The White Tigress

by Todd Merer

  Leave the world alone, and the world will leave you alone.

  Decriminalize drugs, and the criminals will be gone.

  Not that either would happen. The Americans had spent trillions creating military and justice systems that had become lynchpins of their economy: raising and equipping police forces, investigating and arresting and prosecuting and jailing, what, three million prisoners? Most of whom would someday return to society, brains permanently rewired with a con mentality.

  It would never change.

  If the justice machine were eliminated, it would be an earthquake that devastated the American economy. Jobs lost. Politicians booted. In the end, it all came down to one thing: when money was the fertilizer, there was no uprooting the evils it nourished. Contagious evils. The Chinese were equally infected. She would keep her Logui safe from them—

  “Position check,” said the pilot. “We’re now five miles west of them.”

  Dolores peered at the panorama. On the right, rising directly from the sea, were the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and beyond were its snowcapped peaks, the highest of which was Anawanda, which to the Logui was the center of the earth. For Dolores, it was simply home sweet home.

  Now she frowned as, on the beach far ahead, she saw rows of prefab buildings and ranks of giant earthmoving machines emblazoned with the red stars of Communist China. Many more than last time she’d been here. She resolved to send the Chinese a message so stunning, it would idle their machines. That was her personal mission: protecting the Logui and their homeland, at any cost.

  Offshore were anchored a half dozen Chinese cargo vessels. Many small craft moved between them and the beach.

  “Two miles,” said the pilot.

  No point flirting with the possibility of being detected, thought Dolores. Besides, she had seen enough. She ordered the pilot to proceed to their destination, and the helicopter banked away from the sea and flew higher over the foothills that led to Anawanda.

  The Logui village’s terraces and mossy walls resembled Machu Picchu, but here was no vista of mountains and sky; instead, the village was surrounded by dense rainforest. Trees lined the grid, and the village’s thatched roofs were of live foliage, rendering it nearly undetectable from eyes in the sky.

  It was midday, but the place was strangely deserted, except for a youth who resembled a younger version of the Older Brother Who Knows More. The youth, Younger Brother Who Knows More, loped along the empty beaten earth streets, then left the village and continued along a narrow trail that snaked higher beneath the canopy.

  He ran easily, his feet barely touching the ground, and stopped where the path seemingly ended in dense green vegetation. Without hesitation, he parted the foliage, revealing a twisty stone staircase. He ran up it . . .

  And moments later emerged in the ruins of the long-forgotten city of the Logui, La Ciudad Perdida, to which the tribe had retreated five hundred years ago, when the Spanish had invaded the Sierra Nevada.

  The villagers were gathered around an old stone building. Two people dressed in white stood in front of the building. One was the village elder. The other was Dolores, although the Logui called her Alune, meaning the One Who Knows Most of All. The elder addressed the people in the Logui language, Anchiga:

  “Alune believes the outside world is approaching a great catastrophe. Increasingly, it is governed by unknowing fools. The wealthiest among them are devising escape plans. Some even speak of finding another planet. We survived our own great catastrophe when the Spaniards came. Again, we survived when the bandits and narcotraffickers invaded, thanks to Alune. Now we are faced with an even greater threat from Those Who Know Less. Again, our destiny is with Alune.”

  The elder shuffled aside, and Dolores stepped forward. The time had come for her to demonstrate her intentions. She nodded to Younger Brother, who in turn motioned to a ruined wall.

  A moment later, a dozen people emerged from behind the wall. Two were Logui warriors holding the ends of a chain on which ten young Chinese men were roped. Their mouths and eyes were covered. They wore dun army uniforms. They stood in a row as Dolores slowly passed for the benefit of the villagers, addressing them in Anchiga, although obviously none understood a word.

  “You’re young men. You come from a great, learned civilization that has disregarded its past and imitated the facile shallowness of the West. You have families you love who love you. Probably none of you ever committed an evil act. You deserve to return to your country and live decent lives. Unfortunately, there is a principle called the Greater Good. Your leaders have sent you to rape our sacred homeland. The Greater Good demands we do what we must to defend it. We need to send a message to your people that they cannot fight us. Tonight we shall pray for your souls.”

  She paused to regard the prisoners. Poor victims. She looked at her people. They’ll never be victims.

  Again, Dolores nodded at Younger Brother.

  Again, he gestured, and a moment later ten arrows flew from the jungle into the hearts of the ten soldiers. They dropped as one.

  Dolores said, “Remove your shafts from the bodies. Shoot the wounds where the shafts entered so their people will think the narcotraffickers killed them. Leave the bodies on the beach.”

  Dolores watched the bodies being removed. The Logui returned to their village. Throughout, Dolores’s visage had been grim, but now that she was alone, she smiled, picturing the reaction of the Chinese when they awoke to find their slaughtered comrades. Her smile was brief. She’d murdered innocents in order to protect the Logui. But still . . .

  Yes, the Chinese would back off, but only for a short time, and eventually they and the Colombians would attack the Logui en masse. At best, she’d bought her people a respite.

  But she knew it would not be for long.

  CHAPTER 9

  The mercs kept me in the bedroom all day. Its door was locked. They came for me at twilight. They took me outside and put me into another dark-glassed Suburban. I glimpsed them putting Stella into the one we’d arrived in. I thought she saw me, yet she kept her expression hidden.

  From them? Or me?

  The SUVs navigated the road and got back on a highway. Thirty minutes later, we unloaded on tarmac that reeked of aviation fuel: Long Island’s MacArthur Airport, I assumed, yet there’d been no security check.

  The power of money.

  A stairway led to a sleek private jet. Two cabins. Mine was the rear one. I heard the front fuselage doors closing and Stella’s voice—sluggish, probably drugged, I thought—in the forward cabin; then the door between the cabins closed. Within a minute, the jet started taxiing, turned onto a runway, stopped. The engines whined louder, and I felt the powerful machine straining; then its brakes released, and it lurched down the runway.

  In twenty seconds, we were airborne. The plane gained altitude, the cowboy at the controls banked hard left, and off we went.

  Duke had said an overnight flight, so I settled in for the duration. A couple of hours later, one of the mercs appeared with a tuna sandwich and tepid coffee, then left, shutting the door behind him. I ate while looking out the window. Nothing but ocean below, not a ship’s light in sight. I figured we were over the Caribbean, headed south. To Colombia.

  It felt as if I were going home.

  I awoke when the jet touched down. It was still dark. Passenger jetliners were parked outside a modern terminal. As we neared a jetport, I could see lettering on the control tower—Riohacha—a name that spiked my heart like an electroshock. Riohacha was a small city on Colombia’s Guajira Peninsula, the desertlike coastal stretch where the Colombian drug trade first went international half a century ago, when weed was king and coca was a ridiculousness chewed by Indians . . . eventually becoming the basis of my vocation.

  Again, I wondered: Why me? As well as: Why here?

  I tried not to overthink the possibility of a threat. If anyone wanted to kill me, they already would’ve. I was safe because, somehow, I was needed.

  I heard
the forward fuselage door open, then voices and footsteps. I inched open the window shade just as Stella was being arm-walked by two mercs across the tarmac to a midsize helicopter—

  The jet’s rear cabin door opened, and a merc leaned in.

  “Your carriage awaits, massah,” he said.

  He led me to the chopper. It was a big job with a good-size cabin. Two pilot seats up front, four passenger seats in two rows behind. Stella sat in the row behind the pilot, her eyes closed, mouth agape. Sedated, for sure. A merc sat alongside her. Another merc pushed me into the seat behind Stella, then sat next to me. The cabin door closed. The main rotor cast quickening shadows on the tarmac. The copter lifted, tilted, then zoomed off.

  Something was strange.

  Then I realized that, but for a faint whirring, the machine was soundless. I recalled reading something about next-gen weaponry, specifically, the stealth NOTAR—No Tail Rotor—system. Most helicopter noise comes from the tail rotor, so the bright boys of American industry had eliminated it, controlling yaw by blowing air out of vents along the tail boom. Supposedly, NOTAR was not yet in production, but these people, whoever they were, had the collective juice to obtain one.

  The merc handed me headphones and motioned me to put them on over my ears. When I did, over them an intercom-altered voice said, “Hello dere, Big Benn.”

  Altered or not, I recognized the voice. I’d been cursing the memory of its owner every day of the past year. I looked at my seatmate, who wasn’t a merc.

  He was Richard LNU—last name unknown—the same twisted government spook who’d squeezed my every last dollar as a fine when I was suspended, and then, adding insult to injury, spread the untruth that I was an informant.

  What did Richard have to do with this case? It had started as a penny-ante game. Then, first when Duke sat at the table, and again when Dolores took a seat, it had escalated to five-figure buy-ins. And, now that Richard was playing, the game had moved to the big table, where every hand was no limit, all in. That explained the NOTAR, an appliance obviously donated by Richard’s befuddled feds. But what was so important that the feds would get involved?

  More to the point, who was Richard really working for?

  My first thoughts were:

  No way it could be Dolores.

  Very unlikely Stella.

  Very possibly Uncle.

  Most probably Duke—

  Wrong. They’re all coconspirators—

  Wrong again. This was Richard’s show. He was the big man with the heavy guns and big connections, backed by the full power of the United States.

  Bottom line? Whatever was really going on was still hush-hush, with the one exception that I was now part of it.

  “Cat got your tongue?” said Richard.

  Richard was a strapping guy, but my first impulse was to sock him in the nose, right between his bug-eyed goggles. In fact, I did, or tried to—

  I took a swing, but he easily caught my fist. “Easy, B’wana,” he said. “We’re asshole-buddies now.”

  “One day you’ll run out of luck,” I said. “When that happens, I’m gonna take a dump on your grave.”

  His sigh was an electronic rasp. “Change your mode, pally. I’ve got a proposition for you. I wouldn’t call it a matter of your life or death . . . let’s just say that if you don’t accept it, I can’t vouch for your future.”

  “So speaks a bent cop.”

  Hard, he squeezed my fist, which he still held. “Can the tantrum, and let me tell you the real haps. ’Kay?”

  “Leggo my hand.”

  He did. “Ready?”

  I nodded, and Richard drew what seemed a steadying breath before continuing. “The day the towers got hit? Soon as I heard, I headed downtown, full siren, screw the pedestrians, when all of a sudden I spotted this guy I knew. The kind of guy you can’t steal a chopstick in Chinatown without him wanting a piece. You know how guys like that operate, don’t you?”

  “I’ve heard stories.”

  “Don’t slide on me.”

  “They operate according to whatever you want ’em to do.”

  “That’s right. So the day this happened was, ah, 9-11 . . .” For a moment, Richard’s voice broke, but he quickly regained his composure. “Chinatown sits on top of the financial district, so I figure maybe the guy knows something. It’d just come in over the radio that the first tower had fallen, and I was freaking out. I wanted to kill the bastards who did it. Hell, I just wanted to kill someone. So I grabbed my guy and asked if he’d seen strangers in Chinatown lately. Unusual money movement. He swore not, but I knew my guy. Had to break three of his fingers before he fessed up. What finally got him talking wasn’t the pain, though. It was seeing ghosts—gweilos, the Chinks call ’em—powdered-white people emerging from the clouds of dust from the Twin Towers. He took the ghosts as a sign that he should confess his sins.”

  Wearing the goggles, Richard reminded me of a praying mantis possessed of limitless patience until it struck. Was he really suggesting that today’s gig had something to do with 9-11?

  “Of course, it turned out my guy knew zip about 9-11,” Richard answered my unspoken question. “After the word came it was the towelheads and CIA stepped in—I was DEA Main Justice then—I went back to my regular business. At least my guy had good info on that. He was tight with a big player in Chinatown, whom I could’ve put into any number of criminal conspiracies, but I let his Mr. Big continue operating because he was my guy’s source. Anyway, my guy duped a set of keys to the Pagoda—you know the place I’m talking, right?”

  “I know the Pagoda.” Clearly, Richard’s Mr. Big was Uncle, and his snitch was Albert Woo, whom I myself had made an informant years ago. Not surprising that Albert had graduated to being a paid confidential informant, doing eyes-only stuff. Happens all the time, the government making—sometimes instigating—cases based on the word of professional prevaricators, who get a piece of the forfeited action. No doubt after Richard took his lion’s share.

  Richard tilted his head so the colored dash lights reflected from his dark goggles like a row of casino slots. Then he looked at me, and his goggles became black bug eyes above his Chiclet grin.

  “The Pagoda’s owner,” he said. “Say the name aloud for posterity.”

  From the start, I’d assumed Richard was taping the conversation. My intention was to dummy up, but there was the legal doctrine of “conscious avoidance,” meaning that deliberately concealing criminal knowledge can be considered as evidence of guilt. And Richard was an ace at bending a word here, twisting a fact there, putting me in a criminal conspiracy.

  “Winston Lau,” I said. “Uncle.”

  “Very good. Okay, back in 2006, my guy periodically checked out the Pagoda, looking for financial records, but—can you believe?—Uncle uses abacuses. Also, he never goes to the Pagoda before three, so one morning my guy goes in at seven, and he’s snooping around when Uncle unexpectedly shows up. My guy hides behind a cabinet and watches Uncle access a hidden safe, open it, and stare at what’s inside, even talks to it. Turns out Uncle opens the safe only once a year, on the anniversary of something or other. My guy only hears part of what Uncle’s babbling, but it’s enough to get his dick hard. You hearing me, asshole?”

  “I know you’re excited, but you’re spitting on me.”

  “Just listen and nod, got it? So Uncle bows, closes the safe, leaves. My guy barely glimpses the thing in the safe, but it’s enough for him to realize it’s worth a fucking fortune. Because Uncle worked the safe’s combination slowly, like he was getting off on the anticipation, it was easy for my guy to figure the numbers. So when Uncle’s gone, he reopens the safe and steals the thing. Figures it’s something Uncle himself stole, so Uncle can’t tell anyone he had it; tough titty. My guy knows people who’ll pay a gazillion for the thing. Bingo! Guess who just hit the jackpot.”

  “You’re about to tell me. And you can call ‘your guy’ by his name: Albert Woo.”

  Richard paused a long moment. “
Okay, Albert, he knew this was too big for him, so he brought it to me. By then I was CIA, but Albert thought I was still a drug cop. The moron acted as if we were partners. But it turned out I was professionally very interested in the people Albert wanted to sell the thing to. So I set up a deal with fail-safes and fallbacks. You catching my drift?”

  Guys like Richard are world-class manipulators. He wanted my voice on tape. I only nodded.

  “So Albert hands over the valuable object to these people while they simultaneously deposit ten million US currency in a numbered overseas account. I had no intention of giving Albert a dime of it, but the yellow rat outfoxed me. The account is fourteen numbers. Before I stepped into the picture, Albert had conned the buyers into showing good intent by giving him the first seven numbers up front. When I took over the show, they gave me the last seven numbers. So I told Albert we’re partners, just be patient; one day when things cool down, we’ll divvy up the score.”

  Spittle had gathered in the corners of his mouth, and I realized Richard was speed freaking. Good. The more I knew, the better I’d cover my ass and find an escape exit.

  He said, “Even if Albert had all fourteen numbers, he couldn’t touch the bread. See, in addition to the numbers, there’s a security question that needs to be answered. Guess who’s the only one who knows the answer?”

  “Thou.”

  “Or, moi, as our Dolores might say. Me doing her . . . that bother you?”

  “Your presence bothers me.”

  “How about Stella? You mind sharing her?”

  Had the son of a bitch seen our sex tape? I feigned a don’t-give-a-crap sneer. “Stella’s strictly kosher. She hates pigs.”

  “You know the thing is a hat?”

  I nodded.

  He mock-slapped his forehead. “Of course you know. Duke told you. Bet you thought Duke was the man. Wrong. This is my show.”