by Andy McNab
I sat behind the wheel of my hired Chevy Cruze, checking the bars on my iPhone yet again in case it hadn’t rung because of a weak signal. I must have been there at least fifteen minutes because I’d had to spark up the engine to blow out the mist gathering on the windows. I had a new US Sprint SIM card in my mobile. Now I just had to wait – and hope – that Dino was going to call.
It was pointless heading out of the airport: I had nowhere to go. If Dino fucked me off, I’d dump the rental and make my way to Mexico. I had to crack on, with or without his help.
Ten minutes more of the heater doing its stuff and the mobile kicked off. I grabbed the ignition key and closed down the engine. I didn’t want to miss a word. I checked the screen before hitting answer. The number was blocked.
‘Dino?’
I could hear breathing, not heavy and desperate, but like he was weighing stuff up.
‘Mate, where do you want me?’
Still nothing, but I knew he was there.
‘Dino, mate … Where do you want me?’
‘One last question.’ High-pitched – the same voice as twenty years ago, but sadder, more guarded.
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Tell me the range, man. What was the range I gave you?’
I’d made sure I remembered as much as I could about that job, but the distance between our firing position and the Wolf’s lair had been etched on my brain anyway. It was the only thing that bound us.
‘Four – four – seven. Metres. None of your yards shit.’
I kept it light. His emails had given me the sense that talking with him was going to be like drawing blood from a stone.
Silence again.
He had some more thinking to do, and this time I let him get on with it.
Finally: ‘Sixteen eighty-seven Veld Court. Fredericksburg.’
He gave me a second to write it down, which I didn’t.
‘You got it?’
‘I got it. On my way.’
He closed down before I could get a finger to my screen.
2
Maud had a very nice voice. She came on like a friendly shop assistant. She told me that I was seventy-three miles from my destination; my journey would take a shade over an hour and fifteen.
Maud needed to be more climate-aware. I’d heard sat-nav make plenty of promises it had failed to keep, especially when it was raining; that always slows the traffic. But for now I was following her instructions to the letter: heading east from the airport towards DC, aiming to hit the Beltway, then turn south to Fredericksburg.
I’d waved goodbye to my reception committee a few minutes ago, but they hadn’t paid much attention. I checked the rear-view. They were still a couple of cars back.
It had been ten years since I last drove this route, but the airport and its surroundings still looked much the same. That time it had been summer and the place had reminded me of a high-tech business park, with everything green and manicured. Now the leaves were starting to turn red. They’d soon drop onto the grass, but would be sucked up before they had time to flatten out and go soggy.
I remembered suburbia starting about fifteen miles from the airport, mainly ribbon development either side of the Beltway: vast estates of neat wooden and brick houses, many still under construction. Now, as I made my way east towards the I-495, it began almost from the exit road and spread to the western and northern perimeters of Washington.
Swathes of exposed ground on either side of me were crisscrossed with track marks where the big plant had crawled through vast tracts of woodland, turning it into matchsticks and Dunkin’ Donuts packaging. Foundations were being laid for sprawling estates of houses that each had the same footprint. Giant billboards invited me to share the magic of living there in fall 2012.
I turned south on the 495, through what might have been a leafy Surrey suburb if it hadn’t been for the roar of eight lanes of traffic. Large detached houses lined the roads, each with a seven-seat people-carrier or a gleaming 4x4 in the drive and a basketball hoop on the car port.
After about fifteen minutes I saw the turn-off. Maud told me Dino’s place was now exactly forty-nine miles away, most of it on the freeway.
Within eighteen hours of pinging off the email I’d had a reply from the DEA’s El Paso office, which had nearly made me choke on my coffee. They wanted a photograph. I replied with a crisp ‘No’ and suggested they ask me a question that only Dino and I would know the answer to, a kind of proof-of-life statement.
I got one line back: What color hair?
The grin on my face took me straight back to Costa Rica. How the fuck could I forget that ridiculous bleach job? After three further exchanges via the El Paso office I’d finally got the call I was hoping for. The way Dino sounded, the meet wasn’t going to be a social, so I wasn’t expecting balloons and party poppers after all these years.
I still didn’t know if he could or even would help me, and he still didn’t know why I wanted to see him, but I’d decided that, whatever happened now, I was heading to Mexico tomorrow. I wanted this shit over and done with so I could get back to Moscow.
I sat in the middle lane and went with the flow. The rain had pretty much stopped, but I had my wipers on full blast to get rid of the shit being kicked up off the tarmac by the trucks.
I checked the rear-view.
Sure enough, the Taurus was still two vehicles behind, but a whole lot dirtier now than it had been when it started the day.
3
I got caught behind two massive eighteen-wheelers racing each other along the nearside lanes. Some kind of projectile arced out of one of the cabs, hit the concrete ahead of me and exploded in a burst of yellow spray.
Trucker bombs had become a national epidemic. The long-haul lads were getting a hard time for it, but I had a certain sympathy for them. They could go for a hundred miles or more without finding anywhere to park their rigs safely or legally. The average Joe could take the next exit and hit a gas station or a McDonald’s whenever he felt like a piss, but the big dogs were tied up with weight and height restrictions, and the strong possibility of not being able to turn around again to get back on the freeway.
The only answer was to recycle. They’d finish off their carton of whatever kept them going, refill it and bin it out of the window. There were even piles of shit at the roadside; plastic bags full of what looked like four dog loads from the morning walk. How the fuck did they race each other and take a dump into a plastic bag at the same time?
I started to see signs for the massive US Marine Corps camp and training area at Quantico. After years of seeing it in TV crime shows, most people know Quantico as the place where impossibly good-looking baby FBI agents are trained, and all the special units are based. The DEA also had their equally massive training academy on the same patch, which was about the size of the Isle of Wight. I’d spent quite a lot of time instructing at the FBI academy whenever we’d developed a new technique – for room-clearing, covert entry or whatever – and being on the receiving end of their instruction whenever they came up with something they were happy to share. The flow of information between us had always been good.
You couldn’t see it from the freeway, but Quantico looked more like a seventies university than the centre of anti-everything. Agents or students wore different colour polo shirts to ID who they were and what they were there for. Everything was squeaky clean, including the language. I swore in the dining-room once – well, I said ‘shit’ when I tipped over my Coke. The whole place went quiet. You’d have thought I’d slotted the cook, but maybe I’d interrupted one of the prayer gatherings they had over the lunch trays. The training area was just as bad. Bears might shit in the woods, but no one at Quantico was even allowed to piss in them. It was one hell of a training centre, but I hated the place.
I guessed the presence of the DEA academy explained why Dino was now in this part of the world. Or maybe he was big-timing it at their downtown HQ. The fact I’d been FaceTimed and treated to a Tauru
s escort had to mean he was something hardcore, or maybe operating super undercover.
I hadn’t had the slightest indication from him about what he was doing, just a collection of one-line emails and a call that added up to: What the fuck do you want?
The Taurus cut past me on the inside. The two guys had their heads forward, not talking, and took the exit at speed. Surveillance over. It looked like all they wanted right now was to be first to the academy’s car wash.
4
After passing most of Fredericksburg and a series of signs for the National Military Park, Maud told me it was time to leave the freeway.
When I’d done my junior Brecon command course as a young infantry soldier, Fredericksburg 1862 was cited as an example of how easily disorganized fighting can turn into total slaughter. Nine thousand men died as the Union tried to drive further south into the Confederacy, and by the end of the battle the town was a burned-out shell. This whole area had suffered more American dead during the civil war than in two world wars, the Korean war and the Vietnam war combined.
I drove past churches and schools that were all built on one level with plenty of space around them. They didn’t do sidewalks here, and most of the plots weren’t fenced. The dwellings were wooden, colonial-style single- or two-storey, some with verandas, some not. Everything was as shiny as it would have been before everything went tits up in 1862, but there were a whole lot more double-door garages, basketball hoops and SUVs in evidence. Small forests of mailboxes stood alongside the road, so the posties didn’t have to leave their cabs to deliver.
1687 Veld stood beside a turning circle at the end of a wooded cul-de-sac. Only the window shutters – which were the red of the Confederate flag – singled it out from its cream-painted weatherboard neighbours. They were permanently open; they wouldn’t move even if you wanted them to. A black Nissan truck sat outside with a pair of sun-gigs hanging off the rear-view.
The front door opened the instant I pulled into the driveway. The shadowy figure who stood there in a black pullover and jeans didn’t look much like the guy I’d spent time with in ’93, and he didn’t look as if he was a big noise in the DC HQ – or anywhere else – either. This version of Dino had a crew-cut, but the dyed blond was grey. He drooped at the shoulders; the air had been let out of him.
He had to turn sideways to negotiate the four stone steps that led down to the drive, like somebody had just given him a dead leg.
I climbed out of the Chevy as he passed under his hoop. It was in the same position as the others in the development, but rusty and with rotting string.
I held out a hand. ‘All right, mate?’
The skin on his face had lost its lustre and elasticity. It didn’t crease as he tried a smile and held out his hand in return. His shake conveyed as much commitment as his call.
‘You haven’t changed, Nick.’
I was about to say something similar about him, but he shook his head. ‘No need to bullshit, man. Plenty’s changed.’ He wasn’t wrong: he looked twenty years older than he should, and his teeth were worse than Kitty’s.
He let go of my hand, bent down and tapped his left leg just above the knee. Only alloy or hard plastic made that sound.
I had the feeling I wasn’t going to get any more of that hombre shit from him.
5
He did a crablike shuffle up the steps ahead of me, a performance he seemed to have well squared away. He held the door open and ushered me in. It was gloomy. Maybe he didn’t like light, these days – or paying electricity bills.
‘Go on through, Nick.’ His high-pitched voice seemed to suit his new body better than it had the young, fit one, but it also made him sound sad and resigned. It wasn’t funny any more.
The house was open plan and sparsely furnished, almost as if a bachelor pad had been planted inside a family home. The dark-wood floor was past its best, but Mr Sheen had done his stuff. There was a faint aroma of disinfectant; at least it wasn’t that pungent flowery shit that filled my nose everywhere in Moscow.
Dino double-locked the front door before waving me through to the kitchen area – wall-to-wall pine with an industrial-sized two-door steel fridge in one corner. Six white mugs were lined up on a shelf, as straight as a row of guardsmen. Every surface was spotless. The sink was clean and dry, with not so much as a watermark.
The lone brown-leather sofa at the other end of the room looked like it had just been delivered by IKEA. The black leather La-Z-Boy beside it had clearly seen the lion’s share of the arse time. A drinks coaster and the world’s supply of remote controls had been precisely arranged on a small rectangular table by its armrest. A large flat-screen TV took pride of place, with cable, Blu-ray and Xbox wired in with similar care. My Timberlands echoed as I headed towards the sofa.
Dino sounded so subdued as he invited me to sit that I wondered if he was on a prescription. He collapsed into the La-Z-Boy and must have pressed a button somewhere because its footrest unfolded with an electronic whine.
There was a couple of seconds’ silence in the semi-darkness, broken only by a car turning out front. Dino tapped his leg once more. ‘I was held hostage for thirteen months in ’08 – took a round as I escaped, just above the knee. Now I got this fucker.’ He tapped it again.
I didn’t bother giving him sympathy. That wasn’t what he needed. ‘Cartel?’
‘Sort of.’ He nodded. ‘Anyway, I’m pensioned off now, part of the agent-enrichment programme up in Quantico. They tell me I need to pass on my wealth of knowledge and experience to the next generation.’
‘What about your two mates? If they’d come all the way I wouldn’t have needed sat-nav.’
He didn’t see the funny side of it. ‘They’re never far away. They kinda look after me when I need them to.’ He hesitated. ‘I can’t stand the look in their eyes. I’m the guy they hope they’ll never become. They pity me.’
It was clear he wasn’t just talking about his leg.
6
‘A big part of the programme is explaining how this shit happened.’ He massaged his thigh, like he was kneading dough. ‘I suggest ways they can avoid getting lifted, and how they can cope with it if they do. They wheel me out on stage every two or three weeks and I do my party piece.’
If his appearance had anything to do with his time as a captive, they really must have put him through the wringer. Or maybe he was just one of those people who react badly to such things. Biology dictates destiny and all that shit.
I thought about telling him I’d been a PoW in Baghdad, and lifted a couple of times since. Maybe it would make him feel more comfortable. But maybe it wouldn’t. I didn’t know enough about him yet to be sure. I decided to let him do the talking.
‘I’d offer you a drink, Nick, but I don’t do that stuff any more. I got sodas, though.’ He managed to raise a smile. ‘And I went out this morning to get you some tea.’
‘Not that Lipton shit – the stuff in the little yellow packets?’
He nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘I’ll take a coffee.’
The button was pressed and the La-Z-Boy stood to attention.
I stayed put as he got up, taking in what I could of my surroundings in the gloom. This room was beyond spotless. It was sterile. There were no pictures of family, no end-of-course photos of our hero with ‘DEA’ emblazoned across his body armour – just a few prints of lakes on the wall in thin aluminium frames. He’d probably bought them as a job lot with the sofa. It all had the feeling of a short-term rental that had recently had a deep clean.
Lights came on at last as he made it to the kitchen area. The floor and flat-screen gleamed, and I couldn’t see a single particle of airborne dust.
The only items that looked remotely like personal effects – and even then only because I knew something of his background – were two rows of books on a shelf to the left of the flat-screen. They were all drug-war related.
Dino leaned on the breakfast bar to take his weight off the prosthetic as the cof
fee percolator chugged away. ‘Milk? Cream? Sugar?’
It was hard to tell by his tone if he was bored with me or with life in general.
‘Black’s fine, thanks.’
Two guardsmen were selected from the line and filled. He passed me one, positioned his own dead centre of the coaster, then stretched out the La-Z-Boy once more.
I had nowhere to put my mug so I just kept hold of it while I waited for it to cool.
Dino sparked up as soon as the chair stopped whining. ‘What do you want from me, Nick? You didn’t say anything in those emails of yours, and you’ve come all the way from Hong Kong. It must be big-time.’
‘I need some of that agent-enrichment knowledge you’ve got tucked away in there.’ I tapped my head. ‘I need to find someone who’s being held by a cartel in Mexico. Well, as far as I know she is. It happened a few days ago. So I thought, Who’ll know the way things go down there?’
Dino nodded and took occasional sips of his brew as I started to explain the Katya situation.
‘I don’t have the name of the guy who’s got her, but they call him Peregrino …’
His arm froze mid-sip. Then he slowly replaced his guardsman on the coaster. His hand gave a mild tremor – enough for a bead of coffee to roll down the outside of the mug.
‘You all right, mate?’
He said nothing, just gave a couple of quick nods and took some deep breaths.
I tried a sip of my coffee. I’d thought I’d been talking long enough for it to cool, but I was wrong.
Dino had sorted himself out but left his coffee where it was. ‘Nick, you’ve got to know something. It’s worse than you thought. Peregrino …’ he leaned towards me, as if the walls had ears ‘… that’s his new name, like the artist formerly known as fucking Prince … He’s the son of Jesús.’
‘The big boy from Nazareth?’
‘Jesús Orjuela, for fuck’s sake. The Wolf. This fucker’s name is Jesús, just like his dad. He was the first and only son, remember?’