Alejandro, wearing a dark blue cotton sport jacket over a yellow polo shirt and jeans, walked into the cobalt blue room just before seven o’clock.
The bar was crowded, every banquette taken save the one that the maître d’ led Alejandro directly to. They were saving this one, waiting for me, he thought, watching the man avert his eyes and grab the ten-dollar tip at the same time. Classy joint for a meet, he thought, sliding onto the booth and motioning for the waiter. “Johnny Black and soda.”
Sipping his drink and glancing around the room, Alejandro wondered who the dopers were and where they had stashed their cameras. He assumed that the leather booth was wired.
At precisely seven-thirty, Roberto Barrios appeared in the entrance and, without bothering to look for him at the bar, walked directly over to his booth. “Let’s go,” he said quietly.
Alejandro motioned for the check.
Scratching his chin, Barrios said, “It’s taken care of.”
A black sedan with tinted windows was idling at the curb when they walked out of the hotel. A well-dressed man with a tight face that suggested a recent lift, hair dyed black and teeth capped white, stood on the curb in front of the car.
Barrios looped his arm around Alejandro’s and steered him over to the man.
“My card,” the stranger said, handing it to Alejandro.
It read Carlsen, Thromberg, Stassen, and Peach, Attorneys at Law.
Tossing it into the gutter, Alejandro asked, “So?”
“I am John Courtney Carlsen, and I am now informing you that my clients, Messieurs Robert Barrios and Hector Pizzaro, are not independently predisposed to engage in criminal conduct, and that if you are a police officer, or a federal agent, you are now directed, by me, to cease and desist your entrapment activities against my clients. I am also advising you that if my clients are the subjects of a criminal investigation, you are required to read them their Miranda warnings. And further-more …”
As the lawyer talked on, Alejandro edged closer to him, his jaw rigid, his hand stealthily unzipping his fly. He reached inside his pants, fished out his penis, and urinated on John Courtney Carlsen’s leg.
“Wuuuuuhhaaaa!” the lawyer howled, stumbling backward and falling against the car. “You son of a bitch!” he screamed.
Alejandro zipped up, looked at Barrios, and said, “Let’s get on with it.”
“I like your style,” Barrios said, opening the door. He looked at the lawyer. “We’ll be in touch.”
Once the singer was inside, Barrios slammed the door and walked back inside the hotel.
Hector Pizzaro, dressed immaculately in a light tan suit, sat on the far side of the seat, appraising Alejandro. His white swath of hair reminded Alejandro of a ski slope in a coal field. Pizzaro leaned forward and tapped on the partition. The car drove out into Park Avenue traffic.
Pizzaro took a plastic laundry basket off the floor and slapped it down on the seat next to Alejandro, ordering, “Get undressed.”
Alejandro looked at the orange basket, shrugged, and began struggling out of his clothes, folding them and depositing them in the basket.
A few minutes later Alejandro said, “Okay.”
Pizzaro turned his attention from the passing street scene and said, “Skivvies, too.”
Alejandro worked down his briefs and tossed them in with the rest.
Pizzaro pressed a button on his armrest, and the tinted partition whisked down. He handed the basket to the olive-skinned man on the passenger seat, and the partition slid back up.
Pizzaro scoured Alejandro’s body for a concealed transmitter. “Face me and lift your arms over your head,” he ordered.
Alejandro complied.
“Lay back and spread your legs.”
Alejandro complied.
After examining his body, Pizzaro said, “Lift your balls.”
Alejandro did that.
“Get up and turn around.”
Alejandro did as he was ordered.
Satisfied that there was nothing strapped to his back, Pizzaro ran his hand through Alejandro’s hair and ordered, “Get doggie style and spread your cheeks.”
Alejandro struggled onto all fours, resting his forehead on the armrest, and reached behind to spread the cheeks of his buttocks.
Pizzaro examined his body. Seeing no transmitter, he said, “Okay, you can sit up.”
Alejandro unwound himself and sat. Pizzaro moved close to him and again raked his fingers through his hair, gliding them around and behind his ears and under the lobes. That done, and finding nothing, he yanked a bath towel off the car’s rear shelf and tossed it at the singer. “In case you’re the modest type.”
Spreading the towel across his lap, Alejandro said, “You’re a very careful man, amigo. Mind telling me what that bit with the lawyer was all about?”
Pizzaro looked at him with a contemptuous expression. “If you turn out to be a cop, anything we might do together or say to each other would not be admissible in court.”
“You think of everything.”
Pizzaro leaned his head back against the cushion. “Tell me about your friend, Franklin Penzer.”
“The banker? I hardly know the guy. I met him at the club. He liked my music. He’s one of the honchos in a bank in Road Town in the British Virgins. He’s a big spender, and he likes the ladies, a lot. I introduced him to Che-Che a while back. I think they’re doing some business together.”
“You don’t vouch for him?”
“I vouch for no one but me. For all I know, Penzer could be a cop.” He began to shiver from the air-conditioning in the car.
Pizzaro’s cunning glance swept over him. “For all I know, you could be a cop.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
Pizzaro broke the spell by looking out the window. “Your Parapoint delivery system is interesting. How did you learn about it?”
“I read about it in the Sunday Times. I don’t remember when.”
“The Sunday Magazine, ‘The Covert War,’ April 9, 1989.”
This guy is not one of the field hands, Alejandro thought. “You’re obviously a man who likes to get his facts right,” he said.
“I was in Bolivian army intelligence, and was trained by masters.”
“How did you end up in New York?”
Pizzaro ignored the question. “How do you see Parapoint working for us?”
Alejandro repeated what he had told Barrios, then went into greater detail, explaining the security advantages of Parapoint.
“The remote transmitter can only control five chutes at a time?”
“Yes. But I can get you as many transmitters as you need to bring in your heroin.”
“And who told you that we’re talking about heroin and not cocaine?”
“Barrios.”
Brushing an imaginary speck from his trouser leg, Hector said, “He did, did he?” He looked out the window, an unpleasantly thoughtful expression on his face. He turned and looked at the singer. “Are you prepared to deliver all the systems we can use?”
“Eventually, yes. I have two systems for the demonstration, and ten on order from a manufacturer.”
“A growing business, is it? I want to know how you managed to get your hands on the Parapoint system.”
“Through a friend.”
A nasty smile crossed the doper’s face. “That answer is not good enough, amigo. Try again.”
Alejandro raised his eyes upward. “My friend is a major in the Air Force Reserve. He’s stationed in the office of the quartermaster, in Bush Terminal, in Brooklyn. I asked him if he ever heard of the system, and he told me that they have them in stock. So I asked him to lend me two for a while. I promised to get them back to him.”
“If you have to return them to your friend, how are you going to let us use them for our business?”
Alejandro pulled the bath towel around him more closely. “I brought them to a parachute manufacturer on Long Island who has a very expensive nose candy habit. Fo
r cash, he’s making me ten copies.”
“Junkies are bad people to do business with.”
“He doesn’t know who I am. As far as he’s concerned I’m a guy named A. Brown.”
“What’s the company name?”
“Precision Industries.”
“What did you use for money?”
“Che-Che made me a present of thirty thousand, and I had some of my own, enough for a down payment.”
“Where you getting the balance?”
Alejandro hugged himself against the cold and sat forward on the seat cushion. “I’m going to borrow it from Che-Che.”
Pizzaro looked at him and smiled. “Che-Che?”
“Yeah.”
“You must realize that we could buy our own Parapoint systems.”
“Maybe, but then you gotta have your own riggers to repack the chutes. That lengthens your security chain, makes you even more vulnerable to the DEA and the rest of them.” He glanced at Pizzaro. “Besides, I work cheap. It wouldn’t pay you to get your own systems. I’ll rent ’em to you and repack ’em for you.”
“Where did you learn to pack chutes?”
“My friend taught me.”
Pizzaro thought it over for some time. Then he said suddenly, “We’ll pay you three thousand dollars a drop for every chute we use.”
“Barrios and I agreed on four points.”
“Roberto was not authorized to agree to anything. And, for your own information, we don’t pay points.”
“Five thousand a chute,” Alejandro said.
“Thirty-five.”
“Forty-five and you pay the cost of transporting the system back for repacking.”
“Four.”
“Forty-five and costs,” Alejandro said.
“Done.” Pizzaro pressed a button on the armrest and the partition slid down. He gestured to the man on the passenger seat, who passed the laundry basket through to Alejandro. Watching him pulling up his briefs, Pizzaro asked, “Why would a U.S. Air Force major risk going to jail in order to smuggle you a classified system like Parapoint?”
Tugging up his jeans, Alejandro said, “He likes me, a lot.”
Pizzaro shot him a look, his face creasing with disbelief.
Seeing his look, Alejandro said, “Hey, amigo, whatever it takes to get you through the day.” He reached back into the basket, took out his polo shirt, and yanked it down over his head.
“What’s your friend’s name and address?”
“Jeff Scott. He lives on Cornelia Street in the Village.”
Staring straight ahead at the tinted partition, his face a blank, Pizzaro asked softly, “Do your mother and sister still live in Zihuatanejo?”
Alejandro’s heart thudded in his chest. “What does my family have to do with any of this?”
Pizzaro did not bother to reply. The car stopped and the driver held the door on Alejandro’s side open without speaking. The message had been passed on; no further words were necessary.
A bank of thunderheads rolled across the sky as Che-Che Morales walked from La Bandera restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street in Jackson Heights, Queens, toward the black sedan that had just drawn up at the curb.
He looked up at the threatening clouds and wondered if they were omens sent to him by the great god Quetzalcoatl.
One of the bodyguards, who preceded Che-Che out of La Bandera, rushed ahead to open the car door for the drug lord.
Sliding inside, he looked across the seat at Hector Pizzaro and asked, “Well?”
Pizzaro pressed a button on the armrest, and his recent conversation with Alejandro played out of the rear speakers. When the tape concluded, Pizzaro opened his mouth to say something, but Che-Che rushed a silencing finger across his mouth.
The sedan, convoyed by a van full of bodyguards, whisked through the Queens streets. Staring out the window, Che-Che watched the working-class neighborhood of attached frame houses meld into the industrial hodgepodge of Long Island City. The convoy drove west on Roosevelt Avenue to Skillman Avenue, where it streaked into Thirty-fourth Avenue, passed the Ravenswood Houses, and drew up at the curb on Vernon Boulevard in front of Rainey Park.
The pushers and junkies who inhabited the park heard the squeal of tires, looked out to see the van disgorging its cargo of mean-looking men, and shuffled off with their heads bowed in supplication to the dopers. A bodyguard rushed to open the sedan’s door. The drug lord climbed out in his sandals and jeans, followed close behind by his impeccably dressed chief of counterintelligence.
The few people still inside the park vanished as Che-Che entered.
They walked to the water’s edge. The tide lapped against the bulkhead’s boulders. Evening was descending over the city, and ribbons of lights were strung across the Queensboro Bridge, silhouetting its fat cables against a purple sky.
Pizzaro gripped the railing, looking down at the shroud of mist gathering above the water. “Why do we need this Alejandro?”
Che-Che gripped the railing and leaned back, looking up at the Manhattan skyline. “Because the parachutes will save us a lot of money and trouble—and because what he told you and Roberto about security is true. The more people involved in our transportation, the greater our risks.” He looked at the side of Pizzaro’s face. “What does it cost us? Pennies. And my blood brother has an inventive mind. We need new thoughts; they help prevent us from getting careless.”
Pizzaro stuck his hands in the pockets of his trousers. “I haven’t fully checked him out yet.”
“He’s no cop. I knew his family in Zihuatanejo.”
“But his father was a gringo.”
“So what?”
“We can’t be too careful, Che-Che.”
“True,” Che-Che said with an element of suspicion in his voice. “Check out that Air Force friend of his. Make sure he is what Alejandro says he is.”
Across the street from the park an oil truck pulled up in front of one of the Ravenswood Houses. The driver climbed down and walked over to the plot of grass along the side of the building. He took the top off the oil fill pipe and walked back to the truck. After pulling a hose off the rack, he tugged it over to the pipe and secured its nozzle there by clamping it. He walked back to the rear of the truck and pressed a button on the automatic delivery system, and the meter began spinning out the gallons of fuel being dispensed—only no oil was being pumped out of this truck.
The sign on the side of the oil tank read Matarazzo and Sons. Welders of the NYPD’s Motor Transport Support Unit had constructed a metal platform along the bottom of the oval mobile surveillance vehicle so that the detectives of Unified Intelligence could stand upright when they aimed their lasers and cameras out of the concealed portholes.
Lieutenant Sal Elia, the thick-necked, squat boss from Unified Intelligence who had first spotted Alejandro with Che-Che Morales at Lopez’s tire store, stood at the far end of the platform behind the driver’s cab, peering through a telescopic tube, studying the two men standing at the water’s edge. He called out to the detectives strung out along the parapet, “Aim those lasers at the railing.”
Two detectives inside the tank aimed their laser transmitters at the embankment’s black wrought-iron railing. The cross hairs zeroed in on the area of the fence near the dopers’ hands and bodies. The laser beams bounced off the wrought iron, picking up the vibrations from the sound pressure generated by the dopers’ voices. These vibrations caused a shift in the laser’s wavelength, modulating what was reflected back to the laser receiver on a tripod platform inside the oil tank. The laser receiver concentrated the modulated beam’s infrared signal onto a photo-multiplier, which transformed it into a series of electrical impulses. These impulses were then fed into an amplifier and a computerized demodulator, which separated vibrations from audio, recovering the original voice signals and allowing the output to be recorded.
Pizzaro, holding on to the railing with both hands, pushed himself back and forth several times in standing push-ups, looke
d at the side of Che-Che’s face, and asked, “How the hell can we trust this friend of yours if he goes with fags?”
Che-Che withered him with an expression of impatience; sweeping his hand behind him at the bodyguards, he said, “You think none of them ever had their cocks sucked by a man?”
Pizzaro did not answer him.
“I want this network airtight,” Che-Che said. “Any problems, you get rid of them. And speaking of problems, what did you find out about Roberto and his dead junkie girlfriend?”
“Judith checked it out. Her name was Bonnie Haley, and she was a DEA informer.”
Che-Che’s mouth went tight. “Get rid of Barrios.”
Pizzaro looked across the river. “We’re going to need a plane and a pilot for this.”
“We have plenty of both.”
“I don’t trust any of the pilots. Most of them are gringo drunks without honor.”
Che-Che made a gesture of impatience. “Then get a new pilot, someone reliable.”
“I’ll take care of it. What are you going to do when he asks you to borrow the money?”
Morales smiled slowly and replied, “I’m going to lend it to him and become his partner.”
Brushing down the side of his hair with his hand, Pizzaro said, “Our Colombian friends might not like us going on our own, competing with them for control of the heroin market. We could get ourselves killed.”
Alejandro arrived home from Environment shortly after four Friday morning. Driving his car down the underground ramp, he felt frustration gnawing at him. Che-Che had not shown up at the club that night, so he had been unable to ask him for the money; and he still had not told Seaver about his car ride with Hector Pizzaro.
After driving into his assigned parking space, he turned off the ignition and, reaching under his seat, flipped the toggle switch, killing the car’s electrical system. He looked over at the surveillance cameras scanning the garage and walked toward the elevator. Seeing the telephone strapped to the support column, he reached into his jeans and fished out a quarter. Maybe he’d risk one fast call to Control to set up a final face-to-face with Seaver. He lifted the receiver off the hook, took a quick look around, then plunked the receiver back down. He walked over to the elevator, knowing that if he was Pizzaro, he would have put a wire on that phone and on every other available telephone in the neighborhood.
Cleopatra Gold Page 14