by Ted Bell
“Perfectly. Sir.”
“Good. Well, I’d best be getting back to my Americans. Thanks for dropping by on the spur of the moment, Alex. I’m most appreciative as always for your help.”
“Sir David?”
“Yes?”
“One more thing.”
13
H awke remained seated despite C’s dismissal. He made a small coughing noise into his fist and said, “I wonder, sir, did you get round to my last report? I marked it ‘Most Urgent.’ ”
“Your report? I did get round to it, yes,” C said, looking up as if he were surprised to find that Hawke, having been dismissed, was still sitting in his chair. He returned to rifling through some papers on his lap, obviously looking for something in particular.
Hawke stood to go. C remained seated but now fastened his fierce eyes on Hawke’s.
“You’d like a reaction. I was going to save it for another time, but since you’ve asked for it, here it is. You posit a possible link between Islamist terrorists and criminal elements throughout Latin America. Doesn’t wash, I’m afraid.”
“I was sent there to observe. I am merely making projections based on firsthand observation.”
“Point taken. But we need to know more, Alex, much more, before we can take any action. Especially regarding any potential connections amongst FARC in Colombia, the Shining Path in Peru, and the Montaneros in Argentina. And, finally, Alex, I think you indulge in a bit of hyperbole with your fantasies about Islamic radicals and local guerillas out there in the jungle. It’s just not plausible.”
“As I say, I saw this operation with my own eyes. This chap I mention in the report, Muhammad Top, is—”
“No relation to Noordin Top, is he? Fellow who’s running the terrorist operation in East Timor?”
“His half-brother. At any rate, Top is building a guerilla operation the likes of which we’ve never seen. With all due respect, sir, these bloody jihadistas are a huge factor out there. Why, he—”
“Jihadistas?”
“Yes. Sorry. My word.”
“Good one, too; a neologism I believe it’s called. Look here, Alex, please don’t be cross. And, please don’t misread me. The reason I sent you into the jungle in the first place was to confirm my own personal suspicions about Brazil’s current political situation. Britain, as you well know, has heavy investments there and we’re about to invest a great deal more on that new hydro dam at Diablo Blanco Falls. Don’t forget, Alex, I’m the chap who dreamed up your ‘scientific expedition’to the Amazon. And I am deeply sorry that—”
“Please, sir. This is not necessary.”
“I am deeply sorry, in fact, horrified at the tragic outcome. I’m afraid I terribly miscalculated the dangers involved in sending you up that god-forsaken river. And, as I said in my official letter to you, the entire Service is in your debt.”
“It’s my job, sir. You offered me the opportunity to refuse.”
“But you didn’t, Alex, and the Service as always is deeply grateful. And, don’t get me wrong. I’m extremely concerned about what I read in your report. Deeply disturbed, in fact.”
“It is a deeply disturbing situation. Perhaps one of the most dangerous the free world faces at the moment.”
“Alex?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I do have one final thought if you’ll bear with me another minute. Just occurred to me.”
“Of course, sir,” Hawke said, and slid back into his chair.
“Tell me about your relationship with the American Secretary of State, Consuelo de los Reyes.”
“I beg your pardon, sir? I thought that was private.”
“Not your personal relationship, Alex. I already know all about that unfortunate business. Your working relationship is the one in question.”
“Ah, that one. I would describe it as cordial.”
“Hmm. Une entente cordiale.”
“Sorry?”
“A secret agreement to avoid hostilities. Well, no matter, Alex. Look, here. After you’ve had your little chat with the German ambassador I’d like you to give your old friend the American Secretary of State a call.”
“A call.”
“Indeed. She’s chairing a secret and very high-level security conference in Key West, Florida, a fortnight from now. You’re aware of this, of course?”
“Yes. My colleague in Miami is involved. Gathering preconference intel for the Pentagon. I believe you’ve met him. Stokely Jones.”
“Large chap? American.”
Hawke grinned. “Tear Stokely Jones down, one could erect a rather large sports complex.”
C nodded, not bothering to smile. “Quite. Well. All the American regional ambassadors and LATAM State Department officials will be attending a CIA brief by your friend, Director Kelly.”
This was Patrick Brickhouse Kelly, a lanky Virginian whom Hawke had befriended in the first Gulf War.
“National Security Agency will be there as well, Alex. Various U.S. border and police personnel. The Americans are one step ahead of us on this. Like you, some of them suddenly seem to believe Latin America is the world’s next terrorist mecca.”
“It’s true”
“Well, at any rate, I’d very much like it if you were invited to Secretary de los Reyes’s Latin pow-wow. In fact, now that you and I have had a chance to discuss your report in more detail, I think it’s critical you be there.”
Hawke forced a smile.
Despite his convictions about Papa Top’s operations in the jungle, he found the very idea of calling Conch appalling. Humiliating, to be exact. She’d refused to take his calls for months. All of his letters had been returned unopened.
“With all due respect, sir, this conference sounds very much an American—”
Sir David Trulove stood and fastened his somber tweed jacket. He had that resolute look of a man headed once more into the breech. His smile to Hawke was brief, his mind already grappling with the howling Americans down the hall.
“Come now, Alex, you’ve scraped by in far more perilous assignments than this one. It’s a simple phone call. I’m sure Conch, that’s what you call her isn’t it, I’m sure Conch will be delighted to hear from you after all this time. Besides, a bit of tropical sun would do you worlds of good. You look very pale, to be honest.”
Hawke searched for words as the man crossed the room and pulled open the heavy wooden door to leave.
“Sir David, with all due respect, what possible explanation could I offer the American Secretary of State for simply ringing her up after all these months and inviting myself to her—”
“You’ll think of something, dear boy,” C said cheerfully before leaving the room. “Send her some flowers, pink roses, that’s usually the ticket. I already forwarded her a copy of your report in the morning pouch. Once she’s read it, she’ll be chomping at the bit to have you give a first person account at her conference. Nothing to worry about, I assure you.”
Hawke sat back down and stared into the fire for a few moments. He was quite sure C had never sent anyone roses in his entire life. When he felt he could safely exit the room without breaking any furniture, he got to his feet.
Nothing to worry about, Hawke muttered to himself. You’ll think of something.
After all, he had nothing to fear but the inestimable and incandescent wrath of a woman scorned.
Pink roses? For the second time this evening, C had absolutely no bloody idea what he was talking about.
14
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO
A ll the streetlights are out, Sheriff. You notice that?”
“Yep.”
“Transformer down somewhere maybe.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Nobody on the streets.”
“Nope.”
“Kinda early to be so quiet on a Friday night. Spooky.”
“Folks rather stay home than get shot at.”
“I guess. Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.�
�
“Don’t say that!”
“Homer.”
“Sorry. I know you don’t talk about, uh, Cam Ranh Bay.”
“Right. I don’t.”
“But, see, I can’t help but ask you, Sheriff. When you guys, I mean, your squad, when you’d go into a village at night, say. After dark. And you knew they were waiting—waiting for you to come around a corner or whatnot. Did you—I mean, did you ever worry about—I mean—”
“Homer. Are you scared? Are you afraid?”
“Yessir, to tell you the honest truth, I am.”
“Don’t feel bad, son. Everybody is.”
“I don’t believe that for one minute, Sheriff. I don’t think you are.”
“Not now, maybe. But I have been.”
Homer and Dixon had decided it was probably better to go down to Mexico at night. They’d taken Dixon’s pickup, mainly because to take a marked American police vehicle south of the border these days was suicide. They’d even switched the plates, hung a banged-up old Mexican plate on the tailgate. He let Homer drive the thing. He was tired.
They’d all been pretty busy going to funerals.
The whole town had.
It had taken a couple of hours to drive down south of the border from Prairie. During that time, Homer had talked a lot. He couldn’t seem to stop. It was mostly about the twelve boys who’d been killed in Mexico. Franklin had listened respectfully; he knew Homer cared deeply about those kids and their families. They’d all been friends since grade school, some cases nursery school. Homer’d been bottling a lot of things up inside and it probably helped him to just let some of it come on out.
The death of the town’s best and brightest boys, coming like it did in a single night, would take a long time to heal. In one fell swoop, they’d pretty much lost a generation. Lost the future, Franklin’s wife Daisy had said.
All those boys had mothers, and it was the most sorrowful time Franklin could remember. You couldn’t walk into a store or the diner or the filling station without seeing tears falling down somebody’s face. Women spoke in small groups on the street corners. Menfolk gathered at the Wagon Wheel or the other saloons and mostly drank. It would take a long time before this kind of pain subsided and that was assuming it ever did.
There were a lot of old boys in town who didn’t want to wait around for any healing process. Fed up and up in arms somebody called them. They wanted to ride on down there to Mexico and kill every last body they could find. Believed they knew who’d done it, who’d been abducting the girls and who’d killed the whole posse. They wanted to get their vengeance. It was hard to find fault with their emotions. But the law was the law.
And when Franklin tried to remind those fellas that vigilantism was taking the law into their own hands, one of their number, a Mr. J.T.Rawls by name, said, “Yeah. And your point is?”
“Point is, I’m the law. And you lay a hand on me you’ll wish you hadn’t, J.T.” Franklin had said and that was the end of the meeting. Shut him up, but not for long probably. Rawls was what in Houston they’d call a speed freak. And he also had a weakness for tobacco and the many fine corn whiskey products of Mr. James Beam, Clermont, Kentucky.
Rawls had himself a big Chevy dealership out south of town. He’d gotten rich selling big black Suburbans and SUVs to the wealthy cattle ranchers; and he was mean as a diamondback, too. J.T. had up and left his wife of thirty years for a young girl he’d met on the plane over to Houston. Once he’d accumulated all the money he could ever need, he’d run for sheriff. Run twice and been defeated twice. Losing didn’t set well with him. It had gotten to the point where he was drinking a bottle of Beam a day.
Folks around town had wondered for a long time how J.T. managed to make so darn much money being drunk most of the time. There were rumors he had some side business interests that wouldn’t bear a lot of scrutiny, but nothing ever came of it. Some people thought he was using his Chevrolet dealership to fence stolen cars on both sides of the border.
Another curious thing. The Mexican illegals never crossed his ranch property trekking in. Didn’t trash it and eat the dogs and livestock like they did to some others. Franklin meant to look into that sometime. A rich Yankee the Mexicans didn’t mess with? Pretty strange.
But that was all before he’d lost J.J., his son Jerry Jr., down in Mexico.
Now Franklin knew it was only a matter of time before Rawls did something stupid and got a lot more people killed. That’s when he got the idea to just go on down and talk to the Mexicans first.
A low-watt lamp snaked out of the cigarette lighter and illuminated the map on Franklin’s left knee. It was a city map of Nuevo Laredo, the outlaw town situated just over the International Bridge from Laredo, Texas. Used to be a pretty nice place, Franklin thought, gazing out the window at the shuttered storefronts and darkened hollow-eyed buildings that lined the main drag. Tourist ladies used to like to make a day of it, drive down, have lunch, and do some shopping and be back home for supper. Not any more.
It was pretty much the murder capital of the world now.
A lot of windows and doors had been blown out and the plasterwork on most of the building fronts was pockmarked or missing entirely. All this had happened in the last year or two. Drug wars had terrorized this town. No law. No order. Period. Somebody’d said over a thousand people had died in the last year alone. Accidentally on purpose. One Border Patrol report Franklin had seen talked about mass graveyards to the south of town. They had to do something with all those bodies.
He saw movement to his left and swung his eyes that way. Nothing but some old dog slinking around the corner. The town was full of such animals. Crossbred, Franklin thought, with coyotes or jackals or some such thing. Ugly as sin no matter what they were, all bones and teeth.
Every now and again he’d see a human shape or a silhouette looking down at them from above. From a rooftop or to this side or the other of a window or doorway. Homer had noticed them too, but so far he hadn’t said anything more about his fears. He knew what they were getting into when he offered to come down here. Boy clearly had his mind set on it, so Franklin finally just said fine let’s go.
They’d driven down to Nuevo Laredo to have a parlay with a gang-affiliated gentleman by the name of Felix “Tiger” Tejada. Franklin had gotten a message to him via a detective in Laredo PD. Lieutenant Detective Rodriguez maintained a purely mercenary relationship with one of Tejada’s honchos. Somewhat to the sheriff’s surprise, the man had agreed to meet with him. Tejada had a lot of conditions, of course, and Franklin agreed to every one of them all without any hesitation. What else could he do? Lose his whole town?
Tiger Tejada, now he was one unusual bandito. He wasn’t smart enough to do some of the things he did, so you had to assume somebody up the line was whispering in his ear. And he wasn’t brave enough to go out and piss in a windstorm so he hired people to do his killing, stealing, and whatnot. But money? Money was not an issue for this gentleman. The DEA in Austin told Franklin that Tejada was an up and comer in the Latino gangbanger world.
Tejada, as a relatively high-ranking member of the Para Salvados, was already moving a ton of product over the border. As an amusing sideline, he had the biggest string of fancy brothels and claptrap cathouses south of Laredo. But, his real hobby was trucking aliens across the border at five thousand dollars a head. That’s where the big money was, illegal immigration. The Border Patrol called guys like Tiger “coyotes” and it was pretty darn accurate. Coyotes, that’s just what they were.
“Next right,” Franklin told Homer, putting his index finger on an intersection.
“Where’s this meeting supposed to be at?”
“I’ll show you here in a minute. Okay, left, and then stop.”
“That’s it? Right there?”
“Right here. The Plaza del Toros.”
“A bullring?”
“Let’s go.”
15
T hey pulled up as near the entrance as they could.
There were a large number of motorcycles parked in under the concrete overhang, maybe thirty or forty of them, all painted in bright metallic colors. What they had in common was a large white death’s head painted on the fuel tanks. Below the skull, the symbol PS 13 was painted. Para Salvados. PS 13 rode well. They were expensive bikes, Franklin saw, Harleys and Ducatis and big Indians.
They stuck the Mossburg under the seat. Tejada had said no guns, but Franklin wasn’t walking in there completely unarmed. Homer had a gun. Franklin told Homer to take his hand off his hip as they walked toward the darkened archway, marking the entrance to the crumbling building. He didn’t want them getting shot by some trigger-happy crackhead on the way inside. The old building had a damp smell of rotting concrete and urine and time passing by.
They walked out into the center of the ring.
They were standing back-to-back in the middle of a circle of hard-packed sand about fifty-five yards across. All around them the concrete seats rose up into the darkness under the overhanging rooftop. The bad smell was even stronger out here, different. Franklin wondered if it might be a couple of centuries of blood soaked into the sand beneath his boots. Probably a sprinkling of matador blood mixed in with all the bull blood. Bull blood and bullshit, he amended his thought.
The noble corrida. He’d gone as a little kid down to Mexico City. There was a festival of some kind and they went to the Plaza del Toros Monumental. That was the biggest ring in the world at that time. His daddy had wanted him to see El Cordobés and the great Mexican matador, Carlos Arruza.
He’d seen them.
The bulls never had a chance, he thought then and now, gazing up at shadowy figures with guns moving around up on the top rows. Lots of them up there, maybe fifty or so. You had to assume they all had automatic weapons. He felt Homer’s trembling when they brushed up against each other. Just take it easy, he told him. We’re just here to talk to the man. That’s all. We’ll talk to him. Then we’ll go home. Steady.
“Welcome to the corrida, Señores,” a voice said from a tinny loudspeaker mounted high above the ring. It was Tiger. Franklin had heard his voice talking on a tape once at Laredo PD. The Feds had a tap on his home wire at that time and they’d had his cell for a while. He’d stopped using it now that he’d become rich and famous and could afford a sat phone.
