The Night Cafe

by Taylor Smith

  “I don’t need payback. She’s okay. If things had gone differently, that might have been me. Anyway, I don’t do catfights.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  She hung up, smiling.

  Puerto Vallarta

  Unless he was mistaken, Peña thought, he was now being followed by two cars. Between him and Sanchez, his useless brother-in-law, was a white Corolla carrying three men. His wife’s idiot brother he could handle, but who were these other men following him to the airfield?

  Teagarden had warned him to be careful. Now, he began to regret that he had not brought backup. Of course, if a member of his own family could be bought, who could be trusted?

  He pulled out his cell phone and tried not to swerve as he punched in the pilot’s number. “Get the plane on the runway and keep the engine running. I’m almost there, but I’m being followed.”

  “What in the name of Jesus, Mary and Joseph are you getting me into?”

  “I’ll explain later. Just be ready to take off the second I’m on board.”

  “These people following you, they have guns?”

  “Probably.”

  The pilot hesitated, and Peña feared his old friend might back out. Instead, he chuckled. “I haven’t had a good fight in years. I am not without weapons myself, you know.”

  “You’re armed?”

  “Do you know how often I run into bandits and drug runners, my friend?”

  “Tell me when we’re airborne.”

  Peña almost took the last turn toward the airfield on two wheels, throwing up a spray of loose gravel. Sweat was running into his eyes, but he needed both hands to steer. He shot through a grove of trees and onto the taxiway. The Cessna was already revving its engines at the end of the runway. Peña was tempted to take a shortcut across the open field, but last night, an unexpected downpour had soaked the area. Good for the parched landscape, but bad luck for him. If he got bogged down, he’d have to run through mud with the bulky painting.

  Instead, he roared to the end of the taxiway and careened into the unbanked curve, praying the car wouldn’t flip. Behind him, the Corolla fishtailed wildly, then recovered. In his rearview mirror, Peña saw Sanchez’s Cortina miss the curve and bog down in the mud.

  “Good,” he muttered. “Bastard!”

  His back window shattered and he felt a buzz of air next to his ear. He zigzagged to the Cessna, hearing the rattle of metal on metal as bullets peppered the car. Slamming on the brakes, he grabbed the painting and jumped from the car, keeping low as he dashed toward the plane.

  Suddenly, a loud boom sounded over his head. He glanced up to see his friend take aim for a second shot with a high-powered rifle. He fired again as Peña scrambled aboard. The plane was already taxiing down the runway as he pulled the door shut and rammed home the locking bar. By the time he dropped into his seat and buckled up, the plane was lifting off, the pop of gunfire behind them fading fast.

  As the Cessna rose and circled, Peña waved to his grimacing brother-in-law, who stood ankle-deep in mud, a cell phone to his ear.

  Los Angeles

  Gladding ignored the call from the idiot policeman and took the one instead from the backup team in the Corolla that he’d been forced to gather at the last minute.

  “The Cessna is gone,” the team leader said. “The pilot filed a flight plan for Tijuana.”

  “You’re sure?” Gladding said.

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Stand down, then. No, wait,” Gladding added. “One more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Take care of that moron Sanchez. Then clean up and go to ground. Your payment will be wired within the hour.”

  Gladding hung up and drummed his fingers on the chair, ignoring the pain that racked his body. The game wasn’t lost yet. The painting was heading for the border, which meant the courier had put wheels in motion, allowing it to be recovered from her hiding spot. This Nicks woman was obviously not without resources. He didn’t fool himself that the government wasn’t working in the background on the recovery effort, but with the right incentive, she could still be persuaded to pull an end run and get his painting to him. And convincing others to do his bidding was where he excelled.

  The more Gladding thought about it, in fact, the more he realized that this might all work out. It was important for him to have the painting to hand over in trade to the Libyan. But after the bomb maker’s double cross with the hit on his villa, Gladding had no intention of keeping his end of the bargain. He would take the bomb, kill the Libyan and keep the painting. He would arrange for it to be shipped back to Geneva and locked away—a posthumous bequest, perhaps, to his grandchildren, to be delivered a few decades from now. He would explore the legal ramifications and decide later. In the meantime, the Swiss could always be relied upon to keep secrets.

  There remained only the matter of exploding the bomb, and Liggett, for his own twisted reasons, wanted this demonstration as much as he did.

  Whether or not the dirty bomb did much actual damage to the San Onofre generating station was almost beside the point. The radioactive debris it contained would set off a wave of panic and hysteria that no amount of government reassurances would be able to counter. It would start a cascade of economic damage, from the cost of the cleanup effort, the inevitable population flight from Southern California, and a renewed opposition to nuclear power, which the public was only now, thirty years after Three Mile Island, beginning to accept as a possible solution to foreign oil. The demoralizing effect of this terrorist act would also be significant when it was learned it had come not from foreign enemies but from a homegrown one.

  From such sparks are mighty conflagrations lit, Gladding thought. America was at a tipping point, and economic depressions had been triggered by less. The last superpower of the twentieth century was about to enter the spiral of its inevitable decline. The age of American domination was over, and the arrogance of the once powerful would be shattered with the realization of their own pathetic impotence.

  And then, Gladding thought, he would die satisfied.

  Russo’s news could hardly have been worse.

  “Blood?” Hannah gasped, when he told her what he’d found inside Ruben and Travis’s condo.

  “A fair amount,” Russo said, “mostly in the kitchen, which was trashed. There’s a bloody knife on the floor. We’ve sealed off the scene and we’re just waiting for the LAPD.”

  “Are you sure the guys aren’t in there?”

  “We searched the whole house and the garage. No cars. What do they drive?”

  Hannah described Ruben’s Mustang and Travis’s Jeep.

  “We’ll pull the DMV info and get an APB out right away.”

  Hannah nodded. There was a commotion outside the door of the room she was in, and she looked up to see Towle and Teagarden coming in. “Let me know as soon as you hear anything?” she asked Russo.

  “You bet.”

  She hung up and told the others what he’d found back at her condo.

  “I’m sorry, Hannah,” Teagarden said. “But the fact that Detective Russo didn’t find your friends is reason to hope.”

  She didn’t feel very hopeful.

  “In the meantime,” Towle said, “we’ve come up with a plan of action. We need to take a drive.”

  “You want me to go?” Hannah said.

  Teagarden smiled and held out an arm. “You, my dear, are the most important member of this little excursion.”

  The destination, it turned out, was August Koon’s studio. There was no one around when they pulled up his driveway, but yellow tape was still strung around the scene and the LAPD Crime scene—Do not enter seal was on the door.

  Agent Towle held up the tape for the others to pass under, then ripped the seal off the door and pushed his way in.

  “Did you get clearance to do this?” she asked him.

  He shrugged. “It’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. We’ll make sure your name doesn’t come
into it, I promise.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  The pool of blood where they’d found Koon had soaked into the wood floors and dried brown, and almost every surface in the place was coated with gray fingerprint powder. The paintings Hannah remembered as having been blood-spattered had been taken in evidence, as had the murder weapon, the curved blade on which she’d stupidly left her fingerprints.

  “So, what are we looking for?” she asked.

  Teagarden circled the room, measuring canvases with a tape measure he pulled from his pocket. After a while, he put the tape measure away and started lining paintings up along the workbench. He had about a half dozen when he waved her over.

  “Take a look at these,” he said. “They’re the same size canvas as the van Gogh. Do any of these resemble the painting you carried to Puerto Vallarta?”

  Hannah crouched down and studied them, one by one. She’d stared for hours at the one she and Rebecca had picked up on Monday, trying to see what was worth a quarter of a million dollars. She would have thought it was permanently imprinted on her brain, but as she looked at this bunch, they seemed to run together.

  “Everything he does looks alike to me,” she said, “but I think a couple of these might be close.”

  “You’ll have to do better than think, lass,” Teagarden said. “Your life might depend on it.”

  She looked at him, then at the federal agents, and their brilliant plan suddenly dawned on her. “You want me to deliver a fake to Gladding.”

  “A fake camouflaged van Gogh, maybe,” Towle said, “but a genuine August Koon.”

  “We’re going to give Mr. Gladding a taste of his own medicine,” Teagarden added.

  “Oh, joy. And I get to hold the spoon.”

  She turned back and studied the canvases more closely. As Teagarden said, her life could depend on it. She pulled four out of the line, compared them, eliminated two, then tried to decide between the other two.

  “So I go in with the Koon,” she said. “What’s to keep Gladding from killing me?”

  “Luck,” Towle said. “And plenty of discreet backup, of course.”

  She grimaced. “Easy for you to say. Okay, fine. This one, I think.”

  It had too much blue in it, but if they were right and Koon’s painting was just a disguise for a van Gogh, then Gladding had probably never even laid eyes on the overpainting job he’d blackmailed Koon into doing. He wouldn’t care what it looked like, as long as he believed the van Gogh was beneath. She could throw paint on canvas herself and he’d probably be none the wiser. She handed it to Teagarden and he zipped it into a case.

  “Of course, you realize that if we’re wrong about this and Moises Gladding just had to have that one particular painting I was supposed to deliver, then I’m dead meat?”

  Towle glanced around the studio and snorted. “Oh, hell, girl. Nobody could want to own this crap.”

  Thirty

  Airborne, 18,000 feet

  Sixty miles south of Tijuana

  After leaving Sanchez and the other three men in the mud at the Puerto Vallarta airstrip, Captain Peña and his old friend had settled in for an uneventful flight to the main airport at Tijuana to rendezvous with his new friend, William Teagarden. Peña was looking forward to introducing the two fine men. Perhaps a drink, exchanging some adventure stories.

  But then, the Cessna began to buck, and Peña and the pilot shared a nervous glance. Suddenly, out the pilot-side window, an astonishing sight appeared. Peña nudged his friend and pointed. The pilot leapt, startled, at the sight of a fighter jet off his starboard side, dipping its wing in salute. The plane was gunmetal gray, the wings painted with the star-on-a-striped-flag insignia of the USAF.

  Through their headsets, the two men heard the Cessna’s call letters. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. The United States Air Force is here to provide you with an escort.” They could see the fighter pilot’s face almost as clearly as they saw one another’s. He directed their attention to the Cessna’s port-side wing, where a second fighter had appeared.

  “F-16s,” Peña’s friend breathed.

  “You are to proceed north-northwest,” the fighter pilot added. Although English was the language of international aviation, he repeated the instructions in unaccented Spanish to be sure they were understood.

  “Sir, this is Mexican airspace,” the Cessna pilot radioed back.

  “For the love of the Blessed Virgin,” Peña hissed at him, “don’t argue!”

  “Your government has cleared our mission,” the fighter pilot replied. “You will set down on an airstrip just south of Tijuana. The delay there will be brief. Then, you’ll resume your current heading and flight plan.”

  His friend’s panic-stricken face turned to Peña. “What shall I do? What shall I do?”

  “Are you crazy? Do you see the bombs under their wings? Do what you’re told!”

  The Cessna pilot nodded. “Roger,” he radioed.

  The F-16s dropped back and rose up a few thousand feet, holding position there. The turbulence settled.

  Peña’s friend nodded at the leather portfolio. “What are you carrying?”

  “An ugly painting, nothing more.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I examined it myself.”

  Five minutes later, the F-16s directed their attention to a well maintained oceanside landing strip. The Cessna pilot banked his craft, putting the small plane on the ground a few minutes later, where it rolled to the end of the strip and pulled off onto a taxiway. When they looked skyward, the F-16s were circling overhead, silver eagles soaring on the updraft.

  The men on the ground waited. As the seconds ticked by, the pilot slid his rifle out of the scabbard in the door. “Just in case,” he said.

  Peña felt sure Teagarden would not have betrayed him, but he unbuckled his holster and rested his hand on the butt of his revolver just in case.

  And then, they heard a low hum, soft at first, then louder. As they craned to see, a helicopter appeared out of the northern sky. The air force jets backed off, and the chopper set down a short way from the Cessna. Two men emerged, a young Asian-looking man and one with blond hair, both clean-cut and wearing suits.

  As they approached, they withdrew leather folders and held them up to let the Mexicans to see their shields and identity cards. The younger man was also carrying a leather portfolio not unlike the one Peña had recovered from the ceiling of the hotel on the Malecón, except this one was intact.

  “FBI agents?” Peña said, surprised.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Peña opened his door. “Only one way to find out.”

  He stepped out and approached the men, who tucked their credentials away. “Captain Peña,” the older of the two said, “William Teagarden, formerly of Scotland Yard, sends his regards. My name is Special Agent Joseph Towle, and this is Special Agent Ito.”

  “Where is Señor Teagarden?” Peña asked.

  “You’ll see him when you land in Tijuana.”

  “How do I know this is the truth?”

  “Well, Teagarden said you play a mean Frank Sinatra. Apparently you know all the words to all the verses of ‘My Way.’”

  Peña smiled and shrugged modestly. “I am very fond of the music of Ol’Blue Eyes. So, what can I do for you gentlemen?”

  “We need your help with a small ruse. You’re familiar with a Moises Gladding, I think?”

  Peña nodded.

  “He’s very anxious to have what you collected in Puerto Vallarta. We’d like to exchange your painting for a different piece. When you meet Teagarden and the lady with him, they’ll know the paintings have been switched but they won’t let on in case Gladding’s agents are watching.”

  “Gladding has eyes everywhere,” Peña muttered. “Yes, fine. If Teagarden wishes this, I am happy to comply. I will get the case.”

  He brought out the battered portfolio and made to hand it over, but Ito opened his. “Actually, we think it’s better
if you hold on to that case and deliver our picture in it. It’s a long story, but it will add to the ruse’s credibility.”

  They pulled out their paintings and compared them side to side. “They look the same,” Peña said.

  “This one has more blue,” Ito said, “but otherwise, they’re pretty close.”

  “And both very ugly,” Peña said. He zipped the new painting into the battered case.