“Wow. How would they off-load?” Roger asked.
“Launch it through the torpedo tubes attached to rubber boats or floatable containers. Attach the cargo to the sides, and release it beneath the surface. You have to have a well-coordinated pickup operation. Surfacing the sub is a no-go.”
“Unreal. Who makes these narco disposable subs?” Roger asked, fascinated.
“Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador. They estimate that about thirty percent of the drug flow comes from subs. They make them in the jungle, and some have gone as far as Spain and Italy. It’s business innovation—love the free market.”
Roger laughed and pointed at Evan. “You need some new hobbies, son, like cooking, chasing women.”
“True. Don’t judge.”
“You hungry?”
“Born hungry.”
Veracruz, Mexico, Three Days Earlier
Evan inspected the bottle of water carefully, opened it, and took a drink. He had little trouble relaxing, given his circumstances. He stared at the blue oval pool and out at the beach where it met the gulf. The smell of salt and Coppertone teased his nose.
Evan sneezed and looked at his watch.
The Hotel Fiesta Americana sat on the Gulf of Mexico in Veracruz and provided safe, temporary seclusion from the underlying crime and subculture of death. Evan pretended for a few moments that he was on vacation. He smiled at the pretty twenty-something Mexican bartender. She wore an I love New York shirt that was two sizes too small and was far from modest.
“Any food, señor?”
“No, gracias.”
Evan watched the pool for anyone who was watching him. Other than flirtatious young couples and a few elderly Europeans, the pool deck was bare. Wind chimes tingled in the breeze from where they hung on the bamboo-and-pine half-shelter of the bar. The bartender went back to texting near the cash register, and Evan settled briefly into a relaxed posture. He pulled his straw cowboy hat down over his eyes and pushed up his sunglasses.
“Don’t get too comfortable, lad.” His earpiece crackled, and he grinned.
Roger and Green Team were watching him from the balcony of one of the rooms high overhead on the eleventh floor. There were team members in the lobby and in front of the hotel.
“Anything?”
“Aye, Tommy is in the lounge heading your way. Took a cab. A couple of thugs in suites are drinking beer inside at the bar. They aren’t trying to cover up watching him. We got your back. Just stick to the plan, eh?”
“We’ll see, Roger. I like to wing it occasionally.”
“That’s what I am afraid of.”
Evan unbuttoned his Tommy Bahamas Hawaiian shirt to get a little air and packed a dip.
OK, remain calm. The plan was for him to make contact with Tommy, who was their direct link to Mario. Tommy wanted reassurance that he would be protected and not double crossed if he got Evan into the inner circle. Nathan had warned Evan that Tommy was a little paranoid and not altogether there.
“He’s nuts,” Evan had concluded. “Great.” He wasn’t sure how he was going to play it with Tommy. Evan daydreamed for a minute, back to dealings with Russian mafia types like Ivan, right-wing guerrillas in Colombia, and Afghan commanders.
“They are all the same. Everyone’s got an angle, and it’s usually money, power, sex, goats, or all the above.”
He had traded any number of conveniences to the world’s scumbags for information. When it came to getting stuff, everyone was a capitalist.
Evan spat in his now-empty plastic water bottle. He watched a man in his early seventies walk over to his table with the swagger of a movie star: chest out, grinning, and hand extended. He was wrinkled and tan with his gray hair in a long ponytail. He had tiny mirrored, round sunglasses that hung down on a large nose. Evan ignored his hand and just waited for him to sit down.
The man smelled of booze and cigarettes. Evan assumed by his yellow-tinged eyes and bowling-ball belly that he was probably a drunk with some liver disease.
“Ivan, huh?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t look freaking Russian. You’re what—a Puerto Rican?”
“Cuban Russian, one parent of each. You wanna talk in Russian, Spanish, or English?”
Tommy ran his fingers through his thick hair. He looked nervous and fidgety but confident. He clicked his fingers in the air and spoke in perfect Mexican Spanish. “Two tequilas. Bring my bottle under the counter.”
“How long have you lived in Mexico, Tommy?”
“Too damn long. It’s getting crazy—time to move! Give me a second.”
Tommy answered his buzzing cell phone. The Mexican bartender gave Tommy a gentle kiss on the cheek and set the bottle and two glasses on the table. Evan watched her return to her perch at the end of the bar, where she continued to text and watch TV.
Evan smiled. “She’s gotta gun too, eh?”
Tommy stopped speaking for a second. “What?”
“The girl. She’s what—your daughter? She’s got a piece under the bar, huh?”
Tommy concluded his quick phone call and set his phone on the table. “Yes. One of many lovely children I have. She is my little Carla. She watches out for me.”
Evan watched Tommy take two shots and then pour one for Evan. Evan slammed it and savored the warm, smoky burn.
For a few moments the two men stared at each other. Evan heard laughter, loud music, the backfire of a car in the distance, and maybe even the pop pop of a nine millimeter somewhere in Boca del Rio.
“The ground rules before we begin?” Tommy blurted.
“Sure.”
“You got a team here watching us?”
“Of course. They are also watching the thugs at the bar who are watching you, Tommy.”
Tommy smiled nervously and lit a cigarette. His hands shook briefly as he began his personal nicotine-and-alcohol treatment to calm his nerves.
“Look, Ivan, or whatever your name is—I got a lot to lose here. The guys inside at the bar, they are the real deal, Mario’s screeners. I can get you to them. You make it past them, and we go see this bucket-of-rust sub.” He sucked on his cigarette until it glowed. “This whole game is in your court. I can’t make you any guarantees. But let me be clear.”
Evan turned to watch a beautiful, full-figured South American woman walk past with a toddler. “Tommy, the deal was, you get me access, and you toe the line. Stick to the script. I get you out of here no matter what the outcome.”
“Unless we are riddled with bullets, Ivan.”
Evan nodded. “No kidding. You seem like a wreck; you’re nervous, you’re shifty, and you’re an open book. You betray me out of some fear to save your ass, and you and your girl, maybe even your pet Chihuahua, disappear.”
Tommy laughed, more like a nervous expulsion than anything. “I hate pets.”
“Figure of speech.”
“Whatever.”
Evan looked critically at Tommy and realized that the man was just simply insane. Years of adrenaline highs, drug binges, and who knows how many women.
“Now that we got the ‘we don’t trust each other’ speech out of the way, let me fill you in on where I am coming from, Ivan.” Tommy slammed another shot and lit up his fourth cigarette.
Evan braced himself for another rant.
“I am sixty-nine years old. I came to Mexico in 1987 after doing six years on a twenty-year stint. Technicality. I got out, headed down here, never looked back.”
“That explains why you dress and act like Don Johnson, still stuck in the cocaine ’80s.” Evan laughed.
“Screw you, youngster. Happens to lots of guys—they lose time in the joint, get stuck in an era. Anyway, I flew drugs, guns, whores, and other stuff for the CIA. As long as I played by the rules, they didn’t care what the hell I did on the side. I flew for Mario’s dad too. We had a big fleet of planes.” Tommy seemed to stare backward into the nostalgic era of another time that was really not quite as pristine as he imagined it at the time.
<
br /> “Back then commies were the threat. Hell, now they are running your country! Surprised they ain’t putting Bible thumpers in camps yet! Drugs were quick cash, and there was a code, you see. Governments took their payoffs, freedom fighters got their guns, flag wavers got to sing, and bang.” Tommy brought his hands together in a clap as if he were wrapping up a sermon at a gun show. “American apple freaking pie and cash for everyone!”
“Your mouth, Tommy.” Evan looked around and frowned.
“Screw you.”
“Then what happened? So you ran drugs and weapons for the agency. So what?”
“Then the fuckers set me up.”
“Cry me a river, Tommy.” Evan spat into his bottle.
Tommy was slowly getting unglued. Evan was seriously having doubts that he could trust him.
“I sat in prison for six years in Florida. I knew if I spoke, they would take me out. I was scared to eat or drink anything ’cause of those mind-control drugs they use…Same shit they did with that movie-theater shooter and that nut up in, what, Connecti—”
“Focus, Tommy.” Dude’s crazier than I am, Evan thought, not sure if he was impressed or worried.
“When I was free, I came back down here to mi familia, Mario Jr. He accepted me into the casa, and I picked up where I left off.”
“Happily ever after?” Evan prodded.
Tommy’s eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward. “Basically, I can smell a fucking spook a mile away.” Tommy held up his fingers in quotation marks and mockingly said, “Ivan.” Tommy stood up and gripped the edges of the table.
Evan glanced out of the corner of his eye. Tommy’s daughter had produced a sawed-off shotgun and laid it on the bar. Tommy waved her off. No one seemed to notice.
“You’re a spook, Ivan. You ain’t even old enough to have been in Cuba when the real shit went down! You’re a ’Rican for all I know. You probably can’t find Russia on a map!”
Evan chuckled. He could tell Tommy was having half a dozen different conversations at once, spurned by years of disconnected brain synapses. No, drugs don’t affect your brain. Evan’s mind drifted.
“Tommy, what’s your angle? So you hate the government, the CIA—who doesn’t? Hell, you haven’t been in the States for a while. They canceled Miami Vice, by the way. You got to do this my way, Tommy—trust.”
Tommy just kept talking right over Evan, as if his lips were not moving.
“You working for them, and you gonna leave me high and dry. Vietnam and half a dozen other freaking countries and hundreds of people have been left out to dry by the agency. The whole nine-eleven thing was—”
“Stop!” Evan put his hand over Tommy’s mouth.
Tommy froze in fear and sat back in his chair, deflated.
“Take a breath, Tommy. I don’t work for the agency. I am here as a mercenary. No rules, just this.” Evan pulled a roll of one-hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket and smoothed them out flat on the table.
Tommy started breathing again.
“The great equalizer, Tommy. This is why I am here.”
Tommy stood up and then sat down. He looked emotionally exhausted. He suddenly drank straight from the bottle, grabbed the stack of one-hundred-dollar bills, and slid them into his cargo pocket. “I want five passports, five different countries.”
Evan replied, “Done.”
“Me, my daughter, and my new wife.”
“Congratulations.”
Tommy lit his eighth cigarette. His fingers were trembling. “She lives in Italy. Was an Italian stripper, had a car crash last year, and is now born again. The life or her—that was her line in the cocaine. She wants a family and to disappear.”
“She pregnant?”
Tommy smiled but not a happy smile. It was more of a grimace of fear. “Yes, gonna have a girl. All ten of my kids are girls. Carla, she’s the only one who will talk to me. Only one I know.”
“Something is still working, clearly.”
“I think if I get away from this life, I can seek forgiveness, start over. Be a real man.” Tommy rubbed his hair and looked at his fingers.
“How long you got?” Evan asked flatly.
Tommy looked at him for a second and then answered with great clarity, as if they were suddenly having a serious, adult conversation. The paranoia was gone. “Doctors say about a year.”
“OK.”
“Understand my angle, Ivan?”
“Loud and clear.”
“OK. OK, Ivan, I am sticking to the script that your boss sent me. Knew you from a Russian job.”
“Good boy. My team is going to pick up your Carla. Tell her to chill. She is going to a safe house, just in case.”
“OK.” Tommy suddenly reemerged from deep thought as an in-control Don Johnson persona. He stood up, made to move away, and then paused. “You know, there was a rumor back in the late ’90s that several drug cartels of the Colombian persuasion were going to purchase a vintage Soviet sub. Heads of three cartels went to the bottom of the sea, helped paved the way for one cartel to take over—some say, to be controlled by the CIA.”
“Conspiracy theory, Tommy.” Evan shook his head and dismissed Tommy’s words with his hands as if he were clearing a cloud of smoke.
Tommy laughed. “Yeah, hell, you’re too young to know about that. Probably bullshit.”
Evan nodded and smirked smugly. “Total bull.”
Evan and Roger finished breakfast in silence. Evan enjoyed a cup of real coffee, savored it, and set the cup down.
“You know what’s funny, Roger?”
“What?” Roger poured more boiling water into his French press and watched the time as the hot water met with coarse Colombian grounds.
“Here I am, an American playing a Russian, eating the best Mexican food I have ever had, made by a crazy ex-SAS Scotsman off the coast of Cuba. How ’bout that for multiculturalism?”
Roger checked the temperature of his coffee, pressed the press down, and poured a strong black cup in his “Don’t back talk the chef” mug. “Aye, you like the steak, eh?”
“We ever go back to that ranch to train, and I am firing the cook and putting you in the kitchen.”
“Too isolated out there. You should learn to cook. You eat enough!” Roger teased Evan.
“Takes too much effort. Guess just like any skill, you got to practice. My ex-wife, she could cook. Wouldn’t even let me boil water. Said I did not do it right,” Evan said.
Roger laughed. “Aye, we would have gotten along. I am a little particular about everything in the kitchen.”
Evan laughed and thought back to Veronica and her spicy Colombian temperament. The angrier she got, the cuter she got, which always spun any scenario out of control. She got mad, and Evan wanted to have sex. God did have a sense of humor with his design of women and men. Evan continued, “Veronica, she used to spend hours prepping and cutting and talking a million miles an hour to her friends on the phone while she tasted, weighed, and did whatever it was she did. I stayed away when she cooked. The kitchen looked like some kinda special-ops command center; important, strange stuff went on in there.”
“Sounds like a beautiful Latina.”
“Kitchen looked like a war zone when she was done. I used to say, ‘Jesus, Veronica, you don’t have to use every appliance and pan in the kitchen for every meal.’”
Evan finished his breakfast of marinated skirt steak and eggs with peppers and onions. “Not that I complained, don’t get me wrong. She used every weapon in the arsenal for every battle, no matter how big or small. I reaped the rewards, and I washed the dishes. That was the deal. More coffee?”
Roger nodded and poured Evan another cup of coffee. “And the way you eat, lad, you probably kept her busy.”
“True,” Evan agreed.
“What’s your story? Why Mexico?” Evan asked.
“I wanted a change. I wanted away from the cold and the rain. I wanted something more remote. I like Latin women and the food they cook,” Roger answered
.
“Can’t argue with you there. Other than Scotch, castles, and sheep, I can’t think of much else about Scotland that I like,” Evan said with a smile.
“Oh, you’re a freakin’ comedian. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
Evan looked at his empty coffee cup and frowned. “You got a point, Roger.”
“No, really, I came over here to explore. Needed to get away from all of the reminders of a miserable, drunken past and childhood. Can’t retire and live in Scotland. I have two ex-wives there and another ex-fiancée in England. Hate the British, anyway. The French are either gay or rude, and I have had a wee bit of trouble there with the ladies too,” Roger said and shook his head. “Had a bad thing with the fiancée of a police chief while attending cooking school in Paris.”
Silver Lead and Dead (Evan Hernandez series Book 1) Page 16
