“Okay, boss, I’ll be in touch.” They hugged each other warmly and said their goodbyes. MacMurphy watched the big man walk over the old Roman bridge, limping slightly with his signature swagger, On the other side of the bridge, Rothmann hailed a taxi, entered awkwardly and disappeard into the late afternoon traffic.
MacMurphy had his instructions, and funding for the operation was understood. It would come out of the stash sitting in MacMurphy’s alias bank account in Bern. There would be no traceable connections back to the CIA. There would be total deniability.
Chapter Ten
Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
When Harry Stephan MacMurphy had separated from the CIA after thirteen years of service as an operations officer, he did two things right away. He moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and he rented a suite of offices on the eighth floor of a towering glass building overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway on Las Olas Boulevard. The sign he hung on the door read, “Global Strategic Reporting.”
He financed GSR with the money he had taken from the Chinese embassy during his last gig with the CIA. Access to the account could only be gained by a U.S. citizen named Frederick Martin, and MacMurphy had the alias U.S. passport to show he was Martin.
Now he had a mission.
Chapter Eleven
MacMurphy, Maggie Moore, and James “Culler” Santos sat huddled around a small marble conference table in the GSR offices. One wall of the conference room was glass from ceiling to floor; the view offered the sparkling Intracoastal Waterway, sprinkled with white yachts and marinas, and the office buildings and condominiums lining historic Las Olas Boulevard. Beyond spread the expansive blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
MacMurphy, dressed casually in jeans and a white, short-sleeved, button down shirt which accentuated his deep, Florida tan, was winding up his briefing on his meeting with the DDO in Suze-la-Rousse two days earlier.
“So that’s about it. We’ve been given wide parameters to complete this job. Even Ed Rothmann doesn’t know exactly how to accomplish it. He just gave us the goal and told us to run with it.”
“How is this arms dealer down in the Keys going to fit in?” asked Santos in his slow, South Boston drawl. “We can find enough weapons in Northern Thailand to start a revolution. What do we need him for?”
Santos was a brute of a man. Not tall, he stood only about five foot seven or eight, but he weighed in at a solid two hundred pounds. Although he looked like a brawling lumberjack, he possessed two engineering degrees from MIT and was one of the CIA’s best upcoming audio technicians until the fiasco in Paris left him and MacMurphy without jobs. He was wearing a dark polo shirt that accentuated his muscular frame.
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Maggie, twiddling her pencil and leaning back in her chair. She was a career CIA officer “of a certain age,” recently retired as one of the highest ranking women in the clandestine service. She had known and mentored MacMurphy almost since the day he entered the Agency. When Rothmann told Mac she had retired and was living in South Florida, Mac immediately contacted her and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. She sat at the head of the table, looking at them sternly through pale, wolf gray eyes over steel granny glasses. “If we bring him in on this, won’t it just be one more person to worry about?”
MacMurphy flexed muscular arms behind his head, trying to relieve the tension in his shoulders and neck. “Right. You’re both right. If we decide to use Bill Barker, he’ll have to be compartmented from the rest of the operation. I agree we probably don’t need him for guns and such, but it might be more convenient and secure if we don’t have to go running all over Northern Thailand looking for illegal weapons. We certainly can’t take them with us on the plane, and I wouldn’t think about attempting any mission in the Golden Triangle without being armed like a Navy Seal.”
“I guess the point here is that if Ed Rothmann thinks it’s a good idea, then it probably is,” said Santos. He massaged his temples and swiveled his chair to face Mac. “We don’t need to tell him much, and Rothmann has already set everything up with him. And we can pay him in cash. He only needs to know that we need certain equipment to be delivered securely in Thailand. And he’s got the connections to do that, right?”
“Yeah, that’s about it,” said MacMurphy. “But there’s also the question of the way we sabotage the heroin. In Project Eldest Son, they substituted gun power for high explosive, so the guns would blow up when fired. The DDO is thinking along those same lines for this operation. That’s part of the reason he wants us to see Bill Barker. Barker’s also a chemist, and the DDO believes he’ll be able to give us something to put into the heroin. We’re going to have to explain this to him. That’s a problem.”
Maggie looked up at the ceiling, brought her hands up to her head and ran long, thin fingers through her graying, unruly auburn hair. She peered at them over her glasses. “Wait a minute, guys. Hold on. Yes, there is a problem here. When the AK-47s exploded and made the bad guys eat the bolts, it was a good thing for our troops because it killed enemies. But let’s not kid ourselves. We’re talking poison here, whether it makes the users sick or kills them, and I don’t know how we’re going to control that. The users are going to be the victims, not Khun Ut or any of his merry men. That’s troubling to me. A lot. That’s a problem.”
“Good point,” said Santos. He leaned forward thoughtfully and drummed his large fingers on the conference table. “There’s an ethical question here, particularly if we end up killing some innocent person… But I’d like to point out that heroin users aren’t exactly saints. It isn’t like they’re innocent kids puffing on a little pot, or some slick yuppie snorting a little cocaine in his Beemer with some hot little cutie. We’re talking heroin here. People who use that shit are hard core druggies. They’re shooting up in the ghettos before they go out and rape and pillage the world. So I say, screw them. What’s the difference if we kill a couple of those worthless bastards?”
“Okay, okay, Culler, we get it,” said Maggie, “We all know how you got your nickname. ‘Culler,’ the guy who wants to ‘cull’ the world of undesirables. Eliminate all the assholes and the world will be a better place. Right?”
“Yep. And it’s true, too. He leaned back in his chair, satisfied that he had made his point, and then continued to pontificate. “And furthermore, that’s the root problem with us Americans. We’re always so damned concerned about collateral damage. That’s why we’re losing the war on terrorism. We’re afraid to bomb the little fuckers when we have them dead in our sights because we might kill a couple kids or women along with the bad guys. Hell, do you think the Israelis worry about that shit? No way. They just pull the trigger when they get one of the bastards in their crosshairs and worry about the little kiddies and moms later.”
MacMurphy chuckled. “Okay Culler, we know how you feel, but Maggie’s right. We do have a bit of a conundrum here. But at this point we don’t really know if it’s even going to present a problem. So let’s just get all of our facts together and decide what we will do and what we won’t do later. I’m all for heading down south to the Keys tomorrow. We’ll know a hell of a lot more after we meet with Bill Barker. What do you say?”
Culler nodded and Maggie said, “Fine, but I’ll do some checking before you head on down there. I’ll run the databases and see what I can come up with concerning his background. Then we can regroup and discuss it some more before you leave.”
Chapter Twelve
The following morning Mac and Culler did their regular workout at the Ultima Fitness Center a block away from their office. Culler, beast that he was, worked out exclusively on the heavy weights, while Mac stretched, did a fast three-mile run along the quay bordering the Intracoastal Waterway, and finished up with light weights and some vicious beating on the heavy bag.
Mac had been a champion wrestler at Oklahoma State University and had been studying karate and mixed martial arts since he was three years old. His father, an amateur boxer and tough Marine
gunnery sergeant, had pushed Mac hard ever since he was big enough to stand.
After their workout they returned to the office to check in with Maggie who was busy getting the weekly “CounterThreat” newsletter out to GSR’s ever-growing client subscription base. It was a particularly important issue this week because it highlighted growing unrest and a deteriorating security situation in Algeria and Morocco, two places where GSR had an active client interest.
In the nine months since their departure from the Agency, the three of them had built a growing and somewhat lucrative small business. They published a weekly subscription “CounterThreat” newsletter which profiled the security situations in selected countries around the world and kept its corporate clients up to date on the world’s hotspots—where they could go, where they shouldn’t go, and what precautions to take if they must go. They also offered international consulting services—business intelligence and due diligence investigations for individual clients in the corporate sector.
They had hired two employees to work exclusively for GSR, a bright, recent college grad named Christy White as a receptionist and a middle-aged, bookish ex-journalist named Wilber Millstone to do the writing. Neither of them had a clue about the other, more clandestine, activities that Maggie, Culler and Mac were about to undertake. GSR, like the CIA, worked on a strict “need to know” compartmented policy.
The three former CIA officers jokingly called the undercover embedded company within GSR, “CIA Inc.”
The trio gathered in MacMurphy’s office and Culler shut the door.
Maggie said, “I called Bill Barker on the blind line and made an appointment for you guys for later today. He sounds like a friendly guy and responded immediately when I mentioned the name Tom Willet. He said he was expecting our call and has assembled some gear he thinks you might need. I didn’t go into it with him, but it sounds like the DDO may have already tipped him off about where you’re going.”
“Hmmmm,” said Mac, flicking perspiration from his forehead, the after effects of his workout, “no telling what Ed may have told him. Never mind, we’ll find out soon enough. When can he see us?”
“He said to arrive late in the day and plan to stay into the evening,” said Maggie. “He wants to show you some night vision gear after it gets dark.”
“Okay, let’s figure on heading on down right after lunch then,” suggested Santos. “That’ll give us time to eat, get our alias docs together and rent a car at the airport.”
“Always thinking about lunch, Culler,” chided Mac. “Let’s get some work done before we take off for the Keys. Have you got the address, Maggie?”
“It’s just ‘Islamorada, mile-marker seventy-two, turquoise gate, ocean side.’ He says you can’t miss it.”
“Did you get a chance to check him out, Maggie?” asked Culler. “We’d kind of like to know what the guy’s background is before we go traipsing down there.”
“Sure did, Culler. He’s got quite a reputation. And except for a lot of allegations of arms smuggling—nothing concrete, no arrests or convictions—which we already know, he’s quite the marksman. He’s got a ton of awards and certainly knows his weapons. It says here he’s a founding member of the Fifty Caliber Shooters Association, and that he’s a leading competitor in both regional and national ‘extreme caliber’ competitions, whatever that means.”
She flipped through a stack of pages fresh from the printer. “Also, he seems to be persona grata with the Navy SEALs because he is an annual invitee at their Seal Team Eight .50 caliber qualification shoot at Camp Atterbury. They shoot out to 2500 meters at that match.”
“Twenty-five hundred meters!” exclaimed MacMurphy. “That’s like…what…a mile and a half!”
“That’s what it says, and there’s more. According to press reports he’s a co-developer of the ‘ceramic barrel’ M2HB program, whatever that is, for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”
“Pretty heavy stuff,” said Santos. “That’s a first class outfit. High speed, low drag. I’ve worked with those DARPA guys a lot in the past.”
Maggie pushed her glasses back up and continued: “He’s also been a shooting instructor for several police departments, a range master, a legitimate automatic weapons procurement officer for the Colombian Secret Service, a consultant to the Naval Surface Warfare Center and to USSOCOM on combat assault rifles. Whew, the list goes on and on.”
“Sounds like we’ve got a winner,” said Mac. “I’m ready to rock ‘n roll with this guy.”
Chapter Thirteen
Islamorada, Florida Keys
After a quick lunch with Maggie at their favorite sandwich shop, Culler and Mac rode together to the Ft. Lauderdale airport in Mac’s new 6 series BMW coupe. They parked the car in the short-term parking and headed to the Avis counter in the terminal building and Mac used a Florida driver’s license and Amex credit card in the alias Robert T. Humphrey to rent a car. If anyone spotted him meeting with Bill Barker and ran the plate on the vehicle, it would not lead back to MacMurphy.
The drive to Islamorada in the nondescript white Chevy Impala rental took a little over two hours. They drove west to the Ronald Reagan Turnpike, known in the state simply as Florida’s Turnpike, and then south through Miami where the turnpike turned into US Route 1, running along the entire east coast all the way from Maine to Key West.
They drove through the Keys on a two-lane road that was often clogged with traffic and slowed by mom and pop campers, heavy trucks and trailers carrying large boats and yachts. Mac drove silently while Culler chilled out listening to classical music on his I-Pod.
It was just after three in the afternoon when they reached mile marker seventy-two on Islamorada Key. At a divided road, they took a u-turn and came back on the ocean side of the Key for a block until they reached the bright, turquoise gate.
They turned into the drive, honked, and the automatic gate slid open. They drove up the gravel drive to a sprawling flat roof, modern glass-and-stucco home, built typically high on concrete stilts to protect it from hurricane tides, and pulled into the shade on the south side of the house.
A big, heavy, middle-aged man—dressed in olive shorts and matching short-sleeved safari shirt—stood on the second level balcony waving down at the arrivals.
Bill Barker was once a powerful weightlifter, but now in his mid-fiftys he’d gone a bit soft. His hands were large and callused, with dirty, broken nails from working with weapons. The hands of a working man. He looked like a former Sumo wrestler and smelled faintly of gun powder and lubricating oil. He flashed a ready smile and spoke with a soft, slow South Florida drawl, not what Mac expected from a covert arms supplier.
Beside him stood his wife, a pleasant looking woman dressed in shorts and a tee shirt. She had short dark, wispy hair and a broad smile. Bill Barker greeted them warmly with friendly eyes. “How y’all doin’ guys. This is my wife Ruth. Did y’all have any trouble findin’ the place?” They mounted the stairs and he held out a large hand in greeting.
“None at all,” said Mac. “We’re the friends of Tom Willet you’ve been expecting. I’m Bob Humphrey and this is Ralph Callaway.” They mounted the stairs and shook hands.
“Pleasure meetin’ y’all.” He turned to his wife, “Sweetpea, would you be so kind as to fetch us some of that fresh brewed tea of yours? These guys look parched.” He turned back to Mac and Culler. “It’s a lousy drive down here from Miami. Come on inside fellers. It’s hot out here.”
The back of the house was floor to ceiling glass with a wide porch that extended the length, overlooking the sparkling blue-green ocean beyond.
At a long, white rattan bar inside the living room, Ruth served tall glasses of iced tea with fresh key limes and then excused herself to leave the men to talk business.
“Tom didn’t tell me very much other than I could trust you fellows and that you wanted to purchase some arms and other equipment for an operation in the jungles of Southeast Asia. That about it?”
�
��Yep, that’s it,” said Mac sipping his iced tea. “He spoke highly of you, too, saying we could trust your discretion one hundred percent. He also said you had a good contact in Northern Thailand who could receive the stuff we purchase and get it delivered to us securely in Thailand.”
“Yep, sure can. Gotta fellow out there who used to be a police general. Very well connected. Knows just about everyone out there, including the drug dealers and smugglers and politicians. Works for a lot of them too, but one thing is for sure, he never crosses wires. If he does a job for you, he’s yours—for that one job anyway.” He laughed. “One hundred percent discretion. That’s how he stays in business. So what is it exactly you guys are looking for?”
“We’re going to be in the jungle up there for a few days, and there may be some bad guys in the same area.We need survival gear and weapons. Tom said you were one stop shopping. That true?” asked Mac.
“Oh yeah,” replied Barker. “I can fix ya’ll up with just about anything you need, top-of-the-line stuff. I don’t deal in any crap. And every gun I sell I’ve personally sighted in and fired at least a hundred rounds through. A lot more on the automatic weapons. Now, Tom said you’d by paying in cash. If so, I can give you a good discount.”
Mac nodded. “It’ll be a cash deal. We can wire the money anywhere you like or give it to you in a sack. Whatever you want.”
“Wire transfer will do just fine,” Barker giggled in a high-pitched way that didn’t fit his large frame. “I’ll give you wire instructions for my bank in the Bahamas.”
Santos, who had been sitting quietly at the bar nursing his iced tea during the conversation, asked bluntly, “I need a SAW. Can you get me a SAW?”
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