corley had heard it all before.

"Dig it, her bodyguards will go down hard, man. That’s how they earn their money, right? So that means we’ll have to kill them to get her. Count on it. When they get here, don’t go actin’ like this is some kind of surprise, dig? You waste ’em. Just waste both their asses. You just make sure of one thing. Make sure that white bitch stays alive. She don’t get touched, hear? She don’t get no mo’ holes in her ass than God gave her. We need her, dig?"

Corley nodded, saying nothing. It wasn’t his way to talk much, and in any case, he had sense enough not to disagree with Dessalines on anything.

This was one mean nigger, he thought. Smart and tough, but meaner than a bull that ain’t had no pussy in twelve years. I ain’t about to discuss what day of the week it is with this dude.

Corley had his own reasons for being in the Inquisition, but he was smart enough to know that when you’re around somebody not right in the head, which was the case with Dessalines, you just grin a lot and say Right on, Jack. That way, you got to die at an old age, as opposed to all of a sudden like.

Corley sure wished the people they were gonna kill would get here soon. New York was colder than a witch’s tit. His jaw was stiff from the cold, and this spic’s uniform he was wearing smelled of garlic. If he had time, he’d like to burn this set of stinking rags.

One thing for sure. To hell with wine and pussy; first thing he was gonna do after this raid was take a bath and wash the stink off him. Damn, didn’t people in New York ever bathe?

They’re coming.

Dessalines’ soft voice was icepick sharp in Corley’s ear, and he snapped out of his private thoughts, moving closer to the dirty window the black man crouched in front of.

Yeah, he mumbled, licking his lips and blinking his eyes again and again for a clearer focus.

Two men, large bodies made bulkier by thick overcoats. And a girl walking between them. She wore a powder-blue parka with a hood pulled down almost over half of her face, faded blue jeans, and dark brown boots. She clutched her books to her chest.

It’s her, drawled Corley. Goddamn about time, too. ’Bout ready to chip ice offa my ass. He stood up, spun around and the .38 Smith & Wesson was in his hand, held high overhead. Squinting, he looked at it, nodded his head once in satisfaction, then put the gun back into his pocket.

He felt warmer now. There was something to do. Soon he’d have something to do.

There were only nine cars parked on the lot. In one of them, two women and a man waited for Dessalines’ signal. He was to lift the window up and down three times. After that, everybody had to move. Quickly.

They’d better.

No matter why you joined the Inquisition, you lived with one truth. Dessalines was dangerous. To others, to himself, in fact to anyone around him. He was dangerous because he was mentally ill, an illness he himself had ignored, and so had others in his life.

Perhaps at one point he could have been helped. It was too late for help now.

Behind eyes that shone too brightly, he endured paralytic pain of sudden headaches and blackouts, accepting them as temporary inconveniences that went with being alive. Drugs helped sometimes.

Dreams were better, dreams of being important, of being somebody special. Those dreams made everything worthwhile.

His pain. Other people’s blood. Anything was worth it to be important. Anything.

CHAPTER 2

THREE KILLINGS

SHE CLUTCHED HIS ARM tightly, gloved fingers digging into thick coat and hard muscles. She shivered, both with the cold and with relief at not having slipped on the patch of snow-covered ice.

They both looked at each other, grinned, and said nothing, then turned to face the chilled wind. They kept walking to the car. His name was Riley Redman, and at thirty, he’d been a Secret Service agent for six years. His marriage was breaking up in bitterness and hate.

He despised his wife, now sitting in a warm apartment in Washington, D.C., drinking her goddamn brains out. And he loved this beautiful girl walking beside him in the freezing cold.

If he thought about it long enough, it was funny, because he was going to lose them both. His wife would take their two-year-old daughter and every cent of his she could get and go back to Rhode Island.

And the girl now walking beside him in the snow, this beautiful, sweet, kind Mary, well, she had her own life. He loved her, and he’d never kissed her, never touched her dark brown hair the way he ached to do, never smelled the excitement of her body in those secret places only a lover could ever find.

He was hired help, nothing more. A bodyguard drawing a salary from the United States government to see that no one harmed her. Ten months with her, seeing her smile, hearing her laugh, seeing how kind and thoughtful she was. And Christ, was she beautiful.

And he couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it. Just stand around like a kid outside a candy store, nose pressed against the glass looking in. Well, it beats playing with a sharp knife and cutting yourself, he thought. But not by much. Not by goddamn much. He shook with cold and kept walking.

William Burr, the forty-four-year-old senior agent, looked to his right, at the two of them, and thought to himself: You got your tongue hanging out, Riley, and you’d better not let her old man see that. You’re a nice kid who married a bitch, and you’re bleeding, and Mary’s nice to be around, but don’t get your hopes up.

It’s a job. For you, for me. A job. A nice one, ’cause she’s a special girl. Couldn’t love her more myself if she was my own kid, and I wish to hell my own kid was as good as this one. But—he trembled with cold, dropping his head to his chest and leaning into the wind—you and me, kid, all we do with these people is look and don’t touch.

We do that. And we keep ’em alive. That’s it.

Suddenly …

What the—

Coming toward them, bundled up in jeans, boots, quilted jackets, and scarves tied tightly around their heads. Two girls, smiling, clipboards and ball-point pens in gloved hands.

Burr shook his head in annoyance. Shit. Got to be reporters or autograph freaks. No sense asking how they knew she was here. Them people always knew. Fucking vultures. Circling and looking for someone else’s body to land on.

Damn! Now we’ve got to stand around in the cold while she talks to them, or else me and Riley kick ’em in the leg and get ’em the hell out of here. Balls! Last thing I want to do right now, he thought, is stand around in this freezing weather talking to anybody.

Hi, I’m Renee, said the black girl, smiling and revealing slightly bucked teeth that Burr thought looked sexy. Her nose was pierced. A tiny white diamond was on the right side of her long nose, and all Burr could think of was that it must have hurt like crazy when somebody made that hole.

She and the white girl, who had bad teeth, thick glasses, and a chubby, round face red with the cold, stood directly in the path of the girl and her bodyguards. Damn, thought Burr. A few more feet and we’d be inside the car, and these two bimbos could run alongside us asking all the questions they want.

He smiled, thinking that outside of Mary and maybe a couple more, he hadn’t seen a pretty girl on campus in the three months he and Riley had been coming here. Today’s college broads dressed like slobs, looked like dogs, and smelled like public toilets.

Riley stood quietly, and Mary lifted her head and smiled politely, just as Burr knew she would. Well, what the hell, he had to try.

Girls, girls, couldn’t you have picked a warmer place? He smiled, trying to let them know nicely he was freezing his ass off. Reporters? Shit. These two looked like leftover bomb throwers from the 1960’s. Now that was a crazy time, thought Burr.

This suits us fine, said the short, chubby white girl, licking her lips nervously.

In that moment, something started to gnaw at Burr, and he frowned, leaning his head back.

Then it happened.

One second, the two girls were standing in front of them, clipboards clutched to their chests like reporters getting ready to write down answers, and a second later …

Their right hands came from behind the clipboards, and they each held .32’s, and each had taken a step, bringing them closer to Mary—the way