Teeth of the Tiger

CHAPTER 9 GOING WITH GOD

Jack's drive to The Campus took about thirty-five minutes, listening to NPR's Morning Edition all the way because, like his father, he didn't listen to contemporary music. The similarities with his dad had both vexed and fascinated John Patrick Ryan, Jr., throughout his life. Through most of his teenage years, he'd fought them off, trying to establish his own identity in contrast to his button-down father, but then in college he had somehow drifted back, hardly even noticing the process. He'd thought he was just doing the sensible thing, for instance, to date girls who might be good wife candidates, though he'd never quite found the perfect one. This he unconsciously judged by his mom. He'd been annoyed by teachers at Georgetown who said he was a chip off the old block, and at first taken some offense at it, then reminded himself that his father wasn't all that bad a guy. He could have done worse. He'd seen a lot of rebellion even at a university as conservative as G-Town, with its Jesuit traditions and rigorous scholarship. Some of his classmates had even made a show of rejecting their parents, but what asshole would do something like that? However staid and old-fashioned his father surely was, he'd been a pretty good dad, as dads went. He'd never been overbearing and let him go his own way and choose his own path… in confidence that he'd turn out okay? Jack wondered. But, no. If his father had been that conspiratorial, Jack would have noticed, surely.

He thought about conspiracy. There had been a lot of that in the newspapers and pulp-book media. His father had even joked more than once about having the Marine Corps paint his "personal" helicopter black. That would have been a hoot, Jack thought. Instead, his surrogate father had been Mike Brennan, whom he'd regularly bombarded with questions, many of them about conspiracy. He'd been hugely disappointed to learn that the United States Secret Service was one hundred percent confident that Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated Jack Kennedy, and all by himself. At their academy at Beltsville, outside Washington, Jack had held, and even shot, a replica of the 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that had taken the former President's life, and been fully briefed on the case — to his own satisfaction, if not that of the conspiracy industry that so fervently and commercially believed otherwise. The latter had even proposed that his father, as a former CIA official, had been the final beneficiary of a conspiracy that had gone on for at least fifty years for the express purpose of giving CIA the reins of government. Yeah, sure. Like the Trilateral Commission, and the World Order of Freemasons, and whoever else the fiction writers could make up. From both his father and Mike Brennan, he'd heard a lot of CIA stories, few of which bragged on the competence of that federal agency. It was pretty good, but nowhere near as competent as Hollywood proposed. But Hollywood probably believed that Roger Rabbit was real — after all, his picture had made money, right? No, the CIA had a couple of profound shortcomings…

… and was The Campus a means of correcting them…? That was a question. Damn, Junior thought, turning onto Route 29, maybe the conspiracy theorists might be right after all…? His own internal answer was a snort and a grimace.

No, The Campus wasn't like that at all, not like the SPECTRE of the old James Bond movies, or the THRUSH of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. reruns on Nick at Nite. Conspiracy theory depended on the ability of large numbers of people to keep their mouths shut, and as Mike had told him so many times, Bad Guys couldn't keep their mouths shut. There were no deaf-and-dumb people in federal prisons, Mike had told him many times, but criminals never quite figured that one out, the idiots.

Even the people he was tracking had that problem, and they were, supposedly, smart and highly motivated. Or so they thought. But, no, not even they were the Bad Guys of the movies. They needed to talk, and talking would be their downfall. He wondered which it was: Did people who did evil things need to brag, or did they need others to tell them they were doing good in some perverse way upon which they all agreed? The guys he was looking at were Muslims, but there were other Muslims. He and his father both knew Prince Ali of Saudi Arabia, and he was a good guy, the guy who'd given his dad the sword from which he'd gotten his Secret Service code name, and he still stopped by the house at least once a year, because the Saudis, once you made friends with them, were the most loyal people in the world. Of course, it helped if you were an ex-President. Or, in his case, the son of a former President, now making his own way in the "black" world…

Damn, how will Dad react to this? Jack wondered. He's going to have a cow. And Mom? A real hissy fit. That was good for a laugh as he turned left. But Mom didn't need to find out. The cover story would work for her — and Grandpa — but not for Dad. Dad had helped set this place up. Maybe he needed one of those black helicopters after all. He slid into his own parking place, number 127. The Campus couldn't be all that big and powerful, could it? Not with less than a hundred fifty employees. He locked his car and headed in, remarking to himself that this every-morning-to-work thing sucked. But everybody had to start somewhere.

He walked in the back entrance, like most of the others. There was a reception/security desk. The guy there was Ernie Chambers, formerly a sergeant first class in the 1st Infantry Division. His blue uniform blazer had a miniature of the Combat Infantryman's Badge, just in case you didn't notice the shoulders and the hard black eyes. After the first Persian Gulf War, he'd changed jobs from grunt to MP. He'd probably enforced the law and directed traffic pretty well, Jack thought, waving good-morning at him.

"Hey, Mr. Ryan."

"'Morning, Ernie."

"You have a good one, sir." To the ex-soldier, everybody was named "sir."

It was two hours earlier outside Ciudad Juarez. There, the van pulled into a vehicle-service plaza and stopped by a cluster of four other vehicles. Behind them were the other minivans who'd followed them all the way to the American border. The men roused from their sleep and stumbled into the chill morning air to stretch.

"Here I leave you, senor," the driver said to Mustafa. "You will join the man by the tan Ford Explorer. Vaya con Dios, amigos," he said in that most charming of dismissals: Go with God.

Mustafa walked over and found a tallish man wearing a cowboy-type hat. He didn't appear very clean, and his mustache needed trimming. "Buenos dias, I am Pedro. I will be taking you the rest of the way. There are four of you for my vehicle, yes?"

Mustafa nodded. "That is correct."

"There are water bottles in the truck. You may wish to have something to eat. You can buy anything you like from the shop." He waved to the building. Mustafa did, his colleagues did much the same, and after ten minutes they all boarded the vehicles and headed out.

They went west, mostly along Route 2. Immediately, the vehicles broke up, no longer "flying formation," as it were. There were four of them, all large American-made SUV-TYPE vehicles, all of them coated with a thick coating of dirt and grit so that they did not appear new. The sun had climbed above the horizon to their rear, casting its shadows onto the khaki-colored ground.

Pedro appeared to have spoken his piece back at the plaza. Now he said nothing, except an occasional belch, and chain-smoked his cigarettes. He had the radio on to an AM station, and hummed along with the Spanish music. The Arabs sat in silence.

"Hey, Tony," Jack said in greeting. His workmate was already on his workstation.

"Howdy," Wills responded.

"Anything hot this morning?"

"Not after yesterday, but Langley is talking about putting some coverage on our friend Fa'ad — again."

"Will they really do it?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. The Station Chief in Bahrain is saying that he needs more personnel to make it happen, and the personnel weenies at Langley are probably batting that back and forth right now."

"My dad liked to say that the government is really run by accountants and lawyers."

"He ain't far wrong on that one, buddy. God knows where Ed Kealty fits in that, though. What does your dad think of him?"

"Can't stand the son of a bitch. He won't talk in public about the new administration because he says that's wrong, but if you say something about the guy over dinner, you might end up wearing your wine home. It's funny. Dad hates politics, and he really tries hard to keep his cool, but that guy is definitely not on the Christmas card list. But he keeps it quiet, won't talk to any reporters about it. Mike Brennan tells me the Service doesn't like the new guy, either. And they have to like him."

"There are penalties for being a professional," Wills agreed.

And then Junior lit up his computer and looked at the night traffic between Langley and Fort Meade. It was a lot more impressive in its volume than its content. It seemed that his new friend, Uda, had—

"Our pal Sali had lunch with somebody yesterday," Jack announced.

"Who with?" Wills asked.

"The Brits don't know. Appears Middle Eastern, age about twenty-eight, one of those thin — well, narrow — beards around the jawline, and mustache, but no ident on the guy. They spoke in Arabic, but nobody got close enough to overhear anything."

"Where'd they eat?"

"Pub on Tower Hill called 'Hung, Drawn and Quartered. ' It's on the edge of the financial district. Uda drank Perrier. His pal had a beer. And they had a British plough-man's lunch. They sat in a corner booth, made it hard for whoever was watching to get close and listen in."

"So, they wanted privacy. It doesn't necessarily make them bad guys. Did the Brits tail him?"

"No. That probably means a single-man tail on Uda?"

"Probably," Wills agreed.

"But it says they got a photo of the new guy. Not included in the report."

"It was probably someone from the Security Service — MI5—doing the surveillance. And probably a junior guy. Uda isn't regarded as very important, not enough for full coverage. None of those agencies have all the manpower they want. Anything else?"

"Some money trades that afternoon. Looks pretty routine," Jack said, scrolling through the transactions. I'm looking for something small and harmless, he reminded himself. But small, harmless things were, for the most part, small and harmless. Uda moved money around every day, in large and small amounts. Since he was in the wealth-preservation business, he rarely speculated, dealing mostly in real-estate transactions. London — and Britain in general — was a good place to preserve cash. Real-estate prices were fairly high but very stable. If you bought something, it might not go up very much, but it sure as hell wasn't going to have the bottom drop out. So, Uda's daddy was letting the kid stretch his legs some, but not letting him run out and play in the traffic. How much personal liquidity did Uda have? Since he paid off his whores in cash and expensive handbags, he must have his own cash supply. Maybe modest, but "modest" by Saudi standards wasn't exactly modest by many others. The kid did drive an Aston Martin, after all, and his dwelling was not in a trailer park… so—

"How do I differentiate between Sali's trading his family money and trading his own?"

"You don't. We think he keeps the two accounts close, in the sense both of being covert and near to each other. Your best bet on that is to see how he sets up his quarterly statements to the family."

Jack groaned. "Oh, great, it'll take me a couple of days to add up all the transactions, and then to analyze them."

"Now you know why you're not a real CPA, Jack." Wills managed a chuckle.

Jack nearly snarled, but there was only one way to accomplish this task, and it was his job, wasn't it? First, he tried to see if his program could shortcut the process. Nope. Fourth-grade arithmetic with a nose attached. What fun. At least by the time he finished, he'd probably be better at entering numbers into the numeric keypad on the right side of the keyboard. There was something to look forward to! Why didn't The Campus employ some forensic accountants?

They turned off Route 2 onto a dirt road that wound its way north. The road had seen a good deal of use, some of it recent, judging by the tracks. The general area was somewhat mountainous. The real peaks of the Rocky Mountain chain were off to the west, far enough away that he couldn't see them, but the air was thinner here than he was accustomed to, and it would be warm walking. He wondered how far that would be, and how close they were to the U.S. border. He'd heard that the American-Mexican border was guarded, but not well guarded. The Americans could be lethally competent in some areas, but utterly infantile in others. Mustafa and his people hoped to avoid the former and to make use of the latter. About eleven in the morning, he saw a large, boxy truck in the distance, and their SUV headed toward it. The truck, he saw as they came closer, was empty, its large red doors wide open. The Ford Explorer came to within a hundred meters and stopped. Pedro switched off the engine and got out.

"We are here, my friends," he announced. "I hope you are ready to walk."

All four of them got out, and as before they stretched their legs and looked around. A new man walked in their direction, as the other three SUVs parked and disgorged their passengers.

"Hello, Pedro," the new Mexican greeted the lead driver, evidently an old friend.

"Buenos dias, Ricardo. Here are the people who want to go to America."

"Hello." He shook hands with the first four. "My name is Ricardo, and I am your coyote."

"What?" Mustafa asked.

"It is just a term. I take people across the border, for a fee. In your case, of course, I have already been paid."

"How far?"

"Ten kilometers. A modest walk," he said comfortably. "The country will mostly be like this. If you see a snake, just walk away from it. It will not chase you. But if you get within a meter, it can strike you and kill you. Aside from that, there is nothing to fear. If you see a helicopter, you must fall to the ground and not move. The Americans do not guard their border well, and, oddly enough, not as well in daylight as at night. We have also taken some precautions."

"What is that?"

"There were thirty people in that van," he said, pointing to the large truck they'd seen coming in. "They will walk in ahead of and to the west of us. If anyone is caught, it will be them."

"How long will it take?"

"Three hours. Less, if you are fit. Do you have water?"

"We know the desert," Mustafa assured him.

"As you say. Let us be off, then. Follow me, amigo." And with that, Ricardo started walking north. His clothes were all khaki, he wore a military-style web belt with three canteens attached, and he carried military-style binoculars, plus an Army-style floppy hat. His boots were well worn. His stride was purposeful and efficient, not overly fast for show, just to cover ground efficiently. They fell in behind him, forming a single file to conceal their numbers from any possible trackers, with Mustafa in the lead, about five meters behind their coyote.

There was a pistol range about three hundred yards from the plantation house. It was outdoors, and had steel targets, a set just like those at the FBI Academy, with head-plates, circular and roughly the size of a human head. They made an agreeable clang when hit, and then they fell down, as a human target would do if hit there. Enzo turned out to be better at this. Aldo explained that the Marine Corps didn't emphasize pistol shooting too much, whereas the FBI paid particular attention to it, figuring that anybody could shoot a shoulder weapon accurately. The FBI brother used the two-handed Weaver stance, while the Marine tended to stand up straight and shoot one-handed, the way the services taught their people.

"Hey, Aldo, that just makes you a better target," Dominic warned.

"Oh yeah?" Brian rippled off three rounds and got three satisfying clangs as a result. "Hard to shoot after you take one between the running lights, bro."

"And what's this one-shot/one-kill crap? Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice."

"How many did you give that mutt in Alabama?" Brian asked.

"Three. I didn't feel like taking any chances," Dominic explained.

"You say so, bro. Hey, let me try that Smith of yours."

Dominic cleared his weapon before handing it over. The magazine went separately. Brian dry-fired it a few times to get used to the feel, then loaded and cycled the action. His first shot clanged a headplate. So did his second. The third one missed, though number four did not, a third of a second later. Brian handed the weapon back. "Feels different in the hand," he explained.

"You get used to it," Dominic promised.

"Thanks, but I like the extra six rounds in the magazine."

"Well, it's what you like."

"What's with all the head-shot stuff, anyway?" Brian wondered. "Okay, shooting sniper rifle, it's the surest one-shot stopper, but not with a pistol."

"When you can do a guy in the head from fifteen yards," Pete Alexander answered, "it's just a nice talent to have. It's the best way of ending an argument I know."

"Where did you come from?" Dominic asked.

"You didn't scan, Agent Caruso. Remember that even Adolf Hitler had friends. Don't they teach that at Quantico?"

"Well, yes," Dominic admitted, somewhat crestfallen.

"When your primary target is down, you scan the area for any friends he might have had. Or you get the hell out of town. Or both."

"You mean run away?" Brian asked.

"Not unless you're on a track. You make your way clear in such a way as to be inconspicuous. That can mean walking into a bookstore and making a purchase, getting a coffee, whatever. You have to make your decision based on circumstances, but keep your objective in mind. Your objective is always to get clear of the immediate area as quickly as circumstances allow. Move too fast and people will notice. Move too slow and they might remember seeing you and your subject close together. They will never report the person they didn't notice. So, you want to be one of those. What you wear out on a job, the way you act out in the field, the way you walk, the way you think — all of that must be designed to make you invisible," Alexander told them.

"In other words, Pete, you're saying that when we kill these people we're training for," Brian observed quietly, "you want us to be able to do it and walk away so that we can get away with it."

"Would you prefer to be caught?" Alexander asked.

"No, but the best way to kill somebody is to pop him in the head with a good rifle from a couple of hundred meters away. That works every time."

"But what if we want him dead in such a way that nobody knows he was killed?" the training officer asked.

"How the hell do you manage that?" This was Dominic.

"Patience, lads. One thing at a time."

There were the remains of some sort of fence. Ricardo just walked through it, using a hole that did not look recent. The fence posts had been painted a rich green, but that had mainly rusted off. The fencing material was in even worse shape. Getting through was the least of their problems. The coyote went a further fifty meters or so, and selected a large rock, then sat down, lit a smoke, and took a drink from his canteen. It was his first stop. The walk had not been difficult at all, and clearly he'd done this many times. Mustafa and his friends did not know that he'd brought several hundred groups across the border along this very route, and had only been arrested once — and that had not amounted to very much, except for stinging his pride. He'd also forfeited his fee, because he was an honorable coyote. Mustafa went over to him.

"Are your friends okay?" Ricardo asked.

"It has not been strenuous," Mustafa replied, "and I have seen no snakes."

"Not too many along here. People usually shoot them, or throw rocks. No one cares much for snakes."

"Are they dangerous — truly, I mean?"

"Only if you are a fool, and even then you are unlikely to die. You will be ill for a few days. No more than that, but it can make walking rather painful. We will wait here for a few minutes. We are ahead of schedule. Oh, yes, welcome to America, amigo."

"That fence is all there is?" Mustafa asked in amazement.

"The norteamericano is rich, yes, and clever, yes, but he is also lazy. My people would not go there except that there is work the gringo is too lazy to do on his own."

"How many people do you smuggle into America, then?"

"I, you mean? Thousands. Many thousands. For this, I am well paid. I have a fine house, and six other coyotes work for me. The gringos worry more about people smuggling drugs across the border, and I avoid doing that. It is not worth the trouble. I let two of my men do that for me. The pay for that is very high, you see."

"What kind of drugs?" Mustafa asked.

"The kind for which I am paid." He grinned and took another swig from his canteen.

Mustafa turned as Abdullah came up.

"I thought this would be a difficult walk," his number two observed.

"Only for city dwellers," Ricardo replied. "This is my country. I was born of the desert."

"As was I," Abdullah observed. "It is a pleasant day." Better than sitting in the back of a truck, he didn't have to add.

Ricardo lit up another Newport. He liked menthol cigarettes, easier on the throat. "It does not get hot for another month, perhaps two. But then it can be truly hot, and the wise man takes a good water supply. People have died out here without water in the August heat. But none of mine. I make sure everyone has water. The Mother Nature, she has no love and no pity," the coyote observed. At the end of his walk, he knew a place where he could get a few cervezas before driving east to El Paso. From there, it was back to his comfortable home in Ascension, too far from the border to be bothered with would-be emigrants, who had a bad habit of stealing things they might need for the crossing. He wondered how much stealing they did on the gringo side of the line, but it was not his problem, was it? He finished his cigarette and stood. "Three more kilometers to go, my friends."

Mustafa and his friends fell in and restarted the trudge north. Only three kilometers more? At home, they walked farther to a bus stop.

Punching numbers into a keypad was about as much fun as running naked in a garden of cactus. Jack was the sort to need intellectual stimulation, and while some men might find that in investigative accounting, he was not one of them.

"Bored, eh?" Tony Wills asked.

"Mightily," Jack confirmed.

"Well, that's the reality of gathering and processing intelligence information. Even when it's exciting, it's pretty dull — well, unless you're really on the scent of a particularly elusive fox. Then it can be kinda fun, though it's not like watching your subject out in the field. I've never done that."

"Neither did Dad," Jack observed.

"Depends on which stories you read. Your pop occasionally found his way to the sharp end. I don't imagine he liked it much. He ever talk about it?"

"Not ever. Not even once. I don't even think Mom knows much about that. Well, except the submarine thing, but most of what I know about that comes from books and stuff. I asked Dad once, and all he said was, 'You believe everything you see in the papers?' Even when that Russian guy, Gerasimov, got on TV, all Dad did was grunt."

"The word on him at Langley was that he was a king spook. Kept all the secrets like he was supposed to. But he mostly worked up in the Seventh Floor. I never made it that high myself."

"Maybe you can tell me something."

"Like what?"

"Gerasimov, Nikolay Borissovich Gerasimov. Was he really the head of KGB? Did my dad really drag his ass out of Moscow?"

Wills hesitated for a moment, but there was no avoiding it. "Yeah. He was the KGB chairman, and, yes, your dad did arrange his defection."

"No shit? How the hell did Dad arrange that one?"

"That is a very long story and you are not cleared for it."

"Then why did he rat Dad out?"

"Because he was an unwilling defector. Your father forced him to bug out. He wanted to get even after your dad became President. But, you know, Nikolay Borissovich sang — maybe not like a canary, but he sang anyway. He's in the Witness Protection Program right now. They still bring him in every so often to get him to sing some more. The people you bag, they never give you everything all at once, and so you go back to them periodically. It makes them feel important — enough that they sing some more, usually. He's still not a happy camper. He can't go home. They'd shoot his ass. The Russians have never been real forgiving on state treason. Well, neither are we. So, he lives here with federal protection. Last I heard, he took up golf. His daughter got married to some old-money aristocrat asshole in Virginia. She's a real American now, but her dad will die an unhappy man. He wanted to take the Soviet Union over, by which I mean he really wanted that job, but your father screwed that one up for all time, and Nick still carries the grudge."

"I'll be damned."

"Anything new with Sali?" Wills asked, bringing things back to reality.

"There's some little stuff. You know, fifty thousand here, eighty thousand there — pounds, not dollars. Into accounts I don't know much about. He goes through anywhere from two to eight thousand pounds a week in what he probably considers petty cash."

"Where does that cash originate?" Wills asked.

"Not entirely clear, Tony. I figure he skims some off his family account, maybe two percent that he can write off as expenses. Not quite enough to alert his father that's he stealing from Mom and Pop. I wonder how they'd react to that?" Jack speculated.

"They wouldn't cut his hand off, but they could do something worse — cut his money off. You see this guy working for a living?"

"You mean real work?" Jack had himself a brief laugh. "Somehow I don't see that happening. He's been on the gravy train too long to like driving spikes into the ties. I've been to London a lot. Hard to figure how a working stiff survives there."

Wills began humming. "'How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they seen Paree?'"

Jack flushed. "Look, Tony, yeah, I know I grew up rich, but Dad always made sure I had a summer job. I even worked construction for two months. Made life hard for Mike Brennan and his pals. But Dad wanted me to know what it was like to do real work. I hated it at first, but, looking back, it was probably a good thing, I guess. Mr. Sali here has never done that. I mean, I could survive in a real-world entry-level job if I had to. It'd be a lot harder adjustment for this guy."

"Okay, how much unexplained money, total?"

"Maybe two hundred thousand pounds — three hundred thousand bucks, call it. But I haven't really pinned it down yet, and it's not all that much money."

"How much longer to narrow it down?"

"At this rate? Hell, maybe a week if I'm lucky. This is like tracking a single car during New York rush hour, y'know?"

"Keep it up. Isn't supposed to be easy, or fun."

"Aye, aye, sir." It was something he'd picked up from the Marines at the White House. They'd even said that to him once in a while, until his father had noticed and put an immediate end to it. Jack turned back to his computer. He kept his real notes on a pad of white lined paper, just because it was easier for him that way, then transferred them to a separate computer file every afternoon. As he wrote, he noted that Tony was leaving their little room for a trip upstairs.

"This kid's got the eye," Wills told Rick Bell on the top floor.

"Oh?" It was a little early for any results from the rookie, regardless who his father was, Bell thought.

"I put him on a young Saudi living in London, name of Uda bin Sali — money changer for his family's interests. The Brits have a loose tail on him because he called somebody they found interesting once."

"And?"

"And Junior has found a couple of hundred thousand pounds that can't be accounted for."

"How solid is that?" Bell asked.

"We'll have to put a regular on it, but, you know… this kid's got the right sort of nose."

"Dave Cunningham, maybe?" A forensic accountant, he'd joined The Campus out of the Department of Justice, Organized Crime Division. Pushing sixty, Dave had a legendary nose for numbers. The trading department at The Campus mainly used him for "conventional" duties. He could have done very well on Wall Street, but he'd just loved bagging bad guys for a living. At The Campus, he could pursue that avocation well past government retirement rules.

"Dave'd be my pick," Tony agreed.

"Okay, let's cross-load Jack's computer files to Dave and see what he turns over."

"Works for me, Rick. You see the take-report from NSA yesterday?"

"Yeah. Got my attention," Bell answered, looking up. Three days before, message traffic from sources that the government intelligence services found interesting had dropped by seventeen percent and two particularly interesting sources had almost completely stopped. When radio traffic in a military unit did that, it often meant a stand-down prior to real operations. The sort of thing that made signals-intelligence people nervous. The majority of the time, it meant nothing at all, just random chance in operation, but it had developed into something real often enough that the signal-spooks frequently went into a tizzy about it.

"Any ideas?" Wills asked.

Bell shook his head. "I stopped being superstitious about ten years ago."

Clearly, Tony Wills had not: "Rick, we're due. We've been due for a long time."

"I know what you're saying, but we can't run this place on that sort of stuff."

"Rick, this is like sitting at a ball game — dugout seats, maybe, but you still can't go on the field when you want."

"To do what, kill the umpire?" Bell asked.

"No, just the guy planning to throw a beanball."

"Patience, Tony, patience."

"Son of a bitch of a virtue to acquire, isn't it?" Wills had never quite learned it, despite all his experience.

"Think you have it bad? What about Gerry?"

"Yeah, Rick, I know." He stood. "Later, man."

They' d seen not another human being, not a car, not a helicopter. Clearly, there was nothing of value out here. No oil, no gold, not even copper. Nothing worth guarding or protecting. The walk had just been enough to be healthy. Some scrubby bushes, even some stunted trees. A few tire tracks, but none of them recent. This part of America might as well have been Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter, the Rub' al-Khali, where even a hardy desert camel would have found it grim going.

But clearly the walk was over. As they crested a small rise, they saw five more vehicles sitting all alone, with men standing by them talking among themselves.

"Ah," Ricardo said, "they are early, too. Excellent." He could dump these morose foreigners and get on with his business. He stopped and let his clients catch up.

"This is our destination?" Mustafa asked, with hope in his voice. It had been an easy walk, far easier than he'd expected.

"My friends there will take you to Las Cruces. There you can make your travel plans for the future."

"And you?" Mustafa asked.

"I go home to my family," Ricardo answered. Wasn't that simple enough? Maybe this guy didn't have a family?

The remaining walk took only ten minutes. Ricardo got in the lead SUV after shaking hands with his party. They were friendly enough, albeit in a guarded fashion. It could have been harder to get them here, but illegal-immigrant traffic was far thicker in Arizona and California, and that was where the U.S. Border Patrol had most of its personnel. The gringos tended to grease the squeaky wheel — like everyone else in the world, perhaps, but still it was not terribly farsighted of them. Sooner or later, they'd realize that there was cross-border traffic here, too. Just not the dramatic sort. Then he might have to find a new way to make a living. He'd done well the past seven years, however — enough to set up a little business and raise his children into a more legitimate line of work.

He watched his party board their transport and motor off. He also headed in the general direction of Las Cruces, then turned south on I-10 toward El Paso. He'd long since stopped wondering what his clients planned to do in America. Probably not tending gardens or doing construction work, he judged, but he'd been paid ten thousand dollars in American cash. So, they were important to someone… but not to him.