The other call was to a lawyer in Los Angeles, Cletus Proffit, the managing partner at Serna’s old law firm, Mandella, Harbet. I wanted to at least plumb the depths with a few of the people she worked with.
I knew Proffit, but only by name. He was one of the pillars of the local legal clique in the state. He had done all the chairs at the county bar up in L.A. and found a place to squat on the state bar’s board of governors when the music ended. He spent a few years, his spare time, doing the bar’s good works, peddling bills to protect the average Joe from the malevolent clutches of scheming lawyers. The test of legal leadership was always the same, to rat out the fraternity. One was expected to do this. It was the lawyer’s equivalent of a priest sporting sackcloth and ashes outside the church door. Your way of saying that you were repenting, but only for the sins of others.
Proffit’s wife, who was also a lawyer, sat on the federal bench. She was mentioned periodically as a likely nominee to the Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
When I finally got through to his office, Proffit’s secretary told me that her boss was back east, in their Washington office on business. She said that he was likely to be there for some time. I got the number and called it.
When I told the receptionist what it was about, that I represented the man who was involved in the accident with Serna, my call was instantly routed, the transcontinental express from my lips to Proffit’s ear in a nanosecond.
The man was full of jovial good cheer, what you might expect from a leader who’d spent the last several years screwing over other lawyers. He told me that Serna’s death was a great loss to the firm, that she was a very special person, and that he would have an exceptionally difficult time finding someone to fill her shoes. He called it a tragedy at least three times in two sentences, and said that he hoped that my client was not too seriously injured.
For someone who had lost an irreplaceable cog in the firm’s wheel, Proffit didn’t seem terribly perturbed that I was calling him on behalf of the drunk, at least according to the early news reports, who had turned his partner into a piece of crisp bacon.
I told him that Ives was fine, but that he was facing some serious charges. I asked him for a meeting.
He wanted to know why.
I told him that I wanted to discuss Serna’s involvement with the firm, the nature of her practice. What she was like, any volunteer activities in the community in the event that we might ultimately have to deal with “victim impact statements”—that is, if my client was convicted. Just general background stuff, I told him. The information any prudent lawyer might gather regarding the victim in such a case.
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Proffit then suggested that perhaps it could wait until he returned to Los Angeles. He told me that with Serna’s sudden death and all the reorganization in their Washington office that, at the moment, he was simply too busy.
I told him that I already had a ticket to fly to Washington on Thursday morning. Three days from now.
Proffit said he was certain that wouldn’t work. He couldn’t fit me into his schedule. It was impossible. Besides, he hated to see me travel all the way across the country on such a mundane matter.
I told him that I wasn’t, that I already had a meeting scheduled in Washington with another party on Thursday afternoon to gather other information in the case.
In the breathless pause that followed I might have thought Proffit had wrapped the coiled wire from his phone’s receiver around his head. Such were the palpable brain waves resonating at my end: “What other party?” “What information?”
He asked me to hold for a moment. When he came back on the line, it was to tell me that he had conferred with an assistant and that, as a courtesy to me, to avoid inconvenience, they would rearrange his calendar to fit me in. The first step in this process was to find out what time my other meeting was.
I told him that, if necessary, I could probably reschedule it. Nonsense, he said. It was clear that he wanted to meet with me after I had met with whomever else I was seeing. It sounded as if Proffit might want to tie me to the wall in his office and work me over with his stapler to find out who I was meeting with and what they had to say.
When I told him my other appointment was set for Friday afternoon, Proffit immediately said he was busy all morning. Would it be possible for me to hold over or to meet that evening? We set the meeting for seven, at a restaurant near his office. He gave me the name and address, said he would have one of their secretaries schedule the reservation in his name. I thanked him, and we hung up.
I couldn’t be sure whether Proffit knew anything or if he had something to hide. But I could smell the worry on his breath, even over the phone. There was something about a silk-socked lawyer in the midst of an organizational meltdown in his firm who takes the time to turn on the charm for a perfect stranger. Adjusting his calendar for my convenience. It makes you want to grab your wallet and hang on.
Something was bothering him. Whatever it was, it had Serna’s name all over it. And unless I missed my bet, it had nothing to do with filling her high heels at the firm. Proffit wanted to know what I was looking for in Washington. More to the point, he was desperate to find out who the other party was I was meeting with.
Ana Agirre had lost her ability to track her equipment or the people who had it. With the death of the man near the van and the discovery that the vehicle contained only the satellite antenna and its tripod, she was at a dead end. The van was a rental. She knew that would lead nowhere.
The people she was looking for had the computer and the software, but without the antenna they couldn’t use it. And without a signal, Ana couldn’t track them. She wanted it, all of it, and now. Time was running out on the European contract.
She thought about it for a while, racked her brain. The only lead she had left, and it was a long shot, was the original accident out in the desert. One of the parties had survived. She knew this because she had followed the news surrounding the accident from the moment the tracking signals told her that her equipment had been used and where. She knew Ives’s name because she had taken notes. He was charged with the death of the woman who had no doubt been murdered.
Ana headed to a local library. Online she checked the local newspapers going back a few weeks. There she found the name of the lawyer representing Ives—Paul Madriani. She Googled the name and found the location, the law firm of “Madriani and Hinds,” an address on Orange Avenue in Coronado. She set up to watch the place, at first from a distance from her car in a parking lot across the street, and later from a table in a restaurant very near the entrance to the office where she could see people come and go.
It was probably just another dead end, but if anyone knew anything about the accident that might give some clue as to who had her equipment, it would be either the local authorities or the lawyers involved in the case.
What she saw was a guy who came and went regularly and who occasionally stopped in the restaurant where she was seated having coffee. The waitresses always greeted him by name, Harry. This she assumed was one of the lawyers, Harry Hinds.
She watched and waited. For two days there was no sign of his partner, Paul Madriani. Ana considered her options, whether to approach them under some false guise to see what she could learn about the case, or to try to enter the office at night to look for notes or files that might give her more information. She started casing the office at night, checking the routine of the janitors, taking notes on who worked late.
Ana was hunched down at the office door in the shadows of the small garden plaza fishing for the set of lockpicks in her bag. It was after two in the morning. Dressed in a navy blue sweater, dark pants, and a pair of black running shoes, she blended easily into the night. She was preparing to break into the law office. The restaurant and its bar were closed, everything dark, when she heard the noise behind the building. She moved quickly without a sound along the path, toward the gate leading to the service area behind
the office.
Through a crack in the gate she saw him. One man, all alone inside the garbage bin, rooting around, occasionally scraping against the inner steel walls. At first she thought maybe he was some transient. But as she watched she realized whoever it was wasn’t hunting for discarded cans or bottles or other treasures of the destitute. He had taped a large trash bag to the outside lip of the bin. Whenever his hand emerged over the opening it was to stuff papers, what looked like documents, into the bag. He was looking for something, and it wasn’t recyclables.
Ana’s eyes were glued to the action in the bin. After a few minutes the man hoisted himself up out of the large container, over the edge and down to the ground. He grabbed the trash bag from the open edge and quickly headed out toward the street.
She was behind him in a flash. She watched as he entered the passenger side of a car parked halfway down the block toward Orange Avenue. It was a large dark cross-country vehicle, what the Americans called a four-by-four. The driver had the engine on in a second and they pulled away from the curb.
Ana turned and ran for her own car parked just down the street. In less than half a minute she was after them. At this hour there was almost no traffic, only one other vehicle on Orange Avenue that she could see, and it was well out ahead of the 4x4 she was following. Keeping them in sight was not a problem. They crossed over the bridge from Coronado and headed north up I-5.
Ana hung back, following from a distance so as not to alert them. They took the interchange at 94 East. From there they headed north, up 805. They took the exit at Miramar Road. They drove some distance east before taking a right.
As Ana approached the intersection where they turned she saw a sign: MCAS MIRAMAR. It was a military base. As she looked off to her right she could see the car with the two men in it stopped at a kiosk in the center of the road, a small guardhouse. A few seconds later they passed through. Ana didn’t take the turn. She couldn’t follow them there, but to her it all made sense.
The fear growing in her mind was the possibility that the American military, or one of their intelligence agencies, held the equipment that the French techs had designed for her. If that was the case, the authorities already had it. If somehow they used it to their own embarrassment, they might decide to tie it to her. She had to get it back, but she couldn’t go here.
NINETEEN
Early morning, and the Eagle was back on the phone. This time it was an encrypted and scrambled line, but the headache coming over it was just as bad.
“It seems we’ve lost him,” said the man on the other end. The “him” he was talking about was Alex Ives. “We’ve got a blanket over the house. According to the information from the surety who wrote the bail bond, that’s where he’s supposed to be. We see the old man and his wife. They keep coming and going, but no sign of the kid.”
The Eagle thought for a moment. This can’t be happening. “Maybe he’s hunkered down inside the house, doesn’t want to come out,” he said. Always think positive.
“I don’t think so.”
The Eagle was almost afraid to ask why.
He didn’t have to, the man on the other end volunteered it. “This morning we waited ’til the parents left, and we entered the house. The place was empty. Nobody there,” said the man.
“Son of a bitch!” said the Eagle. “You’re sure? You checked the entire house?”
“Top to bottom,” said the man.
To the Eagle, the answer was simple. The idiots working for him were too busy cleaning up the mess they’d made at the gas station in San Diego, too distracted by their own fireworks to bother watching the house until it was too late. The damn lawyers had spirited the kid away. Where was anybody’s guess. “What about the parents? Did you follow them?”
“Yeah! They went to the store. She got her hair done. They dropped off the dog at the groomer . . .”
“Great!” said the Eagle. “Next time I need a good groomer to clip your ass, you can tell me where to go. What about the lawyer? What’s his name?”
“There’s two of them,” said the other man. “Madriani . . .”
“That’s the one.”
“And Hinds.”
“Anybody bothering to watch them?” Sarcasm dripped from the Eagle’s voice.
“We’re on it,” said the guy. “One of them is at the office in Coronado as we speak. Hinds. The other one, Madriani, boarded a plane early this morning headed for Washington.”
“D.C.?”
“He wasn’t goin’ to Seattle,” said the guy on the phone.
“I take it it’s too much to ask whether you might know what he’s up to? Could it be he’s going on vacation?”
“We don’t know. I doubt it,” said the guy. Sometimes it was hard to know when the Eagle was serious and when he was just screwing with your head. “We think whatever arrangements he made he probably did them over the landline from his office.”
“And I take it you didn’t have a tap on the phone.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Most people don’t realize,” said the guy, “it’s harder to get a tap on a landline these days than a cell phone. First off, you have to find somebody old enough who knows how to do it. Not as simple as you think. We’re working on it. We’ll get it done.”
“Some time this century, I hope,” said the Eagle. “Stay on top of the lawyers, especially the one on the plane. I want to know what he’s up to.”
“Got it!” It was the way the guy said it, such certainty and assurance. The last time they voiced such confidence they blew up half a block of San Diego and burned down the other half. It prompted the Eagle to stop and reconsider.
“On second thought,” he said, “leave the lawyer, the one named Madriani, to me.” He collected the name of the airline and the flight number from the man on the other end along with the ETA, estimated time of arrival, looked at his watch, and told him, “I’ll take it from here. You! Your job is to find the kid. Get on it! Find him!” Then he slammed the phone down.
The rippling thermal currents rising off the sidewalk made it look like the griddle on a stove. The small shopping center with its bright-colored walls reflected the intensity of the sun so that it heated Herman’s body like a tanning bed. It felt good. He was happy to be back in a place that was so familiar.
Wearing a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops, Herman trudged down the burning sidewalk and toward the two-story white structure with the red-tiled roof. The red and yellow sign out front read DHL. Inside, the air conditioner was humming, the temperature a good forty degrees cooler than on the cement outside.
Herman wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief, then gathered the supplies he needed from the shelf against the wall. He took four of the cardboard letter packs so that if things got dicey, he could seal up any future message on the run and, if he had to, ship it on the fly from the front desk of any of the resort hotels in the area. DHL, for a price, would pick up.
He took the pen from his pocket along with one of the blank forms, an international air waybill, and completed the information on the form. He entered his name as “H. Diggs” and used the address of the DHL office as the sender’s address. He didn’t want to use the actual location of the condo. He entered the law firm’s DHL account number to pay for it.
He completed the customs portion of the form, declaring no value, then completed the rest of the form and signed it. Then he took the note from his pocket and checked it one more time. It was obscure to the point of being bland, the length of a message from a Chinese fortune cookie. “Package arrived safely. All well this end. H.”
It was written in Herman’s scrawl with a pen on a piece of otherwise blank paper. He folded it up once more, put it in one of the open letter packs and sealed it. He slipped the waybill inside the plastic window on the outside of the envelope and got into a line behind two other guys. Herman folded his broad arms across his barrel chest and waited.
The trio, Paul, Harry, and Herm
an, had worked out the details over the kitchen table at Ives’s parents’ house the night the girl named Ben and her driver were killed. They kept his parents out of it, so they would know as little as possible, sent them to the other room where they could not hear. If questioned by authorities, they could honestly say they had no idea where their son was. Besides, the fewer people who knew, the better, less chance for a mistake.
The two lawyers took their lead from Herman as to the selected location. Given the history of narco-terror and the violence of the cartels, American tourists might shy away from Mexico. But as a place of refuge to hide out with Alex Ives until things cooled down, it was perfect. For Herman, it was like going home. He had connections and contacts in Mexico going back more than a decade, to the time when he worked corporate security and executive protection in Mexico City. It was where he first met Paul Madriani.
Herman called his contacts from a pay phone in a hotel not far from the Iveses’ home. His friends gave him the name of a small condo near the beach in Ixtapa. They had used it once or twice as a secure location for corporate executives when traveling on the coast. They gave Herman the address and told him to check it out online. Herman didn’t want to do that for obvious reasons. He trusted them. He discussed it with Paul and Harry, gave them the address in case of an emergency, and gave his friends in Mexico the green light to set it up.
Norman Ives came to the rescue to solve one of their problems, his son’s lack of a passport. Through his business, Norman had extensive connections with a number of air transport companies and private pilots. He was able to secure help from a small air freight company that owed him a favor.
The Enemy Inside Page 13