“Nice new office, Enrique,” Lathrop said, approaching his desk. “You’re moving up.”
Quiros smiled and indicated the chair opposite him.
“The economy chugs along, whistle blowing,” he replied. “Like everyone else, I try my best to ride the curve and, if possible, stay a little ahead of it.”
Lathrop sat. He could remember when Enrique’s speech had been thickly accented with what they called Spanglish on the peninsula. This was before he had gone off to school, when his father was still alive and running the operation. Now he sounded like a TV news announcer, having acquired the flavorless pronunciation and intonation that was known as General American Dialect in college diction courses, absent any trace of ethnicity or regionalism. The benefits of a higher education.
Quiros shrugged his wristwatch from under the sleeve of his jacket and checked the time.
“You called just at the right moment, Lathrop,” he said. “A half hour later, and I’d have already left for an appointment.”
“I won’t be long.”
“Frankly, I was surprised to hear from you at all. You’ve been doing a lot of work for the Salazars, and it made me wonder if you’d chosen to give up your independence for steady employment.”
Lathrop shook his head.
“Freelance is more enjoyable,” he said. “Make your own rules, don’t have to ration your sick days.”
Quiros was smiling again. “I’d have thought Lucio and his brothers would run a looser ship than your former taskmasters.”
Lathrop shrugged.
“Life gets confusing when people think they know things that they don’t,” he said.
Quiros looked at him. “What do you have for me?” he said, dropping the banter.
“Information more valuable than any dollar amount I can lay on it.”
Quiros’s eyes came alive with interest behind his lenses.
“If I can depend on its accuracy,” he said, “you can depend on being satisfied with my money.”
Lathrop took a moment to review the latest modification of his story line. It was becoming a little complicated, and he needed to stay on his toes.
“Four nights ago, your nephew Felix and his friends grabbed a shipment the Salazars were bringing up from Mexico,” he said, getting right to it. “I’m talking sixty kilos, maybe more, a major load. Took out a bunch of Salazar’s people and cut up a few of them to send him a message.”
Quiros had immediately begun shaking his head in denial.
“You’ve got to be mistaken,” he said. “Felix has been troublesome in the past, but doing something like that isn’t in him.”
Lathrop shrugged mildly.
“I’m telling you what happened. You don’t want the rest, fine.”
Quiros studied him a moment, then gave out a long exhalation.
“Let’s hear it,” he said.
Lathrop hadn’t expected any other answer.
“Since you started running with the top dog in South America, word from my sources is Felix has been acting like he’s untouchable,” he resumed. “When he got tipped off about the product that was being muled over, it hyped him up to where he couldn’t resist pissing in the Salazars’ front yard to mark territory.”
“What are you saying? That knowing I’d be opposed to an action that rash, Felix went ahead and moved without my consent?”
Lathrop nodded. “So you wouldn’t interfere.”
Quiros was still trying to push off acceptance. “Felix is impulsive and sometimes acts in ways that aren’t very smart, but he has enough sense to realize I’d find out about the theft. And I won’t question his loyalty. If you’re suggesting he didn’t tell me because he means to keep the profits to himself—”
“You didn’t hear me say that, Enrique. Maybe he figures to make a quick turnover on the product, impress you with a surprise jackpot. All I know is, he did this thing. I don’t know why he did it. And I’m not here to speculate on his motives or put myself in the middle of your family business.”
Quiros was frowning unhappily.
“Okay.” He produced a sigh that was even longer than the first. “What else can you give me?”
Lathrop prepared to cinch his knot of deception.
“Like I said before, Felix made a mess at the scene of the rip-off, but from what I hear, one of the Salazars’ men lived long enough afterward to tell who was responsible,” he said. The lie sounded good as it left his mouth. “Lucio holds you personally to blame. He can’t see Felix having the cajones to go ahead with something this heavy without you ordering it or at least giving it your blessing.”
Visibly agitated, Quiros didn’t say a word for perhaps a full minute. The fingers of both his hands were outspread on the desk in front of him, arched as if he were pounding chords on a piano, pressing down hard enough to make them white around the nails.
Lathrop waited. He was sure now that Enrique had bought his story, and could practically visualize the question forming in his mind. The trick was not to show he saw it coming.
“I’d like to find out how Felix learned about the shipment,” Enrique said at length. Clearly, he understood that there would be dire repercussions if Salazar was truly convinced the hijack had been done with his authorization and if he didn’t move quickly to correct that impression. “Do you have anything on that?”
Lathrop shook his head no. Convincingly. And thought about the meet he’d set with Felix to ensure Enrique never found out.
“You want me to do the research?” he said.
“It would be helpful.” Quiros abruptly checked his watch again and straightened. “We’d better put a wrap on this. I have to be going.”
Lathrop’s head tilted back a little, the hinges of his jaw relaxing, his lips parting as if to taste the air. Upset as Enrique had been a second ago, he’d managed to compose himself—outwardly anyway—and Lathrop gave him credit for that. But the way he’d almost jumped from his seat when he looked at his watch seemed very peculiar. If the appointment he’d remembered was pressing enough to cut their business short, given the significance of what they’d been talking about ... well, it would have to be pretty important itself, wouldn’t it?
Damn important, in fact.
Careful not to appear the least bit curious, Lathrop stood, told Quiros he’d be in touch, then turned and walked past the two bodyguards in the conference area and left the office.
He was eager to find out what was in the wind.
SEVEN
VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 4, 2001
FOR BETTER OR WORSE, LATHROP SUPPOSED IT ALWAYS had been his nature to look at the dark side of things. Probably, he’d been born with that disposition ... an “insufferable gloom,” wasn’t that the phrase in the Poe story? Always, always, he’d been compelled to poke around under the rug or lift up the rock and see whether some secret nastiness might be exposed underneath.
As he moved between the joggers and strollers on the path leading around the carousel in Balboa Park, Lathrop remembered reading somewhere—in his downtime he would go through stacks of books, gobbling them the way some people did potato chips—that in French, carrousel meant “tournament,” while the Italian word carosello translated to “little war,” giving origin to the English carousel when one of the later crusading armies, composed of knights and mercenaries from throughout Europe, went marching off to relieve their boredom through a healthy dose of bloodshed and noticed that Ottoman Turk and Arab cavalrymen would practice their lancemanship by charging toward a tree on horseback and trying to jab the weapon’s tip through a ring hung from a branch. When the industrious European warriors brought the idea back home—those who hadn’t been slaughtered because they were too wasted from drinking and debauchery to put up any kind of fight—the tree became a rotating pole, and the real horses became wooden mounts that got cranked around by a chain-and-mule contraption, but the purpose of the whole rigmarole was still a martial exercise.
So the merry-go-round had started out a
s a drill for impaling your enemy with lethal accuracy, and Lathrop had known it since he was writing book reports in grade school. Other kids would reach for the brass ring to win a free ride; he’d imagined somebody sticking it to his tender young gut if he didn’t make the grab. It was the same with everything. When other kids saw their pet kitties flip their rubber squeak toys up and over their heads with their paws, they thought Puss, Tabby, or Spooky was just the smartest and the cutest, a regular cat-baseball major leaguer. Lathrop, meanwhile, went and got a book from the library and discovered that the up-and-over move was an aspect of the hunter-killer instinct, how felines in the wild tossed fish out of a stream prior to making them a dinner course.
The lesson in this for Lathrop was that whenever you played, you had to know you were playing for keeps ... which, on second thought, had definitely been learned for the better, since minus that invaluable insight, he would not have come away from Operations META and Impunity with all his vital organs in their proper relative positions.
Ah, the glory days of a hot-shit deep-cover op.
Now Lathrop slowed to a halt at the edge of the path. He had a good view of the carousel from where he stood and didn’t need to get any closer. It was old-fashioned, dating back maybe a century, with a band organ, several rows of antique carved animals, and gondolas on the outside of the platform. Though this was a weekday, the warm, sunny weather had brought visitors to the park in droves, and the ride was filled.
Lathrop bent as if to tie his shoelaces and gazed covertly at the spinning platform through the lightweight, black-framed eyeglasses he’d donned in his car. An instant later, he pushed a tiny knob at the hinge of their left stem with his fingertip, and a rectangular augmented reality panel appeared on that side. Seeming to hover about two feet in front of him, the AR display was in fact being projected onto the upper half of the plain plastic lens by the microelectromechanical, or MEMS, optical systems embedded in the frame of the glasses.
A twist of the control knob focused the image reflector /magnifiers in the lens and smoothed the display’s borders.
“Profiler,” Lathrop whispered into the pickup mike clipped to his collar.
On his vocal command, an audio link through a slender cable running down under his windbreaker to his hidden wearable computer—the same device he’d had on his belt the night of the tunnel ambush—launched a bootleg version of the UpLink International face-finding application sold to him by Enrique Quiros. Talk about an intriguing turn of the wheel.
Lathrop waited as the software loaded. To conserve memory, he’d installed a minimized version that contained a search index of ten thousand terrorists, criminals, and their known associates and would show the twenty closest matches in the AR panel. The program’s full-option setup on his desktop computer would have let him scan many times that number, and Lathrop knew he could have accessed its database resources over his wireless network connection. But that was a time-consuming distraction in the field, and the pinhole digicam in the bridge of his glasses would capture an image of his subject that he could review at his convenience.
He continued to watch the carousel’s jumpers slide up and down on their poles as it went around to the cycling pipe music. Most of the younger kids were belted onto the menagerie animals that made up the inner rows: spotted pigs, smiling fairy tale frogs, and brightly colored birds with long, arched necks that might have been fanciful cranes or ostriches. On the tall king’s horses behind the gondolas were their older brothers and sisters, some with their parents standing alongside the saddles to steady them. A group of whooping, overly giddy teens that Lathrop nailed as stoned on pot occupied the remaining painted ponies.
None of them was his concern.
Estimating he had about a minute to fiddle with his sneakers without attracting attention, Lathrop concentrated on the twosome sitting like sweethearts in a gondola at the perimeter. Except, he thought, this was no such snuggly interlude.
The man was Enrique Quiros. Lathrop didn’t recognize the blonde looker riding with him, but he’d been on enough tails in his day to read their body language and was positive that whatever was going on here was strictly business.
This afternoon was proving to be much more interesting than he could have anticipated.
After leaving Quiros’s Golden Triangle front in La Jolla, Lathrop had pulled his Volvo out of the hourly garage around the corner, swung back toward the office building, and double-parked about halfway down the street, where he’d gotten a good view of its front entrance. That was the only way in or out besides the loading and emergency doors, and Enrique wouldn’t have seen any reason to leave through them.
Five minutes later, Quiros emerged alone onto the busy sidewalk, turned in the opposite direction from Lathrop, and walked a block to yet another of the neighborhood’s ubiquitous indoor garages.
Lathrop followed, stopped near the garage, and watched some more. It wasn’t long before Quiros came driving out in a custom Porsche Carrera 911, the vehicle of choice for ostentatious, drug-dealing slime crawlers. Probably he’d called ahead for the attendant to have it ready.
Lathrop allowed Quiros to get about two car lengths ahead of him and then angled his Volvo into the flow of traffic. The 911 made a left onto A Street and headed north on Twelfth Avenue, following the road to where it became Park Boulevard, moving along toward Balboa Park at a moderate speed. At the intersection beyond the overpass, Quiros waited at a red light, took a left on the green, drove a short distance, and then turned right into the macadam parking lot back of the Spanish Village Art Center.
There were plenty of available spaces, and Lathrop swung in five or six slots down the aisle from Quiros, between a Ford Excursion that could have carted around the entire Osmond clan and an only slightly less house-y minivan. As he’d watched Quiros step out of the 911 and walk north, away from the art center toward the carousel and zoo entrance, he got his jogging clothes out of the gym bag on the passenger seat and changed into them, stuffing the sport jacket, dress slacks, and cordovans he’d shed into the bag.
The concealment offered by his tinted windows and the large, unoccupied vehicles on either side convinced Lathrop nobody would be able to peek in on him, but he doubted it would have raised an eyebrow even if that were the case. Guys did stranger things in their cars. And all he’d have looked like to some busybody who might notice was a working stiff who’d sneaked away from his desk to play hooky in the springlike weather.
Keeping Quiros in sight, Lathrop brushed back his hair and put on the Nike baseball cap resting on his dash. His first law of disguise, a baseball cap was the perfect standby, as long you didn’t wear one with a team logo that might stick in anyone’s memory. Costume beards, wigs, facial prosthetics, and other materials of that sort were great tricks of the trade, but preparation was needed to use them effectively, and Lathrop had been working on the hoof.
He added the AR glasses last, plugging them into the hidden microcomputer belted around his waist.
Within minutes after Quiros left his car, Lathrop made his own exit and trailed behind him to the carousel, where the slinky blonde had been waiting for Enrique near the ticket line.
Now he watched them circle around and around, talking rapidly, as if trying to cram in whatever had to be said before the five-minute ride came to a finish. Lathrop was hoping he’d be able to piece together their conversation on playback using the speech-reading component of his desktop software, which employed context-sensitive logic to fill in sequential blank spots when their faces spun away from his digicam lens or the carousel’s movement blurred the video input, also compensating to some extent for the cross talk that occurred during ordinary verbal exchanges.
As the carousel whirled on, the Profiler floated a dozen possible hits, overlaying the bottom of the mug shots with their known or assumed names, ages, nationalities, and a requisite listing of offenses.
Lathrop was mildly disappointed. He’d have liked to ID the blonde on-site, but it was clear she
wasn’t any of the criminal candidates that had popped into his display. Still, he was charmed to have stumbled onto this little tryst and had plenty of recorded conversation to study later.
He straightened, figuring he’d bent over his shoelace long enough. Also, the ride was grinding to a halt, and he was concerned Enrique would start in his direction after getting off. The guy might not suspect he was being shadowed, but neither was he an oblivious fool.
Lathrop was about to move on down the path when he noticed something that caused him to risk staying put another few seconds. As the gondola spun past on one of its final slow revolutions, Blondie abruptly opened her purse, brought out a smallish object, and gave it to Enrique. A box, dark and shiny, the kind Lathrop imagined they’d carry in those exclusive Rodeo Drive jewelry stores.
He watched with sharp curiosity. The quick handoff squelched any second thoughts that might have occurred to him about this being a lovers’ outing. It didn’t even seem especially amicable. There were no smiles. No meeting of the lips, chaste pecks on the cheeks, or air kisses. Moreover, Enrique looked reluctant to accept the box, almost nervous, stuffing it into the pocket of his sport jacket like it was red hot to the touch.
Lathrop’s chin tilted upward. His lips parted and curled. He drew in a breath. That transaction was it. Right there. The reason for the meet. And he’d captured the cherished moment on his wearable’s flash memory card.
Or had he?
Excited, Lathrop indulged his urge to confirm it.
“Exit Profiler, run video,” he said into his mike, watching the gondola pull away from him.
Another two voice commands, and the scene was replayed on his eyeglass display.
A thrill shot from his spine into his arms and fingertips. Beautiful. And to think a few seconds ago, he’d felt let down.
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