The Sniper and the Wolf

47

Tim Hagen sat on his hotel bed dressed in his pajamas, drinking Dos Equis beer and wondering how the president of the United States had responded to the video clip. He laughed drunkenly, thinking of how shocked the big, bad commander in chief must have been the moment he realized that his tryst with the Korean girl had been recorded for posterity. Hagen knew the CIA might soon move to take him out, but that wasn’t going to do the president any good. In the morning, he would set up a delayed upload that would require him to enter a password every twelve hours. After one missed entry, the video would upload automatically to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Ustream, and a half dozen other websites. Within twenty-four hours, the video would go viral, and the president would go down in flames as the most humiliated world leader in history.

Hagen went into the bathroom to take a leak, and when he came back out, he found both of his Mexican bodyguards standing in the bedroom doorway waiting for him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, fear surging through him.

“Nothing,” said the head bodyguard, taking a silenced .380 Walther pistol from beneath his shirt. “Sit down on the bed.”

“What? What the fuck is going on?” Hagen asked in dismay.

The other bodyguard stepped forward and took him by the arm. “Have a seat, señor.”

“You guys can’t do this,” Hagen said, beginning to cry as he sat down on the edge of the bed. “You work for me. Whatever they’re paying, I’ll quadruple it! We can go to the bank in—”

“Be quiet.” The head bodyguard called into the other room in Spanish, and two beautiful, young Mexican women with long, raven hair came in wearing nurses’ uniforms. One of them was pushing a wheelchair.

“What the hell is going on?” Hagen demanded, swallowing hard. “You guys are supposed to protect me!”

“The señoritas are going to get you ready to leave,” the bodyguard told him. “Don’t give them any trouble, and we won’t give you any trouble. Okay?”

One of the women rolled up the sleeve of Hagen’s pajamas and tied off the arm with a rubber hose while the other prepared a hypodermic needle.

“Don’t do this,” Hagen said, tears welling in his eyes. “Please, don’t do this.”

The young woman smiled at him as she sat down beside him and poked the syringe into his vein, injecting him with 10 cc of Thorazine. Hagen’s eyes rolled back in his head a few seconds later, and he flopped over on the sheet mumbling.

Next they took a pair of clippers from their medical bag and buzzed off all of his hair, sweeping it carefully from the sheet and flushing it down the toilet. The bodyguards then lifted Hagen into the wheelchair, and the women lathered his head with shaving cream, giving him a skillful straight-razor shave that left him completely bald and without a single nick. Then they shaved off his eyebrows and plucked out his eyelashes. After applying a little bit of movie makeup to give him a pallid complexion, he looked exactly like a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy.

Hagen was vaguely aware of what was happening to him, but it was difficult to move his arms and legs, and he could hardly keep the saliva in his mouth, much less form any words.

His “nurses” gently put his slippers on his feet, folded a blanket neatly over his legs, and hooked him up to an IV tube. Then they twisted their hair up beneath their nurses’ caps and wheeled him down the hall to the elevator.

There weren’t many people in the hotel still awake at that hour, but those who were saw only a rich American dying of cancer as he was rolled through the lobby to the main exit. One tourist paused on his way in to hold the door as the women wheeled Hagen out to a waiting handicapped van.

Hagen had no idea how much time had passed by the time he began to come around, but when his vision finally began to clear, he found himself strapped to the wheelchair facing a bright blue swimming pool beneath the hot Mexican sun.

“How are you feeling, Señor Hagen?” asked a Mexican man with bulging dark eyes. “The girls gave you a shot of adrenaline to help bring you around.”

Hagen recognized the man as Antonio Castañeda. “What are you going to do me?”

“Nothing,” Castañeda said, sipping from a glass of tequila. “It was only my job to get you here. My associate Mariana is going to come over and ask you some questions now. I expect they’ll be rather pointed questions, and I expect you to answer them to the very best of your ability. Is that understood, señor?”

Hagen nodded, remembering from somewhere in his foggy memory banks that Castañeda was known for toying with his victims before he killed them. “I understand.”

“Good.” Castañeda looked across the patio and made a come-here gesture with his hand.

Agent Mariana Mederos appeared, and Castañeda got up to give her his chair. “The gentleman is all yours, hermosa.”

“Thank you,” Mariana said dryly.

Hagen looked at her. “Who are you?”

“I’m with the CIA,” she said. “That’s really all that matters. I have some questions for you to answer.”

“And then what?” Hagen said. “I get a bullet in the head?”

“Mr. Hagen, I wasn’t sent here to kill you. I’m not an assassin. It’s my guess you’ll eventually end up back in the US, where you’ll be prosecuted for treason.”

“You can’t use this interrogation as evidence against—” He chuckled sardonically. “It doesn’t matter. Pope sent you.”

Mariana took her sunglasses from the top of her head and put them on. “I need the names of everyone involved in the attempt to take over the CIA, as well as those who had any hand in exposing the Paris operation.”

Hagen cast a glance across the patio, where Castañeda sat talking with an American man he recognized vaguely. His two former nurses were sunbathing naked on the far side of the pool.

“And if I refuse to give you the names?”

Mariana frowned. “I thought Señor Castañeda already covered that with you.”

Hagen looked down at the water. “He didn’t go into specifics… but that doesn’t matter, either. The names you want are Ken Peterson, Senator Steve Grieves, Ben Walton, Max Steiner, and Paul Miller. Steiner and Miller are already dead, but Pope knows that.” He looked at her inquisitively. “Do you even know why the Green Beret is here with you?”

She ignored the question, thinking the Thorazine must still be tweaking his thoughts.

“Who sent Jason Ryder to kill Pope?”

“Ryder worked for Peterson.”

“How much of the plot does Grieves have personal knowledge of?”

“You’d have to ask Peterson about that. Grieves and I never spoke of it. There was no need. Our personal business was strictly political.”

Mariana questioned him for a couple more minutes. Then she stood up and walked back across the patio.

Daniel Crosswhite stood up from where he’d been talking with Castañeda. “Got everything you need?”

“Yeah. He’s confirmed our intel.” Crosswhite walked off, and she turned to Castañeda. “Your help in this matter has been valuable. Thank you. I expect someone to be in touch soon with instructions on where to deliver him.”

Castañeda smiled at her. “Can I get you something to drink, Mariana?”

“No, thank you,” she said, glancing across the patio, where Crosswhite was crouched in front of Hagen’s wheelchair. “What’s he doing?”

“I believe he’s carrying out the rest of Señor Pope’s instructions.”

“What? He doesn’t have any instructions from—”

Crosswhite looked into Hagen’s eyes. “You tried to kill my best friend, you fuckin’ cocksucker.”

Hagen stared back at him, smirking. “There’s no need to make this personal, is there, Danny?”

“The fuck there isn’t,” Crosswhite said. “If you had time, I’d tell you a story about a young girl who got her throat cut.”

Hagen shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Who hired Ryder?”

“I already told Pope’s bitch.” Hagen saw Mariana coming back in their direction. “Why don’t you just get it over with?”

Crosswhite reached out to flip the break levers on the wheelchair. “Adios, puto.”

“Don’t!” Mariana shouted.

Crosswhite stepped behind the wheelchair and pushed it over the edge at the deep end of the pool. There was a mild splash, and Hagen went straight to the bottom.

Mariana froze in place, utterly aghast. “What the fuck do you call that?”

“Swimming lesson.” Crosswhite looked into the water at Hagen’s shimmering image twelve feet down. “Doesn’t look like he’s doin’ too good, does it?”