Fake Truth (Ian Ludlow Thrillers)

by Lee Goldberg

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Eli Tanner’s Ranch. Dunn, Texas. November 11. 1:33 a.m. Central Standard Time.

  Christmas came in November for Jim-Bob Sanderson. That was when Eli Tanner gave him desert-camouflage tactical clothing and boots, a Kevlar vest, a walkie-talkie, Bushnell 260501 Night Vision 4x50 Equinox Z digital binoculars, a Sightmark SM15070 Ghost Hunter Night Vision Goggles binoculars kit, a 700-lumen waterproof flashlight, a bag of zip ties, a Glock, and an AK-47.

  Jim-Bob was the team leader of a six-man patrol covering the southwestern corner of Tanner’s property, the part closest to the Rio Grande. He felt like Rambo even though he was built like Dumbo and had never served a day in the military. His job was to stop Mexicans from sneaking over the border and onto Tanner’s property. But the truth was, he hoped they failed and that the illegals never stopped coming. This was a lot more fun than feeding cows and shoveling their shit, his usual vocation. And even that, he was told, was a job these Mexicans wanted to take from him. They could have it.

  He was hiding behind some rocks and scanning the darkness for any sign of movement. The infrared goggles and binoculars were so good, he could see a lizard taking a crap from a hundred yards away. So when four men suddenly loomed up out of the river, they looked like giants and he almost screamed.

  He used his walkie-talkie to alert his men that four “bogeys” were approaching and to surround them once they’d cleared the river, though he had no idea what a “bogey” was besides a cool word that professionals used in situations like this. As soon as one of the bogeys was ten yards away, Jim-Bob popped up and revealed himself, pointing his AK-47 in front of him.

  “Hold right there.”

  The soaking-wet Mexican stopped and said in broken English, “It’s okay, we’re amigos.”

  “You’re no friend of mine,” Jim-Bob said as the rest of his boys surrounded the four jittery, shivering illegals.

  “We have a delivery for you.” The Mexican smiled and reached under his shirt.

  Beth was in a sniper’s nest that resembled a shallow grave, twenty yards behind the Mexicans, and stared at Jim-Bob through the infrared scope of her rifle. She aimed between the legs of one of the Mexicans, at the ground in front of Jim-Bob’s feet, and fired.

  The gunshot startled Jim-Bob and he reflexively pulled the trigger of his AK-47, blasting the Mexican in front of him, who fell backward. Another illegal to Jim-Bob’s left whipped out a gun from under his waistband. Jim-Bob whirled and shot him, too, again and again and again, screaming as he did it, and then all his men opened up on the illegals, squeezing off as many shots as they could, the flashes like fireworks, blinding him.

  When it was over, the four Mexican men were dead on the ground, and not one of Jim-Bob’s boys was hurt.

  Jim-Bob’s ears were ringing, he was shaking all over, and he desperately wanted to pee as he looked around at his shell-shocked men.

  “He had a gun,” Jim-Bob said.

  “They all had guns,” one of the boys said.

  “It was us or them,” another one agreed, nodding as if to reassure himself and the others that what they’d done was right.

  Jim-Bob looked down at the body of the Mexican who’d spoken to him.

  It’s okay, we’re amigos.

  The dead man’s face was covered with white powder, which made no sense. He took out his flashlight and lit up the corpse. The bullets had torn open the Mexican’s shirt, revealing a shredded vest made up of transparent plastic packets filled with white powder that was rapidly soaking with blood.

  Jim-Bob aimed his beam at the other bodies. All the Mexicans were splattered with blood and white powder. He hadn’t graduated from high school, and he fed cows and shoveled shit for a living, but he knew he wasn’t looking at baking soda, sugar, or flour.

  “Oh shit,” Jim-Bob said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Porto, Portugal. November 12. 6:30 a.m. Western European Time.

  Thanks to jet lag, Ian had been up for two hours before he met Margo in the lobby. Rolfe and Clemens had begun their first morning in Porto with a robust two-mile jog. Ian knew he couldn’t jog a block without needing CPR. So they decided that Margo would replicate the jog while Ian walked the same route and took a closer look at the neighborhood.

  The route took them west, then south into the Clérigos quarter, named after the 246-foot-tall baroque clock and bell tower that could be seen from everywhere in Porto. It was also the neighborhood with the best bars and nightlife, which Ian figured was why Rolfe and Clemens had chosen a hotel that was so close by.

  The only people Ian saw on the street were students in black capes and cloaks who, if they’d had magic wands in their hands, might have been heading to class at Hogwarts instead of the nearby University of Porto. The similarity of the students to J. K. Rowling’s young magicians wasn’t a coincidence. She’d lived in Porto and supposedly the art nouveau interior of the hundred-year-old Lello & Irmão bookstore, which Ian quickly walked past, was the inspiration for Hogwarts Castle. That was why five thousand people a day now bought tickets just to step inside the shop.

  The devotion J. K. Rowling inspired in her readers astonished him. He was sure that nobody would ever buy tickets to visit Hot Dog on a Stick on the Santa Monica Pier because that was where Ian got the idea to have Clint Straker use two corn dogs to beat up three ninja assassins.

  Ian crossed through Lisboa Park, which was the grass-topped roof of an underground parking structure, and then crossed the wide intersection of four streets in front of the Clérigos Tower to reach the top of Rua de São Bento da Vitória, a single tight cobblestone lane that tumbled down to the dead end where Rolfe and Clemens had tumbled to their own.

  But Ian didn’t have the time this morning to see where they’d died, not if he and Margo wanted to stick to the couple’s timetable, because the walk back to the hotel was mostly uphill and he guessed it would take him almost twice as long as it had taken to get where he was. He turned around and headed the way he came.

  It was a wise decision. Margo got to the hotel thirty minutes before he did, but that was fine. It gave her time to shower and change before they had to be at the historic Café Majestic for breakfast.

  On the way to the restaurant, as they crossed the Praça da Liberdade in front of the grimacing, muscle-bound statues holding up city hall and, presumably, the weight of liberty, Margo told him she hadn’t seen anything unusual on her jog and that, when she got to her room, she’d received an encrypted email from the CIA informing her that nobody in the couple’s Portugal photos matched the faces of known terrorists, spies, or wanted fugitives.

  “So we have nothing,” Ian said.

  “Stop whining,” Margo said. “The day has just started. Clint Straker never whines.”

  “I’m not Clint Straker.”

  “You are when you want to be,” Margo said.

  Not in bed, Ian thought. Or in a fistfight. But he did think like Straker, or rather vice versa, and lately that had served him and his country well. There was no harm in taking that approach now.

  Briana Clemens had taken a clever selfie of herself and Stan Rolfe sitting together in the ornate art nouveau café by photographing their reflection in one of the mirrors directly across the crowded dining room. Above the mirror, a sculpture of two naked, chubby cupids looked mischievously down on them.

  “It’s unsanitary to have naked babies floating over the food,” Margo said, picking at her croissant. “I seriously doubt they are toilet trained.”

  “Those are angels,” Ian said, comparing the couple’s photo on his phone, taken days ago from the same seat at the same moment, to the scene in the dining room around them this morning. He didn’t see anything that had changed since Clemens’ picture was taken besides the faces of the customers. “You have no appreciation for fine art.”

  “It’s creepy kiddie porn. If you put that up in a restaurant in Los Angeles, you’d be arrested. But in Porto, it’s fine art.”


  “If this offends you, then it’s a good thing there are no museums on our itinerary today.”

  What did await them was a walking tour that seemed designed to cram as many Porto landmarks as possible into a single day, pausing only to take a selfie or a postcard shot at each one to prove they’d hit everything.

  It was an ambitious tour, but achievable, since the city was relatively compact, though it meant going up and down many steep cobbled streets. Ian wasn’t in the same great physical shape as the couple, and within the first hour of their walk, his polo shirt was sweat soaked, his legs ached, and he had serious doubts that he could keep up the pace necessary to follow their timetable to the minute.

  Almost everywhere that the couple took a selfie—whether it was in front of the tiled mural of a historic battle on the wall inside the São Bento train station, or the old trolley cars winding through the medieval streets, or the piles of salted cod outside a grocer’s stall—there were dozens of other tourists taking the same shots at the same time.

  That fact raised an issue for Ian to consider. If Rolfe and Clemens were killed over a picture they took, then presumably anybody else who took the same shot at the same time had to be killed, too. But he was pretty sure that hadn’t happened. Surely someone would have noticed by now if a hundred people who’d visited Porto on a particular day ended up dead, accidentally or otherwise.

  But that speculation gave Ian an idea, which he shared with Margo as they stood on the plaza of the Se Cathedral, atop a cliff facing west, and admired the spectacular view of the city, the Douro River, and the port wine warehouses of Vila Nova de Gaia.

  “Everyone here is taking pictures with their phones,” Ian said, gesturing at the people striking poses with their selfie sticks all over the plaza, “which means they are constantly being tracked by their devices the same way that Rolfe and Clemens were and that we are now.”

  “That’s true,” Margo said.

  “And probably most of these people are automatically saving their photos to the cloud the same way that Rolfe and Clemens did.”

  “Most likely,” she said. “What’s your point?”

  He lowered his voice to a whisper. “The CIA should be able to get us the photos taken by anyone who was here, or anyplace else, at the same time as Rolfe or Clemens.”

  “That’s a lot of photos,” she said, glancing at the tourists posing for selfies or taking pictures of the view. “Not many of these tourists look like Americans to me. I don’t know if the Agency can get the same data from foreigners.”

  “What kind of intelligence agency is the CIA if they can only steal secrets from Americans?”

  “I’m just saying it may not be as easy as you think,” she said. “Or get us everybody’s pictures.”

  “Even so, whatever we are able to get would still show us more of what was going on around Rolfe and Clemens at each spot than the selfies we’ve got.”

  Margo took out her phone and started texting. “Can’t hurt to ask. At least it shows Healy that we’re working and aren’t just blowing the government’s money on a vacation.”

  “You can text the CIA?”

  She gave him a look. “That surprises you? Anybody can tweet directly to the president of the United States and he might even reply during a cabinet meeting or a bathroom break. Why does a text shock you?”

  It wasn’t something he’d ever seen James Bond do. Then again, he’d never seen anybody climb out of an airplane in flight and have a fistfight atop the fuselage, either.

  “Sending a text just doesn’t seem very covert to me.”

  “Who is watching us?”

  “Everybody,” he said.

  “They can watch us, but it doesn’t mean they are, right this second. Why would they? We aren’t doing anything. We aren’t on a dangerous mission.”

  “We are if Rolfe and Clemens were killed instead of having died from being clumsy,” Ian said.

  “I’ll take that chance,” she said.

  She was taking it for both of them, Ian thought. But she was also right. What were the odds that the couple had been killed or, if they were, that anybody would be watching a thriller writer and his research assistant go sightseeing?

  They made their way down to the Cais da Ribeira, Porto’s vibrant riverfront promenade that seemed designed to keep postcard makers in business. The picturesque riverfront was lined with tightly packed old buildings with red rooftops and facades comprised of brightly glazed tiles in shades of blue, red, and yellow. Lines of drying laundry were strung across the wrought iron balconies, adding even more color, the clothes fluttering in the breeze like flags. The first-floor storefronts were occupied by souvenir shops and bistros with outdoor seating where diners were entertained by street performers of all kinds hustling for spare change.

  But the sidewalk hustle that had drawn the attention of Stan Rolfe and Briana Clemens, and another crowd today, was the kids jumping off the lower level of the Dom Luís bridge into the Douro River.

  Ian and Margo joined the people who were standing at the edge of the high stone embankments along the river and aiming their phones at the divers on the bridge, waiting for the perfect shot of their jump.

  There were four boys, perhaps in their twenties, standing nervously on the bridge railing in their bathing suits, gathering up their courage to jump, while their friends with hats in hand worked the crowds for donations for the high divers. A pair of barcos rabelos, the Nordic-style, flat-bottomed barges once used for ferrying casks of wine and now for tourists, passed beneath the bridge, buying the jittery divers some time.

  But two younger boys in bathing suits, no older than ten or twelve, grew impatient with the show, climbed up onto the railing, crossed themselves, and jumped, undercutting the older boys and generating applause, and probably dozens of Instagram posts, among the crowd.

  Ian heard a scream of pain behind him. He whirled around to see Margo twisting the wrist of a man holding a wallet. The man was in his twenties, wearing a baseball cap, dark sunglasses, an oversize T-shirt, and loose-fitting sweatpants and he was down on one knee, his face contorted in pain.

  “Drop the wallet,” Margo said.

  “É minha carteira,” the man protested in Portuguese.

  “Drop it or I will break your wrist,” Margo said. “I won’t ask again.”

  “Foda-se vadia.” From the way he hissed the words, Ian assumed they were a Portuguese curse.

  Margo broke his wrist. Ian wasn’t sure whether he heard the bone snap or if he’d imagined it.

  But the man’s scream of pain was real and he involuntarily released the wallet, which Margo caught and tossed to Ian, who caught it out of reflex. He immediately recognized the wallet as his own.

  “He’s a pickpocket.” Margo tipped her head to the man writhing on the ground, then she turned and snatched a big shoulder bag from the startled young woman beside her. “And she’s his accomplice.”

  The woman swung a fist at Margo, who ducked the blow and shoved her off the embankment, sending the pickpocket’s accomplice squealing ten feet down into the river below, where she hit the cold water with a big splash.

  Margo held open the shoulder bag so Ian and everybody else around him could see what was inside: it was full of wallets of all sizes.

  “The pickpocket lifted the wallets and dropped them into her purse,” she said.

  The crowd broke into spontaneous applause. Margo took an elaborate bow.

  Ian looked back and saw two police officers approaching from the plaza to investigate the scream and the commotion.

  The pickpocket saw the officers, too, so he snatched up something from the ground and ran off, clutching his broken wrist to his chest. Ian glanced at the river and saw the pickpocket’s accomplice pulling herself up onto a dock. She glared furiously back at him, then hurried up the gangway to make her escape.

  Ian turned back to Margo. “We have to get out of here. We don’t have time to explain ourselves to the police.”

  Now the
men in the crowd were patting their pockets and the women were checking their purses and gasping as they discovered their wallets were missing.

  Margo handed the shoulder bag to one of the victims so they could sort through it and then she and Ian hurried away, losing themselves in the throngs of people on the busy riverfront.

  “You need to be more careful with your wallet,” Margo said to Ian once they were safely away. “There are pickpockets everywhere.”

  “You didn’t have to break the guy’s wrist and toss his accomplice into the river.”

  “It’s what Clint Straker would have done.”

  That was true. “Not because it’s smart, but because I think it will entertain the audience.”

  “The audience seemed entertained to me,” she said. “Or did you miss the applause?”

  “We aren’t here to be Clint Straker,” he said as they reached the bridge. “We’re here to be Rolfe and Clemens.”

  “What’s next?” Margo asked.

  Ian looked back and didn’t see any police officers pursuing them. He checked the time on the phone. Remarkably, they were still on schedule.

  “Port tasting,” Ian said. “Think you can do that without breaking anyone’s bones?”

  “I can try,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The White House. Oval Office. November 12. 9:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

  The president paced in front of his desk. Healy sat on a couch across from Attorney General Ritchfield Douglas, who sat on the matching couch opposite him and looked to be in considerable discomfort, as if he’d eaten something that violently disagreed with him.

  “I called you both here because this border situation is getting out of control,” the president said. “First that illegal in San Diego murdered two women with a gun the ATF sold to a drug cartel. Now a bunch of Mexicans with bags of cocaine taped to their bodies crossed the border in Texas and got into a gunfight with a citizen militia patrolling a ranch down there.”