Children.
Jenkins bent over and threw up, a yellowish spew that became violent dry heaves. He sat up, wiping the spittle from the corners of his mouth, spitting, the acidic burn lingering in his throat.
“They killed the men first,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Center-mass and head shots. Kill shots. They let them run and used them like targets.”
“Jesus,” Branick whispered. Then he made the sign of the cross.
Jenkins stood and walked forward into the carnage. “They bound the women, tortured some, certainly raped others. Some they killed still holding on to their children.”
The pattern became clear to him. Those children still clutching their parents in a fierce embrace were young girls. “They separated the boys,” he said, and turned and hurried through the village, Branick following.
The one-room building near the large, flat stone had been badly charred but somehow remained standing, saved perhaps by the heavy rain and sodden air, or by other forces he did not want to consider. The door had been blown from its hinges, an act designed not to gain entry—a decent kick would have splintered the cheap wood—but to cause confusion and panic.
Jenkins ducked below the threshold into the room. A single body lay in the dirt, and despite the slaughter outside, seeing the woman on the floor, hideously battered and disfigured, alone, separated from the others, made the horror more personal and inconceivable.
The confirmation of what Jenkins had suspected forced his hands into fists of rage. The anger lodged in his throat, choking him with fury, agony, and a guilt that beat him to his knees with the force of sledgehammer blows.
“Charlie. Come on. Come on.” Joe Branick stood above him, urging him toward the door.
“Goddamn them, Joe!” he said. “Goddamn them.”
ALEX STIRRED AND winced in pain, but she did not wake.
Jenkins studied her in the pale light of the dashboard, wondering again whether Joe would have endangered the daughter of Robert Hart. She said they had been tracking right-wing guerrilla organizations that could impede an agreement requiring Mexico to reopen its oil market to foreign interests. That was likely true, but that wasn’t why Joe was dead. Joe had left the answer to that question in Charles Jenkins’s file.
He was dead because of David Allen Sloane.
29
DR. BRENDA KNIGHT had removed the straps that bound Sloane’s chest and ankles but not the ones that kept his wrists six inches from the side of the bed. Hospital protocol would not allow it, she said, unless he was put into the locked ward, which he did not want. Sloane knew there was more to Knight’s decision than protocol. She thought he was either nuts or dangerous. With the police continuing to hold a vigil outside his door, waiting to talk with him, it was a logical conclusion. He could think only of Melda, of holding her tiny frame, lifeless in his arms. Sadness overwhelmed him. Then he would grow angry.
Who would do such a thing? Who would kill a sweet old woman?
And what of his dream? Had it been a dream or had it been something more, some type of premonition? Had he seen Melda’s death? Had he somehow predicted it? Was it like the power he felt in the courtroom?
Alone in his hospital room, he felt the same guilt, that he was somehow responsible. The thought made him numb, lethargic. Then he would think of the man who killed her, and the anger burned.
Despite her unwillingness to allow him to speak to the police, Dr. Knight had been extremely interested in Sloane’s vital signs, and he sensed from her questioning that something there was unique and fascinated her. She told him the police had found him in his apartment, clinging to Melda’s lifeless body, moaning in agony. When they approached, Sloane had ignored their commands. When they tried to separate him from Melda he resisted. Then, just as suddenly, in the midst of the ensuing struggle, he had collapsed, his limbs flaccid. When he did not respond the police had brought him to the emergency room. The doctor on call examined him, could find nothing physically wrong with him, but could not wake him. He called Knight at home, and she admitted him. He now sat in a private room.
Knight had given him a two-milliliter injection of Ativan in the arm, telling him it would help him to relax. The drug was beginning to make everything dull. His head felt heavy against the pillows. His arms and legs tingled, as if he were sinking into a too-hot bath. He closed his eyes and saw the face of the man he had pulled from the depths of his memory. The features were younger, more distinct, not yet softened by age, but it was the same face as the one in the newspaper.
Joe Branick.
Somehow, somewhere, they had met, and that meant that the woman whose death he suffered through every morning was neither a premonition nor a dream. She was real, and Joe Branick, a White House confidant, had been there, too. Branick had also left Sloane a telephone message just a day before someone broke into Sloane’s mailbox and trashed his apartment and, according to the newspaper article, just hours before police found Branick dead in a national park in West Virginia, an apparent suicide. If there was any doubt these events were related, it was erased when the telephone repairman came back. There was no other reason to search Melda’s apartment except to look for Sloane’s mail. In his mind’s eye Sloane saw the rust-orange envelope, his name handwritten on the front. Joe Branick had tried to call him. Was it any more absurd to conclude that he had also sent Sloane a package?
Sloane grew tired, the sedative increasing in intensity. He saw a duck, a yellow plastic duck, floating on the surface of a body of water—a kid’s bathtub toy. He felt himself drifting, floating, eyes heavy . . . a sleeping duck . . . a sitting duck.
The man had not continued down the stairs to his van. He had not tried to get away. He had come down the landing, gun in hand.
He had come to kill Sloane.
Sloane opened his eyes. The foreboding sensation he had felt so strongly in the mountains, the knowing certainty that someone was stalking him, enveloped him. The man could have turned and left. He had chosen instead to come for Sloane.
And he would come again.
Sloane looked down at the red nylon straps binding his wrists.
A sitting duck.
30
Highway 5,
Dunsmuir, California
ALEX SLID ONTO the cherry-red vinyl seat in the booth at the back of the diner. They had driven through Washington and Oregon without stopping. After nine hours Jenkins had conceded to their bladders and hunger pangs when the roadside diner appeared like an oasis in a desert. At minutes after noon the temperature outside was approaching ninety-eight degrees. Having grown accustomed to the Pacific Northwest’s mild climate, one that rarely exceeded eighty degrees, Jenkins felt as though he had driven into a furnace.
“Sore?” he asked.
She felt the bandage beneath her shirt. “My shoulder is fine. My head’s killing me. I feel like I have a hangover. Where did you get that remedy, anyway?”
“My grandfather liked to say enough beer cured any ailment.”
“I feel like someone hit me with a two-by-four.” She let out a breath of air and shook the cobwebs from her head. Then she pointed to his hand. “Arthritis?”
He had been flexing his fingers to relieve the stiffness in the joints. It was worse the day after he worked in the garden.
“My hand just fell asleep.” He folded them in his lap. He considered arthritis an old man’s disease.
“My father used to do the same thing,” she said, smiling.
A young woman in a pink-and-white-striped uniform set two Cokes in old-fashioned glasses on the table, along with two straws, the paper partly torn off. Jenkins ordered a sandwich; Hart, a salad to go. He ignored the straw, drinking from the glass. A rare deviation from his diet, the Coke tasted as sweet as maple syrup, but this morning he needed the sugar and the caffeine. He turned his head to stretch his neck and watched a young man dressed in a thick army fatigue jacket hitchhiking along the side of the road—perhaps another ghost from the 1960s, a decade no longer will
ing to let him be.
“Vietnam,” he said to himself.
“Vietnam?”
He looked back at Alex. She had her hair pulled back with a tie, revealing the soft line of her neck, the straw in her mouth. He hesitated to think it, but she looked like a little girl.
“Little skirmish in Southeast Asia slightly before your time,” he said.
She gave him a patronizing smile.
“I was just thinking I haven’t been in weather this hot since Vietnam,” he said.
She drank from the straw. “You don’t look that old.”
“Thanks.”
She winked at him. “Were you drafted?”
“I volunteered,” he said. “Seemed like the right thing at the time, fighting for my country. Too many of my friends didn’t have that option. I was eighteen when I stepped off the plane in-country at Da Nang, and middle-aged when I stepped back on American soil thirteen months later. The last two days there were the scariest moments of my life. I was sure I was going to die. It took me thirty-eight hours of flying and driving to get back home to New Jersey, and I promptly fell asleep on my parents’ couch smoking a cigarette and nearly burned to death.”
“How did you end up working for the Agency?”
He put his hands on the table, playing with the paper from the straw, rolling it between his fingers into a ball. “Two months after I got home I could still feel the stares of the people on the street and in the mall. People I’d known most of my life suddenly were looking at me differently, and I saw them differently, too. Things were not the same, and they never would be again. I didn’t fit in, and they didn’t want me there, a visual reminder that young men—good young men—were dying over there and they were too busy going about their day to give a damn. Then two guys showed up on my porch, asking me if I might be interested in government service. I figured they weren’t talking about the French Foreign Legion. Since I wasn’t employed and had no immediate prospects, I thought, what the hell? I had to do something to get the hell out of there.”
“Recruiters?”
“They’d already run a complete background check on me.”
“Before you said yes—why?”
“They were in a hurry and they were looking for someone fluent in Spanish and tactically trained.”
She nodded. “Yo hablo español.”
“Not very well any longer.”
“That’s how you ended up in Mexico City.”
“My first foreign assignment.”
“And that’s where you met Joe?”
“Yeah,” he said, turning and watching the hitchhiker continue down the road, the asphalt shimmering ghostly waves all around him. “That’s where I met Joe.”
She seemed to consider this for a moment, then asked, “Why Mexico City?”
“Ironically, because of what was happening in the Middle East. That was right about the time that the Saudis were realizing that the value of their oil exceeded just billions of dollars and that they could use it to assert influence on the world political stage. The royal family began to make not-so-veiled threats that if the United States did not withdraw its support of Israel, Saudi Arabia would nationalize its petroleum industry, just like Mexico. That kind of talk makes a lot of wealthy stockholders nervous, and since they are largely responsible for putting presidents in office, things usually begin happening. Nixon tried a strong hand at first and told the Saudis to pound sand. No pun intended. The Saudis responded in kind, raising the price of a barrel of oil seventy percent. When that didn’t end the standoff, they ordered Aramco to cut off all oil supplies to the U.S. military. With the cold war at its peak and Russia backing the Palestinians and working to establish a foothold in the region, we needed a response the Saudis would understand.”
“We needed something to bargain with,” she said, sipping Coke through the straw. “An alternative oil source.”
“Exactly. We suspected that when push came to shove the royal family would be more committed to making billions of dollars than to supporting the Arab cause.”
“And that was also right about the time Mexico started discovering vast reserves of hydrocarbons and natural gas beneath the lush savannas of Tabasco State and in the Campeche Sound of the Gulf of Mexico,” she said.
“Very good. Initial estimates were upwards of sixty billion barrels, perhaps a hundred billion.”
“The answer to Nixon’s prayers.”
“That’s what we needed to find out. The oil was there. The question was whether we could develop the technology to get at it and whether Mexico would ever allow us to do so. Necessity being the mother of invention, we figured the technology part would take care of itself.”
“We needed to find a way to convince Mexico to reopen its oil market to foreign interests.”
“And you may also recall from your history books that Mexico was having its own share of problems at that same time. Student and labor uprisings were becoming more frequent and more violent. There were reports of communist insurgents from Cuba and the Soviet Union working to turn Mexico into another Vietnam. It was one thing to have that threat in Southeast Asia, Alex. It’s a whole other ball game when it’s in your own backyard.”
“And you and Joe were trying to determine how legitimate the threat was,” she said, the realization dawning on her. “You and Joe were monitoring these groups to determine those likely to cause civil unrest if the United States and Mexico entered serious discussions.”
“Our job was to preserve the status quo in the event the Saudis didn’t flinch.”
“History repeats itself,” she said.
“It always does.” He sat back, an arm on the top of the seat. “So I need to know what you and Joe were working on, Alex. I need specifics to determine if it’s related to what he and I were doing.”
She took a breath and sat back, settling in. “We were working with Mexican intelligence to identify certain organizations, revolutionaries that could impede the current ongoing negotiations. Joe asked me if I would assist him. He said his Spanish was rusty after thirty years and he needed someone to interpret conversations and documents for him.”
He laughed. “Joe’s Spanish wasn’t rusty—it was never any good. Tell me, did these organizations you were monitoring include el Frente de Liberación Mexicano?”
Her brow furrowed. “What’s going on, Charlie?”
“Was it one of the organizations Branick had you look into?”
“Yes.”
“What did you find?”
“You know what I found. The MLF is supposed to be extinct. Nobody has heard from it in thirty years, which is right about the time you and Joe were there.” She raised her eyebrows in question.
Jenkins picked his words carefully. “The organizations die out, but not the philosophy, Alex. Splinter organizations rise from their ashes. We’re getting a healthy dose of it now in the Middle East with the Islamic extremists. They call themselves something different, but their philosophies are the same—they want to take down Western culture.”
She nodded. “It’s been rumored that the National Labor Party has some historical connection to the MLF,” she said.
Knowing Mexico’s history, he had already suspected as much. The National Labor Party happened to be the party of Alberto Castañeda—the only political party in eighty years to overcome the corruption embedded in Mexican politics enough to defeat the PRI. Castañeda was referred to as the destapado, the uncovered one, because he had come out of obscurity to win the presidency. His primary support had come from Mexico’s indigenous people and lower classes: union members, factory workers, farmers. It was normally the element of Mexican society least likely to vote. This time they had. They were also the same groups of people to whom the MLF had appealed in the 1970s, when it was causing considerable unrest, particularly in the southern region of the country.
“The leader of the MLF was a man known as el Profeta,” Jenkins said.
“The Prophet?”
“He
preached, primarily to the lower and middle class, that Mexico could not be free until its leaders were free of all outside influences, and that together they had the power to do it. He proclaimed that he had the power to deliver Mexico from centuries of bondage to outside forces, most notably the United States. At first no one in the government paid him much attention, but when the MLF started assassinating government officials and wealthy landowners for treason, the Mexican government took notice. The people, particularly those in the villages in southern Mexico, seemed emboldened and organized. Something had given them hope that a change was on the horizon. The government pulled out all stops to get him.”
“Who was he?”
Jenkins shook his head.
“You never caught him?”
“No. Despite employing what were normally highly effective interrogation techniques, they had no success identifying him. Neither did we.”
“So what happened to him?”
“Until you showed up at my door,” he said, “I assumed he was dead.”
31
DESPITE THE VIGOR of Sloane’s pleas, Dr. Knight refused to allow him to speak to the police. She told him it was ill advised in his present condition. When he demanded that she release him from the hospital she quoted the law to him, calling his situation a “classic fifty-four fifty” and telling him she could hold him indefinitely. Rationalizing with her was pointless, and getting angry only made her want to increase the sedative, and he was having enough trouble fighting off its effects, struggling to stay alert.
The Jury Master Page 14
