[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel

by Richard Marcinko

  Before seeing the stewardess—Gina—Junior had planned to simply step out and settle for some sort of refund. Now he wasn’t so sure. The seat was occupied by a man in his mid-fifties, who had a wedding ring and a serious paunch.

  Clearly, Junior deserved the seat more.

  “I really do have to get to Milan,” he said.

  “We can offer one of you a voucher for another free trip,” suggested the gate attendant, who was now under pressure to remove one of the passengers or the plane would miss its departure slot.

  “That’s hardly compensation,” said the other man indignantly. “And I’m not giving up my seat for anyone.”

  “Maybe I could stand.”

  Junior glanced at Gina. She gave him a disapproving look.

  “Just kidding,” he said quickly.

  “How about first class on the next flight out, a voucher for two more flights, and a thousand-euro voucher,” said the gate attendant.

  “I’ll take it,” said Junior, looking at Gina. “As long as I get your cell number.”

  Whatever else you can say about him, he’s a chip off the old Rogue.

  (III)

  Veep returned to his office and went about his daily routine. Magoo flew to Italy. Junior—with the phone number and the promise of dinner at a time and place to be decided—went back and reported to Danny.

  Shunt and his team went back to trying to piece together different information, starting with the alias that our CIA friend had used to get a ticket. That led them to the credit card he had used to buy the tickets—a card issued by Veep’s bank to a Terrence Jonlable of Jersey City.

  Was the agency using the bank to construct phony identities for its officers and agents?37

  The agency did use a lot of banks, and had various means of camouflaging its officers’ identities and hiding its intentions. Fake credit cards are one—but generally the addresses aren’t fake as well, since the bills have to go somewhere and eventually be paid. The address in Terrence Jonlable’s records was well out in the Hudson River. Yet the account was current.

  If the airline computer was to be believed, Magoo had landed in New York barely an hour before the meeting. So he’d come here pretty much only for that meeting. It wasn’t out of line for a CIA officer, even one of Magoo’s stature, to fly undercover on a commercial airline. Or to have a meeting with an official of a bank narco-terrorists had used. But why all the secrecy?

  Maybe Veep thought the terrorists were following him. Somebody was following him, after all: us.

  Still.

  “Stay on Veep,” I told Danny when he reported what had happened. “Get more people if you need them.”

  “Will do.”

  * * *

  I was in Washington, D.C., when I took Danny’s call, engaged in one of my favorite pastimes—nodding thankfully at people as they sent over drinks from the bar. I was attending a conference on international security, and was taking a little walk to get ready for my keynote address on Afghanistan. Inside, coffee was just being delivered to the tables after dessert. The warm-up speaker was doing his best to encourage everyone to take the high-test; those sipping decaf were dropping like flies as he droned on. A mid-level muckety-muck at Foggy Bottom, he was speaking about how far the Afghan army had come, painting President Hamid Karzai as George Washington in a kaftan.

  Walking back into the room, I could tell this was going to be another one of those occasions where I’d be as popular as a skunk at a church picnic. I was tempted to start my speech with the words “Horse swaggle.” But being a very moderate and temperate man, I began with the much calmer and more deliberate “Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit.”

  That pretty much summed up what I thought and probably would have been sufficient for most of the people in the room, but I had been paid for fifty full minutes. I therefore felt obliged to continue, fleshing out my observations with facts that ought to have been self-evident to anyone with a sixth-grade reading level, which admittedly doesn’t include 80 percent of civil servants.

  “Karzai needs us but hates us,” I said. “He needs us to fund his government, and to use as a whipping boy when things go wrong, which they do practically every day over there. Bucks and blame—that’s our role.”

  I saw a few of the older men reach to protect their wallets.

  “The administration has a plan to completely withdraw and let the Afghans protect the country,” I continued. “That will work about as well as letting a three-year-old drive the family SUV on the Autobahn.”

  I suggested that we would have to keep special operations troops in the country for quite a while. Though we might say they were operating with the locals, the truth is they wouldn’t. They didn’t want the locals to interfere, and didn’t trust them to keep their mouths shut. For their part, the local troops would be happy to stay out of the way—they didn’t want to die. Roughly the same thing had happened in Iraq.

  All in all, it was one of the more obvious speeches I’ve given on Afghanistan in the past decade. Outside the Beltway, people would have been throwing shoes at me, ordering me to tell them something new.

  But here in Washington, D.C., the land where common sense goes to die, you would have thought that I told a kindergarten class that there is no Santa Claus. I did receive a healthy round of applause—from the waitstaff. On the bright side, there were no questions in the session that followed. And while no one sent over any more free drinks, no one waylaid me at the door with their latest get-rich-quick scheme either.

  Get-them-rich, of course.

  I was halfway to my car when my cell phone rang. It was Shunt, who made an offer I couldn’t refuse:

  “Wanna buy some Viagra cheap?”

  We exchanged a few jokes about who was the one really lacking in that department—for a nerd, he can give as good as he gets. Then he got serious.

  “You know that factory you and Junior visited in Bangladesh?” asked Shunt.

  “Sure. The agency closed it down two weeks ago.”

  “Not really. The Indians stopped a boat off their western coastline yesterday with freshly made prescription pills from the same place.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Oh, well, you see, the Interpol computer network uses this security protocol that was written in the 1980s and—”

  “Tell me about the drugs, Shunt. Skip how you got into the computer systems.”

  “But that’s the fun part.”

  The drugs had been field tested for their ingredients. According to Shunt, the Interpol lab that analyzed them found the same impurities in them that were in the capsules confiscated in our haul. The impurities were like fingerprints. They were unique to the factory where they were made.

  “Is it possible that these were already in transit?” I asked.

  “Maybe, but I had accounted for all of the earlier shipments. The ship had sailed from Lahore. The drugs were in a container, which I tracked to a place about thirty miles north. My guess is that they moved the factory.”

  “You sure you have the right truck?”

  “The people that own the tractor unit that drove the container to the shipyard are the same people who own the ones that drove yours,” said Shunt. “And, uh, I backtracked some of their payments, all electronic transfers. That wasn’t easy. You know the W32.Mubla worm? You might have known it as Fus.worm. Well, I took that idea—”

  “Give me the results.”

  “The account that paid the transport company is held at Veep’s bank.”

  “Tell me something I couldn’t guess.”

  “I took the lab report and used those impurities to do a simple search against police records,” said Shunt. “And I think some of the drugs are being sold in the U.S.”

  * * *

  Ten hours later, I turned my rented BMW past a graffiti-strewn two-story building at the edge of Liberty City, Miami, heading toward the back lot of a large apartment building a block away.

  Liberty City is named
after what’s touted as the first federal housing project in the South, Liberty Square. Erected in 1933 in hopes of relieving overcrowded and hell-like conditions in nearby Overtown, the area did well after the Depression and World War II, when it hosted a growing black middle class. But that changed in the 1960s, and while there have been various efforts to clean up the place and even some progress, it’s still not the first place you would want to look for housing. My white face was surely the only one around for blocks, especially at that hour of night.

  I was on my way to a meeting with a person ID’ed only as “Granny” by the head of the local DEA38 office. He’d provided a personal briefing thanks to a call from a top field agent I’ll only call Narco. If you read Blood Lies, you met him in Mexico. Narco and I did some subsequent business, and he owes me even more favors since the adventures described in that book. Coincidentally, he recently received a promotion and is now working in Florida, though how that figures as a step up I’ve yet to figure out.

  Given that the Allah’s Rule network had been shut down—something confirmed not only by the admiral but by Fat Tony’s death and the arrest of a number of people in Bangladesh and Yemen—you would think that the people on the far end of the pipeline would be looking for either a new supplier or trying to cut back. But Granny was supposedly looking to expand; my source at the DEA had said she was putting out feelers for more business as recently as a day ago.

  Posing as a drug dealer from up north, I’d used a connection Danny had in the Miami police department to reach out to an informer named Lion and set up a meeting with Granny. I was surprised when Lion said we could meet that very night, and now as I was driving down the block, alone, I had a strong suspicion I’d been set up.

  I had backups less than sixty seconds away, but I was alone in the car and only lightly armed, considering the area and time of night. All I had was my PK on my hip, an MP5 between the seats, and a couple of shotguns in the trunk.

  Plus a pair of grenades under the seat. But they were for emergency use only.

  The directions took me to a long driveway covered in shadows. One of my guys—JJ—had just run up the block on his motorcycle, checking it out, and Mongoose was sitting in a car in the next parking lot over, slouched in the seat.

  “Gotta guy stepping out of the building,” said JJ, turning around on his bike. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour. First Peter, verse eight.”

  Short and stocky, JJ is a former marine recon member who grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, but went to school in Miami. He’s as black as night, and as you undoubtedly just realized, a bit of a fanatic when it comes to quoting from the Bible.

  I spotted the man he’d mentioned and slowed, lowering my window. The man approached the car.

  “Lion?” I asked.

  He pulled open the door and got in. “Go.”

  “Where?”

  “Just drive. I’ll tell you where we gotta go. People follow me all the time.”

  From what Danny’s friend had told me, I expected that Lion would be a low-level drug dealer and user, a guy in a hoodie with his pants falling to his ankles. The Hispanic sitting next to me was wearing an expensive silk suit and smelled vaguely of cologne. He was in his forties, tall, thin, and nervous; if he had a weapon on him it was small and well hidden.

  “You’re a friend of Coke’s, right?” he asked. Coke was the street name of Danny’s friend.

  “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here,” I said.

  “Just checkin’. Take a right.”

  He had me make a series of turns through shadowy neighborhoods. Here and there, a man or woman would be standing near a corner, but for the most part the streets were deserted. JJ and the others followed a few blocks behind, tracking with the help of a bug and a GPS locator. We’d also rigged a video bug in the radio. The view was fish-eyed and hard to see on the iPads, but they could hear everything we said loud and clear.

  “You’re a white guy, which is good,” Lion told me. “Granny likes white guys.”

  “I’m not here for sex.”

  “You wouldn’t want sex with Granny. Take a left.”

  We drove a few more blocks. I’m not sure if we could have shaken a tail, but the turns got me confused.

  “Listen, I need you to put a good word in for me with Coke, all right?” said Lion. “Because my trial is comin’ up, and I can’t afford to be—I can’t go to jail, right. And I can’t lose my law license.”

  “You’re a lawyer?”

  Evidently the question insulted him, and he shut up almost completely after that, except to give directions. He had me get onto I-95, heading north. At that point, he started getting restless again.

  “Can’t this crate go any faster?” he asked. “BMWs are supposed to be quick. What’d you do, use regular gas or something?”

  “We don’t want to get stopped.”

  “Around here, you go the speed limit, you get stopped. Speed up.”

  I held steady at sixty, more intent on making sure my people were close by than calming his nerves. Off the highway again, we headed toward the ocean, then entered a development nestled inside a golf course.

  Or maybe it was the other way around—the golf course hugged a cluster of McMansions, all lit with floodlights to show off their stucco facades and exotic landscape plantings.

  “Stop here,” he told me. “Right here, in the street. Don’t park. Just stop the car and get out. Keep the engine running.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m coming. Don’t do anything weird. Better leave your little machine gun.”

  I did. As I got out, two men dressed in black tracksuits came out from around the back of the house on my left. They were carrying what proved to be Uzis.

  “Up against the car,” barked one.

  We went through the frisking routine. The man who checked me was fairly professional, finding the PK without giving me a wedgie. He tossed the gun in the car. Lion wasn’t carrying.

  “That an MP5 you got in the car?” asked the other man after checking the interior.

  “That’s right,” I told him.

  “Nice.”

  “You’re not slumming yourself.”

  “That way.” He pointed me toward the house diagonally across from the yard they’d come out of. The middle of the three garage doors opened as we approached. Two other men in tracksuits stepped out, Uzis framed in the dull light of a single interior bulb. They gave Lion and me grim looks, then waved us inside.

  We walked between two pimped and freshly waxed Cadillac Escalades; the fumes of carnauba were so thick a spark would set the whole place ablaze. A raised wooden platform framed the door at the back of the garage; a man in a sport coat stood in front of the two-step staircase leading to it.

  “You the buyer?” he said to me, pointing.

  “I hope to be.”

  “Hands.” He gave me a perfunctory frisk. “Go.”

  He stepped aside and let me pass, but blocked Lion.

  The door opened. A man with an electric scanning device stood on the inside threshold.

  “Phone?” he asked.

  “In my pocket.”

  “Give it here.”

  He stepped over to the side of the hall and put the phone down into a large metal box. Then he waved the detector around my body.

  “You’re clean,” he said.

  “What about my phone?”

  “You get that back when you leave. It won’t work in here anyway.”

  He put a lid on the box. It was large and bulky; I suspect that it used isolated copper foil to create an electronic barrier to listening devices. A bank of electronic equipment was discreetly tucked under the table; I suspect that one of the devices was a cell phone jammer.

  “Go to the end of the hall.”

  Another man in a suit was waiting for me there. I’ll say this for the illegal drug trade: it sure does employ a lot of people.

&nb
sp; “Inside,” said the man, pointing to the room to his right. He had his hands together in front of him; his manner suggested that he worked in a funeral home during the day.

  The room was a fair-sized living room, well appointed with Colonial-style furniture, fancy plants, and a large, slow-moving overhead fan. Light came from a fancy glass-base lamp on a black-lacquer Chinese cabinet near the side of the room.

  Granny was sitting in an armless chair at the far end of the room.

  “So you want pills?” she asked.

  Contrary to what I’d expected, Granny was a granny. I won’t call her elderly, but I’d be willing to bet she remembered when horses rode down Main Street.

  “I represent some people in New Jersey,” I started.

  Granny put up her hand. “Stop. I don’t want to know anything except how you’re going to pay.”

  “Cash.”

  “Too much trouble,” she said. “We work with bank transfers. If I decide to do business, we’ll explain.”

  “Banks can be traced.”

  “We have ways of fixing that.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll handle it. Tell me what you want to buy.”

  I gave her a shopping list, with Percodan at the top. I “accidentally” mentioned Viagra twice, though in retrospect that probably wasn’t necessary. Granny listened placidly; we could have been talking about yarns and knitting needles.

  “We’re interested in a long-term relationship,” I told her. “I can handle whatever you can get.”

  “I’ve made some inquiries,” she said. “You’re in Hoboken?”

  “And Jersey City.”

  “You have competition there.”

  “That’s not really a problem.”

  She had done some homework, which was good—Danny had woven a tight background story, using the actual names of a Mafia-affiliated group in the two New Jersey cities along the Hudson. He’d also managed to give me a rap sheet, so I wasn’t surprised when Granny asked if I enjoyed stealing cars.

  “Way in the past,” I told her. “Misspent youth.”

  “You look familiar,” she said. “Have I seen you somewhere? Maybe on TV?”

  “I haven’t made America’s Most Wanted yet,” I said lightly. “And I don’t intend on it.”