by Tom Clancy
They were both quiet for a while as the mist and drizzle began intensifying to a steadier rainfall against the windshield. Lathrop leaned back in his seat and drank some coffee.
“Quick story about an acquaintance of mine,” he said. “Special agent, counter drugs, deep cover. Doesn’t matter which agency and I probably couldn’t remember it to tell you. But what I do remember is he wasn’t interested in the rule book. Didn’t follow the rule book. Too many other guys did and it got them killed or burned. Because the players on the other side were smarter and meaner and knew how to turn the rules against them.”
He paused, sipped.
Ricci kept staring out toward the glints of distant light on the electrical towers.
“This guy any good?” he said.
“From what I know he got the job done,” Lathrop said, and shrugged. “If he rubbed his bosses wrong, they left him alone. The main thing for them was he delivered for a long time. And that meant they could stay posed for the television cameras behind piles of seized dope and guns.” Lathrop fell silent a moment. “Doesn’t matter who the bosses are, it’s the same. They don’t have to get their hands dirty. They don’t deal with the snarling dogs. They never get bullet holes in their foreheads, or have their dead bodies dumped in weed fields with their privates stuffed down their throats. From where they sit in their pressed suits and white shirts, everything’s risk free, and that’s exactly how they want it to stay. Gives them a chance to act like winners every once in a while without ever taking the hurt when they lose.”
“Tell me the rest about your friend.”
“Acquaintance,” Lathrop said. “Like the two of us.”
Ricci grunted but didn’t comment.
“I hear a federal judge took exception to him giving a Big Willie drug dealer rough treatment, made some noise about looking into how he’d handled some other investigations,” Lathrop said. “His bosses started to worry about what might turn up, wanted the problem taken care of before stories started leaking to the press, and cut him loose. Erased his name from their employee records, wiped out every mention of him in their case files.”
“Just like that?”
Lathrop snapped his fingers.
“Got it,” he said.
Ricci grunted. “Where’d that leave him?” he said.
Lathrop shrugged.
“Far as who or what?” he said. “He didn’t go away, he was going down. There were some things about his tactics that would have gotten the kind of publicity nobody up the line appreciates. Things he did that wouldn’t jibe with what your ordinary citizen hears is right and good at his Sunday morning church sermons.”
“And how about after he went away?” Ricci said. “He keep on playing by his own rules?”
Lathrop shook his head.
“My guess is this guy would tell you that’d be too simple,” he said. “He would have stepped off the board. Made up his own game, shoved its rule book in his back pocket, and left everybody else guessing. Their guesses get too close to suit his interests, I could see how he’d change the game on them. Or maybe even play a bunch of different games on different boards. All at the same time just to keep things jumping.”
Ricci looked around at Lathrop.
“This one of them?” he said.
Lathrop shrugged again and said nothing more for a long while.
“Remember the night we first crossed paths?” he said finally. “The Quiros and Salazar clans mixing it up in Balboa Park. Enrique and Lucio getting popped. You after information I’d got on Enrique Quiros.”
Ricci kept looking into his face. “You’re the person who brought me there,” he said. “Always figured it was the same thing for them, but that maybe they didn’t know it.”
Again Lathrop’s veiled expression showed neither confirmation nor denial.
“Lucio was an old school handler, used muscle and guts to keep his syndicate together,” he said. “When he died, it was over for them. But Enrique’s style was different. He had the personality of a pocket calculator, ran his business like any other corporation. His branch got clipped, the power just shifted over to another office. Juan Quiros, one of Enrique’s cousins, took charge, pretty much oversees operations from out in Modesto these days. Without Salazar’s competition, the Quiros bunch marked their territory all up and down the coast.”
“And?”
“There’s a girl, Marissa Vasquez,” Lathrop said. “She’s twenty years old, a college student. Sort of kid every father would want for a daughter. Her dad happens to be Esteban Vasquez, ever hear of him?”
“No.”
“He’s Enrique and Lucio rolled into one . . . the badges would call him an up-and-comer and they’d be wrong. Been on the scene for years giving cash subs to pot growers across the Rio Grande, uses his construction companies in Frisco as laundering fronts for his return on investments. Until lately, Vasquez kept his trade away from his own neighborhood, but that’s changed, maybe because he saw some openings after Balboa Park. Ecstasy, meth, smack—Vasquez has couriers moving stuff right through Quiros turf.” Lathrop flicked his eyes up to Ricci’s. “Quiros had Marissa kidnapped to get him to back off.”
Ricci held his gaze.
“Haven’t heard anything about that, either,” he said.
Lathrop nodded.
“You wouldn’t have,” he said. “Guys like Esteban try to avoid bringing their troubles to the cops.”
“So he came to you,” Ricci said.
“Right.”
“And you came to me.”
“Right.”
“Why?”
Their eyes remained locked. Lathrop raised his coffee cup and drank from it very slowly.
“Esteban Vasquez wants me to find his daughter,” he said. “I want your help.”
Ricci sat there, his face very still.
“I don’t do favors for drug dealers,” he said.
“We’d be in it for ourselves,” Lathrop said. “Working freelance.”
“Whatever word you use, my answer won’t change,” Ricci said. “It was my kid, I’d find a different place to run my business.”
Lathrop shook his head. “You aren’t Vasquez. If he gives in to the competition, it’ll make him look weak. They’ll devour him wherever he tries to migrate.”
“Then he’d get what he deserves.”
“And how about the girl?” Lathrop said. “The way these flesh eaters work there’s no guarantee Vazquez gets her back alive no matter what he does.”
Ricci was quiet a second.
“Might be true,” he said. “Still doesn’t make it my problem.”
Lathrop shifted around to look out the rain-streaked windshield, rested back in his seat.
“You ever been to the Sierra Nevada? Out there in the canyons along the mountains between Fresno and Yosemite?”
Ricci shook his head.
“Marissa Vasquez was baited by a slick operator name of Manuel Aguilera,” Lathrop said. “Didn’t know he was connected. He romanced her and set her up to be taken and now she’s somewhere in all that nothing with about eight to ten cholos in guerrilla outfits imported from down around Ciudad Juárez.”
A long silence spent itself between them. It was pouring outside now, raindrops dashing against the windows, beating erratically on the roof of the car.
“How do you know?” Ricci said.
“Where they brought her?”
“Where they brought her, how they did it, everything.”
Lathrop made a low sound in his throat.
“Got it from another Quiros relative. I crashed his party down in Baja three, four nights ago,” he said. “He’s tight with Juan and Aguilera and hooked them up. Pretty much told me everything.”
Ricci flashed a glance at him. “He give you any details about the abduction besides what you told me?”
Lathrop shrugged.
“Some,” he said. And paused. “Won’t be doing any more talking, though.”
Ricci watched th
e raindrops splash the windshield, slither down over it to further distort the red warning lights on the high towers across the slough. The coffee had succeeded in sharpening his thoughts, but while he was mostly sober now the feeling of inner grayness had persisted.
“I could find Marissa Vasquez on my own,” Lathrop said. “But the banditos would be a problem at ten-to-one odds.”
“Ten-to-two doesn’t sound much better,” Ricci said.
“It does if we’re the two and have each other’s back,” Lathrop said.
Ricci was silent staring out the windshield. The cup had cooled in his hand.
“We pull this thing off, Esteban’s reward would be hefty,” Lathrop said. “Three mil split right down the middle.”
Ricci was silent.
“And,” Lathrop went on, “we’d be saving a damsel in distress.”
Ricci held his silence, his eyes peering into the rainswept night. Then he turned to Lathrop.
“Play your games with me, you won’t have to worry about those mercs,” he said.
Lathrop smiled a little, put his cup into the holder beside him, reached for the key in his ignition.
“Anything else I need to be warned about?” he said.
Ricci shook his head.
“Then I’ll bring you back to your car before its spark plugs get soaked,” Lathrop said, and cranked up the Dodge’s engine.
Roger Gordian seemed pleased with himself as he pulled the Rover to a halt in front of his daughter’s garage. He also seemed braced for what was coming from her, and would be very determined to head it off.
“Mission accomplished,” he said, and shifted into Park. “The paintings have been hung. You’re back home safe and sound. And we managed to beat the rain.”
Julia sat quietly in the passenger seat watching him tick off his successes on his fingertips.
“But not the drizzle and fog,” she said.
Gordian poked a finger at the control panel on his dashboard.
“That’s why I’ve got fog lamps,” he said.
On motion sensors, Julia’s exterior garage and porch lights had instantly begun shining down over her lawn as they turned in from the road. She regarded her father in their brightness now, impressed by how well he’d learned to use the warm and cuddly senior routine to his charming advantage since retirement. But the look of dead-set resolution in his steel gray eyes was no different than ever. It didn’t matter if he was laying the foundation for a backyard dog pen, talking about the Dream of global freedom through communications on which he had built UpLink International, or anticipating an invitation he’d already made up his mind to decline.
Gordian’s problem tonight was that he and Julia were two of a kind when it came to persistence—and he knew it.
She waited beside him for a moment, parked there with the mist draping over the Rover’s windshield, and isolated droplets of moisture splatting onto its hood and roof from the branches of an old sequoia overhanging her driveway.
“You really shouldn’t drive in weather like this, Dad,” she said, getting it over with. “It’s already after eleven. The smart thing would be for you to stay overnight.”
Gordian went from poking at his dash console to tapping his steering wheel column.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Thanks, anyway.”
She looked at him.
“You can fix us hot chocolates,” she said. “I’ve got about four kinds of Ghirardelli’s. And a fresh quart of milk and some whipped cream in the fridge.”
He smiled.
“I can fix them?”
“Nobody does it better.”
“I’m proud to see my daughter’s as kind and generous as she is talented,” he replied, still smiling. “Seriously, hon, I appreciate the offer. But I’ll be home inside an hour.”
Which meant his return trip might total almost two hours, assuming the rain didn’t intensify to the extent that it slowed up road conditions, she thought. It had taken them about forty five minutes to get back here to Pescadero from the gallery in Boulder Creek, and a lot of it had been country driving on some of the darkest stretches of Highway 9. Tack on their ride out to the gallery, and it would mean some four hours behind the wheel for him tonight if he headed off into the Palo Alto hills.
“Okay, here’s where the deal really gets sweet,” she said. “I’ll let my adorable canines sleep in the guest room with you. Jack, Jill, Viv, too. So what do you say?”
Gordian suddenly burst out laughing. Julia took that as a good sign considering she’d been braced for his I-flew-fighter-jets-through-enemy-flack-and-canhandle-a-drive-on-the-freeway argument.
“A man’s got to beware of having all his wishes come true at once,” he said. “Any other attempts to buy influence before we say good night?”
Julia gave him a level glance.
“There’s something serious I’ve meant to discuss with you,” she said. “And if that’s not persuasive enough, I might threaten to call Mom and ask her to decide the issue.”
Gordian looked at her and cleared his throat. It was over and they both knew it.
“Do you mean it about wanting to talk?” he said.
Julia nodded sincerely. There were some thoughts that had been bearing heavily on her since she’d gotten together with Megan that afternoon, although she’d wondered whether to keep them to herself. But so much for that.
“I’ll phone Ashley and get those hot chocolates on the burner,” Gordian said, and reached for his door handle.
Thirty minutes later, they were sitting over their cocoa mugs in Julia’s kitchen breakfast nook, cornered by three relentlessly staring greyhounds. The rain was falling in sheets outside.
Gordian looked from Jack, a brindle male, to the two females—Jill, a teal blue, and Vivian the blond bombshell. All of them were stretched out on the floor, their heads cranked toward the table, ears perked, penny-colored eyes fixed on his steaming drink.
“Don’t they know dogs can be deathly allergic to chocolate . . . or are your constant reminders just for my benefit?”
Julia shrugged. “Ex-racers don’t know anything besides being starved for food and attention,” she said. “They’d crunch their insatiable jaws down on our cups if I gave them half a chance.”
Gordian sipped from his mug and listened to the rain pounding against the windows.
“It’s coming down in buckets,” he said.
Julia nodded.
“Lucky thing I didn’t give you a tough time about staying the night,” he said.
She smiled at him. “Not too.”
Gordian was quiet awhile, his face turning serious.
“That talk you mentioned . . .”
Julia noticed his hesitation, reached out to pat the back of his hand.
“Don’t look so concerned,” she said. “I’m fine.”
He kept his eyes on her, visibly relieved.
“Oh,” he said. “I was . . . well, you know . . .”
“You worry sometimes.”
Gordian nodded.
“I never doubt that you can take care of yourself,” he said. “But since the divorce . . . and then after what happened last year . . .”
“I know, Dad,” she said. “And I appreciate it.”
He looked at her.
“And you honestly are okay?”
“Aside from being pregnant by an axe murderer named Jason, yes.”
Gordian’s eyes widened for the briefest of moments. Then he raised his cup to his lips.
“As long as this Jason respects his elders and earns a decent wage, you two have my blessing,” he said.
Julia smiled, spooned some whipped cream into her mouth off the top of her hot chocolate.
“What I wanted to ask isn’t about me,” she said after a bit. “It’s about Tom Ricci.”
Gordian looked surprised.
“Oh,” he said.
“You all right with that or should it be none of my business?”
“Why not?” Gordian shrug
ged. “You just caught me unprepared.” Another shrug. “I don’t know exactly what I expected, but guess it was something else.”
Julia lowered the spoon to the table and sat with her hands wrapped around her cup.
“I met Megan Breen for lunch today and his name sort of came up in conversation,” she said, unsure why she’d elected to omit the fact that she was the one who brought it up. “I knew he’d been suspended, and was wondering if anything was ever made final.” She paused. “Meg told me there hadn’t been a decision.”
Gordian nodded.
“That’s my understanding,” he said. “It will be her call when it’s made. And Pete Nimec’s, I’d imagine.”
“You don’t have any part in it?”
Gordian shook his head.
“One of the biggest things I decided the day I stepped down as UpLink’s CEO was to place my unqualified trust in Megan. She’s too competent to be a figurehead and shouldn’t have to contend with a meddling old know-it-all getting into her abundant red hair.” He scratched under his chin. “Besides, that would defeat the whole aim of retirement, don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” Julia said. And hesitated briefly again. “Nine times out of ten.”
Gordian crooked an eyebrow at her. “You think the Ricci situation ought to be an exception to the rule?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s hard to be objective considering I owe the man my life.”
Gordian didn’t answer. He sipped his hot chocolate and seemed to listen awhile to the whisk of rain on the windows.
“I understand how you feel,” he said at last. “I’d have to be cold and ungrateful not to feel that way myself. But we need to put personal feelings aside here. No doubt, Tom Ricci has proven he’s capable of being the best at what he does. On the other hand he’s shown a contempt of authority that makes him a serious wild card. From an organizational perspective, his . . . I don’t know what to call it except insubordination . . . has brought on a world of trouble.”
Julia inhaled, held the breath a moment, then blew it out to disperse the thin filaments of steam curling from her drink.
“I’ve been thinking about when you, Megan, and Pete cooked up a name for UpLink security all those years ago,” she said. “Sword, you decided to call it. And I felt that sounded so hokey and pompous, remember?”