Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  Raul felt his insides tighten up. “Look, man, I been straight with you alla way. How come we got to run through this again—?”

  “You boost a set of wheels, deliver it to Armand’s chop shop heaven, he pays with crack,” the guy said. “Yes or no?”

  Raul continued to hesitate. He was thinking bleakly about the deal he’d had going with Jose, thinking what an unbelievable piece of luck it had looked to be when they met through Raul’s sister, who had been seeing Jose for a while before she hooked them up a couple weeks back. Since then they’d pulled some inside jobs that had been worth a bundle . . . especially with their terms being wheels in exchange for crack, like the man in the backseat had put it. With flat cash you couldn’t turn it over to double or even triple your profits.

  Now Raul took a breath, held it, blew it out his mouth.

  “Yeah,” he said finally. Even his voice was quivering now. “That how it works.”

  There was another period of silence, this one longer than the last. Blackness swarming the SUV’s windows, no other vehicles in sight, Raul drove on toward what he felt would be certain death, trying to figure how things could have gone downhill for him so fast. That first time at his sister’s place, Jose explained he was a salesman at a dealership in some rich gringo suburb, place with a huge fucking showroom and lot, and that he had access to whatever Raul needed to jack a carriage nice and easy—keys to the building, codes for the gate alarm protecting its outdoor lot, electronic car door openers and starters, even dealer temps and registration documents for him to wave around if he got hauled over by cops. Just as sweet, he could tip Raul to the delivery of a new consignment, give him a chance to roll out a few of the vehicles before they were entered into the computerized inventory.

  Raul had really gotten his ass stoked when Jose told him about the expensive Navigators that had arrived, two of them, both cherry and loaded right off the double-decker truck. This was just the other day when they arrived with a big shipment, and he’d known he could drive one from the lot, and that nobody would notice it was gone for at least a month, six weeks. It would probably be another month afterward until the dealer and factory sorted out whether it had been delivered to the lot, or hauled to the wrong one by mistake, or disappeared somewhere else along the way from the production line . . . no way the setup could’ve have been sweeter. Taking carriages from the dealership was a slam compared to looking for them on the street, where you had to get lucky and find a target that had been left with its door unlocked, or make sure you knew how to bust its antitheft system if it had one, maybe even a GPS tracker—and that was while having to look over your shoulder for its owner, the five-oh, or just some busybody asshole solid citizen who couldn’t keep his eyes in his head where they belonged. Raul had almost never worried about being pinched since he’d got down with Jose, and wouldn’t in his worst nightmares have thought he’d find himself in the spot he was in right now. The thing was here . . . the thing was that the chop shop would show in his headlights soon, and then what was he supposed to do?

  Raul drove through the night, not the slightest clue in his mind, seeing only the worst in store. He had driven maybe another quarter mile toward their destination before the questions started coming at him again.

  “Tell me how many of Quiros’s men I can expect,” the guy in back said.

  Raul clutched the wheel with whitening knuckles. This was a subject they hadn’t touched on yet, and it had rated high among his wishes that they would not get to it. It wasn’t enough that the hijo de puta had set a trap for him at that streetlight, forced him into taking this suicide ride. He had to keep digging him a deeper hole.

  “Can’t be sure,” he said

  “Tell me how many,” the guy repeated. “And where they’ll be.”

  “Listen, man, please, I don’ know—”

  Raul suddenly felt a cold, circular pressure between his neck and the base of his skull. He stiffened with fear, not needing to look around to know his passenger had jammed the silenced barrel of his .45 semiauto into him.

  “Give it up,” the guy said.

  “I don’ wanna die,” Raul said.

  “Don’t be stupid. You already brought me this far along. You think it’ll square things with them if you don’t tell me?”

  “I don’ wanna die.”

  “Then prove you’ve got an ounce of brains that isn’t fried, Raul,” the guy said. And then paused a moment. “That’s your real name, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You wouldn’t have lied to me about it.”

  “No, man, I swear.”

  The guy nudged his head forward with the gun barrel.

  “Understand this,” he said. “I start to think you did lie, I can’t trust your word on anything else. And that would make you useless to me.”

  Raul felt his stomach lurch.

  “It my name,” he said. “Swear to God it my name.”

  A second or two lapsed. Raul felt the weapon easing back from his head.

  “All right, Raul, I’m about to pass along some free wisdom,” the guy said. “Armand won’t care if I hijacked my way into this cart, or you wore white valet gloves letting me through its door. One makes you a foul-up and a loser, the other a sellout. Either way he’ll have you capped without even thinking about any second chances.”

  “An’ how ’bout you?” Raul said, fighting down panic. “We get to the garage, you gonna give me one?”

  “I have a cross-country Greyhound ticket and expense money in my pocket that says so,” the guy said. “Ride this out with me, you can hop on a bus, visit some relatives far away from here. Or sell the ticket and buy a whole lot of stuff to fill your crack pipe. No skin off mine whatever you decide.”

  Raul felt the slow heavy stroke of his heart in the short silence that followed.

  “Ain’t got no shot at makin’ it,” he said. “Gonna get myself hurt, don’t care what you say.”

  There was another silence that lasted perhaps half a minute. Then the guy in the backseat leaned forward, coming so close Raul could practically feel his lips brush against his ear.

  “It’s long odds,” he said. “But I’m all that stands between you and crapping out.”

  The Navigator rolled over the snaking, undivided blacktop. In its cargo section, Lathrop glanced out the front windshield, and then through the limotinted windows to either side of him. The chop shop was just ahead to the left. A little closer up on the right he saw the junkyard, its orderly rows of scrap metal hills stretching off into the darkness.

  He let his Mark 23 pistol sink below Raul’s headrest.

  “You look jumpy,” he said. “Relax.”

  “Been tryin’, man.”

  “Try harder,” Lathrop said. “If Armand’s guards smell you’re scared, we’ll never get past them.”

  Raul inhaled. “What gonna happen after we in the garage? Happen, you know, to me?”

  Lathrop shrugged.

  “Just worry about bringing us in,” he said. “And about making sure I can believe what comes out of your mouth.”

  Raul shook his head, his nervous, rasping breaths very loud over the smooth hum of the engine.

  “Why you got to be doubtin’ me like that?” he said with a kind of fearful indignance. “I swore to God, man. Can swear on my mother’s life, you wan’ me to—”

  “Save it,” Lathrop said. “ ‘Long as I’m the man with the gun, I figure your word’s probably good.”

  He was of course telling an outright lie of his own.

  Lathrop watched the Nav’s headlight beams creep toward the edge of the parking lot, thinking it didn’t matter how many times Raul swore up and down to him, or on whom or what he did his swearing. All Lathrop really trusted was what he’d known firsthand about Armand Quiros’s operations before tonight. This included the answers to most of the questions he’d asked Raul on the way here, answers he had compared against Raul’s responses to get an idea of whether or not he was being purposely deceptive
, almost as if he’d been setting the baseline for a polygraph test . . . though it couldn’t be forgotten for a minute that the kid was a pathetic, strung-out crackhead. When the squeeze got too tight, he would say anything he thought might help buy him some wiggle room.

  Still, Lathrop had learned enough about the garage from his reconnaissance. Learned its location, its size, its outward appearance, and its immediate surroundings. He had also tracked Armand’s normal patterns of movement in and around Devoción. Found out how many guards usually traveled with him from San Diego, and the number of lookouts—mostly young men from town—he kept hanging around the garage and its lot. As Raul had said, though, the place was windowless. Since Lathrop hadn’t yet learned the trick of seeing through solid walls from Clark Kent, he’d obtained no advance knowledge of its interior layout, or where Armand would sit down to take care of his private business.

  Assuming the kid hadn’t tried to sucker him, he knew now.

  Lathrop peered out through the windshield, saw several parked cars in the lot, and noted the shadowy figures of Quiros’s lookouts in the cast of the SUV’s lights. There were five, maybe six of them hanging around near the building’s corrugated steel roll-up doors.

  “Turn on the rearview video,” he said.

  The kid was shaking his head again.

  “That ain’t gonna work while I got us in Drive,” he said. “They make it for when people goin’ backward, you know. When they can’t see what’s behind ’em inna mirror—”

  “Go ahead,” Lathrop said. “Turn it on.”

  Raul obliged without further comment, reaching over to push the dashboard LCD’s control button. Its cover panel slid up above the screen.

  Lathrop thought for a second, still looking out the windows.

  “Okay, Raul, listen close,” he said. “Here’s what you’re going to do next . . .”

  Raul stopped at the parking lot entrance, his window about halfway down like the man behind him wanted it. Then he waited in silence as a couple of the lookouts outside the garage strode toward the Navigator. He recognized the first to approach as a dude named Pedro.

  “Hola, Papi, what’chu bring tonight?” the lookout said, mixing Spanish and English. He was a little older than Raul—around twenty-three or twenty-four. Lived right in town, hung out with Raul and his cousin at the cantina every so often.

  “Ain’ no Matchbox toy, man.” Raul forced a grin.

  Pedro grinned back at him, came around to the driver’s side, clasped his hand through the window. Tall, skinny, he wore a two-tone gray basketball warmup suit and a bright purple-and-yellow paisley skullcap with a long, flowing neck shade that made him look like some kind of flashy Arab camel herder. There was a small diamond stud in each ear, another in his right nostril. On a band around his arm was a gum-stick MP3 player.

  He pressed a button on the audio player, plucked out a stereo earbud, and let it dangle over his shoulder, leaving the other earbud in place.

  “Es un machin mas bárbaro,” he said, admiring the vehicle’s shiny new flank. “This high line merch.”

  “Sí, Pedro.”

  “She somethin’ else, bro.”

  “Sí, eso es.”

  Raul rested his left elbow over the upper edge of the window and leaned against the door, struggling to look calm, look relaxed like the crazy man in back had put it, while intentionally blocking Pedro’s view of the Nav’s interior with his upper body.

  “Armand still around?” he said.

  Pedro nodded over his shoulder at the garage, his eyes still admiring the vehicle. “Bet she tricked out nice—”

  “Armand gonna wan’ to see her.”

  The lookout was in no apparent hurry in spite of Raul’s growing insistence. He leaned against the car, propping himself against the driver’s door with both hands.

  “Like to be havin’ a look inside on my own,” he said. “A ver, how ’bout you let me see . . .”

  Raul drew erect. His head ached and his pulse was racing in his ears. He had the vehicle in Reverse, his foot on the brake pedal to keep it from slipping backward and, more important, to keep its rear lights on. According to Crazy Man, they would give off enough brightness for the cargo hatch’s built-in video camera to serve some kind of purpose.

  But he couldn’t just sit here with Pedro getting ready to climb in front with him. If he could have just taken a hit off his pipe before he got here, one hit, he’d have been able to handle things without feeling like the walls of his skull were closing in around his brain, mashing his brain to a pulp.

  “Que pasa?” he said. “Been drivin’ all night, know what I’m sayin? Wanna take care’a my shit.”

  A moment passed. Another. Raul’s head kept throbbing to the accelerated beat of his heart.

  Finally Pedro frowned with disappointment, boosted himself off the Nav, and held up his palms in acquiescence.

  “Yo, chill, I hear you,” he said, looking quickly around at the garage.

  Raul saw one of the dark figures outside the vehicle bays reach for a wall-mounted control box next to the automatic door. As the door started to rise, he almost crumpled in his seat with relief.

  “You wan’, I give you a ride into town when you done,” Pedro said, studying Raul curiously. Then his expression sharpened, and he added in a low, confidential whisper, “El basuco alvidar mis hambres.”

  The crack will fill our hunger.

  Raul looked at him, momentarly speechless. He’d been struggling to hide the unbearable fear and need at his core, but realized now that the need showing through might have been the best thing he could have wished for. That it was all that had disguised the other.

  “Bien,” he said at last, and nodded. “I got you covered.”

  Pedro gave him another soul handshake, his grip lingering a few seconds. “Hey, awright,” he said with a grin.

  Raul flashed a pretend grin in return. Then he pulled his hand back through the window, shut it, and reached for the shifter.

  On his belly in the Nav’s cargo section, his balaclava pulled up so that only his eyes were visible through its narrow opening, Lathrop looked between its two front seats at the video display. He’d thought he might have seen someone’s outline at its left-hand border . . . a dim, fuzzy human silhouette flitting into the image, such as it was. But that had been several seconds ago. Now he saw only the faint red glow of the vehicle’s taillights tinting the blacktop.

  His gaze steady on the screen, Lathrop heard Raul and the lookout conclude their exchange. I got you covered. Hey, awright. It had been dicey having the kid lower his window more than a little—Lathrop knew he’d have been discovered in an instant had Pedro stuck his head in. But if Raul had kept the window any higher up, it would have invited suspicion, given the appearance he had something to conceal.

  Lathrop had weighed his choices, and what he saw now seemed to confirm he’d made the right one. The lookout had stepped away from the vehicle, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his warm-ups.

  Raul had managed to get by him.

  Now he raised his window, shifted into Drive, and rolled across the lot toward the garage.

  That instantly killed the video, but Lathrop hadn’t expected it to be of any real use until they got inside. The rearview camera was a crummy excuse for a spy eye, meant to help an Average Joe driver avoid backing over toddlers, pissing dogs, and low stationary obstacles in his mirror’s blind spots . . . not pick out roving Quiros stooges in a dark nowhere like this. A crummy, inadequate option with a range that extended fifteen feet at best. Still, Lathrop had gotten a sense of what he could expect from the thing.

  As the Navigator began to move, he slipped his free hand under his partially unbuttoned tac jacket and withdrew a shoulder-slung MP7 compact assault gun he’d carried tucked away against his side at the ready, keeping the other hand around the .45’s checkered rubber grip. He had prepared carefully for tonight’s work and knew they were pieces he could count on.

  Lathrop would hav
e liked to know if anybody was out in the dark circling the wagon, though. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he wouldn’t have minded having a second pair of eyes to cover the very dangerous blind spots in his own sight. But he had gotten along with less than he wanted before, and there had been three million dollars’ worth of incentive for him to do it again tonight.

  Just ahead now, the garage’s vehicle bay was opening wide for the Nav. Lathrop pressed his chest almost flat against the carpet. He hadn’t seen or heard Pedro indicate he wanted the door retracted, yet the lookout had somehow given the okay to somebody before his prolonged handshake with Raul.

  Lathrop wondered if his quick glance around could have been it, decided that explanation didn’t wash. The garage was about a hundred feet away, and it was too dark a night for that look to have been seen clearly by anyone out front. So what was the signal? He pictured the MP3 player on the lookout’s arm, asked himself if maybe it wasn’t what it seemed. A hands-free radio unit could be easily modified to look like an audio player and equipped with an ear/bone microphone that would pick up the wearer’s words from vibrations in his skull. If that were the case, Pedro would have barely needed to move his lips to give his order.

  It occurred to Lathrop that Enrique Quiros, who’d packaged the family business in his tech savvy and Stanford degrees, would have appreciated exactly that kind of touch. And though his cousin and former underboss Armand had a reputation as a throwback player with more muscle than brains, it might indicate that at least some of Enrique’s modern standards of criminality were being carried on two years after he’d been erased from the world.

  Lathrop put that thought aside as the Navigator reached the garage, cool white fluorescent light rinsing over it from the open bay entrance. Raul stopped just outside it, his foot on the brake.

  About thirty seconds passed. Lathrop scooched forward, raised his chin slightly to look out the windshield, saw two men stepping over to the Nav from inside the garage. Lean, dark, curly haired, they looked enough alike to be brothers. One of them wore a black-and-silver rugby pullover shirt, a handgun bulging a little under the shirt, his neck zipper lowered to showcase the tats on his chest. The other had on a flamingo pink button-down with short sleeves, its untucked tails hanging loosely over the belt holster clipped to his jeans. He also had a lot of ink on his arms. Neither man wore a vest or had taken very much trouble to conceal his weapon. Placing strut over smarts.