“You’re kidding me,” Diaz whispered, her voice bearing the familiar lilt of sympathy, the same exact sound that I despised so much, that often served as the impetus for me avoiding the subject entirely.
“I was a DEA agent on the wrong side of the line in a border town,” I replied. “It wasn’t until that moment that I realized just how dangerous everything about my life really was.”
I could see Diaz’s head nodding beside me, though she remained silent.
“By that point, it was obvious help wasn’t coming. A hundred different thoughts ran through my head, but there was nothing I could do. Instead, I called Hutch and told him to send everybody, then I sat my ass on the ground, the heat-scorched grass brittle beneath me, and I cried until they arrived.”
Just like that night I could feel hot tears threatening to streak down my face. I could sense my eyes growing glassy, the anger within me so strong, even years later, that it was fighting to release itself in any way possible.
“Two days later I tenured my resignation. At first Hutch didn’t believe me, said it was just a reaction to what had happened. He put me on administrative leave for a few months to see if I would come around, but all that did was subsidize a very dark time I’d rather not get into.”
Diaz hooked one final turn and pulled off the road and onto the shoulder. In front of us a blue and silver sign welcomed us to theUnited States Naval Base - San Diego, a row of spotlights gleaming off it, a cadre of crisp flags hanging limp behind it. She shoved the gear shift into neutral and folded her hands in her lap, keeping her attention facing forward.
“How did you know your family...?”
My eyes squeezed tight, the body’s natural reaction to such a horrific trauma, even tucked away that long ago. It was the single part that I always tried to avoid, consciously or not, whenever the topic managed to surface in my thoughts.
“They staked them out front, right in front of the house.”
There was so much more I wanted to add. Details such as trying to rush forward and take them down, but the heat driving me back, blistering my forehead and cheeks. The way their bodies had burnt far beyond recognition, their arms and legs blackened away to nothing, just brittle sticks extended out in every direction. That by the time I got them to the crematorium there wasn’t enough left to fill an entire urn, both bodies together.
But I didn’t. I didn’t tell her that, or the way I spent two full months staring at a loaded service piece, wondering what a .9mm slug tasted like. I didn’t mention that once they accepted my resignation and took back the gun, I got another one, with a large caliber, and stared at it for another four months.
I didn’t mention the tattoo that now covered the entire left side of my chest in their memory, imbedded in ink above my heart forever. I sure as hell didn’t mention the fact that to this day that every other relative I have blames me for what happened, has let it be known that my presence is not wanted or needed at home.
Even without all that, somehow, she seemed to understand. She waited a long moment to make sure my story was complete, that there was nothing left for me to add, before nodding. “After you left, it became something of a cautionary tale throughout the Department. A warning to all incoming agents to minimize loved ones, to keep them far away at all times.”
Never had I heard that, though it made sense. I doubt that I would have believed such a story if they’d told it to me when I signed up, being young and gung ho, but I’d like to think it would have at least helped to hear it.
Diaz exhaled through her nose and turned to face forward, resting the back of her head against the seat behind her. “You know, when you hear a story so many times, it starts to take on a mystique. After a while, you come to believe there’s no way it can be real, just the kind of thing old men romanticize while sitting around talking about the way things used to be.”
I nodded. While not the most delicate response in the word, I couldn’t say I faulted her. There was no way of knowing how contorted that story had gotten over the years, the purposes it had been used to serve.
“How far was what I told you from what you’ve heard before?” I asked, almost not wanting to know, fearing that I might have been martyred to serve the purposes of the agency.
“None at all,” Diaz said, her voice barely a whisper. “Which is the most harrowing part. You hear something like that, you want to believe it to be bullshit, that there aren’t people on this planet capable of doing such things.”
My focus grew fuzzy as I stared at the sign welcoming us into the Naval Base. “Hopefully after tonight there’ll be a few less of those people out there.”
For a full moment neither said anything. Diaz reached up and dropped the gear shift back into drive, easing the car forward towards the guard house ahead. The brakes moaned slightly as she kept them depressed halfway down, the car moving just an inch at a time.
“Yeah,” she agreed, pulling her head forward off the seat back. “We’ll get the bastards.”
“Not we,” I said, watching the sign slide by beside us. “You.”
The car came to an abrupt stop as she snapped her head over to look at me, her eyes wide. “What the hell do you mean not we? Where are you going?”
With every bit of composure I could muster I turned to match her gaze, hoping she didn’t see everything clashing together behind my eyes.
“I’m going to Russia.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Steam rose up from the plate of pirozhki situated in the middle of Sergey Blok’s desk, little white threads streaming upward before dissipating into nothing. With it came the familiar scent of baked bread and melted butter, the smell one that had filled the office no less than twice a week for thirty years.
The recipe was a hand-me-down from his mother-in-law, a gift that was presented more as a directive. It was the first dish his wife Anya had learned to make upon their marriage, a meal she had reconstituted with total faithfulness, not even the slightest bit of experimentation for decades.
Sergey had returned to his office from a trip down the hall to the restroom to find his lunch waiting for him, the meal and the dish it was served on both warm. He had no idea how or when Anya had managed to slip it by him, but allowed the left corner of his mouth to curl up in a smile just the same.
Three bites into the meal his food-induced euphoria was shattered by his cell phone buzzing beside him, the growling visage of Pavel staring up from the screen. Sergey allowed it to ring a moment, pulling the cloth napkin from his lap and wiping his face. He tossed it down atop the nearly untouched pirozhki and pushed it away, certain he would no longer be hungry once the call was finished.
Contact from Pavel had not been expected. Several hours before he had given explicit instructions on how things were to unfold. The fact that his most trusted employee was now calling could only mean something had gone awry.
The twisted feeling he felt deep in his stomach wasn’t because something had occurred, but that he had a good idea of what it was.
“Hello?” Sergey asked, trying to mask any animosity from his voice. There was a chance that the call was nothing more than courtesy, a perfunctory explanation of where things stood.
“Mr. Blok? Pavel,” Pavel began, the same exact way he did every phone conversation they ever had. “We have a problem.”
Sergey twisted his mouth up into a sneer and nodded his head, confirming what he had already suspected. “How bad is it?”
“Not Chernobyl, but bad enough,” Pavel said, drawing another wince from his employer.
“I’m listening.”
A long moment passed, the sound of an ocean breeze, the distant burst of a ship’s horn sounding out. Sergey could sense Pavel pausing to find the right words, uncertain of how to approach it. Such a delay could only mean one thing, the same way it did every time Pavel acted unsure of anything.
“What the hell did that nephew of mine do now?” Sergey growled.
Never had Pavel directly stated ther
e was a conflict, though it wasn’t hard for Sergey to piece together. In the past twelve months he had sensed a growing impunity in Viktor, a self-righteousness based in his status as a Blok. His life on the upper echelon of a poverty-stricken country had embodied him with a rather full opinion of himself, Sergey more than once getting the impression that the young man thought he actually had something to do with the lofty status the family had attained.
On several occasions he had seen Viktor exert that sort of high-handed mentality on others, often those in his direct employee. There was little doubt he had done the same to Pavel in their time working together in Mexico, despite the fact that Pavel was a greater asset to the family than the young Blok would ever be.
Such tensions had made for an uneasy working environment. Viktor knew Pavel was a trusted ally of Sergey and was careful never to openly speak ill of him, despite making no effort to hide his true feelings. Pavel respected Sergey and the Blok family too much to ever speak out of turn.
Still, there was little doubt that both sides would eliminate the other without thinking twice if it came down to it.
“It’s not what he did, it’s what he won’t do,” Pavel said. “He is drunk, and he refuses to leave.”
Sergey’s eyes grew wide, revulsion on his face. His nostrils curled upward as he stared out the window in front of him, gaze hardened on the bare branches of a tree outside. “He what?”
“He’s holed himself up in his office and says he isn’t going anywhere.”
“And you told him that agents are en route as we speak?” Sergey asked, his voice low and graveled, his free hand balled into a fist atop his desk.
“He said to let them come, we will fight,” Pavel replied. His voice was even, neutral. It was not his first encounter with Viktor’s antics, his response to hand it over to Sergey and do as instructed.
Sergey dropped the phone onto the desk and looked away a moment, pushing an angry breath out through his nose. He passed a hand over his face and rested it along his jaw, five o’clock stubble already noticeable against his skin.
Viktor would think to do something like standing and fighting. In his head, he would have built it up to be a Hollywood blockbuster, with helicopters in the air and boats in the water. Spotlights would be showcasing him on the veranda, a gun in each hand, screaming as he took out a torrent of faceless intruders, all dressed in black, firing but hitting nothing.
The truth would be that he and everybody with him would either be shot or arrested. Anybody that so much as raised a weapon in opposition would be cut down. The others would be put in a holding chamber, every bit of knowledge they had extracted from them painfully and meticulously.
“The product is finally ready,” Sergey said. He knew the line was safe, but his brevity lay in the fact that he trusted Pavel would pick up on the insinuation.
Everything they had worked to establish the previous years, from finding a suitable network to quietly taking it over, was done with the end goal of finding a distribution system for their own goods. A fiery showdown now with one of the preeminent drug enforcement groups in the world would shatter that all in the course of an hour.
“So get him on the boat?” Pavel asked.
“Yes,” Sergey said, fighting to keep his anger at Viktor’s stupidity from exploding at Pavel. “By whatever means necessary. Get up the coast to Tijuana, I’ll have plane tickets at the airport to get you both back here.”
“Back there? To Russia?” Pavel asked.
“Yes,” Sergey said. “I think it’s time we had all had a little get together and got some things straightened out. Is that a problem?”
For the first time in ages, Sergey heard something in Pavel’s voice that seemed to border on hope, happiness even. “Not at all, sir. Looking forward to it.”
Sergey nodded, it being exactly the response he had expected.
“And the rest of the men?” Pavel asked.
“Continue on as planned,” Sergey said. “We can’t completely abandon things on the ground there, not with us being ready to go live so soon. Disappearing right now would set us back months, if not more.”
He didn’t bother to add that their meeting would not take more than a day or two. Both of them would be traveling back under the auspice of making final business preparations while only Pavel would be returning. Sergey had made the proper arrangements to allow him to take over the North American operations, seizing what he had earned a hundred times over.
His nephew, no matter how much he would like to rid himself of the nuisance for good, would be stashed on a much smaller project, somewhere closer to home, where Sergey could keep a thumb on him at all times.
“Thank you, Mr. Blok,” Pavel said. “We will see you soon.”
Sergey signed off the call without responding, tossing his phone on the desk and shaking his head at the arrogant foolishness of his nephew. As he did so his gaze lingered on his lunch still sitting on the desk, nearly untouched, the scent permeating the air.
He had been wrong. There was absolutely no reason to let one of Anya’a pirozhkis go to waste over a nephew throwing a temper tantrum. He pulled the plate back over and dropped his napkin into his lap, picking up right where he’d left off a few minutes before.
Part IV
Chapter Thirty-Five
I respected Diaz, both as an agent and a person. She had gone out of her way for me when she didn’t have to, long before it reached a point where her career was about to receive a serious bump for doing so. Because of that I felt some responsibility to do the right thing by her, but that would have to come in time.
Right now, I was worried about the situation I had been pulled into, a situation that I was best equipped to handle by going off the grid for a while.
It had taken a few minutes of back and forth for me to convince Diaz to leave me outside the gate. Her initial reaction was the expected shock, followed by disbelief that I would think of stepping away at such a moment. I didn’t insult her intelligence by trying to pretend I was simply bowing out now that the end seemed so near, but rather told her there were things that I needed to handle on my own.
It wasn’t the entire truth, not even close, but she seemed to grasp enough to agree, if begrudgingly.
With a young ensign sailor standing by the front gate giving me a curious stare, I left my weapon in the car, got out, and walked away. On me I took a single shoulder bag, containing some necessary paperwork, my wallet, and a toothbrush. I left my overnight bag stowed away in the trunk, not wanting to undertake the time or hassle of dealing with it. Whatever else I might need, I would pick up along the way.
The single lane leading into the base was just over a mile long. Walking alone in the middle of the night I was able to move easily along the edge of the road, free from worry about traffic whizzing by me. I made it out to the major thoroughfare feeding the base just after midnight and flagged a cab a few minutes later.
Twenty minutes after that, I was standing in the Alamo rental car line at the San Diego International Airport. A quarter hour after that I was on the road north.
Doing the math in my head, I knew that no international flights would be leaving the west coast for at least five hours. There was no way any of those departing from San Diego would be flying direct to Russia, so my best bet was to hit LA. The drive between them was right around two hours at that time of night, giving me more than enough time to work with. After the nap earlier I was still pretty alert, and the trip ahead would give ample time to sleep.
Besides, I had a phone call to make that I didn’t want to run the risk of anybody overhearing. A rental car made for the perfect place to allow that to happen.
I put the car on my Hawk’s Eye Tours American Express, hoping that if anybody was trolling the system for my name it might slide past them. I had an idea for how I would get out of the country undetected, but that wouldn’t help me any on the rental.
Alamo hooked me up with a brand new Nissan Altima, the odometer registering
less than thirty miles total. I racked the seat back as far as it would go and turned the temperature gauge all the way to cold, keeping the fan off as I eased onto the highway and set the cruise control headed north.
One-thirty in the morning in southern California meant it was four-thirty on the east coast. Most likely the target of my call was curled up fast asleep, as most of the world would be at such an hour. Despite that I plugged in the number from memory and set the volume to speaker phone, dropping it down in my lap.
It was answered after the third ring, the voice sounding a bit tired, but not groggy.
“Mr. Tate, what can I do for you?” Pally asked.
No anger or frustration in his voice, which was a good start. “How do you know I need something done?”
“Does anybody ever call another person at two-thirty in the morning unless they need something?”
My guess about Pally being on the east coast was entirely based on Hutch’s new location. The fact that he called it two-thirty meant he was somewhere in the Mountain Time zone, only an hour difference from where I was. Odds were he lived nowhere near my home in Montana, and at some time I needed to make it a point to find out.
Now just wasn’t that time.
“Actually, I need a couple of favors,” I said, taking a breath and staring out over the steering wheel at the road ahead. The I-5 was a full five lanes wide around me, the Nissan sitting comfortably in the middle, speedometer locked at seventy-five miles an hour. A handful of long haul truckers dotted the lanes around me, though otherwise traffic was almost non-existent.
“Aw, hell,” Pally said, emitting a low groan. I hoped it was just him being his normal cantankerous self rather than the sound of a man crawling out of bed, but at the moment it didn’t greatly matter either way. “Let’s hear it.”
“First things first,” I said. “Can you run the logs on international flights leaving Baja tonight or first thing in the morning? Probably out of Tijuana International, but not necessarily. Might even be a private flight.”
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