Bio-Strike (2000)

by Clancy, Tom - Power Plays 04

  SHAZAM! OPEN IMMEDIATELY FOR THE LIFE OF ROGER GORDIAN.

  He opened it.

  Immediately.

  And read it with astonishment.

  “Well, we’re here,” Glenn said.

  “Here we are,” Ricci said.

  “Nice and quiet.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You uncomfortable being the only white guy in the joint?”

  “Not unless you’re uncomfortable being the only black guy who’s sitting with a white guy.”

  Glenn took a gulp of his beer. Ricci drank some of his soda. The cheeseburgers and fries they’d ordered had just been carried over from behind the counter.

  The bar was on a rundown street in East San Diego, Nat King Cole crooning “Unforgettable” on the jukebox, the owner a black man in his late sixties with silver hair and a bristling handlebar mustache. The small handful of patrons was almost entirely male, and around the same age as the bartender. Behind the booth where Ricci and Glenn were seated, a chunky woman perhaps a year or two shy of the clientele’s actuarial mean was swaying to the music alone, her eyes closed, a cocktail glass in her hand.

  “So what’s next?” Glenn asked.

  Ricci shrugged.

  “We eat our food, drink our drinks, I head back to my hotel room,” he said. “How long you figure our surveillance can stay on Quiros before he gets keen?”

  Glenn thought a moment.

  “It depends,” he said. “Give us some added manpower, and we’ll be okay for a while. Use two- and three-car teams. Leapfrog whenever we know his route.”

  “The team that flew in with me enough support?”

  “How many men in it? Ten or so?”

  “An even dozen.”

  “That should be plenty.”

  “They’re yours,” Ricci said. He pulled his burger plate closer without enthusiasm. “For all it’ll be worth. Even if Quiros doesn’t make his tails, he’ll still figure we’re tracking his movements. And he’ll be careful about them.”

  Glenn looked at him.

  “Is Enrique your only lead to whoever did whatever nobody’s talking about to Gordian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Meaning we need to get information out of him fast.”

  “Yeah.”

  Glenn picked up his burger.

  “It’s a predicament. We go too easy on the son of a bitch, he’ll keep his mouth shut. We lean on him too hard, he could go underground. I doubt for good, but it’s sounding to me like we can’t afford to lose any time.”

  Ricci nodded.

  “Between us, Glenn, I figure we’ve got maybe twenty-four hours before it’s too late,” he said. “And other than making ourselves feel like we’re doing something, I don’t know what we’ve accomplished.”

  “You have any sort of plan?”

  Ricci stared down at his glass a while in silence. Then he looked at Glenn.

  “You want to be friends?” he said.

  Their eyes had met.

  “Sure,” he said. “Just make good on your promise to pay the tab.”

  Ricci was still looking straight into Glenn’s eyes.

  “There’s leaning hard, and there’s leaning hard,” he said. “Nothing opens up for us by tomorrow morning, I’m on my own with Quiros. And he’s going to talk. It might cost me my job. Maybe more than that. A whole lot more. But he’ll talk. And he won’t have a chance to go anywhere.”

  Glenn sat with his beer mug suspended below his chin, his fingers clenching the handle. He took in and released a long, tidal breath.

  “If it’s got to be that way, there’s no other choice, I can give you a hand.”

  “No,” Ricci said, his voice firm. “Nobody else involved. I—”

  Ricci’s cellular bleeped in his jacket pocket. He raised a finger in a hold-on-a-minute gesture, reached for it, and answered.

  Glenn waited. He saw Ricci ease upright in his chair, listening without comment, taking in whatever was being said to him with acute interest.

  When Ricci returned the phone to his pocket, there was something very close to relief on his features.

  “That was Pete Nimec in San Jose,” he said. “I think we might’ve been saved by the bell.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 16, 2001

  IT WAS TEN P.M. WHEN ENRIQUE QUIROS DROVE HIS moon-gray Fiat Coupé from the grounds of his Rancho Santa Fe mansion through an electric gate in its eight-foot-high wrought-iron perimeter fence, accompanied by two Lincoln Town Cars that flanked him front and rear.

  Much of the short trip from the rarefied North County community to Balboa Park in San Diego proper would be on Interstate 5, alternately known as the San Diego Freeway. Their route to the southbound entry ramp went along a loose braid of quiet, palm-lined streets and county roads and then skirted the cluster of specialty shops and gourmet restaurants in and around the small downtown.

  As they passed one of the busier eateries, a dark green Saab 9-5 wagon drew away from the curb a few yards farther up the street, easing in front of Quiros’s lead car.

  At the same instant, a young man and woman chatting beside a Cherokee parked near the restaurant’s outdoor café suspended their conversation and climbed into the SUV, looking to all eyes like an attractive couple who had gone to dine out on this pleasantly cool November night. The man at the wheel and his companion next to him in the passenger’s seat took their place following Quiros’s small procession, hanging back a little to remain inconspicuous.

  Just before they reached the first of several signs guiding traffic to the freeway entrance, a Toyota Prius gasoline /electric emerged into the intersection from a cross street where it had idled in the shadow of a tall, spray-leafed royal palm and then swung between the Cherokee and the Lincoln immediately behind Quiros.

  The Cherokee’s driver glanced at the woman to his right. “What’s up with the electric razor?” he said.

  “Could be its pilot wants to prove you can be fuel-efficient and an asshole.”

  “Or could be that he’s trying to queer our tail.”

  The woman frowned. “We’d better play it safe and inform Glenn,” she said.

  A moment after the Prius cut in behind the Lincoln, its driver tilted his head unnoticeably upward to speak into the hands-free, trunked-band radio mounted on its roof.

  “Very good, we are in position,” he said in Castilian Spanish.

  On a sleepy residential block southwest of Balboa Park, a customized Town and Country minivan sat in a parking space where it apparently had been left for the night. Its extended cargo area was partitioned from the front section. The bar lock on the steering wheel and blinking burglar alarm light on the dash were meant to convince anyone who might take a close-up look through the glazed front windows that it was unoccupied. Carefully fitted black shades over the rear windows ensured that the radiance of the computer monitors and LED equipment readouts aboard would be hidden from the street.

  Should a roaming car thief have chanced upon this particular vehicle and failed to be deterred by the visible security devices, it would have been a supremely luckless blunder. And his last ever.

  In the minivan’s rear, the little man seated at his control station acknowledged the message from the Prius’s driver, told him he would await his further report, and then switched frequencies on his transmitter to notify his marksmen in the park of their target’s progress.

  “What the hell kind of car is this, anyway?” Ricci said.

  “An ’88 Buick LeSabre T-type,” Glenn said. “Why?”

  “Can’t belong to the company pool.”

  “Is that some kind of put-down?”

  “No.”

  “Complaint?”

  “No.”

  “Because you might want to remember that she’s gotten you everywhere you’ve been going all day,” Glenn said. “And that not every rolling stakeout’s in the chichi North County. You have to blend in with the scenery. Stay unobtrusive.”

  R
icci looked at him from the passenger seat. “In other words, it’s your personal vehicle.”

  “My personal sweetheart.” Glenn patted the steering column with affection. “Bought her secondhand from an officer pal in Camp Pendleton who kept her in cherry condition, and she’s never let me down.”

  They rode briefly in silence, moving west on El Cajon Boulevard toward Balboa.

  Ricci looked at the dash clock. It was almost a quarter past ten.

  “How much longer till we’re at the park?”

  “Maybe ten minutes or so. I know a few places nearby where we can haul in the car and wait.”

  Ricci looked thoughtful. “Let’s squawk our moving surveillance cars again. See about that Prius.”

  The Cherokee was now several car lengths ahead of Enrique Quiros’s trio in the center lane of 1-5. The Saab wagon had dropped back behind them. This tactic of periodically changing lead and follow spots was a textbook example of leapfrog surveillance, calculated to minimize the risk of detection.

  The Saab’s driver was wearing an earphone mike/ lapel transmitter assembly that he’d set to voice-activation mode.

  “Roger, the Prius is still keeping pace with us,” he said in answer to Ricci’s inquiry. His eyes had flicked to his sideview mirror. “It’s in the right lane, almost directly abreast of my vehicle.”

  “You get a look at who’s inside?”

  “A single male, thirtyish, clean shaven,” the driver said. “His windows are tinted too dark for me to give you more than that.”

  “The way it’s switching lanes, staying out of Quiros’s line of sight, it doesn’t seem like one of his cars,” Ricci said over the VHF communications channel.

  The driver nodded to himself. “Yeah,” he replied. “If I didn’t know better, I’d damn well figure it for one of ours.”

  The snipers had assumed a four-pointed pattern of deployment around the grassy area between the rear of the Natural History Museum and the Spanish Village Art Center to its north, giving them a wide open field of fire. One of them was prone on the roof of the long, three-story museum, his Walther rifle nosed over its baroque ornamental edging. A second was concealed in the 120-foot spread of the exotic Moreton Bay fig tree that had stood behind the museum for almost a century. Opposite the museum, at the northeast corner of the green, a third sharpshooter was atop one of the low stucco-and-tile art galleries of the village. The fourth was posted at the northwest corner, on the roof of another Old Spanish-style cottage.

  Each of their high-magnitude night-vision scopes was equipped with an infrared camera head/optical beam splitter attachment. Designed to bend light at a ninety-degree angle as it struck the eyepiece, it would simultaneously relay the shooter’s sight image to the rifle-mounted scope and to the control van over a wireless video feed.

  Inside the Town and Country, the team commander would have a real-time picture of what his firers saw through their scopes from their separate angles of view. Maintaining radio contact via their tactical headsets, he could coordinate their actions from the moment Enrique Quiros made a move on Salazar until the moment Quiros—and whoever he might have positioned in ambush—fell dead to the ground.

  Now the little man waited at his monitoring station and remembered how Lucio Salazar had balked at the cost of his team’s services. Their clients often did at first. But quality was never cheap, and Salazar had gotten the best that money could buy, as he was bound to realize with gratitude before tonight’s events ran their ultimate course.

  Sitting in his parked Cadillac sedan along with four hand-picked bodyguards, Lucio Salazar shrugged his jacket sleeve back from his wristwatch and read the time.

  It was almost half past ten, and he was feeling impatient. Lucio had arrived early to make sure the contract hitters were where they were supposed to be, and once his men had gone out and confirmed their presence, he’d had nothing to do except wait for Quiros to show. Little as he’d wished for this appointment, he was anxious to push the start button and get it under way. He wasn’t truly afraid; in his fifty-eight years of living, Lucio had been in far too many tight situations for that. Nor had he acquired any scruples about killing in his late middle age. But for all his preparation, it was his hovering uncertainty, his not knowing what was to come, that was hardest to abide. If he were only convinced of Quiros’s intentions, things would be clear to him, and he would know beyond a doubt what to do. He was a man who put a high value on forethought. His operation had thrived as a result of deliberation, planning, and a willingness to compromise—even concede losses, within margins—rather than let himself in for more trouble than seemed worthwhile. When circumstances changed, you had to look at them carefully and know when to make accommodations. Yet here he’d been thrust into a situation where everything hung on split-second decisions and hair triggers. And it didn’t feel right to him in the least.

  He sighed and glanced out his window, watching for the headlights of Enrique’s car to appear in the parking lot entrance.

  Feel right or not, what was about to happen would happen anyway.

  He just wanted to be finished with it and get back to business as usual.

  As Enrique Quiros approached Balboa from the northwest, the third automobile in his entourage separated from the others and took the turnoff to the Cabrillo Bridge. Remaining on the San Diego Freeway, Quiros and his lead car continued to head toward the Pershing Drive exit that provided the easiest and most direct access to the Spanish Village area.

  Inside the tail vehicles that had kept pace with Quiros since he’d left the ranch, the members of each surveillance team noted this unexpected development and promptly advised their respective superiors.

  “What do you make of it?” Ricci said.

  “The bridge hooks up with Laurel Street, and that’ll take you over to Balboa,” Glenn said. He had pulled the LeSabre into a dark, empty employee lot behind a municipal building on C Street, within view of the park. “It’s kind of a long way around. The scenic route, I guess you’d call it. Runs between these two wooded slopes.”

  “I don’t think our guys are interested in admiring the foliage,” Ricci said.

  “Not that anybody could in the dark,” Glenn said and sat thinking quietly. After a moment or two, he turned to Ricci. “What’s that E-mail we got again? The exact words?”

  Ricci frowned, took his cell phone out of his pocket, and touched a button to illuminate the LCD. Then he pressed a second button on the keypad, retrieved the stored message Nimec had forwarded from San Jose, and opened it. “Here,” he said and handed the phone across the seat to Glenn. “Read the damn thing yourself.”

  Glenn did. It said:

  QUIROS. ELEVEN P.M. BALBOA PARK. FINAL CLOSEOUT, EVERYTHING UP FOR GRABS. GET WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE HE’S GONE. FROM ONE WHO KNOWS.

  “Coded messages. Anonymous tips that don’t mean anything.” Ricci studied the government office building’s flat, concrete backside through the windshield. “I’m sick and tired of being jerked.”

  “If you ask me, we’re lucky just to be in the game,” Glenn said, still looking at the LCD.

  “I guess.” Ricci glanced at the dash clock and saw that it was exactly 10:30. “Be nice if we could figure some of it out before we need to make our move.”

  Silence. Glenn pursed his lips, gave the phone back to Ricci. “You know, Laurel connects with a long strip of the park called El Prado,” he said. “That’s the main pedestrian mall. It has lots of recognizable buildings, a big reflecting pond, other stuff.”

  Ricci looked at him. “You guessing it’s where the action might be?”

  “I don’t know,” Glenn said, “but there has to be a reason the last car in Enrique’s cavalcade of stars broke away to head in that direction.”

  Ricci tugged at the flesh below his chin. “You’re looking to set something up, it’s always a good idea to pick a spot where there are landmarks.”

  “Agreed. And tell me this isn’t the definition of a setup.”

  �
�Do we have people sitting on the area?”

  “Some,” he said. “And we can shuffle more over.”

  Ricci nodded. “How close are we?”

  “A hop and a skip,” Glenn said.

  Ricci grabbed for the door handle. “Come on, I think we’ve got ourselves a destination,” he said.

  “Lucio,” Quiros said.

  “Enrique,” Salazar said.

  They shook hands.

  It was a few minutes shy of eleven o’clock, and they were standing in the darkened parking lot behind the Spanish Village. Salazar’s Caddy on one side of them, Quiros’s Fiat Coupé and Lincoln on the opposite side, their bodyguards grouped loosely near the cars from which they’d emerged.

  “So,” Salazar said. “What now?”

  Quiros looked at him in silence a moment, the cool night breeze riffling his lightweight sport jacket around his body. “Now we talk,” he said. “See if we can find a way to straighten out our problems.”

  Salazar tilted his head toward their guards. “We need to give ourselves some room,” he said. “Take a walk, air things in privacy.”

  Quiros nodded. “I propose we each bring one man to follow behind as a precaution,” he said. “Leave the rest here with the cars.”

  Salazar had to grin. “Sure, a precaution,” he said. “Got to make sure we don’t kill each other on the garden path.”

  Enrique looked at him. “I’m glad you’re smiling, Lucio,” he said.

  The balance that Sword’s foot surveillance teams generally had to strike was the same balance struck by cops doing undercover work in every major population center in America or for that matter the developed world. On the one hand, there was an appreciable chance that someone would see them—regardless of their skills at camouflage, concealment, and clandestine movement, and also regardless of how derelict, deserted, or remote their area of operation might be. On the other hand, they understood that being seen and being noticed were two very different things, and that being exposed was yet a third thing altogether.