All The Big Ones Are Dead

by Christopher A. Gray

  Min examined the root of the tusk. This was always the hardest part for her. The hacking marks of the poacher's machete were clearly visible. In spite of the cleaning the tusk had received before transport, some bloodstains were visible in the damaged areas.

  Min wasn’t naive. She was aware of the revulsion that many citizens of Europe and North America had towards the ivory industry. Looking at the bloodstains she understood that revulsion. But soon the evidence of the brutality would be carved away, and the tusk would be transformed into a beautiful mermaid, with Min’s unique signature style so prized by customers. Most of the very wealthy customers were local here in Hong Kong, but many of them resided in Europe and North America. Perhaps her carving would make it all the way to America, maybe even New York City.

  Chapter Ten

  Jorge Tudor chewed on his third antacid tablet of the afternoon. At some point in the last month he realized that his stomach became upset only on certain days, and that it had nothing to do with eating spicy food. Every time he was to meet with Marc Dominican his stomach churned and he felt uneasy. Even when the meeting wasn’t in person. Today’s meeting was over the encrypted video feed.

  His unease was made worse when Dominican showed up with David Trask, which was usually the case of late. No matter how pleasant Dominican was when they met in person, Trask’s expression never changed. The psychopathic duo. No, scratch that. One sociopath and his psychopath attack dog, ready to kill on command.

  It had not escaped Tudor’s notice that several of Dominican’s ‘contractors’ had disappeared over the years, including some mutual contacts. Those who had longer term value were kept around. At first it didn’t bother him very much, since his smuggling and warehousing expertise were indispensable to Dominican. But with Dominican's expanding international reach, and with Jorge plugging him into multiple ports of operation in six countries and counting, Jorge might not be as uniquely important to Dominican as he used to be. Especially if Dominican happened to decide that he could simply move Jorge aside and put someone else in control.

  Don’t be paranoid, Tudor thought to himself. I’m the one Dominican trusts with the electronics distribution to the team. I’m the one he trusts to transport ivory and rhino horn under the nose of border security in six different countries. Nobody has my network. I bring in fifty tons a year, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth.

  Tudor drummed his fingers on his office desk and looked at his watch. The usually punctual Dominican would be activating the video screen in eight minutes. Aside from his desk phone, Tudor had no control over the sophisticated communications system in his office. It was all operated by remote control and Tudor often wondered if Dominican or Trask ever activated the camera or audio to spy on him or listen to his phone conversations. Not very often, he thought. Both are busy men, so if they do listen in, it is probably rare. But the possibility was unnerving enough to ensure Jorge was always careful about what he said in his office. His private calls were made outside, on his mobile phone, and his private ledger was kept under a false floor in the utility room down the hall, where there were no cameras.

  Tudor had sensed early in their relationship that Dominican liked order and neatness, so he straightened some papers and put a couple of loose paper clips into his desk drawer, out of sight. As he closed the drawer he could hear Dominican’s voice over the monitor’s speakers. He was early.

  “Hello, Jorge,” Mark Dominican’s head and shoulders loomed on the monitor. Tudor looked up, startled despite his attempt to steel himself for the meeting. David Trask was not in view, likely hovering in the background or off somewhere doing Dominican’s dirty work.

  “Hello, Marc.”

  “How are the folks, Jorge? Is your father enjoying his retirement?”

  “He’s bored. I think he needs a hobby to get him out of the house. That’s what my mother says, anyway.” Dominican laughed. Despite the jovial small talk, Tudor was always uneasy when Dominican asked about his parents, knowing that it was more a reminder of a vulnerability than thoughts of genuine concern.

  “Dave should be there momentarily. He’s bringing the phones I mentioned, to be distributed among your people down the line.”

  “Of course,” Tudor nodded as Trask walked in after a cursory knock on his office door. Trask hadn’t waited for Tudor to invite him in. He placed the Kevlar and metal briefcase on Tudor’s desk. Tudor was undecided as to whether he should offer to shake hands, but Trask made the decision easy by busying himself with the briefcase lock combination.

  “These have the promised encryption updates,” Dominican continued as Trask opened the case, revealing twenty-four mobile flip phones. “They appear low-tech by today’s standards, but inside is the latest hardware with our special customizations.” Trask handed one to Tudor, then walked off to the side behind the desk. “The phones are discreetly sized, yet are also designed to take some punishment. Have a look at the battery.”

  The slim yet utilitarian phone had built-in rubber corners to absorb shock should it be dropped. He turned it over to examine the back as Dominican resumed speaking. “It’s designed to hold a standby charge for thirty days, and has triple the power and sensitivity of a typical mobile phone. All of the motion sensors, the earphone jack and other non-essential junk have been removed to make room for a bigger battery.”

  “The radios have been cranked up then,” Tudor said, noticing a reflection of Trask in the chrome beverage container on his desk.

  “Among some other tweaks. It is not as if we are going for FCC approval,” Dominican replied with a trace of annoyance.

  “The next shipment is proceeding as discussed last week. You have two days to ensure its security and distribute the new phones. All previous phones must be destroyed. No exceptions. There can be no delay.” As if to drive the point home, Trask resumed his position in front of the briefcase and stared at Tudor.

  “I am ready. My people are ready.”

  “Excellent. I'll be in touch, Jorge.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Agent Michael Bishop was thinking about death. Sitting in a hot, humid, dusty, abandoned office in the second floor of a condemned old shipping warehouse thirty-five kilometers northwest of Marseille, France, was not an activity conducive to cheerful relaxation. Bishop dealt with death a lot in his chosen line of work. Death was dealt his way; he dealt death to others. It was, in his view, a perfectly valid way of making a living and making his way through the world, as long as the government was paying the freight.

  Death was a preoccupation on this late afternoon. The case he was working had begun well before he had been transferred from his CIA field post to this file at Interpol. It had begun in Hong Kong with the death of an unfortunate but reformed criminal named William Ling. The pace of death led from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, from Los Angeles to Vancouver, from Vancouver to Toronto, back to New York, across the Atlantic to London, then to Marseille. From the old French port city, events moved to Casablanca in Morocco and the port of Tangier, then down the West African coast to Cameroon and the huge port city of Douala. Dead contacts, dead confidential informers, and half a dozen dead ivory and rhino horn poachers in the toughest part of the Cameroon interior. Fabrice Masiki had given up a fixer, one of the contacts who acted as couriers and communicators between the poaching gangs, shippers and goods handlers. Linders had helped track down the fixer in the Port of Douala. Bishop had interrogated the man and offered him a deal. Co-operate and stay out of jail, or keep his mouth shut and end up in a Cameroon prison. He co-operated and spilled the shipment destination points in Marseille; it was all he knew. The people running the smuggling networks kept fixers busy, but ignorant. Bishop disliked greeting parties of any kind, so he was hoping that the Cameroon authorities were still sitting hard on this fixer in particular.

  Bishop shouldered responsibility for his part in death dealing the way most other men shoulder a camera bag or a messenger pouch. It was part of the job. That Bishop was recruited for this so
rt of work, and for the more refined art and craft of intelligence gathering too, was a credit to his natural abilities as much as it was to his military training and tours of duty. It was also a telling bit of evidence that the deep and extensive, government-sponsored testing he’d undergone after some anonymous black suit type had flagged his military file years before. Deep testing had evidently revealed to the psych evaluation panel that Bishop was highly intelligent, remarkably stable, and possessed a distinctly ambiguous moral reaction set. Bishop was that rare individual who always made sure he was so fully informed before setting foot in any particular direction that it had become second nature for him to unhesitatingly shoot first when the situation called for it, and ask questions later. The fact was, Bishop understood quite clearly that he had never killed anyone who hadn’t deserve it. A few bystanders had been wounded or otherwise slightly nicked up along the way. But nobody was dead who hadn’t had it coming one way or another.

  At this moment, Bishop was simply sitting and waiting for something to happen in one of the six, small windows displayed on the laptop on the table in front of him. Each of the small windows was displaying a medium resolution video feed. Bishop’s main tech guy in Marseille also worked all of southern France—anywhere along the northern Mediterranean coast actually. He was a private contractor who did confidential technical surveillance installations for a variety of western government agencies. The tech had done a creditable if imperfect job on the camera installs. Some of the angles of view were iffy, positioned in overhead light fixtures as they were because of the proximity to power for the small, battery-less Wi-Fi cams. Some angles were partially obscured. But the cam mics were clear, and the audio was probably going to be just as important as the video, as usual, and all the viewing angles were front-lit which meant the video footage would be clean, glare free and sharp enough. The tech had also positioned Wi-Fi extenders perfectly, and close enough for full power reception from each of the little cameras, with a clear line of sight to Bishop’s laptop position in the shuttered and disused warehouse in the same area.

  The real trick to the surveillance setup was that Bishop was not just monitoring the location across the alley. He was also monitoring almost identical setups at three other waterfront dock locations all within a couple of hundred meters of his second floor roost.

  “I need a bigger laptop next time,” he said to the mice scurrying along the baseboards. “Right, guys?” One of the little grey mice actually stopped and looked up at the sound of his voice.

  “Huh,” Bishop said to the mouse, “could you pass along my request to Field Tech the next time you pass by? Hmmm?”

  The mouse decided that Bishop was just another weird human and scampered away.

  “No seventeen-inch laptop for Bishop, then,” he sighed. “Fifteen inches is just too small. Ah, whatever shall I do?” Bishop thought intently for a moment, trying to remember a quote his mother had taught him when he was very young. “I remember!” he suddenly said, looking around to see if the attentive mouse might have returned. “Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.” The mouse was still absent, so Bishop had only himself as an audience. “Even a blind girl knew better than to whine about things that aren’t, and strive instead for the best she could do with what she had. So I shall sit in a hot warehouse in Fos-sur-Mer and wait for something interesting to happen. Just following the money.”

  The laptop screen showed no activity whatsoever at any of the four warehouses. Not even a scampering mouse.

  ***

  Jorge Tudor was unhappy. Then again, perhaps unhappy was not the best word to describe his state of mind. The word was too weak. He was definitely unhappy, at least as far as an outside observer might conclude. What Jorge was feeling was more akin to anxiety, deep stress, fear for his life, and an unrelenting sense of vulnerability.

  Dealing with Marc Dominican was only half the burden. Having to personally participate as an intermediary and mule to deliver the secure, customized mobile phones provided by Dominican’s people, to a murderous assortment of smugglers, poacher contacts and fixers, was the last thing Jorge had ever expected to be doing with his life. He had traveled to his current location via London to Paris by Eurostar, then by TGV to Gare Saint Charles in Marseille itself.

  Jorge hated Marseille. The casual tourists loved the narrow old byways, half the streets with no visible names, every corner a new surprise in the form of a shop or a little gallery or a little cafe. Jorge felt claustrophobic in the winding, hilly, narrow streets. He found the street corner surprises disaffecting and disorganized. The causal tourists loved the lousy restaurants and tourist traps surrounding Vieux-Port. Jorge viewed the entire old port neighborhood with disdain, an odd-smelling trap for fools. The casual tourists and many of the best and brightest too, loved the art galleries and museums that had grown and evolved in the city over hundreds and hundreds of years. Jorge found the galleries and museums old and musty. The vacationers thronged the Sofitel and the Holiday Inn Express alike, more concerned with wandering Marseille and taking the tours. Jorge had almost mewled aloud when he found that Dominican’s handlers had booked him at the Holiday Inn Express, under the name on the forged ID and passport he was carrying as James Benson, across the street from the train station. Jorge just hated Marseille.

  He had walked, carrying his laden Carrefour shopping bag, down Rue des Petites Maries, which he found dirty and disgusting and populated with street dwellers (at least they looked like street people to Jorge), then along Rue des Dominicaines for a short block, and onto Rue d’Aix and Cours Belsunce past the museum to Bir Hakeim that took him down to Vieux-Port. It was a poor route, very much the long way, but he had tried to avoid what he considered to be the seedier streets. He also wanted the double-backs and pinches along the route that would help him identify any followers and other unwanted scrutiny. Jorge was a classic example of a big city fish out of water; used to cosmopolitan sophistication and elegant choices, but trapped in a riotous mélange of the ancient and the modern and the unfamiliar and the polyglot shopkeepers and cafe owners. He hated it, and he wanted to transact his business and get back on the train to Paris as soon as humanly possible. It was 19:30 as he sat down at a reserved table on the patio of La Galiote.

  ***

  Bishop checked his watch. 19:30 hours. He noticed that the luminous dot on the Submariner’s rotating bezel was not lined up at 12 o’clock. It had been bumped counter clockwise at some point since he last noticed, so he ratcheted it around but found a bit too much resistance and a disturbing amount of faint grinding.

  “Grit in there from scrabbling around in the Cameroon bush,” he mused aloud. “This will need some TLC at Vik’s, that is if I ever get back to Boston, which is looking very far away at the moment.”

  It was hot. And even though he was sitting calmly and perfectly still, he was sweating. He had a few bottles of water. There was a toilet for him to eliminate the water as needs demanded. But his intel was unproductive so far. He had personally interrogated the fixer in Douala. It had taken Bishop a full twenty-four hours to get squared away with the Cameroon authorities before they'd let him talk to the fixer. He’d needed less than an hour to persuade the man to co-operate once it was made clear to him that he might still be able to do other business in return for his “professional co-operation” as Bishop had phrased it.

  DeCourcey had needed an additional twenty-four hours to convince the Cameroon Customs & Border Security commander at the Port of Douala to not suspend his usual ‘fee’ demand from the fixer, something that would have looked highly suspicious to the ever-present observers in the employ of the miserable assemblage of smugglers of all kinds who worked the seaport. At least the port commissioner had been willing to participate. It was small miracle the DeCourcey had been able to persuade the man.

  The fixer’s information had been clear about a suspected meet at 19:00, but here he was at 19:30—make that 19:3
2 now—and it was still a no-show. So Bishop paused for a moment in his general ruminations to try and estimate how many hours he’d spent over the years just waiting. Waiting for a team to show up. Waiting for a CI to show up. Waiting for an asset to show up. Waiting for a surveillance target to show up or wake up or do something.

  “No way to tell or add it all up,” he said. “Hey, Monsieur Souris.” The same rodent (well, it looked the same anyway) had reappeared. “What are the odds that somebody shows up at all tonight?”

  The mouse, only checking to see if the unwanted human interloper was still present, had nothing to say as it scurried away, back to whatever hole in the wall it called home. It was still hot.

  ***

  “Mistah, ah, Benson?” the voice said behind him. “You are heem?”

  Jorge twisted in his chair to the left, found no one, then twisted around to his right and started a bit. The man standing behind him seemed to be two meters tall and thin as a reed. His skin was inky black, and he had a classically shaped head on which he wore a large, knitted cap in alternating weaves of black, blue and red yarn. He wore full length, well fitted, army-style fatigues that, upon closer inspection looked well-worn and actual military issue. He also had a well-worn canvas messenger slung cross-shoulder. His combat-style boots looked broken in but well cared for.

  “Yes, I’m Benson,” Jorge responded curtly, confirming his cover name for the trip. “How is your mother?” It was a security question, all pre-arranged.

  “You are late then,” the contact said just a curtly. The words “late then” came out as ‘laaaat thin.’ “My mother, Precy, is well.” The tall contact nodded his head, showing appreciation nonetheless for the false inquiry.