Wrecker

by Mark Parragh

  “Are you all right?” Lalo asked.

  “Who did this?” said Tate. “Do we know who did it?” Even as he asked the question, he was pretty sure he knew the answer.

  “An American named John Crane. I believe you’ve met. Is this a personal matter?”

  “Oh, you better believe it’s personal now!” Tate snapped. “Wait. How do you know it was him?”

  “Our two friends were aboard when it happened. They gave a full report.”

  “Those two fuckups were there? Jesus! I sent them to get this guy out of my hair before, and they came back with some bullshit story. You need to get a better class of thug out there.”

  “We’re doing what needs to be done.”

  “Well, I hope you do it better than you have up to now! I want this son of a bitch dead. No! No, strike that. I want him here. In front of me. I’ll deal with him myself.”

  “We’ll let you know. Have a nice day.”

  The line went dead, and Tate drew back his arm to hurl the phone out into the night, but stopped himself.

  The cartel was pissed off. They blamed him for this guy Crane causing trouble and getting them involved. Well, let them be pissed off. They didn’t help him because they were running a goddamn charity. They needed him, and it wouldn’t hurt to remind them of that once in a while.

  He stalked back into the bedroom. The girl was awake, looking up at him with concern.

  “Is everything all right, baby?” she asked.

  Tate snorted. “No, it’s a long damn way from all right. The world is out of balance.” He put the phone down on the nightstand, lowered himself to the bed, and reached for her.

  “But it’s going to be all right again.”

  Tate had read up on the history of this area. The local Indians, the Tepehuan, had revolted four hundred years ago against Spanish and Jesuit rule. They slaughtered every Spaniard they could get their hands on and drenched the land in blood for four years before the Spanish managed to put them down. It was another century before the Jesuits came back to bother them again.

  When he got his hands on this John Crane, he’d make those old bastards proud. And then, and only then, would things be all right again.

  Chapter 16

  Josh drained his coffee and tossed the wilting paper cup into a trash can as he walked by.

  Just remember, you wanted this.

  Not now.

  More properly, he needed it. He’d been assigning some very strange tasks to Myria employees lately. Locating the right Amy Carpenter’s family, out of all the Amy Carpenters in the country, based on a passport number. Watching hours of a stranger’s bedroom sex tapes to see if he’d murdered someone. It wasn’t what the regular workforce had signed on for.

  What Josh needed was more of an irregular workforce, people with more specialized skills, people who wouldn’t blink at the kind of unusual jobs he’d be throwing at them. So he’d gone through Maggie Nguyen’s short list, interviewed the most promising candidates, and come up with what he hoped were the right people for his … his what?

  Scooby Gang? Impossible Missions Force?

  Jesus, not now!

  Josh walked into the war room and stood before the old climbing wall. He felt like a new teacher on the first day of school. His new students looked eagerly up at him from a long table.

  There were four of them. Don Finney was a forensic accountant. That was pretty much all there was to him as far as Josh could tell. But that was what he needed, and Finney was apparently a very good one. He’d impressed Josh during the interview, so he was in.

  Laura Berdoza was a Columbia law grad who, upon passing the bar, decided she had fulfilled her obligation to her parents and had no interest in working eighty-hour weeks at a white shoe law firm full of aging misogynists where she’d never make partner. She’d come to Silicon Valley to start over. She was smart as hell, and she could work with Finney to navigate the legal labyrinths people built to hide their skullduggery.

  That’s a great word, skullduggery. Use salacious next.

  João Santos had grown up in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. It was an unlikely beginning for a brilliant hacker, but João was a prodigy. He’d learned to penetrate systems using a stolen laptop he’d gotten from a local gang, and he paid them back by cleaning up police records, disabling building security systems, and generally making their lives easier. All the while, he’d also been squirreling away money for the time when he would get a green card, come to America, and talk his way into CalPoly. He’d openly admitted all this to Josh in the interview because he wanted a chance to combine his more formal skills with those he’d taught himself back home.

  Smart kid. Keep an eye on that one.

  Finally, there was Perry Holland. Josh was still trying to figure him out. He’d gone to some oddball liberal arts school in Florida where there were no grades and students cobbled together their own degrees out of whatever interested them. Perry’s was in something called Meta-Systems Analysis. His coursework appeared to bounce around from macroeconomics to anthropology to game theory. Perry had told Josh he’d gone after a job at Myria, and then this particular job, because he was intrigued by Josh’s work and thought it could be expanded to fuzzier, more human applications than the mathematically intensive things Josh used it for. Josh had no idea if that was true, but he was interested in finding out. Perry’s role on the team was still vague.

  Generalist?

  So there they were, looking up at him like …

  “Okay, seriously,” he said. “You all need to stop that.”

  “Stop what, sir?” Finney asked.

  “Looking at me like I’m some kind of demigod! I’m just a normal guy.”

  Yeah, I don’t think they’re buying it.

  “Okay, no. But I used to be. I wasn’t born rich. I was a little bit smart, but mostly I was really, really lucky. You know, I came this close to working with historical employment data instead of the stock market feed. It would have been easier, and right now, I’d be an underpaid adjunct professor somewhere with an interesting paper.”

  But you are, Blanche! You are in that chair!

  “But I cracked the stock market, and now my life is very different. At the end of the day, you’ll go home to your normal lives. Except maybe you, Perry. I’m not sure about you.”

  They laughed. That’s a good sign.

  “And I’ll be driven home by a bodyguard and sealed into my security perimeter for the night. But behind all that is a normal person. I don’t make the sun come up in the morning. And my point is …”

  You’re sure you have one, right?

  “My point is that we can be a lot more effective as a team if we can get past who I am and pretend I’m just one of you.”

  Well, the one in charge, obviously.

  “Can we do that?”

  They all nodded and murmured agreement. He was pretty sure Don Finney said, “Yes, sir,” which kind of defeated the purpose.

  But then João said, “Are you always this self-conscious?”

  “Thank you!” he said. “That’s perfect. Just like that. And no, I’m usually a lot more comfortable in my own skin. I’m nervous under the circumstances. Just like a real boy.”

  “So what have you brought us here to do?” Laura asked. Steering him back on point. That was a good sign too. This might work out.

  “I do have a longer-term project in mind, but something pressing has come up. I want us to hit it from every angle we can think of.”

  He brought up one of the wall screens he’d had installed. “This man is Alexander Tate,” he said, “in happier times.”

  Crane stood in the paved turnoff near the end of the airstrip, waiting for Malcolm Stoppard’s charter to arrive. It was early afternoon, and the air was heavy and still. Chloe and Scott McCall waited in the shadow of the foundation pickup, and their bags were stacked in the bed. Chloe had her knee brace on over her jeans. She was still limping a little, but she’d gotten off easy. She and Scott had both been
quiet and subdued on the ride out from town, and from their body language, Crane gathered there had been no reconciliation.

  It hadn’t been a pleasant day so far. That morning, Crane had been on the satellite phone with Amy Carpenter’s parents. That wasn’t an experience he was eager to repeat. They had been devastated, obviously. Grateful for his help in getting Amy’s body flown back home. Confused as to who exactly Crane was and how he was involved.

  He’d ended up flipping the private detective story he’d used with the locals. He told them Amy had been in Bahia Tortugas catching up with a college friend. When she’d gone missing, that friend had gotten concerned and called him. He agreed to help because he owed the family some favors. It wasn’t a bad story. It was Malcolm who’d taught him to keep his cover stories as close to the truth as necessity would allow.

  But at least the situation with Amy was resolved. Now he would get Chloe and Scott settled. Once that was done, he would convince Captain Burch to take the Emma to Cabo San Lucas for a while. There were plenty of yachters there they could hector about proper sewage disposal, and getting them away from here would clear the field. He wouldn’t have anyone else to worry about when Tate or his cartel buddies got around to hitting back.

  Eventually the plane appeared out of the endless blue sky. It landed neatly, taxied into the turnoff, and came to a stop.

  As Malcolm climbed out, Chloe hurried to him, wobbling a bit on her stiff leg, and they embraced.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” she said. “I’m all right.”

  “I know,” Malcolm said softly as he stroked her back. But his eyes met Crane’s, and a look of gratitude passed between them.

  Crane and Scott got the bags out of the truck, and Scott helped the pilot load them into the baggage compartment while Crane and Malcolm walked toward the edge of the tarmac.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Malcolm said. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “She’s still my little girl, John.” Crane could hear the emotion as his voice went tight. “If you hadn’t been here … The girl who didn’t make it, did this Jason Tate kill her?”

  Crane shrugged. “Autopsy shows she drowned. No other injuries, but she was seriously intoxicated. It looks like she just fell overboard from his yacht. But yeah, he was involved. With a lot of things.”

  “And he’s untouchable?”

  Crane gave a grim smile. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

  Malcolm nodded.

  “I’m doing a lousy job of taking your advice, Malcolm,” Crane said. “There’s no vision at all here. This guy just needs to be taken down, and I’m going to do it.”

  “I’m not arguing. Long term, yeah, you need a plan. But when your house catches fire, you do what it takes to put it out. If there’s anything you need, John, anything at all, you just have to call. Call anyway, and keep me posted.”

  “I will.”

  They shook hands before Malcolm headed back to the plane. Malcolm gripped Crane’s hand in both of his for a moment. Neither of them spoke. It wasn’t necessary.

  Chapter 17

  El Paso, Texas

  If there was one thing you could count on from Jessie Diamond, it was the unexpected. The town car dropped Josh and Tim at the Santa Fe Street entrance to the El Paso Convention Center, and Josh got his bearings while Tim arranged for the car to pick them up when they were ready. He looked at the signage on the building. “Border Region Coordination Conference.”

  What the hell is she doing here?

  When Tim returned, they walked through the huge glass doors and into the air conditioning. The cavernous lobby had all the trappings of a convention in full swing. Voices combined into a dull white noise. Men in suits and cowboy hats sat in clusters of barely comfortable chairs, talking business. People manned fabric-draped tables, offering literature and smiling like mad. A video crew shot b-roll under the big dome of blue glass in the ceiling. There was that same heavy traffic carpeting with the abstract patterns that Josh remembered from pretty much every convention center he’d ever been in, and the same dull light that seemed to come from nowhere.

  They found the membership counter and bought a pair of day passes. Then they walked through the lobby while Josh flipped through his program. There were tracks of panels on cross-border public health, transportation and infrastructure, telecommunications, security, banking. Well, he thought, Jessie did spend a lot of time crossing borders, usually without permission.

  He sent her a text message through his smart watch. “I’m here. Where are you?”

  They followed the flow of the crowd, which seemed to be taking them to the booths in the main hall. Someone offered Josh a brightly colored tote bag with some kind of catalog inside. He politely declined.

  Then his watch buzzed, and Josh checked the screen. “Where’s Juarez Room B?”

  Tim studied the map of the convention center they’d gotten at the counter. “Got it,” he announced after a moment. “This way.”

  Tim led the way to a row of doors. It looked like a larger space had been divided up into several smaller rooms for panels. The door to Room B had a sign that read, “1067-A Cross-Border Spectrum Coordination in a Crowded Region.”

  Okay, sure. She has to be somewhere, I guess. Why not here?

  Inside, perhaps fifty people sat in uncomfortable stacking chairs. They were the same chairs they had at all these places, like they came from a single storeroom that connected to every convention center on Earth. On the dais at the front of the room, someone was talking about increasing congestion in the ISM band, and there, in the back row, sat Jessie Diamond. Over a white blouse and a tan pencil skirt, she wore a fitted brown jacket that looked like some kind of cross between a business suit and a bomber jacket. Her blonde hair, usually worn up, cascaded down onto her shoulders.

  Damn, she cleans up good. Now that’s who you should ask out. She’s gorgeous. She’s interesting. God knows she’s not intimidated by your money.

  For a moment, he entertained the idea. But no.

  Too many passports. She’s more Crane’s speed.

  She glanced over and took her large shoulder bag from the chair beside her to make room for him. Tim nodded and stood beside the door as Josh sat down beside her.

  “How are you?” she asked softly.

  “Good,” he murmured. “It’s good to see you. What in the world are you doing here?”

  She gave him a quick look of disapproval. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to talk to you!”

  “Well, okay, then.”

  In other words, stop asking me about my business.

  Josh sighed. “All right, point taken.”

  And with that, his transgression was forgotten. “What do you need, and where do you need it?” she asked.

  “I’m still working on the what,” he said. “It won’t all be legal.”

  “You wouldn’t need me if it was, would you?”

  “The where is Baja. Bahia Tortugas on the Pacific coast.”

  “Is this going to John Crane?” she guessed. “Are you two putting on another show?”

  “It kind of looks that way.”

  “If you’ll tell me the story, I might be able to help put your shopping list together.”

  “Sure,” he said with a laugh. “I’ll tell you about my dubious activities because I trust you.”

  She smiled and then reached out and briefly touched his shoulder. It was a strangely intimate moment.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Josh,” she said. Then she was all business once more. “So what’s going on?”

  Josh quietly told her what Crane had found in Bahia Tortugas. He left out the backstory about Chloe Stoppard and decided it wasn’t especially important at this point to go into whom “Brad Zahn” really was. But he hit the high points, covering Crane’s raid on Gypsy, finding the missing radio engineer, the discovery that a Mexican cartel was apparently searching for and kidnappi
ng people with advanced technical skills.

  At some point, the panel concluded with a round of applause, and people began filing out. But Josh and Jessie kept their seats, and by the time Josh finished, she was looking at him with an odd expression. He could see her mind working furiously behind her dark eyes.

  “I’m going to do something I never do,” she said at last. “I’m going to introduce you to another client. Come on.”

  They stood up, and Jessie led him deeper into the room, past knots of people talking in the aisles. She approached a man seated near the stage, going through the messages that had come in on his phone during the panel.

  “Sawyer Cottrell,” she said. “Let me introduce Josh Sulenski. Sawyer owns a telecom company called Cochise Broadband and Wireless.”

  Sawyer stood up. “And Mr. Sulenski owns pretty much everything else,” he said with a grin. They shook hands. Sawyer Cottrell was somewhere in his fifties, Josh guessed. He had the lean physique and bearing Josh associated with retired military. The haircut didn’t change that assessment. He wore khakis and a white polo shirt with his company logo.

  He’s got a booth here that he’s going to have to man later.

  He seemed friendly enough. Josh grinned and said, “There’s plenty of stuff I don’t own yet.”

  “Well, you’re still young.”

  “I think you should tell Sawyer what you told me,” said Jessie.

  Josh did, and he could see Sawyer react. Sawyer didn’t speak until Josh had finished, but more than once, Josh noticed Sawyer and Jessie trading looks.

  When Josh had told his story, Sawyer mulled it over for a moment, and then said. “We should talk somewhere more private. I’ve got a room in the Camino Real. Come on.”

  Josh introduced Tim as they crossed the street. “I don’t really get to go places alone anymore,” he explained.