Army of Devils at-8 Read online

  “We were so busy getting in here,” Towers added. “Didn’t see what happened…”

  “Who wanted to talk about the officer?”

  Their laughter stopped.

  “What’s his condition?” Towers asked.

  “He’ll be staying for observation, but we think he’s improving. We tried the standard sedative and antipsychotic drugs but finally we resorted to the expediency of changing his blood, which proved to be helpful.”

  “You changed his blood?”

  “Then we upped the antipsychotics until his convulsions and rages stopped. Drastic, but the treatment seems effective. The residual amounts may trigger repeated seizures. I believe the continuing treatment will be rest and calm until we can identify the chemical that initiated his attacks. Then we can attempt to neutralize whatever traces of the chemical remain in his body.”

  “Have any idea what the drug was?” Lyons asked.

  “A drug? I don’t know that this chemical is a drug. It seems to activate areas of the brain usually unaffected by drugs. It creates rages. Like a drug, it makes the individual unaware of pain, but that may be a side effect of the rage. The police department’s chemists already have a sample,” the doctor said. He was enthusiastic. “And we’ve sent pathologists to the morgue to take samples of the five teenagers’ brains. I’m really quite excited about this. I’ve already outlined a paper I plan to publish. This is all very, very extraordinary.”

  Lyons nodded. “Yeah, it sure is.”

  On another floor of the hospital, in a private room guarded by an LAPD officer in the white uniform of a nurse, Lou Stevens rested after minor surgery. The white-uniformed woman — an officer with black-belt degrees in both karate and judo — admitted Towers, Lyons and Flor after they presented their identification.

  “He’s awake,” she whispered before opening the door. “He wants to talk. He’s very shook up by what happened.”

  “No doubt,” Towers answered. He knocked before opening the door.

  In the sun-bright white room, Lou Stevens sat up in the cranked-up hospital bed. Newspapers with bold headlines covered the blanket. He looked up from reading as they entered.

  “Mr. Stevens, how are you?” Towers shook hands with the white-haired electrical engineer. “Doctor told me you didn’t even need general anesthesia.”

  “I don’t even need to be in the hospital. The bullet went through the wall before it hit me. Doctor showed me the fragments he took out of my leg. I got bigger pieces of metal than that still in me from the Philippines.”

  “World War II?” Towers asked.

  “Signal Corps.”

  “Is that how you got your start in electronics?”

  “Electronics?” Stevens laughed. “That’s what I thought. Wanted to go to trade school or college, but I didn’t think I’d ever have that much time or money. So I enlisted. Thought I’d do a four-year course in the Army, learning about radios. What I did was unroll wire for field telephones while everybody shot at me. Japs thought I was a soldier. Our side thought I was a Jap infiltrator. Soon enough I learned to dig with my nose while I ran with my legs. Sort of a human plow. Except never more than three inches off the ground. Something like a torpedo through the dirt.”

  All of them laughed. Towers took the opportunity to introduce Lyons and Flor. “This is my friend Carl Stone. He’s with federal law enforcement. And Angelica Lopez. She’s Federal, also. They’d like to talk to you about what happened last night.”

  Stevens tapped one of the newspaper stories.

  “I’ll tell you. It was awful. But what I see in the papers… I had my daughter and her husband in the next room. My month-old grandson. I gave those… those… delinquents a chance. I told them. And they started shooting. That machine gun they had, it just ripped the place apart. So I shot the first two in the feet. But good God, they didn’t stop…”

  “Did they seem to feel the pain?” Lyons asked gently.

  “They started screaming, but… but they only really screamed when I told them to get out. They screamed, but it wasn’t… it wasn’t like pain. ‘Die, whitey, die, you white…’ They used words I won’t repeat in the presence of a young lady. I shot the first two in the feet and they went down. The one with the machine gun started shooting everywhere. So I shot him. The ones with pistols saw me and shot. That’s when I got wounded. I fell down.

  “They rushed me with those pistols. I was on the floor, and I put the little red dot right on their faces. Shot them.

  “Goddamn glad for all the time I’ve spent on the range shooting skeet. Those two fall down, and I see the one on the ground trying to get that little machine gun. He’s wounded and bleeding like… like… like terrible casualties I saw in the Philippines. But he’s still trying to get the machine gun. I had to shoot him.

  “And the other two. One of them, his foot is gone. And he stands up and tries to run at me. Not away. At me, with a machete. ‘Die, whitey,’ he screamed. I shot him. The other one, he takes a pistol off the floor. I shot him, too.”

  For a moment, the grandfather stared into space. He shook his head at the remembered images. “It was so awful. It was so goddamn awful.”

  Lyons put his hand on Stevens’s shoulder. “You saved your family. Those punks weren’t there to steal. They were completely doped out of their minds and looking to kill.”

  “I know, I know. But I’ll never be able to forget what… what I had to do.”

  Towers spoke then. “Sir, you gave us the only break we’ve had so far. We’ve got a start on that crazy drug, and we’ve got the weapon and the bodies. Without that, we’d have nothing to work on. It’s a start. You can be proud of that.”

  “Thanks for trying to cheer me up, but I’ve got to live with it. I’ll see what I did for the rest of my life. I’ll never forget.”

  A knock sounded on the door. Towers glanced to Lyons and Flor. The two Federals turned their backs to the door. Towers asked, “Who’s there?”

  “Urgent message for Mr. Lou Stevens!”

  “He’s resting,” Towers answered.

  “Who’s the message from?” Stevens called out.

  “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 type
writers 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.