Fake Truth (Ian Ludlow Thrillers)

by Lee Goldberg

  Beth waited with the motor running while Magar got out to finish off the survivors. She heard three muffled pops from his Glock and then he got back into the Jeep.

  She pulled away, her headlight beams sweeping the desert and briefly illuminating a man on the ground, trying to get to his feet. He’d obviously been thrown from the Jeep when it flipped.

  Beth floored the gas pedal and hit him, the Jeep rocking as it rolled over his body. It sounded like she’d driven over a pile of melons and dry branches, which was nearly the equivalent of what the man’s life meant to her.

  Jim-Bob Sanderson felt that he’d been treated very unfairly. Because he’d killed a drug mule who’d pulled a gun on him, Eli Tanner had benched him from the militia, taken away all his cool weapons and battle tech, and sent him back to the barns to shovel horse shit.

  That was plain wrong. Wasn’t stopping drug dealers, rapists, and murderers from sneaking into the United States what Jim-Bob was supposed to do? Shouldn’t he be put back on the front lines of the fight for border security and American virtue as an example of how to do the job right?

  Tanner assured him that the benching was only temporary, until the cops officially cleared him, but Jim-Bob knew in his flabby gut that he’d never get back on the line, protecting America from the invasion.

  On the plus side, the shooting got him on the Edney show and his picture in the newspapers, which impressed his mom, but that fifteen minutes of fame didn’t mean much once he was up to his ankles in steaming piles of fresh crap and horse-piss-soaked sawdust. The horses weren’t wowed and, so far, neither were any of the local women.

  So while all the other able-bodied men in town were out patrolling the border, getting to wear camo, carry guns, and talk on the radio about bogeys, Jim-Bob was back at the bunkhouse with a dozen old farmhands who’d been around cattle so long they smelled like them and chewed tobacco like it was cud.

  Jim-Bob drowned his disappointment in six-packs of cheap beer, which kept him up at night pissing, which he was doing right now, watering a cactus out in the desert, twenty yards from the bunkhouse, where nobody could see him in the darkness. He much preferred doing his business outdoors rather than in the stinking, cramped, fly-infested outhouse. Pissing on a bush or crapping in the dirt made him feel like a true cowboy and that he was one with nature, like Grizzly Adams or Jeremiah Johnson. Every man has peed outdoors, that was for sure, but he knew there were men who’d never taken a natural shit in the wild and he pitied them.

  These were the issues that Jim-Bob was pondering, his pants open and his dick in his hand, when a Jeep charged up to the bunkhouse. The driver slowed down, the passenger tossed what looked like a rock through one of the bunkhouse windows, and the Jeep sped off again toward the main house.

  What the hell? Were they drunk?

  An instant later, the bunkhouse exploded, startling Jim-Bob so much that his pants fell to his ankles without him even noticing.

  That wasn’t a rock . . . It was a fucking grenade!

  The blast brought Eli Tanner and his two eldest sons charging out of the big house with their guns, but before they even cleared their front door, the two figures in the Jeep mowed them down with their AK-47s, spraying the front porch with bullets. Then the two shooters lobbed a couple of grenades into the house. An instant later, the house blew up, fire and glass belching out the doors and windows.

  Jim-Bob turned and ran, immediately tripped over the pants around his ankles, and fell into the cactus, arms outstretched, like he wanted to give it a hug. He screamed in blinding agony as the needles skewered his body, miraculously missing his eyes but piercing his nose, lips, nipples, hands, and dick.

  He peeled himself off the cactus, screaming again as some of the needles came out of his flesh, and he hit the ground flat on his back, arms and legs extended, looking like an enormous porcupine wanting a tummy rub.

  Jim-Bob was so overwhelmed with pain and humiliation that he wanted to die, and when he saw a dark figure looming over him, he feared that his wish was about to come true.

  The figure was a man, dressed in black from head to toe. He aimed a gun with a silencer on it at Jim-Bob’s head, but instead of pulling the trigger, he started laughing instead.

  “You’re pathetic. Letting you live is more brutal than killing you.”

  The man had a Mexican accent. He lowered his gun, lifted the balaclava from his face, and squatted down close to Jim-Bob. He had a black goatee and breath like a rotting corpse, but then Jim-Bob realized what he smelled was himself. His bowels had sung “Born Free” when he saw the gun aimed at him.

  “Tell your friends that this is what happens when you oppose the Viboras.” He smiled and Jim-Bob wanted to scream again but couldn’t find his breath.

  The man’s teeth were capped with gold.

  The horror stories Jim-Bob had heard some Mexicans tell their children was real.

  This was the Golden Devil.

  The man lowered the balaclava over his face, rose to his feet, and stepped back until he was enveloped in darkness.

  Jim-Bob began to cry.

  Beth drove the Jeep with the headlights off to the spot where they’d stashed her pickup truck. Along the way, Magar peeled off his goatee, removed the gold-colored caps that he’d placed over his front teeth, and tossed them all in the desert.

  There was a plane waiting in Rio Grande City to take them to Los Angeles. They had two more people to kill.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Ian Ludlow’s House. Malibu, California. November 14. 3:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

  Ian took an Uber home from LAX, undressed, and went straight to bed without bothering to shower. The house was dark and quiet, so he had no idea if Mei was there or not. But that question was answered some time later—Ian didn’t know whether it was minutes or hours—when Mei awoke him. She slid naked and warm into his bed, pressed her body against his back, nuzzled his neck, and slipped her hand between his legs, quickly making him achingly hard. They made love without speaking, with desperate, sweaty urgency. He drifted back to sleep, still entwined with her.

  CIA Headquarters. Langley, Virginia. November 14. 9:18 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

  The president called Healy from Air Force One. “Are you up to speed on what happened last night in Texas?”

  “The attorney general called and briefed me,” Healy said, though it made him very uncomfortable to be participating in a domestic law-enforcement issue that was clearly outside of the CIA’s mandate. It could be very damaging, for him personally and for the Agency, if word ever leaked out about the assistance he was providing to the Justice Department at the president’s urging.

  “I’m on my way now to Shithole, Texas, to be consoler-in-chief to the widows of those damn fools who were playing army on the border,” the president said. “Did you find out where Arturo Giron is hiding?”

  “Yes, we have and I gave the location to the AG.”

  “Good. This bastard needs to be put down fast.”

  Healy could, and probably should, have ended the call at this point, for political as well as legal reasons. But he didn’t, partly out of his devotion to his country and to the office of the president, and mostly because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut if something felt wrong to him. Not morally, ethically, or politically, he was quite capable of living with those wrongs. It was preventable, operational mistakes that bothered him.

  “Nothing about this attack in Texas makes sense,” Healy said. “The AG told us in the Oval Office that the smuggling operation was too amateurish, and the product that was being carried was too low grade, for the Viboras.”

  “Clearly Ritchy was wrong,” the president said.

  “But the DEA and US Customs have confiscated tens of millions of dollars’ worth of high-grade cocaine that Giron has tried to smuggle into the United States before and he didn’t retaliate. So why kill dozens of people in Texas for stopping a small shipment of low-grade, penny-ante garbage?”

  “Perhap
s because this time it was civilians who screwed up his operation, and not a government agency, so it was possible to make them pay for what they did to him. Who knows?” the president said. “The whys and what-fors don’t matter. We can’t let some lunatic drug lords send death squads into Texas like we’re just another part of Mexico.”

  The president might as well have been quoting one of Dwight Edney’s rants and that concerned Healy. The CIA chief made his decisions based on solid facts, not emotion or politics. The intel on this just didn’t support the conclusions that were being made.

  “I’m not arguing that Giron shouldn’t be apprehended. He obviously should be. But I do question the basis for the urgency for you to act. We don’t know that he’s responsible for the smuggling or the killings.”

  “Yes, we do. His top killer, the Golden Goose or something like that, led the death squad,” the president said. “We have a witness who positively identified him.”

  That bothered Healy, too. “Why did the killer let himself be seen?”

  “A guy doesn’t cap his teeth with gold if he wants to be discreet. He wanted the world to know he did this.”

  “So why did the killers cover their faces at all if they didn’t care about being identified?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” the president said, irritated. “Arturo Giron and his cartel have killed hundreds of people, thousands if you count the people who’ve died using his dope. And what has the Mexican government done about it? Not one thing. All the Mexican politicians and cops are in his pocket. That leaves the responsibility to us. We need to take action. Nobody is going to complain if we take this drug lord off the field, regardless of whether or not he was guilty of the killings in Texas. Hell, when we do it, there will probably be celebrations on both sides of the border. Afterward I could run for reelection here, and for the presidency of Mexico, and win both seats by a landslide.”

  In other words, Healy thought, the president couldn’t see any possible negative political blowback from going after Giron, so why not do it? The only risk for the president was if something went wrong—if any DEA or FBI agents, women, children, or puppies were killed in the operation. Even so, Healy couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being played somehow.

  The president added: “I hope you will continue to provide Ritchy and his people with any operational assistance they might need to bring this asshole down.”

  “Of course,” Healy said, though it went against his better judgment.

  The president let him go and a moment later Healy got a call from Norman Kelton, the CIA veteran who ran the operations desk. Kelton asked if he could see him and Healy told him to come right up.

  Kelton hated leaving the operations room, where they tracked all the active field operations worldwide, for anything. He only left to go to the toilet, and even then, he’d often stay in constant communication by cell phone, which led to some embarrassing and uncomfortable moments for everybody except Kelton. That meant this had to be important news for Kelton to leave his seat.

  A few minutes later, Kelton came into Healy’s office, his ever-present pipe in his mouth and clutching a folder in his hand.

  “What’s up, Norm?” Healy asked.

  “Your apprentice may have stumbled into something big.” Kelton was one of the few people in the Agency who knew about Margo French’s activities, though even he had no idea that Ian Ludlow was a spy, too. As far as Kelton knew, working as Ian’s research assistant was simply Margo’s cover. “Was it her idea or yours to investigate the deaths of those two Americans in Porto?”

  “Neither one of us,” Healy said, not seeing any reason to lie. “It was Ludlow’s.”

  “He’s got great instincts. You should recruit him next,” Kelton said, and for an instant Healy wondered if the old pro suspected that Ian was already in the fold. “Before the American couple died taking a selfie, they were being followed by this man.”

  Kelton pulled a photo out of the folder and handed it to Healy.

  “Where did she get this?” Healy asked.

  “Margo asked us to pull the sightseeing photos taken by people who were at the same spots at the same time as the couple who were killed. She picked his face out of the crowd in every location.”

  “Clever idea,” Healy said.

  “It paid off. We’ve ID’d him. His name is Magar Orlov. He’s a GRU hatchet man.”

  Healy looked up at Kelton. “The American tourists were killed by a Russian assassin?”

  “It gets better. Margo found a selfie one of the two Americans took in San Diego the same day they left for Porto. These two men were in the background.” He handed Healy another photograph. It was a blowup of Orlov in the driver’s seat of a black Escalade and leaning out the window to talk to someone. “That’s Orlov talking to Gustavo Reynoso, an illegal immigrant and convicted rapist from Mexico. Thirty minutes after this photo was shot, the police rolled up behind that Escalade outside of a condo complex. Reynoso was in it alone with two dead women and a gun from the Guns & Roses sting. If you’ve been watching the news lately, you know what happened next.”

  He did and he found it especially troubling given recent events and the conversation he’d just had with the president about the Vibora cartel. “Have you shared this information with Margo?”

  “I thought you’d want to hear it first, considering that your apprentice has discovered that there’s a Russian spy running around killing American civilians.”

  “Did she ask you for anything else?”

  “Detailed background information on the two women that Reynoso supposedly kidnapped and killed with that ATF gun,” Kelton said, shaking his head. “I don’t blame the attorney general for wanting to prosecute the idiots who came up with that sting. How many different ways can that monumental fuckup come back to screw us?”

  “Apparently more than we can imagine.” But not, he hoped, for Ian Ludlow. Healy passed the photos back to Kelton. “Give Margo what you’ve found right away. But otherwise, let’s keep this between us for the time being.”

  “That’s why I’m here and not calling you from my desk.”

  “Thanks, Norm.”

  Kelton nodded and walked out, but the old pro was no fool. He knew there was probably a lot more that his boss wasn’t telling him. But, Healy thought, it wasn’t as much as Kelton might think.

  Healy knew that the killings of Americans in San Diego, Texas, and Porto were all connected somehow with illegal immigration, the Viboras, an ATF gun sting gone wrong, and a Russian assassin. But he didn’t see how it all fit together.

  All Healy knew for sure was that the president of the United States was on Air Force One right now, flying straight into the center of whatever the hell it was.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Margo French’s apartment. West Los Angeles, California. November 14. 5:08 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

  Margo was jet lagged and couldn’t sleep, but since she didn’t have a nine-to-five job or any place she had to be, she didn’t worry about it. She’d sleep when she felt like sleeping. So she got out of bed, put on her sweats, and made herself a cup of instant coffee and a scrambled egg in a cast-iron pan while she waited for dawn to break.

  She stood and ate at the counter of her galley kitchen, which was directly across from the front door and looked out over her tiny living room, which was furnished with a futon and a flat-screen TV. It was fine for her needs, which was just a place to sleep, eat, and bring home an occasional lover.

  Margo waited until she saw a hint of sunlight seeping through the slats of the blinds. She left the pan on the stove, and her dirty dishes on the counter, and grabbed her phone, earbuds, and house keys, stuffed them into her waist pack, and headed out for an easygoing jog around the neighborhood. She wanted to get her blood pumping, and loosen up her muscles, after her long journey home from Portugal.

  There was a chill in the air when she stepped outside onto her “Welcome” mat and locked up her second-floor apartment
at 6:15 a.m. The building was a 1960s-era square doughnut around a concrete courtyard with a couple of picnic tables and two sickly palm trees in the center that the tenants used as hitching posts to chain-lock their bikes and scooters. The tenants were primarily cash-strapped UCLA students, which was why she’d picked the building. She liked the vibe of university neighborhoods and she was still young enough that she could pass for a graduate student herself. Nobody paid any attention to her or her sometimes odd hours.

  She put on her earbuds, cranked up Laura Nyro’s 1967 album More Than a New Discovery on her phone, and dashed down the stairs and out the building. She took the cracked walkway to the street rather than cross the lawn, which every dog owner in the building, and many on the block, used as their pet toilet.

  Margo jogged around the corner, oblivious to the white Camry parked up the street and the man inside who was watching her building.

  Magar Orlov watched Margo jog away and smiled to himself. It was a perfect setup for her “accidental” death. Nobody would question how a woman exhausted after a twenty-four-hour flight, a sleepless night, and a run around the neighborhood at the crack of dawn managed to slip in the shower and break her neck. Who wouldn’t be dazed, and clumsy, after all of that?

  It was also considerate of her, he thought, to go out for her jog before anybody was awake in the building, so the chances of anybody noticing him coming or going were slim.

  Maybe he’d thank her by sending a wreath to her funeral.

  He got out of the car and crossed the lawn to the front door of her apartment building, the Tropic Palms, though there was nothing remotely tropical about the concrete box she lived in. He’d only walked a few steps across the grass when he stepped in a mushy pile of dog shit.

  It figured, he thought. God was reminding him what a stinking mess this business with Gustavo Reynoso had been from the start. At least the work in Texas had gone smoothly and had been some fun, too.