by Geoff Wolak
‘We were stateside anyhow, so got shoved in a plane in a hurry and sent down here via Vegas. Deputy Chief wants us as your liaisons.’
‘Are you far enough down the food chain that he can blame you if something goes wrong?’
They exchanged peeved looks, and that answered my question.
Mounting the jeeps, little was said till we left the airport and followed signs for Route 19 south. Franks finally said, ‘What’s the game plan here?’
‘What I did in Panama, I’ll try and do here.’
They exchanged looks as we joined a highway.
I added, ‘Aim is to get intel on gangs this side of the Rio Grande.’
‘Ah…’ Franks let out. ‘And the Rio Grande is a long way off.’
Half an hour’s drive, and we turned off the highway, signs seen for the border crossing – the official one, soon on a dark road with no street lights, and I noticed the local police escort upfront.
That escort left us at the next junction, three SUVs going on, and half an hour of poor roads led to a dirt track, and that led to a final halt.
Jumping down, I took in the small trees and distant dark hills.
Franks began, ‘This SUV is yours, rented in a fake name, M4s in the rear, water bottles, and a bag of items from Vegas. But I regret to inform you … that you lost some money there; the house always wins.’
Smiling, I led Sasha to the rear as the other SUVs turned around, soon checking the M4s. From the bag of goodies I handed Sasha a few ticket stubs, a pass for a casino, a receipt from a restaurant, similar items placed in my pockets. From my luggage I fetched out my Russian ID pack, and both myself and Sasha handed over our British passports and IDs to Franks, banks cards and British pounds.
Pockets checked, luggage checked again, and we were ready. I shook hands with Franks, and he handed me a phone number.
He explained, ‘That phone will be answered by a woman in a video porn shop in New York.’
‘VHS or Betamax?’ I asked, Sasha laughing through the dark.
‘Follow the track across the stream, up the other side to … wherever you’re going.’
With Franks now aboard an SUV, dust thrown up, I called Tomsk. He gave me the sat phone number of Carlos, who he reported spoke good English.
With Sasha checking the area, I hit the numbers as I read them in the light from the SUV.
‘Si?’
‘It’s Petrov.’
‘Ah, my friend, how are you?’
‘I’m good, and about to cross the border. I’m about eight miles west of the official crossing south of Tucson.’
‘I know it, no fence there but many border patrols.’
‘We can avoid the patrols,’ I assured him, certain that they had been given the night off.
‘Then cross over, up the hill, go two miles to a tarmac road, go west down the road to the first junction, a small café, my men are there now.’
‘Are we likely to meet anyone else as we cross?’
‘Maybe migrants, yes, always crossing, but my men checked the area an hour ago for rival gangs.’
‘See you soon then.’
Mounted up, windows down, weapons ready, I heaved a sigh and exchanged a worried look with Sasha, soon bumping along the uneven dirt track, our visible world limited to the narrow strip caught in our headlights.
We drove toward a dark border, a dusty track to follow, small shrubs seen, a few lonely trees with no branches, our headlights catching the reflective eyes of an animal, soon catching the glistening water.
‘We are breaking into Mexico,’ Sasha noted. ‘I am sure I read that people are supposed to do it the other way around.’
‘We are … unconventional,’ I told him.
‘Convention means a meeting of people in a large hall, so conventional means to meet in large halls, so we are opposite of meeting in large halls, no.’
I shot him a look.
Through the stream, we found the track and followed it, but women were soon caught in our headlights as they dashed off the track.
‘Nice night for it!’ I shouted as we passed them.
Climbing steadily now, we passed an old man and I eased to a halt, handing him a few dollars. ‘Take it easy, fella.’
He stared at the money, infinitely puzzled as we pulled off.
At the tarmac road we turned right, crested a small hill and started to descend, ten minutes to find the café, many jeeps parked around it.
With the engine still running, I leant out the window next to a table, men sat observing me, no guns in sight. ‘Is the chicken any good?’
A local man in a new and clean white cowboy hat shrugged, eased up, and wiped his mouth in a napkin. ‘You are expected by Carlos?’
‘That depends. Will there be cold beer at his place?’
The second man to stand now smiled. ‘Maybe a Fanta. Follow us.’
They mounted three jeeps - meals having been paid for, and these guys were all in ironed shirts, neat jeans and clean expensive boots. I had expected a dirty bunch of hard men covered in bandoliers, rifles slung, a skinny cigar resting on a lip. This lot had shirts ironed by fat wives; they were not Clint Eastwood’s enemies in some movie.
With Sasha holding his M4 as if his life depended on it - and that was a real possibility here, we followed the jeeps for a few tense miles, up and down gentle hills, a police roadblock passed, money handed over by our escorts as we observed.
Turning due south - I could see the Orion Constellation, we joined a better road for ten miles and picked up speed, passed a hamlet or two, and we finally glimpsed a brightly lit town in the distance as we crested a ridge. At the edge of town we passed through a roadblock of jeeps, one hosting a mounted fifty cal.
Sasha noted, ‘We are in den of lions now.’
‘Put your weapon under your seat, mine too. They would do us no good here.’
‘Not against the fifty cal, no, that would be unconventional.’
I shot him a look. ‘Have you been reading a dictionary again?’
‘Stupid language,’ he noted. ‘Science … conscience. Aiyah. Should con-science not be the opposite of science?’
‘OK, so our language has it quirks.’
‘How you spelling that?’ he teased. ‘I or E. Clerks, or cleerrks?’
After navigating the town streets, men seen sat outside typical Central American tabernas, but no armed men seen, we turned east and up a long road, down a side street and to a large villa with high walls, waved inside, but now the men were armed, well armed. Whether they could shoot for toffee was another matter.
Parked where directed, we stepped down, cases left behind, weapons left behind, keys in the ignition. I stopped to listen, but there was a real absence of gunfire on the breeze. On the steps to a large two–storey villa stood two men, an old man and a younger man, the younger man being a carbon copy.
They were both quite tall, black hair and square jaws, bushy black eyebrows and olive skin – not much of a tan. The older man offered a pot belly under his dark blue jumper.
‘Welcome, Petrov, to my humble home,’ came accented.
‘Not so humble, I think.’ I shook his hand.
‘This is my son, Miguel, and he is also my business manager.’
I shook the younger man’s hand. ‘You could be twins, so your wife did not have a secret lover.’ They exchanged smiles. I swivelled. ‘This is Sasha.’
They nodded at Sasha as if he was an underling, turning to lead us inside. The inside was not at all humble, but not as grand as Tomsk’s new villa.
‘Tomsk had a famous French designer work on his new villa. Very nice, but I like a simple room.’
‘He has invited me, but … not so easy to travel.’
In the huge kitchen, women cooking, we were shown to a table, drinks offered. I saw “Mad Dog Jackal” Carlos kiss a ten year old girl on the forehead, and I noticed with interest that there were no armed guards inside the house.
He turned to face me. ‘Tomsk sugg
ested that you take your shirt off, for us to be sure who you are…’
If I had a dollar, I thought, soon easing off my cotton shirt.
‘My god,’ Carlos let out. ‘You have been shot so many times.’
‘It goes with the job,’ I told them as I started to button up, a nod at Sasha. He took off his shirt.
Carlos asked Sasha, ‘Did a grenade go off in your stomach perhaps?’
I told them, ‘I pushed him out of a helicopter.’
‘You did?’ Carlos puzzled.
‘We were in a Huey, near the Colombian border, when the FARC fired a heat-seeking missile at us. I figured that jumping could be no more dangerous that staying aboard. We hit trees, landed softly enough -’
‘For you,’ Sasha challenged. ‘I had wood in my stomach.’
‘My men tell tales of your exploits over a beer at night, they will be keen to chat to you.’
Miguel asked, ‘How do you move around America? You are the most wanted man?’ The accent was definitely that of someone educated in America.
‘I get good help from the CIA.’
His eyes widened. ‘CIA?’
‘Tomsk never gave you the story?’
‘No.’ They waited, both sat across from me.
‘In England, I was captured, tortured, sick afterwards. I was grabbed by British Intelligence, but they had no wish to see me arrested. They offered me a passport and some money if I assisted them, and I have a woman and child in London, so I accepted the deal.
‘In England, the police and intelligence agencies have oversight, laws, regulators, they’re not allowed to just shoot someone -’
‘But if you shoot someone, no one will ever believe it was them,’ Carlos noted.
I nodded. ‘So I had a way to travel, but a CIA team came after me in London and I fled to Spain, to the Caribbean and then Panama.’
‘You shot down a CIA helicopter…’
‘It was flying over my place in Africa in the mornings, waking me.’
They laughed.
‘In Panama I met Tomsk, and I asked for some money in return for some work, and I started to kill his rivals – all of them, and to train his men.’
‘You were in the army in Russia?’
‘No, I grew up in Canada and England, but in West Africa I joined British mercenaries, and they taught me well.’
‘And Tomsk has the assistance of the Panama Army…’
‘Yes, we had Hueys and Hercules, jeeps and weapons, so long as we hit the FARC.’
‘Doing the work that the lazy Panama Army did not wish to do!’
I nodded. ‘I knew that the DEA would be sniffing around, but I also knew that my contact in British Intelligence could help, so I had Tomsk put some old drugs and some rifles on a ship, and I tipped off my contact. He had the British Navy stop the ship, a good newspaper headline.
‘After that I got the phone number for the CIA in Panama, and we did the same thing, and we did it ten times, and I knew they were fucked, the CIA.’
Miguel puzzled that. ‘Why were they … fucked?’
His father turned to him. ‘If it was known where the tip-offs came from, then they would be the ones in trouble; the CIA are not allowed to received tip-offs from men like Tomsk.’
‘The CIA managers would go to prison,’ I told Miguel. ‘But the tip-offs were too good to ignore. So the CIA would never arrest Tomsk, and they started to assist me against the DEA and FBI.
‘I then had a visit, and this is where you two idiots come in.’ They straightened, offended. ‘The man you grabbed, Miller, he runs the CIA’s drug smuggling operation.’
They exchanged looks. Carlos began, ‘The CIA run drugs through Tomsk?’
‘Yes, worth a great deal of money, money for their illegal activities. In return, Tomsk is left alone. No one will ever arrest him.’
‘We never knew, of course.’
‘He’s alive?’
‘Yes, not harmed, but … we had questions for him. The Colombian man, we bugged him, and he talked about the investments in the Belgian bank that was destroyed, as if he was involved with them.’
‘What has he said, the American?’
‘He confirmed that he organised money laundering through the bank.’
‘That is true, the CIA used the bank, but the idiots in the bank were starting wars and selling blood diamonds. They got greedy.’
An angry Carlos began, finger raised, ‘I invested in them because they were in Europe, and safe, not some tin-shack bank in Panama! But those shits were up to no good and cost me my investments!’
‘How much did you invest?’
He hesitated. ‘Two hundred million dollars.’
‘How did you do it?’
Miguel answered, ‘Share package investment utility, through a New York broker we know.’
‘The bank is alive on paper, you’ll get some money back. Eventually. Did you try and sell it?’
Miguel answered, ‘They offered us 30%.’
I pointed at a phone on the table, and they slid it across. It was a smart modern phone with speaker-phone mode. I hit the numbers for Bob Staines and selected speaker-phone. Everyone could hear it ring.
‘Hello?’ came a sleepy voice.
‘Mister Robert, it’s Petrov, calling from Mexico.’
‘Do they have clocks in Mexico?’
Sasha smiled widely.
‘Sorry if I woke you. Listen, this Dutch bank, the one that was set on fire, my friends here have investments in it, a utility package of shares or something. I was wondering if The Banker would be interested in it.’
Carlos straightened, recognising the title.
‘Maybe, I can ask, but they need to move quickly.’
‘Why … quickly?’
‘The bank is being investigated, and if your friends in low places are found to be the owners of the packaged portfolio, it will be cancelled.’
Carlos now looked very worried.
‘So … not to be sitting around, eh. Listen, the package is worth $200 million, so … how much could you get?’
‘If The Banker buys it, it would be safe, he’d just wait a year to sell it on. So … maybe 75% of face value.’
My look asked Carlos if that was good, and his look suggested it was, it was damned good. I said towards the phone, ‘Can you get back to me quickly please.’
‘Tomorrow. And get a fucking watch!’ He hung up.
‘Who is that?’ Carlos asked.
‘Manager in British Intelligence.’
‘He deals with The Banker?’
‘I kill people for him, and I introduced The Banker to him to help launder some money. CIA, British, they’re all the same, men trying to get promoted over the next guy; never give them too much credit.’ I pointed at the phone. ‘I made that guy’s career.’
Sasha put in, ‘I have a British passport now, and I’m off the Interpol list.’
Carlos regarded me coolly. ‘You trust them?’
‘There are two ways to do business with someone; shoot first, or sit down with a coffee.’
Miguel laughed loudly, a pointed look at his father.
Carlos looked peeved. ‘My son tells me this often, also his mother.’
‘He’s correct. But tell me, how come you are doing so well? What’s different about you? Tomsk trusts you, and he never trusts Mexicans.’
‘Thanks can go to my son. After college in America he came back with … ideas, and now we have … structures. I have six managers, each has about eight teams, each team has a leader and second in command, and pay and bonuses are structured like a factory.
‘I also have a man that audits the managers and the teams, and he makes reports. But thanks to my son … we think before we do.’
‘I had to alter Tomsk’s outlook and ideas.’
‘Some say … you built him up, that you were the real power…’
With a straight face, I told him, ‘I introduced structures.’
Miguel laughed, as his father again
looked peeved at me.
‘I also got Tomsk talking to the CIA, the British and the French. In France, he sends four consignments, one to be tipped off so that they French get their arrests and a big splash in the newspapers.
‘I then introduced Tomsk to my friends in West Africa and got him the oil concession in Liberia. When Tomsk wanted to kill someone, I sat down and talked to them first. Most we converted to work with us, not to shoot at us. And then I hit the Cali Cartel after they planned to kill Tomsk.’
‘I watched the news about their downfall with amazement. They say you parachuted in?’
‘Yes, high level parachuting, a small team, and we took them in their beds, the British and the CIA intercepting phone and radio messages in Cali for me.’
‘And you gave the Americans the credit,’ he noted. ‘To this day no one has got a straight answer as to who the soldiers were.’
‘You’ll meet them soon, they’re heading here.’
Carlos looked horrified. ‘Coming here?’
‘Tomsk wants your rival gangs hit, so that you don’t lose consignments.’
‘How many men?’
‘Twenty or thirty.’
‘Not many…’
‘Wait till you see them in action,’ I said with a smile. ‘They make me look like an amateur.’
Sasha put in, ‘They will shoot you in the eye at a thousand yards out.’
‘Can I see Miller?’ I pressed.
Carlos stood. ‘We can drop him at the border.’
‘And the Colombian man needs a ticket to Jamaica,’ I insisted.
Carlos led me out, and around the villa to a second house, armed men seen sat around, and I was wondering if Miller was a good actor – or we could both be in trouble here.
The men stood as we entered, Miller sat on a comfy sofa, cup in hand, but he displayed a black eye. He was shocked to see me. His fingers, however, were all still attached.
‘Are you hurt, my friend?’ I asked, but accented.
‘I’ll live.’
‘Your host will have you taken to the border, so you are now an illegal alien,’ I said with a grin. ‘And Carlos, he … did not know who you are, so I asked Tomsk to get you released, business as usual in the trafficking world. We will compensate you.’
