Cleopatra Gold

by William Caunitz

  Throttling up, Fiona Lee headed the plane back toward the sea and her uncertain future.

  Alejandro paced nervously up and down the meadow, looking off into the star-filled night, holding a homing transmitter. Judith also had one, its antenna extended in front of her, and was waving it about like a conjurer trying to make magic.

  Behind them the helicopter pilot, a wiry little guy on the long side of fifty with hard miles on the clock, wearing an old flight jacket, jeans, and sneakers, stood in the cargo passenger door. He pressed the external cargo mechanical release button and extended the hoist cable down to the ground.

  Alejandro spotted them first swaying down silently and gracefully toward the clearing. “There,” he called, aiming his transmitter at them.

  Judith gave a little gasp and ran over to stand beside him, raising her transmitter up at the gliding parachutes. They watched them grow larger and larger. One by one they glided in, skimming over the treetops, their duffel bags thudding into the soft dirt as the Ram Air canopies blossomed down over the riggings. One almost snagged in a tree, then fell free with a snapping of branches that broke the silence like gunfire.

  “Get the cable,” she ordered him.

  Alejandro ran back to the helicopter. The pilot handed him a pair of work gloves, which he pulled on quickly. Holding the end of the cable, he ran over to the nearest duffel bag and snaked it under the folded-down flaps where the eyelets were pushed down over the locking pin and secured with a padlock. He bent the steel rope and secured it to the other side with a pressure clamp she had handed him. That done, he turned and waved to the pilot, who pressed a button on the side of the cargo passenger door. The hoist cable began to rewind, pulling the duffel bag over the grass and hoisting it up and into the helicopter. The pilot released the pressure clamp, pulled the cable out from under the folds, and pushed the cargo along the casters to the back of the helicopter. It took them another thirty-three minutes to get the remaining nine duffel bags stored aboard. Alejandro began gathering up the parachutes and their rigs.

  “Leave them,” Judith ordered.

  “We can’t abandon this equipment,” he shouted over the whine of the copter’s engine and the swish of the rotors winding up.

  “Get on board the helicopter!”

  He stood his ground defiantly. “I’m not leaving this stuff here. Are you crazy? These things don’t grow on trees.”

  She ran over to him, shouting, “Don’t you think we know what we’re doing? The dope is what’s important, not these things. Now hurry up and get aboard.”

  He climbed into the craft while she waited below. After he was aboard, she took a portable radio out of her tote and, turning her back so that he could not read her lips, made a transmission.

  The helicopter lifted out of the meadow, leaving the parachutes billowing in the night breeze. Once again Alejandro began thinking about her place in the network. As the craft flew out over the mountains, he spotted what appeared to be a truck, using only its parking lights, stopping just inside the clearing they had just flown out of. So they have a cleanup crew, he thought. Then he felt a stab of anxiety—what if they discovered the transmitters hidden in the duffel bags? He decided finally that the risk was minimal, and his thoughts turned again to Judith. She was standing in the front, just behind the pilot, staring at some kind of map or chart in the faint illumination of a small navigator’s spotlight. As she turned to speak to the pilot, her medallion slipped out of her blouse. Alejandro could see it clearly for several seconds as it caught the light.

  When she came back aft and sat down next to him, he put his lips close to her ear so that she could hear him over the noise of the copter and, pointing to the medallion, said, “That looks like the profile of someone I know.”

  She looked at him in the darkness and said, “I doubt it. She died in Egypt a long time ago. You might call her our good-luck charm.”

  “Are all our people on the street?” Romano asked Seaver.

  “Yeah, they’re all on station,” Seaver said, sounding more confident than he felt. He removed the ever-present cheroot from his mouth and studied the transparent sheet of plastic with horizontal and perpendicular lines that was above a large console inside Special Operations communications room. Bright dots of internally projected light were interspersed between the lines. Pointing his cigar at the plot board, Seaver said, “Each dot represents one of our mobile units. The grid takes in the city’s five boroughs, Nassau, Westchester, and Suffolk counties. It also covers New Jersey on an arch line from Bayonne to Fort Lee. Once those duffel bags come within a hair of this town, our electronics will be on them, and we’ll triangulate them to their destination.”

  Romano asked in a worried tone, “And if they take the dope out of the bags?”

  “Then our units will beam in on the adhesive diodes.”

  Romano continued to worry. This was a totally untested operation for which the rule book hadn’t been written. “Suppose they make the drop outside the grid, maybe Philadelphia—and leave the dope there.”

  “I’m gambling that they won’t.”

  Romano persisted. “Let’s say they do.”

  “Then we lose.”

  Looking at the detectives bunched around the console, Joey-the-G-Man asked, “Shit. Anyone got a cigarette?”

  The helicopter’s nose rose slightly as it landed back at the East Side heliport. Not a word had passed between its two passengers for the last twenty minutes.

  Judith looked at him and asked in a not terribly concerned voice, “Tired?”

  “A little,” he said.

  She smiled. “You better get used to long hours, amigo.” The helicopter finally came to rest on the pad.

  “Are we off-loading the stuff here?” he asked, astounded that the dopers would make a transfer in such a public place.

  “That’s not our department,” she said, getting up and making for the door.

  They climbed out of the helicopter and walked over to a waiting sedan. Climbing into the back, Alejandro recognized the driver as one of Che-Che’s crew. He glanced back and saw a windowless black van pull up by the helicopter’s cargo passenger door.

  “You know,” he said to Judith, “you might as well do this in Times Square.”

  She gave him a cool glance. “You don’t get it. The more open you are, the less suspicion you’ll attract. We just off-loaded sacks full of computer printouts—if anybody asks.” Turning away to look out the window, she asked, “Where do you want to be dropped off?”

  “Home. I want to crawl under the sheet and sleep.”

  She slid her hand on his thigh. “I’d like to go with you.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, looking out the car window.

  The black, windowless vandrove up the ramp leading out of the Sixtieth Street heliport and turned north onto York Avenue. Above it a tram glided effortlessly across its cables, making a routine transit from Roosevelt Island to its station on Second Avenue.

  Day was breaking through the night.

  At Sixty-third Street the van made a hard right into the southbound entrance of the FDR Drive. The ten duffel bags containing the packets of Cleopatra Gold were stacked in the back of the van, guarded by two men armed with mini Uzi machine guns and a third armed with a LAW rocket launcher. The driver was a broad-shouldered man with a short ponytail held together by a rubber band. He had a diamond chip stuck through his left earlobe.

  Jasmine, the bartender from Environment, her yellow ribbon tied around her long queue, sat in the passenger seat, wearing brown pleated slacks and a brown silk blouse with tiny whales and seals on it. Her Kelly bag with a brown-and-gold Hermès scarf tied around its handle rested on her lap. Inside the pocket-book, its checkered handle upright for easy access, was a nine-millimeter S&W automatic pistol.

  Throughout the city mobile surveillance platforms disguised as commercial and recreational vehicles beamed in on the signals being emitted from the transmitters hidden inside the seams of the duffel b
ags.

  Deep inside Mobile Control One—a hollowed-out soda truck with an exterior facade of stacked soda cases—Detective Kathy Herer sat at the cramped control console with her headset snug over her blond hair, watching the beeping signals of surveillance units converge on the black van.

  “Mobile One to all units,” she transmitted, keying up a tight shot of the FDR Drive on the screen, “Lucifer is going south on the FDR. Angels three and five cover Bowling Green exit in case Lucifer does a spin-around on us.”

  Watching the clear plastic plot board inside the Special Operations communications room, Joey-the-G-Man glanced over at Seaver and said, “Looks like we got lucky.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Seaver said, gnawing at the right corner of his mouth. He was sure that Chilebean was not out of harm’s way yet.

  Romano got out of his chair and looked directly at Seaver, then walked over to the window. Seaver took the cue and followed him.

  Staring out across the empty school yard at the net of the basketball goal, Joey-the-G-Man said, “’At’s a lotta heroin they just dumped on us. I’m thinking we oughta grab it.” He hitched up his trousers and muttered, “We’d make a major league score on this one.”

  “If we do, we’ll end up with their junk and some of their front-line people—but risk losing the head of the network.”

  “Hey,” Romano objected, “Pizzaro ain’t horseradish. And we can tie Che-Che into a conspiracy to import narcotics.”

  “Chilebean is not positive that Che-Che is the head guy,” Seaver said, taking out his box of cheroots and shaking one out. “I’d really like to burn this Cleopatra. She must have been the one who gave the orders to hit our three undercovers.”

  Romano pressed his argument home to the thing that was really bothering him. “If we don’t grab that dope, and they somehow manage to slip it through our electronic net, we could have a heavy-duty problem.”

  “What dope?” Seaver asked, lighting another cheroot and glancing at his boss through the smoke.

  25

  The car had barely pulled up to the curb in front of Alejandro’s apartment when Judith slipped her hand in his and asked, “Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to come upstairs with you?”

  Sneaking a look at the dashboard clock and seeing that there were only seven minutes left to his transmission window, he said, “I’d love it, but I’m really beat. Another time, okay?”

  She leaned across the seat and raked her fingers through his hair. “I hope that I wasn’t too bossy out there.”

  Alejandro gave her a reassuring smile. “Hey, you had a job to do and you did it. I understand that.”

  She looked directly into his eyes. He leaned across the seat and met her waiting lips. Her skin was smooth and hot, and her breasts swelled against his chest. He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed away from her.

  “I hope we can be friends,” she said, grabbing one of his earlobes playfully.

  “So do I. I’ve thought of another way for Che-Che to wash his money.”

  Her hand fell to his groin, and she whispered, “Would you like me to suck you off? Now! Right here!”

  He groaned. “I’d bloody love it, but next time. I want to be at my best.” He looked at the driver, who was staring out the windshield, seemingly oblivious of them. He also saw that another minute had passed. He jerked open the door. “See you soon.”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  He walked slowly along the crescent driveway toward the building’s white portico.

  Judith sat back and crossed her legs, jiggling her left foot. To the driver she ordered, “Take me to Che-Che.” Looking at Alejandro entering the lobby of his building, she muttered, “You’ll be seeing me sooner than you think.”

  Joggers were making their early-morning circuits around Washington Square Park. Once inside his lobby and out of view from the street, Alejandro dashed for the elevator. He threw open the door to his apartment and let it slam shut behind him, running into the living room to grab the head of the Aztec warrior. He slipped quickly into his bedroom, shaking the pocket-size satellite radio out of its hiding place. He tossed the head onto his bed and entered the bathroom, pulling the radio out of its plastic sheath. He unfolded the tiny dish antenna and plugged it into the radio.

  Standing on the toilet seat, he pushed down the frosted window, aimed the antenna, and whispered hurriedly into the microphone, “Heroin chuted over Catskill region around 0230 today. Urgent you ascertain pedigree and background of the white female between forty and forty-seven years of age who left the Emerald Pub with me. First name, Judith; surname unknown. Fluent in Spanish, English, and Tarascan. Known to have attended the Ramaz school. I need a meet with Mother Hen. I’ll be leaving my apartment around 1445 to keep appointment with Budofsky.”

  He checked the time. The second hand was sweeping around to 0530. Watching the swift-moving hand, he thought of the lion-colored mountain just outside of Zihuatanejo, with the heap of stones piled up as a memorial to the honest policemen and journalists murdered by the drug lords, and he recalled that sunny day long ago when he had added his personal stone to the cairn. The hand swept to six; he pressed the red button, compressing his message into a second of energy that hurled his transmission to the orbiting law enforcement satellite.

  Out on his terrace, Alejandro gazed off into the pearly lightness replacing the fading night, aware of the anxiousness surging through his body. Somewhere out there police units were closing in on a drug warehouse. He worried that the dopers might spot the cops, or that one of the bags’ seams might come undone, or the dopers might somehow slip through the net.

  I’ve got the undercover blues, he thought. He felt it would be different if only he could be out there with them. But then he knew down deep that not a thing would be changed if he was.

  Grabbing the railing tightly with both hands, he thought of how good Judith felt in his arms and of her almost insistent offer of sex. Suddenly he was very tired and walked back inside to get undressed and take a long, hot shower. He had barely crawled into bed and pulled up the sheet when the telephone rang.

  “Yeah?” he mumbled sleepily into the mouthpiece.

  “Ahee es lo key koo ahn’doe,” Che-Che said, and went on in Tarascan, telling Alejandro that he wanted to see him that night before his first show. Morales would send a car to pick him up at seven in front of his apartment. He ended the conversation by adding, “Don’t mention this call to anyone. Por la seguridad.”

  “Sí,” Alejandro said, and slowly slipped the receiver back into its cradle. Che-Che had never before telephoned him at home. He reached over the side of the bed, picked a sneaker out of the basket, and tossed the reminder into the middle of the room. Rolling onto his side, he pulled the sheet over his neck and closed his eyes, knowing that sleep would not now come easily to him.

  Lines fore and aft secured the four-masted schooner Peking to the dockside capstans of the South Street Seaport. The black van containing the Cleopatra Gold had exited the FDR Drive at Front Street and continued south along South Street.

  Jasmine looked out at the massive suspended iron canopy of the Fulton Fish Market. The majestic interior was a beehive of early-morning activity as store owners and restaurateurs negotiated over the day’s catch. She watched a man wearing fisherman’s boots and a bloody white apron toss a bucket of crushed ice over a bin full of flounder.

  “Make the next right,” she told the driver sharply.

  The van turned into Burling Slip, then made a quick right into Plaza Prudential and Bache, continuing north to Water Street. It halted at the three steel traffic stanchions rising vertically out of the ground at the intersection of Water and Beekman streets, preventing vehicles from continuing north.

  The driver steered the van onto the sidewalk and around the barricade, drove west onto Beekman, again rolled up on the sidewalk, and then stopped in front of a restored Georgian-Federal warehouse with a high-pitched roof. This part of the South Street Seaport had nineteenth-cent
ury lampposts and Belgian block street pavements punctuated with slabs of granite, all designed to evoke images of the horse-drawn era. Abutting the west side of the warehouse was an abandoned five-story box-shaped building that had a hip roof and all its windows boarded up with plywood that was decorated mostly with painted blue anchors.

  Jasmine slid off the passenger seat and walked over the blue-stone sidewalk to the corner, examining the area for anything suspicious. Seeing nothing amiss, she looked at the driver of the van and nodded. He jumped down and knocked twice on the steel accordion door of the warehouse.

  The television cameras bracketed on both sides of the door’s header zoomed in on him. The door clattered up. The driver got back in the van and drove it inside, where the duffel bags were off-loaded.

  Jasmine stood by, supervising the unloading of the duffel bags. After the two men who had done the unloading stood the bags upright, Jasmine went from one to the next, unlocking the padlocks. The ground floor was divided into aisles by tall metal shelving racks filled with dolls and toys, fake amphorae, different-size sailing ships, and stuffed toy animals.

  Jasmine walked out, supervising the workers, watching the heroin being removed and stuffed carefully inside the cavities in the dolls and animals.

  “A few of the packets broke,” one of the crew shouted across to the van driver.

  “Pour the loose stuff into the dolls,” Jasmine ordered.

  “What do we do with the duffel bags?” another of the crew asked.

  “They go back into the van,” she said, her voice trailing off when she saw one of the men licking some loose heroin off his finger. Walking slowly over to the van driver, she lifted her jaw at the finger licker and asked, “Who is that guy, Juan?”