Spy

Stoke had seen some scuba gear below. Sharkey told him the plane was lying too deep to free dive. This was fine with Stoke. It was a good day for diving, not a cloud in the sky. The highly reflective sandy white bottom helped a lot.

Still, Stoke was getting worried. A lot of these damn flyboy druggies ended up as ocean bottom-nappers out here. More than you’d think. Old airplanes, usually chicken-wired DC-3s, flown by shitty bush pilots smoking dope. Finding a planeload of soggy cocaine and a couple of dead Colombians floating inside was not going to make his day. He motioned to Shark and they went back to the stern.

“What you think about this being a DC-3, Sharkey? Drug mule kind of airplane, right? We ain’t DEA, we’re not in that business, man. You know that. I hope you didn’t bring me down here for some damn drug shit or—”

Sharkey looked hurt. Chin down on his chest.

He said, real low, “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Shark, come on, man, it’s a DC-3! You know what that means. You got to tell me again why I’m down here.”

“My father told me he saw a plane go down right next to a little island. I was down here, man, in the Marquesas. On a visit. I didn’t see it go down, but I dove on this plane myself.”

“Yeah? And?”

“I called you, didn’t I?”

“I’m not interested in drug runners.”

“It’s not drugs. I don’t know what it is, but no drugs.”

“You sure about this.”

“Stokely, you got to trust me, man, I’m on the team. Come on. Let’s get the tanks. I’ll show you.”

“Over there by those mangroves?”

“That’s it.” Sharkey made a slashing motion across his throat. Luis Sr. hauled back on the throttles and the old boat slowed and stopped in about sixty feet of water. There was no wind, and the boat settled into a gentle rocking motion.

“Muchas gracias, señor,” Stoke said, smiling up at the skipper. The old guy looked down from the helm and smiled back. Nice smile. People spend their whole life on the big blue ocean, it gives them something you just can’t find on solid ground. Peace, maybe.

There was a tiny island with nothing on it but thick mangroves and sea grapes. Just a spit sticking up out of the water, maybe a couple of hundred yards long and maybe fifty feet across. Some debris had floated up inside a small cove, a pool of emerald green water washing up on the white sand. Stuff had gotten hung up in the roots inside the cove. It looked recent. Kind of thing you might see after a plane went down. Stoke thought he saw movement over in the mangroves out of the corner of his eye, but when he looked he didn’t see anything.

Probably a big heron or an osprey doing a little fishing. Could even have been a cloud of skeets moving around back in there. He’d go check out the debris after he’d seen the plane. See what had washed up.

“I got to saddle up, amigo,” Stoke said.

Sharkey grabbed one tank and handed it to Stoke, then picked up a second one.

“Where you think you’re going?” Stoke said, looking at the one-armed man.

“Down to the plane,” Sharkey said, “You don’t think I’d let you go down there alone, do you? The plane is sitting in a very precarious position. Edge of a shoal. You get inside and she shifts a foot or two, you kiss your ass good-bye.”

“You want to come, you come on. But don’t worry your ass about me, Luis. I was born alone. I’ll go out the same way.”

STOKE FELT the cold inrush of sea into two layers of wet suit and started down, the twelve pounds of weight on his belt and his tank helping him descend through all the bubbles. The world suddenly turned off-blue and dark. The visibility was okay, though, good enough to see what he saw. Below the thermocline, down around forty feet, it would get a lot colder and a lot darker.

But they’d gotten lucky.

The plane, one wing sheared off, was hung up on a narrow shelf of limestone in about thirty feet of water. The whole shelf was only a few yards wider than the fuselage. One hundred yards farther east and she would have slipped down into a deep trench.

Stoke gave Sharkey the OK signal and saw him return it. He checked his dive watch and then continued his descent toward the airplane, looking back now and then at Sharkey. It was interesting to see how you went about swimming down here with only one arm. Sharkey seemed to do just fine, considering.

It was a DC-3, all right, intact except that the port wing was completely gone and the whole nose and cockpit were pretty smashed up, meaning it had come in at a very steep angle. It was a very old airplane, unpainted, and there were no exterior markings at all. Just some blackened aluminum on the fuselage where the engine must have caught fire.

Stoke checked up and hung in the water a few seconds, just looking down it, surveying it from nose to tail. He hoped Sharkey was right about this thing because to him the damn airplane looked about as narco as you can get.

He motioned for Sharkey to follow and swam down directly to the nose. The windows were all blown out and a school of angelfish was just swimming out of the pilot’s portside window. He saw Sharkey pointing at that window, nodding his head. Stoke flipped his fins and swam right up to peek inside.

Boo!

The dead pilot’s lolling head floated up right into his damn mask when he peered inside the cockpit. Stoke pulled away instinctively. The guy’s gray face was pretty messed up. Things like his nose were gone. You could see where the fishies had been having a picnic, pecking at him for a couple of days. Stoke pushed the head away from the window and stuck his own inside for a better look-see.

Something big had taken a chunk out of the pilot’s right thigh, looked like. And his right hand was pretty much gone. Sharks, barracuda, maybe.

But none of that was the real interesting part.

What got Stoke’s complete attention was the fact that the dead guy was wearing a military uniform. You had to wonder what a uniformed officer was doing flying around in an unmarked relic like this. Looked like Sharkey had been right about this damn thing, Stoke was beginning to think.

This was definitely not shaping up like any kind of drug lift. Of course, it could just be a rogue air force guy with a freelance weekend gig or—no. This didn’t feel like drugs anymore.

He swung around and found Sharkey hovering about six feet behind him. Gave him a big thumbs up. He could see the Cuban nodding his head in excitement, see his eyes smiling inside his mask.

Stoke, checking the shark-bit flyboy out, could just barely see military insignia, maybe a piece of a patch on the guy’s far shoulder. Could only see a little bit of it but if he could move the guy in his seat, he might be able to twist him around enough to find out where this dead cat called home. He reached inside across the guy’s chest, carefully because there was broken glass and jagged metal, and grabbed the corpse by the upper right shoulder. He pulled the man’s shoulder toward him but the guy didn’t move. Still strapped in too tight.

He’d have to swim inside and check out the cockpit anyway.

Stoke turned around to look for an entry point and saw Sharkey’s bright orange swim fins disappear inside a ragged opening in the fuselage aft of the former port wing. His diving buddy was one step ahead of him. There was also a big ugly mako hanging around, circling just above the fuselage opening and the big fella had that mean and hungry look. Maybe he was the one who’d enjoyed the cockpit entree earlier and was just dropping by for dessert.

Sharkey had probably seen that big mother too, that’s why he’d ducked inside. You could hardly blame him.

Once bitten, as the man says.

Something else beside the shark was bothering Stoke.

All these planes flew with a crew of two.

So. Where the hell was the damn copilot?

12

LONDON

A lex Hawke was half an hour early for his appointment with C at 85 Vauxhall Cross. He parked his fastback R-Type Continental in the underground parking. The old Locomotive, as he called it, had just turned fifty. Battered but unbeaten he thought, and, keying the lock, he stood back to gaze lovingly at her gorgeous flanks. He drove her hard and got sensual pleasure doing so. He even loved the hideous paint job, a color he referred to as elephant’s breath gray.

He’d grabbed his umbrella for a short stroll along the Thames. He went via the riverside walk, which, mercifully, was open. It was bitter cold and still spitting rain, but the air off the river was bracing and, besides, he needed a good chilling to clear the juniper cobwebs from his brain. Damned rum. He’d better steer clear of it.

Twilight was Hawke’s cherished time of day on the river, the hour when the plodding river traffic and headlamps streaming across the bridges acquired that misty glow. It was a scene he’d long associated with the watercolor artist he most admired, Mr. J.M.W. Turner. He walked the Embankment for ten minutes, trying to imagine why on earth C had summoned him. A pretty dark-haired passerby asked the time and he told her, realizing he’d have to hurry back.

Having satisfied himself that his city, despite all it had weathered recently, was still the most beautiful place he knew, he mounted the broad steps and strode through the main entrance at #85 Albert Embankment, Vauxhall Cross. Crossing the gleaming lobby to the bank of lifts, one could not help but notice the architecture. The current MI-6 Headquarters was a five story, exceedingly modern affair, and was variously known in the intelligence community as Babylon-on-Thames or Legoland. It had been home to C and his several thousand colleagues since 1995.

Hawke, no fan of most modern architecture, found that he liked the place despite his predisposition not to. He was especially looking forward to seeing the chief’s private and much ballyhooed lair.

“Lord Hawke!” cried a lovely young woman, walking purposefully toward him across the polished granite. He thought he recognized the tall and perfectly tailored auburn-haired beauty, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember her name or even place her. She was a type, to be sure, the English Rose with large liquid eyes and exquisite manners.

“How do you do? Has he sent you down for me?” Hawke said, extending his hand and shaking hers. It was surprisingly warm and for some reason triggered his memory, the name popping to the forefront. He smiled at her and turned away, slipping out of his dripping mackintosh.

“Guinevere, isn’t it? You were last seen at Number Ten Downing working for the PM.”

“Gwendolyn. Kind of you to remember. Yes, I’m the same Miss Guinness. My friends call me Pippa. I was one of the PM’s Garden Girls at Number Ten until this thrilling life of derring-do beckoned. I’ve been working for Sir David now, oh, a year at least, your lordship.”

“Call me Alex, won’t you, Pippa? Don’t use the title, never have.”

She looked at him. It was a brief appraisal, no more than three seconds, tops.

She would find him all right looking, he supposed, at least other people seemed to think so, as far as that went.

Alex Hawke was a strikingly handsome man, high-browed, with a sense of powerful self-control—indifference, some of his harshest critics called it. At best, it was an odd combination of latent ferocity and languid, mannered elegance. He stood a few inches north of six feet and had a full head of unruly black hair. He was well proportioned and quite fit for a man without a current exercise regime beyond sit-ups and pull-ups every morning.

Of course, he had lost a bit of weight in the jungle and it was mercifully slow coming back on. He had that strong Hawke jaw line and a slight cleft in the middle of his determined chin. Above his narrow and imperious nose, a pair of pale, arctic blue eyes. Eyes that turned ice cold when he was troubled. Deep within the iris, flecks of dark blue burned like a welder’s torch when he was angered. The overall impression one got, however, was of resolution, tempered by boyish good humor.

Having completed her cursory evaluation, Miss Guinness smiled.

“Sorry. Alex it is, then. So, won’t you come along with me? We’re up on the fourth floor as you probably know.”

“I didn’t know, actually,” Alex said, happily following her into the lift. “First time he’s invited me to the sanctum santorem.”

“I’ll give you the penny tour later if you have time. There’s a rather contentious meeting going on in his office right now, so he’s slipped out to meet you down the hall in the Salon Privée.”

“Salon Privée? That’s new.”

“Sorry. Inside joke. We use the language of diplomacy around here sometimes to break the tension. It’s what he calls his private study.”

“Splendid,” Alex said, regretting the word as soon as it came rolling out. She was young and bright and beautiful and here he was sounding like some ancient and pompous toff. He was curious about the appealing Miss Guinness. To rise from a Garden Girl at Number Ten Downing to C’s personal assistant at MI6 Headquarters was a dizzying leap.

Hawke, who dreaded small talk, said, “He keeps you very busy, I imagine.”

“Oh, yes. We never close around here.”

“You’re his personal assistant?”

She looked back at him before getting out of the lift. It suddenly went rather chilly inside.

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? Collecting visitors in the lobby. No, we’re very egalitarian around here. I’m fetching you because I was the only one available.”

“Ah.”

“I hear you were tortured by Indians in the Amazon. Pity, that.”

“Les hommes sauvages, n’est-ce pas?” Hawke said, smiling.

She walked out, her heels clicking smartly on the granite floor and he quickly followed.

“So, Pippa,” Hawke said, struggling to keep up with her pace, “what exactly do you do here?”

“I’m Senior Analyst, Latin American Affairs. It was my field of study at Cambridge.”

“Ah. Fascinating.”

“WELL,HERE we are, then,” Pippa said, leading the way. They had left the granite behind and quickly covered the distance down a thickly carpeted hallway. He certainly didn’t miss the drab Ministry-of-Works green corridors of the old Headquarters. The darkly paneled walls here were hung with lovely nineteenth-century marine art, Hawke noticed, some older Thomas Butterfields scattered amongst the Samuel Walters and the newer Geoff Hunts. He considered commenting on his own meager collection and then decided against. Surely he’d inflicted enough damage already.

Pippa opened one of a pair of double doors and gave him an encouraging smile. “Go right in, Mr. Hawke, he’ll be with you momentarily. He’s on with his wife.”

She smiled again, it was a warmish smile, practiced, and then she left him, pulling the door firmly closed behind her. Only now did it come back to him. Yes. Gwendolyn. He and Congreve had been going up the cantilevered stairs at No. 10 Downing behind her, both of them relishing the sight of Miss Guinness’s spectacular ascent. Seamed stockings, as he recalled…yes. Quite a girl.

Sir David Trulove, his face half in shadow, was seated at a small crescent desk. A brass reading lamp with a green glass shade created a pool of light on the red leather top. He was on the telephone and waved Hawke into an armchair by the fire. Hawke sat, and used the few found moments to take in the inner sanctum of the Chief of British Intelligence. It was a far cry from the old digs at Century House, a short stroll from the Lambeth North Underground, but still uninspired.

C’s small room was finished in gleaming Bermuda cedar panels. All the lamps, paintings, and fixtures were nautical. Above the fire was a not very good portrait of Admiral Lord Nelson wearing the Order of the Nile given him by the Sultan of Turkey. Nelson, Hawke’s hero since boyhood, was also clearly a favorite of C’s. In the famous picture, Hawke knew, the decoration was worn incorrectly, having been sewn on by Nelson’s manservant upside down. Hawke decided he would be ill advised to point out this irregularity to his boss.

There was, atop the mantel, a glass-encased model of Sir David’s last command, the HMS Yarmouth. Hawke, like everyone in the Navy, knew her history. She’d had a narrow escape, down in the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina.

Two days after the British nuclear submarine Conqueror sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, Sir David’s Yarmouth, along with another destroyer, the Sheffield, had joined the fray in the Falklands. Both destroyers had been ordered forward to provide a “picket” far from the British carriers. A squadron of Argentine Dassault Super Etendards from the ARA attacked the British fleet. The Sheffield, mortally wounded by an Exocet missile strike, had sunk while under tow by Admiral Trulove’s Yarmouth.

Trulove’s destroyer had also been fired upon, but Yarmouth had deployed chaff and the missile had missed. It was common knowledge that the tragic loss of the Sheffield, finally abandoned as an official war grave, still played upon Sir David’s mind. He was convinced the Argentine junta’s decision to go to war over the Falkland Islands had been capricious and an act of outright political convenience. Nearly a thousand British boys had been killed or wounded because an unpopular regime had found it expedient to start a war.

“Lord Alexander Hawke,” Sir David said, replacing the receiver and getting to his feet. “How very good of you to come.”

“Not at all,” Hawke said, rising to shake the man’s hand. “Very good to see you again.” He’d forgotten just what an imposing figure Trulove was when he rose to his full height. He was a good inch taller than Alex, very trim, with a full head of white hair and enormous bushy eyebrows sprouting over his shrewd gray-blue eyes and hawkish nose. Most MI6 chiefs are recognized with a title only upon completing their tour of duty. Trulove had enjoyed enormous success in a private sector career that followed the Navy. This had led to an early knighthood, long before he’d been lured into the spy game.

“You look a bit thin,” Trulove said, looking him up and down. “No Pelham to look after you in the jungle, Alex?”

“Jolly mingy rations out there, I must say.”

“Sit down, sit down, please, Alex. Will you have anything, dear fellow? Whisky? Rum?”

“Nothing, thank you, sir. I was just filling my daily alcohol quota when you rang.”

“Yes, yes. I know. So. Our old friend Chief Inspector Congreve is considering marriage. That’s bloody marvelous. About time he settled down with a good woman. How is dear Diana?”

“You knew? But I just found out myself not four hours ago.”

“Ah. Well, good news travels fast,” C said, and his sharp eyes twinkled. You always had the feeling the man was checking your pulse for irregularities, like a bloody telepathic physician.

“Give Ambrose my warmest congratulations, will you?”

“Indeed, sir,” Alex smiled, trying to imagine who on earth could possibly have overheard his luncheon conversation with Ambrose at Black’s. Surely there weren’t microphones in the salt cellars at the venerable sanctuary?

“Alex, I’m terribly sorry to have interrupted what was no doubt a most convivial occasion,” Trulove said, and all traces of jollity had fled from his face.

“How can I help you, sir?”

C pulled an ancient gold timepiece from his waistcoat pocket and glanced at it impatiently.

“I’ll get right to it, Alex. We found a hired lorry parked at Heathrow yesterday afternoon. Terminal 4. Abandoned for at least a week at short-term parking. Hidden under a tarp in the back were a thousand pounds of high explosives on a very sophisticated timer. We found the cache less than a quarter of an hour prior to intended detonation.”

“Good lord.”

“One certainly hopes. We’re keeping this from the public for the time being. In the meantime, we’re making good progress. There were three men in the truck and we got a fairly good look at them on the security cameras. We’ll catch them. Soon I hope.”

“Al-Qaeda? Or, another case of local boys?”

“Neither of the above. Certainly not AQ, although they may have their fingers in it. We’ll see. Here’s the thing. We learned about this only through an amazing sequence of events involving a chap named Zimmermann. Name mean anything to you?”

“Can’t say it does, sir.”

“German diplomat. He’s Germany’s ex-ambassador to Brazil. Or, was. He may be dead now.”

“Dead?”

“We know where he is. A New Scotland Yard operator received an urgent call yesterday morning. She passed it to my office and we subsequently found the Heathrow fireworks. An anonymous tip. Something made her keep the caller on the line long enough to put a trace on that call. It was made from a hospital bed in Tunbridge Wells. I supposed you’d call it a deathbed confession.”

“The man saved countless lives.”

“Indeed he did. He is gravely ill. Poisoned, his doctors think. Someone tried to kill him. Perhaps he’s someone whom they knew had a change of heart and was planning to give up the Heathrow bombing. He’s still in hospital, at least he was as of two hours ago. Tunbridge Wells Hospice, a private one in Kent. Do you know it?”

“Indeed. But, sir, if you know where he is—”

“Alex, I’m sure you of all people will understand. I can’t be seen as involved in the thing. The Americans, who are at this very moment climbing the walls in my office down the hall, were running this fellow Zimmermann in some Mexico City operation. There’s a fresh crisis brewing down Mexico way, and the German is somehow involved. That’s all I can tell you. I can’t touch this man but I won’t give him up to the Americans until you’ve had a chat with him first. Do you follow?”

“I think so. I just don’t—”

“I would very much appreciate it if you would go out and see him first thing in the morning.”

“Jolly good.”

“There’s one more wrinkle. He refuses to speak.”

“Makes chatting difficult.”

“Indeed. That’s why I strongly suggest you take Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve along for the ride. He was a language scholar at Cambridge, if memory serves?

“He was.”

“Yes, I thought so. Any number of languages, I seem to recall.”

“All of them as far as I can make out,” Hawke smiled.

“Good, good. This chap refuses to speak anything but German. None of my own valiant charges seem up to the task. Besides, we could use the Chief Inspector’s brain on this thing.”

“I’ll make sure he brings it along.”

“But, Alex, please use assumed names when you interview the man. I don’t want this coming back to MI6 under any circumstances. All clear?”

“Perfectly. Sir.”

“Good. Well, I’d best be getting back to my Americans. Thanks for dropping by on the spur of the moment, Alex. I’m most appreciative as always for your help.”

“Sir David?”

“Yes?”

“One more thing.”

13

H awke remained seated despite C’s dismissal. He made a small coughing noise into his fist and said, “I wonder, sir, did you get round to my last report? I marked it ‘Most Urgent.’ ”

“Your report? I did get round to it, yes,” C said, looking up as if he were surprised to find that Hawke, having been dismissed, was still sitting in his chair. He returned to rifling through some papers on his lap, obviously looking for something in particular.

Hawke stood to go. C remained seated but now fastened his fierce eyes on Hawke’s.

“You’d like a reaction. I was going to save it for another time, but since you’ve asked for it, here it is. You posit a possible link between Islamist terrorists and criminal elements throughout Latin America. Doesn’t wash, I’m afraid.”

“I was sent there to observe. I am merely making projections based on firsthand observation.”

“Point taken. But we need to know more, Alex, much more, before we can take any action. Especially regarding any potential connections amongst FARC in Colombia, the Shining Path in Peru, and the Montaneros in Argentina. And, finally, Alex, I think you indulge in a bit of hyperbole with your fantasies about Islamic radicals and local guerillas out there in the jungle. It’s just not plausible.”

“As I say, I saw this operation with my own eyes. This chap I mention in the report, Muhammad Top, is—”

“No relation to Noordin Top, is he? Fellow who’s running the terrorist operation in East Timor?”

“His half-brother. At any rate, Top is building a guerilla operation the likes of which we’ve never seen. With all due respect, sir, these bloody jihadistas are a huge factor out there. Why, he—”

“Jihadistas?”

“Yes. Sorry. My word.”

“Good one, too; a neologism I believe it’s called. Look here, Alex, please don’t be cross. And, please don’t misread me. The reason I sent you into the jungle in the first place was to confirm my own personal suspicions about Brazil’s current political situation. Britain, as you well know, has heavy investments there and we’re about to invest a great deal more on that new hydro dam at Diablo Blanco Falls. Don’t forget, Alex, I’m the chap who dreamed up your ‘scientific expedition’to the Amazon. And I am deeply sorry that—”

“Please, sir. This is not necessary.”

“I am deeply sorry, in fact, horrified at the tragic outcome. I’m afraid I terribly miscalculated the dangers involved in sending you up that god-forsaken river. And, as I said in my official letter to you, the entire Service is in your debt.”

“It’s my job, sir. You offered me the opportunity to refuse.”

“But you didn’t, Alex, and the Service as always is deeply grateful. And, don’t get me wrong. I’m extremely concerned about what I read in your report. Deeply disturbed, in fact.”

“It is a deeply disturbing situation. Perhaps one of the most dangerous the free world faces at the moment.”

“Alex?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I do have one final thought if you’ll bear with me another minute. Just occurred to me.”

“Of course, sir,” Hawke said, and slid back into his chair.

“Tell me about your relationship with the American Secretary of State, Consuelo de los Reyes.”

“I beg your pardon, sir? I thought that was private.”

“Not your personal relationship, Alex. I already know all about that unfortunate business. Your working relationship is the one in question.”

“Ah, that one. I would describe it as cordial.”

“Hmm. Une entente cordiale.”

“Sorry?”

“A secret agreement to avoid hostilities. Well, no matter, Alex. Look, here. After you’ve had your little chat with the German ambassador I’d like you to give your old friend the American Secretary of State a call.”

“A call.”

“Indeed. She’s chairing a secret and very high-level security conference in Key West, Florida, a fortnight from now. You’re aware of this, of course?”

“Yes. My colleague in Miami is involved. Gathering preconference intel for the Pentagon. I believe you’ve met him. Stokely Jones.”

“Large chap? American.”

Hawke grinned. “Tear Stokely Jones down, one could erect a rather large sports complex.”

C nodded, not bothering to smile. “Quite. Well. All the American regional ambassadors and LATAM State Department officials will be attending a CIA brief by your friend, Director Kelly.”

This was Patrick Brickhouse Kelly, a lanky Virginian whom Hawke had befriended in the first Gulf War.

“National Security Agency will be there as well, Alex. Various U.S. border and police personnel. The Americans are one step ahead of us on this. Like you, some of them suddenly seem to believe Latin America is the world’s next terrorist mecca.”

“It’s true”

“Well, at any rate, I’d very much like it if you were invited to Secretary de los Reyes’s Latin pow-wow. In fact, now that you and I have had a chance to discuss your report in more detail, I think it’s critical you be there.”

Hawke forced a smile.

Despite his convictions about Papa Top’s operations in the jungle, he found the very idea of calling Conch appalling. Humiliating, to be exact. She’d refused to take his calls for months. All of his letters had been returned unopened.

“With all due respect, sir, this conference sounds very much an American—”

Sir David Trulove stood and fastened his somber tweed jacket. He had that resolute look of a man headed once more into the breech. His smile to Hawke was brief, his mind already grappling with the howling Americans down the hall.

“Come now, Alex, you’ve scraped by in far more perilous assignments than this one. It’s a simple phone call. I’m sure Conch, that’s what you call her isn’t it, I’m sure Conch will be delighted to hear from you after all this time. Besides, a bit of tropical sun would do you worlds of good. You look very pale, to be honest.”

Hawke searched for words as the man crossed the room and pulled open the heavy wooden door to leave.

“Sir David, with all due respect, what possible explanation could I offer the American Secretary of State for simply ringing her up after all these months and inviting myself to her—”

“You’ll think of something, dear boy,” C said cheerfully before leaving the room. “Send her some flowers, pink roses, that’s usually the ticket. I already forwarded her a copy of your report in the morning pouch. Once she’s read it, she’ll be chomping at the bit to have you give a first person account at her conference. Nothing to worry about, I assure you.”

Hawke sat back down and stared into the fire for a few moments. He was quite sure C had never sent anyone roses in his entire life. When he felt he could safely exit the room without breaking any furniture, he got to his feet.

Nothing to worry about, Hawke muttered to himself. You’ll think of something.

After all, he had nothing to fear but the inestimable and incandescent wrath of a woman scorned.

Pink roses? For the second time this evening, C had absolutely no bloody idea what he was talking about.

14

NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO

A ll the streetlights are out, Sheriff. You notice that?”

“Yep.”

“Transformer down somewhere maybe.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Nobody on the streets.”

“Nope.”

“Kinda early to be so quiet on a Friday night. Spooky.”

“Folks rather stay home than get shot at.”

“I guess. Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Don’t say that!”

“Homer.”

“Sorry. I know you don’t talk about, uh, Cam Ranh Bay.”

“Right. I don’t.”

“But, see, I can’t help but ask you, Sheriff. When you guys, I mean, your squad, when you’d go into a village at night, say. After dark. And you knew they were waiting—waiting for you to come around a corner or whatnot. Did you—I mean, did you ever worry about—I mean—”

“Homer. Are you scared? Are you afraid?”

“Yessir, to tell you the honest truth, I am.”

“Don’t feel bad, son. Everybody is.”

“I don’t believe that for one minute, Sheriff. I don’t think you are.”

“Not now, maybe. But I have been.”

Homer and Dixon had decided it was probably better to go down to Mexico at night. They’d taken Dixon’s pickup, mainly because to take a marked American police vehicle south of the border these days was suicide. They’d even switched the plates, hung a banged-up old Mexican plate on the tailgate. He let Homer drive the thing. He was tired.

They’d all been pretty busy going to funerals.

The whole town had.

It had taken a couple of hours to drive down south of the border from Prairie. During that time, Homer had talked a lot. He couldn’t seem to stop. It was mostly about the twelve boys who’d been killed in Mexico. Franklin had listened respectfully; he knew Homer cared deeply about those kids and their families. They’d all been friends since grade school, some cases nursery school. Homer’d been bottling a lot of things up inside and it probably helped him to just let some of it come on out.

The death of the town’s best and brightest boys, coming like it did in a single night, would take a long time to heal. In one fell swoop, they’d pretty much lost a generation. Lost the future, Franklin’s wife Daisy had said.

All those boys had mothers, and it was the most sorrowful time Franklin could remember. You couldn’t walk into a store or the diner or the filling station without seeing tears falling down somebody’s face. Women spoke in small groups on the street corners. Menfolk gathered at the Wagon Wheel or the other saloons and mostly drank. It would take a long time before this kind of pain subsided and that was assuming it ever did.

There were a lot of old boys in town who didn’t want to wait around for any healing process. Fed up and up in arms somebody called them. They wanted to ride on down there to Mexico and kill every last body they could find. Believed they knew who’d done it, who’d been abducting the girls and who’d killed the whole posse. They wanted to get their vengeance. It was hard to find fault with their emotions. But the law was the law.

And when Franklin tried to remind those fellas that vigilantism was taking the law into their own hands, one of their number, a Mr. J.T.Rawls by name, said, “Yeah. And your point is?”

“Point is, I’m the law. And you lay a hand on me you’ll wish you hadn’t, J.T.” Franklin had said and that was the end of the meeting. Shut him up, but not for long probably. Rawls was what in Houston they’d call a speed freak. And he also had a weakness for tobacco and the many fine corn whiskey products of Mr. James Beam, Clermont, Kentucky.

Rawls had himself a big Chevy dealership out south of town. He’d gotten rich selling big black Suburbans and SUVs to the wealthy cattle ranchers; and he was mean as a diamondback, too. J.T. had up and left his wife of thirty years for a young girl he’d met on the plane over to Houston. Once he’d accumulated all the money he could ever need, he’d run for sheriff. Run twice and been defeated twice. Losing didn’t set well with him. It had gotten to the point where he was drinking a bottle of Beam a day.

Folks around town had wondered for a long time how J.T. managed to make so darn much money being drunk most of the time. There were rumors he had some side business interests that wouldn’t bear a lot of scrutiny, but nothing ever came of it. Some people thought he was using his Chevrolet dealership to fence stolen cars on both sides of the border.

Another curious thing. The Mexican illegals never crossed his ranch property trekking in. Didn’t trash it and eat the dogs and livestock like they did to some others. Franklin meant to look into that sometime. A rich Yankee the Mexicans didn’t mess with? Pretty strange.

But that was all before he’d lost J.J., his son Jerry Jr., down in Mexico.

Now Franklin knew it was only a matter of time before Rawls did something stupid and got a lot more people killed. That’s when he got the idea to just go on down and talk to the Mexicans first.

A low-watt lamp snaked out of the cigarette lighter and illuminated the map on Franklin’s left knee. It was a city map of Nuevo Laredo, the outlaw town situated just over the International Bridge from Laredo, Texas. Used to be a pretty nice place, Franklin thought, gazing out the window at the shuttered storefronts and darkened hollow-eyed buildings that lined the main drag. Tourist ladies used to like to make a day of it, drive down, have lunch, and do some shopping and be back home for supper. Not any more.

It was pretty much the murder capital of the world now.

A lot of windows and doors had been blown out and the plasterwork on most of the building fronts was pockmarked or missing entirely. All this had happened in the last year or two. Drug wars had terrorized this town. No law. No order. Period. Somebody’d said over a thousand people had died in the last year alone. Accidentally on purpose. One Border Patrol report Franklin had seen talked about mass graveyards to the south of town. They had to do something with all those bodies.

He saw movement to his left and swung his eyes that way. Nothing but some old dog slinking around the corner. The town was full of such animals. Crossbred, Franklin thought, with coyotes or jackals or some such thing. Ugly as sin no matter what they were, all bones and teeth.

Every now and again he’d see a human shape or a silhouette looking down at them from above. From a rooftop or to this side or the other of a window or doorway. Homer had noticed them too, but so far he hadn’t said anything more about his fears. He knew what they were getting into when he offered to come down here. Boy clearly had his mind set on it, so Franklin finally just said fine let’s go.

They’d driven down to Nuevo Laredo to have a parlay with a gang-affiliated gentleman by the name of Felix “Tiger” Tejada. Franklin had gotten a message to him via a detective in Laredo PD. Lieutenant Detective Rodriguez maintained a purely mercenary relationship with one of Tejada’s honchos. Somewhat to the sheriff’s surprise, the man had agreed to meet with him. Tejada had a lot of conditions, of course, and Franklin agreed to every one of them all without any hesitation. What else could he do? Lose his whole town?

Tiger Tejada, now he was one unusual bandito. He wasn’t smart enough to do some of the things he did, so you had to assume somebody up the line was whispering in his ear. And he wasn’t brave enough to go out and piss in a windstorm so he hired people to do his killing, stealing, and whatnot. But money? Money was not an issue for this gentleman. The DEA in Austin told Franklin that Tejada was an up and comer in the Latino gangbanger world.

Tejada, as a relatively high-ranking member of the Para Salvados, was already moving a ton of product over the border. As an amusing sideline, he had the biggest string of fancy brothels and claptrap cathouses south of Laredo. But, his real hobby was trucking aliens across the border at five thousand dollars a head. That’s where the big money was, illegal immigration. The Border Patrol called guys like Tiger “coyotes” and it was pretty darn accurate. Coyotes, that’s just what they were.

“Next right,” Franklin told Homer, putting his index finger on an intersection.

“Where’s this meeting supposed to be at?”

“I’ll show you here in a minute. Okay, left, and then stop.”

“That’s it? Right there?”

“Right here. The Plaza del Toros.”

“A bullring?”

“Let’s go.”

15

T hey pulled up as near the entrance as they could. There were a large number of motorcycles parked in under the concrete overhang, maybe thirty or forty of them, all painted in bright metallic colors. What they had in common was a large white death’s head painted on the fuel tanks. Below the skull, the symbol PS 13 was painted. Para Salvados. PS 13 rode well. They were expensive bikes, Franklin saw, Harleys and Ducatis and big Indians.

They stuck the Mossburg under the seat. Tejada had said no guns, but Franklin wasn’t walking in there completely unarmed. Homer had a gun. Franklin told Homer to take his hand off his hip as they walked toward the darkened archway, marking the entrance to the crumbling building. He didn’t want them getting shot by some trigger-happy crackhead on the way inside. The old building had a damp smell of rotting concrete and urine and time passing by.

They walked out into the center of the ring.

They were standing back-to-back in the middle of a circle of hard-packed sand about fifty-five yards across. All around them the concrete seats rose up into the darkness under the overhanging rooftop. The bad smell was even stronger out here, different. Franklin wondered if it might be a couple of centuries of blood soaked into the sand beneath his boots. Probably a sprinkling of matador blood mixed in with all the bull blood. Bull blood and bullshit, he amended his thought.

The noble corrida. He’d gone as a little kid down to Mexico City. There was a festival of some kind and they went to the Plaza del Toros Monumental. That was the biggest ring in the world at that time. His daddy had wanted him to see El Cordobés and the great Mexican matador, Carlos Arruza.

He’d seen them.

The bulls never had a chance, he thought then and now, gazing up at shadowy figures with guns moving around up on the top rows. Lots of them up there, maybe fifty or so. You had to assume they all had automatic weapons. He felt Homer’s trembling when they brushed up against each other. Just take it easy, he told him. We’re just here to talk to the man. That’s all. We’ll talk to him. Then we’ll go home. Steady.

“Welcome to the corrida, Señores,” a voice said from a tinny loudspeaker mounted high above the ring. It was Tiger. Franklin had heard his voice talking on a tape once at Laredo PD. The Feds had a tap on his home wire at that time and they’d had his cell for a while. He’d stopped using it now that he’d become rich and famous and could afford a sat phone.

“Howdy,” Franklin said, not bothering to raise his voice. They could all hear him just fine. A minute later, Tiger had some of his guys file inside the ring and fan out in a circle, maybe thirty of them, all standing behind the wooden barrera not twenty yards away. The barrera was a five-foot fence all around the ring to keep the bulls from goring the spectators. The sweet stench of marijuana wafted up from behind the thing. Some small talk and laughing. Friday night gangbangers having a good old time.

“You didn’t get my message about the guns?” the amplified voice said.

“I’m not having a conversation with a loudspeaker. You come on down here and talk man to man. We’ll put the guns down.”

There was a silence while Tiger thought that one over and discussed it with his compadres in the broadcast booth up at the top of the stadium. A blue-white spotlight suddenly came on, shining right down in their eyes. It was blinding and he hadn’t counted on that.

There was a loud bark and then the sputtering staccato sound of one of the big choppers outside exploding into life. This was followed shortly by the fairly awesome sound of about thirty more bikes being cranked and revved under the concrete overhang of the stadium.

“They leaving?” Homer asked.

“I don’t think so. I think they’re coming in.”

The wavering beam of a bike headlamp was visible in the tunnel leading to the ring. The first motorcycle to enter the ring came in slowly and took a left just inside the barrera. The rider made a slow circuit of the ring. The next rider took a right, the next a left and so on, left then right, until there were thirty or more inside, executing a slow parade at the perimeter of the ring.

Behind him, Homer said, just loud enough to be heard over the deep rumble of the bikes, “Looks like Hell’s Angels wannabes to me.”

Franklin spoke to Homer in a low voice over his shoulder. “Listen. Take your weapon out of your holster real slow and lay it on the ground.”

“You sure about this, Sheriff?”

“Yeah. Do it now.”

Homer did it but he plainly wasn’t happy about it. Franklin kicked the gun away with his boot tip.

“You coming down?” Franklin asked, squinting in the bright lights above. “Turn those dang things off if you want to talk to me.”

A few seconds later the lights went out, snapping and popping.

Tiger Tejada came out from behind the barrera and started walking. He waited for a break between bikes, then strode across the ring toward them with a whole lot of attitude. Heck, he was just a kid. Franklin was startled to see he was wearing a shiny jacket that seemed to be made out of blue sequins. His long black hair was pulled back from his face and tied into a ponytail. His narrow face was set in a frown, his eyes black under a high forehead with the entwined letters PS tattooed there. He was wearing black jeans and shiny snakeskin kicks on his feet, looked like some kind of gangbanger rockstar.

Tiger was a high-ranking Mexican warlord in a gang known as the Para Salvados, or PS. The gang originally formed during the civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s, a war that killed a hundred thousand and left millions impoverished and homeless. Many thousands made their way to the United States and settled in Hispanic neighborhoods in cities like Los Angeles. Victimized by black gangs like the Crips or the Bloods, they soon formed their own self-protective society.

Over time, the PS, with a history of violence and business savvy, had grown to be one of the world’s preeminent importers of illicit drugs and weapons. By 2005, they had expanded far beyond the California borders. Huge cells of the gang existed from New York to Florida, and throughout the Midwest states of Illinois, Michigan, and into Texas and even Alaska.

“Ola, Tres Ojos,” Franklin said to Tiger, using the street moniker he’d picked up on the FBI taps. Franklin saw a sudden flash of strong white teeth. Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as everybody thought. He clearly enjoyed the gringo sheriff knowing his secret handle.

“Ola, Señor,” he said with a smile of exaggerated politeness. “Thank you for coming down to visit.”

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Franklin said. “Tell me something, how’d you come by that name?”

The smile became a smirk. “Tres Ojos. Three eyes. My third eye is my pecker. Always on the lookout for pussy.”

Franklin forced a smile. “Yeah.”

“It’s good we have this little chance to talk, señor. Tell me. What was it you wanted to discuss? You here to arrest me?”

“I’m here to offer you a way out of this.”

“You’re offering me a way out, señor?”

“Correct.”

Tiger turned and looked back at his boys lingering behind the barrera. They all had their gun barrels resting on the top of the fence now, pointed toward the center of the bullring. A couple of them racked the slides on their weapons.

Tiger signaled the motorcycles to stop. When they had done so, he spread his arms in a wide arc and pivoted on his bootheels.

“Muchachos! The man says he’s willing to offer us a way out of here!”

After the irony of that had a chance to jell there was a chorus of raucous laughter. Somebody behind the barrera fired his 9mm automatic into the air and that really brought the house down. Tejada turned back to Franklin with a glittery mescal look in his eyes.

“Apparently, they do not accept your offer, Sheriff.”

“Listen. You want to be a grown-up and have a serious talk, tell me now. If not, my deputy and I will leave. Your call, son.”

“I admit to curiosity. What is it you could possibly want from me?”

“I want what I can get.”

“What you can get.”

“Yes. I can’t get the boys back, so I’ll take the girls.”

“Las putas? What’s the difference? Really. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You wasting my time.”

“Tiger, listen to me. You see that big black thing up there, looks like the sky? It ain’t. It’s a big Yankee hammer about to come down on your head. I’m offering you a chance to get out from under it.”

“What is this fucking hammer?”

“Swift justice. It’s coming your way shortly.”

“You threatening me?”

“Yes.”

“What is it you want? Spit it out. I have other appointments.”

“I want you to work for me.”

“You are truly crazy, you know that, man?”

“Maybe I am.”

“Tell me. What you want, man?”

“Let’s take a walk.”

“Si. Whatever.”

“It’s called flipping,” Dixon said when they were out of earshot. “We start at the bottom which is you. We flip folks in your organization, find out who the guy above them is and go after him. We keep flipping until we reach the top of Para Salvados. The head honcho who’s getting you into so much trouble.”

“You lost me way back with flipping, man.”

“Whoever it is. At the top. We take him out. And you take early retirement where nobody can touch you. Guaranteed. You understand?”

“I understand. You think I’m crazy as you.”

“I did. I don’t anymore. I think you’re smart enough to follow your survival instincts.”

“Yeah?

“Tiger. You’re in over your head and you know it. Take my offer.”

“And if I don’t? If I just add your Yanqui blood to this sacred ground of el toro?”

“You do that and men far less polite will come down here in sufficient numbers and with sufficient firepower to put you and everybody in this town underground. I promise you that will happen.”

“You serious, man?”

“Right now, I’m the only thing stopping it.”

The kid looked away and Franklin could see him coming to a decision. “It wasn’t me. That unfortunate thing with your posse. I heard about that, but it wasn’t me.”

“We’ll see, I guess.”

“I need to think about this.”

“Think fast. As a show of good faith, I want you to release the five women that were stolen from my town over the last six months. Today is Saturday. I’m giving you forty-eight hours.”

“You are crazy, man, fucking loco gonzo. What makes you think I have them?”

“If you don’t, you know how to find them. If all five are not back with their families by sundown Monday, I’ll take that as a decision on your part and act accordingly.”

“Shit. I don’t know, man.”

“Look at me, Tiger. See who I truly am.”

“I see pretty good who you are.”

“You’ve got until sundown Monday.”

“I make no promises.”

“Pleasure doing business with you, son,” Dixon said, walking away from the Mexican. “All right, Homer, get your gun. Time to saddle up.”

“Adios, Tres Ojos,” Homer said, smiling at the narco.

“You know, perhaps some day me and my compadres will return the visit? How about that? We come see you sometime? You would like that?”

Homer and Dixon kept walking.

As they were climbing in the pickup, Homer said, “Were you kidding about all that ‘hammer of justice’ stuff?”

“Maybe.”

“America ain’t got a spare hammer right now, Sheriff, that’s the whole damn problem.”

“I know. I made it up when we were walking out there.”

16

DRY TORTUGAS

T he hungry mako was still in the picture. Loitering in the foreground, swimming lazy loops about twenty feet above the fuselage. Acting like he didn’t give a good goddamn, but Stoke would swear the fish kept checking him out, fish with that snaggle-toothed grin of his.

Stoke, back in his Navy SEAL days in the Keys, had always thought this particular make and model of shark was the meanest looking animal on earth. Fish had a very expensive set of curved knives set into his jaw. His pointy snout and dark eyes gave him a look of intense brainpower, even though he was just a damn eating machine. Definitely came with an aggressive attitude; his eyes looking into the back of your eyes, saying, “Hey! I’m the kind of fish who will personally bite your ass in half.”

Mako was a fast fish, too. Any Keys fisherman will tell you a mako can reach speeds of almost twenty-five miles an hour and can jump about twenty feet in the air. They’ve been known to attack small fishing boats, leaping up suddenly and landing on the deck, biting everything in sight. Like a collision at sea, a thing like that can ruin your day.

Stoke kept one eye on the mako, especially because he was pretty busy trying to stop his arm from bleeding. He’d ripped it on the jagged edge of some protruding cockpit glass. Reaching inside again, trying once more to move the dead pilot around, he’d been forced to pull his hand out in a hurry. What happened was, a big ass barracuda swam right up inside the cockpit, knocked the pilot’s head to one side and gave Stoke the evil eye.

Shit! Tore his damn wet suit, yanking his arm out and slicing his forearm deep and now his cut up hand was bleeding pretty good, too. Nothing like getting a good blood flow going around man-eating sharks to add a sense of heightened drama to any situation.

One swift scissors kick got him to the entrance to the plane. He poked his head inside. Visibility was way down inside the submerged airplane, but he could clearly see his man Luis poking around in the plane to his left. Sharkey saw Stoke and motioned him forward, pointing down at something below his fins. Stoke checked his right flank first, see if there were any more jaws-of-death types lurking around in the rear of the fuselage.

It was clear so he swam right through and hung a left toward the cockpit.

Sharkey immediately saw all the blood trailing from Stoke’s hand and started shaking his head, pointing upward, meaning he thought the wound was bad enough they should surface and get it taken care of. Stoke shook his head “no” and turned on his Beacon halogen dive light to see what all the excitement was about.

Sharkey had already ripped up a small section of the plane’s aluminum flooring. Something was down there and Stoke had the feeling it wasn’t any damn cocaine. He swam right down to the small opening and peered through it. Too dark to see anything much but they were definitely carrying cargo down there. He poked his hand down there and felt around. A flat surface under some kind of rough covering.

He stuck his light through the hole and directed the bright white beam fore and aft. There was way too much silt and blood in suspension to see anything much and he had to wait a bit for it to settle.

He looked at Sharkey, mouthing the words “good job.” Luis nodded his head, but grabbed him by the elbow and pointed up at the surface again.

Stoke held up two bloody fingers. “Two minutes.”

He pulled out the dive knife strapped to his thigh and used it to lever up a larger section of flooring. Now he could maybe get his light down inside there and see what the hell he had here. A foot below the floor frame, what looked like two large rectangular containers were lying side-by-side and covered with heavy burlap.

Stoke felt his heart pump.

Sharkey helped him get the rest of the floor section up. It took about five minutes. Stoke was starting to feel the loss of blood, but this was damn well worth a little dizziness. There were two long cases, each about six feet across and about twenty feet in length. He tried, but he couldn’t see how far they stretched back under the remaining floor.

He sliced open the burlap, making a slit about four feet long and then just ripping the material away.

Inside was a large metal container. There was stenciled information on top, printed in red. The writing was Russian, not one of his languages. Still, a word popped out at him and sent a new sensation flooding through his body, a mixture of fear and satisfaction. He’d seen this word buried in the thick briefing documents Harry Brock had given him to study when they’d met for his initial briefing in Washington.

On the Jet Blue back home, he’d opened the brief book and dug in. Read a lot of governmental boilerplate about what he could and could not do as an independent contractor. Perused a CIA overview of all of Latin American countries. And, finally, a long list of all the bad shit he should be on the lookout for when he got to the Caribbean. One whole section had been about black market foreign cruise missiles. Brock had told him to read that section very carefully. He didn’t need to tell Stoke why. It was one of the things the U.S. was most concerned about in the region.

Hell, you had half the nation’s strategic oil supply going up the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans. Somebody, Fidel or Hugo, say, started taking out tankers or offshore rigs, you were looking at war on your back porch.

The Russian word he had recognized was Yakhont. Stoke sucked a lot of oxygen down and held it there, trying to calm himself down.

Yakhont had a familiar ring to it.

Sharkey and his old man had stumbled on the jackpot.

Yakhont, called Firefox by U.S. military, was the new Russian anti-ship missile. It scared the hell out of everybody in Washington. Death with wings. Unstoppable ship-killer. And, precisely what the U.S. government did not want was for even one of these damn things to find its way into the hands of somebody who didn’t have America’s best interests at heart. That’s why it was at the top of the list Brock had given him.

Firefox combined all the qualities of future anti-ship missiles. It was designed to fly at supersonic speeds, be invisible to radar, deaf to jamming, and was guided autonomously on a “shot-forgot” principle. Fire a Firefox and fugheddaboudit, game over. It had a range of up to 300 km at an altitude of about 15 meters. The missile would drop down to about fifteen feet seconds before it hit you.

Flying at roughly 750 meters a second, and performing complex tactical maneuvering during flight, the Firefox would reach its target no matter what. Just one of these damn things could sink a supertanker or an aircraft carrier. And, no navy in the world had an effective means of defending against the Russkis’ new missile. Not one.

The missile was designed to be carried by Russian Su-27 and Su-35 fighter aircraft. This was the new Sukhoi Flanker, a front-line fighter that was one of the mainstays of Russian airpower. Sophisticated and extremely expensive. Now, who the hell had planes like that down here in the tropics? Castro certainly couldn’t afford any damn Su-27s. Cubans could barely afford breakfast in that island utopia.

But his bosom buddy, Latin America’s new Daddy Warbucks, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, sure could.

Two minutes had been used up. Stoke swam up to Sharkey who was tapping on his watch and staring at Stoke like he was crazy which was no newsflash. Stoke knew he’d lost a hell of a lot of blood but he wanted to get this done in one dive and get on the horn to Washington as quickly as possible.

Stoke opened his dive bag and pulled out a small digital camera designed to work underwater. He gave it to Luis and then pointed at the two cruise missiles. Sharkey understood and swam down to photograph the things.

The big barracuda, thank you very much, had left the premises when Stoke got up to the cockpit. He’d chewed up el Capitán a little more but Stoke wasn’t interested in the man anymore, only his uniform.

It was light blue. Military, but if Stoke expected to find insignia identifying the pilot’s outfit, he was mistaken. Anything that could have identified rank or national origin had been removed from the corpse’s uniform. And it wasn’t fishies who’d done it. Someone had used a knife to cut the patches away. Stoke knew that because he saw the knife still lying in the pilot’s lap.

Very interesting. The deceased had been stripped of ID. Somebody had survived the crash. Yeah. Somebody who’d kept his wits about him before he disembarked.

Stoke checked his remaining air. Time to go. He looked at the pilot one last time before he swam out of the cockpit.

Hasta luego, amigo, he said silently.

Fly below the radar.

Die below the radar.

17

HAMPSTEAD HEATH

C ongreve pushed back from the table and laced his fingers atop the plump pillow of his tightly buttoned yellow waistcoat. Suppressing a sigh of pleasure, he surveyed the sunny scene of domesticity before him. Basking in the morning light, shafts of pure gold streaming through his windows, the famous detective had the look of a man who had finally grabbed life by the lapels and shook it for all it was worth.

Life was worth, he was now convinced, a very great deal. He’d had a near miss a year ago. A would-be killer’s bullet had lodged very near his spine. It had all been quite touch and go for a while. To be honest, though he’d never told a soul, there were not a few times, lying there in the dark in his hospital bed, when he’d heard the angels calling. It was sweet and seductive, the music from heaven. But he’d turned a deaf ear, and it had finally stopped.

Yes, yes, Ambrose thought. Life was certainly hurrying by, running away at breakneck speed. Too fast to stop, and too sweet to lose.

May Purvis, his housekeeper, who’d been quietly arranging a dozen dewy peonies in a silver jug, was suddenly up on her toes. She had her hands clasped to her bosom, and seemed on the verge of a pirouette.

“Well, well, Chief Inspector, look who’s come to call of a morning,” said a beaming Mrs. Purvis. Ambrose looked over his shoulder and saw Alex Hawke framed in the doorway.

“Ah, good morning, Alex,” Congreve said, putting down his Times crossword. The man was half an hour early. He’d called the night before. Something about visiting some diplomat in hospital. Very tight-lipped about it and wouldn’t say more.

Hawke, never one for a lazy entrance, didn’t falter now. Before you could blink, he was kissing the back of Mrs. Purvis’s fluttering hand.

“Mrs. Purvis’s younger daughter, are you not?” Hawke said, bowing slightly from the waist. “We meet at last!”

“Oh, my! Don’t be ridiculous! It’s only me, of course. It’s poor old May, you silly boy!” she said, giving a half-curtsy.

Hawke took a seat.

“Tea?” May asked Alex, pouring.

She was buzzing about his lordship, teapot in hand, like a bee round a stamen. It was a bit much this early in the morning.

“You might put a patch on mine as well, please, Mrs. Purvis,” Congreve said, holding up his cup, a trace of peevishness in his voice.

“Did I tell you I bumped into C, of all people,” Hawke said, putting down his cup and passing the linen over his lips. “After our splendid luncheon at Black’s yesterday.”

“Did you indeed?” Congreve affected his most innocent smile, his baby blue eyes conveying nothing but simple curiosity. For now he’d decided to let the green ink on the dropped note remain where it had fallen.

“Yes. Bumped into him at Harrods, believe it or not. Buying a tie.”

“Harrods?”

“Yes, Harrods. Rather large emporium in Knightsbridge. Surely you know it?”

“Alex. Please. Spare me this day your ridiculous sense of humor.”

“Anyway, I saw him.”

“Hmm. Anything in particular on his mind? Other than neckwear?”

“Nothing in particular, really.”

“I don’t believe you for a moment. Marching to the colors again, are we? That’s my guess. Drawing steel once more. Is that right, Alex?”

“Hmm.”

“What was on that formidable mind?”

“This and that.”

Hawke looked at his watch. “We’re late. Our meeting with this German chap. We’d better shove off.”

“German? Who said anything about Germans?”

“I did. Let’s take your Morgan, shall we? The Yellow Peril?”

“ZIMMERMANN IS his name?” Ambrose asked above the wind and engine noise. “This chap I’m to interrogate?”

“That’s it.”

“Why does that name sound so familiar?”

“Just thinking that very thing. Something to do with the Great War, wasn’t it?” Hawke replied.

“Hold on, it will come to me. Ah, yes, the Zimmermann Telegram. The cryptographic lads in Room 40 at Whitehall intercepted and decoded it. Dispatched by the German Foreign Secretary in 1917. Instructing his German Ambassador in Mexico City to approach the Mexicans about forming an alliance against the United States.”

“Exactly. To keep the Yanks out of Europe while the dreaded Hun polished us off?”

“Yes. The Kaiser believed the Americans would get so bogged down fighting a war on their southern border they’d leave us in the lurch. The Mexicans were leaping at the chance to recover Texas, Arizona, and California. Might have worked, too, but for the fact that we cut the Germans’ suboceanic cables and rerouted all their transmissions to—”

“Ambrose,” Hawke said, “the man you’re about to meet was somehow involved in a plot to blow up Heathrow. Herr Rudolf Zimmermann is also the former German ambassador to Brazil. C is a clever man. He’s read my report and now he’s sending us to interview someone who may possess vital information relevant to the region.”

“I still need more details before I interrogate this man.”

“I’m afraid details are incomplete.”

Congreve smiled. “I pray we make them less so.”

Hawke swung the Morgan into the car park. Twenty minutes later, the two men were standing at the dying man’s door.

A burly SIS type, an ill-concealed weapon bulging beneath his jacket, sat outside chatting up a pretty nurse.

The SIS man stood, opened the door, and waved them inside an ill-lit and ill-smelling room. It was also stifling. Someone had sealed the windows and pushed the thermostat to ninety. The bed was against the far wall, surrounded by more new technology devoted to keeping people around when by all rights they should be gone.

The patient was a sickish shade of gray and breathing rapid, shallow breaths. Tubes and electrodes ran from all parts of his being to the anti-death machinery. Hawke bent forward and peered at the fellow, bending the gooseneck light so that it shone on his face. He was clearly feverish and suffering chills beneath his blankets. There was something else, Hawke saw, lifting the covers back.

The man was covered with the beginnings of blood blisters. Identical to the same awful thing he’d seen on the man crashing through the jungle. One of the untouchables from the medical compound.

“He looks like death,” Hawke whispered, glad of his gloves and mask.

Zimmermann’s eyelids fluttered and he croaked something indecipherable. It was German all right, but not any German Hawke had ever heard before.

“It’s Hochdeutsch,” Ambrose said, as if that explained the matter. “Leavened by some strange continental accent. Must be his dementia speaking.”

Congreve leaned down close to the man’s face and spoke quietly. “Grüss Gott, Herr Zimmermann. Ich bin Dr. Franz Tobel. Wie geht es Ihnen?”

The pale face turned away and faced the wall.

After a minute or so of this, the man feebly slid his hand under his pillow and withdrew an envelope attached to a small package in gift wrapping of faded roses. His hoarse whisper was full of incomprehensible pleading as he handed these to Congreve.

“What’s he saying?” Hawke asked. “What’s he given you?”

“He says these are gifts for his wife in Manaus. A book, perhaps, and a farewell poem of some sort. He wants me to make absolutely sure she receives them.”

“One has to honor a deathbed wish,” Hawke said.

“Hmm,” Congreve allowed.

“I think I’ll bid you both auf wiedersehen,” Hawke said to Ambrose, taking the wrapped gift and letter. Hawke looked around as if searching for an escape hatch.

“Please don’t feel the need to stay. I think he’s mildly insane with fever, actually. You go. I’ll do the interrogation. Go to Reception and read a magazine. Or, that farewell letter if you really want to pry.”

“I do want to pry. It’s my métier, you know.”

Hawke turned and was out the door in an instant, his face flooded with relief at escaping the noxious oven.

Ambrose moved a chair into position beside the bed and sat down. He took the man’s skeletal hand and held it under the dim lamp, examining his skin and fingernails. After a few moments, he put the hand down and leaned in toward the face for closer inspection.

The mouth was conveniently agape. Congreve pulled the white linen handkerchief from his breast pocket, wrapped it round his fingers, and grasped the German’s tongue twixt thumb and forefinger, extracting it.

“Good lord,” he said, under his breath.

The tongue, in the small pool of light, was horribly furry and spotted white. Malarial, possibly something far more interesting. Hemorrhagic fever perhaps, although it was quite rare, and confined primarily thus far to West Africa.

“Listen to me, Herr Zimmermann,” Ambrose said to the man in flawless idiomatic German, “I perceive that you are dying. You seem to have some kind of parasitic infection. Viral, or, possibly microbial.”

“Poison,” Zimmermann croaked.

“I don’t think so. I think you caught something. Tell me, have you recently been traveling in the Amazon Basin, Ambassador Zimmermann?”

“Igapo,” the man managed to say. “The Black River. They—tried to kill me—they tried many times. I was thrown overboard. But, I am still here and—”

“Who tried to kill you, Ambassador?”

He closed his eyes and whispered in Spanish, “Las Medianoches.”

Ambrose had heard the name from Hawke.

“My wife…she’s in danger…”

“Mr. Ambassador, I want to hear your story. But I fear we haven’t a good deal of time.”

The man lay back upon the pillow and closed his eyes.

And then he began to speak softly but most volubly and Ambrose leaned in to listen, nodding his head periodically as a dead man’s tale came rolling off his discolored tongue.

While he sat there, he learned a few terrifying facts about a union of radical Islamists, guerillas, and narcoterrorists. About the size of their infrastructure, and the power of their influence in Latin politics. Their possible links to Castro and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.

If this man was to be believed, it seemed the whole of the southern hemisphere was about to blow up in the Americans’ faces. And, if Zimmermann’s information was correct, ground zero was going to be the Texas-Mexico borderline. It was frighteningly familiar. A third-party plot to use Mexico against the Americans. Just like 1917. Only this time it wasn’t Germans doing the plotting. It was Middle Eastern terrorists.

The German’s clawlike grip was surprisingly strong. Congreve looked down and saw the man’s head had come up off the pillow and was straining toward him, his watery eyes bulging.

“There is a man in the jungle,” he said, his voice raw. “He knows I’ve betrayed him once. You must stop him before he attacks again. Do you hear me?”

“Give us his name.”

“Muhammad. Muhammad Top.”

“Papa Top?”

“Ja.”

Congreve said, “Where will he attack next?”

“It is written.”

“I don’t have time for biblical references. Tell me where to find him.”

“It is written, I tell you! Written in…in—”

Zimmermann was gone.

18

LA SELVA NEGRA

M uhammad Top ended his morning prayers with a special flourish, three ascending notes flung to the curved bowl of ceiling above his head. He gave a small sigh, allowing himself the brief luxury of repose. Yes. Allahu Akbar. Mighty Allah had replenished his soul during the night hours and now prayer chased sleep from every cobwebbed corner of his waking mind. As he sat kneeling on the hard wooden floor, with nothing but his thin prayer rug for comfort, he shivered.

But, it was not the deep jungle cold that had seeped inside his bones during the night that stirred him.

No, this was a frisson of pure excitement. Papa Top, as he was known to his adoring legions, felt the electric promise of the coming day as a sharp, tingling sensation, one that raced up and down his spine and sped along nerve endings to his extremities. Every day now promised to be a great day, even an historic one. The Day when all wrongs would be righted. And all sins punished. Inshallah. God willing.

The Hour of Retribution.

The Reckoning.

Hello, there! Is that you?

Yes, this feeling was so delightfully pleasant he looked down, half expecting to see an erection sprouting from his groin. But no, the sleepy serpent had not bestirred himself, had not yet risen from the dead calm of the predawn hours. Alas, there had been no concubine in his bed last night, nor did he feel need or want of having one sent up now. No. There was far too much work to be done this day.

Let sleeping snakes lie.

Dawn was just breaking in the leafy green stillness beyond his opened doors and windows. It would still be an hour or more before any trickle of sunlight managed to penetrate the gloom at the very top of the rain forest. Even though his small room was suspended just beneath the deep green canopy of the treetops, only thin rivulets of watery pink light ever managed to leak down his walls as the sun rose over the jungle.

Upon rising from his pallet, Papa Top lit one of the many iron torches that ringed the wall of his spare circular bedchamber high in the trees. During morning prayers, the light from the single flickering kerosene torch threw stark orange and black shadows upon the thatched walls of his room. Torchlight was both eerie and comforting and he would have it no other way. He had become, after all, primarily a creature of darkness.

Like running water, though, electricity was now readily available throughout this strange village. Early on, Muhammad Top had decided to erect his empire high in the trees. Because of the heavy flooding that swept through this remote area during the rainy season, it was critical to be above ground level. And, as all military commanders know, one wanted the high ground in battle. Not that he ever intended to fight here.

His life’s mission was to take the fight to the enemy.

The newly installed high-capacity power stations meant all manner of wonders were possible. There was a new underground communications bunker, the command center, from which he would soon wage his great jihad on the infidels to the north. Electric powered buggies and troop trams, for instance, now sped across the suspended rope bridges that formed the network of the warlike community. Battery-powered aerial drones patrolled the skies above looking for intruders. And Trolls that spat lead rolled through the jungle looking for invaders.

Still, in his primary bedchamber, he chose not to have power at all. He preferred candles or torches in spaces where he lived his solitary life.

Of all elements, Papa Top vastly preferred fire.

Once, when Muhammad was a child, he had visited his paternal ancestral village on the parched banks of the Euphrates in Syria. One day an old crone came to visit his house. She was a Syrian Hama, a witch, veiled and wearing a black cotton garment, called an ezar. Embroidered with symbols of wind, earth, and fire, the flowing ezar enveloped most of her frail body and head. Little Muhammad Top had seen only the witch’s fierce black eyes and, as she had bent and whispered a strange riddle, smelled her sour breath.

“If your house was burning, Muhammad Top,” the woman said to the small boy, “and God in his wisdom allowed you to rush in to save only one single thing, what would that one thing be?”

“I know the answer,” the boy had said, deep vertical creases of concentration forming above his long, already commanding nose. “Wait, it will come.”

“I am patient beyond words,” the witch said.

“If I could save only one thing,” Muhammad Top said, “it would be the fire.”

“Yes,” she whispered, placing her hand atop the boy’s head. “Guard the fire,” she whispered. “You must save the fire.”

He had made her words his life’s calling.

The big man now stood, rose to his full height, six and a half feet, stretched, yawned, and walked through his opened bedroom door and out onto his circular veranda. A gourd hung from a peg beside the door and he dipped it into a wooden bucket of water. He drank. He placed his hands upon the wooden railing still wet with dew and gazed down with complete satisfaction at the tranquil scene below.

Enraptured by the sight of his sleeping treetop village, he almost missed the black scorpion moving swiftly along the railing toward his left hand. The little beast was feeling aggressive, waving his lobsterlike pincers in the air. The poisonous jointed tail was held aloft, curved over his back, ready to strike. He’d found one of these ferocious and deadly monsters in his boot yesterday. He was ill disposed toward them this morning.

He lifted his hand a few centimeters to allow the insect passage beneath it and then slammed his hand down on the rail and smashed the creature with a satisfying crunch beneath his palm.

Life was short, but good, he sighed to himself, scraping the remains of the insect from his hand.

Swirling spirals of mist rose from the damp jungle floor. The damp air created perfect halos around the bobbing torches, the countless fireflies of light streaming below. These were the servants and guard changes. His men rushed with guttering torches across the suspended ropewalks linking the circular thatched and tin rooftops of varying diameter below. These were called roundhouses. The larger ones, like the mosque, were built nearer the ground.

Wisps of smoke curled from chimneys, mingling with the mist. In two of the larger roundhouses, built only fifty feet in the air, fires were now being stoked for cooking. Fans drew off smoke during working hours, to prevent even a wisp from escaping the canopy above.

The day was beginning.

Around the great blue dome of the central mosque (the only tiled roof he allowed) were the larger circles of the great common roundhouses and storage rooms built in the last few years. They provided barracks for House Guards, food and water storerooms, dining, emergency generators, and, of course, vast stores of weapons and ammunition stockpiles.

Above these, smaller circular structures housed officers of sufficient rank to warrant private quarters. Near the river, a sick bay was adjacent to a small room for special prisoners to be interrogated.

Viewed from this position high above, the village resembled, he had always thought, a bizarre flowering, a profusion of manmade silver mushrooms, growing in the thick fragrant air amongst the towering dark trunks of the Amazonian trees. Poisonous mushrooms, he liked to think, yes, poisonous to be sure. To the core.

In the beginning, when all the magic spread out below him was but a vision, he had chosen a simple Spanish name for his hidden refuge in the rain forest, La Selva Negra. It was, he decided, the perfect name for an empire erected in dark hatred.

The Black Jungle.

19

WEST TEXAS

Y ou think that phone will ring if you just stare at it long enough?”

“No, I don’t, Daisy. It was a crazy idea, going down there and talking to that Mexican boy. I could have easily gotten us both killed. I don’t know what I was thinking. Plain stupid, I guess.”

“Well, stop staring at it then. Listen, why don’t you go on outdoors, honey? Take a nice long walk. Go riding or something. You haven’t ridden Rocket in a month or more now. He could use a little giddy-up and go and so could you. For Pete’s sake, Franklin.”

“I don’t want to even look at a damn horse.”

“Is something wrong, darlin’? You’ve been acting funny all week.”

“No. Nothing’s wrong.”

“Listen. Those boys that rode down to Mexico were volunteers. Every last one of them. They all wanted to go. Their families wanted them to go! Look for their sisters or their girlfriends or whatever. All you did was swear them in. You thought you were doing the right thing and you did your duty. That’s all anyone can ask of a body.”

“Yep.”

“You think you should have gone with them. Well, you couldn’t. You’ve got an obligation to protect this town. And God knows it needs protecting. You went down there and tried to do something for those girls and it didn’t work. You’ll think of something else.”

“Yep.”

“You don’t want to talk. Fine. Go do something then. Turn on the television. Read a book. Dance a jig. You’ll go flat crazy sitting around here all afternoon staring at a telephone for lord knows what reason. Or, I will.”

“I am sorry to be such a bother to you,” Franklin said, getting slowly up from his armchair. “I reckon I’ll go on into the office now. Got some work to do.”

He plucked his short brim off the rack and started for the front door.

“Franklin, it’s Sunday afternoon. This is time you should be with your family.”

“I was trying.”

“I ain’t never seen you like this, honey. Don’t say hi to anybody at church. Don’t smile when you shake hands with the preacher. These are your friends, Franklin. Folks who love and admire you.”

“I’ll see you later on then, Daisy. I’ll take the pickup in case you decide to go on over to your sister’s in the good car.”

“You planning on being home for supper?”

“I can’t rightly say at the moment.”

“What can you say?”

“That’s all I can say.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, baby girl.”

FRANKLIN DROVE slowly into town. Wasn’t any traffic to speak of, it being Sunday. Just a couple of good old boys heading out to the Wagon Wheel to catch the second half of the Cowboys on the wide screen. The sun still had a ways to go before it set down and that gave him a little lift. He’d do some deskwork, take his mind off things. Keep his eye off the clock.

He figured he’d try and get that report done, a short version of the one they had asked him to write up here about a month ago. It had been sitting on his desk, staring at him long enough. Just like high school papers, wait till the day before something’s due to write it. Most folks never got out of high school their whole lives he thought, but that was just his opinion.

Some time ago, he’d written what they called a White Paper. It was on illegal immigration. This he’d done at the request of the Texas Sheriff’s Association. He wasn’t special, everybody got asked to write the same thing and send it to some bureaucrat in Austin, whether they lived near the border or not. Well, he sent his in. Next thing you knew, somebody or other up in Washington had called up the governor’s office about his report.

The lady in Austin who’d called him here back in November had said something about how they were fixing to have a big government terrorism pow-wow down in Key West, Florida. State Department, CIA, Border Patrol, and who knows who all else was supposed to be there. Part of the program or presentation or whatever you want to call it was going to be about border problems with Mexico apparently.

The woman from the capital said they’d be real interested in a short version of what he’d put in his paper. The part about increased violence along the border and anti-Americanism. Border Patrol officers getting shot at, stoned on a daily basis by kids heaving rocks. Weapons coming across through tunnels. Drugs by the ton, above and below ground. And the outright lawlessness that prevailed in some of this territory just south of the border. How it was spreading this way.

And, if you can believe this one, they wanted him to attend the conference and maybe even present his report if there was time enough on the schedule. He hadn’t even told Daisy about it, it was so preposterous.

Somebody at the U.S. State Department had read his paper. If that didn’t beat all, he didn’t know what did. He hadn’t told anybody at all of course, even Homer or June. But, you couldn’t help but be a little, not proud of it, but gratified that somebody that high up in government was actually interested in what you had to say about things.

The Prairie County Courthouse stood in the center of the town square. It was a four-story building dating from 1914, still all original right down to the doorknobs. Even the big sash windows. It was made out of yellow brick and had four doors, one set on each side. The parking was on the south side, the main entrance was on the north, facing Main Street. One of his predecessors as sheriff, an old man named Wyatt, was now working three days a week as an unpaid deputy. Wyatt had a thing about landscaping. He’d put in some walnut trees that had grown pretty big now. They gave a nice shade on hot days.

His office, as well as Wyatt’s, was up on the second floor overlooking the main drag. There wasn’t much to see up there other than a spittoon, a hat rack, and a checkerboard. June and Homer spent a whole lot of time playing checkers most afternoons. When he walked in he was startled to see the place so empty and he realized he’d been so preoccupied he’d plain forgotten Daisy had reminded him it was Sunday. Then he saw June Weaver, who was sitting with her shoes propped up at a desk just outside his door.

There was loud snoring coming from Wyatt’s office. He came in on Sundays to get away from the Cowboys game his wife always had cranked up full volume. Wyatt was a good man. He’d taken over as sheriff when Franklin’s daddy had been killed in the line of duty. His father and Wyatt had gotten into a shootout with some bank robbers and a stray bullet had nicked Franklin Sr.’s heart.

June was a pretty little brunette gal. About Daisy’s age, she was in her early forties but looked younger. Always watching her weight, not that she needed to do that much. She had her nose deep in a movie magazine.

“Hey, Junebug,” he said to her, trying not to spook her.

“Hey, Sheriff. What are you doing here?”

“Thought I’d try to finish that dang report.”

“Well, it’s past due.”

“Anything happen I should know about?”

“Phone hasn’t rung once.”

“Well, we figured on that, right?”

“Yessir, I guess we did. I’m sorry.”

“You want any coffee?”

“I’ll bring you a cup.”

“I ’preciate it, Sheriff.”

He’d brought June coffee and then stared out his office window for a while, just watching folks stroll by down below. Then he’d gotten going on his paper pretty good and an hour or more went by before he knew it. He looked up and saw June was standing in the doorway saying Homer was on the radio and needed him quick.

“He say what the trouble was?”

“He said there was a big bunch of ’em out at the Wagon Wheel raising hell. Liquored up and smashing furniture. Somebody’s firing his gun in the air out back.”

“Cowboys must be losing pretty bad.”

“He said they were calling for your head.”

“Ain’t my fault the ’Boys are losing. All right. Tell him I’m heading on over there. Phone rings, some news about the girls, you let me know.”

“I got operators standing by.”

“Be good. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“You take care now.”

The Wagon Wheel was five and a half miles south of Prairie. It was just about what you’d expect, the kind of place folks used to call a juke joint or a roadhouse. There was a lot full of dusty pickups when he turned in. A lot more than you’d normally see, unless it was the play-offs or there was live music like they sometimes had whenever the T-birds or some other band was passing through on the way to somewhere else.

Franklin pulled up and parked next to Homer’s cruiser. He noticed the front door was open and the motor was still running. Looked like he’d been in a hurry and felt the need of bringing the Mossburg shotgun too. He made his way through a covey of big Harleys parked near the entrance, taking note of a couple of bikes he’d not seen before. New Mexico tags.

His boots crunched on broken glass when he walked through the door. He saw Homer with his back up against the bar, blood on his face. Two men were holding his arms out to the sides while another one worked on his midsection with the butt end of a busted pool cue, shouting at the top of his lungs, his voice full of rage and spittle. The man with the cue stick was Mr. J.T.Rawls. His face was bright red and his eyes were blazing in the miraculously unbroken mirror behind the bar.

“Why didn’t you shoot me when you had the chance, you little fuckin’ shitbritches?” J.T. asked. “Huh? Answer me! You want some more? Awright, you—”

“That’s enough of that,” Franklin said, raising his voice just enough to be heard above all the TV football noise and the music and shouting going on inside. Every head swiveled in his direction and he was conscious of how he must look to them. He was wearing what he wore every day of his life including Sundays. Dress trousers, a starched white shirt, and a necktie representing Old Glory. His badge was clipped to one side of his belt, his sidearm clipped to the other.

“Enough of what?” Rawls said, turning drunkenly toward the doorway on one heel of his boot.

It got quiet fast.

“J.T., put down that stick. You two boys let Homer go.”

“Or, what?” Rawls said.

“Yeah!” somebody shouted. “Or, what?”

It became a kind of a liquor chant, “Or, what?” did, everybody focused on him now, saying it over and over, and Homer slumping to the floor. Homer’s shotgun, Franklin saw, was lying on top of the bar in a puddle of beer. There was movement now, as the men formed up close on J.T.’s flanks. A couple of men he didn’t recognize stepped in, putting themselves between him and the rancher. They were the motorcycle owners, wearing leather chaps and vests. Big fellas with prison tats on their biceps.

“I got to see about my deputy,” Franklin said, walking toward them so they had to step aside.

He waded through the mess of angry men toward Rawls and his deputy, resisting the temptation to put his hand on his sidearm. He was just determined to keep moving forward and that’s what he did. Suddenly a hand reached out and grabbed his shoulder and hung on.

“Let me go, Davis,” he said to the wild-eyed man. There were tears in the man’s eyes. Davis Pike’s son Tyler had been a member of the posse. After a couple of seconds of staring at each other, the man looked away and let go. He just looked broken and lost.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Franklin said, and kept moving.

Franklin figured there was about fifty of them in the place. Most if not all of them were drunk as skunks and past all caring which way this thing went. And a lot of them had weapons. He saw some .357s stuck in the waistbands of jeans and a couple of rifles here and there.

When he got to J.T., he stopped about two feet in front of the man. Rawls’s chest was heaving, shallowlike, and his eyes had a methamphetamine glitter to them. Suddenly Rawls reached around behind him and grabbed Homer’s shotgun off the bar.

“Give me that gun, J.T.,” Franklin said softly.

“Yeah. Both barrels, killer,” he said, too wasted to notice the Mossburg was a single.

“I am not a killer. I never did kill anybody didn’t need killing.”

“No? What about my son? What about all them poor boys you sent to their deaths? What about them? You got ’em scalped! What about all the daughters of men here? You know? They’re gone, ain’t they? Might as well be dead! You know what I think? I think we’ll have us a trial by jury right here. I think we can find twelve angry men in this room.”

“Good one, J.T.!” someone said.

“Who wants to be on the jury? Say ‘aye.’ ”

A chorus of “ayes” rang out. The men pressed forward making a tight circle around Rawls and the sheriff and the downed deputy.

“Put the gun down now,” Franklin said, taking a step forward.

Rawls backed off and raised the gun to his shoulder and aimed it square at Franklin’s heart. Franklin thought he was going to pull the trigger right then. Then he stepped forward until the muzzle of the gun was pressed against the sheriff’s breastbone.

“Guilty,” Rawls said, trying to shove Franklin backwards with the Mossburg. But suddenly, Rawls was going down hard like he didn’t have legs anymore. Homer, still on the ground, had somehow managed to kick J.T.’s feet out from under him.

Franklin knocked the shotgun barrel aside and knelt beside Homer. The boy’s eyelids were fluttering and he looked up and smiled.

“I appreciate that, son,” the sheriff said to his deputy. “You got a little kick left in you.”

“Howdy, Sheriff. Glad you made it.”

“Yeah. Come on. We’re going to take you over to the emergency at Southwest Medical.”

“You ain’t going nowhere but Hell,” Rawls said from the floor. He fired the weapon about six inches above the sheriff’s head and blew a jagged hole in the veneer of the bar about a pie plate wide.

Franklin grabbed the muzzle and swung it away before the man could fire again. He tried to pull it downward so that if J.T. fired again he wouldn’t hit anybody and then there was a muzzle flash and he felt a searing pain in his forearm. He ripped the gun from the man’s hands and swung on him. Rawls caught it on the side of his head and fell back, blood pouring from the wound. He tried to stay sitting upright but he went down. Out cold by the look of him.

The sheriff threw the gun behind the bar and turned toward the mob pressing in on him now, all around him, sensing blood.

Dixon stood his ground.

“It’s all over, boys. Time for everybody to go home.”

“Hell if it’s all over,” one of the big Harley fellas said, coming right up in Franklin’s face. “I’ll be damned if it’s all over, you sonofabitch. Why, I’m going to kick your—”

“Sheriff, come quick!” a man said above the murmurs and angry cries. He was standing in the doorway, just a silhouette with the blazing sun falling to the ridge behind him. Something about the way he called out made them all stop, freeze in fact, and look at him. It was Joe Beers. He stepped inside a bit, looking at the mess and Homer on the floor and all, taking the whole of it in and immediately understanding what was going on.

He stepped forward, pushing men aside, and took Sheriff Dixon’s hand, pumping it up and down. The man was laughing and crying at the same time.

“I seen your car out there on my way into town, Sheriff. Lord, I’m glad to find you here. I was going to the courthouse. Everbody’s there, the whole town. They all want to thank you for getting all our little girls back home safe.”

“You mean to say they’re all back?” one of the semidrunk fellas nearest the door said.

The bar went dead quiet.

“He’s lying,” Rawls said. “Don’t believe a word of it.”

“All of them. Ever last one. Heck, my wife just called my cell and told me. An old moving van pulled up at the courthouse here not ten minutes ago and dropped them off. All five of ’em is what I hear. It’s a miracle is what it is. My wife Sherry’s there with Charlotte already. I got to go hug my daughter.”

“Are they all right?” Franklin said. “Unharmed?”

“Yes, sir. I asked. Sherry says they’re all physically unharmed as far as she can tell. She already called the Southwestern EMS and it’s on the way. Check everybody out, make sure they’re all right.”

“They just brought ’em back?” Davis Pike said, crossing over to where Joe Beers was standing. “Just like that? I find that hard to believe, Joe.”

“Well, they sure did. Way I understand the thing, what I hear is the sheriff here went on down there to Nuevo Laredo and had a little talk with them Mexicans. He and Homer there, just the two of them. Took a lot of guts, you ask me. You can thank your sheriff and his deputy now, any you people got any damn manners.”

Davis Pike knelt and cradled Homer in his arms, wiping off some of the blood running from his nose and mouth.

“Homer?” Franklin said, kneeling also. “Can you walk?”

“I believe I can, yessir.”

Franklin and Davis managed to get Homer on his feet. They each got an arm around him, supporting him, and they started for the door. Men were falling all over each other getting out of their way, looking stunned and averting their eyes.

“You killed my boy, you son of a bitch!” Rawls cried out. “I’m going to get you, you hear me?”

“Sometimes I wonder whose side you’re on, J.T.,” Dixon said, pausing at the door to look at him. “Texas? Or Mexico?”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“You know what I mean.”

After that, nobody said a damn word.

20

QUARTERDECK

T he course of history, as Sir Winston Churchill so presciently remarked, is always being altered by something or other—if not by a horseshoe nail, then by an intercepted telegram. Churchill was referring, of course, to the Zimmermann Telegram intercepted and decoded by our Room 40 chaps back in the year 1917.”

“Ah, yes,” C said to Ambrose Congreve, “Room 40. Every schoolboy in England knows that stirring spy saga. Isn’t that right, Alex?”

“I seem to remember hearing something about it, yes,” Hawke said, prying his eyes away from the wintry scene beyond the window to regard his two companions with a faint smile. He was tired all the time since his escape and return to England. He slept a good deal, more than required, but felt unrestored by it. There were demons lurking and they’d have to be dealt with soon.

Ambrose, who had the floor, paused, took a sip of his whiskey and smiled at Alex. Hawke, who had seemed distracted if not downright somber since their arrival at Sir David Trulove’s home, was perched on a window seat overlooking a dense thicket of woodland. Something was troubling him and Ambrose had no idea what it might be.

C, his sharp eyes bright and alert as always, was in his favorite high-backed chair near the crackling fire. Sir David was suffering some form of bronchial infection and now sat with a black cashmere scarf swaddled round his neck and had his feet encased in woolen slippers. Despite his occasional coughing fits, he was now in the process of lighting one of his poisonous black cheroots.

A sleeting rain was chattering against the high windows in C’s library where the three men had earlier sought refuge from the gathering storm.

Half an hour or so earlier, under sunny skies, Hawke had swung the long bonnet of his Bentley off the A30. From there it had been a leisurely ten minutes or so on some twisting back roads through the pine woods. Then the Bentley slipped across the Windsor-Bagshot Road and shortly thereafter they arrived at the unimposing stone gateway that led to the house known as Quarterdeck.

A lone sentry, most likely a plainclothes detective sergeant from the Met working a rotation shift, waved them inside the gate. There was, of course, a good deal more security on these grounds, but this unobtrusively armed man was the only face the public was ever allowed to see. The neighbors, who were distant in every sense of the word, had no inkling about who lived at the end of the lane.

It was not by any stretch a large house, but it was very handsome. Sir David Trulove’s Regency manor house was quietly situated on the edge of Windsor Park, and the flinty bachelor had lived there in comfort and privacy for many years. As they left the beautifully maintained gravel drive and pulled into the car park, Hawke realized why he’d always admired the house. Simplicity. Quarterdeck was a plain rectangle of Bath stone that had weathered over the years to a lovely shade of greenish gray. An ancient wisteria climbed above the shallow portico and encircled a small first-floor balcony, on to which the windows of C’s bedroom opened.

An invitation to call upon C at home was most unusual. Originally, C had invited Hawke and Congreve to lunch with him outside on his sunny terrace. It was to be a working repast, he said, an informal chat covering a range of topics. But Hawke knew that C especially wanted to hear about the prior day’s visit to the Tunbridge Wells hospital. The chief of MI6 wanted to hear firsthand what had been revealed to Ambrose yesterday by the late Ambassador Zimmermann.

Hands clasped behind his back, the happy detective had been striding back and forth in front of a small fire laid against the afternoon chill. He was dressed in his favorite suit of tweeds and was wearing, like his fashion idol, the late lamented Andrew Devonshire, bright yellow cable-stitched socks. He had now relayed to C some, if not most, of what had spilled from the dying German’s lips.

Suddenly, Ambrose stopped in midstride. He stood in the middle of the faded Persian carpet, a perfect ring of blue smoke wafting above his head, waiting for some reaction from Alex Hawke.

There was none.

A semi-reclining Hawke stared wistfully down at the mist-shrouded forest, the thick trunks and bare limbs etched black against the stormy gray sky. A dense plantation of pine, beech, silver birch, and oak grew on three sides of the house. Forests had been magic for him as a child, and, he realized, they still were. Finally, he looked up and smiled at Congreve.

“Sorry. You were speaking of Room 40,” Hawke said from his window perch. “Tell me about those fellows again? Kept a low profile, did they not?”

“Yes, Ambrose,” C said, taking a long puff of his cheroot. “You might refresh both our memories. I think we’ve got a few more minutes until luncheon is served.”

“It was the most secret room in all of Whitehall,” Congreve said, resuming his brisk pacing before the fire. “Masked under the deliberately guileless name of Room 40, a pair of civilians had been diverted there to do cryptographic work. One morning, at a very low point of the war, they intercepted a German wireless transmission in a code no one had ever seen before. But the two chaps, Montgomery and de gray were their names, were determined. They ultimately broke the code and, in doing so, discovered the key to the whole thing.”

“What, pray, was the whole thing?” Hawke said, his mind elsewhere but his interest piqued. “I remember learning about this in school but I’m afraid it’s been a while.”

“Why, the stalemate, of course,” C said. “The dreadful deadlock that gripped both armies in the trenches along the Western Front.”

“And the key?”

C said, “The key to unlocking this stalemate was finding some way of convincing President Woodrow Wilson that the Krauts were coming after the Yanks’neck, too. It was vital to convince Wilson to get the Yanks into the bloody war. This Zimmermann Telegram, sent from Germany to their station in Mexico City, revealed the German duplicity. And, Mexico’s desire to get into the war on Germany’s side.”

“Yes,” Congreve added, “it did the trick. Once the contents of the telegram were published in the American newspapers, there was a huge shift in American public opinion against the Germans. There was now no way Wilson could keep the Yanks out of the war.

“The Americans suddenly had the duplicitous German and Mexican treachery laid out for them in black and white, right there at the breakfast table.”

“And over they came. Thus this Zimmermann Telegram saved England’s bacon at the last hour,” Hawke said, his eyes following a ragged squadron of geese skimming the distant treetops.

“Indeed,” C said, expelling a gray plume of smoke. “None of us likes to admit it, of course, but there you have it.”

“But what’s all this ancient history got to do with our present situation?”

“The present situation?” Sir David said, looking carefully at Alex. “I’ve got one word for you, Alex. Mexican treachery again rears its ugly head. To be more precise, the Mexican border. The Americans have ignored that problem for nearly a century. They can’t do it much longer.”

“Not all quiet on the Southern Front,” Alex said.

“The Southern Front,” C repeated, liking the sound of that. It was good shorthand for the direction his mind was taking. “The Mexicans were the key to the Great War,” he added, “and they bloody well may be the key to the next.”

“And we’ve got a German ambassador named Zimmermann involved in both.”

“Mere coincidence?” Hawke asked.

“Perhaps,” C said. “History has a way of repeating itself.”

C got to his feet and rubbed his hands together to warm them up. “Well. I’m famished. Feed a cold and starve a fever. I’m sure there is sustenance to be had in the dining room. Let’s continue this at the table, shall we? I’ll go make sure we’ve got a good claret to accompany the delicious goose the kitchen has prepared.”

C left them, pushing through the double doors and into the adjoining hallway that led to the dining room.

“Are you quite all right?” Congreve asked Hawke.

“I suppose.”

21

C learly, Hawke wasn’t all right. Congreve knew Hawke’s many moods, including this one, the black fugue. His condition, at least this present distraction, Ambrose believed, was hardly a deficit or even a mild disorder. It was simply the restless curiosity of a hungry mind. If anything, it explained the man’s early success in both the military and in the financial markets. And his recent triumphs in the dicey world of international espionage. Hawke’s mind was constantly ranging over a wide spectrum of subjects, often touching down only briefly before moving on. Congreve believed it was what the brain so rapidly assimilated during those brief encounters that mattered. Retention, it was called.

It surely accounted for Hawke’s ability to take by surprise those who dismissed him as merely a wealthy aristocrat laboring in the family’s financial vineyards; or those who too quickly took the measure of his strength or courage and found him wanting. Congreve hadn’t enough fingers on both hands to count the number of villains who had made the deadly mistake of underestimating Alex Hawke in these last years.

“Let’s go in, shall we?” Congreve said softly, putting a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “He’s waiting.”

“Of course. I’m sorry to be so distracted. I’ve been sick with the bloody fever again. Does something to my brain. I’ve promised C I’d call Consuelo about getting invited to this damn meeting in Key West. Well, I damn well haven’t done it, and I’m sure he’s going to bring it up.”

“Why haven’t you called her?”

“The woman hates me, Ambrose. She feels utterly betrayed and not without some justification. I’ve been rather a shit. I’ve no idea how I’m going to accommodate C’s request. He’s right, of course, to want me there in Florida. Conch’s gathering is likely to prove vital.”

“The professional should override the personal, I should think, Alex. We’ll think of something. Just keep him going on about history during lunch. You can ring her as soon as you get home.”

“And say what?”

“Tell her you can’t live without her, for starters.”

“I won’t lie to the woman.”

“Are you quite sure it would be one?”

“A lie? How should I know?”

Hawke cut his eyes toward him and left without another word. For now, Conch would remain the enigma she had long been.

They found C at the oval dining table, filling their goblets with an ’89 Château Batailley. Hawke had long ago learned not to bring up the subject of C’s unwavering loyalty to the French vintners if not their wretched government. Any such discussion would prove fruitless and unpleasant.

“Tell us, Ambrose,” Hawke said as soon as they were all seated, “exactly how it was that this purloined telegram changed everything.”

“With pleasure, assuming this is not too familiar ground, Sir David.”

Sir David looked up from his first course. “Well-trod ground, yes, Ambrose. But my appetite for military history far outweighs my desire for this damnable aspic. Please, Ambrose, tell the story.”

“Well, you see, Alex, by early 1917, the Germans had us dead to rights. We were fresh out of young men and fresh ideas along the Western Front. We’d gain a foot of muddy ground only to lose it in the next day’s slaughter. Half a million had died at Verdun alone. Our allies the French were drained and the Russians dying.”

“But it was the bloody U-boats had us in a corner,” Sir David said.

“Indeed. The U-boats had effectively cut our small island off from food and all other supplies. We could have held out for another two months. We were desperate for fresh troops in large numbers, men whose reserves of fighting spirit were still untapped.”

“The Yanks.”

“Correct. President Wilson was determined to keep the Yanks out of the war. But, Whitehall knew that only the entry of the United States into the fray would chase the German wolfpacks from Britain’s door. We were stalemated in that bloody abattoir of trenches, and the German U-boats were circling in for the kill. But then we got very, very lucky and intercepted Herr Zimmermann’s telegram.”

Hawke said, “The Mexican government was tempted by the notion that they might reconquer their lost territories in the southwest. Correct?”

Congreve piped up, “Precisely, Alex. This is what I was able to gather from the now deceased yesterday. These Latino-Arab terrorists are developing highly creative strategies for attacks based in Mexico. The border is still the soft underbelly of America. America’s greatest vulnerability.”

“So this modern day Zimmermann was following in the footsteps of his famous namesake? Stirring up trouble in Mexico?”

C said, “Until, for whatever reason; he apparently had a change of heart and contacted us. I assume you’ve brought along this deathbed letter I’ve heard about, Alex?”

“Yes, sir,” Hawke said, pulling it out of his inside pocket. “It’s in some code neither Ambrose nor I have ever encountered before, sir. Numeric. Apparently random, but obviously not.”

Hawke handed Zimmermann’s folded letter across the table.

“I’ll get this to our signal section immediately.”

C must have pressed a hidden button on the floor with his foot because two people suddenly appeared at the doorway. A man and a very pretty young woman.

“Yes, sir?” the man in the dark gray suit said.

C held out the envelope. “Geoff, get this to Signals right away. With a note from me. Saying Alex Hawke got it from the dying German ambassador.”

“Done, sir,” the man said, taking it.

“Oh, Pippa,” C said to the woman who’d escorted Hawke up to C’s office at MI6. “You remember Alex Hawke. He’s the fellow attending that conference in Key West next week. You’ll be accompanying him as aide. Make sure he has everything he needs will you?”

“Of course, sir,” Gwendolyn Guinness said, glancing over at Alex Hawke before she turned and left the room.

C said with a brief smile, “Brilliant girl. I’m quite sure you two shall get along famously, Alex.”

Hawke shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He knew C was deliberately putting him in an awkward position.

“Sir, with apologies, I haven’t spoken to the American secretary about my attendance yet. Terribly sorry. I’m planning to call her this very evening.”

“That won’t be at all necessary, Alex. I’ve already spoken to her. Just this morning, in fact. She’s expecting you on the fifteenth of December. Now, then. Who’d like some more of this perfectly cooked goose? Alex?”

C rose and moved to the sideboard to carve more meat. Hawke seized the opportunity to lean across the table and whisper to Congreve, “His bloody idea of humor. It’s my goose that’s cooked. And he’s signed up Miss Guinness to make sure I’m well done.”

“Don’t mind him, Alex. You forget, he’s not feeling well.”

“Yes, of course,” Hawke murmured, his eyes flashing. “The spy who came down with a cold.”

22

DRY TORTUGAS

S toke surfaced in the shadow of El Bandito’s hull. He looked around for a dark fin slicing through the water and was suddenly aware of a black shape looming above him. Sun was so bright, you couldn’t even make out the face, but it was Sharkey all right. So, Luis had already gotten himself aboard. Stoke’s ascent up the line must have taken longer than he thought. He rapped on his mask with his knuckles. How come everything seemed so blurry up here? Must have gotten saltwater inside his mask.

Either that or the whole damn world was on the fritz.

Luis was leaning out over the gunwale, offering Stoke a hand up the ladder. Stokely was mighty glad to see that brown hand. A minute or so ago, when he was coming up the anchor rode, he was thinking he wouldn’t have the strength left to get back on the boat without some help. He was wondering if he could even haul himself all the way to the surface. And wondering where that mako was hiding.

Luis shouted to him again. He had a battered bucket of fish guts in his hand and was in the process of flinging its contents over his shoulder, long loopy entrails and assorted other things. Most of the chum was going in the boat but some of it made it over the gunwales and into the water.

“C’mon, man! Get your ass out the water!”

Stoke looked up at him and smiled. “Where’s that damn shark?”

“I’m telling you, you’re just not hearing me. Why you think I got out of the water so fast? That mako is nosing around up here on the surface now. He just cruised over to the other side of the boat. I threw some chum over there. C’mon, bossman, grab my hand.”

“Chum? You threw chum?”

“Grab the hand, man. I’m telling you!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming as fast as I can,” Stokely said, reaching up to take the man’s hand.

Luis was wiry, but he didn’t look like the kind of man who could pull a midsize Buick out of the water single-handedly. Thank God he was stronger than he looked, because Stoke realized he was fading fast. With his last little ounce of reserve he got up the steps and over the toe-rail and staggered forward toward the pilothouse. He needed to get out of the sun and lay down for a while. He almost made it to the door, too. The faded green deck rushed up out of nowhere to greet him. As he went down, Luis grabbed his tank and kept him from hitting the deck.

“Take it easy, boss. Lay down a minute.”

“Chum?” Stoke said, sinking to his knees. “You got a hurt diver coming up and you throw chum in the water? Jesus, Luis!”

“I told you I threw it on the other side. Keep him occupied.”

“Yeah, but still—”

“Shit, Stokely, man, we got to get you to the hospital. You bleeding bad, man. It’s worse now.”

“I’ll be all right. Get this damn tank off me. And slice off a piece of that hose there and tie it off above my elbow. Tight. Tourniquet one-oh-one.”

“Like this?” Luis said, cinching it with his teeth.

“Yeah, you got it. That’s good but tighter.”

Stoke tried to get to his feet but it didn’t work. He was in serious danger of blacking out. He lowered himself to the deck, rolling over on to his back. The sky was blue above and he tried to focus on a single white cloud that hung just above their stern. It was blurry but maybe that was just the cloud. He saw Luis Sr. up on the flying bridge. Papa was just sitting up there with his back to the wheel, staring down into the cockpit with concern on his face. Nothing a skipper hates worse than human blood running in his scuppers.

What was everybody so damn worried about? It was just a scratch. Problem was, the tourniquet wasn’t working too good. When you had arms the size of piano legs, normal-sized things didn’t fit too well.

Luis sliced another two-foot section and wrapped it tight around Stoke’s arm, cinching it in tight above the first tourniquet and tying it off. The blood flow instantly slowed way down.

“There you go, bossman, that’s better.”

“You got the pictures?” he asked Luis.

“Every angle. I even got the cockpit and the pilot. I told you, man. I told you I had something down here. You see those damn missiles?”

“Yeah. You got something worthwhile all right. Remind me to give you and your daddy a bonus when I get home. Now listen up, Sharkey. I need you to get on the VHF and talk to the Coast Guard. First, get me a GPS location to give to them. Tell them to send a chopper or a cutter out here immediately and—what’s your problem?”

“You look inside that pilothouse? The old man doesn’t exactly have the latest technology aboard this boat. I tried to give him a handheld GPS for his birthday and he nearly killed me. You crazy? he says, I never been lost a day in my life.”

“You got a radio, right? He’s got to have a VHF radio.”

“Yeah, yeah, we have a radio.”

“Good. Go get the chart. Let’s figure out exactly where we are. But get the Coast Guard on the radio and tell them what’s going on. National security, got that? Let me just lay here a minute and I’ll come in there and talk to them.”

“I’ll check the chart, then call,” Luis said, getting to his feet. “You stay right where you are for a few minutes. You don’t look good. Hey, you want some rum? I keep a pint in the fish box.”