by Blake Banner
I shrugged. We took the turn for the Sumner Tunnel. “I am not impressed with your organization, Brigadier. Mary Brown should not have died. She should not have been in the field at all. She was murdered by one George Santos, a CIA officer.”
“This would be the chap near the Parc des Beaumonts, Rue Condorcet.”
“Yeah. He was acting on the orders of his unit chief, Samy Arain. She’d gone to George after leaving me that morning, to ask him if the CIA were cutting some kind of deal with al-Qaeda.”
I turned to look at him as we plunged into the tunnel under Boston Harbor. Amber light slipped across his face in a slow, steady rhythm in the sudden darkness. He was expressionless, looking out at the grim walls of the tunnel. I said:
“That was naïve. It was a naïve thing to do. She might have been a brilliant analyst, sir, but she was still green. George Santos was a killer. When she went to talk to him, she signed her own death warrant. She should never have been put in the field.”
After a while he nodded. “I agree.”
I snarled, “Then why was she?”
He turned to look at me out of the shadows, revealed momentarily by a lurid, dirty orange glow that faded, sinking him into shadows again. He said, “Don’t question me, Bauer. You’ve briefed me, I understand and I agree, but don’t question me.”
We drove on in silence until we emerged into bright sunlight at North Washington Street. Then the lieutenant started a process of weaving in and out of roads, doubling back on himself and checking his mirror a lot.
“Where are we going?”
Byrd gave his head a brief shake. “Nowhere, just yet. Listen, Harry, you need to understand something. We are not a law enforcement agency. We are not, in fact, any kind of official agency. We are a private enterprise; we do not even officially exist. We are tolerated by the powers that be by the grace of an inspired mixture of self-interest and blackmail. It is not for us to investigate or monitor the activities of US federal agencies. If the CIA think it behooves them to make a deal with al-Qaeda, then that is a decision for them.”
“It stinks,” I snarled. “Is it also a decision for them if they decide it behooves them to murder our operatives?”
“No. And I agree, it stinks. Did you kill George Santos?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. They’ll think twice before going against our operatives in future.”
“So what now?”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “Are you still onboard?”
“Of course I am.”
“Then you go to Los Angeles.”
“Do we know he’s there? Or is this another wild goose chase?” Before he could answer I went on. “How much does the Central Intelligence Agency know about you? Because it seems to me they are playing you like a fiddle. How much did George Santos pump out of Mary Brown before he killed her? And while we’re at it, how many naïve college kids have you recruited? Because if you have a lot of girls like Mary Brown on your payroll, you’re probably leaking like a damned sieve.”
I saw the lieutenant glance in his mirror. The brigadier watched me without expression for a while, then said, “Are you done?”
“I don’t know.”
“First let’s get something clear. You are employed by Cobra; that does not entitle you to demand access to every piece of intelligence you think you need. How much the CIA knows about us can be summed up as, they know we exist, and that’s it. They knew Mary Brown worked for us, now they don’t even know that. But they know that her death did not go unpunished.
“The size and nature of our personnel is none of your concern. And finding out whether we are leaking or not, is not part of your brief. But I can assure you, we are not. Now, let me ask you a question.”
“What?”
“Are you going to be a problem?”
I thought about it, then gave my head a single shake. “No, not for you, sir.” Then I added, not hiding the bitterness in my voice, “But I do recommend you review your recruiting and deployment criteria.”
“For reasons already stated.”
In other words, I’d already said that, move on. I nodded.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now, no, we do not know, one hundred percent, that Ben-Amini is in LA. But, from our own analysis of the intel we have, and from friends we have in the Bureau who are also keeping an eye out for him, we are fairly certain he’s there.”
“What about the CIA?”
“Not surprisingly they are keeping very quiet. Beyond stating that they arrested him and have him in custody at a secure location, they are saying nothing. Our intelligence suggests that that secure location is south of LA, at Salton Sea.”
“Is that San Diego? Some kind of eco-disaster in the 1920s?”
“It’s a lake, thirty miles north of Mexicali. It’s pretty remote. It was a holiday resort in the early 20th century, but things went wrong. Now it is desolate, largely desert. The I-10 passes about ten miles to the north. It forms the end of the Coachella Valley, where Palm Springs is, but Palm Springs is thirty-five miles to the northwest of the lake. As I said, it’s remote, and it is mainly desert.”
I nodded. “Remote, but relatively easy access to roads and air transport if you need it.”
“Mm-hm, and an hour’s drive from Calexico and the Mexican border. A comparatively simple, fifteen-hour drive to Culiacan, in Sinaloa, and a mere hour and a half by private plane. All of which is consistent with your findings in Paris.”
I glanced at him and said, dryly, “I thought we were not law enforcement investigators, just executioners.”
He didn’t answer me and after a moment I noticed we hadn’t taken any turns for a while. We seemed suddenly to have a direction. I glanced out of the window and saw we were moving toward the I-90.
“Obviously,” he said, “your primary objective will be to eliminate the target. But it would do no harm at all if, as a secondary objective, you could gather intelligence on the CIA’s purpose in holding Ben-Amini, his connection with Hussein Saleh and Jaden Abdullah, and above all what they are discussing with Mexico.”
I gave him something approximating a smile. “I had that pretty much penciled in, sir. I also want to know a little more about Samy Arain. I want to know if his agenda is personal or sanctioned by the Agency.”
“Good.” He pulled a large manila envelope from his coat and handed it to me. “I’ll need your old passport and credit card. This is your new identity. There will be no liaison. You are on your own. You are Oliver Frost, an electronics technician from New York, on holiday in Los Angeles. You have a driver’s license and credit card and a thousand dollars in cash. There is also an American Airlines ticket and papers to collect a rental car. I thought you’d appreciate a Wrangler. You may need it. You’re booked in at the Hotel California, downtown LA.”
“Great, I can check out but I can never leave.”
“So, we can drop you at JFK if you like, though you still have a few hours before your flight is due.” He handed me a cell phone. “This is a burner with my number pre-inserted. Call me when you arrive and keep me posted, but do try not to call too often.”
I took the phone and put it in my pocket. “Still no laser pen, huh?”
“We’re working on it. You’ll be the first to test it in the field, I promise.”
I examined his face. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. “Drop me at my place, if it’s all the same to you. I left the P226 and the Maxim in a safe deposit box at the hotel, back in Paris, if you want to send somebody to retrieve them. I want to collect my own weapons from my house.” I saw the question on Byrd’s face and smiled. “DHL to the hotel.”
“Your Sig Sauer.”
“And the Fairbairn and Sykes, sir. I missed it in Paris.”
They dropped me at my house on Shore Drive. I watched the Chevy disappear down the road and make a right on Lafayette. Then I let myself into the blue clapboard cottage, dropped my bag by the door and went into the kitchen, where I stood leaning
on the sink, looking out at the unkempt, overgrown lawn in my backyard.
When you’re dealing with life and death, when you are in an immediate conflict where life is at stake, you cannot afford to get mad, much less allow grief to affect your thoughts or your actions.
In my mind I could see Mary Brown lying motionless on her bed, in the half-light. I remembered the momentary feeling of relief and amusement, when I thought she had succumbed to her hangover, and her lack of sleep. And then there were the vivid images of her eyes, open in the gloom, and the wound at the base of her skull; the knowledge, the implacable, unalterable knowledge, that she was dead.
The knowledge lay there, in her blood, in the simple but irreversible gash in the back of her neck. It cried out for rage, for revenge, for tears. It demanded some kind of outpouring of human emotion. But none came.
It was not that the emotions were not there. I knew they were. But they refused to show themselves. All there was, was a voice in my head that said, “Not yet…not yet…”
I had known her less than twenty-four hours. I had liked her. She had been smart and funny. And innocent. Given time…
I reached in my cupboard and pulled out a bottle of Cardhu. I poured myself a generous measure and pulled off half of it. What the hell! Given time, what? We might have become friends? Lovers? That wasn’t the point. It wasn’t what I had lost. Just as I had lost nothing in Al-Landy. It was what they had lost, what she had lost. It made no sense.
And pain never hurts so much as when it doesn’t make sense.
I went up to the bedroom and opened the trunk at the foot of my bed. Under the bedding and the winter clothes I found the small, gray Samsonite case. I pulled it out and opened it on the bed. I’d had the molded interior made especially. There was the Sig Sauer P226 TacOps in the center, with two boxes of 9mm rounds nestled beside it. Beneath the gun, parallel to it, was the Fairbairn and Sykes fighting knife, sitting razor sharp in its sheath. And packed in the lid were the two holsters: one for battle, to be strapped to the thigh, the other, made of waxed leather to fit under the arm, a concealed carry.
I called the carrier company and told them I wanted a parcel delivered to the Hotel California in Los Angeles, by breakfast the next day. They said they’d send a car to collect it. While I waited I unpacked the case I’d taken to Paris, and packed a new one for California. This one included binoculars, night-vision goggles and things of that sort.
The DHL van came and went, and soon it was time for me to go too. But before I went down to the waiting taxi, I paused for a moment in the bedroom door and looked at the dirty clothes strewn across my bed. They’d still be like that when I returned. I had nobody to deal with that kind of thing, nobody to wait for me to come home.
If I came home.
I wondered briefly what the hell I’d be coming home for, but killed that thought and went down to the cab.
The trip to Los Angeles was uneventful. I played a game in the taxi, in the airport and on the plane, to see if I could spot anyone following me. I couldn’t. And when I thought about it, it seemed unlikely they would anyway. The only people who had seen me in Paris were the two Afghans in the apartment on Rue de Naples, and George Santos, and all three of them were dead.
But I reminded myself not to be too confident. I knew next to nothing about Cobra, except that so far they had struck me as sloppy and unprofessional. Buddy Byrd liked to portray them as slick and well connected with the higher echelons of the CIA and the Bureau, and maybe that was true; but all it meant was that if Cobra was leaking, it was leaking at a very high level. And if that was the case, then the place I needed to start looking out for a tail was in Los Angeles, not New York.
I touched down at eight thirty-five PM California time, collected my bag from baggage reclaim and went to get my car. It was a nondescript kind of muddy beige that the kid at Avis told me was called Gobi. It wasn’t pretty, but I figured it would be just the thing at the Salton Sea.
The sky was turning from dusk to evening as I cruised north along the Harbor Freeway and came off onto West 4th Street, then turned left onto South Olive street. By the time I’d handed the Jeep over to the parking valet, it was gone nine thirty and my belly was telling me it was time for a martini, dry, and a sirloin steak.
I gave the buttons twenty bucks and told him to take my stuff up to the room and leave it on the bed, then I went to find a table on a terrace at one of the two hotel restaurants. The maître d’ sat me next to a table of noisy, overdressed beautiful people: the kind who leave their plastic surgeon’s designer label hanging out of the tucks behind their ears. I’d picked up an issue of the LA Times at the airport and was trying to read it while sipping my drink, but there was an insistence to their yammering that kept drawing me away from the article.
They were in films and they wanted everybody to know about it. I glanced at them and logged them in my mind: two guys and two girls, gender-fluid and not necessarily two couples. One of the guys was older, with a goatee and long floppy hair under a fedora. He was carefully eccentric, a wannabe Orson Welles crossed with Jack Sparrow. He was wearing sunglasses at night, hinting he was a drug user. He was the loudest.
The girls looked like they were aspiring to be in B movies. They were overdressed in too few clothes, with deep-cut necks exposing silicone breasts and bizarrely overdeveloped small muscles. They were trying to laugh through faces paralyzed by Botox, and it was hard to tell them apart, except that one was blonde and the other was a redhead. The fourth character at the table was conspicuously dressed in Armani jeans and a grandfather shirt that was longer than his dark blue blazer. He had long, carefully unkempt hair and a baseball cap. They were not a remarkable crowd for Los Angeles. They were standard-issue rebel bad boys and the girls, though probably not what the Beach Boys had in mind, were standard-issue California girls.
But it was what the wannabe eccentric was saying that had caught my attention.
“…my dear fellow, do you know how difficult it is to get cocaine these days? Or so I am told!” They all laughed. He went on. “I am quite serious! They shut down the Caribbean. The poor Mejicanos were actually making submarines to try and smuggle it in! But it became quite impossible to get any kind of volume past our astute law enforcement boys. So they had to shift their attention to the desert, all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to Baja California, and for a long time it was nigh impossible for border control to stop the flow. It was coming through in trucks, cars, campers, tunnels and hikers—you name it! Blow and crack were just flowing in over the border and law enforcement in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas were just overwhelmed.”
Baseball Cap stroked his chin with mock thought and asked, “How do you know so much, Brad?”
More laughter, but not from Brad. “I had several Mexican friends who told me all about it. From the late eighties, for three decades, successive administrations were powerless before the deluge of illegal immigrants and cocaine: crack and blow, and eventually heroin too. And obviously, the more Mexican immigrants they had here, the bigger their distribution networks. And we, the rich glitterati, or should I say you the rich glitterati, could indulge your passion for snorting to the full, with ever declining prices to boot!”
I was listening to what he was saying, and my mind was beginning to race ahead. It was true that in the ’80s, between them, Florida and Texas had managed largely to shut down the Colombian drug cartels’ access to the States via the Caribbean. It had been partly that which had allowed the Mexicans to take over the traffic, and Sinaloa to rise to its present dominance. First they had seized control of distribution across the border, and then manufacturing itself. They had simply shifted their focus, as Brad was saying, from sea and air across the Caribbean, to land distribution through, over and under the Mexican border.
Brad was going on. “But now, thanks to Mr. Strange-Hair Trump, Mexican immigration is down by somewhere between fifty and sixty percent! It’s outrageous! And with it the supply of blow and crack ha
s dropped through the floor, and, naturally, the prices have started creeping up. I tell you, partying just ain’t fun no more.”
The blonde squealed, “My God! We’ll all have to go back to champagne again!”
“My darling!” Brad gasped. “I never left it, it is the perfect accompaniment to a good old snort!”
“Allegedly!” cried Baseball Cap, and received a chorus of approval, like he’d said something witty:
“Allegedly!”
“Allegedly!”
“Oh, absolutely! Allegedly!”
And they all fell about.
The waiter brought me a salad of avocado and prawns and a glass of ice-cold Chablis. I sipped and stared up at the blind, starless sky. So that was what they were doing, then. The borders were closed, so they were resurrecting the spirit of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, El Padrino.
Now. Now it all made sense.
Chapter Fourteen
My case arrived, as promised, before breakfast the next morning. I checked it was all there, present and correct, strapped the P226 under my arm in the leather holster, and strapped the Fairbairn and Sykes to my right calf, with the sheath inside my boot. For now I was on recon, and the Sig Sauer and the knife would do just fine. Later, when I moved to execute the plan, if I needed more firepower, Ehrenberg, in Arizona, was little more than two hundred miles away on the I-10.
And the I-10 was what I took after a quick breakfast of espresso and croissants. Named here the Christopher Columbus Transcontinental Highway, it cut through Los Angeles as far as Beaumont, then continued through the Coachella Valley, past Palm Springs and through Thousand Palms to Indio, where it turned east through the desert, toward the Colorado River, Ehrenberg, and Phoenix.
It was a hundred-and-thirty-mile drive to Indio, and I took it easy, enjoying the California weather. I arrived shortly before eleven AM and took Highway 111 south and east through Thermal and Mecca, into ever more wild, apocalyptic desert landscapes: gray dust and sand, peppered with palms and what looked like acacias, struggling to survive in a dry, semi-toxic environment where the only water came from a lake that should never have existed, and was every day more poisonous.