Border Sweep

by Don Pendleton

  There was always bargaining, but that was no problem. For most Mexicans, regardless of station, bargaining was a way of life. It was in the air, or the soil, and came in mother's milk. Those who were desperate enough bargained because they couldn't afford not to. Those for whom money was no problem bargained just as hard, because the game was more important than winning or losing. As a result, there was no such thing as a fixed price.

  But for the coyotes, the important thing was setting a price high enough. Nobody was willing to pay the full amount at the outset. Most of the chickens preferred to make three equal payments — one on reaching agreement, one on crossing the border and one on reaching their destination. The coyote shared the risk, but only when the third up front was satisfactory. He had to assume that his client might be lying to him. If a chicken beat you out of your money, you had three options: you could ignore it, but that was usually too risky. If word got out that you were too easy, you would be a sitting duck. You could take him back across the border and leave him where you found him. That, too, was risky, and it was twice as much work. Since most coyotes were about as interested in work as they were in reading Marcel Proust, that left option number three. Wasting the bastard. It was the easiest thing to do, and the one with least negative impact on future business. And if you got beat too often, all you had to do was raise your prices to make up the shortfall.

  But now Antonio felt an added burden. He was negotiating for two. No one, especially Don Carlos Calderone, had said as much, but Antonio was operating on the assumption that if he got beat by a client, he would eat the loss himself. Don Carlos was a man of refined diet. Swallowing such a meal wouldn't appeal to him in the least.

  Antonio dropped into a crouch alongside the head of a sleeping man. Reaching out with one manicured hand, he shook the man by his shoulder, gently at first and then, when the man started waking, more vigorously. "Hey, Chico, wake up, man."

  The sleeper finally came to his senses and sat up, rubbing his eyes. "What's going on?" he asked. "Why do you wake me?"

  Antonio held a finger to his lips. "Shh… Come on, Chico, don't wake everybody up, okay? We got to talk."

  "About what?"

  Antonio laughed with a conspiratorial wink. "You know, Chico. Where you headed?"

  The man now stiffened a little, his sixth sense warning him to be careful. "Tijuana, to see my sister."

  "Oh, sure. I get it. Ah, how you going, man? By bus, right?"

  "Sure, by bus."

  "You in a hurry?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  Antonio didn't answer right away. He knew the man was interested. And the man knew he knew. The deal was all but signed and sealed. The only thing at issue was price. "I think I can get you to Tijuana pretty quick." Antonio laughed, and nudged his client in the ribs with an elbow. Then he turned to the silent Angel. "Ain't that right, man? Can't we help Chico here to get to Tijuana!" The emphasis on the destination was now accompanied by an exaggerated wink.

  "How much you want to pay, Chico?"

  "That depends. How much is it?"

  "Oh, I don't know. I think maybe that depends on how much you want to pay, eh?"

  An extended period of haggling finally ended in agreement on the sum of 450 dollars.

  "Okay, Chico, you get some sleep. We'll see you in the morning, okay?" The man nodded and he curled up again on his makeshift pillow.

  Antonio moved around the square of benches, stopping on the far side in front of a tall, thin man who slept in articulated sections, folded like a carpenter's rule. He dropped to one knee and shook the sleeping man as he glanced at his watch.

  "Hey, Chico, wake up, man," he whispered.

  21

  Mack Bolan watched the small red light on the dashboard wink on and off at regular intervals. Its rhythm was steady, even insistent, and the pulse began to stimulate a sonic echo in his head. An imaginary beep…beep… beep… beep kept chirping away. Bolan relaxed and let the rhythm take over.

  They'd been on the road since just after sunrise. They had waited patiently all night long, taking turns napping in the close confines of the four-wheel-drive. Eventually the heightened expectations took their toll, and when the small green grid light first began to move, neither man noticed it.

  The blip was almost off the tiny screen when Bolan happened to glance at the receiver, which lay on its side on the dash, tucked in up against the windshield glass. The sudden rumble of the engine coming to life woke Randy Carlton. For the first hour they were able to hang close enough on Allenson's tail to catch a glimpse of him now and then as he topped a rise and they topped another behind him.

  The pursuit was steady and the pace rather relaxed. Long-range scrutiny through binoculars revealed the presence of three men. That one of them was Buck Allenson was an article of faith. Who the other two happened to be was a good question.

  But now, as the green blip swerved off the screen and the Subaru struck out across the floor of the desert, it was no longer desirable to stick to Allenson's tail; they didn't want to get too close. The small blobs of light, red and green like a miniature Christmas motif, suddenly assumed a significance out of all proportion to their size. Neither man seemed willing to breathe normally, as if some careless gust of wind might extinguish one or both flames, leaving them in total darkness, despite the forbidding glare of a relentless sun in the cloudless sky overhead.

  "I've been meaning to ask you something," Bolan said, taking one hand off the steering wheel to stretch an arm behind him.

  "What's that?"

  "The thing that puzzles me is that railroad car. How did it get to where it was? Ray Conlan told me it was supposed to be hundreds of miles away."

  "Mistakes happen. Hell, if the railroads were perfect, there'd be more of 'em. I think it's that simple."

  "Maybe, but I wonder…"

  "Don't wonder too hard, Mike. We'll likely never know what happened."

  "Look, I can accept a railroad car getting misplaced. I mean, it's a big system and there are hundreds of thousands of cars. I can also accept some poor souls getting locked in, either on purpose or by accident."

  "Seems to me you don't really have a problem. You can accept those two things, and those two things are exactly what happened."

  "Listen to yourself, Randy. Think about it for a minute. What do you think the odds are against either of those two things?"

  "Pretty high, I guess."

  "Damn right. And the odds on both of them happening to the same car?"

  "Yeah, I suppose… math isn't my long suit. And probability theory isn't even in my vocabulary. I just take what's at face value, I guess. It works. So far, anyhow."

  "But that isn't the half of it. Look, you admit it in small cases. Buck shows up at Sipe's when I'm supposed to meet you there. No way it's a coincidence, you say. And I agree."

  "So? I still don't see what you're driving at."

  "What I'm driving at is this…" Bolan pounded the wheel with the heel of one hand. "You know, if you ran the odds on each of these things through a computer, you'd be getting some pretty long numbers. You start asking the machine to figure all of them being unrelated, I think you'd probably need a new computer. The point is, there are too damn many fantastic coincidences. They're in little clusters, not superficially related in a single fabric. I'll grant you that. But that just makes it more unlikely that they're not connected. They have to be because it would be an even greater coincidence if they weren't related. Do you see what I mean?"

  "No, but don't let that stop you." Randy laughed and reached into the back for a thermos. "You want some coffee while I have this thing open?"

  "Not now, thanks."

  "I wish we knew where that son of a bitch is going," Carlton said. "I've just about had it with riding around in the desert. I keep remembering the last time I was out here. With Will…"

  Bolan glanced at him, but said nothing.

  "You ever in a shoot-out like that?"

  "Yup."

  "Yeah,
maybe so, but I mean, did you lose your best friend."

  This time Bolan remained silent, but nodded.

  "The war? Vietnam?"

  "I don't want to talk about it, Randy. Okay?"

  "Sorry."

  Carlton turned his face to the side window. Watching the desert go by, he felt desolated, as if he carried too much of the desert inside himself. For a moment the world outside the Jeep seemed to be a metaphor for his entire life. It was as if someone had managed to project it on a gigantic screen, and it overwhelmed him.

  He had always loved the desert. Whenever he thought about it, he would smile. It was a place he went to think, to explore his life for hours, sitting in his beat-up convertible, leaning back with the top down under the stars. He didn't even know how many long nights he'd spent revelling in the brutal aridity. It was pure, and that, he knew, was what had attracted him so strongly. But that was all ruined now. He could no longer look at the desert without thinking of Will Ralston.

  He turned away from the searing glare and stared at the blinking red light on the receiver. He watched it closely, as if mesmerized by its predictable rhythm. The green locator was pale in the bright sunlight, and he paid little attention to it. Lulled, almost asleep, it took him several moments to realize the green light had drawn closer to the bottom edge of the grid. They were drawing closer to Allenson's 4x4.

  "He must have stopped," Carlton said. "We're coming up on him pretty quick."

  "I know. I've been watching it."

  "Don't you think we ought to stop, too?"

  "Not yet. If he stopped, it was for a reason. We won't know what it is by sitting here."

  "What do you think's going on?"

  "Unless your friend Buck came all the way out here for a picnic, I'd have to guess that he's meeting somebody." Bolan swung the wheel to the left, and the vehicle started to drift off line.

  "Where the hell are we going?"

  "I want to get as close as I can, but if he turns around and comes back this way, he'll spot us. If we come in from the side, we might be able to see what he's up to."

  Bolan eased the Renegade forward, watching the green blip on the locator grid. They were less than two miles behind Allenson. At one mile the Executioner stopped the vehicle and killed the engine. He grabbed a pair of binoculars and yanked the door open. He dropped to the ground and said, "Randy, you keep an eye on them. I'll use the other beacon to get as close as I can. If he starts moving back this way, head due west from here, and I'll get to you as soon as I can. If he keeps on toward Mexico, pick me up."

  "You sure you don't want me to go, Mike?"

  "Not in this heat, Randy. You need to get your strength back."

  Bolan waved and started off at an easy lope. Carlton climbed down out of the Renegade and watched him, amazed at the big man's seemingly inexhaustible energy. He moved as comfortably under the desert sun as if he had been born and raised there.

  When Bolan had dwindled to little more than a stick figure, Carlton took his own glasses and swept them across the landscape. Looking straight along the line intersecting Allenson's location, he saw something that chilled him to the bone.

  Low on the horizon, like a glittering insect, a helicopter was headed straight toward him. It was several miles away, coming in from the south, but there was no mistaking what it was. For an instant he wanted to climb into the Jeep and race after Mike Belasko, but any movement on his part might call attention to him. If he stayed where he was, they might overlook him. And there was always the chance, he told himself, admittedly slim, that there was no connection between Allenson and the chopper.

  Even as the patrolman considered it, he dismissed it. Belasko had been dead on when he talked about the frequency of apparent coincidences. There were no such things. And there was no more innocence.

  The whole fetid mess smelled to high heaven. And coming out of the Mexican sky, at this precise moment, there was no way in hell that chopper was there by chance alone.

  22

  "Hey, Chico. Rosalita's Cantina, one hour, eh?" Antonio covered his mouth with his hand. Anyone more than three feet away would have thought he was just politely stifling a cough. The man he'd addressed looked at him with big eyes as if uncertain about what had been said.

  "Hurry, Chico. Rosalita's, one hour. Let's go." Antonio swaggered away, his eyes darting nervously around the interior of the bus station. If possible, it was even darker during daylight than it had been the night before. The dim bulbs overhead were swallowed by the glare pouring in through the tall, narrow windows and the glass front doors.

  Dropping casually onto one of the hard wooden benches, Antonio watched Angel in the doorway. He was acting more comfortable than he really felt. This was his first major run for Don Carlos, and he wanted to do well. Of the nine men he had lined up the previous night, he had so far found five. He started to stand again when the telltale flurry of activity that always signaled the arrival of the federales sent people on the sidewalk outside scurrying in every direction.

  The usual procedure was to sit tight and see which of the policemen he knew. If both members of the two-man team were strangers, he'd simply walk away. A run with five chickens was better than no run at all. If he knew one or both, he would simply spread a little of the wealth around, round up the remaining four and be off for a quickie at the local whorehouse before meeting his clients at Rosalita's.

  But that was the old days. He wasn't working for himself now. He was taking orders, and although he wasn't sure he liked the idea, he knew better than to cross Carlos Calderone. No fewer than three of his friendly competitors had disappeared in the past few months. No one knew for certain what had happened, but there were rumors. And in a country fueled by idle gossip, rumors were more than sufficient.

  As the people outside milled around, Angel drifted toward him, pretending to be absorbed in a newspaper. When he reached the bench, Angel turned to look at the vacant seat behind his knees, backed up a step, then fell onto the bench.

  Spreading the paper out and raising it to cover his face, he whispered. "Federates."

  "Who?"

  "Nobody I know."

  "Shit!"

  "What are we going to do?"

  "Wait."

  "How long? We only have an hour. We wait too long, we miss the pickup. We miss the pickup, we get our balls in a pickle jar. I'm not ready for that."

  "You make it sound like Don Carlos is some kind of savage. He's nothing of the kind."

  "You think so?"

  "Of course not! He's a businessman. Even now there's a meeting at his house — like the board of directors in a big company. This is gonna really be some operation. Besides…" Antonio leaned in to whisper through hands cupped over Angel's ear"…if he hears what you said, he might be angry, and we could lose a soft job, eh?"

  "Uh-huh… I know what you mean. You seen Mendoza lately?"

  "Who?"

  "Mendoza, Felipe Mendoza. The one with all the Donna Summer tapes."

  "Him. No, I haven't seen him. But what does that matter? He's a pig. Do you know what Luisa told me?"

  "Who?"

  "Luisa, from La Dicentra."

  "The whorehouse?"

  "Yeah."

  "No. What did she tell you?"

  "She said Mendoza wears silk underpants. Tiny things, like a woman wears."

  "He has expensive taste, eh?"

  "That's not the point. The point is, Mendoza is… he's a little, you know… funny."

  "So?"

  "So maybe he got himself into trouble. With that fancy underwear of his, no? It could happen."

  "Maybe. So you're saying we shouldn't worry about no one seeing Mendoza. Not even if they found his car in the desert. And even if his shoes and wallet were in the sand alongside the car. Is that what you're saying?"

  "His shoes?"

  "Yeah, his shoes."

  "Aha!" Antonio sat back, as if the interjection were the last word, and pretended to be dozing. He watched the federales throu
gh slitted eyes.

  The policemen pushed their way into the waiting room, now very quiet. They turned to the left as soon as the door banged closed behind them. In a slow orbit of the room, they stopped every now and then, sometimes leaning forward to peer into averted eyes. As they drifted out of his view, Antonio whispered instructions to Angel, then got to his feet. He began to move toward the door, walking slowly, as if he weren't sure where he was going.

  As his hand touched the tarnished push plate on the wooden door, he heard a sharp bark. "Just a minute. Stay where you are."

  Antonio turned, wearing what he hoped was an expression of surprised innocence. "You talking to me, Officer?"

  The two policemen took their time joining him at the doorway, their studied swagger overdone a little.

  "You seem to be in a hurry," one of them said.

  "Oh, yeah. Well, I just remembered something I forgot."

  "Oh? And why were you here in the bus station to begin with?"

  "I was waiting for my mother. She's coming to visit me."

  "And you were going to leave her here alone, with no one to greet her?"

  "No, I was coming back."

  "I see. Maybe we should step outside, eh?"

  "Whatever you say, Officer." Antonio turned and pushed the door open just as the blunt end of a riot baton was planted between his shoulder blades. He stumbled through the open door, nearly falling facedown on the littered sidewalk.

  He scrambled to his feet with a clenched fist, coiling his body into a tight crouch. He came up ready to swing when the baton caught him on the left shoulder, knocking him back down. He lay on his back, holding the shoulder and moaning. His left arm was numb. He closed his eyes to block out the bright sun beating down on his face. The federale planted a foot on Antonio's stomach and leaned forward, then poked him under the nose with the end of the baton.