by Blake Banner
I followed the road on, through a landscape of desolate, ruined and crumbling marinas and holiday resorts, stark and corroded under the Sonoran, Colorado Desert sun.
Eventually I came to a fork in the road, where an expanse of dry, yellow grass stretched down to the water, and far across the lake I could see the misty forms of the Santa Rosa Mountains. I stopped at the intersection and observed a couple of peeling, eroded signs that advertised new homes for sale. It didn’t look like many people had taken up the offer—aside from the Central Intelligence Agency, that was.
There was a green sign that said the road was called Mecca Avenue. I drove down it for a couple of minutes, slow, looking around me, studying the surrounding area. The road was flanked by damaged and dying acacias, occasional oaks, and, scattered here and there across the dust and the dry grass, the ubiquitous palms. There was, despite the desert nature of the area, plenty of cover, especial for a nocturnal assault.
Soon, as I approached the water’s edge, one and two-story houses began to appear. They were rundown, dilapidated, overgrown with untended trees and shrubs. They all looked uninhabited. The power lines were supported on old wooden pylons, and on many the cables had snapped and dangled, lifeless down the poles.
After a quarter of a mile the road turned sharp left, and here, on the corner, was a large house of recent construction, with a high perimeter wall. On the inside of the wall, tall palms grew and looked well-kept. I estimated the size of the entire place, including the surrounding gardens, at about a hundred yards by seventy-five. At a quick mental estimate that put it at about twenty-two thousand five hundred square feet.
The walls were too high to see over and the big, steel gates in the south wall were solid, and offered no view of the interior. What was clear was that there was an abundance of trees on the inside, but whether they were all palms, or whether there was foliage closer to the ground, was impossible to tell.
I drove around for a while: Damascus Avenue, Tripoli, Algeria… Perhaps they had wanted to evoke A Thousand and One Nights, but with the desolation and the inescapable feeling of a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland, all those names managed to suggest was the devastation of the Middle East, right here in California.
I made my way back to Highway 111 and drove slowly back to Mecca, where the fondness for Middle Eastern names continued. But unlike what I had seen of that other Mecca, where Kaaba was, here the streets were wide and well-kept, clean and orderly—with very few people on them.
I drove about for a bit until finally, on the corner of Date Palm Street and Seventh Street, I found Mecca Palms Realtors, pulled over and killed the engine. I stepped into the growing heat and the sunshine, crossed the broad sidewalk and pushed through the plate-glass doors.
There were two people sitting at wooden desks, a man in back in a blue suit with the kind of heavy-rimmed glasses nobody wears anymore, and an attractive, middle-aged woman with a white lace blouse and a blue suit, and the kind of reading glasses that make a lady look like a librarian with interesting secrets. They both looked up as I came in, and the woman smiled.
“Good morning, how may I help you?”
I jabbed my thumb in the direction of the lake. “I was just looking around Salton Sea. Biggest lake in California. Cryin’ shame state it’s in. Land down there must be dirt cheap. What you got for sale on the waterfront?”
She made an expression that wanted to be a smile but was more like a wince.
“We don’t actually have a lot. What did you have in mind?”
I snorted. “I’d buy the whole darned thing if it was available. I only saw one house that showed signs of habitation. Down the bottom of Abu Dabi Drive or some shit, don’t mind my language, miss.”
She fixed her smile and blinked a few times. “Mecca,” she said. “Mecca Avenue.”
“Who owns that?”
“Well, I am not absolutely sure. The land was sold privately. The buyer had a lot of money but refused to go through an agent. We thought it was a developer, didn’t we, Phil?”
She didn’t look at him, but he nodded and smiled. “Uh-huh.”
“Then they just tore down the old building and built that vast palace in a matter of six months. We thought it would be the first of many, didn’t we, Phil?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But it wasn’t. There has been no movement since. Except that the owner seems to have moved in.”
“The owner, huh? What kind of a guy is he? You think he might sell?
The man in back made a doubtful face and looked at the back of the woman’s head, to see what she might say. She examined her pencil from various angles and made the same kind of doubtful face, like it had seeped through from the back of her head to her face.
“He is, curiously enough, an Arab. He has actually only been seen a couple of times, by the boy delivering the groceries, the satellite TV engineer, and who else, Phil?”
“Glen, when he went to fix their router.”
She nodded. “And Glen. He is reclusive, for sure.”
“A reclusive Ay-rab, huh? Find all kinds in your backyard these days, and that’s for sure!”
She leaned forward, her eyes wide and her eyebrows knit. She spoke quietly with elaborate lips, like she was mouthing the words instead of speaking them. “They say,” she said, “that he has armed guards!”
“No! For cryin’ out loud…!”
“Well what is he guarding that is that valuable, is what I’d like to know!”
“You have a point,” I said. “Perhaps it’s hisself? How many guys has he got there? What about dogs?”
“Mrs. Vanderveldt, that’s Bobby’s mom, the boy who delivers the groceries? She says that he says there are a dozen men there. They do two shifts, he says, twenty-four hours night and day.”
“Holy cow!” I said, “You don’t say! And I guess they have dogs and everything!”
“Dogs, really nasty ones, those Rottweilers? At least two of them, patrolling the grounds.”
“Not a very friendly guy, and like you say, what has he got that is so valuable? You don’t like to cast aspersions just because a man happens to be an Ay-rab, but all the same…” I didn’t want to ask her about alarms because it might look too obvious, but I was hoping she’d go there herself. Instead all she said was, “Exactly!”
“These people, I have nothing against foreigners, mind,” I said, holding up both hands, “We are all, after all, the children of immigrants…” They both made doubtful faces and I pressed on. “Though they were immigrants who built this country, not destroyed it! These people come here and they think it’s like it was back home, where you can do as you please. But this is America. Here, you can shoot a man in self-defense, fair enough, but we don’t take the law into our own hands. We install an alarm system, and we let the cops do their job, am I right?”
She sat up straight, wide-eyed. “Oh, but that’s the thing, they haven’t!”
I frowned. “Haven’t what?”
“Installed an alarm system!”
Phil sat back in his chair, nodding knowingly. I muttered something about her kidding me and he waved a pencil at me.
“You know why, don’t you?”
She ignored him and added, “My brother-in-law was on the construction team. Absolutely no alarm systems were installed.”
I knew exactly why they hadn’t, but I jerked my head at him and asked, “Why you reckon?”
“Because,” he said, and pushed his glasses up his nose, “if they have an intruder, they want to deal with him their own way, and dump the body in the lake, no questions asked.”
“Absolutely no alarm system,” she repeated as though he hadn’t spoken. “Video surveillance cameras, oh yes, plenty of them, but no alarm system.”
I sighed and shook my head. “And then they call us lawless. But you say you don’t have any properties on your books that I can look at right now?”
“Not actually on the lake…”
“And how did he get it, if you
don’t mind me asking?”
“Seems he approached the owner direct. Must have known him personally…”
Or accessed the land register, I thought.
“Well,” I said. “I’ll drop in again before I leave town. Meantime, let’s just hope that ain’t a darned bomb factory they’re buildin’ down there!”
They both watched me leave with alarmed faces and I made my way back to the Jeep. Phil had been right on the money about why they had no alarm system, but the woman had also been right that they had twenty-four-hour video surveillance. I had spotted the cameras mounted on the walls. Any attempt to break into that compound was going to be difficult, and met with extreme force.
And I still didn’t know for sure that it was him in the house.
I crossed the sunny street. The midday temperatures were rising in the glare of the sun. I put on my shades and climbed into the cab of the Jeep. As I pulled away, south down Date Palm Avenue, toward the 111, I called Brigadier Alexander, “Buddy” Byrd.
“Yes.”
“I’ve had a look at the place. It’s a fortress. All you can see from the road is the walls and the outer perimeter cameras. I need a couple of flyovers and aerial photographs.”
“OK, I’ll arrange the flyover and email you the pictures. What about intel on what’s inside?”
I shrugged as I crossed the Hammond Road roundabout and turned north onto the highway.
“So far the only people who have had access to the interior of the house are the delivery boy from the grocery store, the satellite TV engineer and the IT engineer, to fix their router. I don’t see myself delivering groceries, so can we interfere with their electronics and have me drop in as an engineer?”
“You’re talking about EMP weapons. Let me get back to you on that. We may be able to arrange something. The only other alternative would be to enlist the aid of the electric company, and that’s not going to happen. The FBI and the CIA can do that, but we can’t.”
“You have access to an EMP generator?”
If I sounded incredulous it was because I was. That technology was little short of science fiction.
“Maybe. We have a range of weapons under development, and one of them is an EMP generator. It hasn’t been tested in the field yet…”
“How big is the damned thing, sir? Last thing I heard they were being flown around in jumbo jets.”
He laughed. “They’ve been shrinking. We can fit one with a modest range into the back of a Dodge RAM.”
“What’s a modest range?”
“About half a mile.”
“Jesus! Are you serious?”
“Of course I’m serious, Bauer.”
Of course he was. He was always serious.
“When will you know if we can use it?”
“I’ll have to talk to a couple of people and get back to you tonight.”
“If we have access to this thing, maybe I won’t need to recon the inside. I might move straight to the execution phase.”
“Hmm…” He sounded doubtful. “We’ll talk about it. Anything else?”
“No, just get me the flyover pictures ASAP.”
“You’ll have them this evening.”
I hung up and cruised the valley, toward Indio, where I would join the I-10, west and north bound. EMPs were among those weapons, like lasers or microwave rays, that you always associated with science fiction. You heard that there were boys at the Skunk Works, or at White Sands, who were working on them and developing them, though you never really believed it would come to anything. But, I reminded myself, that was also true of stealth technology not so long ago. Now it was a part of the standard arsenal.
An EMP that could be loaded into the back of a RAM, and had a range of half a mile, would be one hell of a weapon. I just wondered what the power source would be. One thing was for sure: You wouldn’t be plugging it into your car battery. I figured they’d be pre-charged cells, or batteries, good for a single discharge.
I’d have to wait and see.
I got back to the Hotel California after lunch, so I went to the bar, climbed on a stool and asked the Australian kid in the burgundy waistcoat if he could wrangle me a steak sandwich and a dry martini. He said he could and fixed the martini before disappearing to find the steak.
I had taken my first sip and bobbed the olive a couple of times when I felt a presence next to me. I looked up and saw a woman who was on the wow side of good-looking. She was leaning with her elbows on the bar and smiling at me.
“Did you scare away the waiter?”
“Yeah. I sent him to get me a steak sandwich. He promised to come back, though.”
She nodded at my drink. “That looks like exactly what I need.”
“I’d let you have mine, but I already bobbed the olive. Have a peanut.” I slid the bowl of peanuts over and smiled at her for the first time. “Hard day at the office?”
“Something like that. I’m in real estate, and the market is just going crazy at the moment. I had some clients I was supposed to meet today. We’re talking big, big numbers. And they just never showed up. No call, no message, nada.”
“That sucks.” I jerked my head at the returning barman, who was carrying my steak sandwich. “But here comes the cavalry. Thanks…” The last was directed at Bruce, the boy from Oz, and I added, “And fix the lady a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred.”
She had the good grace to giggle and held out her hand. “Miriam Grant.”
I took her hand. She had a good, firm grip. “Oliver Frost.”
I bit into my sandwich, wondering if I was going to invite her to dinner.
Chapter Fifteen
She was funny, beautiful and great company, and for those reasons I decided I could not invite her to dinner, or indeed see her again. At least not until the job was done.
While I finished my sandwich, she asked me what I was doing in LA. I told her I was on holiday, and, to deflect the conversation, I asked her about real estate in Southern California. Then I sat and listened with half an ear, while I thought about the EMP and tried to devise a plan B if I wasn’t able to knock out the villa’s electronics.
But all the while I couldn’t quite silence that other part of my brain that was thinking that Miriam was witty, intelligent and engaging, and I was enjoying being with her. She wasn’t babbling. She kept drawing me back from my thoughts because she said things that were perceptive and worth listening to. And that was when I made my decision not to see her again. The last thing I needed was that kind of distraction.
I wiped my mouth and fingers on a paper napkin and drained my drink. When I looked at her I could see she had read the gesture and was disappointed.
“Gotta go,” I said.
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “Me too, I guess. Thanks for the drink.” She slid gracefully off her stool and hesitated. “How long are you in town?”
“Couple of days…”
She made a rueful face. “But I guess you’re real busy, being on holiday.” There was an edge of irony to her voice and for a moment I wasn’t sure what to say, but she laid a hand on my arm and laughed. “Don’t sweat it. I’m just pulling your leg. I need to get my head down and find some new buyers anyway. Imperial County is a hard sell.”
Something clicked in my head and I frowned.
“Imperial County? That’s on the border, right? Calexico…?”
“That’s the one, nestled snug between Arizona and Mexicali. Exactly where nobody wants to live.” She didn’t hide the sarcasm in her voice. “That’s why these buyers were such a godsend…” She patted my arm. “Anyway, look, I have bored you more than enough with my silly problems. Thanks for the drink, and you have a real swell holiday…”
We had been making our faltering way toward the lobby as we spoke. Now we stood outside the elevators and I stopped her as she made to leave.
“Hang on, Miriam, you haven’t bored me at all. Look, are you free tonight?”
She smiled but made a show of checking her schedule o
n her cell. “Well, I am, as a matter of fact, from seven thirty onward. Why, what did you have in mind?”
“Dinner. You know a nice restaurant? Maybe you can convince me to buy Imperial County.”
She laughed and agreed to pick me up in a taxi at seven thirty.
I watched her walk across the lobby with a swing of her hips that most women don’t remember how to do anymore. She became a black silhouette against the bright glare of the plate-glass doors, and then she was gone.
I rode the elevator to my floor, thinking about Imperial County, tucked snug between Arizona and Mexicali. The main town down there was El Centro, which was, as the name suggested, roughly at the center of a broad expanse of farmland and ranches that extended all the way down to Calexico and the Mexican border. It was a no-brainer that farmland and ranches would have large barns appropriate for storing bulky produce and keeping it dry and safe from the elements. So, reaching a little, it might make sense for anyone running any kind of contraband from Mexico into California to want to buy real estate in that area.
But that was the kind of long-standing, old-school thinking that belonged in the last three decades of the last century. In the last twenty years things had changed a lot. Cocaine and then heroin had become the main products to cross the border, pushing the cartels’ turnover up into the hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars every year. And they were developing ever more innovative and creative ways of importing and storing their goods.
The safe house by the lake, the Yemeni guys in Paris, the CIA… They were all parts of a puzzle that did not fit into the old model. Something else was going on. Something completely different.
Maybe I was way off track with Miriam. Maybe I was just giving myself an excuse to take out a beautiful woman. God knew I had had a lack of that kind of thing in recent years. But still, I thought, her buyers had made me curious. She might provide useful information. I had nothing to lose by talking to her.