Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  A moment later Eckers spun away from the curb and started back down the drive to the gate.

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

  Tom Ricci knew as he awoke that he was hung over. It was the dry graininess in his eyes, the sour taste on his tongue, the headache and burning stomach. This wasn’t his first time, not by far, and he knew.

  He stretched out a hand, found the other side of the bed empty, and lay back in the morning light eking through the window blinds. He remembered her drawing them shut while he’d started to undress her, tugging at the cord as he worked on her blouse from behind. The pile of clothing had built up fast. Hers first, then his—they’d made a bet at the bar and he’d won. Ricci had gaps in his recollection of the night before, but that was among the parts that had stuck. There were enough of those, especially of what they’d done when they got back to her place, even if he couldn’t recall what their bet had been over.

  He remained very still, his head on the pillow, not bothering to look around for her. She was in the kitchenette; he could hear her through its Dutch doors, opening and closing the cabinet, moving things around. Her apartment was small, a studio—hard to get lost in here for very long.

  A minute or two passed. Ricci listened to her in the kitchenette, holding out the slim hope that she’d put up some coffee. But he didn’t hear the maker gurgling and supposed he’d have caught whiff of a finished pot.

  He pulled off his covers, sat up naked on the edge of the bed, felt his brain slosh against his skull. He was slower leaning down to check for his holstered FiveSeven, making sure it was there underneath the bed where he’d left it.

  Devon appeared from the kitchen entrance wearing a short robe of some silky black material and carrying a black melamine serving tray in both hands. She collected Melmac and vintage Ray-Bans and body jewelry, bought them through online auctions. With only two closets and a single cupboard over its half-height refrigerator for storage, her apartment became easily cluttered, but she kept the place neat and planned to start looking for a bigger one soon. The sunglasses were professional accessories, she said. For her costumes when she danced. She’d had the strategic piercings done for work and play, but keep it quiet from the IRS, she said. Melmac was strictly a hobby, and she liked the black pieces best. Black was her favorite color, and “black velvet” was the hardest shade of Melmac to find, she said.

  Ricci supposed he’d learned a few things about her that weren’t in the basic course requirements.

  She crossed the room to the bed in her bare feet, a bottle of Drambuie and two crystal cordial glasses on the Melmac tray, their drinks already poured. She set the tray down on the nightstand, picked up the glasses, carried them over to him, and held his out.

  Ricci looked at her fingers around the glass. Their nails were long and carefully painted and manicured. She paid a lot of attention to her appearance and he supposed some of that would be for professional reasons, too.

  “Hair of the dog,” she said.

  “Maybe we ought to try those morning-after pills.”

  Devon kept his glass between them without lowering it, gave him a slight smile over its rim.

  “I already took one, just a different kind,” she said, and wobbled the glass. “Come on. My arm’s getting stiff.”

  “No,” he said.

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to use that word.”

  “Who says?”

  “You,” she replied. “Last night.”

  Ricci looked at her. The two of them hadn’t done a lot of sleeping, and her large blue eyes were a little bloodshot. In the timid light coming through the blinds, with her makeup off, he could see faint dark crescents under them.

  By tonight, when she danced under the bright lights, she would have erased or covered up the dark spots, made sure she was looking fresh for her admirers. Keeping up that appearance.

  “We’ve been drinking too much,” he said.

  She put the Drambuie in his hand, reached for her own glass, and sat close beside him on the bed, her legs crossed yoga-style, the hem of her robe brushing up their bare thighs.

  “Here, here,” she said.

  They clinked and drained their glasses and sat holding them in silence. Ricci felt the warmth of the sweet, powerful liqueur spread through him.

  “It’d be good if we went out for a walk,” he said. “Got some air, put something solid in our stomachs.”

  She moved closer to him, put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It would be better if we stay right here and mess around,” she said.

  Ricci glanced at the display of his WristLink wearable. Nice that they hadn’t made him turn it in with his Sword tag.

  “It’s almost noon,” he said.

  “I’m not due at the club till five o’clock.”

  “Happy hour.”

  “Maybe for the regulars.” Devon shrugged her shoulders. “We’ve got all day.”

  Ricci looked at her. “What about A.J.?”

  Devon shifted her body a little but stayed there close against him.

  “You didn’t have to mention him.”

  “He might decide he wants to see you.”

  “That’s what answering machines are for,” she said. “He never shows up without calling first.”

  “And you won’t care about the phone ringing. Or him leaving messages on the machine.”

  “I’ll turn off the ringer, and you can distract me from the blinking light.” She paused. “A.J. doesn’t decide who I will or won’t fuck.”

  Ricci looked at her.

  “Kind of obvious,” he said.

  They studied each other awhile. Then Ricci lowered his eyes to his empty glass and smiled a little.

  “What’s so funny?” she said.

  Ricci shrugged.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe something about my sitting here with no clothes on, and talking about us having an affair behind your married boyfriend’s back.”

  Devon massaged his arm with her fingertips.

  “Since when does it bother you?” she said.

  Ricci shrugged a second time, leaned across her, reached for the open bottle of Drambuie on the nightstand, and refilled their glasses.

  “Bottoms up,” he said.

  They drank and sat quietly on the bed. Then Ricci took the glass from her hand, put it on the tray alongside his own.

  When he turned back to her, she had loosened the sash of her robe, let the robe fall partially open around her body.

  He looked into her eyes. They were still a little red and also overbright now from the alcohol. Probably his weren’t any different.

  He kept his gaze on hers without saying anything, and reached out, and tugged her robe the rest of the way open a bit roughly, and holding it like that moved his eyes down to her breasts, and let them linger there before taking a long look at the rest of her, and then slowly brought them back to her eyes. He was aware all the while of her touch on his leg, her hand probing, taking hold of him as greedily as his eyes had taken in her body.

  “We don’t have any shame,” Ricci said.

  “Like you said, we drink too much.”

  Ricci looked at her, his head swimming.

  “That our excuse?”

  “If you need one,” she said, and then shrugged out of the robe, and fell into his arms.

  He kissed her, and she tumbled onto her back with her mouth against his, biting his lower lip, running her nails over his shoulders, and down his back, and down, digging them into his skin.

  The smooth silk of the open robe bunched in his fist, his face tightened into what almost might have been a look of pain, Ricci moved over her, a hard thrust that she arched her hips to receive.

  “What about our walk?” she said, the words coming out in a broken moan.

  “We’ve got all day,” Ricci said.

  TWO

  BAJA PENINSULA, MEXICO APRIL 2006

  IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT WHEN THE LINCOLN Navigator reached the outskirts of Devoción,
a tiny dust spot on the road some forty miles south of the U.S. border and roughly midway between Mexicali and the smuggler’s hive of Tecate. Unmarked by direction posts, excluded from most maps of the Peninsula for its slumbery irrelevance to tourists, Devoción was known to locals as the birthplace and original home territory of the brothers Lucio and Raul Salazar, two of the three Magi of Tijuana—Los Rayos Magos de Tijuana, in Spanish—so called for the blessings and protection they had once bestowed upon their underlings and lesser allies in a widespread theft, money laundering, and narcotics trafficking empire they built from scratch.

  Devoción translates directly into English as “devotion,” a word defined as a profound, earnest attachment or religious dedication.

  The Spanish give it another meaning as well: to be at another’s full and absolute disposal.

  For the three decades that the Salazars controlled their native stronghold, it was the latter definition that its sparse peasant community might have best understood. Yet while fear was a constant for them, and obedience to the cartel law, they were grateful for the many tangible dividends of their loyalty. It had meant a meager but steady income, food on the table, and good clothes gifted to the children at Christmas. It had meant paved sidewalks for the town’s main street, a new church, and even a movie house that screened first-run American films. Disloyalty would bring swift retribution, but the magnanimity of those who governed was never without strings, and the clear-cut threat of knife and gun could be easier to abide than the hypocrisy of corrupt Federales and their stacked courtrooms.

  This state of affairs had undergone an explosive upheaval when Lucio Salazar and his rival Enrique Quiros were killed on a night of vengeance and rumored double-cross up over the border in San Diego. No one in Devoción seemed to quite know what ignited the bloody violence. But the warfare between their formerly cooperative families had left the Salazars on the losing end of the struggle, and allowed Enrique’s successors to extend Quiros dominance into their vacated borderland territories, including the village at the real and symbolic heart of Salazar power.

  Afterward, Devoción had quickly settled down to life as usual. Its five hundred or so inhabitants now pledged allegiance to the Quiros family, who, like their predecessors, continued to put bread and butter on their tables in return. Streets were dusty, faces were resigned and suspicious, and the kids bouncing through the alleys at all hours wore clean white Nike sneakers come the holidays. At the south edge of town, the chop shop garage that was a pet operation of the Salazars—whose lawless careers had started out with their driving hot American cars down across sierra country to the ports of San Felipe and La Fonda, where they were crated and shipped overseas—remained as active as when Lucio had taken in multimillion-dollar profits from the cannibalized auto parts racket, perhaps more so since the garage had become a roof for other lucrative areas of criminal distribution.

  A competent mechanic was rarely undervalued, and every man who had worked there for Lucio had retained his job.

  The Navigator, boosted up north, had been headed to the chop shop for disassembly when things went crazy.

  In its driver’s seat, his eyes throbbing in his skull, so wide open with fear and apprehension they felt ready to pop from their sockets, Raul Luiza suddenly recognized the tall, broad shape of Devoción’s Catholic church up ahead on his left. His hands moist around the steering wheel, he saw the church, saw the enormous cross atop its spire outlined darkly against the yellow moon, and realized with fresh dread that time was running out. La Iglesia de Jesus Christos, it was named. The Church of Jesus Christ. But it was the name of Quiros that the villagers had been calling on to answer their prayers for the past couple of years, the same as he’d done in his own way.

  Tonight, though, Raul had started the long list of regrets he’d compiled in his mind wishing to Jesus, the Virgin Mother, and all the blessed saints that he’d never heard of it. From there he’d moved on to wishing he’d listened to his old lady for once, hung at Anna’s crib like she’d practically begged of him. Had he done that, stayed there with her, they could have stepped out to score some rock, put the kid to bed early, everything would have been different. But he’d ignored her, and instead hustled over to the car dealership, where it all turned bad for him, turned to absolute shit in a hurry—

  Raul tightened his sweaty, trembling grip on the wheel. He could remember his cousins in Devoción wanting to parade through town with joy when the Quiros family moved in, remember them chirping like perequitos about how those dudes walked a young man’s walk, talked a young man’s talk, dudes were players who brought some San Diego street with them, a big city style that would open doors most people hadn’t even dreamed of knocking on when those old-school fat cats the Salazars were on top.

  Even in his gaining despair, Raul thought that was kind of funny. In fact, he might have laughed aloud if he hadn’t suspected that was something the man in the backseat would want explained . . . and he’d already asked too many questions, following every answer Raul him gave with another.

  Now Raul passed the rear of the church as the road swung off to his right along the foot of the low mesa west of town. He took a final glance at the cross staring down from high above him, then turned his attention back to the road even before the church vanished from sight behind the curve of the mesa’s slope.

  Raul drove on, his tremors growing steadily worse . . . and it wasn’t all because of nerves. Goddamn , he thought. Goddamn. If his stem had been in his pocket, he’d have tried to talk the head case in back into letting him stop on the way down from Chula Vista, take a few pulls. Just a couple on his way down and he would’ve been okay. Or okay enough to keep his hands steady on the wheel. But the guy had stamped his kit into the sidewalk, dumped his vials and everything else down a sewer after frisking him clean—

  “How long until we’re at the shop?”

  Raul jerked at the sound of the voice behind him.

  “I tol’ you,” he said without glancing over his shoulder. “Wasn’t five minutes ago I tol’ you . . .”

  “Tell me again.”

  Raul took a breath. He’d driven the entire distance from Chula trying to convince himself he’d make it through this jam, find a way to get out of it alive and whole if he could only manage to keep his cool.

  “Two, three miles up, we gon’ see it,” he said. “Be onna left side th’ road.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  “Jus’ a garage, you know.”

  “Describe it.”

  Raul shrugged tensely.

  “Place made ’a big cement blocks. Sorta square, got no windows. There a parkin’ lot goes aroun’ it . . .”

  “A paved parking lot.”

  “Uh-huh. Like I say before—”

  “I want to hear more about the garage,” the guy behind him cut in. “How many entrances does it have for vehicles?”

  “Two in front, two onna side.”

  “The south side?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Means they’d be facing us when we pull up, that right?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  There was a beat of silence. The Navigator’s high-beams slid over the road.

  “Tell me what else is nearby,” the guy in the backseat said.

  “Lotta nothin’.”

  “Describe ‘nothing’ to me.”

  Raul took another breath. This was some kind of scary hombre he’d picked up, not that he’d done it by choice. Wore a black jacket and pants with all kinds of outside pouches and shit, besides having one of them SWAT cop masks, or hoods, or whatever it was called, pulled down around his neck. Except Raul was pretty convinced he wasn’t a cop.

  “Ain’ no houses, no stores, nothin’,” he said. Then hesitated, thinking. “ ’Cept, you know, the junkyard.”

  “What kind?”

  “Huh?”

  “What kind of junk gets dumped there?”

  Raul grunted his understanding.

  “All kinda parts for
cars,” he said.

  “You’re sure.”

  “Right—”

  “You have some reason for not mentioning this yard to me before?”

  Raul shook his head. The motherfucker never got tired of grilling him, asking the same questions over and over in different ways . . .

  “Wasn’t keepin’ no secrets, that what you mean,” he said. “Thought you was askin’ about buildings.”

  The guy didn’t answer. Raul glanced at him in the rearview mirror, saw a look on his face that he’d already noticed more than once. He’d gone perfectly still, his head kind of tilted to the side, his upper lip curled back a little, his eyes far off and at the same time right there and honed in . . . the way a cat looked when it was waiting for some rodent to crawl out of a hole so it could pounce and tear it apart. It was like he was reading signs in the air Raul couldn’t see, or listening to sounds he couldn’t hear, scary as hell.

  Raul wondered what he was thinking and planning, asked himself if he could have ever seen that face before tonight and somehow forgotten it. It was long, thin, pale. Black hair combed straight back from the forehead, eyes dark as the night outside. Still as could be when that weird, focused-on-his-own-thing look came over him. Not a face anybody could read. Or forget.

  The guy was a stranger, Raul concluded. A total stranger.

  He lowered his eyes from the mirror, afraid his passenger would notice the close scrutiny.

  “Let’s get back to Armand Quiros,” the guy said barely a moment later. “What makes you so sure he’s going to be at the garage tonight?”

  Raul chewed his bottom lip. He’d figured they’d come around to Armand again, wasn’t stupid enough to think the guy was finished asking about him. That hadn’t stopped Raul from hoping, but you had to expect it, know what was going down here.

  “He hands on,” he said with reluctance. “Like bein’ the one does the payout.”

  “The payout in drugs.”