Cutting Edge (2002)

by Clancy, Tom - Power Plays 06

  “I’ve been hearing all kinds of news about Africa,” he said at length. “The hit on that supply convoy, other things besides. What the hell’s going down?”

  Ricci rattled his ice cubes some more.

  “Maybe it ought to be you telling me,” he said. “Since you hear so much.”

  Glenn smiled thinly again. He waited.

  “Truth is, I don’t know,” Ricci said. “I haven’t got all the facts yet. A lot of odd stuff’s happening over there. All kinds of questions floating around. But it’s only been a couple days, and so far nobody’s connected anything to anything else. They’re not even clear about what the attack was supposed to accomplish.”

  Glenn exhaled, cigarette smoke streaming from his nose and mouth.

  “I guess this makes the extravaganza aboard the oil platform a scratch,” he said.

  Ricci shook his head.

  “Gordian needs to get the Sedco deal done,” he said.

  “How can they work out a security plan, decide what protective measures to take, when they don’t have any idea what to expect? Seems crazy to go ahead with it until they do.”

  “It shouldn’t,” Ricci said. “The timing of what happened puts us on the spot. You know the game. The territory we cover, you’ll find plenty of uglies who’d love to see us skip out from a threat. That would be giving them what they want.”

  “Notice we can be intimidated.”

  Ricci nodded.

  “This is bigger than Gabon,” he said. “If I were in Gordian’s position, I’d do the same as him. He’s got to hang tough.”

  “With some extra manpower to protect him, I hope.”

  “A fresh Sword detail’s flying out,” Ricci said. “He’ll be fixed okay.”

  “You mean to join them?”

  Ricci shook his head again.

  “Pete Nimec can handle whatever comes up,” he said. “Better I stay out of his hair, mind the family farm. That way we’ve got all fronts covered.”

  Glenn lipped his cigarette, reached both hands into his pants pockets, and fished out a couple of quarters.

  “Makes enough sense,” he said. “There’s nowhere you can feel safe these days. Sometimes I think we’re all stuck in the land of Nod.”

  Ricci’s face showed incomprehension.

  “You know,” Glenn said. “It’s from the Bible. Book of Genesis: ‘And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.’ ”

  Ricci shrugged a little. “Religion’s never been one of my vices.”

  Glenn gave him a look.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said.

  There was a brief silence between them.

  “My offer,” Ricci said. “You interested?”

  Glenn shook his head no.

  Ricci looked straight into his eyes.

  “Seems like a fast decision,” he said.

  “Fast, yeah,” Glenn said. “That doesn’t have to mean arbitrary.”

  Ricci kept watching him across the table several moments, then nodded slightly.

  “No,” he said. “Guess it doesn’t.”

  Glenn finished off his stout, went to get himself a second. Before returning to their booth he stopped at the juke, dropped in his quarters, and punched in some selections.

  “Can’t find many bargains around these days,” he said, sliding back opposite Ricci. “Fifty cents for three good spins on the box is one of the few left.”

  Ricci’s lack of response opened out another spell of silence between them.

  Glenn drank his beer, swayed a little to the music in the background. A female vocalist sang to the accompaniment of a piano, its fills running smoothly around her nuanced phrasings.

  “The song’s ‘When October Goes,’ ” Glenn said after a while. “Singer’s Mary Wells. Lyrics by Bobby Mercer, music by Barry Manilow. Nice.” He paused and took a deep swallow of beer. “I’ve dug Manilow since I was in high school.”

  Ricci looked at him.

  “You going to explain your turndown?”

  Glenn shook another cigarette from the pack near his elbow, lighted it with a Bic disposable, and sat there smoking. The Marlboro’s tip flared on his deep inhale.

  “I’ll let you in on a little something,” he said. “I grew up right in this neighborhood. A rowhouse on Fourteenth Street, two blocks south. All my older brothers wore Crip blue. It’s kind of a long story, but I wound up wearing a beret at the opposite end of the color spectrum.”

  Ricci nodded.

  “The flash was black with a wide diagonal gray stripe, yellow borders,” he said. “Delta Force, attached to Joint SpecOps. I wouldn’t’ve considered you for my replacement without reading your personnel file.”

  “I don’t suppose.”

  Ricci regarded him through a haze of cigarette smoke.

  “Any special reason you joined the service besides wanting a change of scenery?”

  “Like I said, long story,” Glenn said. “Maybe we’ll get to it sometime. Meanwhile, you can have one crack at guessing where I choose to live nowadays.”

  “Fourteenth Street. Two blocks south.”

  “My, you are an astute son of a bitch,” Glenn said.

  He drank, smoked, and listened to his music.

  “Family ties why you’re back here?” Ricci said.

  “Family’s gone, one way or another.”

  “Then what’s holding you?”

  Glenn’s broad shoulders went up and down.

  “Maybe it’s my volunteer work,” he said. “I do a lot with teenage kids.”

  “Why the ‘maybe’?”

  Glenn finished his second beer, pushed the bottle aside.

  “I think part of it’s that I’m just stubborn,” he said. “Civil boosters and quick-kill real estate brokers hate the sight of rowhouses. They’d be glad to sweep everybody out of them like litter and doze them flat to make room for more hotel towers, art galleries for rich people who can’t draw a straight line to hang their junk, and ritzy apartment lofts where the Swells can live. Try moving into one of those pads—you need to show your broker that you earn fifty, even a hundred times the monthly rent in income.”

  Ricci looked at him.

  “Sounds to me you’re on a crusade,” he said.

  “Could be,” Glenn said. “But, you know, the Mexican gangs that smuggle drugs across the border into this city, players like the Quiros bunch we brought down a couple years ago, have a Spanish expression, plata o plomo. The silver or the lead. You’re either a friend and taking their bribes or an enemy taking their bullets.” He shrugged again. “I read a paper by some professors comparing what they do to unfair pressure tactics in business and politics. Fat cat landlords, brokers, and public improvement committees, they just use legal harassment instead of guns. Sometimes to influence each other. Mostly to put the squeeze on tenants. Same principle, different methods.”

  Ricci sat without offering any comment. The barkeep had dropped onto a chair behind the counter and was watching a ball game on the television above his head, following its action with the volume down—Seattle Mariners, Oakland A’s, forty-three thousand screaming fans. Although it was not yet nine P.M., his smattering of customers had evaporated and left him to tend only the two Sword ops in their rear booth and a skinny old drunk at the bar. The drunk was slouched over a shot glass, mumbling to himself as he threw left jabs and hooks into the empty air. Ricci watched him a moment or two, noticing the punches had snap. Probably the guy had done some real boxing once. Coulda been a contender.

  Ricci shifted his attention back to Glenn.

  “Your answer to my proposition final?” he said.

  Glenn nodded.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it. And if you ever need help with something up north, count on me to be there,” he said. “But this town stays my home base.”

  Ricci grunted. He was still rotating his glass between his fingertips.

  Glenn leaned forward across the table, point
ed to the soda.

  “Now you need to tell me if you ever intend to start on that, so I know whether to order another beer or call it a night,” he said.

  Ricci regarded him quietly, seeming to consider.

  “Can’t say why, but you quoting the Bible off the top of your head, reading papers by university eggheads, somehow it’s no stunner to me,” he said. “Explain how you grew up listening to Barry Manilow without the homies kicking your ass every day, maybe I’ll stick around.”

  Glenn grinned, waved his hand in the air to catch the barkeep’s attention.

  “Settle back and get comfortable,” he said.

  Ricci gave him the slightest of nods, then carefully raised his glass off the tabletop and drank.

  A high-intensity electric lantern in his hand, Siegfried Kuhl strode slowly around the white station wagon and utility van parked near his cabin in the late-night darkness. What he saw satisfied him. The PG&E logo on their flanks, the racked ladder on one side of the van’s roof, their yellow safety beacons, every exterior feature was convincing. Indistinguishable from the real thing under his scrupulous inspection.

  Kuhl opened their doors one at a time and repeatedly leaned inside with the lantern to examine their interiors from front to rear. Again he was quite pleased. He had studied photographs of the power company’s repair fleet and even the upholstery and carpeting matched.

  He turned to Ciras and Anton, who stood a few paces from him awaiting his assessment. They had driven the vehicles from a shop outside Monterey where their subterranean customizers had performed the remodeling work.

  “Good enough,” he said. Then he went to stand behind the vehicles and motioned toward their rear license plates. “You’ve checked these, too?”

  Ciras gave him a quick little nod.

  “I was impressed,” Anton said. “It must’ve been quite some trick getting them down right.”

  Kuhl regarded the spike-haired Croatian with a kind of fascination. Anton’s speech bore no trace of the thick Slavic accent, with its hard glottal stops and drawn-out vowel sounds, that had characterized it when he’d been inserted into the United States on a student visa two years earlier. And his capacity to absorb dialect was only part of what suited him for the role of forward scout and intelligence gatherer—the ideal sleeper agent. It was as though Anton could plug into any cultural reservoir and saturate his persona with its mannerisms. While his bluff at the animal shelter had been intended to massage useful information from Gordian’s daughter, the performance had gained results that went beyond Kuhl’s expectations and had been pivotal to his fixing an operational timetable.

  Returning his attention to the license plate, Kuhl shone his light directly onto its face. The tag’s reflectorized plastic sheeting material glowed bright under its beam so the alphabetical prefix and serial numbers were illuminated. He stepped back from the rear of the van, moved to one side of the bumper, and again turned his lantern onto the plate.

  A vertical row of hidden verification symbols became clearly visible, running down the middle of the tag, dark against its surface. Used by law-enforcement personnel to differentiate authentic license plates from counterfeits, they were composed of tiny glass beads in the sheeting which had been coated with a special polymer that made them nonreflective when viewed at a thirty degree slant. Due to the complex polymerization and embedding processes involved in their production, the coded symbols were the most difficult feature of the plate to replicate. But Harlan DeVane’s resources had proven equal to the task.

  Kuhl nodded his approval and looked over at the two men. “Move the vehicles into the trees where they can’t be seen,” he said. “Then join me and the others inside.”

  He strode back toward the cabin. It was a pleasant night. The air was cool and fresh and the chirping of insects surrounded him. Somewhere in the distance a night bird whooped. He could see Lido watching his approach through a front window, the brute’s head silhouetted against the light of the room beyond. A good night, yes. Something of its atmosphere hinted at the best moments of his long caesura in Europe—those when he had found a kind of peace at the core of his typhonic restlessness. Perhaps, Kuhl thought, this was because it followed a day on which he had accomplished everything necessary in the way of final preparations, and still managed to exercise his curiosity about something of unrelated personal interest.

  Before dawn that morning, Kuhl had gotten into his Explorer and driven west across the Ventana wilderness to the San Antonio de Padua Mission. He carried his fraudulent identification documents in his wallet. Beside him on the passenger seat were his camera and a packet of maps and tourist brochures. The cargo section held a bladdered hydration backpack, a length of rope, hiking boots, his electric lantern, and some basic tools that Kuhl had left in plain sight to ensure they drew no suspicion from military guards—a small wood ax, a collapsible shovel, and a Japanese pull saw.

  Kuhl wore an open-collared chambray shirt with a Saint Christopher’s medallion on a silver necklace, and had wrapped a rosary around the stem of his rearview mirror. On the vehicle’s rear section were a pair of bumper stickers Anton had obtained for him in the city of Carmel. One of them pictured a small map of the original Camino Reál twining in and out of US 101, the sites of the Spanish missions along the road circled and marked by crucifixes. Splayed across the map in large see-through text were the words FRANCISCAN MISSION TOURS, and, below it in a smaller typeface, the name and telephone number of a local travel agency. The other bumper sticker read: I’M ON A MISSION TO SEE THE MISSIONS. An adhesive plaque with the Greek acrostic IXΘYE engraved within the Christian fish symbol was mounted on the SUV’s tailgate.

  Out past the cattle and horse ranches, Kuhl had wound through miles of rolling scrub country on a steady climb into the Santa Lucia Mountains, where he had seen the sunlight wash up over the wooded lower mountain slopes to eventually flush their bare sandstone peaks with orange. By full daybreak he had reached the edge of the valley that overlooked the confluence of the San Miguel and San Antonio Rivers, and made his slow descent into the basin following road signs to the army reservation and mission. At length, he stopped at the guard station mentioned to him by Anagkazo, the dog breeder.

  The MP inside the checkpoint booth had politely asked Kuhl for his driver’s license and vehicle registration. As Kuhl handed them to him through his lowered window, a second guard had walked around the Explorer, casting discreet glances first over its body, and then through its rear windscreen.

  They had seen nothing amiss and waved the visitor on after returning his papers.

  On his way toward the mission quadrangle, Kuhl had passed some branching roads that ran toward a gated cantonment and noticed additional barricaded checkpoints posted with signs reading FPCON LEVEL ALPHA. These indicated an elevated alert for terrorist activity that had been implemented as a rule at all military installations in the United States after the strike on New York City a few years before—a step up from FPCON Normal, but significantly below the Bravo, Charlie, and Delta force protection levels exercised whenever specific threat warnings were issued by federal authorities. Kuhl would not have chanced his trip if any of the higher stages of alert had been in current effect, but his men had determined otherwise, and the mission grounds had been a considerable lure to him—the prospect of an easy penetration spicing the venture with a provocative element of scorn.

  It was also a preparatory drill of sorts. The moment approached when Kuhl would have to plunge deeper into hiding than at any previous time in his mercenary existence. Knowing he faced a manhunt of long duration and unprecedented intensity, he had wanted to test his reflexes for survival and subterfuge—smooth any hitches that may have developed over his latent period—in a climate of heightened but nonurgent scrutiny.

  More than two hundred years after its founding, a small order of Franciscans still occupied the mission. While some of them chose to live in meditative solitude, others worked in its gift shop and offered guided tours of
its grounds on a regular schedule. Kuhl was mostly able to avoid the organized tour groups and prowl the compound alone, stopping to see its olive gardens, its chapel, its cloistered tile-roofed archways, its centuries-old aqueducts and gristmill. Near the end of his wanderings he had found himself in a chamber with simple forms of musical notation painted on the walls. There he studied the instruments on display: a native American hand drum, a violin and cello, a baroque lute and lyre. One wall of the room was covered with a diagram of a huge upraised hand, the front of each finger marked with numbers and Spanish calligraphy. This had caught Kuhl’s attention like a barbed hook, and he had stood taking photographs of the diagram, thinking it would be a fine reference for the construction of a possible scale replica, should he ever choose to resume that pursuit.

  As Kuhl stood with his eye to the lens, one of the tonsured monks had noticed him from the outer hall and paused in the entryway.

  “The chart you see shows the hand signals our fraternal predecessors used to use to teach their Indian converts Western scales,” he said. “As new believers, they were taught not only to petition the Lord with their prayers, but exalt him with music.”

  Kuhl had turned toward the entrance and stared coldly at him over his lowered camera.

  “It is good they were given their diversions,” he said. “All God’s prisoners are in need of them.”

  Kuhl paid no heed to the monk’s reaction. With a slight bow, he had touched a hand to the Saint Christopher’s charm around his neck and brushed past him into the hall.

  Minutes afterward, he had driven west from the compound. It was not yet one P.M., giving him plenty of time to do his work.

  In an oak- and pine-forested stretch of rolling highland some thirty miles back toward Big Sur, Kuhl shifted the Explorer into four-wheel drive, eased it off the roadside into the cover of some scrub growth, and cut the engine. Then he went around to the rear section and got out his hiking boots, backpack, and tools. He changed from his loafers into the boots, loaded the tools into the pack, strapped it over his shoulders, closed the Explorer’s tailgate, and started into the brush.