“I want double what you paid me.”
Vásquez shrugged his uniformed shoulders, pointed to the diagonal trucks, and the four young men waiting outside them. And all of them simultaneously—without raising their weapons—put their right index finger on the trigger.
Hoffmann magnified the telescope on his rifle and moved the bull’s-eye to the center of Captain Vásquez’s forehead, aimed at the point between his eyebrows.
Eighty degrees outside. Hoffmann’s left hand on the rifle’s telescope. Windless. The small screw gently between his index finger and thumb. Distance ninety meters. He turned, one click.
TPR1. Transport right one. Object in sight.
“Be careful, Il Capitano . . . you know as well as I do that accidents happen easily out here in the jungle. So listen very closely, Vásquez—you’re not getting any more money.”
Through the telescopic sight, Hoffmann was almost a part of that thin skin, wrinkling up on the forehead, eyebrows drawing together. Captain Vásquez had just been threatened. And reacted. What had been confidence and self-control now became aggression and attack.
“In that case, I hereby confiscate your transport.”
Hoffmann felt it. They were on their way there. Where he didn’t want to go. Right index finger lightly on the trigger. Avoid all questions. Survive.
His official duty was to protect. That was what El Mestizo believed and must continue to believe.
Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, the calm, it had to be in there somewhere. He’d killed seven times before. Five times since he got here. Because the situation demanded it. To avoid being unmasked.
You or me. And I care more about me than about you, so I choose me.
But the others had been the kind who profited directly from the drug trade, which slowly took away people’s lives. Captain Vásquez was just an ordinary officer in the Colombian army. A man who was doing what they all do, adapting to the system, accepting bribes as part of his salary.
“So that means your truck is mine now . . .”
Vásquez was armed, an automatic rifle hanging off his left shoulder and a holster on his right hip, and that was the gun he pulled—a revolver he pressed against El Mestizo’s temple.
“. . . and you’re under arrest.”
The captain’s voice had become much quieter, as if this was just between them, and that’s probably why the metallic click sounded so loud as the gun was cocked and the barrel rotated to release a new cartridge.
Breathe in, out. Hoffmann was there now, where everything could be broken down into its separate parts and built back up again. This was his world, and it made him feel secure. One shot, one hit. No unnecessary bloodshed. Take out the alpha, it worked every time, forcing everyone else to look around for where that shot came from, take cover.
“Nobody puts a fucking gun to my head.” El Mestizo spoke softly, almost a whisper, while turning around, even though the gun dug into the delicate skin of his temple—there’d be a round, red mark there later.
“El Sueco.” And now he looked straight at the second truck. At Hoffmann. “Now.”
One shot, one hit. Piet Hoffmann squeezed the trigger a little more. And I care more about me than about you, so I choose me.
And when the ball hit Captain Vásquez’s forehead it looked just like it always did with this ammunition—a small entrance wound, just a centimeter wide, but a huge exit wound, an explosion as the whole back of his head disappeared.
HE HAD NEVER seen anyone die before. Not midstep. Breath, thoughts, love, longing, and then—nothing.
He had faced death, of course, had been hunted by cowardly, ugly, shitty death and learned to hate it, but in another way—he knew what it felt like to hold it in your arms while you said good-bye, to lose the one you love the most one glacial moment at a time.
Timothy D. Crouse stared at a screen covering an entire wall of the room that bore his name. The satellite, which had just filmed and recorded a bullet from a sniper rifle hitting the middle of a man’s forehead, was floating right now according to the operator’s computer at an altitude of one hundred miles, orbiting the Earth every eighty-eight minutes. An image angled from above.
The man in uniform—probably an officer, he’d moved that way in relation to the four other men in uniforms—had pressed his gun against the head of one of the truck drivers. Four military vehicles had formed a roadblock, and it was clear the commander and the driver had argued. Then his life had been extinguished in front of his men, who became confused, uncertain where the shot had come from. Soon they too were under fire. Shots to the side, in front, and behind them. It was as if the shooter, who so accurately hit the officer’s head, was deliberately missing, content to intimidate, control. The four soldiers had thrown themselves to the ground. Not falling, just needing to get down to the ground as fast as possible. While the shots rained down, the burly, almost square driver with the thick, dark braid drew his own weapon and ran over to them, tying them up one by one, their arms pinned behind their backs and their faces in the mud.
Crouse was absorbed by the monitor. Everything had stopped. The burly man in the middle of the screen was waiting for something. Or someone. Then Crouse saw the shooter come running in from the right side of the image, slipping on the muddy, uneven road, a weapon in his hand.
“Eddy, you okay?”
A murder streamed live. Watched by two viewers. He himself on one seat and the satellite operator, one of the people responsible for monitoring Colombia, on the other.
“I’m okay, sir.”
“Take a break, if you like. This shit . . . seeing this, it’s rough.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“In that case, Eddy, I’m gonna leave you here for a minute. I need some air.” Crouse put a hand on the operator’s shoulder and stood up. Threw a cursory glance at the two giant screens that covered other walls in the Crouse Room—one of which looked over the Golden Triangle—Laos, Burma, and Thailand—and the other concentrating on the Golden Crescent—Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan.
Cultivated coca on its way to cocaine kitchens in Colombia. Poppy fields headed for the opium factories of Asia. All of it ended up in drug transports, drug sales, drug abuse. Death. The sort that he’d just witnessed. Or the kind he’d given birth to, dressed up, and seen end.
Crouse opened the locked door with his plastic card and went into the endless corridor. Stifling, dusty air. The kitchenette was halfway down the other end of the hall, and empty, just as he’d hoped. He spooned some coffee grounds into the coffee maker, a little more than was necessary, had to make it really strong. He poured the water into the top of the machine and watched it start dripping, the condensation collecting on the glass pitcher as it slowly filled. With that first sip came the rush to his chest. He wanted to remain inside that wet steam and with that coffee, warming him from throat to stomach, felt so good sometimes to fall into the void, escape death and demands and responsibilities. The speaker of the House. Technically, the third most powerful person in the United States after the president and vice president. And here he stood, in a cramped kitchenette in the building he increasingly sought out, where for a moment he could be nobody at all.
He continued down the corridor, which seemed a little less sultry. Passed by the room where the sign still hung on the door even though the mission was completed, Operation Neptune’s Spear—the information gathered there had formed the basis of the US military raid on a house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden had been hiding. Passed by the room with a sign that read Operation Iraqi Freedom—the continuing hunt for the fifty-two most wanted men in the invasion of Iraq; passed by an entirely new room for something called Operation Aladdin and a room marked Operation Mermaid, which was not yet up and running.
Then the endless corridor came to an end.
He stepped into one of the world’s largest rooms—an atrium with a glass roof big enough to house the Statue of Liberty. With mug in hand he sought a b
ench at the far end near the stairs, not particularly elegant but he liked sitting there, drinking his coffee and glancing up at the blue sky hanging above the glass roof, which hid the satellites much of his work depended on.
Liz.
He missed her every day. Many times a day. It never passed, never lessened. More death always stoked the grief. And even when he thought he couldn’t bear it, he knew tomorrow would be worse. Crouse took slow, deep breaths as he looked around a compound that housed eight thousand employees, yet remained almost unknown, often confused with the NSA. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—the NGA—the US government agency tasked with analyzing images from aerospace, commercial satellites, other nations’ satellites.
And our own satellites. One of which had just taken him to another part of the world. A reality he would soon return to.
“Sir? I don’t like you sitting here.”
“And I don’t like you pointing that out. As usual.” Crouse smiled at the tall, well-built man who had snuck up behind him. Dark suit, gun in a holster across his chest, a radio, he looked like all the others, but he wasn’t. One of several bodyguards, Roberts was the one who had been at his side the longest, since he was elected minority leader and first started receiving threats—there was always someone who was angry or disappointed or needed someone to take it out on.
“You were supposed to let me know if you left the Crouse Room.”
“And I didn’t do that, Roberts. Because I wanted to be left alone.”
“My job, sir, is not to respect the privacy of your coffee breaks. It’s to keep you alive.”
“And I’m alive. Aren’t I?”
They walked back, and Roberts followed him all the way to the door that read THE CROUSE MODEL, and only then did he stop and stand outside. He’d still be standing there when Crouse came out again.
“It’ll be just a minute, sir, until we get the live feed back.” The operator at the Colombia desk nodded toward the giant screen on the wall. It was black. “A new window is about to open. Another satellite.”
Crouse sank down onto a simple wooden chair he used so often that it almost felt like his own. A few years ago, when the Crouse Model was first initiated, black silence had dominated that wall, broken up only now and then in limited intervals by extremely low-res, hard-to-interpret images. Now it was the opposite. Only a few times a day did a short window of time arise when spy satellites, which circled the Earth closer and faster than other satellites, didn’t overlap, thus making a specific location inaccessible.
“There. The window is gone. We can follow them again.”
Crouse looked up at the screen. The satellite image had altered, now had a new center. The scene had changed. Half of the four military vehicles that had formed a roadblock were gone. But the four men in uniform remained on the ground, bound and guarded by the burly man.
“We’re gonna get in real close now.” The operator grabbed what looked like an electronic pen, held it over the disk on the desktop, and zoomed in on the burly man. “Close enough to almost be able to identify them.”
Crouse watched a powerfully built man on a winding road in the Amazon jungle, unaware he was being watched, walk back and forth beside prone soldiers, giving them a sharp kick now and then if one of them moved too much. This image was also from above, the satellite’s angle, but was vastly more detailed. That hadn’t been possible in the beginning—the first time he sat here they’d been using spy satellites that conveyed sequences in which every pixel corresponded to ten-centimeter resolution—which meant that it was impossible to make out anything in these unprocessed images, no one was identifiable. A new generation, three-centimeter resolution, had also been inadequate. Now they were using satellites with one-centimeter resolution in anticipation of the next generation, zero point one, evolving—at that point they’d be able to read the fine print in a newspaper.
“Can we get any more detail?”
“Unfortunately not, sir.”
The face dissolved into colorless squares. It didn’t matter. Crouse had already guessed who it was—had watched him several times before, just like this, twenty-five hundred miles away and close enough to be able to touch him.
His physique, the way he moved. It was him. El Mestizo—Johnny Sánchez. Professional killer. The man the FBI had classified as the fourth most dangerous member of the PRC guerrillas.
But it was his companion that Crouse was more curious about. The other truck driver. The sniper. Who now came running for a second time from the edge of the image, this time from the left.
“I want you to change focus—go right up to him instead.”
A new zooming in. More colorless squares. A hairless man with what appeared to be a large tattoo on his shaved skull. Slightly shorter than Sánchez, slender, a hunting vest worn over his shirt, jeans, boots, dark gloves.
Twelve seconds was as long as they were able to follow him before he jumped into one of two remaining off-road vehicles and drove away with it, back into the jungle. The man the FBI placed at number seven out of a total of thirteen on that same Most Wanted list of the cocaine-financed PRC-guerrilla hierarchy. The only one who had yet to be identified. El Sueco.
From his appearance, and according to their few sources, not South American. Not necessarily Swedish, as the name suggested, but probably northern European, or maybe Australian, even North American. That was as far they could get with facial recognition software.
“Every time we’ve seen him, every time, we’ve registered Sánchez at his side. Or rather—this guy is always at Sánchez’s side. According to our patchy information, his closest companion. His right-hand man. He protects the cocaine fields, the cocaine kitchens, and cocaine deliveries. Protects weapons shipments. Protects Sánchez.”
A murder streamed live. And they were still streaming, guarding the bound soldiers and moving the vehicles as if nothing had happened. Just another day in the drug trade, where a life was worth less than money. Crouse took a slow lap around the large room with that restlessness that never left him alone—he could feel it again, death brought death. He passed the next screen and the operator watching the anonymous factory buildings that handled opiates in Laos, then the screen showing the poppy fields in Afghanistan and the many farmers harvesting with simple tools. Farther into the room, those responsible for the development of the Crouse Force. He said hello and told them to prepare for a site visit tomorrow, and beyond them sat the leaders of the Crouse Group—the heart of the Crouse Model, the analysts who compiled the images taken in via the NGA’s spy satellites, the audio intercepts and documents downloaded via their cousin the NSA’s signal reconnaissance-program, and the insider information that came from the DEA’s undercover work.
A slow second turn around the hall before returning to the Colombia investigative desk. By far the largest producer. Eighty-five percent of all cocaine that was snorted, smoked, or injected originated there and was transported by the Mexican cartels to six million Americans.
His own daughter was one of them. Had been one of them. Crouse closed his eyes, took a breath, held in the air, keeping it in his abdomen as he’d learned to. It didn’t help. The restlessness turned to anger. The anger became more restlessness. What a fucking anniversary.
In 1915, cocaine became illegal. In 2015, more tons of cocaine are smuggled across the border than ever before. One hundred years of failure.
Crouse looked up at the screen and for a moment the resolution was perfect. The truck had been moved and was parked behind the one Sánchez drove. He was alone in the picture. The man they called El Sueco was no longer visible to the satellite cameras.
Sánchez seemed hesitant, as if he was waiting for something. Without being in any particular hurry. They’d murdered someone. And unlike those who were several thousand miles away watching that murder, they didn’t seem haunted.
Then, suddenly, he moved, turning in the direction of the muddy road, clearly searching for something.
“Can you zoom out?
”
The satellite operator took his electronic pen, pulled it over the plate on his desk. Zooming out five steps. Until Crouse saw what they were waiting for. A minibus and two motorcycles, men in uniforms, approaching rapidly.
PIET HOFFMANN ROLLED out his sleeping bag onto the rough, gritty truck bed. He’d spread out a newspaper, the center spread of yesterday’s El Espectador, to cover the truck bed properly. And on top of the paper stood his disassembled weapon—twelve parts that needed to be sprayed, wiped clean of powder residue, and oiled.
He had killed a man. They would discuss it this evening, he and Zofia. Not that she would judge him, condemn him—she never did—but he’d learned that he had to talk about it. Or, she had taught him that.
Hoffmann looked at his wristwatch, counting. They’d been waiting for an hour and forty minutes. It wasn’t far to Puerto Arango, but El Cavo would soon be here.
A revolver. Pressed against his temple. Johnny—he was Johnny at that moment—had stood ninety meters away. And slowly turned back toward him, whispering, El Sueco, now.
Johnny trusted him. Even when his life hung in the balance. The one person he shouldn’t trust.
Four young soldiers from the regular military had been forced down onto their stomachs, tied up tightly with their faces in the mud and hands behind their backs. Hoffmann had moved his own truck closer to El Mestizo’s and parked behind it. That was after he read the topographic map and found a slope half a kilometer into the partially cleared jungle—terrain that had not yet begun to form new walls of bark and leaves, fragile vegetation that was more reminiscent of the kind he and Zofia sometimes walked through far out in the Stockholm archipelago. The kind you could drive on. He drove the first military vehicle through the jungle to the precipice, backing up close to one of nature’s own cavities, where a small, blue river wound by twenty-five meters below. He’d left the jeep in reverse, pressed down the clutch, and replaced his foot with a heavy stone attached to a string to hold the pedal down. After that it had been enough to pull up the hand throttle, jump out of the car, and with rope in hand gently pull away the stone. Until the car started to move. Then he snatched away the stone completely and the jeep coughed a couple of times before rolling backward over the edge of the precipice and down into the river. He had driven away the fatigue that came with oppressive heat and humidity, and time after time run back and picked up the next military vehicle. All four six-wheeled vehicles were now at the bottom of the ravine, scattered here and there like a wilted bouquet of flowers.
Three Minutes Page 3
