Wild Card pp-8

by Tom Clancy

  “Chicago, south side,” Ricci said. “I’d guess that’s the accent.”

  Lathrop remained silent another moment and then shrugged.

  “He is what he is,” he said. “If he used to be something else and wants to tell you about it, it’s up to him.”

  * * *

  Salvetti’s ranch house was a small, single-story building with rustic furnishings that looked as if they were mostly handcrafted. Its main room was off the kitchen and had a large trestle table with benches on either side, a Native American rug of some kind in the middle of the dark hardwood floor, and pine chests and chairs here and there around it. Ricci saw a computer in a hutch against one wall, a crowded bookshelf above it, and against the opposite wall a stereo with a turntable on a stand beside several stacked crates of vinyl albums. He didn’t notice a television.

  “I’ve got something for your stomachs,” Salvetti said. He’d emerged from the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches and sweating ice-cold soda cans and set it at one end of the table. “Grab whatever you want; the bread and cheese are homemade.”

  Lathrop sat on a bench and reached for a sandwich. Ignoring the food, Ricci stepped toward the opposite end of the table to look at a pile of open and semi-unfolded maps.

  “These for us?” he said.

  Salvetti nodded, came around next to him.

  “I had most of them handy, downloaded the rest off the Internet. Aerials, government topos, Triple-A road maps.” He shuffled one out of the pile and fully outspread it. “This’s a satellite closeup of that area out there south of Yosemite.” He glanced over at Lathrop. “I circled off your major landmarks. The twin buttes, that creek… only thing I couldn’t locate is the Miwok trail. If it’s really there like the man told you, you’ll have to sniff it out on your own.”

  Ricci looked at him.

  “Miwok?”

  “It’s the name somebody or other gave the Sierra Nevada Indian tribes after they were happy to call themselves Ahwaneechee for four thousand years,” Salvetti said.

  “For God’s sake,” Lathrop said. “Listen to you.”

  Salvetti smiled a little.

  “It pays to know your neighbors,” he said. “Or at least to know who they are.”

  Lathrop rose from the bench and joined the other two, carrying his sandwich with him.

  “You decide on someplace to put us down?” he asked.

  Salvetti slid a finger over the map until he got to a site he’d inked a heavy black ring around, then tapped it twice.

  “This mesa here should be perfect,” he said. “It’s low and wide so you can hardly notice its elevation. Pretty naked, too, and that’s firsthand knowledge… I’ve flown over it before.” He paused. “Brings you to within five miles of those buttes, the closest I can get.”

  Ricci looked at him again.

  “Seems like it’d be a rough landing.”

  Salvetti seemed mildly surprised by his remark.

  “I tell people I can bring them anywhere in my plane,” he said. “They won’t ever hear me guarantee it’s going to be easy.”

  * * *

  The moment he entered the hut, Pedro saw Marissa Vasquez watching him from her place on the floor. Always, she watched him. And always looking back into her eyes filled Pedro with a venom for this schooled and coddled daughter of privilege that only equaled his desire to have his way with her. It was as if the hateful resentment and lust fueled each other, and he wanted her to feel its relentless, intolerable inner burning just as he felt it. Physically feel its volcanic release inside her. And soon enough, when the time came, he would do it. He would treat her no better than the cheap Tijuana whores he left weeping in pain and degradation on their filthy sheets, on their bare backs, his crumpled bills reclaimed from the purses in which they had stuffed them. Treat her without even as much regard, for they did not ever think to stand up taller than he. Soon, yes, soon. Pedro would give her what roared within him like an angry, hungering beast, pound it into her, and as she fought and cried out in resistance, he would let her have still more of it. He would force upon her an education that not all her father’s wealth could have provided, show her for once what it was to live in common flesh. And in that sharing Pedro would take something from her as well, for whatever long or short time she had left. And there, for him, would be the true and lasting satisfaction.

  He stepped toward her in his combat-booted feet now, stood with hands on his hips. Her face was gaunt from weariness and anxiety, her hair hanging around it in tousled disarray. But her eyes were sharp and clear.

  And they watched him

  “I have good news, hermosa,” he said. And glanced at her constant guard. “If César has not already broken it.”

  Marissa said nothing. The guard shook his head slightly but did not otherwise move. He would, of course, never have taken it upon himself to tell her of the information that had reached them from Modesto.

  “A man comes to free you,” Pedro said. “As soon as today, I am led to believe.”

  She did not speak.

  “He has been sent by your father,” he said. “A gringo whose services the millionaire Esteban Vasquez has bought, as he always buys his adored niña’s safety and comfort with his money.”

  She studied Pedro’s masked face with restrained interest, as if not wishing to yield him the gratification of a perceived ruse. Her composed silence and stillness clawed at his stomach, made him impatient for the release he himself held tightly in check.

  “Do you believe me about this?” he asked.

  She did not speak.

  “Do you believe me?” he repeated, an insistent edge in his voice.

  Marissa finally shrugged.

  “I’m not sure about anything my father will do,” she said. “If someone comes, I suppose I’ll know.”

  “Perhaps only after I throw your rescuer’s dead body at your feet,” Pedro said. “For the impressive gringo who comes for you, this one who is said to have delivered the daughter of a great and famous American businessman from her own unfortunate captivity, has been betrayed by his compañero for the money of the millionaire who pays me.” He showed a grin through the mouth opening of his balaclava. “We know where he will arrive. We know about when. And even now my men disperse to set their trap for him.”

  Marissa looked at him without answering.

  Pedro’s grin hardened. “So what do you think, flora?” he said. “Of how money brings us full circle, and the rest?”

  She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, released a drawn out but steady breath.

  “I don’t know what to say that you would understand,” she replied.

  Pedro stared at the girl a second, feeling the angry urge to take her right there and then. On the ground, in the dirt, with his hands around her throat, he would add to her humiliation by doing it while César watched. But then he caught hold of himself. This affair was not over, not yet. If he was to collect on his own fee, he must still be bound to Juan Quiros’s wishes.

  He turned back through the hut entrance, suddenly perspiring under his full face hood, his mouth parched with thirst. Outside, he started to reach for the water canteen on his gear belt but changed his mind, his hand going instead to the metal flask of whiskey in his breast pocket.

  The deep swig Pedro took quenched neither his thirst nor his seething rage. He had not expected that it would.

  The slut’s time was coming, he thought, and swiped a hand across his lips.

  Not yet, no. Not yet.

  But coming.

  * * *

  Salvetti drove them a short distance past his ranch house and then pulled the truck to a halt. Up ahead, a single-prop Grumman Tiger sat on a twelve-hundred-foot improved airstrip.

  “That plane come with the ranch?” Ricci asked from the backseat.

  Salvetti craned his head around.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “The chickens also.”

  Ricci just looked at him.

  Salvetti turned away,
pushed open his door, glanced up at the cloudless sky, and checked his watch.

  “Haul out your gear and I’ll get us loaded aboard and flaps-down in the air,” he said. “Under these flying conditions, we should be over the Sierra in a hop and a skip.”

  * * *

  Pedro pushed through a tangle of manzanita and joined the three lookouts he’d posted on the other side. Then he gazed straight ahead northward, where the double buttes heaved up from the flat valley bottom, scored and knobbed with erosion, but stacked high above the surrounding landscape as if in a display of resistant strength.

  After a moment Pedro turned to the man beside him. Leaving the hut out of sight had quieted his ache for their captive in a way the whiskey had not, but now he felt a restlessness to spring the ambush. It would, Juan Quiros had promised, be an action well worth his trouble.

  “I take it the others are on the move, Lafé?” he asked.

  “As you ordered,” the guard said.

  Pedro grunted with satisfaction, looked toward the buttes again. Though still washed in afternoon heat, he could barely wait for the chirping of the insects to announce dusk’s arrival in the valley.

  “The maricone will come for the girl from the direction of those spires,” he said. “And he will go to his death under their shadows.”

  * * *

  With its thirty-one-foot wingspan and high-rev Lycoming engine, the Tiger had been designed to be feather-light and fighter-powerful. And so it was as Salvetti piloted the little four-seater over an irregular terrain of jutting peaks, pine-forested upper slopes, and arid, shadow-splashed foothills and depressions studded with thickets of dryland scrub, all of it visible in panorama below vaporous white swags of low-altitude clouds.

  Quiet since they had gone wheels-up, Ricci sat behind Salvetti trying to match what was depicted on the USGA map across his lap to what he saw through the aircraft’s wide canopy and windows, occasionally glancing at the digital ground image on the avionic panel’s navigational display for additional comparison. In the copilot’s seat, Lathrop also kept his words to a minimum, but had seemed not once to look at the ground as he gazed outward into space.

  Ricci observed this by chance and filed it away in his mind without particular inference.

  Half an hour after takeoff, Salvetti pointed out the lined, wattled necks of the buttes projecting between the walls of a shallow valley or basin to his left.

  “You’re going thereabouts,” he said, and then nodded his head toward the forward curve of the canopy. “Look out and you’ll notice the land flatten in front of us almost like it’s been smoothed over by giant rollers. A kind of dark rim around its edges, see?”

  Ricci leaned forward.

  “Shadows,” he said.

  Salvetti nodded.

  “They outline the mesa’s plateau, give you an idea how it barely rises over the plain,” he said. “If this was around noontime instead of three in the afternoon, you’d have the bright sun overhead and might not even notice that it mounts.” He paused, adjusted himself behind the controls. “You fellas better strap in — I’m going to drop down and run a couple of passes to scout a landing spot that won’t throw our spines out of whack.”

  Lathrop reached for his seatbelt buckle.

  “We hope,” he said to finally break his long, staring silence.

  * * *

  It wasn’t exactly easy. But it could have been much worse.

  The Tiger grooved out of the sky to land with a jarring bump and then rumbled shakily on across the mesa’s open table for several hundred feet, its propeller whipping up a cyclonic cloud of dust, its treaded wheels scraping out corrugated channels of parched earth and pebbles that tacked like hail against the underside of the airframe.

  Inside the cabin, Salvetti had his lips puckered into a spout as he gripped the control column. Ricci couldn’t hear him through the noise, but looking around his contoured headrest thought for a second that he might have been whistling.

  Then there was another, lesser jolt. Ricci lurched forward against his seatbelt, and back against the leather upholstery, deceleration slapping his stomach like an iron hand in a furry mitt. Moments later the grating bombardment of dirt abated and the prop’s blurry rotation slowed until its separate twin blades were distinguishable at the nose of the plane.

  Salvetti rolled to a halt and exhaled a surge of breath, his mouth wide open now, his knuckles relaxing around the column.

  “Did it again,” he said in a half whisper.

  Then he took his hands off the controls, leaned back, and briefly closing his eyes, tipped a finger toward the heavens and crossed himself.

  * * *

  The five guerrillas came midway down the trail, where they could see the bend of the sluggish creek it followed winding away from the buttes. Then they took cover, three hiding in the snarled vegetation that bordered the trail on its right, two splitting off to its left.

  They dumped their knapsacks, put their weapons down at their sides, and settled into position.

  “There are still hours until sundown,” one of them said to the man beside him in Spanish. He extracted a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook a couple out. They were unfiltered American Camels. “Nothing to fucking do but wait.”

  The man beside him nodded and accepted the cigarette that had been offered.

  “It should be cooler soon,” he said.

  “Yes,” said the other man, putting the rest of his cigarettes away and reaching for his Zippo lighter. “But then the biting flies come out.”

  “They are hateful creatures.”

  “Yes, that is the word. Hateful.”

  “I wish I could kill them. Kill every last one.”

  “I wish I could kill them all, too,” said the man with the pack of smokes. He fired the cigarette in his mouth, then held the lighter to the tip of his companion’s. “And I would like to kill both those fools who come for the girl.”

  “For making us sit out here in these bushes?”

  “Yes. I ask you, what extra pay will we get for it?”

  “Nothing.” The man who’d been given the Camel puffed to get it started. “You have a point, but we can only kill the one.”

  “Yes.”

  “We are, unfortunately, limited.”

  “Yes, limited, I agree,” said the man with the lighter in his hand. “That is another very good word.”

  He spit a fleck of loose tobacco from the tip of his tongue and then lapsed into silence, smoking and waiting for the dusk.

  * * *

  Outside the plane, Salvetti got their packs and other gear from the luggage hold and handed them off as they waited.

  Ricci took his duffel, reached for his rifle case, and slung it over his shoulder. Then he turned to where Lathrop was on his haunches studying one of the maps, and walked over to him.

  “We’re basing what we’re doing on something some small fry Quiros ringleader south of the border told you,” he said. “You sure you weren’t duped?”

  Lathrop glanced up at Ricci. He had put on dark mirrored sunglasses that gleamed in the sunshine.

  “It’s late to be asking again,” he said.

  “Not too late yet.”

  Lathrop continued looking into the brightness.

  “He knew what was at stake,” he said. “I knew he was too scared to have lied.”

  Ricci stood there.

  “Still haven’t told me how his stake paid off for him,” he said.

  “And maybe that’s how I want to keep it,” Lathrop said. “But if I’d gone to Juan with anything besides the goods on Marissa Vasquez, he’d have laughed in my face. Instead he confirmed every piece of information I got and filled in blanks I left to see how it all fell in line.”

  “Because he thinks I’m the man who did whatever you won’t tell me you did to his cousin down there in Baja,” Ricci said.

  Lathrop nodded.

  “And because he thinks I hired you to help me grab the Vasquez girl back for her fa
ther,” Ricci said.

  Lathrop nodded.

  “And because he thinks you’re pulling a double-cross on me,” Ricci said. “Setting me up for an ambush on that Indian trail. Dumb blanco that I am.”

  Lathrop nodded again.

  “Except,” Ricci said. “It isn’t me who’s being set up.”

  Lathrop’s head went up and down a fourth and final time, the sunlight slipping across his lenses like quicksilver.

  “Role reversal,” he said. “With a twist.”

  Ricci looked at him awhile without saying anything more. Then they both heard Salvetti slam the door of the Tiger’s baggage compartment.

  Rising from his squat, Lathrop folded the map, stuffed it into his shirt pocket, and lifted his packs off the ground.

  “We better get on the move,” he said.

  * * *

  Sunset, the western sky bleeding red across the horizon. Ready now, the guerrillas increased their vigilance, the stocks of their HK G36 submachine guns tucked against their arms.

  A last Camel was ground out in the scrub, dirt kicked hastily over its charred remnant.

  The smoker cleared his throat of phlegm and swatted helplessly at the tiny winged biters as they swirled in, attracted to some chemical in human sweat.

  “God damn this job,” he said in a hushed tone. “I only want it to be over.”

  The man beside him nodded.

  “What spares Lafé from coming out here?” he whispered. “Or even Manuel? It’s as if his softness is being rewarded.”

  “He’s already gotten his reward, or haven’t you taken a look at the girl he seduced?”

  “Of course I have. And between us, Pedro won’t be satisfied until he takes his turn with her.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed.”

  “He’ll have it before all this is done, too, I would bet.”

  “Yes. You can see how he waits. In his eyes, you can see. It could happen very soon.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes,” said the man who’d brought the cigarettes. “Yes, I do. While we’re out here getting eaten up by bugs.”

  The other man frowned.

  “You’re right when you say this job stinks and must be gotten over with quickly,” he said.