by Lee Goldberg
It was an intelligence bonanza.
Dwight was their only child and, from a very early age, he was groomed to become a journalist and someday help the Russians manipulate the media and, by extension, American public opinion. His big break came early, when he was just fourteen years old and working on his high school newspaper. He wrote Boris Yeltsin a letter, asking for an interview. Yeltsin not only responded but invited the youngster to interview him during his Vancouver summit with President Clinton. That opportunity, shrewdly engineered by the GRU, made Edney a national media darling, popularity that he was able to leverage into a successful journalism career.
Edney knew that in the eyes of his nameless, faceless superiors in Russia, his success on Fox News and his cultural influence completely overshadowed his failure to have offspring and produce another generation of homegrown spies. But not to his mother. Cloris took each of his childless divorces as a personal betrayal. She believed he was intentionally refusing to procreate to sabotage the long-term mission she and her husband had dedicated their lives to achieving.
She was right. It was his one act of rebellion. And besides, he hated kids.
Edney gestured with his glass of Scotch to the envelope his mother had set on the bar. “What’s in there?”
“Secret Justice Department memos that reveal that hordes of drug-crazed, sexually depraved illegal aliens are streaming over the border, raping, killing, and taking American jobs.”
“In that order? Or are they doing it all at once?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she said. “Just do what you’re told.”
“I would be more effective at it if the Kitchen would share the big picture with me,” he said, “whatever it is that they are trying to pull off.”
“The less you know, the less likely you are to screw it up by revealing too much on TV. You love to hear yourself talk.”
“The Kitchen is working in the dark, coming up with these grandiose plots in some back room in Moscow,” Edney said. “They’re caterers, for God’s sake. They should talk to me. They don’t understand the culture here as well as I do.”
“That’s why they have experienced spies like me to advise them,” she said. “I’ve been here fifty years. I understand Americans.”
“But you’re still an outsider looking in,” Edney said. “I am an American.”
Cloris slapped him hard across the face, drawing tears in his eyes, but at least he remained standing this time and didn’t have a nosebleed. This was the second time in a week that he’d been slapped by a woman and he didn’t like it.
“Don’t you ever say that to me,” she said. “You are a Russian.”
“Who doesn’t speak a word of the language and has never set foot on Russian soil. My soul may be Russian, but in every other way, I am an American,” Edney said. She started to take another swing at him but he grabbed her by her thin, age-spotted wrist. “I was born, raised, and educated here. That is a fact. It’s also an asset that isn’t being exploited to its full extent. I could be doing so much more for them than whipping up public anger. I shouldn’t be a puppet. I should be one of the people pulling the strings.”
He let go of her wrist, took a fresh glass, and poured himself a new drink.
She shook her head in disappointment. “You’re arrogant and egotistical. You think you are smarter than everybody else. It serves you well on TV, but it will get you killed in the spy game. That’s why you will always be kept in the dark about the part you are playing and why you’ll talk to no one but me. It’s your enforced ignorance that’s keeping you free and alive.”
“The FBI has no idea I’m a spy and even if they did, the worst they’d ever do is put me in prison. They wouldn’t kill me.”
“They wouldn’t,” his mother said. “But I would.”
“Only because I haven’t given you any grandchildren.”
“Then you better knock up a woman soon.” Cloris finished her brandy, grabbed her purse, and stood to go. “As a life insurance policy.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
La Villa Contenta Resort. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. November 1. 3:11 p.m. Central Standard Time.
Gustavo Reynoso raked the private beach. It was a dumb thing to be doing, but apparently the rich, self-indulgent American tourists who stayed in the resort villas expected the sand to be as smooth as carpet.
He wore a jaunty little panama straw hat with a flowered band, a short-sleeved guayabera shirt covered with brightly colored flowers, white shorts, white socks, and white sneakers. It was a resort uniform that made the dark-skinned, loose-limbed thirty-year-old look like a gay circus clown as he walked back and forth, pin-striping the sand with the tines of his rake and smiling as if this were the greatest joy of his life. This was the second-worst job at the resort, one step above cleaning the toilets, which is what he had to do after he raked the beach.
But he was lucky to have the work, considering that only two weeks earlier he had been released from the Topo Chico penitentiary in Monterrey after a seven-year stretch for rape. The resort didn’t know that, of course. They didn’t waste time doing background checks on losers willing to dress like a clown, rake sand in the blazing sun, and stick their faces in shit for forty pesos a day.
He’d been watching a blonde American woman in a string bikini who was sunbathing on a cushioned chaise lounge under a palapa. She was in her early thirties and had spent most of the day drinking cocktails and smoking cigarettes that she’d stubbed out in the sand, using the beach like her personal ashtray. But now she got up, her towel falling off the chaise, and dove into the surf to cool off. After a few minutes, she strode back onto the beach, water beading on her bouncing boobs and streaming in rivulets down her long, lean legs.
She approached her chaise lounge and looked with disgust at her towel on the sand as if it had landed on a pile of steaming manure. She caught Gustavo’s eye, snapped her fingers at him, and pointed at the towel like it was his fault.
“Get me a fresh towel,” she said.
Gustavo nodded, understanding the message if not the actual words, dropped his rake, and headed for the beach cabana where the fresh towels were kept.
“Ándale!” she said, snapping her fingers. “Ándale!”
Gustavo felt his skin burn with anger. Nobody had ever talked to him like that before. He grabbed a clean, folded towel and walked back toward her.
She snapped her fingers again, insistent, a scowl on her face. “Arriba! Arriba! I’m freezing here, Pedro.”
He ran the last few steps, as if it were an emergency, and presented the folded towel to her. She had goose bumps on her skin and her nipples were hard.
The woman snatched the towel from him, sat down on the edge of her chaise, and dried herself off, running the towel over her breasts and down her stomach. She then spread her legs to dry her thighs.
His breath caught in his throat and he was suddenly aware of himself still standing there staring at her. He turned his back to the woman and went to retrieve his rake, hoping she couldn’t see the tent in his shorts.
She snapped her fingers at him again. “Wait, Pedro. I didn’t say you could go yet.”
Gustavo looked over his shoulder. She held a plastic bottle of suntan lotion out to him, shook it, and gestured to her back.
“Do my back.” She slid to the end of the chaise lounge, turned her back to him, and set the bottle beside her.
Gustavo was glad her back was to him and she couldn’t see his obvious arousal as he returned to the chaise lounge. He picked up the bottle, squirted the lotion between her shoulder blades, and began to spread the warm lotion over her skin. It was the first time he’d touched a woman in years. As he worked on her firm shoulders, he imagined himself slipping his hands around her slender neck, forcing her facedown into the sand while she struggled helplessly underneath him.
He climaxed just from the thought of it, shocking and embarrassing himself. She turned, glanced at his shorts, and burst into laughter.
�
�Poor little man,” she said.
She was still laughing at Gustavo as he covered his groin with his straw hat and rushed to the toilets, where he could work until his shorts dried and escape her humiliating, shrill laughter.
But he wasn’t going to let it end there. He couldn’t and still call himself a man. Gustavo watched from afar as she left the beach and returned to her villa.
Gustavo had a switchblade in the old, rusted-out Ford Escort that he lived in and that he’d parked in an empty lot thirty yards from the resort. After work, he went to his car, sat in the back seat drinking tequila until it was dark, then took his knife and crept back to the rude woman’s secluded villa. He was still in his ridiculous uniform, so he wouldn’t look suspicious if any guests saw him on the property.
The sliding glass door that faced the beach was open, letting in the ocean breeze through the screen. Tourists were so trusting. He peeked into the living room. It was empty and the only movement came from the ceiling fan moving the breeze over the rattan furniture. He could hear the shower running.
Gustavo eased open the screen and slipped inside. At almost the same instant, he heard the shower shut off. He moved to the bedroom door, stepped to one side of it, pressed his back against the wall, and waited for the woman to step out.
A moment later, she walked past him with a bath towel wrapped loosely around her naked, damp body. It was almost as if she was begging for it. He sprang on her, intending to hold the knife to her throat and force her to the floor for a lesson in respect. But things didn’t go quite the way he planned.
She sidestepped him and yanked off her towel. The sight of her nude distracted him for an instant, an opportunity that she used to brandish the towel like a whip, expertly taking the knife from his hand and knocking him to the floor in three lightning-fast moves he never actually saw.
To his astonishment and dismay, he found himself flat on his back, the naked woman straddling him and holding the sharp edge of his knife under his shriveling scrotum. He knew his shorts wouldn’t offer him much protection from the blade.
She leaned over, her bare breasts swaying in his face, and whispered into his ear in perfect Spanish what in English would translate to: “You like blonde women with big boobs, don’t you, Gustavo?”
When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, a physiological reaction that probably had something to do with the knife under his wrinkled ball sack. “How do you know my name?”
“I know all about you and all of the women that you’ve raped.”
“I’ve never raped anyone.”
“So what is this? Room service?” She ran the edge of the knife along the contours of his left testicle and he thought he might cry. “You obviously can’t control your impulses. Perverts like you are not welcome in Puerto Vallarta. There are two ways we can solve this problem. I can cut off your balls for a coin purse or you can go to the United States tonight and never come back. What’s it going to be?”
He’d tried to get into the United States before and had been caught, and deported, five times. He didn’t have the money to pay the coyotes to get him across the border again.
“I don’t have the money,” he said.
“I don’t care,” she said.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because you’re bad for tourism.” She abruptly sliced through his shorts and jammed the edge of the knife up where his scrotum met his perineum, the tender skin between his genitals and his anus. One swipe and he’d be a eunuch. “Make a choice.”
“I’ll go,” he squeaked. He’d find the money somehow.
“Wise decision.” She stood up with the knife in hand, strode to the front door, and opened it. Two hard-looking men walked in past her, neither one of them paying any attention to her nudity. “Prepare Mr. Reynoso for the trip while I pack.”
Gustavo sat up on his elbows and she whirled around, throwing the knife in the same motion. The knife tip stabbed the floor between his legs, a mere hair away from his crotch. His dick retreated so far into his body he wondered if he’d ever find it again.
One of the men lifted Gustavo to his feet and the other jammed a syringe into his shoulder. He was unconscious in an instant.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ian Ludlow’s House. Malibu, California. November 2. 6:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.
Ian’s Spanish-style hacienda was nestled in a canyon on a secluded stretch of Mulholland Highway in the Santa Monica Mountains. He’d rebuilt the house exactly the way it had been before a gas leak caused an explosion that burned the place down. The explosion wasn’t an accident, but that was another story. He’d added a six-foot-high stucco wall around the property, a wrought iron front gate, and security cameras, but otherwise the house appeared to be virtually the same on the outside as it was before.
Restoring the interior of his house wasn’t so easy. Everything Ian owned had gone up in flames, including his vintage paperback collection, his framed Straker book covers, his James Bond movie posters, and a real human skeleton that he’d kept in his office.
He’d found a used bookstore that was going out of business, bought out their entire stock of mysteries and thrillers, and filled the shelves of his office with the old, yellowed paperbacks. It gave his workspace, and his true refuge, the right smell, but the books weren’t the same ones he’d collected over a lifetime and that had shaped his career as a writer. He’d framed his Straker book covers and a few James Bond posters and hung them on the walls. But the dust jackets weren’t the originals that he’d framed with such pride and excitement as each new book was published. And the Bond posters weren’t the creased ones with yellowed Scotch tape residue and multiple thumbtack holes in the corners that he’d got as a kid and brought with him to college, to every apartment he’d ever lived in, and finally to his own home. He’d found another human skeleton from India for $5,600 online, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the mysterious set of sun-bleached bones, with a $250 price tag tied to the cracked jaw, that he’d stumbled upon in a Barstow antique store and that, in the years since he’d bought it, had often sparked his imagination.
The end result was that Ian didn’t feel at home in his own house. It was like he was living in captivity in a zoo that had re-created his dwelling, less for his comfort than for the education of the visitors peering into his cage. Maybe that was why his writing was going so badly.
He’d been sitting in his office for weeks now, trying to come up with the plot for his next Straker novel, but he had nothing. For the last few days, Ian had tried the Lee Child approach, just writing and hoping a story would come to him along the way, but all he ended up with was fifty pages of Straker walking around, beating up muggers and purse snatchers and sleeping with the appreciative women that he rescued. Ian deleted it all.
Now he stared at his blank computer screen and listened to a Fox News report on the TV, which he’d kept on in the living room for company. He learned that China’s president, Xiao, had been appointed ruler for life, the US stock market had lost all its gains for the year, the leader of the Vibora drug cartel had escaped from a Mexican prison using a tunnel under his toilet, and a senator in Oregon had decided to become a woman. Just another typical news day in which life was a lot more exciting than anything he was writing.
The theme music for Dwight Edney’s The Real Story began to play just as his computer pinged and a window opened up on his screen, showing him the video feed from the motion-activated camera at his gate. A black Mercedes had pulled up in front of the house.
Wang Mei got out of the car, marched up to the gate, and leaned on the buzzer. Ian hadn’t seen her, or heard from her, since she’d left New York to go back to work on Straker. He’d heard about the yin-yang contract scandal, of course, but it had flamed out after only a few days, overshadowed by more prurient and salacious news, and he had no idea how it had ended up.
Ian hurried to his front door and hit the button on the wall that unlocked the gates. It wasn’t until he opened the door
to greet her that he remembered that he was unshaven, barefoot, and wearing an open terry-cloth bathrobe over a T-shirt and sweatpants.
“If I’d known you were coming,” Ian said, trying and failing to sound nonchalant, “I would have put on socks.”
“Sorry I didn’t call first, but I didn’t know what to say.”
“How about, ‘I’m in the neighborhood, can I stop by and say hello?’”
“That’s why you’re a writer,” she said. “Words come so easily to you.”
“God, I wish that was true,” he stepped aside and gestured for her to come in.
She waved to the limo driver, who drove off, and she stepped inside the house. “The truth is, the movie wrapped today and when I left the set, I realized I had nowhere to go. So I told the driver to come here.”
“I’m glad you did,” he said, closing the door behind her. “It’s nice to see you.”
Mei went down the hall and peeked into his office. “So this is where the magic happens.”
He was about to say something self-deprecating, and sadly true, but that was when Dwight Edney spoke on the TV from the living room and she followed the sound of his unmistakable voice.
“The president is letting hordes of illegal aliens swarm over our borders to rape our women, rob our homes and businesses, and sell drugs for the Mexican cartels. Why hasn’t he stopped it?”
Mei stood in front of the big flat screen, put her hands on her hips, and stared disapprovingly at Edney, who was tapping his Montblanc pen on the sheaf of papers in front of him.
“I’ll tell you why,” Edney said, looking into the camera and creating the illusion that he was talking directly to Mei. “Because it’s the drug cartels, led by Arturo Giron, who are secretly financing his reelection campaign. It’s a battle that Southwest Texas rancher Eli Tanner knows all too well because it’s playing out on his land. Tonight you’ll get the real story.”
