Wild Card pp-8 Read online

  “It’s my understanding, yes.”

  “Which means he can be expected to do more poking around.”

  “I’m convinced he will.”

  “And how do you feel we should handle this problem?”

  “Honestly?”

  “I rely on you to be honest with me, Toll.”

  “We know what he’s up to. We know his background and capabilities. It makes him a threat that has to be eliminated.”

  “He’s with his wife, isn’t he?”

  “Right, sir.”

  “You sound as if you’ve considered that.”

  “I have. And it could be to our benefit.”

  “How so?”

  “I recommend we take care of them together,” Eckers said. “There are scenarios that will give authorities on the mainland a plausible explanation. And that should also take the legs out of any progressive investigation by his people at home.”

  “You sincerely believe their suspicions won’t be raised?”

  “Of course they will. But they can suspect whatever they want. We just have to be careful not to leave them any solid proof.”

  Jean Luc thought a moment.

  “The one hitch in all this might be Beauchart. He’s been difficult before—”

  “Beauchart’s already aware of what I have in mind.”

  “And he hasn’t objected?”

  “No,” Eckers said. “And if he does, I’ll quiet him. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Jean Luc held the phone silently to his ear, seized at once by a kind of morbid humor. In a few minutes he would have to get dressed and ready for his meetings — discussions meant to reassure his partners that their illegal oil shipments were being successfully covered up despite a glorified bookkeeper’s aborted attempt at snitching them out. But not until he’d started his day with some brief words about double murder.

  “And He shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end,” he mused aloud. “Is that line by any chance familiar to you?”

  “No, sir, it isn’t.”

  “It’s a quote from the Christian scriptures I memorized a long time ago,” Jean Luc said. And shrugged a little in the stillness of the room. “Go ahead, Toll. Do whatever’s necessary. Keep us among the quick. Because if I’m going to be judged at all, I’d rather it be that way than the other.”

  BOCA DEL SIERPE, TERRITORIAL TRINIDAD

  It was a quarter to ten when Vince Scull called back. Nimec had hung around the villa’s pool all morning, watching Annie take some laps and admiring how graceful and relaxed she looked. He’d learned to swim in the military as part of his combat survival training and, even so many years later, found that being in the water made him revert to the tight discipline the training had instilled.

  “Okay, Petey, what am I interrupting?” Scull said.

  Nimec shrugged with the satphone to his ear.

  “Me getting a kick out of Annie enjoying herself,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.” Scull said. “Don’t suppose I should want to go there.”

  Nimec frowned. At least Vince sounded wide awake now — maybe even excited, the way he did when his juices got flowing.

  “Your noggins find out anything?” he said.

  “Haven’t talked to a single one of them who’s heard of combo tanker-freighters. but they’re on it,” Scull said. “Meanwhile, Bow — I mentioned him, didn’t I? Cal Bowman?”

  “Yeah, Vince. You did.”

  “Bow helped me with some groundwork, basic shit just might interest you.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “You told me the feeder ships you saw were maybe three-hundred-footers, right?”

  “Be my guess,” Nimec said.

  “Give or take, it puts them in line with the size of industrial oil barges,” Scull said. “They’d be anywhere between two forty and two eighty feet long and carry loads of crude, refined, gasoline, home fuel, asphalt, or all the above and then some. The number of tanks in a barge’s hold depends on how many types of product they’ve got aboard. Might be one, two, four… there’d need to be different tank linings for different grades of petroleum.”

  “And different ways of filling the tanks,” Nimec said. “I figure if the feeders were taking oil, it would have to be a lighter type. Put crude in the hoses I saw and it would gum them up like thick molasses.”

  “Bow said about the same,” Scull answered, and then paused for a long while.

  “Vince? You still with me?”

  “Don’t get your bathing trunks in a knot, I need to look at my notes.” An audible shuffling of papers over the phone. “Okay, here we go… It’s twenty-four thousand.”

  Nimec’s forehead creased.

  “Must’ve missed something,” he said, sure he hadn’t. “What’s twenty-four thousand—”

  “Barrels, Petey. It’s the typical load on one of those barges. Talking equivalents, that comes to one million gallons. You want another example, imagine a convoy of a hundred twenty tanker trucks, because that’s how much rolling stock it’d take to move it by ground.”

  Nimec let that settle in for a minute. He was wearing a short-sleeved Polo shirt and the morning sun was already hot on his bare arms. He reached for the icy glass of Coke on a table beside his lounger, sipped, watched Annie from under the bill of his Seattle Mariners cap. Stroking to the deep end of the pool, she dove like a seal, then executed a kind of acrobatic loop-de-loop that left her long, toned legs briefly sticking straight up out of the water before they submerged with the rest of her. He’d promised they would go snorkeling together that afternoon. A boat would take them out over the coral reef beds for a couple of hours, and there would be exotic fish, and maybe dolphins and sea turtles. Then Annie was hoping they could hit another restaurant on the beach — it had a steel drum calypso band performing at dinner. After dark he’d leave her alone in the villa, head over to the harbor again, do a little undercover work like a character from a spy movie. That was the main thing on his mind right now and he felt lousy about it, but not lousy enough to bump it down on his list of priorities.

  Pete Nimec, Man from UpLink, he thought. Some vacation you’re having… some great husband you are.

  “Got anything else for me?” he said into the phone.

  “You sound testy all of a sudden, Petey,” Scull said.

  “I’m not,” Nimec said. “Anything else?”

  “Maybe,” Scull said. “Remember what I told you about those disguised tankers in the Big One?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, here’s some history I found in our computers that’s a lot more recent — don’t know why it wasn’t right in my head, because it should’ve been,” Scull said. “A few years ago, around the time Uncle Saddam had his ass kicked out of Baghdad, two thousand troops from the Thirteenth MEU were assigned to a Brit naval operation to choke off oil smuggling on the Iraqi coast. There’s that city there, Umm Qasr, you might’ve heard of it. The country’s biggest port. What the smugglers did was tap crude from the Rumeila pipelines, run it down the al-Faw Peninsula in tanker trucks, then pass it off onto barges at Umm Qasr. Our troops pulled in dozens of non-Iraqi flagged ships moving about five hundred thousand gallons of oil out to sea every night — and, guess what, some of them were converted freighters.”

  Nimec sat quietly for a moment. Oil. According to his company travel and intelligence briefs the area certainly had a rich supply — it’d accounted for most of Trinidad’s export economy for decades. In fact, they had those tar pits in the south where a British outfit built the first well rigs in the Americas, maybe in the world… a plantation owner had leased them drilling rights to a pitch lake on his land after his father, or grandfather, or somebody like that, had made a fortune marketing kerosene that had been distilled from it. Nimec believed the family still owned some processing plants, but would have to glance over the briefs again to be sure. In any case, it was oil that had indirectly brought UpLink here through its wi
ring deal with Sedco. There were the onshore fields and refineries, and some new deepwater patches. Lots and lots of oil. But oil smuggling… who would be doing it? Why? Where would it be going? And more to the immediate issue, what were the chances of his having stumbled onto something like that after just an hour or two of compulsive peeping through his five-thousand-dollar binoculars?

  Probably much slighter than the odds that he was starting to let his imagination carry him away, Nimec admitted to himself. Still, he’d seen something peculiar at the harbor. No getting past it. He could hardly wait to head back tonight for another — and if he could swing it, closer — look around.

  “Thanks for getting on this for me, Vince,” he said. “Keep in touch, okay? Something turns up, I want to know ASAP.”

  “Got you,” Scull said. “And be sure to send my regards to the missus… that’s if you wind up seeing her before I do.”

  Nimec blinked his eyes.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?’ he said.

  “Figure it out, honeymooner,” Scull said, and terminated their connection.

  Nimec let the phone sink from his ear and exhaled, staring at Annie in the pool.

  Figure out what Scull meant? It would have been too easy.

  The rough part was that he already damned well knew.

  NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

  The Modesto offices of Golden Triangle Computer Services occupied the entire top floor of a four-year-old medium-rise office building overlooking the downtown arch at 9th and I Streets. Behind the receptionist’s and security stations were large double doors with a sky blue satin-finish metal skin and the name of the concern plated across them in liquidy gray- and blue-toned prismatic lettering. This reproduced the decor of Golden Triangle’s original headquarters hundreds of miles to the south outside La Jolla, where Enrique Quiros had once run his narco empire surrounded by the sleek, stylish trappings of modern corporate respectability.

  Lathrop took a stride or two out of the elevator toward the pretty young secretary sitting near the double doors, gave her a little smile, and waited. Their eyes met in brief, unacknowledged recognition as a dark-suited guard came around from his station, passed a metal detector wand over Lathrop, and then nodded at the secretary. She punched a button on her switchboard, spoke quietly into her headset’s mouthpiece, and the doors swung open, another guard appearing in the entrance to motion Lathrop past him into the carpeted hallway beyond.

  The second man conducted Lathrop through several turns of the office-lined corridor, walking slightly ahead as if to guide him along, but that was just a formality. Lathrop knew his way around and it was no secret to the guards, the woman at the reception desk, or anyone else he passed approaching the main executive suite.

  Juan Quiros was waiting for him inside, his elbows resting on his desk, his thick hands folded in front of him.

  A stocky, bull-necked man with heavy features and an olive complexion, he seemed as constricted and ill at ease in a beige Italian designer suit as his predecessor Enrique had been sleek and loose, as out of place in an office setting as Enrique had been harmoniously compatible. Since his rise to ultimate power in the clan, Juan had acquired an overmanicured look from evident and increasingly frequent visits to the salon. His curly black hair had been treated with relaxers and imparted with a sprayed-on plastic gloss. His needle-sharp mustache might have been drawn with the fine point of a pencil. The eyebrows that had formed a solid bristly line above his nose before being reshaped by a series of waxings and tweezings were now neatly separated on his wide forehead, their high, thin arches giving him an appearance of perpetual surprise. But there was something in his eyes, something baleful and wolfish, the soft touch salon cosmeticians couldn’t lift away or mask.

  “I thought about having you kicked the hell out of the building,” Juan said.

  Lathrop glanced at the door to make sure it had been shut behind him by the departing guard.

  “Always ready with a pleasant greeting,” he said to Juan.

  “Pleasant doesn’t interest me,” Juan said. “I’m not sure you do, either.”

  Lathrop looked at him.

  “That wasn’t your attitude when I called,” Lathrop said. “You’ve changed your mind, tell me.”

  Juan didn’t move or answer.

  “Go on, tell me,” Lathrop said. “I’ll walk.”

  Juan watched him closely, his fingers still linked together.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “I hear that question a lot from people,” Lathrop said. “The smart ones have learned to ask what I’ve got, and I figured you were one of them.”

  Juan’s smile showed nothing.

  “Okay,” he said. “You have edge for me, talk.”

  “Edge costs,” Lathrop said. “Figured you’d know that, too.”

  Juan’s gaze was as empty as his smile. “I don’t spend money on thin air,” he said sullenly.

  “How about on finding out who killed your cousin Armand?” Lathrop said. “And why.”

  Juan regarded him without visible reaction for a moment.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “The trade we’re in, we make enemies, and Armand was good at that. Maybe I got my own ideas about who would’ve killed him and am dealing with it.”

  “Maybe,” Lathrop said. “Or maybe you don’t have a clue who sent that masked white man came blasting his way into that garage in Devoción. And maybe you’d better for your own health.”

  Juan took a breath, his full lips parting over rows of white capped teeth. Then he slowly reclined and pulled apart his stubby hands. There were kinks of hair on their backs and on his knuckles that had escaped, or been ignored by the cosmeticians.

  Lathrop waited.

  “Give it to me,” Juan said at last.

  “There’s more in the package and I don’t break it up,” Lathrop said. “You pay for all or nothing.”

  Juan nodded, his eyes suddenly narrow and gleaming.

  “We’ve done business before,” he said, “I know how it goes.”

  “A minute ago you acted like you didn’t.”

  Juan kept staring at him.

  “Give it to me,” he said again. “Everything.”

  Lathrop grinned, waited another moment. Then he stepped closer to the desk and took the seat in front of it.

  “The man who killed Armand was hired by Esteban Vasquez to find out where you’re keeping his daughter and bring her back to him,” he said. “You make it worth my while, I’ll arrange to bring you that gringo’s head on a stake instead.”

  * * *

  Tom Ricci was in the bedroom of his rental condominium zipping the HK G36 into its case when he heard the doorbell. The sound took a moment to sink in, as if it was something new to him. He listened, thinking maybe there had been a mistake. Not many people came to call lately. And to his surprise the bell rang again.

  Ricci finished packing away the carbine, propped it in a corner, left the room, and pulled the door shut behind him, listening for the solid click of the latch. Then he went into his entry hall and looked out the peephole.

  He straightened up, doubly surprised now. But this time he reacted with a jolt.

  He’d recognized Julia Gordian at once.

  Ricci stared at the door as confusion took hold of him. His first thought was to turn back around without answering — he had no use for company, and what would she be doing here? They’d only met once or twice before that day in Big Sur and hadn’t seen each other after. It didn’t make sense and could only mean problems for him.

  Ricci stared at the door, not reaching for its knob. She’d have seen his Jetta out front but that didn’t mean anything. Let her decide he was asleep, or out for a walk, or whatever. He didn’t want or need company, especially this morning. He just wanted her to leave.

  He waited.

  Another ring. A soft knock on her side of the door.

  Ricci swore under his breath. His hand grasped the doorknob, turned it, and pulled the doo
r half-open.

  He looked at her for several seconds.

  “Hi, Tom,” Julia said from the front step. She nodded toward her station wagon in the driveway. “I happened to be driving past your neighborhood this morning and figured I’d stop and say hello.”

  Ricci was quiet. Julia had her black hair pulled into a loose ponytail that was kind of twisted up and clasped to the back of her head and seemed to be almost but not quite coming apart. There were three small gold rings in her left ear and two in her right and she was wearing black capri pants and flip-flop sandals and a lilac-colored sleeveless blouse with a lot of small yellow polka dots on it. In her hand, the one that hadn’t just dropped from the buzzer, was a waxed white paper bag.

  Ricci kept the door partially closed between them.

  “I never told you where I live,” he said.

  Julia shrugged. “Are you sure?” she said.

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  “Guess I must have found out from somebody else, then,” she said with a smile. “Because I remembered the address while I was passing by. And since you’re you, and you’re here, and this looks like a home, the evidence shows I got it right.”

  Ricci studied her, his eyes adjusting to the sunlight flooding over the small plot of lawn neatly maintained by the condo development’s service staff.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m kind of busy.”

  Julia stood there on the front step, shrugging again, her smile becoming a little sheepish.

  “I don’t want to bother you,” she said softly, and held up her bag. “But I brought coffee and muffins… and, well, I haven’t had a chance… that is, much as it’s kind of late, I really want to thank you for saving my life.”

  Ricci regarded her through the entryway awhile longer, hesitated. Then he grunted and pulled open the door.

  “I’ll need to get going soon,” he said.

  Julia nodded.

  “Actually, that’s perfect,” she said. “I have a bunch of stuff ahead of me today, too.”

  She entered, paused inside the door, and glanced around. The living room was medium sized with a pale gray carpet, a small sofa, a plump bustle-backed wing chair, and a television/satellite box setup on a plain black stand. It gave way to an open sort of hallway that led in turn to a combination kitchen and dining area. Everything seemed clean and orderly and comfortable enough in a sterile, impersonal way that reminded Julia of a motel room on check-in.