“I’m afraid it’ll have to be a cheeseburger,” he said, “and here in New Jersey. We won’t get to New York until tomorrow.”
“But Charley, we’re almost there! You said we would stay at the Plaza.”
“It’ll have to wait one more day. There’s a stop I have to make in New Jersey. I was going to do it on the way back, but it’s important, and I don’t want to chance having to miss it. We could run into trouble in New York. We can run into trouble in a lot of places.”
“What sort of ‘important stop’?”
“You don’t need to know. It involves the commission of a felony.”
“Charley!”
“I didn’t exactly advertise this as a Club Med vacation. Don’t worry. I’m not going to involve you. While I’m attending to business you can wait at the motel. I’ll be back by morning.”
“What business? What do you mean by felony?”
“Breaking and entering. Burglary. I want to acquire some videotapes that don’t belong to me. It’s vital that I get a hold of them. They’ll be more convincing than anything I can say—especially to the vice president.”
“Convincing of what?”
“Of everything I’ve told you. You’ll see when I get back. If I get back.” He should not have said that. The uncertainty returned to her eyes. “I’ll get back. Don’t worry. If I can be here with you now, driving down the New Jersey Turnpike instead of being chained to a toilet in some California jail cell, anything is possible. Everything is possible. We’d better turn off and find a motel soon. The place where I want to go isn’t far, if I remember it correctly, and as this will be of the late-night variety of business, I could use a little sleep beforehand. After last night, you could too, couldn’t you, Madeleine Margrit Anderson?”
She returned to smiling. “After last night, dearest darling Charles August Dresden, I am deliriously in need of a little sleep. But let’s try for a Holiday Inn, at least. I dread the thought of one of those little cinderblock wall places.”
“A Holiday Inn will be fine. To make it absolutely perfect, take off your wedding ring.”
She pulled off her left glove, revealing a naked hand.
“You didn’t notice,” she said. “I took it off last night. For good.”
There was a local telephone directory listing for the network’s New Jersey warehouse, but it took Dresden nearly an hour of mostly useless driving in the fading daylight before he found the place. The building reasonably resembled his memory of it—a large, one-story structure with a two-story annex, the network’s logo on a huge sign at the front. There was wire fencing at the rear and sides, but the parking lot by the entrance was open to the street. He left Maddy’s car at the curb, out of view of the entrance, and strolled toward the door, briefcase in hand, looking his very best impression of an important television executive.
Nodding to a security guard standing just inside the doorway, Dresden continued on to a young black woman at the front desk.
“I’m Mr.—uh—Ireland from Los Angeles,” he said, as matter-of-factly as possible. “I was supposed to meet some people from the news division here to look at some tapes.” He glanced at his watch. “I may have the time wrong.”
“Just have a seat, sir. I’m sure they’ll be along soon. They’ve got two lanes of the Holland Tunnel closed this week and New York traffic this time of day’s bad enough with four.”
She went back to her work, which didn’t appear to amount to much, as Charley seated himself on a vinyl-covered chair, crossed his legs, and tried to look as significant and impatient as possible. A man in a short-sleeved shirt came down the corridor pushing a cart laden with cases of videotapes, but otherwise there seemed to be little activity in the building. Dresden glanced irritably at his watch. He guessed that the security guard post here in the small lobby was probably manned twenty-four hours a day and that there might be an additional security man on duty overnight. Probably a librarian or clerk, too, just to provide the network with fulltime access. The network news operation and the network’s New York owned-and-operated station both maintained huge tape libraries. This warehouse in New Jersey was archives. But if the aging Soviet president were to die in the middle of the night, this is where they would come for footage of him standing with Khrushchev atop Lenin’s mausoleum in the 1960s, and they would want it fast.
After twenty minutes, now ignored by the security guard, Dresden returned to the woman at the desk.
“Is there a phone I might use? I just want to make sure they’ve left. The way my week’s been going, I’m probably here on the wrong day.”
“Sure.” He might just as well have asked to browse among the tapes.
Dialing the recorded weather report, he asked the tinny voice that ultimately responded for the office of the former protégé he had called from Washington the previous morning. He then engaged in a spurious conversation that ended with him in a high state of exasperation. Finally, regaining his composure, he hung up.
“I have the right day,” he said to the young woman. “They had the wrong one.”
He looked again at his watch. As he did so, he stole a quick look about him. There was a file records room, probably containing the main tape index listings, just off the corridor to his right, an older woman looking slowly through one of the drawers. Adjoining it was an office that looked unoccupied. No other employee was in view.
“Thank you very much,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
The guard opened the door for him. He had earlier presumed his effort that night would entail wire cutting, window smashing, and other dangerous difficulties. He decided now he would use a direct, frontal approach, and that it might even be fairly easy.
Maddy was awake when he returned. The motel was closer to cinderblock than a first-rate Holiday Inn, and she was not comfortable in it. He supposed she had not slept well. He felt no need for sleep at all. He could go the night, and might have to.
“You took a long time,” she said.
“I had trouble finding the place.” He sat down on the bed beside her, taking her hand. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to stick you here a fair bit longer. I think I can manage this nicely. But I want to wait until after midnight. I’ll come back for you as soon as I can.”
She sat up, brushing a tumble of blondness back from her forehead.
“No, you won’t,” she said. “You’re not sticking me anywhere, Mr. Dresden. Especially here. I’m coming with you.”
“No, Maddy.”
“You asked my help. You’re going to get it.”
“No, thank you. There’s some potential rough stuff in this.”
“You told me about the rough stuff in the beginning.”
He reached behind his back and took the heavy Magnum pistol from his belt. “I didn’t tell you about this.”
She stared at the weapon as though he had just shown her a severed hand. Finally, her expression firmed. She took a deep breath. “What do you want to tell me about that?”
“It has no past that you need worry about. I just need it now. I’m going to use it tonight.”
“Charley? What the hell do you mean?”
“I didn’t say fire it. I said use it. Now, do you still want to come?”
She bit down on her lip. “Yes. Damn you to hell, Charley Dresden. There’s nothing safe about you whatsoever and never was. But, damn it, yes. I’m coming with you. It’s my car. It’s my me. It’s my us. I’m coming with you.”
Maddy only looked as though one had to carry her across puddles. As Charley was coming to remember, she was of stronger stuff than that. In many ways, of stronger stuff than him.
Colonel Victores, as Kreski had suspected, was the diminutive man in the business suit and sunglasses who had instantly cleared him through customs and passport control that afternoon. He was still wearing sunglasses, but was now dressed in a dark suit, expensive white shirt, and dark tie. A large gold ring was visible on his right hand. Kreski detected a slight bul
ge beneath the man’s coat below his armpit. It was a professional observation, professionally understood. From the very beginning, he and Victores had absolutely no doubts about one another.
At first the conversation was entirely social. They talked of what the colonel called the unusually clement weather, of the red snapper that was the catch of the day from the coast, of international police officials they knew in common, of the terrorism that plagued the hemisphere and their general inability to do anything about it, of the beauty of the ash-blond English lady at the table next to them, of South American versus European soccer, of the beauty of the dark-haired Argentinian woman across the room, and then, at last, of what Kreski needed to know about Manuel Huerta. The colonel took a thick envelope from his suit pocket and carefully set it upon the tablecloth.
“Here it is,” he said. “It is not all that is in our files. You do not wish to carry all of that with you. But I think you will find this a most useful distillation. It is facsimiles, as you say, ‘Xeroxes.’”
“Should I look at it now?” said Kreski, pulling the envelope toward him.
“I was told, Señor Director, that discretion was a great virtue of the American Secret Service.”
Kreski nodded to him without speaking, slipping the envelope into his pocket. “Can you tell me, Colonel, as we sit here, during this most pleasant evening, whether there is enough in here to justify my coming? Does this say anything of La Puño?”
The colonel leaned back in his chair and smiled. “What might be in there that is of value to you, that might or might not justify the expense of your journey, is for you to decide, Señor Kreski. As for ‘La Puño,’ I view that as one of the great amusements, the big joke, of this entire affair. Your people have continually talked about it. References to it have gone back and forth in your diplomatic dispatches. Your news magazines and newspapers are full of talk of this underground group ‘La Puño.’ Your secretary of state threatens an all-out war over it. But it is a great joke. La Puño there was. La Puño was one man. You shot him to ribbons on a tower in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. ‘The Fist’ is old, dead, rotting meat. He is no more.”
“What do you mean?”
“‘The Fist,’ ‘La Puño,’ was never something written down on paper. It was not intended to be. It was what Manuel Huerta called himself, what he wished to be known as in the slums and villages. It was both sobriquet and threat.”
“He was a crook?” Kreski asked. “An extortionist? An enforcer?”
“An avenger, Señor Kreski. It is all in the distillation. His people were well off, of El Salvador. They were, as your journalists say, ‘Garks.’”
“I beg your pardon?”
Sandoval smiled. “Their slang for oligarch, Señor Kreski.”
“When the Communists toppled the government there, they scattered,” Victores continued. “Those with the most money went to Brazil and Mexico, a few to Europe. Manuel and his brother came here, with their families. They acquired that small but thriving farm, and Manuel joined our Guardia Nacionale. His father had been a colonel in the El Salvadoran army. We made Huerta a lieutenant. He was a good one; too good. Very thorough. But it was all vengeance. It always came back to that.”
Kreski remembered the bodies at Gettysburg.
“Huerta ran what you people would call a ‘death squad.’ He made strikes only across the El Salvadoran border at first. Then he took to looking for El Salvadoran leftist infiltrators on this side of the frontier, murdering them singly; leaving their bodies in the middle of streets at night. We made the mistake of transferring him to the East Coast. Then he just contented himself with Honduran leftists. And any Nicaraguans he could find, any he might suspect of association with the Sandinistas.”
“And they struck back?”
The colonel swatted an insect upon his face. A tiny trace of blood was left when he took his hand away.
“Oh yes, Señor Kreski. It is done all the time. It is the basic nature of the war here. Huerta’s farm and family were burned out. The families of others in his unit were hit too. They talked of crossing the border into Nicaragua for revenge. This would not be allowed. You understand? All of this war is by arrangement. Huerta and his men were not part of the arrangement. Not in their particular demeanor.”
He signaled the waiter for more ice. Kreski could hear loud but engaging music from somewhere down the street.
“Our government strongly disapproved of these activities,” Sandoval said, finally joining the conversation. “So did the Honduran government. Contras, sí. Guardia Nacionale, no. President Hampton had just reinvoked the unfortunate fate of the poor Catholic women in El Salvador. You may recall.
“We had just elected Emiliano Madeiro Ramon. You recall that your president came down here to campaign for him, to put the muscle of the United States behind the forces of moderation. You were here. I believe we may have met then.”
“Probably so, colonel. We get very busy on such occasions. Forgive any lapse of memory.”
“Of course. No importante. Huerta was an embarrassment. Now, we might bring such people to trial, or shoot them outright, or promote them to colonel, depending. Then, it was just a few months ago, policy was merely to dismiss them. Huerta was cashiered. He languished about his village until his people were buried, and then he struck out on his own. If he had been vengeful, he then became a fanatic. If a ‘La Puño’ grew from that, quien sabe? But at that time, he was all it was.”
Kreski wiped his brow. This country seemed to grow hotter with the enveloping darkness.
“Señor Kreski,” the colonel asked, all smiles, with an innocent curiosity in his eyes. “This name ‘La Puño’ has been in all your news journals. This country crawls with American journalists, with journalists from all over. There are many, many; very, very costly television camera units. You find the people everywhere—in the hotel toilets. In the jungles. On the front lines. They talk to official government spokesmen. They talk to leftist guerrillas from across the border. They talk to the nuns from Maryknoll. They talk to local newspaper editors. Mostly they sit in restaurants or cantinas and talk to each other. But they never ask about ‘La Puño,’ true or false. They never ask about Huerta’s real background. The reports I receive—what I read in these two big American newspapers—all say Huerta was a poor farmer opposed to American policy in Central America.”
Sandoval smiled, and sipped his rum drink. “But that is only fair, my colonel. Huerta was opposed to American policy in Central America. As he had come to learn about it, as we have all come to learn about it.”
“But these journalists never ask to learn more. They keep writing the stories they bring with them. They talk to each other. They try to learn nothing. Is this always so?”
“Mostly,” Kreski said.
“Why?” asked the colonel. “Are they ideologues?”
“To some degree. On the edges. But that’s not it.”
“Well, please, Señor Director. What is it? Why is this so?”
“Colonel. I learned a whole bunch of things working for the Secret Service. But that’s something I’ve never been able to figure out. I suppose, like most of us, they want a job with rules to follow. But there are no real rules for their job. They have to think for themselves. For some of them, that’s hard.”
The colonel grinned, then frowned. “Too bad we depend on them so much.”
The dark of night. The cold outside and the warmth of the interior of the Mercedes. Pulling up at a stop light, he leaned to kiss her cheek. He kissed his fingertips and touched them to her breast.
She looked at him, those clear blue eyes pondering, assessing, knowing. She took his hand again, and squeezed. Then she sat back, against the window.
“What we do tonight will give me no choice but to stay with you to the bitter end.”
“You can get out now. I’ll stop the car and let you out. I’ll get the car back to you. If you want, I’ll get out. You’ve already done more than I’ve a right to ask.”
/> “Damn you, damn you, Charley Dresden. You’ve screwed up my life once again.”
The security guard, confronted by two extremely well-dressed people pounding on the door, snatched his consciousness back to full attention and hurried to open the door. Though he had grown up in a neighborhood of Jersey City where all norms and abnorms of human behavior could be witnessed on any weekend night with the temperature above zero, he was very surprised when Charley stuck the big gun in his ribs.
“I want you to take us into the tape room,” Dresden said, pulling out the man’s pistol from his holster. “Now.”
The man’s eyes widened with very genuine fear. It was probably the first such incident in his career as a security guard, certainly while working for the network.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “No problem, sir.”
There were two others in the huge chamber, one behind a desk and a second man filing tapes from a cart. They looked up, uncertainly, perhaps presuming Charley was an unexpected visitor from the network offices downtown.
“Tell them this is no joke and to do everything I say,” said Dresden.
“Do everything he says,” said the guard. “He’s got the biggest gun in the world.”
“Get against the wall, in the back, behind the shelves,” Charley said.
They hurried to it, Charley pushing the guard after them. The other two held up their hands.
“That’s not necessary,” Charley said. He glanced around. As he would expect at any kind of television facility, there was a large roll of gray gaffer’s tape on a shelf. The stuff of stagehands and floor directors, it was used for everything from sealing tape cartons and film cans to marking lines on studio floors to holding scenery together. It was about the strongest adhesive tape made.
Handing the two revolvers to Maddy, who held them a little clumsily, he quickly bound their captives’ ankles and wrists. He made the three sit down against the wall.
“This is going to take a long time and they’re going to get antsy,” he said, “Just shoot the first one that moves.”
She glanced at him, but kept steely control of her countenance. Settling into a chair, she took the pistol in both hands and held it in her lap, aiming it directly at the head of the man opposite her. He closed his eyes.
By Order of the President Page 33
