Justice by Fire at-7

by Dick Stivers

  Holt took a folder from his briefcase. “Here are photocopies of the death threats against my clients. Photographs of the murdered child and administrative assistant. A photo of the men who followed Mr. Marquez in San Salvador. These are photos of the Salvadoran soldiers who arrived in Miami. My client identified this man as one of the murderers of Ricardo Marquez. Other sources identify…”

  Swiveling his chair around, Agent Gallucci interrupted the attorney. “Why don’t you take all this to the Salvadoran Embassy?”

  “Because this concerns the murder of an American citizen…”

  “Who got killed in El Salvador. We don’t investigate what happens in other countries.”

  “There is reason to believe that Quesada ordered the murder of Marquez from Miami. The murderers are now in the United States…”

  “Reason to believe? What does that mean?”

  “Quesada is the commander of the death squad. Marquez attempted to interview him in Miami. The next month, when Marquez traveled to El Salvador to report on terrorism directed against the land-reform programs, he noticed men following him through the city. He photographed those men before evading them — or believing he evaded them. The next day, while he was waiting to speak with my client, he was murdered with machetes.”

  “The State Department says he got killed in combat, in a cross fire between the army and the Communists.”

  “The autopsy will disprove that…”

  “What autopsy?”

  “The newspaper has sent a doctor to examine the body.”

  “Until the State Department issues another statement, he died in combat. Occupational hazard for newspapermen creeping around in other people’s wars. Maybe you ought to take all this over to OSHA office.”

  “May I quote you on that?”

  “I tell you what, Mr. Holt. Why don’t you bring your clients in. We’ll talk about all this. I’ll call down the hall to the INS. We’ll have one of their officers stop by to discuss extending your clients’ visas. Chances are all this will take months to sort through.”

  “That won’t be possible.”

  The middle-aged FBI agent faked surprise. “You mean, your clients won’t come in to talk about this? You implied you had their full cooperation — oh… I know what the problem is. They’re illegal. You’re representing some Commie wetbacks, aren’t you? What do you intend to do, sell your crazy story to the networks?”

  “My clients are in fear for their lives…”

  “You better be in fear for your freedom, Mr. Pro Bono. And your practice. Aiding and abetting illegal entry into this country is a crime. You want to go to prison?”

  Holt returned the documents and photos to his briefcase. He glanced at his watch. “Do you watch the news programs in the evenings, Agent Gallucci?”

  “Sure. Got to know what’s happening in the world.”

  “Watch tonight.”

  The attorney left the federal office without another word.

  4

  Technicians held spotlights. Sound men crowded around David Holt with microphones as other technicians readied TV cameras. On the steps of the Wilshire Boulevard Federal Building in the Los Angeles suburb of Westwood, Holt waited as the network crews readied their equipment. Federal employees returning from their lunch hour glanced at the impromptu news conference. But they passed without commenting or questioning; they saw the media and demonstrations every day.

  A camerawoman signaled the attorney. “Ready here, Mr. Holt.”

  “Anytime,” another technician called out.

  “Sir. Please give us a voice level before you begin your statement.”

  “Certainly. Thank you all for coming at such short notice. For those of you who may not know me, I am David Holt, of the law firm Holt, Lindsey and Stein. Usually our firm handles corporate law. However, we often take cases on a pro bono basis if we feel they represent a worthy public issue. Last week, a dear friend died in El Salvador. Do you have your levels now?”

  “Go ahead…”

  “Perfect.”

  “Last week, the Latin American correspondent for the San Francisco Globe, Ricardo Marquez, died in Sonsonate, El Salvador. The United States ambassador reported to the American public that Mr. Marquez died in a cross fire between government and rebel forces.

  “That is a lie. Marquez was murdered by members of the Ejercito de los Guerreros Blancos, the Army of White Warriors, a death squad founded in December of 1979 to defeat the reforms of the Salvadoran government. I have a cable from San Salvador…”

  Holt held up a telex. “We sent a pathologist to exhume and examine the body. The doctor reports that Marquez was hacked to death. He was beheaded and mutilated.

  “We have witnesses to this crime.

  “We have identified the murderers.

  “The commander of this death squad lives in Miami Beach, Florida. At this moment, the Salvadorans responsible for the murder of Ricardo Marquez, an American citizen, enjoy the protection of the United States government.

  “The Federal Bureau of Investigation threatened our witnesses with deportation to El Salvador, where they face certain death.

  “Tomorrow, I will go to our nation’s capitol to present this information to the United States Congress.

  “This crime demands justice!”

  5

  A late afternoon breeze stirred the branches of the oak, the new leaves rustling with a sound like flowing water. The breeze lifted the helipad’s Day-glo orange wind sock away from the pole, then swept across the fields beyond Stony Man Farm to sway the trees screening the installation from the highway.

  His chest heaving, Carl Lyons sucked down cool air heavy with forest scents and the wet-earth smell of the roads and pathways still muddy from the spring rains. The cynical ex-cop, hardened and scarred by wars in the streets of Los Angeles, and more recently, in the secret dirty wars fought by Able Team, watched the wind caress the Virginia landscape. He saw Rosario Blancanales leave the farmhouse. In an easy jog, his Puerto Rican partner started across the hundreds of yards of pasture toward Lyons.

  Lyons returned to his karate exercises. A heavy bag swung from one of the oak’s lower branches. Four feet long, eighteen inches in diameter, the vinyl bag weighed a hundred pounds. To hit it approximated hitting a standing two-hundred-pound opponent. Lyons had raised the bottom of the bag to the level of his own crotch. The top twelve inches of the bag represented the opponent’s head and face. In the hour of his workout, he had progressed through punches, elbow strikes, knee lifts, and right-leg front kicks. Now the left-leg kicks…

  He gave the bag a shove to get it swinging. In appropriate stance, he waited as the bag swung back, then snapped his left foot into the crotch zone. The second kick slammed the bag back an instant later. The third kick came as fast as Lyons could drive it into the rag-packed bag.

  Kicking fast and hard, Lyons never let the bag swing forward. It hung at an angle as his kicks slammed the heavy bag back. After twenty-five kicks, he let his momentum carry him forward. He slammed his left elbow into the throat zone, stepped past the bag and whirled to drive his right fist into his imaginary opponent’s kidney even as his left arm screamed with pain. Ignoring the pain, he wiped sweat from his eyes as Rosario Blancanales jogged up.

  “Ready for a party?”

  Lyons reached for his sweat shirt. “Mack sending us out again?”

  “I’m serious. A party.” Blancanales looked at the huge bruise on Lyons’s left arm. A calm, quiet ex-Green Beret born in Puerto Rico, Blancanales served as medic, interpreter and indigenous-operations specialist for Able Team.

  A week before, in the Sierra de Chucus of Guatemala, Lyons had assaulted a Huey troopship in an attempt to block the escape of the would-be Nazi dictator of Central America, Miguel de Unomundo. While Blancanales and Gadgets and a squad of Quiche Indians annihilated the last soldiers of Unomundo’s army of Fascist mercenaries, Lyons dueled with the troopship’s doorgunners — his full-auto twelve-gauge Atchisson against
an M-60. Lyons killed one gunner, then another, but suffered a wound: as he took cover behind a burning truck, a burst from the dying gunner’s weapon smashed through the door and windshield of the truck, a slug throwing the truck’s rearview mirror into Lyons’s arm.

  “Why don’t you take a break?” Blancanales said. “Let that heal before…”

  “It’s nothing,” Lyons told him.

  “Yeah? It’s okay already?” Blancanales poked a fingertip into the wound. “How’s that feel?”

  Lyons recoiled, his left hand clawing with pain, his face going tight. He clenched his right fist. “Son of a bitch!”

  “How’s it feel when you’re slamming it into that punching bag? You getting into pain? Macho masochism?”

  Lyons grinned against the pain. “Nerve noise. Just nerves transmitting noise to my brain. Nothing real.”

  Blancanales cocked back his fist. “Ignore this one!”

  Deflecting the fist with his shoulder, Lyons hooked a foot behind his partner’s right foot, dropped him onto the grass. He went into a down-strike, as if to finish Blancanales with a fist to the temple. As the fist came down, Blancanales rolled to the side, scissored his legs around Lyons’s legs, dropped him.

  On his ass in the grass, Lyons laughed. “You know all the tricks. So what’s this party you’re talking about? April set us up with some of her friends? No thanks!”

  “No, this is a Washington party. A reception.”

  “Politicians? Bureaucrats? Only if I can take my Atchisson. Do some rat killing.”

  “You’re positively antisocial…”

  “Nah, man. I just know who’s bringing this country down.”

  “It’s a reception for a retired Salvadoran general. He’s merging his shipping company with an American multi-national corporation.”

  Lyons stopped his cynical jokes. Squatting now, he waited for more information.

  “You remember the briefing on Unomundo?” Blancanales asked. Lyons nodded. “I read through this general’s background file. There wasn’t anything definite, but there are most definitely some questions as to how the general financed his operations. He also associates with a clique of colonels and landowners in self-exile from El Salvador. We could meet some very interesting people.”

  “Brognola assign this to us?” Lyons asked. Standing, he paced the pasture. The pasture’s mud stained his sweat pants.

  “It’s not an assignment. Seems the Salvadorans invited a senator friend of Hal’s. But the senator can’t stomach these people, so he passed the invitations to Hal, and he passed them to me. He sent a set of Senate credentials with the tickets. We’ll be the senator’s personal aides. What do you say? It’s free.”

  “Could be a mistake. If we ever go undercover on an Unomundo operation, one of the general’s people could remember us from this reception.”

  “How could you ever go undercover in El Salvador? They look at you, they know where you’re from. You don’t even speak the language.”

  “All right, I’ll chance it. I want to see what they look like. We take weapons?”

  Blancanales laughed as he got to his feet. “Hey, Carl. It’s a party. Drinks. Food. Good times.”

  “Sounds more like a recon to me.”

  Blancanales nodded. “That, too.”

  6

  Union musicians played instrumental renditions of Beatles songs. Near the bandstand in the hotel reception hall, couples danced. The women wore designer gowns and flashing jewelry, the men formal attire.

  In rented tuxedos, Lyons and Blancanales stood at the bar. A hotel bartender in a white coat served drinks to the crowd of guests.

  Annoyed by the starched collar of his formal shirt, Lyons twisted his head from side to side. He hooked a finger inside the collar and pulled. But the stiff collar and the bow tie did not stretch.

  “Go dance with someone,” Blancanales suggested. “A bit of sweat will make the collar softer.”

  “How do you say it in Spanish?”

  “Don’t try to fake it, you might say something weird. English is good enough.”

  “Most of these people are speaking French,” Lyons commented.

  “And Castilian,” Blancanales added.

  “Who are all the Europeans?” Lyons asked, looking at a tall blond woman in a sequined red gown. “I thought this was a Salvadoran party.”

  “Rich Salvadorans. They want us to think they’re Europeans, but they’re not.”

  The blond woman — lithe, perhaps twenty-five years old, her face a perfect oval of finely sculpted features touched with powder and rich red lipstick — laughed with a group of men. Two stocky men, one blond and balding, the other with crew-cut salt-and-pepper gray hair, spoke loud in English. The blond woman turned to her escort, whispered to him. The middle-aged Latin, his hair glistening with pomade, smiled. The blond saw Lyons watching her.

  Her lips froze in midword as her eyes examined the stranger. The Latin man waited for her to complete her whispered confidence. Then he looked from her face to Lyons. The Latin scowled.

  Lyons laughed at the middle-aged man’s jealousy. A hand jerked Lyons aside.

  “Be cool, Ironman,” Blancanales hissed. “That’s the general.”

  “Who’s the beauty?”

  “How should I know?” Blancanales pushed Lyons through the crowd. “One thing I do know, it’s less than diplomatic to make eyes at the main man’s girl friend.”

  At the buffet table, Lyons grabbed a handful of sliced roast beef. He took a plate and held it under his chin to catch the blood dripping from the rare-cooked beef.

  “Pardon me for living,” Lyons said with his mouth full of meat and blood. “I’m just an animal on the prowl.”

  Blancanales took a plate. A Latin waiter served him slices of beef and turkey. Blancanales held up a fork and spoke to Lyons.

  “Now that you’re moving in high society… this is a fork. Watch, I will demonstrate how to use it.”

  “You!” a Spanish-accented voice demanded. “Who are you?”

  The Americans turned — Blancanales with a speared slab of white turkey meat in his mouth, Lyons holding a hunk of beef dripping blood — to see two young Latins confronting them.

  Except for their expensive suits and gold wrist-watches, the Latins looked like soldiers. Their backs ramrod-straight, they wore their hair military-short. Their wide shoulders and barrel chests stretched the fabric of their expensive Italian suits. As the two members of Able Team studied the men who demanded their identities, one of the Salvadorans raised a hand to point at Lyons’s chest.

  “I said, who…”

  Lyons grasped the young soldier’s immaculate hand, shook it like a long-lost friend. He talked through a mouthful of beef. “I’m Mike! I’m pleased to meet you. Who are you?”

  The Salvadoran tore his hand free. He grabbed a napkin from the caterer’s table and wiped the smeared blood and gravy from his hand and shirt cuff. The elegant diplomats and women around them stared.

  “You come with us. We are security.”

  Blancanales turned to Lyons. “See what happens when you flirt with a general’s girl friend?”

  “I didn’t even talk to her.”

  “Come!” the other soldier demanded.

  “Sure, where you want to go?” Lyons grinned. He reached toward the rows of wine bottles. He saw a waiter stripping a champagne bottle of its foil and wire. “Let me get a drink…”

  As Lyons’s hand closed around the neck of the unopened bottle, the first soldier seized Lyons’s left arm, his fingers digging into the healing wound under the coat sleeve. Lyons’s face went white with pain and a guttural roar rose in his throat as he reflexively smashed the soldier on the side of the head with the champagne bottle.

  The cork shot across the room. An explosion of champagne foam sprayed Lyons and the onlookers. Stunned, the soldier dropped. Women shrieked as their escorts pulled them back from the violence. Men pushed through the crowd. Blancanales scanned the ballroom, saw the general
and three other Salvadorans approaching.

  Champagne ran off Lyons’s rented tuxedo. The bottle in his hand dripped foam. He looked around him at the faces of the staring men and women. Lyons laughed, then drank from the foaming bottle.

  The second soldier jerked a 9mm auto-pistol from his belt. Blancanales kicked him in the crotch, the force of the kick lifting the young man off the floor. The pistol flashed, a slug punching into the parquet floor.

  In the screaming and panic, shoulder to shoulder with satins and diamonds and bow ties, Lyons and Blancanales ran for the door. A Salvadoran stood at the door, his eyes searching the crowd, his right hand under his coat.

  As the two men of Able Team shoved through the elegant guests, the Salvadoran saw them. His right hand closed around a shoulder-holstered pistol, but the pistol never cleared his coat.

  Lyons drove a full power front kick into the Salvadoran’s solar plexus. In the crowding and confusion, the kick hit an instant late, just as the Salvadoran’s forearm crossed his body.

  Bones snapped. Screaming, the Salvadoran fell back, his auto-pistol clattering to the floor, lost among the feet of the guests rushing out the door. Smashing the champagne bottle down on the Salvadoran’s head, Lyons followed Blancanales and the crowd into the hotel corridor.

  They jogged into the lobby. Shoving through the plate-glass doors, they ran past the taxis and limousines lining the hotel’s driveway. Their breath clouded in the cool spring night. Blancanales looked at Lyons, noting the champagne soaked tuxedo, the bits of glass sparkling on the sleeves and lapels. The Puerto Rican laughed, put his arm around his partner’s shoulders as they ran.

  “Lyons, you’re my friend, but this is the last time I take you to a party.”

  7

  Passengers bound for Washington, D.C., crowded from the lounge to board the jet. Floyd Jefferson ran to a pay phone. He punched the number of David Holt’s Mill Valley home. After a few rings, he heard the voice of Mrs. Holt.