Spiral

by David L Lindsey

  Renata stopped. "I'm sorry, I just took down everything she said. I know some of this is not the kind of thing to help us now."

  "No," Haydon said quickly. "It's all important, every bit of it. Go on. What else?"

  "Well, I think that is most of it," she said, flipping through her pages. "She wanted to know why all the questions."

  "What did you tell her?"

  "That I would explain when I returned."

  "What about a photograph?"

  "Oh, yes. She has several."

  "What's the most recent?"

  "1980."

  "Did you ask her if it was clear, in good shape?"

  "Yes, I did. They're family pictures that one of his sisters gave friend, who then gave them to Consuela."

  "Fine, excellent," Haydon said. He thought a moment. "Oka; I want to check something before we go any further. Can you fir the Medranos' residence number in the Guadalajara telephone directory?"

  "I've looked for it already, but it must be unlisted."

  "We've got to try to locate Bias before we go ahead with this Haydon explained. "It would be an unforgivable blunder to run his picture only to find out later that he's walking around down the minding his own business, and could have been reached with a simple telephone call."

  "Then the best way to be sure of that is to call one of the Rivas brothers," Renata said. "We would never be able to reach any of the family—there are too many intermediaries whose business is to keep people away. Hernan Rivas would know what to do about your call,'' she said, opening the telephone book. "Here." She circled a number and handed the book to Haydon.

  Haydon took the book and turned around to his desk. The Mexican secretaries were as difficult to get past as Garner's. He spoke two of them, identified himself, waited, spoke to another, assured it was extremely important and confidential. When Rivas finally came on the line, he did not disguise his suspicion. Haydon explained who he was, and said that it was urgent that he speak to Bias Medrone. When Rivas asked why, Haydon explained that the HPD had reason to believe that Bias had been involved in a homicide in Houstor previous night, but if he was there, perhaps he could clarify mistake. Rivas said that that was a preposterous story because personally knew that Bias was in Costa Rica on family business. Haydon asked how he could get in touch with Bias in Costa Rica, but Rivas said he was in the countryside there and could not be reached. Haydon said that he was sorry, then, but he would have to go a with the warrant. Rivas, very excited, said that would be a grave take, and asked for the name of Haydon's superiors. Haydon the names to him and said that he would withhold the warrant six o'clock that evening. If Rivas could provide him with good reasons why he should not issue the warrant, then he could contact Haydon before that time. He gave Rivas both his home number and the number at the homicide division, thanked him for his help, and hung up.

  Haydon turned around and stood. "Mitchell, let me ask you a couple of questions," he said, starting toward the library door. Outside in the hall he walked halfway to the foyer before he stopped and turned to face Garner.

  "I want to charter a business jet and send her down there for the pictures." He looked at his watch. "It's almost one-thirty. She'd be able to leave Hobby airport by two-thirty. I think it's about a two-hour flight. If her friend would meet her at the airport there, she could be in the air again by five, and be back here in time to have the picture on the ten-o'clock evening news, and before tomorrow's papers go to press."

  "Is that the only way you can get them here? Doesn't the DEA have some kind of wire or satellite transmission hookup to the States?"

  "No. Everything like this is handled by diplomatic courier, or simply the mails. Mitchell, I need you to go with her. She can't be allowed to do it by herself. You can get in a cab right now, and I'll have all the arrangements made by the time you get to the airport. Richland Charter Flights. I've used them before on Mexican flights."

  "Okay," Garner said. "I'll have to make a few calls first and cancel some appointments."

  "I'd appreciate it," Haydon said. "You can use the telephone in the living room if you want some privacy. It's also a separate line."

  "Give me five or ten minutes," Garner said, turning toward the double doors of the living room.

  Haydon walked back to the library and explained to Renata what he wanted to do. She readily agreed.

  "I'll call the charter service right now," he said. "I'll make the arrangements and get an arrival time in Guadalajara. Then you'll have to call your friend and tell her when to meet you at the airport. We don't want to waste time having you going into the city.

  "As soon as Haydon had confirmed the charter and the arrival time in Guadalajara and called a cab, Renata placed her call. At one forty-five a cab pulled into the drive, Haydon slipped Garner a couple of hundred dollars in case they incurred any out-of-pocket expenses, and they were gone. Haydon went back into the house and called Dystal.

  Chapter 47

  As he sat at the traffic light, Bias lifted the icepack off his left wrist, which rested in his lap, and checked the swelling. He had tried keep ice on it from the time he got back to his rooms in the early morning hours. While it wasn't as bruised as he had expected, it was too painful and the swelling still too extensive for him to do enough probing to determine if it was broken. But despite the throbbing, wrist was not his main concern.

  He had been extraordinarily lucky. When he had jumped over the barrier into the dark he had had no idea what lay below, and assumed he would land on cement. But it was dwarf juniper, which afforded a softer landing and had probably saved his life. Had it been cement, he might not have recovered from the impact as agilely as he had, rolling against the wall of the building before the men above reached the barrier and started firing into the shrubbery. Pressed against the wall, he had listened to the sputtering machine pistols, the oddly muted ripping of the shrubbery and the empty casings plinking into the shredded bushes. He heard cursing in Spanish doors slamming, but he didn't begin running until he heard th engines racing and the screaming tires.

  Since the police didn't normally carry fully automatic machine pistols, he knew it was Negrete. While he lay on his stomach in the dark bank of oleanders where he had gone to ground again only a block away, his wrist throbbing and his clothes soaking up the sweat that poured off him in the still, humid night, Negrete's cars circled the neighborhood in the vicinity around the garage. If he had parked the rental car somewhere along the street instead of in a parking lot, they would eventually have discovered it. When they finally disappeared at the first distant wailing of the police sirens, Bias got feet and walked with disciplined unconcern back to his car hospital parking lot.

  He had immediately signaled Arizpe on the radio, and they met at a late-night diner on Richmond. Bias told Arizpe what had happened, that the police knew about him, that apparently Negrete had gotten to Waite, had picked up on Ferretis, and had followed him to the dead drop. After some discussion they decided that whatever Negrete had gotten out of Waite it wouldn't have been enough to threaten them. They decided not to change any plans. They could not determine how the police had gotten Arizpe's name, but believed the authorities had little information beyond that or they never would have let Cordero leave the city. Except for Negrete knowing they had purchased RDX, they were the only two who knew where the explosives had been placed, and they could see no point at which they might have left a trail for the police, or even Negrete, to pick up. The greatest liabilities in this operation always had been the contacts in Houston, and by one means or another, all of them were now dead, except for the escaped Cordero. The only remaining significant dangers were that Arizpe's surveillance might be spotted, and that by some freak change of routine Gamboa would not cross the San Felipe rail crossing for several days. They agreed to go back to their bases, get some sleep, and follow the procedures they had already initiated.

  Bias returned to La Colombe d'Or. No one knew he was staying there, not even Rubio. Nor did he know R
ubio's base, an arrangement that was a long-standing method of security they routinely initiated in the final forty-eight hours before a hit. It freed both of them from the tension created by the nagging fear that one might be caught without the other's knowledge, and be tortured into betraying his location.

  He was in the car by seven o'clock, and drove to the Steak 'N Egg diner near Post Oak Boulevard where he and Rubio had talked the evening before. He bought the morning papers and ate breakfast as he read the articles on Ferretis and the Waite killings. The police, who were still withholding information about the details of the investigation, confirmed that they were utilizing the resources of the FBI and the DEA. An energetic reporter had finally determined that the limousine, though it had been leased in Sosa Real's name, was in the employ of Benigo Gamboa Parra, whose home appeared to be under heavy guard. Though the headlines were big, the articles about the killings were indeed sketchy, just as Ferretis had said, including, now, his own.

  Bias left the newspaper behind when he left the diner, makin a mental note not to go there again. If he had not been preoccupies he would not have returned there for breakfast. Luckily, a shii change had provided different waitresses. His second appearanc there in less than eight hours wouldn't have attracted the attention c any one waitress.

  During the next three hours, Bias cruised the streets in a rougl rectangle that lay within an area from Post Oak Boulevard to Shep herd on the west and east, and between the Southwest Freeway am San Felipe on the south and north. He stopped for coffee twice, pullei into a service station and filled his half-full tank with gasoline, parkei in parking lots and watched shoppers until the heat forced him tt begin driving again so he could run the air conditioner. He had ha< two "nothing happening" signals from Rubio.

  Then, while he was examining his swollen wrist at the traffic light, Rubio signaled him to go to a telephone booth on Kirby. Whei he got there, he called a booth on Buffalo Speedway, and Rubi< answered.

  "Somethin's happenin'," Rubio said in a flat voice. "Abou twenty minutes ago, a little after eleven, I saw three or four polici cars pulling onto Inverness. I made a pass by Gamboa's, and it look like they were picking up Negrete's boys. They got the stakeout dowi the street, too. I don't know how many they took away, but I saw foui at least."

  "They left policemen around the house?"

  "No."

  "There are no guards at the house?"

  "I didn't see nobody."

  Bias felt a sudden tingle of warning. "Gamboa's still there?"

  "I didn't see him leave."

  "What do you think?"

  "I don't know. Maybe they tied them to the Waite thing. I don'l know."

  "It's too soon," Bias said. He was looking through the dirt) booth glass, out into the sunlight. "But maybe they suspect them, maybe it's a shakedown. You didn't see them take Negrete?"

  "No." After a pause Rubio said, "I don't like this."Bias thought of Rubio's dark face, the glimpse of a white tooth in the cleft of his lower lip. Then he thought of Negrete's face. His lovely, oily eyes, the broad forehead and narrow face that so much resembled the head of an ant. Like the proverbial master who had grown to resemble his dog, Negrete brought to mind the insect for which he had been nicknamed. Or maybe it was his appearance and his reputation that first had suggested the insect. He was, after all, dark and small . . . and had the sting of death. El Hormiga Negro. The Black Ant. Bias remembered seeing Ireno's face through the binoculars, remembered the nail and the ant. In certain parts of Mexico this signature of Negrete's was infamous. Bias had seen his work before, and he had seen the fear it inspired. And now, for an instant, he saw Rubio's forehead ... the nail. . . and the ant, dancing on the end of the string like a tiny marionette. "Do you think it's too risky to continue the surveillance?"

  "I don't know. That doesn't bother me. It could be easier this way, maybe. What I don't like is, where is Negrete?"

  "Maybe the police have people in the houses in the neighborhood. Maybe they're trying to draw us out." Bias thought a moment. "Rubio, don't make any more passes by the house."

  "What do you mean? What do you want me to do?"

  "Let me think."

  The telephone booth was like a glass oven. The goddam thing wasn't even in the shade. He stood there holding the telephone, knowing that every minute Rubio was away from Inverness increased Gamboa's chances of slipping through. But he had to assess the removal of Negrete's men. If something happened to Rubio, he would have to call it off. It would be insane to try to monitor Gamboa's movements himself. He drew the line at that. Every assignment boiled down to two ultimate priorities: take out the target; and preserve his own life. He would sacrifice everything and everyone to achieve the former, except the latter. At one time, at some point in the gray, far past that was not so long ago in years, but a vast distance in the mind, he must have thought like Teodoro Anica. He must have held convictions, believed philosophies, adhered to truths. Now such motivations were cold flames. He could imagine nothing in the ideologies of men for which he would give his life; sacrifice had become for him an alien concept.

  "With all this going on, the old man might move," Rubio said.

  "It's risky."

  "You want to call it off?"

  "Not yet."

  "Okay, then I got to get back over there." Rubio's matter-of-fact statement resolved Bias's hesitation. The Indian was right. It was his turn with blind risk . . .

  "Signal more frequently," Bias said. "Every half hour."

  "Bueno," Rubio said, and hung up. ... and he had no right to expect what he hoped he would get.

  Chapter 48

  HAYDON told Dystal about Renata Islas hitting on Bias Medrano's name and what he had done about it, and asked what had happened at the lieutenant's end of the operation. He was standing at his desk, and while he listened to Dystal's Texas-accented basso, he watched Nina and Celia taking away the plates and glasses from the refectory table.

  ". . . didn't let them know they were coming, so it was pretty confusing. Lapierre said some of the boys didn't want to give up their firearms and it was a little tense there for a bit. But Gamboa's boy, Efren, came outside and got them all calmed down. And that's where we had some good luck. Three of those boys were carrying Mac-10s— converted to full automatic. So they made three arrests right on the spot. Thing is, they only got four of them. Negrete wasn't anywhere around. If the son of a bitch was telling the truth in the first place, there's two more gone with him."

  As he watched the two women, it occurred to Haydon that something unexpected had happened. Nina and Celia had somehow exchanged a sisterly understanding of one another, and seemed very much at ease together.

  "They went through the whole compound?" Haydon asked, but his mind went back to Nina and Celia. In a way, he wasn't surprised at their affinity. Not because of what he knew about Celia, but because of what he knew about Nina. The facade of nearly theatrical self-confidence Celia had displayed when Haydon had first met her at Valverde's, the anger she had shown at her mother's, the fear she tried unsuccessfully to hide behind a willful stubbornness in the car when she was telling him about the tecos, all had evolved now into an unabashed vulnerability. Not only had she lost a brother, but she had finally realized that a project to which she had dedicated herself with some passion for the past six months had turned out to be only a trick of mirrors. She didn't know what she had been doing. Bein the victim of such a grand deception was demoralizing, and it ws typical of Nina to sense how shattering this sudden vulnerability ha been for the girl. It was typical of her too to show in her uncalculatin and straightforward manner that she sympathized. That kind of sir cerity was seldom wasted on people who truly yearned for it.

  "Yeah, they did," Dystal said, "and they found another converted Mac-10 out in that little shack of Negrete's. I don't know what the DA's gonna let us do about that, but I want to charge Gamboa with constructive possession on all four of those Macs, and that'll give us sufficient reason for deportation." Dyst
al's voice lowered a little and Haydon had to strain to hear him. "That may be kinda thin soup but I think the wind's changing a little bit down here. We got son city officials and a senator in here stirring up the water, and, uh, think the general feeling is that if there isn't any target, then the won't be any shooters. It's gotten to that point. You know, just get the hell rid of this thing, quickest way possible."

  Haydon had been afraid of that. The killings had made the ne work television news again that morning, and the city politicians were eager to avoid being tagged in the national media as a Little Mexico, a haven for plotters of Latin political intrigues. They would be able to explain their way out of that kind of association if they could say that Benigo Gamboa Parra was the object of grievances by an unknown group of radicals in Mexico, and that he simply happened be living temporarily in Houston when they decided to pursue him. It was just one of those things. If he had lived in Happy Valley, Tex; then the violence would have followed him there, too. It had nothing at all to do with Houston's geography or demographics. Just bad luck.

  Benigo Gamboa had cut his teeth on political intrigue in Mexico, and now he was about to experience the full force of political maneuvering on this side of the border as well.

  "So they're going to run him off?"

  "That's right. And the sooner the better. They don't want him bombed to jelly in this city."

  "And what is Gamboa's reaction so far?"

  "The man's pissed we took away his militia. Pete told him we'd leave him plenty of uniformed officers to take their place, but he said hell no he didn't want them. He said he was going to make some calls straighten this business out."

  "So you didn't leave anyone?"

  "Nobody showing. We've got stakeouts in the upper floors of residences on both sides of the street in both directions, and there's men in unmarked cars in driveways. He's covered, but he doesn't know it. I imagine he's doing some heavy sweating."