Dark Target

by David DeBatto

  “Listen to me, you piece of shit whore,” Lev said in English, grabbing MacKenzie by the wrist and pulling her toward him. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think you have no idea what’s on that disk, because if you did, you’d know the United States is the last place that I would be afraid of. We’ve been taking girls just like you out into the desert and using them for target practice for years. So you watch out who you think you can threaten.” He released her, regaining his composure. He laughed again. “And as for Little Mickey, man, that’s funny. I knew Miguelito since he was five years old. He used to call me Uncle Leon, and right now, I think he would rather be down in Desemboque making his Girls Gone Wild videos with drunk American college girls. I killed his father and I will kill him, too, if he even comes close to me.”

  “How close do you need him to be?” MacKenzie asked in unaccented English. “Because he just made that sandwich you ate. And he heard every word you said. And I’m guessing he’s just dying to tell you what was in it.”

  From behind the counter, the Oscar De La Hoya lookalike waved to him, removing the headphones and holding them up for Lev to see. At the same time, MacKenzie produced the transmitter she’d worn on her bra strap.

  “Buenas tardes, Tio Leon,” Miguel Cabrera said.

  If Lev had been paying attention, or had he been less drunk, or less cocky, he might have noticed how, gradually, all the children at the McDonald’s had been ushered outside, their mothers given fifty dollars American to take them somewhere else for lunch. He would have noticed that the restaurant was full only of men, young men with bulges beneath their shirts. Three of the men behind the counter leveled Tec-9 machine pistols at Lev, while a fourth aimed a Striker 12-gauge “Street Sweeper” shotgun at his head from the soda station. Guzman got to his feet, then stood at attention and saluted both Vasquez and MacKenzie before moving to the bodyguards, handing each of them a stack of fifty hundred-dollar bills. He returned to Lev, reached into the pocket of his sweatshirt, grabbed the keys to the Suburban, and tossed them to one of the bodyguards.

  “Good-bye, Leon,” Guzman said, leaning over and speaking into the Russian’s ear. “It was a pleasure working for you. Be sure to give my regards to Cipriano when you see him.”

  MacKenzie and Vasquez stood as well.

  “Tell me what happened to Theresa Davidova and I’ll ask ‘Little Mickey’ to be gentle with you,” she told Lev.

  “I don’t know anything about that whore,” Lev said. “She called me and asked me if I could get her a gun and I told her to go fuck herself. I don’t know any more than that.”

  “Who in the United States government are you working with?” Vasquez asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lev said.

  “Miguel,” MacKenzie said, turning to the man behind the counter. “Would you please go easy on my friend Leon?” She turned to Lev again. “Sorry, but it appears he doesn’t speak Russian. Enjoy your Happy Meal. Don’t forget the toy. Maybe the genie from Aladdin will grant you one last wish.”

  Crossing the bridge back into the United States, she and Vasquez agreed that Lev was telling the truth about Theresa Davidova, and about not knowing whom his partners in the American government were.

  “What do you think they’re going to do to him?” MacKenzie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hoolie said. “But I think I’d want to wait a couple months before I ate at that McDonald’s again. You never know what’s in the ground beef.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  DELUCA STOPPED FOR GAS IN LAS CRUCES AND picked up three e-mails on his PDA while he waited for the tank to fill. The first was from Ben Yutahay.

  David,

  Would you give me a call when you get a minute? I know how busy you are. A friend of Marvin’s told me that my son told him he was going to Ajo to see somebody about Cheryl. My son’s friend admitted that Marvin and Cheryl Escavedo were seeing each other but Marvin couldn’t tell me because of his wife. He was afraid I would be ashamed of him. Do you know who in Ajo he might be going to see? I’m going to go there to ask around but please give me a call if you know anything.

  Ben Yutahay

  The second e-mail was from Walter Ford. It read:

  David,

  Had some of my kids working overtime on this, though they didn’t know the full import of what they were discovering, as I kept them intentionally uninformed.

  Sorry if you were looking for something sexy here. The document your friend P. Romano sent contains accounts and bookkeeping information, going back thirty years. Most of the accounts are numbered so I couldn’t begin to tell you what’s what, exactly, without the key, but it appears to be several subaccounts connected to a larger budget. You’d probably want a bunch of accountants to go over it in detail to really tell you what it means.

  There is, however, a file containing a summary that was last opened a week before Cheryl Escavedo disappeared. Part of it’s a spreadsheet listing total annual disbursements to companies like Lockheed-Martin and TRW and Boeing and Raytheon—I would assume the figures are supported in the rest of the document. We’re talking about billions of dollars, David. In short, three things of note.

  *First, payments to GNA, which is Global Netherlands Atmospheric—you said a Dutch weather satellite went out shortly after D1/D2 launched. They owned it. They’re owned by Kirkos Industrial, which is owned by Vitaly Sergelin. Question: Who profited from loss of satellite? Conclusion: GNA/Kirkos (satellite was insured for $250 million)—or this was a way to conceal transfer of funds.

  *Second, this program was spending more money than it was budgeted for. That may be more the rule than the exception for government programs, but how were overruns met?

  *Third, one of the smallest accounts on the spreadsheet, only $23 million (only!), is described as “Home improvements / Nantucket.” That’s a lot of bathroom tile—doesn’t Koenig have a house in Nantucket? This one is underscored with three question marks after it, the author’s, not mine. Here’s my guess: Escavedo was trying to document expenditures Koenig made, appropriating government money for work on his house. Question: What is the reason for this? Conclusion: It gave her leverage. Question: How was she using this leverage? Conclusion: Blackmail is a possibility, but that doesn’t sound like her. Self-protection is another.

  Another point of interest. The summary lists dollar amounts, to the unrounded penny. For example, 1998, Lockheed-Martin, $12,587,905.32. Also totals, very precise. Those totals appear, digit for digit, in a speech given at last month’s Union of Concerned Scientists meeting in Denver, where the costs of the space race were discussed. The person giving the speech was Dr. Penelope Burgess. Question: How did she arrive at these figures, if this information is/was classified? Conclusion: Cheryl gave her the information. We looked at Dr. Burgess’s phone records and e-mail accounts (just the AOL one, not the unm.edu account) but cannot verify contact.

  Walter

  P.S. Your boy Dan asked me to pull Congressman Benson’s voting record regarding military expenditures. He might have gone to Decatur Academy with Koenig, but I don’t see any current possible connection. He’s voted against every proposed Space Defense Initiative program he could, tried to kill MIRACL, tried to cut the budget for THEL to next to nothing, etc. That bill, by the way, was cosponsored by Bob Fowler. UCS loves ’em both. I agree in general with the idea that Koenig might have friends in high places, but Benson isn’t one of them. Koenig had a “secret club” or society at Decatur they called the “Key Club.” Young conservatives filled with conspiracy theories and love for Richard Nixon. Benson was kicked out. Looking into membership roster.

  P.P.S. Did a little more looking into Shijingshan Entertainment. The intellectual properties lawsuit against them was brought by Dimension Video, a big DVD distributor in the U.S. Koenig is a major shareholder in Dimension, whose stock went up when SE went down.

  The final e-mail was from General LeDoux’s office, written by his aide, Captain Martin.

  Agt. DeLuca,


  The general said you were asking about NORAD with questions as to alternative command and control. Such capabilities exist wholly or in part at NASA in Houston, at Vandenberg/Edwards in California, at NSA, and in the White House operations center, with a hierarchy of override and security protocols. Recall that part of the Reagan Space Defense Initiative was a recognition of the need to build greater redundancy into the system, multiple launch sites, multiple C&C centers, etc., given proliferation and/or increasing accuracy of Sov./Sino ICBM targeting capabilities. This was when the Global Positioning System was on the drawing boards, but it was coming, and both sides knew it. Space Command at that point prepared for the possibility of the catastrophic loss of the Cheyenne Mountain facility by installing a second backup site at the former Sinkhole Laboratory in Carlsbad, which is nearly a mile underground. The White House also wanted another option if executive branch relocation were required, beyond the current (then) options. Sinkhole’s computers were upgraded, post-9/11, but other than a skeleton crew of maintenance personnel that visits only sporadically, it is unmanned and nonoperational. Officially, the existence of Sinkhole is denied.

  Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to assist you.

  Yours truly,

  Captain Charles C. Martin

  DeLuca called Ben Yutahay and arranged to meet him in the parking lot of a pancake house in Ajo, a desert copper mining town (the mine now closed) of four thousand people centered east of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, south of the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Testing Range, north of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and west of the Tohono O’Odham Indian reservation, in the valley between the Sauceda and Growler mountain ranges. He’d put nearly seven hundred miles on the odometer of Gary Burgess’s truck, driving through the night and reaching Ajo as the sun was rising. He stopped first at a local real estate office to ask for directions to the Koenig ranch. The woman he spoke with, a gravel-voiced blonde woman named Rita, said she was well aware of the Koenig ranch, which, at nearly three hundred square miles, was the largest piece of privately held land in Pima County and one of the largest in Arizona.

  “One of the least friendly, too, if you ask me,” she said. “Every once in a while they might send a man into town for supplies or call a local plumber if something breaks, but as a rule they fly everything in and out on their own private airstrip and act as if the town wasn’t even here. That and the eight-foot fence don’t add up to coming off as exactly neighborly, but that ain’t changed in fifty years, so why should it now?”

  “Why an eight-foot fence?” DeLuca asked.

  “Keeps the game in,” Rita said. “Too high to jump. Tom Koenig’s been growing exotic Asian speckled deer and African antelopes and what have you so his old schoolmates and Army buddies can come in and hunt ’em. Nothing is so thrilling as murdering an endangered species. The rumor is that he’s got an albino elk in there, too, which the Indians consider sacred.”

  “There’s nothing illegal about owning a private game preserve,” DeLuca said. “Even with exotics.”

  “Illegal, no,” Rita said. “Just unfriendly. Most ranchers around here let the hunters and the hikers and the gem hunters have access, unless they have some sort of protected Anasazi or Hohokum sites on the property. Or they make arrangements to let their neighbors run stock, if they’re not using it. They even got a lake three miles long up there that sits full while we’re suffering down here from droughts. The Koenigs have never let anybody pass. The new one is worse than his father was.”

  “Thank you, Rita,” DeLuca said.

  “Any time,” she told him. “If you ever want to get a winter place, you give me a call. Average home price in town is under sixty thousand.”

  “I will,” he said.

  “I have another idea—why don’t you come over to my place and I could make you dinner?” She smiled. “I could use a fresh conversation. Everybody local has already said everything they have to say to everybody else, and the snowbirds are useless.”

  “No thanks,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be staying.”

  He found Ben Yutahay sipping coffee in a booth at Jose’s Casa de la Waffle, recognizing his black cowboy hat from across the room. The parking lot was filled with motor homes and campers, the restaurant crowded with white-haired retirees shuffling along the breakfast bar.

  “How are you, David?” Yutahay asked.

  “Good,” DeLuca lied, sliding into the booth opposite the Cocopah policeman and ordering coffee and a short stack of pancakes from the waitress, who had so many rings in her ears it looked as if silver caterpillars were crawling up the side of her head. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I think I got here at five, and the place was already hopping with old people here for the early bird special. I don’t get it. When my people get old, we know how to spend our final moments with dignity.”

  “You go sit on a mountaintop until the great spirits carry you away?”

  “No,” Yutahay said. “We go to Florida. I have a lot of friends around the Boca area. I have to tell you, I’m worried about Marvin. Nobody here seems to have seen him. I thought maybe I’d get lucky.”

  “Did you learn any more about what his relationship with Cheryl Escavedo might have entailed?”

  Yutahay nodded, then laid a manila envelope on the table.

  “This is for you, if you want to read it,” Yutahay said. “I’m afraid I was a prying old man but I went into Marvin’s computer and found out that he’d saved all the instant messages that he’d exchanged with Cheryl. I can summarize for you if you’d prefer.”

  “I would,” DeLuca said. “I’ll read these later.”

  “They were in love all right,” Yutahay said, as DeLuca scanned the pages, perhaps fifty in all. “But she was in a relationship with an older man who was very possessive of her, and very jealous. She was afraid of him because she knew he could make her life very difficult.”

  DeLuca came to a set of pages that were folded and stapled shut.

  “What are these?” he asked.

  “You can open that if you want to,” Yutahay said, “but it’s just my son and Sergeant Escavedo having cybersex. I think that’s what it’s called. Typing dirty things back and forth. I don’t think it’s of value and I wanted to respect their privacy, but I didn’t want you to think I was keeping anything from you. It was difficult for me to read, but I suppose that’s just my generation.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s necessary,” DeLuca said. “Does she name this older man, by any chance?”

  “She uses three asterisks,” Yutahay said. “I gather she was afraid of even naming him. Do you know who it could be?”

  “I think three asterisks could stand for three stars,” DeLuca said. “As in a three-star general.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Ben Yutahay said. “Know of any around here?”

  “I do,” DeLuca said. “Do you think Marvin might have tried to do something foolish?”

  “Marvin does foolish things all the time,” Ben said. “But I don’t think trying to find someone you love is foolish. I don’t think refusing to believe someone you love is dead is necessarily foolish—it has a kind of nobility. I was hoping if I could have a look around at Koenig’s ranch, I might be able to tell something.”

  “Why don’t you come with me then?” DeLuca said. “Though I have to tell you something. And there are things that I can’t tell you, but you should know that there could well be a high degree of danger involved, in the form of a new weapon the military has developed that General Koenig has at his disposal.”

  “Just don’t expect any stoical Indian ‘it’s-a-good-day-to-die’ crap from me,” Yutahay said. “I saw Little Big Man. I liked it a lot, but when I die, I’m going to go kicking and screaming, just like my ancestors did.” He opened his coat jacket to reveal a sawed-off shotgun, hanging from a sling. “I took this off a drug smuggler two years ago. It’ll blow a hole th
e size of a garage door into just about anything.”

  “I welcome the company,” DeLuca said.

  They drove south of town on Darby Wells Road, past a dusty and desolate RV ghetto where the fattest tree trunk was thinner than a girl’s wrist, across Gray’s Wash and Daniel’s Arroyo and past the turn to the New Cordelia Mine, closed, the sign said, up into the high country where the palo verde and saguaros gave way to scrub oak and chaparral. In the distance, DeLuca saw a pyramid-shaped mountain and thought it looked familiar, though he couldn’t recall where he’d seen it. Then he remembered—the mountain had been in the background of Major Huston’s hunting triptych. The truck rumbled and rattled along the gravel road.

  A dozen miles from town, they turned off the main road and traveled another half mile before reaching an iron gate extending across the road beneath an arch with the words “Koenig Ranch” carved into the wood. There was a surveillance camera mounted atop a pole and an intercom by the gate.

  “What were you going to say to him?” Yutahay asked him. “I was hoping you’d have a plan.”

  “I don’t know,” DeLuca said. “I never know. If you spend too much time preparing what you’re going to say, you lose the ability to respond flexibly to the moment. I usually think of something.”

  “Do you mind if I get out?” Yutahay asked. DeLuca said he didn’t mind.

  He walked to the intercom and pushed the button. After a moment, a voice said, “Yes?”

  “David DeLuca to see General Koenig,” he said.

  There was a long pause, then the lock buzzed for a moment, and the gate swung silently on its hinges, opening inward. When he returned to the truck, Ben Yutahay was crouched in the dirt, examining the pickup’s front tire.

  “Something wrong?” DeLuca asked.

  “Not with your truck, but I didn’t want the camera over there to see what I was doing, so I’m pretending,” Yutahay said. “Cheryl was here. It rained here. A couple days before she disappeared. This is where the red mud we found on her tires came from. And those are her tire tracks. The sun baked the mud and froze them for us to find. Here she is, driving in, and here she is, driving out. It couldn’t be plainer.”