by Tom Clancy
Once Eduardo had climbed into the front passenger seat and they were under way, Ramon had explained that they would be traveling to DeVane’s ranch outside San Borja to meet with him and Vicente. This had caused a knot of apprehension in Eduardo’s stomach, but speaking with the air of fraternal confidentiality common to rank-and-file members of any organization when discussing their superiors, Ramon had told him that a substantial payoff had been needed to compel the authorities to drop their case against him, and that the two bosses merely wanted to be shown proper appreciation for having interceded on his behalf.
After all that he’d endured, Eduardo had replied, he was prepared to demonstrate his gratitude and contrition with relish, even if it meant getting down on his knees to kiss their bare bottoms.
“Everything in life is easier to get into than out of,” the driver had commented with a chuckle.
Now the Rover slowed as he guided it up a side street lined with grimy, leaning hovels that seemed on the verge of collapse, took a series of turns along nearly identical streets, then guided it onto a narrow gravel lane running between a stretch of empty lots. Eduardo, who had been paying little attention to their dismal course through town, suddenly furrowed his brow in puzzlement. A glance through the windshield showed that they were heading toward a dead end, their way blocked up ahead by a sentry gate, beyond which was a low, gray, flat-roofed structure with six or eight tractor-trailer trucks parked on either side of its cinder-block walls — presumably a warehouse of some kind.
“Perdoname, donde esta la estacion?” he said in Spanish. Asking where the railway station was.
The driver smiled and motioned to the right.
“Sólo al norte de aqui, ” he said, slowing as he approached the sentry gate. “It’s just north of here.”
Eduardo glanced in that direction, and saw nothing but the wide, muddy lot. Then he heard Ramon’s pushbutton window roll down, jerked his eyes back toward him, and saw him reach out the window to swipe an identification card through a gatepost security scanner.
Eduardo felt a cold spark of alarm as it swung open to admit them and Ramon pulled to a halt several yards in front of the building.
“Qué es esto?” he blurted. “I don—”
Its movement a blur, Ramon’s hand had shot beneath the dash and come back into sight gripping a pistol that must have been clipped to the dash’s underside.
“Open your door and get out,” he said, brandishing the gun at Eduardo. “Slowly.”
Eduardo swallowed thickly, dumbfounded. One look at the weapon had told him it was a Sig Pro.40 semiautomatic — a standard-issue DEA sidearm. The thought that he’d fallen for another anti-drug squad setup flashed through his mind, and was quickly dismissed. What sense did that make? He had not escaped from confinement, but been willingly freed by his jailers. Nor had he uttered a peep about his business dealings to his driver or the plainclothes men who had escorted him to the border crossing.
He decided that Ramon, if that was his real name, must indeed be with DeVane — but the suddenly aggressive look in the man’s eyes, the deft speed with which he’d produced his concealed weapon, and the particular model of gun he was using were all indications that he was no mere chauffeur. While conducting anti-drug operations in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America, DEA and U.S. Special Forces units had recruited and trained in-country field commandos who knew the territory and were able to speak the language. After completing their mandatory one-year tours of duty these natives — many of whom had blood ties to the coca farmers and distributors — would often put their skills and inside knowledge of narco police tactics up for sale to the cartels they had once sworn to oppose.
Eduardo cursed himself for a fool. His uncle was a respected lieutenant in the DeVane organization, and he had assumed it was Vicente, acting out of familial loyalty, who had brought about his release. But it could have been DeVane who’d engineered it. Must have been. And for reasons that, it seemed, were far from benign.
His face paling, Eduardo did as he had been instructed. Almost before he had exited the vehicle, Ramon was out his own door. He hurried around to Eduardo’s side, grabbed him roughly by the arm with one hand, and shoved him along toward the building’s corrugated metal door, the Sig pistol jammed against the back of his head.
There was an intercom beside the entrance. Ramon leaned toward it, pushed a button under the speaker, and announced himself, his gun held steady. An instant later the door rose clankily on its metal tracks.
Ramon prodded Eduardo through the entrance with the Sig and followed him inside. Then the door rattled down behind them, shutting out the daylight. Eduardo found himself thrown into sudden gloom. The air was stale and warm. Incandescent lightbulbs on the ceiling, covered by simple metal grills, seemed to propagate rather than dispel the interior shadows.
Ramon forced him to keep moving. As his pupils adjusted to the dimness, Eduardo glanced from side to side, and noticed the shipping crates on wooden pallets stacked all around him. Just as he had suspected, a warehouse. He guessed it was a hundred feet deep and twice as wide.
Then he looked straight ahead of him, saw the group of men waiting in the cleared-out space at the end of the aisle, and felt a sharp jab of fear. Only two were seated, the backs of their chairs against the bare unpainted walls. Vicente was one of them. Although Eduardo had never met him in person, he knew the slightly built American in the incongruous white suit seated to his uncle’s right was Harlan DeVane. On either side of them stood a pair of guards holding short-barreled Micro Uzi assault rifles.
The tall, muscular man standing rigidly in front of the others, his chiseled face impassive, was DeVane’s chief lieutenant, Siegfried Kuhl.
“Eduardo,” DeVane said, his voice carrying softly across the room. “How do you do?”
Eduardo tried to think of something to say, but thought was impossible, swept from his head in the whipping gale of terror generated from the group of men before him and the pressure of Ramon’s gun against the base of his skull.
DeVane steepled his hands on his lap. His legs were crossed, his right thigh hanging loosely over his left knee.
“You look frightened,” he said. “Are you?”
Eduardo still could not wring any sound from his throat. He felt a choking, breathless nausea.
“Tell me if you are afraid,” DeVane said.
Eduardo opened his mouth in another unsuccessful attempt at speech, then closed it and simply nodded. The tiny projection of the Sig’s front sight ruffled his neck hairs as his head moved up and down.
DeVane sighed.
“You know, my boy, I am as loath to be here as yourself,” he said in his smooth, quiet voice. “I preside over a great many enterprises, and generally a small complication such as you have caused would be the sort of thing I let others handle. I cannot be everywhere at once. A leader must have confidence in those who work for him.” His hand left his lap and fluttered toward Vicente. “Solid, honorable men like your uncle.”
Eduardo glanced over at Vicente. A rail-thin man in his mid-sixties with a sweep of white hair over a high forehead, Vicente looked back at him for only a second, his wrinkled face grim. Then he dropped his eyes.
Eduardo’s legs weakened underneath him. It was the expression on the old man’s face. The way he had avoided his gaze.
“This isn’t to say your situation hasn’t been of interest to me, or that I feel it is inconsequential,” DeVane went on. “The problem isn’t your arrest. That happens. In any competition there are errors and setbacks. Times when the best of plays are outdone by your opponent. Do you understand me so far?”
Eduardo nodded.
“Good,” DeVane said. “And since you’ve admitted to your own fear, I’ll tell you what scares me.” He leaned slightly forward in his chair. “I fear the stupid and the weak, because history illustrates that their actions can bring down the most powerful. When someone like you is gullible enough to be duped by a common street-walker, letting her co
nvince you to deal with men you do not know, men you do not bother checking out, there is no telling what information might slip to the other side. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you have to offer, because one thing leads to another, and that to another, and so forth.
“For example, by contacting Vicente to bail you out of trouble, you put him in a position of having to ask a favor of me. Out of respect for your uncle, I then felt obliged to offer bribe money to a petty government bureaucrat, some of which filtered down to the magistrate in charge of your case, with smaller amounts trickling in dribs and drabs to a federal prosecutor, and then, I suppose, to a police clerk in an evidence control room who conveniently made the proof of your transaction disappear. These are markers, my boy. And they may lead an astute and determined opponent from you to Vicente, from Vicente up to me, from me down to a lackey officer, and then finally back to you — a connective loop that could theoretically cause me trouble without end.”
He paused a moment. “Are you still following, Eduardo?”
Eduardo nodded agitatedly again.
DeVane’s eyes bored into him with such awful, palpable force he thought his knees would finally give out.
“Open your mouth and answer me,” he said. His expression was brittle. “Find that much strength.”
Sick, dizzy, Eduardo again struggled to speak. He knew that he was standing at the brink of Hell, and if his silence were perceived as defiance, he was finished.
“Yes,” he said in a faint, cracked voice. “I–I understand.”
DeVane sat back in his chair and put his fingers together in a steeple again, resuming the relaxed, self-assured posture in which Eduardo had first seen him.
“Good,” he said. “Then you should finally understand something else. I am here, now, as a gesture of respect for Vicente, for whom I know your punishment will be difficult. Were it not for him, it would have been unworthy of my attendance. I would have ordered it done from the comfort of my home, and devoted no more thought to it than I do to blinking my eyes.”
With that, he looked at Kuhl, who had turned partially in his direction. There was an unspoken interaction between them — a brief meeting of their gazes, barely perceptible nods.
Then Kuhl reached back around his right hip and pulled something from his wide leather belt. Squinting in the semidarkness, Eduardo could see that it was some sort of wooden club or nightstick.
He looked beseechingly at DeVane, but he was staring at his own hands as if contemplating some unrelated matter. Beside him, Vicente sat with his head still lowered.
Kuhl stepped toward him, his hand gripping the stick.
“Please,” Eduardo said. He cowered backward, came up against Ramon’s solid body and the unyielding gun-metal pressed to his neck. “Please.”
Kuhl was on him an instant later. Even as Eduardo raised his hands in defense, Kuhl struck a sharp, precise blow to his right arm with the end of the stick. His wrist bone broke free of the long bones of his forearm with a clean and audible snap. Kuhl swiftly brought the stick to the right and down again between Eduardo’s neck and collarbone, then swung it across his middle. Eduardo simultaneously crumpled to his knees and vomited on himself.
Kuhl hit him three more times with the stick, smashing his nose with one blow, then striking him twice in the head. Eduardo collapsed further, curling his knees up into his chest. Blood gushed from his pulverized nose onto the rough concrete floor.
His eyes rolled blearily upward. He could see Kuhl standing above him, holding the stick in a vertical position, pulling at its upper end. And then the stick’s handle detached and the long length of a knife blade slid from inside its bottom segment.
Kuhl stood there without expression, the knife in his right hand and the remaining portion of the stick in his left, looking as if he were about to plunge the blade into Eduardo’s body. But instead he turned and passed it to someone who had come up beside him.
Eduardo shifted his head as far as he could, saw the man standing next to Kuhl, through a haze of pain, and released a low, tormented groan.
Vicente stared down at his nephew a moment, his eyes solemn, the lines around his mouth deepening. Then he knelt over him with the knife and sliced its edge across his throat to deliver the coup de grace.
Eduardo jerked, made a gurgling noise, and expired.
Rising, the old man gave the weapon back to Kuhl, turned toward DeVane, and bowed his head a little.
“I am sorry for your loss, dear friend,” DeVane said gently.
Vicente nodded again but remained where he stood.
DeVane rose from his chair as Kuhl approached him, the knife dripping in his hand.
“Have Vicente driven out of here so the others can scrape that garbage off the floor,” he said. “The Albanians have come through for us, and you and I have matters of vital importance to discuss.”
ELEVEN
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA APRIL 19, 2001
“Any word on Thibodeau?” Gordian asked.
“He’s still in ICU, but his condition’s been upgraded from critical to serious,” Nimec said. “The doctors are encouraged. They say he’s alert. Also told me he’s already getting on their nerves.”
“How so?”
“Asking a lot of questions.”
“Good sign.”
“And demanding they find him a Stetson.”
“Even better.”
“Exactly my thought.”
“Either of you care to explain?” Megan said. “About the Stetson, I mean.”
Gordian looked at her. “Thibodeau was Air Cav in Vietnam. It was their tradition to wear Stetsons as part of their military wardrobe when they received awards and decorations. Still is, I think.”
“Ah,” Megan said. “So he’s presumably of a mind that there’s something to celebrate.”
Gordian nodded.
They were in a sub-basement meeting room at UpLink’s corporate HQ that looked much like any other in the building — beige carpet, oval conference table, recessed fluorescents — but differed from them in many important respects. The most apparent to the handful of top-tier executives permitted access were the electronic security panels outside the door incorporating voice-activated key-code software and retina-fingerprint scans, and the total absence of windows once they got inside.
The most substantive differences involved the interstitial matrix of comint technology that had been subtly worked into the room’s design and construction. Layers of two-foot-thick concrete and acoustical paneling soundproofed its walls to human ears. Steel reinforcements, white-noise generators, and other counter-surveillance systems had been imbedded within them to block the tapping of conversations and electronic communications. Adding to security were twice-weekly sweeps for bugs, and spectrum and X-ray scans of all electronic equipment coming into or out of the room. While continual advancements in eavesdropping technology made it unrealistic to guarantee that any space on earth was strongboxed against droops—a word meaning “dirty rotten snoops” coined by UpLink’s risk-assessment man, Vince Scull — its occupants could feel a comfortable degree of assurance in the inviolability of their discussions.
These occupants presently being limited to Gordian, Nimec, and Megan Breen, who had convened in this high-tech sanctum sanctorum to see what they could make of Brazil.
“Thibodeau’s doctors mention the sort of questions he’s been asking?” Gordian said now.
“No, but Cody did. He’s the guy Rollie insisted on talking to,” Nimec said. “It’s pretty much as you’d expect. Who, what, why. And how the invaders knew as much about our perimeter security and grounds plan as they did.”
“The answer to the last part seems painfully obvious.”
“A mole,” Megan said.
“Or moles,” Nimec added.
“Anybody look good for it?” Gordian asked.
“Not yet, and I expect it’ll take a while before we find solid pointers,” Nimec said. “There’s no evidence our internal defenses w
ere compromised in the sense of systems shutdowns or restricted databases being hacked. The reconnaissance that was gathered wouldn’t have required a high level of clearance, just a familiarity with the complex and the time and incentive to do a thorough job of mapping it out. My guess is there are over a thousand administrative, R&D, production, building construction, medical, maintenance, and even kitchen staffers who could’ve provided the information.”
“Nor can we rule out Sword personnel,” Megan said.
Nimec looked at her. “That’s right,” he said. “We can’t.”
Gordian glanced from one to the other. “Impressions?”
“The invasion force was well organized and armed to the teeth,” Nimec said. “It had land and air elements that performed with exceptional tactical coordination and were equipped with a French integrated weapon/helmet-mounted targeting package that gave them the equivalent of our country’s Land Warrior system — ordnance that’s technically still in field trials. The airborne teams that we think took out the robots made their insertion using high-altitude-high-opening para techniques. Again, we’re looking at skills, experience, and equipment generally associated with elite commando units. They made the terrorists who hit us in Russia a couple years back look like toy soldiers.”
“I assume none of the men we captured gave up information about who sent them?”
“There hardly would have been a chance if they’d wanted to,” Megan said. “Brazilian federal police scooped them out of our hands within an hour after we notified them of the strike.”
“Which is pretty much what I expected. Have we made official inquiries of the gendarmes since then?”
“Several, but they haven’t exactly been eager to respond. Nobody we’ve contacted even seems sure where the prisoners are being detained.”
“And I’d be willing to bet they’re never seen or heard from again.” Nimec rubbed his thumb over his fingers. “Whoever could launch an operation of the kind we saw the other night has got to have plenty of grease. The hinky bastards that pass for lawmen down there would be just the ones to soak it up. Mark my words, Gord, we’ll get zero disclosure from them.”