by Kirk Russell
‘You did what you had to do to free the warden and protect yourself. Then we came here as fast as we could. We came straight out.’
‘Yes.’
‘No time was lost at the hospital.’
‘Not much.’
‘None at all, nothing was lost.’
‘OK, no time was lost, but Stoval went into the brush that direction. We need to find him.’
‘Let me finish,’ the chief said. ‘They had the conservation warden chained to the iron hoop. You saw he was badly injured and when you went to rescue him they tried to shoot you.’
‘Trocca fired twice at me.’
‘You could not protect Chole and escape without locking them up first, so you locked up General Trocca and Mr Stoval escaped.’
‘He killed Trocca with a knife before running into the brush.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘My guess is he wanted to draw the hyenas so he could escape. I’m going to go look for him.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘Bring your guns and come with me.’ Marquez pointed at the iron hoops. ‘There are other bones there. You’ll need to search the site. Chole wouldn’t have been the first.’
The chief refused to go but sent his two officers and Marquez led the way through the trees. He moved toward the sounds. They were feeding. No question about that and the officers shot two of the hyenas before they moved away. One of the hyena dragged what was left of Stoval. It was awful to look at and an officer shot that hyena and another pulled Stoval’s remains back into the brush. They were that hungry. Marquez looked at bloodstained shreds of Stoval’s jacket and pointed at the fence.
‘He must have fallen,’ he said, but neither officer was listening. Both shot into the trees and brush at targets they couldn’t see. They backed up the trail taking more random shots and Marquez turned and walked back to the gate alone.
They drove back to the main house and picked up Verandas who looked very happy. An officer searched him to make certain he hadn’t taken anything and Verandas protested as he held his arms out wide, but he nodded to Marquez. He’d gotten it all. They rode back in the chief’s vehicle and nobody had much to say on the road back to Bariloche.
SIXTY-NINE
In the 1980s when Marquez was still DEA, the Bahamas were known as the cocaine islands. If you got your start in those days then you heard about the opulence, the boats, beachfront palaces, the cars, parties, and beautiful women who arrived when the money did. Marquez located Anderson’s house and was unsurprised to learn it wasn’t a vacation rental, but that Anderson had recently bought it. It was a nice enough house, a little worn, yet with a wide view of the beach and cay below.
Anderson knew Stoval was dead. He knew the FBI had stripped his computer. And he must have known after years of working with Stoval how meticulous Stoval was. Stoval kept very good records. There were over six hundred photos of the dead dating from 1972 forward. Among them was a recent one of Jack Gant lying on his back out in the desert somewhere. The only clue was two creosote bushes caught in the photo. That narrowed it down to a few hundred thousand square miles.
No one at the FBI could say yet who had ordered the hit on Gant. The client hadn’t been identified, but the Gant hit was in Stoval’s files. It was nothing personal toward Gant, strictly part of a business enterprise. Stoval trafficked in death on a scale bigger than anyone had ever imagined. In the file on Gant the client was anonymous, but it was recorded that a quarter million dollar fee was paid to a hit team of two men and one woman.
Desault and Hosfleter believed it was Ben Marsten, Gant’s old friend and the wealthy founder of 1+1Earth, who had him killed to break the link to himself. Hosfleter thought it was Marsten who’d tipped them. According to Desault, she had a whole theory about the hit squad making contact with Gant through Marsten and then convincing Gant to let them help him escape. Hosfleter believed the hit team moved Gant’s vehicle to Tioga Lodge, and maybe Gant thought he was home free and on his way to Mexico when they pulled off on a sandy desert road.
Terri Delgado was the most recent photo. The two Zetas that killed her were identified by name. Both were arrested in Dallas later the same day. That was the way Stoval had his files set up. It was all there so that if he ever went down, many people would go with him. Or maybe the files were carefully kept so that if the day ever came and he needed to trade, he had information.
Marquez had his own theory. He figured Stoval had the files and photos so anytime he wanted to he could have the pleasure of revisiting the thrill. He kept files on his hunts and the photos there were the standard photos of the proud hunter near the body of an elephant or black rhino or one of the last tigers, whatever it was he’d shot, the same photos we’re used to seeing mounted on a wall in a bar or bragged about in a club. There were records also of animal trafficking and Marquez knew he’d be months unraveling those.
The murder files went back to 1972. The earliest shots looked like old Polaroids that lately were scanned into computer files. Among the first were four women, one left alongside railroad tracks, one in an alley, two on road shoulders. In the San Francisco Field Office everyone wanted to see the photo of Gant, but Marquez never looked at the Gant photo. He did study the early photos and especially one of a woman lying on a road shoulder. There was no notation of money paid and his guess was that Stoval took the photo himself.
He remembered from Billy’s tapes that her hair was black and that there was a field of maize behind her body as there was in this photo. There wasn’t a name on this or any of the earlier killings with women, but he felt sure this was Billy’s wife, Rosalina. She was as beautiful as Billy had claimed.
He found Anderson outside on a deck, sitting on a lounge chair with a glass pitcher of margaritas sweating on a glass table next to him. Kerry wouldn’t look away from the ocean yet, but offered to get Marquez a glass so he could drink with him, and when Marquez didn’t take him up on it, said, ‘I knew it would be you.’
‘No, all along you thought it was going to work, and now it isn’t.’
Marquez looked past the coconut trees and the beach to the purples and blues of the Caribbean. He looked back at the tiled deck. Anderson wore red shorts that finished just below his knees. He wore sandals and a Washington Nationals baseball shirt. Near the pitcher of margaritas was a form half filled out for box seats for the Nationals’ next season.
‘Are you going to look at me, Kerry?’
‘I’m going to look at this view as long as I can.’
‘That won’t be much longer. They’re in the air but almost here. Was it all about money?’
‘It was about needing something to look forward to. I couldn’t have gone on without it.’
‘How does it feel now?’
‘Terrible.’
‘There are some things I need answered before they get here.’
Anderson took another long drink. ‘In Washington they called me Mr Information. Go ahead.’
‘I want to ask you some questions about Jim Osiers.’
‘What would you like to know? When James Gardiner-Osiers was born? That was March 23 1955, and though you worked with him I’ll bet you didn’t know that for a long time his name was James Gardiner-Osiers. He was raised by his mother who divorced his father because he ran around with other women constantly. In gratitude to his mother, Osiers dropped her name, Gardiner, as soon as he hit eighteen. That’s what happened in Loreto. He was just trying to be like the old man. Getting him to fall for the girlfriend was easy. He’d waited his whole life for that. I got everything ready then for later. I left it muddy. I left it so it could be solved when the time came and I was ready to pull the plug. I needed someone because the leaks were going to end when I left.’
‘You set him up with Alicia?’
‘No, they found her, but she didn’t know any better. The Salazars knew the Americans would back off once they found out about the pregnant girlfriend. I knew he was vulnerable.’ He turned and grin
ned drunkenly. ‘I was the analyst. They were right about his tastes and Stoval liked the idea.’
‘So why frame Sheryl Javits?’
‘The leak needed to be found before I retired. Sooner or later, someone would figure out information wasn’t flowing anymore and start looking at me. Her ex-husband took bribe money. We got her through him. He had a story for her. We worked it for a couple of years and when they divorced he gave her the money. By then, she already believed the cover story.’
‘Phelps has been arrested and she’s out.’
Anderson waved his hand, dismissing that, saying, ‘I knew Stoval had records of everything. He was a fascinating man with an incredible memory.’ He added with odd pride, ‘I made it almost twenty years.’
‘But you didn’t make it, Kerry.’
Anderson gave another drunken grin, poured himself another drink and lifted a towel on the small glass table to show Marquez a gun.
‘You’d better take it away before I use it on myself. How much time do I have?’
‘Maybe an hour.’
‘I’d like to watch the ocean until then, if I can.’
Marquez picked up the gun and removed the clip. He pictured Anderson in prison a decade from now, small and gray, sitting on his bunk working on a baseball box score.
‘You have to answer some questions for me now,’ Anderson said. ‘How was I listed in his computer?’
‘By a code name and number and you’re not alone. You’re listed under US government employees. It’s the bank transfers that are going to nail you. Every date of every payment is in there, along with what he got for it.’
‘So why are you here first and they’re not here?’
‘They’re looking at everything and I was looking for what happened to Group Five and this recent thing with Sheryl. You’re listed as a Washington Senator, yet you’re under law enforcement, US government. I put it together from our baseball conversations over the years. I’m guessing your season tickets came every year from him.’
‘Very good.’
‘Four FBI agents are on their way. I called when I changed planes in Miami.’
He left Anderson on the deck and figured he’d run into the FBI crew at the airport, but it turned out they passed him on the road around the island before he got there. He called Desault after turning in the rental car and Desault told him he’d scored big with the Anderson hit.
‘If you want to keep the wildlife angle going, this is your chance to push it.’
‘Yeah, I want to keep it going, but I’ve got some ideas.’
The flight home took him to Mexico City. He had a layover there and a bad encounter with two Customs officials who detained him and led him to a room. They left him there for fifteen minutes, and then returned and explained that the questioning would not be here, but at a police station. They still wouldn’t say what it was about, but asked for his passport and as he got it out, he realized he wasn’t going to give it up.
‘I’m going to keep this until the police station.’ He opened it for them. ‘You can take another look, but you can’t have it.’
A third man arrived, a big guy who walked behind them as they went outside toward a police van. The van driver was in a federales uniform. He was an older guy with a gut, a black mustache, and a vertical scar right down the middle of his nose. Marquez remembered the scar and as the Customs men closed behind him to force him into the van, he pushed his way back on to the sidewalk. The driver was an old Salazar man.
He knocked away the arm of the one who tried to grab him and got back inside the airport with them following, trying to catch him but not drawing their guns. Nor did they yell or call for help. They didn’t want to attract attention and that told him all he needed to know. The third man who’d showed up late dropped away as Marquez walked up to the airline counter. He made the connecting flight.
On the plane a stewardess handed him a large manila envelope with his name and seat number on it. Someone wanted to make sure he got it. As the plane taxied toward the runway, he opened the package and pulled out three black and white photos. He guessed he was looking at a dry wash in Baja. They had dressed Billy Takado in the Hawaiian shirt and the old cotton slacks he liked so much. They didn’t bother with shoes. The last photo had a handwritten message, ‘Nos vemos pronto.’ We’ll see you again, soon. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t, he thought.
He slid the photos back into the manila envelope, tucked the envelope into the seat pocket in front of him, and as they flew over Baja, he thought of Billy and his dreams of a beach cantina, and of Brian Hidalgo haunted by Vietnam and trying to take it to the cartels. He remembered Sheryl as they walked the almond orchard in the night so long ago, and a dawn on the north coast when the sun rose red through fog as the SOU busted a big ab poaching ring, and how they celebrated later on a deck above the ocean in the gold light of fall. You fight the fight even if it’s bigger than you, and keep going, and meet them head-on at the next spot, or outsmart them and buy time for a grizzly to get away or a herd of bighorn to disappear into the rocks.
The stewardess returned and he ordered a beer. When it came, he drank slowly. He looked out the window at the line of the Sierras floating in the distance. Group 5 was gone and his years running the SOU were over. In the end, it’s all gone. In the end it’s what we cared about and how we lived.
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