Liberty

CHAPTER THREE

The Walney’s Bank building in the heart of Cairo was a small replica of the Bank of England building in London, and in that setting it jarred the eye. Walney’s Bank was founded to help finance the export of Egyptian cotton to Britain during the American Civil War. The current building was completed during the siege of Khartoum in the Sudan, and had withstood war and riot and political turmoil ever since.

The dark, spacious interior projected a sense of deep calm, a striking contrast to the cacophony, dirt, intense sunlight, and gridlocked traffic in the streets outside. The floors were marble, the counters, lintels, and doorjambs dark, highly polished wood.

Walney’s still maintained a cozy relationship with a large group of British banks — and Swiss, German, Italian, Russian, Saudi, Kuwaiti, Iranian, Pakistani, Indian, and Indonesian banks. Walney’s advertised heavily in British magazines, publicizing their slogan far and wide: “Walney’s treats you right.” British tourists on holiday regularly dropped by to cash travelers’ checks and purchase more; English tellers made the tourists feel right at home.

While Walney’s looked as British as tea and toast, it wasn’t. In the aftermath of World War II British taxes became confiscatory, so the descendants of the original Walney — one Sir Horace, dead now for over a century— sold out to a group of Egyptian investors. The bank today was managed by Abdul Abn Saad, a large-nosed, lean, hawkish man in his fifties who spoke excellent English with a slight Egyptian accent.

He didn’t stand when Anna Modin entered the room. She seated herself in front of his massive desk and waited for Saad to address her. He finished reading the sheet of paper in front of him before he looked up.

“How was Russia?” he asked in Arabic.

“Dismal,” she said. She kept her knees together and sat perfectly erect, as if the chair were a stool, with her hands folded on the purse in her lap. She was wearing a well-cut dress from a Roman designer, a matching jacket, and high-heel pumps. Her purse was also Italian and very expensive. A single strand of pearls encircled her neck. Her long hair hid her matching pearl earrings.

“Report.”

“Zuair arrived on schedule at the Russian arms depot with the money. General Petrov sold him four warheads, which he selected from hundreds that were there. He and his men loaded the weapons on a truck and left. Petrov was quite pleased with the transaction. He didn’t rob, cheat, or kill them, hoping that they would soon return with more money for more weapons.”

“Very good,” Saad muttered as he looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Did you have any trouble getting into or out of the country?”

“No, sir. I stayed at the Metropole Hotel just off Red Square, visited the banks we discussed, then took a holiday. It was during the holiday that I traveled to meet Petrov, who was expecting me. Trusevich recommended me to him, as he said he would.”

Trusevich was a Russian mobster who controlled much of the drug traffic in southern Russia. He was one of Walney’s better clients.

“Trusevich also recommended Walney’s to Petrov, who deposited a million and a half American with the bank. I gave him a receipt and deposited the cash with one of our correspondent banks in Moscow. They should have wired the funds.”

For the first time Abdul Abn Saad grinned. He picked up the sheet of paper he had been perusing when she entered. “They did,” he said, indicating the paper, then centered the sheet on his desk.

He was grinning, Anna Modin knew, at the irony. Walney’s supplied the money to Frouq al-Zuair for his weapons purchase; now a significant chunk of the money was back as a deposit from a Russian general, a deposit that could and would be loaned to the people who were helping finance jihad around the globe. Truly, modern finance was a marvel, a weapon that could be turned against its inventors and used to crack the foundations of secular civilization, and ultimately bring it down. And Walney’s was making a profit on every transaction!

“Miss Modin,” said Abdul Saad, “you have been with the bank almost five years. I confess, I had misgivings about hiring you, but your fluency in various languages, your knowledge of finance, your contacts in Russia, and your discretion have made you invaluable.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Especially your discretion,” Saad added.

Modin lowered her gaze modestly for a few seconds.

“I am sure you will enjoy a few days to recover from your journey. Still, business is pressing, and I must ask you to travel again on Friday.”

She nodded.

“I shall give you your destination and errand on Thursday afternoon. Four o’clock.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, and rose.

Abdul Saad watched her walk from the room, then went back to his paperwork.

Anna Modin went to her office, a small cubicle on the top floor of the building. She had one window, from which she could just see the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops on clear days. She didn’t look today.

She stirred through the paper in her in-basket, settled down to scan a report on nonperforming loans, then leaned back in her chair. Abdul Saad’s crack about discretion was on her mind; it was a veiled threat, and it bothered her.

She was a Russian woman working in a male-dominated Islamic society … naturally she had little or nothing to do with bank business in the Arab world. She had been employed at the bank because of her experience at Swiss banks. She kept her job because she was damned good at what she did, which was to deal almost exclusively with European and American merchants who often felt more comfortable with a European woman than they did with “inscrutable” Arab males who didn’t speak their language fluently.

What none of the customers or bankers knew was that Anna Modin was a spy. She was not an agent of any government — she provided information to Janos Ilin, who had approached her ten years before, when she was at the university in Moscow. She turned to the window and stood looking out as she thought about those days.

Janos Ilin, a senior officer in the SVR. Those were heady days, in the early nineties. Communism had just collapsed and a new day was dawning in Russia. A boyfriend introduced her to Ilin, who over the course of four dinners, one a week for a month, felt her out about her political views.

She was not a communist and she told him so. She labeled herself a citizen of the world who happened to be Russian. She believed in democracy, she bravely told Ilin, and the rule of law.

Finally, at the fourth dinner, Ilin asked her to leave Russia, to get a job in European finance and provide him with information, when and if circumstances required it. Of course she refused. She thought he was asking on behalf of the KGB, now the SVR, the senior officers of which had just tried to overthrow Gorbachev in a coup d’état and were now under arrest.

“I am not asking for anything,” Ilin said. He laid a passport and exit visa on the table and pushed it across to her. “No strings. I shall provide you with a drop, which is a way to communicate with me. If you ever discover anything you wish to tell me, you may use the drop. If you don’t, never use it.”

She refused the offer, but two weeks later, when Ilin called again, she decided to talk with him one more time. The thought of leaving Russia intrigued her. She had never been abroad. She had heard so much of the West — seeing it, living there, working there would be a great adventure. She could always return to Russia if she ever wished to. Her parents were elderly, and she talked about the possibility with them, leaving out Janos Ilin and his conversations with her. Seeing her enthusiasm, they gave a reluctant approval.

So she listened carefully to Ilin and decided to take a chance. This time, when he handed her the passport and exit visa, she had put them in her pocket.

Upon graduation six weeks later she went to Switzerland and began hunting a job. Her linguistic skills landed her in a Zurich bank. She heard nothing from Ilin for five years.

One day she ran into him on a street corner as she left her building for lunch.

He picked the bistro and the booth. Over a sandwich and glass of wine, he asked how she was, how she was doing. Finally he got around to it: “I would like for you to apply for a job at Walney’s Bank in Cairo. They have an opening for an experienced European banker, and I think they might hire you.”

“Are you asking me to spy for the SVR?”

“No. I have a friend inside Walney’s. I want you to carry messages from me to him, and him to me. I want you to be a courier.”

“That sounds like spying to me,” she retorted, thinking of her Swiss friends and a man she thought might be in love with her.

Ilin had taken his time answering. They were in a corner booth where no one could overhear their conversation. “Walney’s is involved in financing Islamic terrorist organizations. These groups are composed of fanatics who murder people for political or religious reasons.”

“What if I’m caught?”

“You will be tortured for every scrap of information you know, then murdered.”

“And you thought of me. I’m flattered.”

“Someone has to do it.”

After a week’s thought, she had applied to Walney’s. They asked her to come to Cairo for an interview. Then they hired her. That was five years ago.

Anna soon decided there was no spy at all. The drop, an opening in a brick wall behind a loose toilet paper dispenser in the ladies’ room, was never used. One had to reach behind the dispenser with two fingers to extract whatever was there while sitting on one of the commodes. At first she checked it daily, then weekly, finally once a month or so. Nothing. Until five months ago, when she found the first wadded-up candy wrapper in the drop.

The information was on a tiny roll of film inside the wrapper. The candy wrapper seemed innocuous. The film certainly wasn’t. Someone was risking their life photographing records, just as she was risking her life carrying the film.

She carried the wrappers in her purse and left them in various drops in cities all over Europe. Ilin didn’t offer to pay her, and she didn’t ask. She was helping him, not the Russian secret police.

She never learned the identity of Ilin’s spy on the inside, and in truth didn’t want to know. What you didn’t know you couldn’t tell, inadvertently or intentionally, even to save your life. All she knew was that the spy was probably a woman; the drop where she picked up information was in the third-floor women’s room. The janitors were men and cleaned the rest room at night, and one of them was a possibility. Yet it was more probable that the person leaving the information for her to find was one of the women clerks in the wire transfer division. Among the countries in the Arab world, only in Egypt, and perhaps Iraq, did women work in banks, and then only in back-office clerical jobs. And that is where the hard intelligence is. That is where the information that Janos Ilin wanted could be mined, the who and how much and when.

Two years ago Abdul Abn Saad had begun sending her on missions that were outside the sphere of legitimate banking. Indeed, he and the bank were involved in funding and directing terror.

Four nuclear weapons.

She had written a report of Petrov’s sale on the inside of a candy wrapper and left it in a drop on the Moscow subway for Ilin to find. She hadn’t telephoned or made any other attempt to contact him. Abdul Abn Saad and his people might be watching.

These people were cutthroats, and hers was the throat they would slit if they learned that she told a solitary soul about the bank’s business or theirs.

Saad paid her well for working at the bank, almost twice the salary she had been getting in Switzerland. She fancied that she earned it, but when the secret missions began she understood that she was being paid to keep silent and go along.

They were evil men. And ignorant. They thought all Westerners were motivated by money. Virtue, they thought, was theirs alone. Women were some subspecies of human, useful only for recreation and procreation.

She abandoned the window, sat at her desk, and examined her hands. They were shaking. The trembling was barely perceptible, but it was there.

She was burning out. Saad had never threatened her before. What did it mean? Did he suspect?

What if they had discovered the drop in the women’s room, or caught the spy and learned of it?

It would be a simple matter to install a hidden security camera to see who serviced the drop. Interrogation and torture and death would swiftly follow.

Four nuclear weapons …

Perhaps she should have stayed in Moscow. Called Ilin, told him what she knew, and told him to get another courier.

She hadn’t done that. She hadn’t wanted to abandon whoever was risking her life to acquire information here. The fact that it was a woman, probably an Arab woman, made it doubly difficult. No, she could not abandon a woman who was risking her life to fight evil.

Yet now her hands shook all the time.

Anna Modin stood, straightened her skirt, checked her reflection in the glass of the window, then went down the corridor to the women’s room. She pushed open the door and went inside. No one was there.

She paused at the sink, studied the room in the mirror, then turned and scrutinized every square inch, looking for any changes to the room since her last visit two weeks ago. There seemed to be none.

She entered the stall and removed her jacket, which she laid across the toilet paper dispenser. Then she rearranged her clothing and sat down.

She glanced at the ceiling, at the walls in front of her. Everything looked as before.

Finally she reached for toilet paper. Keeping the jacket over her hand, she reached into the hole behind the dispenser, felt with two fingers. Nothing there — the drop was empty.

The rest of the day passed doing routine paperwork. She waited and waited for the ax to fall, and it didn’t. The waiting — that was the life of a spy. Waiting, always tense, always pretending, always trying to project a calm one didn’t feel.

When she finally left the office that evening, she didn’t look back.

In the days that followed Jake’s interview with Coke Twilley and Sonny Tran he heard no more about Ilin’s missing weapons, nor did anyone whisper Richard Doyle’s name. Jake’s job as military liaison to the antiterrorism task force consisted mostly of coordinating the use of the military in roles that couldn’t be performed by civil agencies of the government. He spent long hours on the telephone talking to various commands throughout the country and to the civilians, to whom he had to explain precisely what the military could and couldn’t do.

Commander Toad Tarkington was also there, of course, working the phones alongside his boss. Jake was too busy to worry about the bombs, so Toad worried for both of them. “Do you think maybe you should have another talk with Coke?” he asked hopefully. “Maybe find out what’s going on?”

Jake shook his head and pushed a button on his phone to answer a waiting call. An hour later, during a momentary lull, Toad suggested, “Wha’daya think about arranging another meet with Ilin, see if he’s heard anything else?”

“There’s nothing we can do, Toad.”

“Goddamn, Admiral, the world is on the brink of the abyss. You and I are the only two sane people on the planet who know about it, and I’ve got my doubts about you.”

Grafton chuckled and started to reply to that bon mot, but the telephone rang, so he answered it. Whatever he was going to say to Toad was never said, because when he finally hung up the phone he was thinking about something else, then finally he forgot it altogether.

On Thursday evening the telephone rang at Jake’s apartment. The voice on the other end of the line was that of the deputy chief of naval operations. After a muttered greeting, the admiral said, “An hour from now, at nine, be waiting downstairs in front of your building. You jog, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wear jogging shorts, tennis shoes. Do you have a distinctive sweatshirt with a college logo or something?”

Jake had to think for a moment. “Slick Willie’s.”

“What’s that?”

“A whorehouse in Nevada, sir.”

The admiral chuckled dryly. “Wear that. Nine o’clock, down front.”

“Want to tell me what this is about, Admiral?”

“Somebody wants to meet you.”

So Jake dressed in his jogging duds, stood in front of the building feeling like an idiot as light traffic rolled through the Roslyn neighborhood and a light Thursday evening crowd strolled by, heading to or from the Metro or to get a coffee drink.

A large black sedan with dark windows pulled up to the curb about a minute before nine. A sedan stopped in the street in front of it, and another sedan pulled in behind. A fit man in his early thirties wearing a sports coat got out of the front passenger seat and opened the rear door. Then he motioned to Jake.

Jake walked over and climbed in — the man shut the door firmly and got back into the car.

“Rear Admiral Grafton,” the man sitting beside Jake said as the car pulled away from the curb. “It’s a pleasure.” He held out his hand.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Jake Grafton said, and shook hands with the president of the United States.

“Cool shirt,” the president said, and nodded to the Secret Service agent behind the wheel, who put the car in motion.

“It’s a pleasure meeting you, Admiral,” the president continued. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Jake tried to think of an appropriate response. This was the first and only president he had ever met. He seemed like an okay guy, but after all … “Heard a lot about you too, sir,” he muttered, and felt like an idiot.

“Tell me about your meeting with Janos Ilin last week. I’ve read the CIA’s summary, but I want to hear it firsthand.”

Jake covered it all, who Ilin was, explained how he and his wife had met Ilin about a year ago when the Russian was assigned to the military liaison team for the SuperAegis antiballistic-missile defense system. He mentioned the FBI’s surveillance efforts to ensure Ilin wasn’t followed to the meet in New York, then carefully related the substance of the conversation, the revelation that a Russian general had sold four missile warheads to the Sword of Islam, and the name of the CIA officer that Ilin said was a Russian spy, Richard Doyle.

“Four nuclear warheads with two-hundred-kiloton yields,” the president said softly to himself. He took a deep breath. “Do you think Ilin was lying?”

“When he told me about the missing weapons I thought he was telling the truth. It had the right …” Jake rubbed his fingers together as he searched for the proper word “ … the right feel, I suppose you could say. Since then I’ve gone over and over it in my mind, weighing it. For the life of me, I can’t see what the Russians would gain by telling us a lie like that. The story isn’t one I would want told if I were them. It makes them look like incompetents, criminal incompetents who can’t control rogue generals — and if the story is true, that is precisely what they are.

“Was Ilin spilling the beans on his own responsibility or was he playing a role? I don’t know the answer to that one. Ilin always struck me as a man with his own agenda. On the other hand, I doubt that he would have made lieutenant general in the KGB or SVR or whatever they call it this week if his superiors had the slightest doubts about his loyalty or judgment. That said, judging abstract qualities like loyalty or honor is always difficult.”

“Russians have been defecting from positions of trust since the communists took power way back when,” the president observed.

“In any event,” Jake continued, “it seems to me we must take a hard, careful look at Richard Doyle. I can’t see what Ilin or the Russians would gain by defaming an innocent CIA officer. If it’s a gambit, I don’t see how it helps them. A lie like that would be a dangerous precedent. On the other hand, if Doyle is indeed spying for the Russians and the weapons story is a lie, giving him to us may be a way to make the lie plausible.”

“Yes,” the president said. “I see that.”

Jake rubbed his head, then said, “The heck of it is that I’m not an intelligence professional. I’m an ex-attack pilot shuffling paper and telephone calls.”

“I’m not an intelligence professional either,” the president said matter-of-factly. “But the buck stops here.”

“Seems to me,” Jake remarked, “that the mistake here would be to overthink this. We should proceed — cautiously of course — on the assumption that Ilin was telling the truth and see where that takes us. If we ever discover that he was lying, then we can reevaluate.”

“I agree.”

“Until we are absolutely convinced that no weapons left Russia, we should pull out all the stops to find those four. I don’t think we have any choice here, Mr. President.”

“Nor do I,” the president said, and looked at his hands. He made a face, then looked out the window at monumental Washington. “The terrorists’ attacks laid bare some of the problems that the American political system has been unable to solve for the last thirty or forty years. Since the end of World War Two we’ve needed a secure place to store all our nuclear waste, and we still don’t have one. No one wants the dump near them, so the stuff is sitting in cans in poorly guarded warehouses all over America.” He held up a finger.

“We have an estimated six million illegal aliens in the country and no effective way to track or get rid of them. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has just twenty-two hundred people to find, process, and deport illegals. It’s unbelievable, yet nothing has been done to fix this mess because many industries want cheap labor and everyone feels sorry for the illegals, many of whom were starving in Third World sewers.” Another finger went up.

“Then there is the FBI, which is supposed to build cases for federal prosecutors and catch spies and terrorists. There are exactly eleven thousand one hundred forty-three FBI agents. That’s all of them, counting the director.” He flipped fingers up as he ticked agencies off. “The CIA is still watching to see if the Russians are going to start World War Three. The Customs Service is so overwhelmed and undermanned that they merely do spot checks of shipments coming into the country. The DEA has been fighting and losing the war on drugs for a generation.”

“Democracies are messy,” Jake remarked when the president paused for air.

“Aren’t they ever!” The president made a chopping gesture. “The hell of it is that the bureaucracies are what governments have to work with to protect human lives. Every bureaucracy has its rules and regulations, rivers of forms and reports and memos and correspondence, in- and out-baskets, federal holidays, people sick or on vacation, plus the usual cast of feudists, fatheads, fools, fanatics, hotshots, incompetents, tattletales, suck-ups, backstabbers … and a few dedicated people who do all the real work.

“The challenge is to put all the information from all these bureaucracies together and use it in a timely manner. That is what I want you to do. You must mesh the information from everywhere and prevent future mass murders.” The president’s eyes flicked over Jake’s face. “I’ve been talking to the folks at the Pentagon; they tell me that you are the man I want. They say you’ve got good judgment and common sense and you get results.”

Jake was surprised. He hadn’t heard that the White House had been asking questions. He kept his mouth shut as the president continued:

“I want you to find the weapons. On paper you’ll be operating inside the antiterrorism task force, but you are on your own. Put together an independent covert team to find the weapons. Get people and supplies from wherever you need them. Find the weapons before they explode.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The bad guys have kicked us in the teeth,” the president said as he looked out the windows of the limo at the government buildings lining the boulevards. “Should never have happened. Thousands murdered, tens of thousands of lives maimed … the shock waves are still ricocheting around America and will be for years to come. The America you and I grew up in is changing. Our freedoms …” The president passed a hand in front of his face. “In any event, it’s not going to happen again. Never again! You understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

The president took a deep breath as he collected himself. “We’ve got to get better, we’re going to get better. We’re going to overhaul the CIA, the FBI, the INS, change the priorities. We’re going to emphasize HUMINT. We’re going to use all the tools we can lay hands on to prevent American citizens from being murdered by criminal fanatics. We must go after our enemies wherever they are, whoever they are, without regard to national borders or political connections or Supreme Court decisions or the rules of criminal procedure or the Code of Federal Regulations or the federal holiday schedule. We’ve got to find these people before they hurt us.”

“All our enemies aren’t in Kandahar,” Jake said. “Janos Ilin remarked on that fact, and it struck me as critical.”

“I think we understand each other,” the president said, meeting Jake’s eyes and measuring him.

“To do what you want me to do I’m going to have to put together some kind of computer center,” Jake said slowly. “Everyone in today’s world leaves tracks — electronic tracks on government and nongovernment computer databases. Credit card receipts, bank records, insurance bills, car rental contracts, airline reservations, hotel bills, utility bills, telephone records, e-mails, Web-surfing records — everyone’s life is on computers, a tidbit here, a fact there, a shadow in that corner. In Germany in the 1970s the police used computers to pull together all the information in the various databases that existed then to fight the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhof Gang. They got’em. And because they did it overtly, the German people rebelled. The threat didn’t justify the invasion of privacy. Yet today it isn’t just murder and kidnapping, it’s nuclear weapons, airliners full of passengers used as kamikaze bombers, murder of the innocent on a grand scale.”

“It’s war,” the president said simply. “Move fast and hit hard. I want results, not excuses. You’ll be a branch of the antiterrorism task force, but you’ll answer to me.” The president handed Jake a card. “The top telephone number is for my aide, Sal Molina. Call him when you need help. The other number on there is mine. You can reach me anytime, anywhere with that.”

Jake glanced at the card and put it inside his runner’s wallet, which was Velcroed to a pocket in his shorts.

“If the press gets this, you’ll be impeached and I’ll go to prison.”

“I’ll take my chances,” the president said. “We’re not going to be a nation of victims on my watch. The people who wrote the United States Constitution didn’t intend it to prevent us from defending ourselves. The president has the inherent power to defend the nation. I’m using that power here and now.”

“I’ll buy that. But why me?”

The president cleared his throat but didn’t answer immediately. The car was gliding by the Supreme Court. “Our thinking,” he said slowly, feeling his way, “is that we want the operation handled by someone outside the intelligence community.”

“The folks at Langley and down at the Hoover Building will have to be told. I’ll need their cooperation. Hell, I’ll need a lot of their people. I’ll need the help of experts from the National Security Agency.”

“I wanted a tough sonuvabitch with a hatful of brains who wasn’t worried about getting another star,” the president said. “The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, CNO, the army chief of staff, they tell me you’re my man.”

Jake didn’t reply to that comment. While he had never worked to earn a promotion, getting another one wouldn’t hurt. Yet the president of the United States just said that the military chiefs thought another promotion unlikely. Thank you, sir. Thank you, thank you.

“Someone will bring some paperwork to your apartment in the morning,” the president continued. “A copy of the appointing document will go to the director of the antiterrorism task force, and the directors of the FBI and CIA. Tell them what you want in the way of people and offices and support. Your budget will come from the CIA.”

“Who in the CIA or FBI don’t you trust?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I feel like I’m on the high wire without a net.”

The president’s face showed no expression. “We don’t have a choice, Admiral. We’re in a war we didn’t want and didn’t start. By God, we’re going to win.”

“If you trust me enough to give me this job, then trust me enough to tell me all of it.”

“I’ve told you what you need to know. Use good judgment and common sense and go where your nose takes you.”

Jake Grafton thought it over as the car rolled along, and he looked at the people on the street, men, women, and children from every racial and ethnic group on the planet.

“I’d rather go to Afghanistan,” he murmured, “hunt down bin Laden and his thugs.”

“You may end up there, Admiral. I don’t have a crystal ball.”

Jake grinned. “Okay, Mr. President. I’ll give it a try. You and I may spend our retirement years in prison, but by God, we’ll hit the bastards a hell of a lick between now and then.”

The president extended his hand. “They said you were the man.”

“If you don’t mind, sir, how about letting me out at the next corner? I need to do some thinking. I’ll walk for a while and catch a cab later.”

“Fine,” the president said, and pushed the button on the intercom to talk to the driver.

Jake Grafton got out of the car and didn’t look back. He was on the Mall near the National Air and Space Museum.

He broke into a trot. For the first time in months, he felt good.

Yeah, it’s a war. And war is my profession.

He jabbed his fist in the air and increased the pace.

Miguel Tejada had never liked the plains. He had grown up in Sonora and for the last ten years had lived in Los Angeles. Western Kansas had no resemblance to either. The plains rolled gently away in all directions as far as the eye could see. Overhead clouds were building, but even at this time of the spring, it was too dry to rain. Tejada knew about clouds in dry air.

He was in the lead vehicle, a sedan, sitting in the passenger seat. The man at the wheel was named Luis, and in the backseat cradling an Uzi was a man named Jose. These weren’t their real names, but they were the names Miguel knew them by. There were two more men in the van behind them, Chico and Chuy.

They were two miles along the old road, driving carefully along the cracked, broken asphalt, when they topped a low rise and saw the old airfield. It was an abandoned World War II army air corps base. The runways formed a triangle. Weeds were growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. The only building still standing was the control tower, which stood on the edge of a giant parking mat, one that sprawled over at least five acres beside the north-south runway. Sitting at the foot of the tower was a tractor-trailer rig, an eighteen-wheeler.

Luis slowed the car to a crawl as they approached the hole in the rusting wire fence.

“Parate ahí!” Miguel said. He used the binoculars to inspect the truck. No sign of the driver. He scanned the tower. The glass was gone from the windows, birds were perched on the window ledges, so the man wasn’t in there. Hmm …

He looked all around the airport, taking his time. No other vehicles, no people in sight. He looked at the fields of green wheat that stretched away in all directions. Also empty.

“Marchate!” he said, and Luis put the car in motion, threading his way through the hole in the fence. Miguel could see the ruts the truck had made going through.

If he didn’t know this guy, Miguel would have been more cautious, but he had done business with him twice before. He was a long-haul trucker who occasionally added marijuana or cocaine to his load, buying it here, selling it there. Today he had ten kilos of cocaine.

The man has probably been driving all night, Miguel thought, and is asleep in his tractor.

Miguel had Luis pull up in front of the control tower. Luis killed the engine and all three men got out of the car. The cold wind had a bite to it.

Chuy stopped the van behind them. He and Chico got out, took their time looking around, then walked over to the truck. The wind whipped at Miguel’s thin trousers. He zipped his jacket shut.

He heard a thud and a grunt from Jose, who was behind him, and turned in time to see him fall, just as the sound of the shot reached him. Jose’s weapon clattered on the asphalt.

“Vámonos!” he roared, and started for the car. Something slammed into his right leg and he went down. The shock and pain were so bad he didn’t even hear the shot. He began crawling.

Luis jerked open the car door and threw himself behind the wheel. The engine roared into life just as the driver’s window shattered and blood spattered the windshield. The engine roared mightily, but the car didn’t move.

Miguel kept crawling, cursing.

He heard another shot, then seconds later another.

The hell of it was that he didn’t know where the shooter was. Behind him, he assumed, because of the way the driver’s window shattered. But maybe not.

When Miguel reached the dubious safety of the car he crawled under it, dragging his injured leg. He was hit bad and knew it. Blood was soaking his trouser leg, he was leaving a streak of it on the asphalt. He tried not to think about his leg. Somehow he managed to get his jacket unzipped and the Glock out of its holster. It felt good in his hand.

Where the fuck was the shooter?

“Chico!”

No answer. Given the wind and the hum of the car engine, Chico would have had to shout to be heard.

“Chuy! You see the bastard?”

One of them was lying on the asphalt, his weapon beside him. Chico maybe.

There was so little room under the car that Miguel couldn’t turn, couldn’t go backward or forward. Shit!

Another shot, and a scream. The scream wavered on the wind and finally died as the screamer ran out of air. When it came again, it was more shrill.

Making a superhuman effort, Miguel managed to extricate himself from under the car. He backed out and was looking at the mess that had been his leg when a bullet ricocheted off the asphalt under the car and hit him in the lung. He dropped the Glock.

As his blood pressure dropped he found himself staring at the mud on the car tire. That was the last thing he saw.

The screams had ceased when the shooter approached the car fifteen minutes later. He carried a Remington Model 700 with a scope in the ready position. He took his time, approached each man carefully, ensured that he was dead.

One man, Chuy, was still alive. He had ceased screaming. Only his eyes moved.

The rifleman backed off twenty feet, took careful aim at Chuy’s head, and shot him again. The head exploded.

When he was sure that all five of the men from the car and van were dead, the rifleman cradled his rifle in his arms and lit a cigarette.

He collected the weapons from each man, opened the trunk of the car, and pulled out a pillowcase full of money.

Five pistols, three submachine guns, a shotgun, and $200,000. A good day’s work.

The rifleman loaded the weapons and money in the back of his tractor, behind the seat, and started the diesel engine. When it had warmed sufficiently, he eased the transmission into gear and got the rig under way.