A Five Year Plan

Chapter Six

Special Agent Kate Furey stared out of the window of a third-floor conference room in FBI headquarters and stifled a deep yawn as her boss, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Kent Bowen, began to tell the story. It was one of those unpleasant, cruel stories that her male colleagues seemed to relish. Most of them were already grinning since everyone knew that the subject of the story was how Bolivar Suarez, a cousin of the Colombian Ambassador, and one of Miami’s major cocaine traffickers, had met his untimely death the night before last.

‘So you wanna see where this asshole lives, on Delray Beach. Jesus. Two acres of ocean-front estate. And the house is like something out of James Bond. Battleship gray, 10,000 square feet, looks like the Guggenheim Museum in New York. But inside it’s a goddamn palace. Marble floors, mahogany doors and windows, art deco fixtures and lights from Paris. You get the idea. Florida living in the lap to the tune of $10 million.

‘Anyway, here’s the set-up. Asshole liked art, in a big fucking way. Pictures all over. He must have kept some of those New York salerooms going single-handed. Modern, but not shit, y’know? I mean I know nuthin’ about art but even I could see that some of these artists had real talent. Lot of Scottish stuff, from Glasgow, which I liked of course. Asshole probably thought Glasgow was a double-glazing company. Lot of South American stuff too. I guess that he did know. Frida Kahlo. Diego Rivera. You name it. Asshole had it in a frame with a little light on. I mean, very particular. Like he couldn’t just hammer a fucking nail in the wall. These pictures were positioned like he was a fucking surveyor. Story goes he once beat up his kid’s nanny when she accidentally brushed against one of these canvases. And when I say beat up, I mean beat up. Apparently, he used one of those Romitron cosh things — you know, kind of a plastic ball and chain? — on her fucking hands. Damn near crippled her. No one touches those paintings except asshole himself.’

From headquarters on North-west Second Avenue it was only a couple of minutes’ drive east to Kate’s Williams Island apartment home. At least it was her home until the divorce came through. Howard, her husband, and a partner with one of Miami’s smartest law firms, had paid almost $900,000 for the place. Her own lawyers had told her there was a chance she might get to keep the apartment as part of the settlement. But she was thinking that it hardly seemed fair he shouldn’t get half. Besides, it wasn’t as if she actually wanted to stay there in view of all the secretaries in his office that Howard had been balling there when, as on this occasion, Kate found herself working late.

‘This information must have got out to someone in one of the other cartels,’ Bowen continued, with one eye on Kate. ‘Someone who wanted asshole dead. Take your pick. Hell, there’s enough of them. Anyhow, whoever it was, they were real clever. Set it up while asshole was back in Bogota. The Delray place was well guarded on the highway side. Cameras, sensors, the whole protection package. But light on the ocean side. Like the stupid schmuck had never heard of boats. Anyway, CCGD Seven reports seeing some kind of high performance sports boat anchored a couple of miles up the coast, off the municipal beach, the night before asshole got hit. Sam Brockman figures they must have put a diver into the water who crawled ashore at the Suarez place under cover of darkness. There was only the one guard on the beach front. The guard says he saw nothing. Kate?’

Kent Bowen wanted her attention and approval most of all. She was one of the Miami Bureau’s brightest agents, not to mention one of its great beauties and he had a thing about her. She snapped her attention back to Bowen and his interminable story.

‘Here’s the clever part,’ he said. ‘Guy gets in the house. A real pro. He selects his picture — no idea what it was — takes it off the wall and flattens out about 250 grams of C5 plastic onto the back of the canvas. Then he tapes a simple tilt detonator onto the inside of the stretcher. Just a ball bearing inside a test tube, two needles, a little battery and a blasting cap. And that’s his bomb. Beautiful. A really neat job. He leaves the picture hanging slightly crooked and then skedaddles out of there. He’s long gone by the time asshole returns from Colombia.’ Bowen shook his head as if still amazed at the assassin’s ingenuity. ‘As usual the sniffer dogs go in first, but they can’t get the scent of any explosives because the picture’s about five feet up the wall. The asshole walks into the room and sees the picture hanging squint as Quasimodo’s dick. And being the obsessive he is, right away he’s over there to straighten it.’

Bowen sat back in his chair, grinning sadistically, to savor the climax of his story.

‘The ball bearing rolls along the test tube, touches both points of the needles, completes the circuit, and karaboom! blows the guy’s head clean off his fucking shoulders.’

Kate caught Bowen’s eye and smiled thinly as he and the rest of the guys in the room laughed some more at that.

‘The crime scenes investigation unit spent forty-five minutes looking for Bolivar’s head. They were beginning to think one of those Colombians must have taken it for a fucking souvenir when they found it floating in the goddamn aquarium. The blast had carried it right across the room, like a basketball.’ Bowen pretended to make a basket. ‘Field goal, two points.’

He cackled some more, wiped a tear from his eye and thinking of another wisecrack, said:

‘Now that’s what I call a really mind-blowing picture.’

Bowen guffawed loudly and helped himself to a glass of water, like he’d just told a really funny story on Jay Leno. Balding and fiftyish he reminded Kate a lot of Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. He had the same kind of hard-ass attitude to the enemy and the same love of his staff. As soon as she started to speak she felt like the guy who wouldn’t surf at Kilgore’s beach party.

‘Bolivar Suarez’s assassination—’ she began.

‘Hey, what has two asses and no head?’ chuckled Bowen. ‘The assassination of Bolivar Suarez.’

‘Since his death would seem to leave Rocky Envigado as Miami’s undisputed Citizen Cocaine,’ she persisted, ‘it may be that we need look no further than that particular quarter when searching for a perp.’

‘One way of getting your head round modern art,’ said someone else and Bowen found himself trying to keep a straight face in the presence of Kate Furey’s more businesslike demeanor.

‘Citizen Cocaine,’ Bowen repeated. ‘I like that. Did you think of it yourself?’

‘No, I think I read it in a British newspaper,’ she explained, aware that she could easily have got away with claiming it for herself. There were times, she knew, when she could be too honest, even by the standards of the FBI. ‘When I was on vacation there last year.’

The one and only time she had been outside the States, and the last good time she had enjoyed with Howard. And yet it had been a vacation only in part. The main purpose of her trip to London and Paris had been to visit with British and French police forces who were worried about the amount of cocaine now arriving in Europe from Colombia, via Florida. But after Miami it had seemed like a vacation.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I mean when I was visiting with NCIS and Interpol.’

‘Aha,’ grinned Bowen. ‘Now we learn the truth, Agent Furey. You were holidaying at the expense of the American taxpayer.’

Kate smiled politely and hoped that they could get on with the meeting in progress. Its purpose was to share new intelligence about drug traffickers who used South Florida as an entrepôt for their activities. Information received from other agencies, at home and abroad. Now that Kent Bowen had told his story she could table what she had learned and then maybe go home and soak in the tub. It had been a long day.

‘I had lunch with Peter van der Velden today and—’

‘How is Dutch?’

Van der Velden was a detective inspector with Holland’s BVD, on a two-year attachment as special liaison officer at the Netherlands Consulate in Miami.

‘He’s fine.’

‘Go somewhere nice?’

‘Don’t worry, he paid.’

‘I bet I know where you went. That place in Coral Gables. Le Festival. Dutch loves that place.’

‘Yes, Le Festival.’ She felt herself coloring a little as she made her reluctant admission.

‘Is that good?’ This was Special Agent Chris Ochao, a half-Cuban guy with his arm in a sling.

‘Excellent,’ said Bowen. ‘Best soufflés in town.’ He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively and added: ‘Romantic too.’

‘Can’t say as I noticed,’ said Kate.

‘No?’

Someone sniggered.

Kate looked Bowen squarely in the eye. She knew it was generally suspected around the office that she was having an affair with Peter van der Velden. Every year all the liaison officers from the various consulates in Miami got together and hosted a party at the Doubletree Hotel in Coconut Grove. It was only two or three months since the last one, at which Kate had been seen leaving with the Dutch policeman after talking with him alone for almost an hour.

‘Y’know, I think there’s something I ought to clear up,’ she said, smiling coolly. ‘A little misunderstanding I know’s been going around. Just for the record, I am not fucking Peter van der Velden. Nor have I ever fucked Peter van der Velden. Nor do I have any intention of fucking or being fucked by Peter van der Velden. Moreover our lunch appointment was not made for the purpose of his suggesting that he might get to fuck me, but that we might come together in a spirit of co-operation and diplomacy and get to fuck some major-league drug traffickers and bad guys. Do I make myself clear?’ She looked from one end of the table to the other. Nobody said anything for a moment.

‘Everyone got that?’ said Bowen. ‘OK Kate, you made your point. What is it that you were going to tell us about Peter van der Velden before you were interrupted?’

‘Just this,’ she said, pleased no one in the room had cottoned onto the occasional relationship she was actually having with the British liaison officer, Nick Hemmings. ‘Peter’s sources tell him that they’re expecting a big shipment from Rocky Envigado. And get this. It’s coming up from Mallorca, same as before.’

‘Meaning?’ Bowen was frowning now.

Kate took a deep breath.

‘Meaning last time we must have missed it.’

‘Yeah, well, if we missed it, so did the Spanish police and so did the Dutch,’ said Ochao. ‘We searched that boat from top to bottom. There was nothing.’

‘Could be that Rocky has discovered a new way of transporting the stuff,’ said Bowen. ‘A way we don’t yet know about.’

‘Maybe he’s doing it on the Internet,’ suggested another agent. ‘Seems like that’s all that’s obsessing people these days.’

‘I want us to get scientific here,’ said Bowen. ‘Quantico. National Crime Information Center. The Smithsonian. Back issues of the Law Enforcement Bulletin if you have to. With all the resources at our command we ought to be able to come up with some ideas.’

Bowen stood up and tried to look inspiring to his people. It seemed easy enough until he met Kate’s doubtful stare.

‘Problem, Kate?’

‘It might be that there really was nothing last time. That he used that first trip as a way of embarrassing us. After that little debacle maybe he thinks now we’ll leave him alone. But either way we ought to try and find the boat before we do anything, don’t you think?’

‘Well sure, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?’ He placed a carefully avuncular hand on Kate’s shoulder. ‘Take charge of the landing party, Mister Spock. I want some answers.’

Kate drove home in her white Sebring, fixed herself a rum punch, drank it while running her bath, and then fixed herself another before soaking in the hot water. The bathroom gave onto the wrap-around terrace and she left the blinds up so she could see across the intercoastal waterway to the winking lights of the Miami Riviera beyond. It was a big sunken tub with a Jacuzzi and just about her favorite spot in the whole apartment. A couple of times after she and Howard had taken the place they had shared a tub together. But mostly he preferred a shower and if he did take a bath he liked to have it to himself. After a while she got used to the idea that he generally took advantage of her extended sessions in the tub to lie in bed and watch the Playboy Channel on cable. He pretended he didn’t of course and would switch onto Letterman or Leno the minute she came back into the bedroom. Not that she had minded him watching it very much. But what really did surprise and irritate her was that he must have believed he could take out a subscription to any new channel, let alone Playboy, and that somehow she wouldn’t notice. She worked for the FBI, for Christ’s sake. Noticing things was her job. Naturally she had known that he was having affairs almost as soon as it started happening. She had hoped that he might get whatever it was out of his system. Just as long as none of it got into hers. But what finally prompted her to take action was not jealousy, nor even her love for Howard but, like the Playboy Channel subscription, the irritation she experienced at being considered too stupid to see through his lies and evasions. She was the bright one, not him. Second in her class in law at the University of Florida in Gainsville, graduating with honors, this was the same class in which her future husband had struggled to make the top fifty, and still the bastard figured he could outsmart her, like she was the dumbest short-order waitress in Oklahoma.

Kate had borrowed some surveillance equipment from the Bureau to obtain aural and pictorial evidence of Howard’s infidelity and caught him banging the ladies’ golf pro from the nearby Turnberry Isle Country Club. That was bad enough. Golf was such a stupid game. But it’s the small things that really bother you and she had been even more appalled to discover that Howard’s golfing partner was using the contraceptive gel from Kate’s own bathroom cupboard for their stroke play. So with the help of a girlfriend in the Bureau’s laboratory, and following extensive trial and experimentation, she had substituted the gel inside a tube of Gynogel for an identically clear and similarly scented brand of exercise balm — an alcohol and menthol-based deep heat muscle rub that was definitely not recommended for use on sensitive areas. Especially the two sensitive areas that Kate had in mind. Even now, months after the event, just the thought of the tape she had made of her husband and his lover screaming through their hottest ever session of lovemaking could still make her laugh out loud. Whoever said that revenge was a dish best served cold had obviously never listened to two generous servings of overheated genitals.

Somehow Kate had never thought of herself as the vengeful wife. With her beautiful face, her keen appreciation of art, literature and music, not to mention a strong imagination, she had always seen herself as a more romantic type. It seemed odd to think about it now, but that was the reason she had joined the Bureau in the first place, and not some sawgrass-dull firm of downtown attorneys. She had wanted action and excitement, even the occasional danger. But of late the most hazardous thing she had done had been forgetting the safety catch on her Lady Smith & Wesson; and for all that she needed a weapon she might as well have been packing a hatpin. In the hope of getting a foreign posting, like Bogota, Caracas, Lima or Mexico City, Kate had started to learn Spanish. Meanwhile she stared out to sea and dreamed of adventure.