by David Poyer
“The record should show that,” the Brit delegate prompted. Dan said into the mike, “The record should show that: on a speculative basis only, no commitments by the United States or any other government.”
* * *
He was sweating by the time the discussion broke. Seeing the punji pit he’d almost stepped into. As they stood to polite applause he muttered to his new friend, “Thanks for saving my can there.”
“We must all help one another,” the Briton said quietly, and limped off the platform. Dan, watching, realized he had an artificial leg.
* * *
It took twenty minutes after the panel ended for Dr. White to catch up with him. In fact she was lying in wait for him outside the men’s room. Her mouth looked as if it had been drawn with white chalk. “Tell me you didn’t make a public commitment to a security guarantee for Kazakhstan,” she hissed.
“Uh, it might have started out that way. But the situation got retrieved.”
He told her about the British diplomat’s skillful pullback of his gaffe. White fitted a hand over her eyes. “But the transcript. What’ll the transcript say?”
“I got to the woman who’s producing it. From the Carnegie Endowment. It won’t be in there.”
She wavered, caught between further anger and, he saw, the knowledge that she’d asked him to sit in; chewing further on him, or passing the ding up the line, would be admitting her mistake. At last she said he had to watch everything he said. Even a hint that the U.S. was considering a security commitment in central Asia would trigger every immune system left in Russia, and send the Chinese to the battlements as well.
But maybe he’d succeeded in retrieving his misstep, because he hadn’t heard anything since, no calls from a livid Sebold or outraged cablegrams from the president’s personal son of a bitch, Holt. And the parallel negotiations must have gone all right, because Air Force One landed again that afternoon, back from central Asia with De Bari and the presidents and other plenipotentiaries from the region. Blair was invited to the signing ceremony for the protocol or whatever it was, Dan hadn’t gotten a clear picture exactly what, back in the Catherine Palace. But he thought he might as well make himself invisible for a while.
* * *
He woke suddenly in the icy dark, clawing for the bedside light. Gusts rattled the windows, shrieking. This time he’d heard them screaming, behind the wind. The ones he’d left behind, while he went on. But the dark presence was with him. He couldn’t see it. Only feel its paralyzing closeness, as if it were lying next to him.
When he reached out, her side of the bed was empty.
The bedside phone beeped again. He realized it was what had woken him. As he lifted it even the memory of the dream faded, leaving only a lingering terror. Black outside the window. The sea crashing far below. “Yeah?”
“Lenson?” An unfamiliar voice. Male.
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“You might want to check on your wife.”
He tried to focus. It felt as if he were still in the dream, or maybe in another one, a follow-on, the way dreams caboosed from one scene to another. “What? What’d you say?” He wasn’t sure if that was exactly what the guy had said. It wasn’t the hotel desk—the accent was American. “Check on her? Is that what you said?”
“Try the third floor.”
“The third floor … wait. Who is this?”
The rattle of a handset.
Squinting at his watch, he couldn’t tell whether it was 4 a.m. or 4 p.m. Anonymous calls … nightmares … But where was she? He called out, but got no answer from the loft. She wasn’t in the bathroom, either.
At last he pulled on pants and shoes and went out into the corridors. They were cold as meat lockers. When he saw his breath in the air he wished he’d put on a shirt too. But he kept going, though he wasn’t sure what he was looking for. The third-floor elevator was locked out. He got off on the fourth and walked down.
He was coming down the hall when he saw them waiting. For a moment he didn’t recognize them, or realize what they were there for. He wondered again if this was all part of the dream. The cold. The loneliness. The voice on the phone. The stocky men in sport coats, just standing around. Relaxed yet alert, heads cocked as they stared at him. As if listening to voices that whispered on and on through the wires that led to their ears.
10
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Back in counterdrug, two days later. Exhausted, jet-lagged, he gripped his skull in both hands as Meilhamer ladled out every item of minutiae that had gone through the office since he’d left. But he wasn’t listening. He was back again in that moment when he’d realized what the Secret Service agents meant. Whose suite Blair must be visiting. At four in the morning.
And, no, he hadn’t made the first motion toward that door. Not only because it would have been futile to try to force his way in. He didn’t want to face it, or her. Not feeling the way he did.
Because he wanted to kill them both, then himself. Tear her, and the man she was with in there, into bloody, palpitating fragments with his bare hands.
Instead he’d gone back to the room. Waiting, awake in the dark, for her to come back. But she hadn’t.
He’d watched Air Force One take off from the air lounge at Pulkovo, where White and Solas and the rest of the U.S. conference team were waiting for the other 747, the backup. The central Asians and their entourages had taken up so much space there wasn’t any left for lower-ranking staff. And then it was delayed. So he hadn’t seen her there, either, and had gotten in at five that morning eastern standard time, without a wink of sleep en route, and come straight to the Old Executive because he couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“… and you might want to sign this card. Ellie Ihlemann had her boy. Seven pounds eight ounces.” Dan stared at a Polaroid of a wizened, scarlet humanoid. Scribbled his signature. Added Get well soon, which he realized too late didn’t jibe with the sugary printed sentiment, or even make sense.
He cleared his throat and tried to concentrate. On anything … “Tell me about the Baptist, Bry. He popped up yet?”
“I try to stay clear of the operational side. You should too.”
He ignored that. “Who’s in?”
“Bloom and Ed Lynch. Oh, and Marty’s back from Burma. Alvarado’s down in Miami trying to help pick up the pieces. That boy’s a real hard worker. Always volunteering. Always the last to leave.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s always the one who locks up,” his assistant said. “Don’t know what he’s working on—it’s always in Spanish. But he’s always there, beavering away.”
Dan was asking him to send Miles Bloom in when the DEA agent poked his head around the jamb. Dan beckoned him in, saying to Meilhamer, “Okay, then what’s on my plate on the administrative side?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“You gave me signing authority when you left. Remember? Copies of everything that went out are in that blue folder. You’ve got a chance to catch up, next couple of days. Mrs. C’ll be out of town with the president. Manila this time. It’ll be quiet around here.”
Meilhamer smoothed his shirtfront, smiling and bobbing on his toes. Dan gave him the compliment he so obviously wanted and nodded to Bloom again to come in.
The DEA liaison brought him up to date on the fallout from what was looking more and more like a fiasco in Miami. The raid had netted lots of bodies, but either has-beens, blasts from the past, or with no discoverable connection to drugs at all. Local consuls, political donors, media figures whose arrests had embarrassed the cops who made the tags. “It was a setup,” Bloom said. “Same as with the shoot-down. The only single thing we did they didn’t expect was bust the Haiti meet.”
“Which we ad-hoced at the last minute, from Key West.” Dan eyed the door Bloom had closed. “What you’re saying is, we have a leaker.”
“Either that or they’re reading our comms.”
“I
s that likely?”
“It’s never likely, but ordure occurs. I’d suspect a human source, myself.”
“Somebody in this office?”
“Could be one of a long string on this one. All the way from the top on down to the foot soldiers.”
Dan remembered how much Tony Holt had known about the operation. The rumors about drug use among the civilian staff. De Bari supposedly blowing coke in the governor’s mansion. His wife’s ties to organized crime. He blinked, shook them off. The administration had counted on this bust to prove it was hammering the drug trade. Giving it away wouldn’t have been in its interest.
What about his own people? Everybody in his office had known about Hot Handoff. Should he start suspecting them? Lynch, Harlowe, Sergeant Ihlemann—she saw a lot, heard a lot, at that front desk. Alvarado—could the cartel have gotten hold of one of Luis’s relatives, squeezing him that way? Certainly the Coast Guard officer was closely associated with South American operations. The banal, cunning little Meilhamer? Bloom himself? He cleared his throat, watching Miles watching him and knowing he was thinking the same thing about him. “So … where to from here?”
“On the cartel? I’ll pass along DEA’s view. Smartest thing we can do right now is to let the silt settle. Know how when you’re spearfishing, you go for a big langouste and miss, he kicks a lot of sand up into the water? We still picked up some heavy players in Haiti. A clear gotcha. Let’s see how things shake out with Tejeiro, and where Nuñez pops up next.”
Dan swiveled, looking out and down a hundred feet into the loading area. The GSA guys were playing b-ball with trash bags again. One scored a two-pointer as he watched. Unfortunately the bag broke, showering documents all over the asphalt. Yeah. Great security.
He was struggling with the old craving. But getting drunk wasn’t going to help with Blair, or Nuñez, or with anything else that was wrong. He needed sleep, and to get things straight with her, one way or the other. “Okay, I guess we can let it ride awhile,” he said at last. Glad Bloom was here. Behind the breezy facade, the guy was sharp.
“Another issue, if we’re done with that, boss.”
The first time one of them had called him that. He leaned back. “Shoot.”
Bloom cracked the door and yelled, “Ed! Get your ass in here.” The Air Force major took the last chair, and they all three sat uncomfortably intimate, knees bumping.
“Here’s the picture,” Lynch said. “Remember, you told us to keep an eye peeled for anything pointing to a linkup of terrorists and druggies.”
“Right.”
“Well, the FAA’s surfaced something.”
Dan told them to go on, and Bloom started. “Kind of a weird indicator; we’re not sure what it means. Aviation Administration called it in. Has to do with someone who might be trying to penetrate the cargo-handling setup for UPS.”
Lynch told him that United Parcel Service, which most people thought of as the guy in shorts who came to your door in a brown truck, was actually one of the biggest airline operations in the world. “Six hundred airplanes, making it, like, the tenth biggest. That’s how the package gets from the truck that picked it up from you, to the truck that delivers it. The Office of Transportation Security/Civil Aviation Security service—that’s the part of the Transportation Department that does security on air cargo. They put out a bulletin reporting inquiries by a group in Pomona, California, called International Blessings. They were importing empty containers from Mexico.”
“Wait a minute.” Dan rubbed his face. “I missed that. What’d you say was in these containers?”
“Nothing.”
“I meant originally. When they were shipped.”
“There was never anything in them. As far as Aviation Security could tell.”
“That’s illegal? Shipping nothing?”
“Course not. That’s why they got bulletined, not charged. There’s a write-up, you want to read it?”
“Maybe later. What kind of containers?”
“The usual air cargo boxes. They load up ramps into the plane. Like sea containers, only smaller.”
“So they’re coming in from Mexico, you think it’s drug related? Dry runs for shipping drugs by air cargo? Illegal immigrants? Or what?”
Bloom said, “That’s why they liaised up. We put a warning out, thinking yeah, like you said, it might be a new wrinkle on transporting stuff. Using the air cargo system, which is admittedly pretty loosey-goosey security-wise.”
“Is it? A new wrinkle, I mean.”
“I talked to the guys who looked into it. They X-rayed the containers, put sniffer dogs in and everything. No secret compartments. No traces of coke, opiates, cannabinols. Nada,” Bloom said. “That’s kind of the universal conclusion.”
Dan said, as patiently as he could, “So these idiots were shipping empty containers. Why are you telling me?”
“Because you asked us to pop a flag on links with any kind of terror organization. And this International Blessings is an Islamic outfit. The guys who contracted for the delivery say they’re a humanitarian nonprofit, trying to put together a rapid-reaction package to go to Mideast countries suffering natural disasters.”
“So it might be up and up. Like Catholic Relief, United Jewish Appeal.”
Lynch said, “Except what kind of humanitarian supplies would they be importing from Mexico? The guys I talked to over at Transportation were thinking charter fraud, money laundering, some kind of reshipment. But they still haven’t gotten a lock on anything actually illegal.”
“What about it, Ed? You think this could be terror-related?”
The major said he thought it was more likely drug-related. He couldn’t speak specifically to UPS, but as Bloom had said, the international air cargo system was definitely porous. There was no accountability or tracking procedure for consignments. Customs was undermanned, so they didn’t actually look inside more than one in a thousand containers, and ramp security—of aircraft at the gate, being loaded and unloaded—was lax.
“There was a drop in theft when containers came in, but the crooks have figured out how to get access. The stats on drug shipments via air container are rising too. A lot of coke moves by air. You see it in walls and ceilings of containers. Shipments of concentrated pineapple juice, fresh asparagus, cut flowers, chocolates. They found some once in teeny plastic bags inside the stomachs of live tropical fish.”
They sat digesting that last one, so to speak. Dan remembered the consensus in Key West that now that they had a handle on the seaborne traffic, it would shift west, to air routes over the Mexican border. He shook his head, feeling that sense of sweeping against a rising tide with a busted broom everyone in counterdrug had to come to terms with. “Okay, you mentioned money laundering. How would that work?”
Bloom took that one. “That can run either with the smuggling or on its own. First you collect the currency. That comes from your local distributors, gangs or whatever. You run it through the legitimate banking system first. The cover’s gambling profits, or real estate. A lot of the run-up in real estate in L.A. is laundering profits. Shuffle it through wire transfers and cutouts a couple of times, to add smoke. Then it goes overseas.”
Dan said, “An aid agency, they’re going to be shipping things overseas, not importing them.”
“That’s why we were checking out the money angle. But we came up as empty as those containers.”
“Okay, whichever it is, it sounds like the kind of between-the-cracks stuff we want to keep everybody comparing notes on. Ed, why don’t you dig into it a little more, Miles has been putting in a lot of hours lately. Due diligence. Liaise with FBI, DEA, and Transport. Anything else?”
Bloom told him President Tejeiro had asked for a conference in Bogotá in one month with top U.S. and Central American officials, to coordinate a major movement against the cartels, possibly involving military force. General Sevinson, now confirmed as head of DEA, would lead the U.S. delegation. “It’s not billed as revenge for their blowin
g away his kid, but there’s not much doubt where Tejeiro is coming from,” the agent said. “Even among the Latins, he’s known as a guy who keeps score. Help him, you get rewarded. Cross him, he’ll fuck you up, no matter how long it takes.”
“That’s good—from our point of view. But in Bogotá? That’s going to take tight security,” Dan said. The cartel was wounded, and wounded animals were dangerous. “Does the White House need presence?”
“That’s up to Bony Tony. Sevinson might be enough of an executive-side marker. Aside from that, we got this hearing coming up on the the High-Intensity Drug Area program. That’s gonna be our big budget Donnybrook. You ever testified before?”
Dan said he’d seen it done, though he hadn’t been the guy on the hot seat. He remembered reading about HIDA but didn’t recall the specifics. Bloom said Meilhamer knew about it, he’d been fighting for it for three administrations. Dan blinked. Having that come out of left field made him wonder if the grubby little administrator might not be more of a mover and shaker than he looked. It also made him wonder why his second hadn’t mentioned that this morning. “Okay, I’ll ask him. Get back to work, you guys.”
* * *
Meilhamer hauled out an immense binder and pointed to two more behind his desk. He said HIDA was the only appropriation that went directly through the counterdrug office, $107.5 million that got allocated to various agencies over and above their operating budgets. Dan saw the idea. A pot of money to throw at emergencies until the dinosaurian budgetary process could lumber around and charge. “I didn’t know we had that much cash to play with, Bry. And Miles said you drove getting it?”
Meilhamer smirked modestly. “I had a role.”
“Where does it go?”
“It’s driven by each region’s needs. Like, see this table? It lists where and for what we wrote checks the second quarter. The Drug Squads Initiative in Houston. A Black Ice Task Force in L.A. Tactical monitoring system for the Border Patrol.”
“Who decides who gets what?”