Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  “Those years in community theater will not be for naught,” he told himself.

  He went to the office restroom, put the photograph on the mirror, and set up his theatrical make-up kit on the sink. He first tested several shades of greasepaint on the back of his hand until he found an approximately correct hue. Before he applied this hue to his face, he put some strips of tape at the corners of his eyes to give them a narrower, slightly slanted affectation. Mondragon attempted with the same tape to tighten the wide nostrils of his formidable nose, and he found that a small strip across the bridge did the trick as well as he could manage.

  After he had patted a bit of putty over the white tape, the change still did not look natural and would not, in his estimation, withstand close examination. He applied the greasepaint, blackened and trimmed his already dark eyebrows, and then combed his hair again so that it resembled the wig the agent was wearing over his regulation FBI haircut.

  Mondragon tried on a girdle intended to give him a waspish waist similar to the man in the photo. Much to his displeasure, he could see in the mirror that this was not the case. His pudgy middle stuck over the top and bottom of the girdle like loose meat sprouting from a sausage casing. Mondragon decided he would have to wear the delivery man’s loose jacket unzipped in order to hide his midriff.

  Using a recorder also taken from the parking garage, Mondragon practiced aping the few words the agent had said as he drove out the parking garage door.

  “Number Five, over and out,” the agent had said to the two uniformed cops standing guard at the open door.

  “Number Five, over and out,” repeated Mondragon, and turned his head to the right. Why couldn’t he have been more foreign sounding? he thought. Foreign accents are easy to do. This Number Five is pure Californian; his unaccented vowels all sound the same.

  Mondragon scowled at the face he saw in the bathroom mirror saying, “Number Five, over and out.” It had better be dark, he thought.

  Erin had made no effort to duplicate the agent’s delivery uniform; Number Five was definitely taller than he, and with the aid of a couple safety pins to shorten the pants legs, Mondragon planned to use the man’s clothes when the time came. He made a few more touches to his face and checked in the mirror, then cleaned himself off and returned to his plans at the desk.

  CVII

  01/25/11 21:48

  At that moment Bob Mathers was sleeping in his bed at the Imperial Hotel in Montara, a small town between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay. The dripping sink in the kitchenette and the fighting couple in the room next door to him in the rent-by-the-week establishment had kept him awake most of the evening, as he tried to get some rest before he went on duty at midnight. He had drifted off for a few minutes when the black rotary phone rang.

  “Hello, Frank Peterson here,” mumbled Bob, using the name he had given at the airport.

  “Mr. Peterson,” said an adolescent voice on the other end of the line, “this is Jerry Luchowser out at Half Moon Airport. You asked me to call you if anybody prepped any of the private jets.”

  The young man was a maintenance worker Bob had given fifty dollars to call him in case anything happened at the airfield while Bob was not present.

  “Yeah, good,” said Bob, now becoming fully awake.

  “Well, they’re fueling the Mondragon Corporation’s plane right now.”

  “Who is ‘they?’” asked Bob.

  “I guess somebody from the company,” said Jerry. “Up at the tower they submitted a flight plan for a Mr. Rich, a company pilot going down to San Diego.”

  “Is that so? I’ll be in a little early tonight.”

  Bob pulled on his clothes and drove the four miles down Highway One to the airport. The two security men on duty before the graveyard shift began were, as usual, in the tower break room drinking coffee. There was no one on the ground to see Bob take a shoe-box-size package from the passenger side of his pick up and carry it into an open hanger on the north side of the tarmac.

  CVIII

  01/25/11 23:20 PST

  “Sundown, we’ve got a delivery headed for M.,” crackled the radio in Agent Thomas’ ear.

  As agent in charge while Fuller was not on scene, Thomas had to sit in the observation post on the twenty-seventh floor in the hotel across from the Mondragon Building and monitor anyone entering or leaving the suspect’s domain.

  “What does he want at this time of night, Eagle?” asked Thomas, looking through the blinds with his night vision binoculars.

  “Sundown, it’s an order of Mo Goo Gai Pan and Shrimp Fried Rice from the Hong Lee Restaurant,” radioed the uniformed agent on the ground.

  “He’s hungry?” asked Thomas. “M. must be up tonight. Who is the designated delivery man?” he asked the other two men in the observation room. “Is Number Five still on duty?”

  “Andrews is on call till morning,” said one of them. “Number Six won’t be here till eight.”

  “His lights are on,” said Thomas looking across Market Street at Mondragon’s penthouse. “All right, get Number Five up. Tell everybody heads up. I don’t like this. Do you read, Eagle?”

  “Roger, Sundown,” replied one of the uniformed cops in front of the parking garage door. “Number Five will be fifteen minutes inside.”

  Agent Andrews was found napping on a cot inside the ground floor suite the FBI was using as a rest area for the scores of operatives they were keeping on Market Street. He was up and about in time to meet the Hong Lee’s delivery truck at the corner and to drive to the wide parking garage door of the Mondragon Building. Andrews’ family had long lived in Sacramento and had never had strong ties to the old country and its culture. He hated Chinese cooking, in fact the strong smell of cabbage, water chestnuts, and peanuts that met him inside the delivery van made him somewhat nauseous. Nor did he care for the real delivery man’s heavy Cantonese accent or how the man smiled and bobbed his head when Andrews looked directly at him.

  “This is so nineteenth century,” he told the man. The real delivery man’s English was none too good, and Andrews spoke not a word of Cantonese. “Get over!” he told the man as he took the driver’s seat. “Get out! I’ll bring the truck back later.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said the man and smiled and bobbed his head, which Agent Andrews considered a personal affront.

  At the parking garage one of the two uniformed cops on duty stopped the van with a sleepy raised hand. “You bring anything for us?” they called into the van’s open side window.

  “Any food eaten after eight PM goes directly into your fat cells,” Andrews told them.

  “Excuse us for asking, Dr. Atkins,” joked one of the cops. “You mean this clown up there is going to miss a lousy egg roll, maybe a fortune cookie?”

  “He counts everything, boys,” said Andrews and drove on.

  He parked in a service space and took an elevator through all thirty-one floors of the empty building. The elevator doors opened automatically on the first, fifth, and twenty-first floor, but peering outside Agent Andrews could see only the silent hallways partially illuminated by the weak emergency lights. The penthouse door was left ajar. Rather than enter Andrews called inside:

  “Delivery for Mr. Mondragon!”

  No one responded. Andrews thought he might leave the food inside the door and have the restaurant call back to tell Mondragon they had added the meal to his bill. He also wished that Fuller had allowed delivery men to wear their ear radios inside the building, then he could have called Sundown to ask what to do.

  “Delivery for Mr. Mondragon,” he called a second time.

  The agent took a couple steps forward and peeked into the fully lighted outer room of the penthouse, a spot in which Mondragon’s bodyguards usually lurked, but at the time held only some Barcelona chairs and a couple chrome-stemmed lamps.

  “Anyone here?” asked Andrews.

  He stuck his head inside the room and beheld a large glass tumbler sitting on the arm of a chair in the corner. It held
the melting ice cubes. Andrews considered having a closer look at the glass, and thought he should set the food on an end table and leave.

  What is going on here? he thought.

  His first guess was that Mondragon had somehow taken flight. He pondered running downstairs to an office telephone and notifying Sundown. He put that notion aside upon spying a duffle bag leaning against the leg of the chair holding the drained tumbler. Cops, including the grand cops called FBI agents, are driven by curiosity; the urge to uncover secrets is the reason they became policemen in the first place. When Andrews saw the fat duffle bag sitting in a place it should not have been, he really had no option but to take a couple steps further into the room to check the object at closer range. He did remember to stay alert. So alert that he heard the creak of the door as Mondragon stepped forward, and the agent had turned his head part way around in time to see the shadow of the blackjack as Mondragon brought it down on his head.

  When he awoke he was gagged and bound hand and foot and stripped to his underwear. Mondragon had on his shirt and pants and was struggling to get on the jacket.

  “Ah, you’ve come back to us... Special Agent Troy Andrews,” said Mondragon, reading from the FBI identity card and badge he had found in the agent’s wallet. “You’ll survive this, I’m sure. Say what they will about me, I’ve never killed anyone, not personally. I do wish you weren’t in the good shape you’re in, Troy, old man. You’re clothes are too damn tight.”

  Troy’s head was swimming, and he thought he could see several matches burning between himself and Mondragon. The most he could tell of Mondragon was that his skin looked strangely yellow that night.

  “They give you fifteen minutes, don’t they?” asked Mondragon, not expecting the

  gagged agent to answer. “I’m running a bit late. I have two minutes left,” he said, checking his watch. “Well, if I’m a minute late I doubt they’ll have a cow.”

  He put Andrews’ cap on his head and started for the elevator door, the duffle bag slung over his shoulder. “You’ll feel better in an hour or so, old man,” he called back to Troy. “I’ll send you a postcard from... wherever.”

  *

  Erin Mondragon took the elevator to the basement and hopped into the delivery van. On the elevated ramp leading to the exit he took care to turn to his right, away from the two uniformed policemen standing outside on the sidewalk.

  “Number Five, over and out,” he said as he passed them and simultaneously spoke into his portable radio.

  Mondragon drove the van at a steady thirty miles an hour down Market Street to Eighth Street, at which point he made a left turn and parked behind a rental car his bodyguard Trey had left for him that evening. Mondragon quickly transferred to the rental, and drove away in the direction of I-280, leaving the radio crackling inside the cab of the empty van.

  “Come in Number Five. This is Sundown, over.” Back on Market Street Agent Thomas was calling on the radio and wondering why Andrews did not respond.

  “Ah, sir, I think we have a problem,” an agent behind Thomas said.

  A Chinese man who bobbed his head and smiled when the FBI men looked directly at him had shuffled into the command room and was asking why he had not been given back his delivery truck. “You always return it to me,” he said and smiled. “I was waiting on the corner, and this time he kept right on driving.”

  Thomas dropped his radio on the floor, and stared open-mouthed at the man from the Hong Lee Restaurant. “Get the copter up and on that truck!” he commanded. “Get out an APB.” he added, waving his arms. “The goddamned van’s got a dragon painted on its side. The son of a bitch won’t get too damned far.”

  CIX

  01/26/11 00:25 PST

  Bob Mathers remained close to the rows of private planes at Half Moon Bay Airport after his regular shift began. The news of Mondragon’s escape from his lair on Market Street had not yet spread through the metro area, but the prepped aircraft told Bob that tonight marked the time for the last of the conspirators to attempt to escape to a clime holding more palm trees and fewer federal agents. The small airport was quiet at that hour of the early morning. The two air traffic controllers on duty were snug inside the tower, and the skeleton crew of technicians and mechanics working the graveyard shift were in the break room awaiting the arrival of a charter plane from the east coast. Until then they were playing cards and sipping the very bad coffee their aging percolator made. As for the one other security guard on duty, a boy of nineteen working his first job, Bob had given him the opportunity to get out of the cold drizzle that was falling on the air field.

  “Did you check all the hangers?” Bob had asked the young guard.

  “I guess,” said the young man. “I made a quick in-and-out. There’s nobody in there.”

  “Being thorough never hurts,” Bob told him. “Check and double check. You can get in from the rain for a while. I’ll be fine looking after things out here. Go on. It’s OK. I used to be a cop, you know. I’m always prepared.”

  Mathers had discovered that telling anyone on the airport security detail that he had once been a policeman had a magical effect on the other members of the security team.

  “Sure,” agreed the young guard, “I guess I can look around where it’s warm and dry.”

  Once he was alone beside the parked planes, Bob retrieved the package he had brought with him before the shift began and placed it between the rear wheels of Mondragon’s jet.

  CX

  01/26/11 00:51 PST

  Mondragon parked the rental car in the far reaches of the airport parking lot and walked onto the field carrying his duffle bag on his shoulder. He had changed into black slacks and a light black jacket and was bothered by the steady mist falling across the entire Bay area. The police scanner Mondragon had brought in the rental car told him every squad car in the region was on the lookout for a delivery van driven by a disguised man. They obviously had not located the abandoned truck on Eighth Street, so Erin knew he was light years ahead of his pursuers. By the time they had trailed him to Half Moon Bay he’d be in his plane cruising at 16,000 feet, the blue Pacific below him and Brazil, carnival, and the beaches of Rio immediately before him.

  The air traffic controllers inside the airport’s small tower saw the lone figure strolling over the tarmac toward the long row of private airplanes. One of them took another bite of his bear claw and asked, “Who’s that?”

  “Company pilot,” said the other. “Daniel Rich. Filed a flight plan to take the Mondragon Lear down to San Diego yesterday, today I mean,” he noted upon checking the wall calendar.

  “Isn’t old Mondragon himself in some kind of trouble?” the bear claw eater asked.

  “You don’t read much, do you, Mel?” said his co-worker. “He is the news these days. Bigger than ‘Homeless in Paradise.’”

  “Nothing could be bigger than ‘Homeless in Paradise,’” Mel assured him of the nation’s most popular new television show. “Except for that girl with the black beret. What was her name?”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” said the co-worker. “I guess she wasn’t that big after all.”

  The solitary figure walked within a dozen feet of Bob Mathers, unaware the former deputy sheriff was standing behind the fuselage of the plane parked next to Mondragon’s jet. If he had wanted to frighten Mondragon, Bob could have taken a pen from his shirt pocket and flipped it against the back of Erin’s unsuspecting head. When the pilot opened the passenger side hatch Bob could see him in full profile silhouetted against the jet’s interior light and made certain it was Mondragon, and Mondragon alone, climbing into the cabin. Bob waited until the man had sealed the cabin door with a hiss and was busying himself on the rows of buttons and dials on the control panel, and then Mathers went to the small storage door near the jets tail, set the timer on his package, and stuck it inside, snapping the door securely shut at the instant the whining engines came to life.

  The technicians inside the tower immed
iately responded to the electronic buzz that came over their radio intercom when Mondragon signaled them he wanted to begin his pre-takeoff check list. “EDN-195 to tower,” said Erin, “this is Daniel Rich.”

  The tower crew ran through the nearly one hundred items the pilot had to check in less than ten minutes and told Mondragon he could take the lighted runway.

  “Are you expecting any passengers, 195?” a controller asked him at the last moment, when Mondragon was slowly bringing the jet into alignment with the north-south strip and both the plane’s engines were roaring.

  “That’s a negative, Half Moon Tower,” said Mondragon. “I’ll be picking up passengers in San Diego.”

  The controller had asked because he had seen someone running on the tarmac close to the Lear jet’s outside wing. He and his partner in the tower leaned toward the glass and squinted to see what this unidentified figure was doing.

  “Isn’t that the new security man Peterson?” asked one of them. “What is he doing? 195, please be informed you have a pedestrian on the ground with you. Have you by any chance left something behind?”

  Mondragon looked to his left and saw Bob Mathers jogging along the side of the plane. The former deputy sheriff made no effort to stop the aircraft. He could not have halted the big craft anyway; he seemed content to stay even with the cabin window as the plane taxied toward the end of the runway in preparation for final lift off. Erin did not at once recognize the man he knew as the phantom who had pursued him from the Arizona desert, or he did not until the runner turned toward him and waved. Oddly enough, Mathers smiled as he waved, and let the jet pull away from him.

  Mondragon swung the jet around at the far end of the runway and began his last, rapid dash to get airborne. The running man who had chased him during the taxi drive had strayed among the ground lights on the east side, and watched the jet zip past and saw its red lights rise into the grey mist south of the airport.