by Tom Clancy
The speedboat gained by the second. Came closer, closer, closer . . .
Finally it caught up, nosing past the stern, then rapidly pulling even with the pontooner’s keel, continuing to surge forward until the two vessels were moving along side-by-side.
Nimec stood there waiting some more. The racer trimmed speed to avoid overshooting its target, then veered in sharply as if to broadside it, but Nimec knew that was bluff for the very reasons he’d given Annie. The lightweight strike boat would get the worst of any collision.
He kept watching the racer as it clipped along beside him, a slim band of water separating the two vessels now. He saw the racer’s copilot move to its low portside gunwale, a Steyr in his hand. Then Nimec raised the barrel of his own gun to the safety rail’s upper bar, tilted it upward, and fired a volley high across the racer’s bow.
The copilot stared through his speed goggles, his gun pointed at Nimec over the gunwale. But Nimec didn’t think he would return fire unless directly engaged . . . these men were pros and it would be clear that his salvo had been a warning.
His gunstock against his arm, he met the copilot’s gaze and waited.
Whatever happened next, Nimec knew the call wasn’t his to make.
“I’m pulling off them.” Harrison said, his voice raised above the sound of the outboards.
The copilot glanced at him, his submachine gun still aimed at the pontoon boat.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
Harrison nodded.
“Those shots were a message,” he said. “He doesn’t want a fight and our orders haven’t changed.”
The copilot understood. Eckers had stressed that they were to avoid using their guns on either the boat or the Sword man, were to refrain from firing at all absent a deadly and immediate threat—and even then there must be absolutely no other recourse. The mission’s success hinged upon it looking like an accident.
He lowered the Steyr’s barrel from the gunwale.
“What now?”
“We radio Beauchart,” Harrison said.
“That gutless prick?”
Harrison nodded.
“Eckers is down,” he said. “Gutless or not he’s next in command.”
The copilot frowned at him. “I don’t like it,” he said.
Harrison wrenched the wheel to his right and went sheering away from the pontooner.
“Beauchart can have the choppers pick this up or do whatever else he bloody well wants,” he said. “It’s out of our hands from here.”
SEVEN
EASTERN CALIFORNIA
APRIL 2006
THEY HAD STARTED OUT IN THE DODGE COUPE from their appointed meeting place in Sonora and driven south on State Route 99 to cross the San Joaquin River some miles above Fresno. There Lathrop turned onto a series of local roads that took them eastward through the rolling dry country with its hills of eroded sandstone and occasional clumps of rough grass, sagebrush, and piñons on their dull, sunbaked faces.
The air conditioner worked well enough and they kept their windows shut as the temperature outside steadily climbed. Ricci sat in the passenger side saying very little, observing the monotonous scenery, and sipping coffee from the lid of the thermos bottle in the compartment between them. It had a thin, stale taste that got less palatable as they rode along, and was barely lukewarm by the time he noticed Lathrop slow the car coming up on a sign for some place called Amaranto.
Ricci remembered the smell of the coffee Julia Gordian had brought and how it had spread pleasantly in his dining room. Then he lowered his window partway, and as the hot air outside hit him, he extended his arm away from the flank of the car and sloshed what he had left in the plastic thermos lid onto the dusty blacktop.
Lathrop looked over at him.
“Don’t like my brew?”
“No.”
“Neither do I,” Lathrop said. “But it’s all we’ve got and I have to drive awhile longer.”
Ricci didn’t respond. He pressed the button to shut his window, put the lid back in place on the thermos, and glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle had fallen to just above the eighth-of-a-tank mark.
“We’re low on gas,” he said.
“I know.”
Ricci motioned toward the road sign. It had a generic pump symbol below it.
“We should probably fill up,” he said.
Lathrop shook his head.
“Not in Amaranto,” he said. “Unless you want to find trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“The sort with eyes and ears connected to the Quiros family,” Lathrop said.
Ricci grunted.
“Makes sense why you’re riding heavy on the brakes,” he said.
Lathrop gave him a small nod.
“I don’t want to get stopped by any badges,” he said. “They’re the ones with the high-speed connections.”
Ricci thought a moment. “How much farther to that ranch?”
“I told you, a while,” Lathrop said. “About five minutes after we pass the town exit, there’ll be an unmarked turnoff on the right. We’ll have to take it north for fifteen, twenty miles through a whole lot of nothing.”
Ricci leaned back, returned his eye to the fuel gauge.
“We’re cutting it close,” he said.
Lathrop shrugged, his hands on the wheel.
“Salvetti’s expecting us,” he said. “He’ll be ready with whatever we need.”
The turnoff led to a narrow, undivided road that ran away from the shoulders of the hills in meandering curves. Soon the ridges had almost disappeared behind them in the incessant flood of sunlight, and the surrounding landscape leveled into plains stubbled with more sagebrush, creosote shrubs, and, increasingly, widespread mats of those hardy grasses that somehow manage to thrive across the alkaline flats.
As they went on, the paved road became cracked and rutted from lack of maintenance and, with several bumps that seemed a final, rattling protest against this gradual but complete deterioration, surrendered to a hard dirt track that actually proved smoother by contrast. Looking out his window, Ricci saw brown- and white-fleeced goats grazing at the patches of grass in loosely defined groups, and then a weathered old barn with a couple of workhorses outside in a corral and chickens penned near some big, lounging mixed-breed watchdogs.
They rode for another three-quarters of a mile or so. Then Ricci spotted a vehicle up ahead in the glaring sun, a red open pickup truck. He could tell at once it wasn’t moving and, as they got closer, realized it had been pulled across the track to block their advance.
Lathrop nosed the Dodge to within a few yards of the truck, stopped, cut the engine, and waited. The pickup’s driver was its sole occupant, and a minute later he got out and approached the car. A solid, broad-shouldered man of about fifty with thick, neatly cut waves of salt-and-pepper hair, dark brown eyes, and a clean-shaven face with a firm, squarish chin, he wore a white T-shirt, dungarees, and cowboy boots.
Lathrop turned to Ricci.
“He’s going to want to put a name on you,” he said. “Any preferences?”
“Yeah,” Ricci said. “Mine.”
Lathrop shrugged and brought down his window as the man came around his side of the car, tugging a work glove off his right hand.
“Lathrop,” he said, and leaned over toward the window. “Been a long time.”
Lathrop nodded.
“Don’t know how you always manage to look the same.”
“That’s for me to know, and you to find out.”
“Sooner or later,” Lathrop said, “I will.”
The pickup driver grinned, reached his gloveless hand through the window, and gave Lathrop’s shoulder a masculine squeeze, his eyes going to Ricci’s face at the same time.
“Al Salvetti, Tom Ricci,” Lathrop said. “Ricci, Al.”
Salvetti took his hand off Lathrop’s shoulder and stretched it over the back of his seat. He grasped Ricci’s and shook it, holding his gaze on him a few s
econds longer.
“Good to meet you,” he said, then shifted his attention back to Lathrop. “I’ll turn my truck around and you can follow me up to the house. Got some food in the fridge, and everything ready for working out the details of the flight.”
Lathrop looked at him.
“We’re on fumes,” he said. “That old service station off the main road closed down and I wanted to steer clear of those sons of bitches in Amaranto.”
“Can’t blame you,” Salvetti said. “Hang on, I’ll bring a jerrican from the truck, put some gas in your tank to be on the safe side.”
Salvetti turned and started back toward the pickup.
“Doesn’t look like some boondocks rancher,” Ricci said, watching him. “Or sound like one.”
Lathrop faced him but didn’t say anything.
“Chicago, south side,” Ricci said. “I’d guess that’s the accent.”
Lathrop remained silent another moment and then shrugged.
“He is what he is,” he said. “If he used to be something else and wants to tell you about it, it’s up to him.”
Salvetti’s ranch house was a small, single-story building with rustic furnishings that looked as if they were mostly handcrafted. Its main room was off the kitchen and had a large trestle table with benches on either side, a Native American rug of some kind in the middle of the dark hardwood floor, and pine chests and chairs here and there around it. Ricci saw a computer in a hutch against one wall, a crowded bookshelf above it, and against the opposite wall a stereo with a turntable on a stand beside several stacked crates of vinyl albums. He didn’t notice a television.
“I’ve got something for your stomachs,” Salvetti said. He’d emerged from the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches and sweating ice-cold soda cans and set it at one end of the table. “Grab whatever you want; the bread and cheese are homemade.”
Lathrop sat on a bench and reached for a sandwich. Ignoring the food, Ricci stepped toward the opposite end of the table to look at a pile of open and semi-unfolded maps.
“These for us?” he said.
Salvetti nodded, came around next to him.
“I had most of them handy, downloaded the rest off the Internet. Aerials, government topos, Triple-A road maps.” He shuffled one out of the pile and fully outspread it. “This’s a satellite closeup of that area out there south of Yosemite.” He glanced over at Lathrop. “I circled off your major landmarks. The twin buttes, that creek . . . only thing I couldn’t locate is the Miwok trail. If it’s really there like the man told you, you’ll have to sniff it out on your own.”
Ricci looked at him.
“Miwok?”
“It’s the name somebody or other gave the Sierra Nevada Indian tribes after they were happy to call themselves Ahwaneechee for four thousand years,” Salvetti said.
“For God’s sake,” Lathrop said. “Listen to you.”
Salvetti smiled a little.
“It pays to know your neighbors,” he said. “Or at least to know who they are.”
Lathrop rose from the bench and joined the other two, carrying his sandwich with him.
“You decide on someplace to put us down?” he asked.
Salvetti slid a finger over the map until he got to a site he’d inked a heavy black ring around, then tapped it twice.
“This mesa here should be perfect,” he said. “It’s low and wide so you can hardly notice its elevation. Pretty naked, too, and that’s firsthand knowledge . . . I’ve flown over it before.” He paused. “Brings you to within five miles of those buttes, the closest I can get.”
Ricci looked at him again.
“Seems like it’d be a rough landing.”
Salvetti seemed mildly surprised by his remark.
“I tell people I can bring them anywhere in my plane,” he said. “They won’t ever hear me guarantee it’s going to be easy.”
The moment he entered the hut, Pedro saw Marissa Vasquez watching him from her place on the floor. Always, she watched him. And always looking back into her eyes filled Pedro with a venom for this schooled and coddled daughter of privilege that only equaled his desire to have his way with her. It was as if the hateful resentment and lust fueled each other, and he wanted her to feel its relentless, intolerable inner burning just as he felt it. Physically feel its volcanic release inside her. And soon enough, when the time came, he would do it. He would treat her no better than the cheap Tijuana whores he left weeping in pain and degradation on their filthy sheets, on their bare backs, his crumpled bills reclaimed from the purses in which they had stuffed them. Treat her without even as much regard, for they did not ever think to stand up taller than he. Soon, yes, soon. Pedro would give her what roared within him like an angry, hungering beast, pound it into her, and as she fought and cried out in resistance, he would let her have still more of it. He would force upon her an education that not all her father’s wealth could have provided, show her for once what it was to live in common flesh. And in that sharing Pedro would take something from her as well, for whatever long or short time she had left. And there, for him, would be the true and lasting satisfaction.
He stepped toward her in his combat-booted feet now, stood with hands on his hips. Her face was gaunt from weariness and anxiety, her hair hanging around it in tousled disarray. But her eyes were sharp and clear.
And they watched him
“I have good news, hermosa,” he said. And glanced at her constant guard. “If César has not already broken it.”
Marissa said nothing. The guard shook his head slightly but did not otherwise move. He would, of course, never have taken it upon himself to tell her of the information that had reached them from Modesto.
“A man comes to free you,” Pedro said. “As soon as today, I am led to believe.”
She did not speak.
“He has been sent by your father,” he said. “A gringo whose services the millionaire Esteban Vasquez has bought, as he always buys his adored niña’s safety and comfort with his money.”
She studied Pedro’s masked face with restrained interest, as if not wishing to yield him the gratification of a perceived ruse. Her composed silence and stillness clawed at his stomach, made him impatient for the release he himself held tightly in check.
“Do you believe me about this?” he asked.
She did not speak.
“Do you believe me?” he repeated, an insistent edge in his voice.
Marissa finally shrugged.
“I’m not sure about anything my father will do,” she said. “If someone comes, I suppose I’ll know.”
“Perhaps only after I throw your rescuer’s dead body at your feet,” Pedro said. “For the impressive gringo who comes for you, this one who is said to have delivered the daughter of a great and famous American businessman from her own unfortunate captivity, has been betrayed by his compañero for the money of the millionaire who pays me.” He showed a grin through the mouth opening of his balaclava. “We know where he will arrive. We know about when. And even now my men disperse to set their trap for him.”
Marissa looked at him without answering.
Pedro’s grin hardened. “So what do you think, flora?” he said. “Of how money brings us full circle, and the rest?”
She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, released a drawn out but steady breath.
“I don’t know what to say that you would understand,” she replied.
Pedro stared at the girl a second, feeling the angry urge to take her right there and then. On the ground, in the dirt, with his hands around her throat, he would add to her humiliation by doing it while César watched. But then he caught hold of himself. This affair was not over, not yet. If he was to collect on his own fee, he must still be bound to Juan Quiros’s wishes.
He turned back through the hut entrance, suddenly perspiring under his full face hood, his mouth parched with thirst. Outside, he started to reach for the water canteen on his gear belt but changed his mind, his hand going inst
ead to the metal flask of whiskey in his breast pocket.
The deep swig Pedro took quenched neither his thirst nor his seething rage. He had not expected that it would.
The slut’s time was coming, he thought, and swiped a hand across his lips.
Not yet, no. Not yet.
But coming.
Salvetti drove them a short distance past his ranch house and then pulled the truck to a halt. Up ahead, a single-prop Grumman Tiger sat on a twelve-hundred-foot improved airstrip.
“That plane come with the ranch?” Ricci asked from the backseat.
Salvetti craned his head around.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “The chickens also.”
Ricci just looked at him.
Salvetti turned away, pushed open his door, glanced up at the cloudless sky, and checked his watch.
“Haul out your gear and I’ll get us loaded aboard and flaps-down in the air,” he said. “Under these flying conditions, we should be over the Sierra in a hop and a skip.”
Pedro pushed through a tangle of manzanita and joined the three lookouts he’d posted on the other side. Then he gazed straight ahead northward, where the double buttes heaved up from the flat valley bottom, scored and knobbed with erosion, but stacked high above the surrounding landscape as if in a display of resistant strength.
After a moment Pedro turned to the man beside him. Leaving the hut out of sight had quieted his ache for their captive in a way the whiskey had not, but now he felt a restlessness to spring the ambush. It would, Juan Quiros had promised, be an action well worth his trouble.
“I take it the others are on the move, Lafé?” he asked.
“As you ordered,” the guard said.
Pedro grunted with satisfaction, looked toward the buttes again. Though still washed in afternoon heat, he could barely wait for the chirping of the insects to announce dusk’s arrival in the valley.
“The maricone will come for the girl from the direction of those spires,” he said. “And he will go to his death under their shadows.”
