“I’m also giving you a chance to go home to the family and let this roll on to conclusion by itself, George. Please consider taking it.”
He looked at me with one of his ‘I’m bored with this topic already’ faces and gave a simple answer.
“Not going to happen, Jeff.”
His tone and stance was such that I knew before exploring it that he wouldn’t be giving in anytime this year, so I let it go and focused on Ronnie, who was about to start a debate from the body language she was putting out. An aggressive debate.
“Ronnie?”
“Thank you. What about the gear we need to do our job? You can’t waltz into Brazil with that kind of equipment, posing as tourists for goodness’ sakes! How does that help? I don’t see it.”
“Only because you don’t want to. What you want is to win a political coup for your department, garnering praise from the ‘Tower’ in Ottawa, and brownie points with the largest nation in South America. And you want to do it personally. That’s a mistake in judgement.
It’ll all come back down to you no matter how it turns out, good, bad, or downright ugly. So, what you have to decide is how to accomplish the good part without bringing the bad part down on your head.
We’ll bring the gear ourselves when we go in to meet up with them. It all leads to Brazil. We all have to go to Brazil. The trick is to go without endangering anyone. Surprise is the pivotal ingredient of our plan. We go quietly. That means no badges, and no known names or faces.
Don’t kid yourself for a moment that they’re not on the lookout for the whole Zurich team, because they are. Enrico left us a poignant message at the double flat that he was using to stage his operations. Remember Terry? Enrico knows who we are.
And nobody outside this current team is going to get involved in the action, so forget about another team from the home office.
If Enrico knows, his boss knows. What if his boss runs some critical operations at the MOI? Then, if we move openly we’ve tipped our hand before we finish getting our passports stamped. Not good.
We then lose the element of surprise, and we sure as hell lose the advantage of any gear we declare when we enter, because it’ll be confiscated before you can say ‘Jack Robinson’, and if they find any gear we didn’t declare, the Canadian Embassy will be visiting us with care packages for the next few weeks while negotiations for our release take place. In the meantime, we’d all fall victim to a shocking prison riot, or a psychopathic cell-mate. Or a fatal dose of Amazonian paralytic toxins.”
I gave George a look that said it all. He nodded back at me in agreement. Ronnie sighed and rubbed her face with both hands.
“Jeffry, why don’t you stop holding back and just tell us all what we’re supposed to do next?”
Now it was my turn to be exasperated. I took a slow breath and started over from a different angle. This time there wasn’t a lot of explanation, just orders.
“Why is everyone getting so damned edgy and sarcastic here? You don’t think I know what I’m doing? Then send me home. I’m of no use to you unless you accept what I say and do at face value. I don’t have a hidden agenda, I’m not looking for personal glory, I would rather not even be known to be associated with this mission. But as long as I am, then the number one purpose is to succeed, plain and simple. When I tell you ‘we need to do it this way', it’s because we do, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Telling you all what to do.”
Ronnie gave me an awful smile. Patently forced. She was conceding.
“Fine. Tell me then. What’s our next move? Who and where and a brief why if possible?”
Finally. We got quickly down to business, as I laid out the three teams, their primary and secondary objectives, and the manner of travel and cover for them all.
The one straw in the soup was Therese. She needed to go home and take cover until this was over. One way or the other. I had had an especially strong instinct to protect her from the first time I spoke with her on the telephone, and even more so after I’d met her in person.
The way it was now, I wanted her in a safe house in Canada so fast it wasn’t funny. Maybe nothing would come of it all. Maybe I was just the ‘protector’ who showed up at the right time and deflected all of the bad stuff for her, in turn creating the false feelings that were finally played out not more than an hour before. But I didn’t believe that the feelings were false.
Therese had turned out to be more than just an ‘adult’ about what had transpired in her life recently, she had shown herself to be strong, and a person who knew her own mind. I didn’t kid myself that what she felt for me was true love of the ‘once in a lifetime’ kind. But!
She had wanted me, even needed me, in a way that made her feel better. I wasn’t sure that she was even considering my feelings once the moment had passed, but I think she was.
When I got back, and there’s always an 'if’ in there with a mission, ‘then’ would be the time to explore that whole experience, see if it stood up under the test of ‘morning after’ contemplations. That was something that would work two ways as well.
In the back of my mind there was still a nagging voice whispering Cynthia’s name. By now that should have seemed long ago and far away, but it didn’t. That told me something about myself and the feelings that had seemed to explode out of me when I was with Cynthia.
What had taken place between Therese and I, on the other hand, had been growing on us since we first met. Apparently, it had grown faster on Therese than it had on me, but it had finally hit me too, and that couldn’t have been denied. Not under the conditions she had contrived today. I still felt flattered, and I was riding a high from the whole thing, but…
Now it would be much more of an albatross around my neck than previously to have her with us in any of the teams. I needed my concentrations totally focused, and that wouldn’t happen if she wasn’t home and safe.
George had agreed now to take her and Ted home, and get Therese settled in a safehouse with a crew of his best men. Handpicked and loyal.
Then he would continue on, bringing Ted, meeting up with me in Venezuela, which was going to be my launching pad for the Brazil invasion.
I had plans for that entry that involved Ted Dawson, though nobody else knew that yet. Later I would take George aside and instruct him to bring Ted onwards with him when he came to the southern continent.
Whether Ted would readily agree or not I didn’t know for sure, but I figured he would. He wouldn’t have any choice in the matter if push came to shove, because I was going to order it not request it, but I didn’t think it would be necessary to coerce him. These people had killed his brother. It was pay-back time, and human nature being what it is, I was counting on him wanting to be there, to see with his own eyes when the rain of revenge fell. That’s the way he would see it.
For the rest of us, there was no revenge, but instead, justice. Sometimes it gets hard to differentiate between that fine line that separates lawful exploits from unlawful attacks. This one was so twisted already I wasn’t about to try making a call, I was just going to do the job.
The RCMP had empowered me, through the weight of Ronnie’s Office as well, and Interpol, to do so legally.
Once they’d set me on their planned course of action, the goal had taken over, and things would progress towards that end. The manner of progression might not find favour with the big bosses, but the conclusion would. I knew that we could pull this off, and somebody had to shut down this Enrico guy, and his controller. I wasn’t going to let that pass by.
The murdered men had rights, and seeing as they weren’t here to help enforce them, we had to do it for them. For me, I always had to make it a simple thing when I thought about motivations. The entire issue of motivation had to be a non-starter, and then the job could be focused on properly.
I was sending Casey and Littlefox to Rio, as newlyweds on their honeymoon. They’d take a normal high profile in keeping with their cover, settling into the best hotel in town,
and venturing out to see the sights occasionally, otherwise sticking close to their hotel, connubial bliss, and contact with the rest of the mission.
Evie and Wilson would go to the Bahamas with Ronnie in charge, and Collette in tow. She would be the bait, and after finding out what was happening, and realizing that she’d been lied to from the start, her eagerness to cooperate was good enough. Not flamingly passionate, but indignant enough to help us out if necessary.
I figured that as soon as Enrico found out what was going down with Heidi Meir there would be a confrontation of some sort. Maybe he’d even show up in person.
If he did, I wanted Evie there to push Ronnie out of the way and for the trigger work. She was the best they had, and I had to be in another place.
Once Heidi Meir was under our control, we were halfway there. I doubted that she could give us the full rundown on the top man, or that she would want to, but she’d know enough, and tell enough, to help us narrow it down to at least a multiple-choice question.
When we combined that with what I’d learn inside the Kingdom, we had a fair chance of going in prepared to expose the right man. Or woman, as the case may be, but I doubted it. South America was still a bit behind in passing out leading government positions when it came to women, and the Minister of the Interior was a man. I believed that we would find that the Minister himself was the one behind the scenes. He had too much power to be out of the loop. Ipso Facto, so it had to be him.
Now it was even more imperative that our comms link would be stable and untraceable between teams. I’d let Ronnie instruct her people on that one, but it was a big one. All three teams would need to be in touch with me, and each other, for the duration of the separation. Satellites. God bless ‘em. The opposition was tough, and they weren’t going to be playing by any better rules than they’d used so far, which was none.
They were all killers, and care had to be taken not to wind up on their victim list. They’d done it in Toronto. Twice. Once to John Dawson, and once to the husband of one of the daughters of the ‘Old Man’, my dear friend Adi’s own father. Both times right under George’s nose, as far as George was concerned anyway.
Sure, the husband was an idiot. That’s why the daughter was back in the Kingdom. Safe with her family, accent on safe. But you can’t just murder one of the Old Man’s family. Not unless he thought it was a good idea. Nothing that affected his family was done without the prior consent and approval of he, and he alone.
There wasn’t much room for discussion on this one. His resources were vast, as was his reach. I would use that to my own advantage shortly, and to the advantage of my dear friend’s family at the same time, by coincidence. A happy one by my reckoning, and I was betting that the Old Man would see it that way as well, and receive me with the warmth and affection I anticipated.
It was only through this manner of infiltration, that Adi was able to integrate me into the family in a sort of sideways approach, back when we were still in college together.
We’d had brilliant times together on summer hiking vacations in the mountains out by, and all around, Taif, where his family ‘summered’. As did King Fahd, blessings of Allah be upon him. Old habits die hard. I couldn’t even think about the Kingdom without falling into the patterns of social etiquette required for basic survival. Good enough.
The weather was perfect every day in Taif in the summertime. It’s probably one of the most perfect climates achieved at any point on the globe, as far as human comfort went.
It was warm, but it wasn’t hot. It was fresh mountain air every moment of the day and night. It was every day, clear sky so pale and blue and limitless that you could be hypnotized just by glancing up, stars coming alive at nightfall and filling the heavens until it couldn’t hold any more.
It was more sharp precipices dropping away thousands of feet to the canyon floors below per square mile than anywhere I could think of, including the Rocky Mountains. It was tiny, old, patched and re-patched, two-lane twisting winding, so you couldn’t see what was one hundred feet ahead of you on the road half the time, roads, that led across bridges small and large, that were indeed marvels of human engineering, spanning gorges that were, for all intents and purposes, bottomless. Once you had driven those roads, every other state of driving became casual in comparison.
The eco-system was another thing about Taif. It was so exotic that even a common pine tree was a beautiful example of flora, and the scrub brush looked lovely enough to put into a landscaping plan if you were doing up a new house area.
The fauna was one of the most amazing things, though. It included some of the absolute foremost in the species of great hunting birds of prey, the great Falcons and Hawks of the Sarawat Mountains. There was a lot to like.
Adi had brought me to the family home well prepared on those summer trips, and so I had managed to prove myself over the years, until I was accepted as a family friend. Once that had been acknowledged by the Old Man, it was a done deal.
Even though I had neither seen nor spoken to Adi in quite a few years, I knew it would be easy to find him and set up the meeting with his father.
After a few details were ironed out, Ronnie gave her stamp of approval to the next stage. We were now going to be fielding the three teams, keeping in constant touch with each other, and narrowing in on the prey. We were the hunters. The trick was not to allow ourselves to become the hunted.
The meeting broke up and I went off to find Therese and let her know what was happening. I thought she might appreciate a chance to get away to somewhere safe and sound. And away from me. Sometimes, when you finally get what you want, you can easily discover that you don’t really want it anymore. I had no illusions about my potential for falling into that category of ‘no longer wanted’. It was fairly high. The only way to find out would be to separate, get some time to think about it all. I hoped that she would see it that way.
I found her in the kitchen, making a snack of toast and tea, so I joined her. We were sitting on authentic chrome and naugahyde low-backed stools in the breakfast area, up against a counter between the kitchen and the dining room. It was just like when I was a kid. The counter top was Arborite, and it reminded me of the kitchen table and chairs I’d eaten at as a child. A pretty good ‘fifties’ design, I had to admit.
Therese was pleased to see me, and had changed into jeans and a tee-shirt after our shower. The tee-shirt was a bright red-orange-white tie dye affair, short, showing a strip of her belly. She had more abdominal muscle tone than anyone I’d ever met, so it looked pretty flattering on her. She had slipped on a pair of moccasins with beautiful beadwork on them. Blue, both light and dark, with white. A good colour combination for the pattern.
She looked about eighteen, and I felt suddenly old. Much older than I was. It was hard to shake off.
Therese kept glancing up at me from her tea, and smiling. She didn’t say much, which might bode well, or not. We wouldn’t be able to tell for a while, I think. I was resting my arms on the counter and she put down her tea and covered my right hand with hers. She still had that smile on her face.
“Est-ce que c'est l'amour pour toi?”
“No, it isn’t. What happened has sent me into a tailspin. It was wonderful and so full of emotion that it almost overcame me. I don’t even remember what that was like anymore. I didn’t, I mean. Not until today.”
“Je t’aime d’amour. C’est tout.”
“Yes, for you it is, apparently. You made that clear the night we camped out. For me it’s far more complex. I want you to feel the way you do, but I want it to last as well. If it was meant to be, it will last. But we can’t figure that out under the current conditions. You understand what I mean?”
“Je pense que oui. C’est un temps de solitude. Donc nous avons une chance pour comprendre nos sentiments, n’est-ce pas?”
“That’s it exactly. I think that if you had some time to yourself, away from me, you’d be able to tell if it really was me that you wanted. If it turns out
that it wasn’t real, then I’ll always remember you with love in my heart, but I won’t try to bother you. When and if you want to talk to me or see me, all you have to do is call. I’ll come. And if you decide it is what you want, I’ll stay. But you have to go with George to Toronto. He’ll set you up in a safe place, with good people to look after you. When I finish with this mess, I’ll come back. Then I’ll call you, and ask you the question, do I go, or do I stay?”
“I do not wish to travel with George anywhere. I know that you want to send me away now, and I understand why you think it is the best thing to do. You are doing a job that should take an army of secret agents, yes? It must be necessary to concentrate with much precision on this thing. You don’t think that you can do that while you are so busy making sure that I am safe, yes?”
“Yes. The ride is going to get pretty bumpy from here on in. There’s a chance that some of us… won’t be coming back.”
I kept my eyes down, focusing on her hand where it lay on top of mine. The contrast between the two was comical. I have large hands even for a man my size, with long fingers, and a wide grip. Her hand was petite, the skin soft and white. She kept her nails trimmed like a man’s. Short, and rounded at the edges.
I guess it made things easier when you were being hurled about in the air on stage by other ballet dancers. I didn’t know what the hell I was thinking. My mind was wandering, trying not to focus on the fact that she was going away now. She squeezed my hand suddenly and made me look up.
“I will go with George. I will do whatever is asked of me. I want you to come back, monsieur. I do not wish to be the cause of your failure, or my worst nightmare of all…”
“Don’t say it. I know. It hasn’t been long since you went through that with your fiancé, I won’t even contemplate your having to go through it again. I’ll come back, I always do.
When I do, we’ll go out for a few weeks to the north country. We’ll see what’s what, and how we both feel then. It’ll be good. And soon.”
“Même quand je ne suis pas ici, je suis toujours avec toi, dans ton Cœur. N’oublies jamais ! Prends soin de toi, mon chéri.“
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 86