Every time Farrell tried to talk to Gabriel about wanting to get out, his friend introduced him to another of the men he’d been brought south to see. Like Montenegras, they were all well-dressed, polite men who had trim front lawns, children who attended boarding school in London, and wives who were greeted as regulars in the boutiques of Miami, New York, and Los Angeles.
Each bowed and shook hands with Farrell as if he were a respected diplomat. Each deferred to Gabriel as a prize client, someone to whom a debt was owed. After Farrell chatted with the men, after they had walked away, Gabriel would lean over and tell him of their strange pasts. There was Christian Rodriguez, a nasty-looking man with a nose as sharp as a pencil. On his right cheek he bore a thick, ugly welt he’d received as a child in the Cali slums. Rodriguez was fourteen when it happened. A contract of $200 had been placed on a marijuana smuggler who’d reneged on a deal with a grower in the hills. Rodriguez crept through the French doors that led to the balcony of the man’s second-floor hotel room and got the wire around the man’s neck just like his friends had shown him. But before the man died, he had managed to stick a knife through Rodriguez’s cheek, knocking out two molars. Besides scarring Rodriquez, the knife had left him with a permanent, eerie trademark: when Rodriguez inhaled, you heard a slight whistle. It was said that the enemies of the cartel laid awake at night, sweating in their beds for fear that a flute note would pierce the darkness before the garrote hugged their throats. Rodriquez also knew the cargo statistics and speed of a hundred different planes and boats; besides being the company’s enforcer, he was the transportation specialist.
And then Fernando De La Leone and his bitchy wife, Estelle, who broke into their conversation to demand that De La Leone fly her to Caracas or Buenos Aires for the weekend.
“Perhaps I go too far to say I knew them,” Farrell said, thinking out loud as he got back in the truck and drove again. “I certainly heard the gossip and met with them, with De La Leone almost constantly.”
Lithe and tall with wire-frame glasses and a pleasant smile, De La Leone was everything Rodriguez, Montenegras, and the rest of the upper-level managers of the cartel aspired to be, but could not. De La Leon was not of the slums. He was born in Bogota and, like Gabriel, was the privileged son of the elite. Outwardly, he was a polished international economist and businessman with an advanced degree in business administration from Santiago University and banking contacts all over the world. He enjoyed gardening and grew beautiful purple orchids in a hot house attached to the side of his home. He collected rare coins that he displayed in cases in his library. He had a rare first edition of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. And he was a news junkie; he had installed a massive satellite dish on the roof of his house so he could capture CNN updates twenty-four hours a day.
Underneath the patina, however, De La Leone was one of Cali’s six financial advisors. In that capacity he served as review analyst of schemes to launder money. As Farrell would learn, his primary responsibility was to extend the organization’s control of the business.
At lunch the next day, De La Leone took a sip of wine, then looked Farrell straight in the eyes. “Cocaine has made my country a flashier banana republic, Mr. Farrell. As usual, we are not getting—how would you say it?—our slice of the pie?”
Farrell nodded uneasily. De La Leone continued. “We want greater control over the flow of cash and goods inside your country. With that, more profits would return to Colombia.”
“Which is where I fit in,” Farrell mumbled.
“It will expand our investments in the United States and give us the physical presence to launch future efforts,” said De La Leone. He laughed and turned to Gabriel and Cordova. “Imagine it: we buy the border!”
They laughed with him. Farrell scratched at a raised bump a jungle insect bite had left on the back of his hand. Through the open French doors, somewhere out in the humid night air, he thought he heard an animal cry.
Each night in Cali, Farrell had jerked awake, frightened by dreams he could not remember save the gentle patter of the rain forest and the slug that rested on Cordova’s chin. He had gone over the plans with De La Leone, Montenegras, Gabriel, and Cordova because he had to. All he really wanted was to go home.
In the afternoon of his fourth and last day, he finally managed to be alone with Gabriel. They were sitting on the balcony of the twentieth floor of a downtown high-rise apartment building De La Leone and Montenegras owned. They were drinking wine, waiting for the final meeting. An explosion rocked the far quarter of the city. Dust and fire rolled high into the air, drifted, and settled.
“What the hell was that?” he asked Gabriel, who had not flinched at the roar.
“A problem solved, I should imagine,” Gabriel said in a nonchalant tone. “The climate here is fabulous, like San Diego’s I should think.”
“Too much moisture in the air,” Farrell said. “But—”
“The soil yields much to those who plant. Look at the hibiscus growing in that garden down there.”
“Gabriel …”
“Sometimes you have to trim the weeds around these plants or they will not grow,” Gabriel continued. “There are vines that can sprout, run, and throttle a plant before it is ready to flower.”
Gabriel paused, looked at his hands, and rubbed them together as if he were washing. “A good gardener will cut the vine away early,” he said. “Jorge said your wife is a gardener. Would she agree?”
Gabriel rarely mentioned Lena.
“I suppose,” Farrell said. “I—”
“Maria sends you her best,” Gabriel broke in. He was leaning against the railing now, twisting a sprig he’d plucked from a potted plant.
Farrell rubbed at the knot that was developing on the back of his neck. “Send her mine, too.”
For a brief moment, across the balcony and down into the garden and even into the streets beyond, there was not a sound. Then in the distance came the wail of sirens. “I don’t know if I can continue,” Farrell said finally. “I’m as far as … well …”
With an easy thrust of his arm, Gabriel straightened and lowered himself into a chair. He leaned forward to the table, took the wine bottle from the bucket, and poured into the glasses. “And how far is that?”
“I’ve set up the system you wanted,” Farrell stammered. “But the more I listen to these men, I realize the bank is too small to work the sort of deals we’ve discussed without suspicion.”
Gabriel wet his finger in the wine. He pressed it to the rim of the glass, circling the rim until a clear, rich tone reverberated in the air.
“Perhaps it is so,” Gabriel said, looking down into the wine. “The bank is no longer the place for you. I’ve been considering that you should resign and recruit a replacement.”
Relief surged through Farrell. “It would be for the best—” he began.
Gabriel cut him off. “A private real estate development company would be better. From there you could coordinate the buys of the border properties without compromise.”
Farrell splayed his fingers wide and flat on his thighs. “Actually I’d thought of leaving the business altogether. In the jungle the other night, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.”
“What’s that?”
“Hesitation,” Farrell said. “Insecurity. I don’t know exactly what to call it. Guilt maybe.”
“Common enough afflictions.”
“They are,” Farrell said. “But not if you are preparing to test the limits of your skills.”
A smirk developed on Gabriel’s face. “What you are feeling is growth, my friend. I believe you are in danger of becoming stronger, not toppling over.”
“It’s more than that,” Farrell replied. “I’ve always believed in understanding limits because then you act with respect. Even if you are going to the very edge of the possible, you can see the line.”
“And?”
“This strikes me as having no boundaries whatsoever.”
Gabriel tilted
his head back, so his chin was pointed at the fading glow on the horizon. “What you are experiencing is the fear of heights,” he said. “What do you call it in English?”
“Vertigo,” Farrell said.
“Ahh, the same in Spanish,” Gabriel said, and he ran his fingers back through his hair. “Perhaps, too, the fear of open space—agoraphobia, I believe.”
Gabriel rocked forward and tapped the arm of the metal chair. “It all comes down to what you’re used to, Jack,” he said. “There are boundaries in all of this; you just haven’t figured them out. But you will, because—and I have sensed this from the moment we met—you are a survivor.”
Farrell struggled to reply, but Gabriel cut him off again. “Indeed, you must survive.”
The menacing tone in Gabriel’s voice shook Farrell. “Why is that?”
“Because now that you have met these men, you have no choice.”
It was almost dark now. The headlights of cars flickered along the road below them. In the distance, orange flames licked sky. A gate opened and slammed shut. Farrell drank the rest of the glass and another and another as fast as he could.
Out on the dark highway beyond Twin Falls, Farrell looked for a place where he could pull over to sleep for the night. With no warning, a yellow Labrador retriever appeared in his headlights. He swerved to avoid hitting the dog. He skidded to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, his heart pounding. He looked in the rear-view mirror. The dog, a puppy really, no more than seven months old, trotted down the center of the highway. Another car narrowly avoided it.
Farrell swore and got out. He jogged back on the gravel and called to the dog, which seemed disoriented. Farrell knelt and whistled. It came to him whining, head down, tail between its legs. She had no collar. When Farrell ran his fingers along the top of her back, he felt a jagged, open sore. A low growl boiled from the dog’s throat.
“It’s okay,” Farrell said. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”
He led the dog to the truck and opened the side door. She backed away at first, then jumped in, nervously sniffing the seat and the dashboard. Farrell got in the other side and turned on the light to look at the sore. It was raw and oozing. Farrell blanched when realized she’d been whipped, not cut.
He found a rest stop thirty miles beyond Twin Falls and got the dog in the back. He dug out some hydrogen peroxide and cotton to clean the wound. The lab winced once, but did not growl. When he’d finished, she curled up on a blanket near the door and looked up at him with gentle brown eyes. This pleased Farrell in a way he’d long forgotten. He rummaged around in a box until he found a can of beef stew, which he opened and gave to her. She ate it, turned, and licked his arm.
Farrell smiled then got into the bunk and turned off the light, remembering how he had found Lena digging at weeds in the garden the day he returned to San Diego.
“Hello, stranger,” he had said. She raced to him and hugged him.
“I missed you so much,” she said. “I felt kind of … well, lost without you.”
Farrell stroked her cheek. He wanted to tell her, to apologize, to beg her forgiveness. Overriding his impulse was the sound of a brief, flutelike whistle in the darkness of his mind. He was ashamed and frightened.
“Me, too,” he said. And that night for the first time in many months, they made love slow, tender, falling asleep in each other’s arms. Holding her, Farrell told himself he had no choice. He would go forward with the plans that he had agreed to. But he knew now he was expendable. He must prepare a way to escape.
In the weeks that followed, as he bought small parcels of border land, he also set up two more Swiss and Grand Cayman accounts for himself as well as a shell corporation on the Isle of Jersey off the coast of Britain. On his way to Texas in early February, he took a side trip to Tennessee, and in a small town outside Nashville found the names of a boy, Nathaniel Collins, and a girl, Shelly Crown, both of whom had died in infancy about the same time he and Lena were born. Then came the flurry of papers and notices that became the beginning of the new identities he planned. Two weeks later he flew to Dallas, bought the camper, and arranged to have it driven to San Diego by a college kid who needed to haul his stuff home.
In the back of his mind, Farrell always knew there would come a day when he’d have to explain himself to Lena. This he feared more than anything, putting it off through the end of the month while he bought two more hundred-acre border parcels, one outside Nogales, Arizona, the other near Harlingen, Texas. On March 1, 1989, he passed papers on a third parcel near El Paso. It had been a long three days of negotiations. He flew into San Diego with eyelids that weighed two pounds each. Lena was not waiting for him at the airport. He called the house and got a recorded message saying that the phone was temporarily out of order.
In the cab on the twenty-minute ride home, Farrell dozed and dreamed of what it would be like to leave it all behind, to live in the camper, a vagabond. He tried not to think about what he’d do if she refused to go.
Farrell paid the driver at the gate. He rang the doorbell. Waited, then rang again.
Lena opened the door to the darkened front hallway. Her face was white. Her shoulders hung limp, weak, defeated. Her eyes were puffed, almost shut. “I just want to know why,” she whispered.
A man appeared behind her. He was short, no more than five feet seven. Despite the boxy cut of his business suit, Farrell could tell he was thin, perhaps 140 pounds. He had curly brown hair, graying at the temples, and possessed extraordinarily large ears.
The man placed a sympathetic hand on his wife’s shoulders, then slipped by Lena before Farrell could speak, his other hand thrust forward to show a black billfold. The stubby fingers flicked the billfold open. A silver badge embossed with blue enamel hung in space.
“Jacob Stern, Mr. Farrell,” he said. “FBI. I think you know why we are here.”
There were other men around him now, men in blue wind-breakers, men who held guns, men who grabbed his elbows, men who dragged him forward. As he drifted off into sleep in the back of the camper, what Farrell remembered most was how Lena had turned to flee into the dark house like a little girl scared by a nightmare.
By the time Farrell reached Jackson the next afternoon, he’d decided we all live in tunnels of our own design, peering ahead for that little pinpoint of light that tells us we’re moving in the right direction, but denying the walls that surround us.
He named the Labrador Ruby after the Nevada mountain range. Caring for her made him feel wanted in a way he hadn’t in almost a year. He talked to her as he drove. On the way into the town, he pointed up at the Grand Tetons, which towered over Jackson Hole and the Snake River. He told her the ragged slash of cirques and peaks and couloirs that make up the Tetons were sculpted by glaciers 10,000 years ago. What amazed him, he said, was the fact that in geologic terms the Tetons were young and therefore still growing, not in inches, but in leaps of a foot or more. These growth spurts happened in sharp, catastrophic upheavals after years of dormancy. Not unlike the events that can upset the level planes of a life.
Farrell found the Elk Tine Motel on a side street at the edge of town. The manager said The Wave and Page had gotten in the previous evening. Inez, Tony, and Ann were due in the following day. Farrell fed Ruby. When he left, she was curled up in front of the heater.
Page and The Wave were right where he expected them to be: at a saloon in the middle of Jackson that lures tourists with blazing Las Vegas lights, a stuffed grizzly bear, a horse saddle made almost entirely of silver, and dozens of other saddles that pose as bar stools. He threaded his way through a crowd of late-season skiers and by a group of East Coast women who tittered at the local cowboys posing across the room in lank slouches for their benefit.
The Wave stood up in the stirrups of the bar stool, twisted, and raised a shot glass to Farrell. “He arrives! He who goes voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”
“Shelly?” Farrell asked.
“Wordsworth, mon.” The Wave h
anded Farrell a shot. “This is George Dickel.”
“I’m tired. Whiskey will knock me out.”
“All the more reason to do it then,” Page said, raising his own glass. It was obvious he’d been through several toasts already.
Farrell shrugged and they clinked the shots together, quick dropping the liquor down their throats. Farrell slid into the saddle next to The Wave. The rastaman put his hand on Farrell’s shoulder, smiled, and said: “So you prove it … Hell hath no fury …”
“What are you talking about?”
Page scoffed, “Inez. When she got to your room yesterday morning and found it empty with that note that said you’d headed for Jackson, I thought she’d bust that vein that’s always bulging on the side of her neck.”
“She’s just pissed I won’t play her game,” Farrell said. “Where is she?”
“San Francisco and L.A., I think,” The Wave said. “Something to do with her money men. They’re getting nervous.”
“So we sit here until she comes in tomorrow?”
“Not you,” The Wave said. “In one of her more lucid moments she said, and I quote, ‘Tell zat bastard if he has the courage enough to come, to find out where we ski off-piste. No more of zis chicken sheet leetle couloirs. Take me out of bounds!’ ”
Farrell smiled in spite of himself; The Wave mimicked her almost perfectly. “A bit early for zee out of bounds,” he said.
“She seems set on it,” Page said. “She called the stuff we have in the can so far … now how did she say it?”
“Caresses préliminaries,” The Wave said, fumbling over the consonants.
“Foreplay,” Farrell said.
“Yeah,” Page mumbled. “We figured that out.”
“Cold,” The Wave said. He stared at his beer.
“Ours is not to reason why …” Page chanted. He signaled the bartender for another shot of Dickel. He drank it as soon as he poured.
The Fall Line Page 31