The Enemy Inside

NINETEEN

Early morning, and the Eagle was back on the phone. This time it was an encrypted and scrambled line, but the headache coming over it was just as bad.

“It seems we’ve lost him,” said the man on the other end. The “him” he was talking about was Alex Ives. “We’ve got a blanket over the house. According to the information from the surety who wrote the bail bond, that’s where he’s supposed to be. We see the old man and his wife. They keep coming and going, but no sign of the kid.”

The Eagle thought for a moment. This can’t be happening. “Maybe he’s hunkered down inside the house, doesn’t want to come out,” he said. Always think positive.

“I don’t think so.”

The Eagle was almost afraid to ask why.

He didn’t have to, the man on the other end volunteered it. “This morning we waited ’til the parents left, and we entered the house. The place was empty. Nobody there,” said the man.

“Son of a bitch!” said the Eagle. “You’re sure? You checked the entire house?”

“Top to bottom,” said the man.

To the Eagle, the answer was simple. The idiots working for him were too busy cleaning up the mess they’d made at the gas station in San Diego, too distracted by their own fireworks to bother watching the house until it was too late. The damn lawyers had spirited the kid away. Where was anybody’s guess. “What about the parents? Did you follow them?”

“Yeah! They went to the store. She got her hair done. They dropped off the dog at the groomer. .”

“Great!” said the Eagle. “Next time I need a good groomer to clip your ass, you can tell me where to go. What about the lawyer? What’s his name?”

“There’s two of them,” said the other man. “Madriani. .”

“That’s the one.”

“And Hinds.”

“Anybody bothering to watch them?” Sarcasm dripped from the Eagle’s voice.

“We’re on it,” said the guy. “One of them is at the office in Coronado as we speak. Hinds. The other one, Madriani, boarded a plane early this morning headed for Washington.”

“D.C.?”

“He wasn’t goin’ to Seattle,” said the guy on the phone.

“I take it it’s too much to ask whether you might know what he’s up to? Could it be he’s going on vacation?”

“We don’t know. I doubt it,” said the guy. Sometimes it was hard to know when the Eagle was serious and when he was just screwing with your head. “We think whatever arrangements he made he probably did them over the landline from his office.”

“And I take it you didn’t have a tap on the phone.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Most people don’t realize,” said the guy, “it’s harder to get a tap on a landline these days than a cell phone. First off, you have to find somebody old enough who knows how to do it. Not as simple as you think. We’re working on it. We’ll get it done.”

“Some time this century, I hope,” said the Eagle. “Stay on top of the lawyers, especially the one on the plane. I want to know what he’s up to.”

“Got it!” It was the way the guy said it, such certainty and assurance. The last time they voiced such confidence they blew up half a block of San Diego and burned down the other half. It prompted the Eagle to stop and reconsider.

“On second thought,” he said, “leave the lawyer, the one named Madriani, to me.” He collected the name of the airline and the flight number from the man on the other end along with the ETA, estimated time of arrival, looked at his watch, and told him, “I’ll take it from here. You! Your job is to find the kid. Get on it! Find him!” Then he slammed the phone down.

The rippling thermal currents rising off the sidewalk made it look like the griddle on a stove. The small shopping center with its bright-colored walls reflected the intensity of the sun so that it heated Herman’s body like a tanning bed. It felt good. He was happy to be back in a place that was so familiar.

Wearing a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops, Herman trudged down the burning sidewalk and toward the two-story white structure with the red-tiled roof. The red and yellow sign out front read DHL. Inside, the air conditioner was humming, the temperature a good forty degrees cooler than on the cement outside.

Herman wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief, then gathered the supplies he needed from the shelf against the wall. He took four of the cardboard letter packs so that if things got dicey, he could seal up any future message on the run and, if he had to, ship it on the fly from the front desk of any of the resort hotels in the area. DHL, for a price, would pick up.

He took the pen from his pocket along with one of the blank forms, an international air waybill, and completed the information on the form. He entered his name as “H. Diggs” and used the address of the DHL office as the sender’s address. He didn’t want to use the actual location of the condo. He entered the law firm’s DHL account number to pay for it.

He completed the customs portion of the form, declaring no value, then completed the rest of the form and signed it. Then he took the note from his pocket and checked it one more time. It was obscure to the point of being bland, the length of a message from a Chinese fortune cookie. “Package arrived safely. All well this end. H.”

It was written in Herman’s scrawl with a pen on a piece of otherwise blank paper. He folded it up once more, put it in one of the open letter packs and sealed it. He slipped the waybill inside the plastic window on the outside of the envelope and got into a line behind two other guys. Herman folded his broad arms across his barrel chest and waited.

The trio, Paul, Harry, and Herman, had worked out the details over the kitchen table at Ives’s parents’ house the night the girl named Ben and her driver were killed. They kept his parents out of it, so they would know as little as possible, sent them to the other room where they could not hear. If questioned by authorities, they could honestly say they had no idea where their son was. Besides, the fewer people who knew, the better, less chance for a mistake.

The two lawyers took their lead from Herman as to the selected location. Given the history of narco-terror and the violence of the cartels, American tourists might shy away from Mexico. But as a place of refuge to hide out with Alex Ives until things cooled down, it was perfect. For Herman, it was like going home. He had connections and contacts in Mexico going back more than a decade, to the time when he worked corporate security and executive protection in Mexico City. It was where he first met Paul Madriani.

Herman called his contacts from a pay phone in a hotel not far from the Iveses’ home. His friends gave him the name of a small condo near the beach in Ixtapa. They had used it once or twice as a secure location for corporate executives when traveling on the coast. They gave Herman the address and told him to check it out online. Herman didn’t want to do that for obvious reasons. He trusted them. He discussed it with Paul and Harry, gave them the address in case of an emergency, and gave his friends in Mexico the green light to set it up.

Norman Ives came to the rescue to solve one of their problems, his son’s lack of a passport. Through his business, Norman had extensive connections with a number of air transport companies and private pilots. He was able to secure help from a small air freight company that owed him a favor.

Late that night, Herman took over and worked out the destination with the company and its pilot so that Norman Ives would not be involved in any of the details. The carrier agreed to fly Alex and Herman to a small dirt strip, thirty miles from Zihuatanejo on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, about an hour north of Acapulco by air. They filed no flight plan and avoided radar over the border by flying well out to sea before heading south down the Mexican coast. The landing strip sometimes used by drug dealers had no control tower, customs, or immigration. Herman had used the place years earlier in his prior employment, once when it was necessary to bring in a special cargo of American firearms needed for security.

Ixtapa was a small community just a couple of miles north of Zihuatanejo, its sister village. Both were perfect. Low-key tourist destinations nestled in the hills over the ocean where no one would ask any questions of two Americans relaxing on vacation.

The only real wrinkle was communications, how to stay in touch with the office and keep track of what was going on.

It was the mysterious manner in which people kept dying behind the wheel of their cars that gave Madriani and his friends pause. It had the distinct odor of high tech about it. Especially after witnessing the startled look on the face of the driver and the girl next to him as their vehicle launched them down the road toward eternity, their destiny at the gas station.

It wasn’t a far reach to imagine that whoever was doing this might have the technical savvy to invade the firm’s electronic communications, to say nothing of their cell phones. Hackers were doing it all the time. Most people didn’t care, but for those who did, recent developments in the news made it clear, you could no longer trust your cell phone or your computer when it came to personal or professional privacy. And they weren’t dealing here with mere matters of legal etiquette, feared breaches of the sacred seal of lawyer-client. Anyone probing these communications was probably looking to kill Alex and anyone else unlucky enough to be near him at that moment.

There was no sure way to protect against the penetration of communications and no time to look for encrypted phones. Even if they could find them, it was hard to know if they were equipped with the latest scrambling software.

The trio, Paul, Harry, and Herman, after thinking about it, decided that the best option was the one used by the Unabomber. He had managed to stay off the radar screen of the most technologically advanced government on earth for more than a decade-by going primitive. No computers, no telephones, no wires leading to his shack in the woods, not even electricity. They agreed not to use e-mails, the Internet, or phones, either cell or landlines, to communicate.

Any messages would go by snail mail or private delivery services, and even then they would not be delivered directly to the condo unit, unless it was an emergency. They would be collected by Herman, if sent by mail, at general delivery in the post office. If sent by private carrier he would pick them up at the carrier’s local office. It might take a few days longer to get there, but they believed that the risk of its being intercepted and read were far less. They would keep the content of any messages short and cryptic, giving away as little information as possible.

The clerk behind the counter took the envelope from Herman. He put it on the scale, checked the waybill, completed his portion of it, and then entered whatever information was needed into the company’s computer. This produced a stick-on barcode. He peeled the sticker from its backing, slapped it onto the envelope, handed Herman his copy of the waybill with its tracking number on it, and dropped the envelope into the mailbag for shipment to the airport with the next delivery.

Herman turned and headed for the door. He would hop in a cab and in a few minutes he would be back under the cabana with Ives, fondling a cold bottle of Dos Equis.