by Blake Banner
I hesitated. “I’m half expecting Hussein Saleh and Jaden Abdullah to show up with Bernardo Muller. If they do, I might just finish the job.”
He made the “hmmm” noise of thinking, then said, “That isn’t actually a job, yet. It might be though. Keep me posted.”
When I got back to Miriam she was finishing her last croissant. She looked up as I sat, and smiled.
“So?”
“So let’s go and look at these properties. And I couldn’t possibly allow you to face the Sinaloa cartel alone and unprotected, so I’m going to delay my flight till tomorrow evening.”
Her cheeks flushed and she jumped up from her chair, ran around the table with tiny steps and gave me a huge hug and a kiss. It made me laugh, and a couple of minutes later I followed her out into the lobby as she spoke over her shoulder.
“We’ll go in my car. I have it parked out front.”
As we passed the reception desk she stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face me, moving in close, staring up into my eyes.
“What?” I asked.
She hesitated, then closed her eyes and said, “No! It was a stupid idea, forget it.”
“What was a stupid idea?”
She blushed. “I’m behaving like a sixteen-year-old. I was going to suggest you pay your bill and stay the night at my place. And then I’ll take you to the airport tomorrow. But it was stupid. I am coming on much too strong. I feel embarrassed now.” I laughed and she looked hurt. “Was it a really stupid idea?”
“No. It was a nice idea. But Miriam, you realize, I live a long way from Los Angeles…”
“I know!” She grabbed my lapels and rested her forehead on my chest. “I don’t want to marry you, for God’s sake! I just thought it would be nice to make the most of the time we have.”
“We’ll have to lug my bags around all day.”
“That’s OK.”
So I paid my bill, arranged for the Wrangler to be collected from the hotel and carried my bags out to Miriam’s Mercedes convertible. I slung them in the trunk and climbed in the passenger seat. She was waiting behind the wheel, grinned at me and fired up the engine. Then we were away, speeding north again toward the freeway. An ironic voice in my head told me I was stuck in Groundhog Day, but pretty soon we were speeding toward the I-10 with the soft-top down under the clear blue California sky, and the last thing on my mind was Groundhog Day.
It was two hundred and twenty miles. It should have taken three and a half hours to get there, but Miriam drove with the kind of zest that seems to warp space and time, and though I am not a fan of German cars, the Merc could shift, and in a little more than two hours we were cruising down the Imperial Valley Pioneers Expressway, surrounded on all sides by infinite flatness, moving fast toward El Centro. Before we got there she took the Yuma exit onto the I-8, going east, and as we climbed the ramp onto the bridge, she glanced at me and smiled, fingering her wind-whipped hair from her face.
“We’re almost there. The landscape’s not very entertaining here, but we can eat out in the desert, at the Duner’s Diner. You’ll like it.”
We followed the I-8 for another seven or eight minutes among endless, interminable, featureless flat fields, under a sky that was turning from Californian blue to scorched desert blue-white, until eventually we came to the Bonds Corner Road intersection and she slowed and turned south onto a road that had once been blacktop, but was now covered in an encroaching layer of dust and dirt. It went perfectly straight for five miles, and by then I had the feeling I had driven through some kind of portal into a Stephen King movie.
At the end of Bonds Corner she turned left. The land continued to be flat and featureless, but now there were more trees, oaks, eucalyptus and pines in sudden dense clusters. She pointed south, across me. “You can’t see it,” she said above the battering of the breeze, “but that right there is the All American Canal. It runs parallel to the border with Mexico.”
We passed a green sign pointing to Bonesteele Road, and then she was slowing, pulling off the road beside a cluster of tall pines. We were bumped and jostled over dirt and dust, headed toward an open gate in a fence. Beyond the gate the dirt track continued for a couple of hundred yards toward a house and a cluster of large barns and sheds. A sign by the gate said the place was for sale.
“Here we are,” she said. “This is the first of the properties they seem to be interested in.” She gave her head a twitch. “You got me thinking the other night, with what you said. This is good farmland, but it’s only half a mile from the canal, maybe less.”
We did a big circle, dragging a cloud of dust behind us, and came to a halt behind a large, oxblood barn that formed the north side of a broad yard. There she killed the engine and the desert air carried the dust away, toward the canal. She watched me a moment as I stared away south.
“What do you think…?”
I climbed out of the car and sat with my ass against the door, wondering what I thought. I said, absently, “Omar Qasim, huh?”
Even if the name was an erudite joke, why Arabic? Why not Latin or Greek? Why make a joke like that in Arabic? And why the sudden return of interest, if Mohammed was dead and the safe house was destroyed? It didn’t make a lot of sense.
“What did he sound like?” I said and turned to look at her. She climbed out of the car and came to stand next to me.
“I’m not good at accents. An educated Mexican with an accent sounds pretty much to me like somebody from the Mediterranean or the Middle East.”
I smiled. “I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”
“I guess…”
A gust of warm air lifted a column of red dust, like a ghost rising from a grave, spun it gently and then spread it softly across the yard, while it rattled the leaves of the eucalyptus trees.
Over on my left there was another barn. That one was painted green and looked like it housed tractors and harvesters. The one on my right was part brick and part wood. In its day it might have been a stable.
“Hell of a risk,” I said. “Right under the noses of the border patrol. And a big investment.”
“You want to look in the barns?” I looked at her and she winked. “This one has a hayloft.”
I smiled. “I never could resist a hayloft.”
“You’re a bad man, Mr. Frost.”
She walked to the vast red door, pulling a bunch of keys from her jacket pocket. There was a hefty padlock and as she fitted the key, for a moment I thought about telling her my name was not Frost. But the key slipped in, the padlock came off and the next moment she was leaning, pushing against the door and rolling it back. I went to help her, but she’d stopped pushing, leaving just enough space for two bodies to fit through.
It was like a huge church inside, with a gabled roof and slim beams of dusty light piercing the wooden walls and the ceiling, casting everything about them into deeper gloom. There was a vast stack of hay against the far wall, under a loft that held more of the golden bales. The smell was strong in my nostrils. It wasn’t musty or old, but fresh and clean and sweet.
Against the wall on the far right there was a stack of steel drums. Diesel oil, I figured, and bits and pieces of farming equipment lay strewn here and there. Aside from that, the place was largely empty.
A tunnel, little more than half a mile long, and a giant warehouse. The hay could cover hundreds of kilos of dope, and the existence of a functioning farm would make the coming and going of trucks the most normal thing in the world. God knew the cartels had money enough to buy a dozen farms like this one, and to build the tunnels too.
But the growing difficulty in pulling off exactly this kind of operation was why Muller had approached Ben-Amini in the first place. I shook my head. Omar Qasim? The flourishing distributor…
I turned to face her. She was leaning against the doorjamb with her arms crossed, watching me. The sun was bright behind her and I couldn’t see her expression. She said, “What do you make of it?”
I shrugged. “It’s a per
fect setup for a Sinaloa group to bring dope across, and they certainly have the resources to make the tunnel. But I have to say, the Arab connection is baffling. Omar Qasim? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Really?” She said it and laughed. “And there was me thinking you had the whole thing figured out, Harry.”
Chapter Nineteen
I can’t say it surprised me. I guess there had been a niggling there from the start. I’m not the kind of guy women sit next to and get into conversation with at bars. And she wasn’t the kind of woman to do that, even if I had been. Plus, the bits of information she’d fed me were just enough to be enticing, but not quite enough to make sense. But I had liked her, and she played the part of the smart but naïve girl next door well enough to be convincing. I had not wanted to believe it, but the suspicion had been there.
I gave a small laugh. “Who are you with, the Firm?”
“Well, Harry, I’m not Sinaloa and I sure as hell ain’t al-Qaeda.”
“There is no Omar Qasim, is there? No buyers interested in border real estate.”
“No.”
“And your name is not Miriam Grant.”
“None of it, Harry.”
“What is your name?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Are you going to kill me?”
She laughed a little, paused a moment watching me, smiling, then laughed a lot. Finally she shook her head and said, “I don’t know. You’re not easy to kill, are you? But you’re in a lot of trouble, Harry. You’re drawing a lot of unwelcome attention. I thought you SAS guys were supposed to be like ninjas, moving through the shadows, killing and vanishing into the woodwork. But you, you’re like a one-man warzone.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“George Santos?”
“Who is that, a Brazilian jazz musician?”
“Funny.”
“Yeah, I know, deep down funny, where it’s not like funny anymore. What do you want?”
“It’s one thing killing bad guys, Harry. Even if it interferes with our work, we can live with it up to a point. But when you start killing our assets and our officers, that’s a whole different story.”
I sighed. “I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Really? You want to make this hard, Harry? We can make it hard. You want to start by explaining why a dishonorably discharged SAS trooper, living in New York, is staying at a five-star hotel in Los Angeles under a false name?”
“Not really. I can tell you this, though. It’s none of your damned business.”
She pushed off the door and walked toward me with her hands in her pockets. She stopped when she was a few inches away. Her eyes flicked over my face.
“Maybe it’s not. Maybe it is. Where were you yesterday afternoon and last night?”
I put a wonky smile on the right side of my face. “I’ll tell you what, take me to Yemen and ask me that. Over there, you have some jurisdiction. Here, you’re nobody, nothing. You’re wasting my time.”
She made a fist and stuck out her index finger, then used that to poke me in the chest. “You killed twenty men last night, Harry. Two of them were CIA officers. Another was a valuable asset for this country. You also destroyed two CIA helicopters. Do you seriously think that you can do that and walk away, with no consequences?”
I made the face of innocence, shrugged my eyebrows and shook my head. “Have you any evidence at all that I did all those things? Can you prove any of what you’re saying?”
“We followed you from Paris, Harry.”
“What makes you think I was in Paris?”
“Mary Brown makes me think that. She talked to George Santos, before you killed him…”
“Mary Brown? Doesn’t ring a bell. Doesn’t sound very French, either. But just for argument’s sake, let’s say I knew who she was.” I took a step closer to her and looked hard into her eyes. “What happened to Mary Brown? What did George Santos do when she, allegedly, told him about me?”
“You know what happened to her.”
“No…” I shook my head. “You have me confused with somebody else.”
“How do you think this ends, Harry?”
“Well, let’s see. You think I am a one-man warzone. So the chances of you confronting me here on your own are, what? Zero? Which means that in this immediate vicinity, within this barn, you have at least two men with automatic rifles trained on me right now, waiting for the order to shoot. You haven’t given that order yet, which means one of two things: you are not one hundred percent sure that I am your man, or you think I have information that could be useful to you. My money is on the latter.”
“Two out of three. I am one hundred percent certain that you are my man. And you are alive right now because I think you have information I need. So let me ask you again, Harry. How do you think this ends?”
I smiled down at my boots, turned and took a few steps away from her. The placing was obvious now. One in the hayloft, the other behind the bales of hay. I turned back to face her.
“OK, how does this end? Let’s play that game. According to you, I went to Paris and murdered a CIA asset there, named George Santos. Or was he an officer?”
She didn’t answer so I went on. “Did I do anything else while I was there, to qualify as a one-man warzone? Did I break in anywhere and kill any other assets? Let’s say I did. And then I came back to the States, flew to Los Angeles, killed twenty men, destroyed two choppers and murdered another valuable CIA asset. How is this going to end? I’d say, on the information available, the CIA ought to think twice about making any threats or getting into a conflict, because this guy you’re after sounds dangerous. I think he might just take out your two sharpshooters, and then tan your little tush.”
We stared at each other a moment. Then I smiled. “What’s this information you think I have? Theoretically we’re on the same side. Have you thought, maybe all you need to do is ask?”
A small twitch of her brow told me the question had surprised her.
“Who do you work for?”
“What is that information worth to you?” I walked back, so I was just inches away from her again. “What do I get if I give you that? Because right now it seems to me that I get half a dozen rounds in my back.”
“You tell me who you work for and, depending on who that is, you walk away.”
I laughed. “Have your boys come out of the hay, let me see them, then we’ll talk.”
She nodded and said, “OK.”
Behind me I heard the rustle of moving bodies. A moment later two guys in jeans and leather jackets appeared on either side of me. They looked like Marines, with thick necks and powerful shoulders. One looked Latino, the other was Japanese or Korean. They both had assault rifles slung over their shoulders. I jerked my head toward the barn door.
“Go stand where I can see you.”
They didn’t move till she gave them the nod. Then they backed up to the door and stood watching us. They still had me covered.
“How many more people you got here, Miriam?”
A flicker of her eyes, then she shook her head. “Nobody.”
I leered at her. “How about if I kill these bozos and strip you naked? Will I find a wire?”
The color drained from her face. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“I’ll bet you wouldn’t. But I would. Now let me explain something to you. When I left you eating your croissants this morning, I made a call. That call has been connected ever since, and is being recorded in DC. Now, I have no wish to harm any federal agents, officers or employees, but if these two,” I pointed at the two gunmen, “come at me, I will kill them, and then I will kill you, too.” I smiled. “I am allowed, under federal law, to defend myself.
“But here comes the trade. I need to talk to Samy Arain. I am betting he’s in the barn across the yard with a pair of phones in his ears. Let me talk to him, and I will arrange a meeting between my boss and your boss. We’re on
the same side; we don’t need to go around killing each other, am I right?”
A shadow morphed against the brilliant slat of light in the doorway and three men came in. There was a guy in his mid-twenties, with long, floppy blond hair, skinny arms and legs. The guy beside him was heavy, had acne and a dirty T-shirt that looked like it had been slept in for a week. He had short, dark, un-brushed hair.
But the guy who’d come in ahead of them was in a sharp, double-breasted Italian suit, with a crisp white shirt and a fat, bright tie. He had a three-hundred-dollar haircut and the kind of eyes Bambi looked at the hunters with, before he blew them away.
He looked at me with those eyes, laughed and shook his head.
“Who the hell are you?”
“You Samy Arain?” He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. His face told me he was. I went on: “Where are Hussein Saleh, Jaden Abdullah and Bernardo Muller? Does that project still go ahead, even without Mohammed Ben-Amini?”
His eyes narrowed. “So it was you?”
“You answer mine, I’ll answer yours.” He didn’t say anything. I kept pressing. “Do your superiors know you’ve been running around engaging in plots to flood Europe with cocaine and heroin, in exchange for weapons from Mexico? I mean, I keep turning it over in my mind, and I don’t see it. What benefit does the CIA get? Ben-Amini said it was so you could monitor the activity of al-Qaeda and Sinaloa.” I shook my head. “But that doesn’t wash. What is the use of monitoring if you can’t control? What the Agency wants is control. This was your private enterprise, wasn’t it, Samy? You had your own little team, ready to profit, and you played the Agency, making them believe that you were turning Taliban and al-Qaeda assets, when what you were really doing was using them to line your own damn pockets, and probably your Belize bank accounts.”
There was a moment of strained silence. Then he snarled, “You’re full of shit.” He jerked his head at my jacket. “Let me see your cell.”
I looked down at Miriam. She was frowning at me. I smiled. “If I am about to die, I’m going to do now what I’ve been wanting to do since you sat next to me on that barstool at the Hotel California.”
