Wildcard Page 8

  Boise didn’t smell like sulfur. In fact, it didn’t smell like anything at all. For Tom, who had spent the last five years of his life breathing the noxious smog of L.A. and the beltway exhaust of D.C., taking in air that had no discernible scent was a novel experience. For a moment he simply let himself take it in, deep lungfuls of untainted air. Then he remembered why he was here and how far out on a limb he’d stepped when he’d decided to come.

  He’d debated whether to tell Miriam where he was going, and decided against it. Kevin Willis had been her mentor at the Bureau, and she had been Tom’s. Miriam was nothing if not loyal, and Tom had decided it would be unfair to trap her between competing loyalties. If his anonymous caller turned out to be a crank, or the woman’s information turned out to be bogus, Tom could write all of this off as a much-needed vacation and no one had to ever know otherwise. Assuming the woman showed up at all.

  He’d scanned the arrivals area upon stepping off the jet-way but had seen no looks of recognition. Although he’d brought only a single carry-on, he followed the herd to baggage claim, in case he might see her there. But apart from the customary lip-locks of reunited lovers and the peripatetic scurrying of an overexhausted two year old too long pent up on an airliner, he’d seen nothing noteworthy.

  So he’d made his way out to the taxi queue, thinking there must be a respectable Sheraton or Ramada somewhere in town where he could take a room, stretch out and think about whether and by whom he was being led by the nose. He flagged a cab and closed the door as a pair of unnaturally pale eyes met his in the rearview mirror.

  “Where to?” the driver asked, taking a sip from an insulated mug and returning it to a cup holder at her side.

  “A decent hotel,” he said. “Downtown.”

  “The Grove is excellent,” she said. “Not too pricey, great Italian restaurant. Gets rave reviews.”

  He nodded, wondering for a moment if she received a kickback on referrals, before deciding he’d become way too cynical. She probably just wanted a nice tip in exchange for a good tip. “That’s fine. Thanks.”

  “No problem, sir.”

  The ride was fairly brief and, by L.A. or D.C. standards, the streets devoid of traffic. Tom offered a prayer of thanks that his driver wasn’t the chatty type who wanted to fill him in on all the nuggets of local history and entertainment. He wasn’t in the mood to talk, nor to listen. He had no fear of flying, but the steady decline of airline amenities, coupled with the inevitable delays, had turned it into an exhausting mode of transport. He wanted a hot shower, a good meal and some quiet time to mull over his options.

  He hefted his bag and passed the driver her fare, plus a ten-dollar tip, with a muttered “Thanks.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, smiling as she pocketed the tip. She had a lovely smile, open and honest. The kind of smile that seemed destined for Hollywood, rather than driving a cab. “Enjoy Boise.”

  “I’ll try.”

  He registered at the front desk, went upstairs and quickly concluded that she had not led him astray. The rates were cheap, by D.C. or L.A. standards, but the lobby was both spacious and tasteful, and his room immaculate. He tossed his overnight bag on the bed and dedicated himself to task one on his list: a steaming, pounding, relaxing shower.

  After briskly rubbing himself down with a thick towel, he felt almost human again and emerged from the bathroom to dress for dinner. He froze.

  “Hi, Tom.” It was the voice he’d heard on the phone, now coming from a woman who sat in one of the two armchairs, silhouetted against the sunset streaming in the window. “Good of you to come.”

  “How did you get in here?” he asked, surprise giving way to anger. “For that matter, how did you know where I was staying?”

  “You told me,” she said, reaching for the lamp on the table. She switched it on, and he recognized her as his cab driver. Except that she’d hidden her accent in the cab. “Or rather, I told you.”

  “That answers the second question,” he said, feeling distinctly vulnerable with nothing but a towel around his waist and an unknown and now even more suspicious woman in his hotel room. “What about the first?”

  She shrugged. “Hotel room doors are good. But manageable.”

  He nodded. “Then how about you manage it again and get the hell out?”

  She laughed, and once again he saw that smile. “You don’t really want me to do that, Tom. You want me to tell you why you’ve come out here. You want to know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  “And why all the cloak-and-dagger bullshit,” he said.

  Another laugh. “Yes, perhaps it was overdramatic.” Then her eyes hardened. “Or perhaps not. You’ll want to get dressed, however. You’ll find a Glock nine millimeter in your overnight bag. Standard Bureau issue. I knew you hadn’t traveled with one.”

  He flipped open the travel bag, and sure enough, a black handgun lay atop his clothes. Hefting it, he popped out the clip and counted off twelve rounds.

  “The clip holds thirteen,” she said, “but like a lot of agents, you only load twelve. Thirteen compresses the feed spring too much, right?”

  Although he knew nothing about her, she apparently knew a great deal about him. As a former undercover agent, that was not a situation he found palatable. On the other hand, she seemed to see no reason to conceal what she knew. Nor did she seem stupid enough to arm a would-be opponent. Which meant she didn’t see him as an opponent.

  He reseated the clip and tossed the Glock on the bed, instantly memorizing the subtle wrinkles it created in the bedspread. He then gathered a change of clothes and returned to the steamy bathroom. When he reemerged, the gun and the wrinkles were exactly as they had been. In fact, he would have wagered she hadn’t so much as left her chair.

  “So,” he asked, “why am I here?”

  By way of response, she picked up the remote and switched on the TV, where Harrison Rice was addressing what the crawl described as an Arab-American gathering in California.

  “Many of you may still have relatives in your homelands,” Rice was saying. “And I want to assure you that the United States will not stand by while they are needlessly killed. A wise man once said, ‘With the power to do good comes the responsibility to do good.’ The United States has the power to help restore peace and stability, and to ensure real freedom, in that troubled part of the world. And if I am elected, the United States will do that.”

  She flicked off the TV and fixed her icy gray eyes on his. “That, Tom, is why you are here.”

  10

  Guatemalan Highlands

  Steve Lorenzo stood in the chapel sacristy, peeling off his vestments. Most of the villagers were at work with the sun in the morning, so he said daily Mass in the early evening, before dinner. He realized he’d gotten soft in the past twelve years. Even with the lightweight cotton chasuble, he was perspiring profusely. The afternoon rains had left the air thick and soggy, and the village chapel had no air-conditioning. He had grown too accustomed to the amenities of the United States, too insulated from the realities of life in much of the rest of the world.

  “Padre?” a young woman asked, standing in the doorway.

  Lorenzo searched his mind for her name, knowing he had been introduced to her upon his arrival two days ago. He was normally quite good with names, but the last week had been so hectic that his mind was still spinning.

  “Perdone,” he said. “Cómo se llama?”

  “Rita,” she replied with a shy smile. “You have too many names to remember. And it has been many years.”

  “You look familiar,” he said. “But yes, it has been many years since I was here.”

  “You performed my Confirmation,” she said. “In this chapel. Fourteen years ago.”

  Lorenzo’s cheeks colored. His mind flashed back to this same face as a teenager, with bright, smiling eyes. “I’m so sorry. Rita. Now I remember. Your Confirmation name was María Magdelena, yes?”

  “Sí, Padre,” she said, her smile broad
ening. “Rita María Magdelena Carmena-Ortiz. Now Rita María Magdelena Quijachia.”

  “Of course, I remember now,” he said. “I see you’re married. How have you been, Rita?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I am married now. My oldest son, Rolando, was your altar boy tonight.”

  Lorenzo laughed and shook his head, smiling. The years went by too fast. It was a feeling shared by most priests. One minute you were baptizing an infant. The next minute, it seemed, that same child was receiving First Communion. Then Confirmation. Then Matrimony.

  Or a funeral, he thought, his smile fading. That was why he’d finally left this country. He had performed too many funeral Masses for children, killed by war or disease. At least young Rita and her children seemed to have avoided those dangers so far.

  “How are your parents?” he asked, remembering the beaming couple who had stood beside their daughter at her Confirmation. “And your brother? Miguel, wasn’t it?”

  The smile dropped from her face as quickly as if a cold wind had blown through her heart. “My father is dead, Padre. Hanged by the army. And my brother will soon be dead, I fear.”

  “Oh no,” Lorenzo said. “Come in, please. Sit. Tell me what happened.”

  “My husband will be home soon,” she said, shaking her head. “I need to prepare dinner.”

  “I’m so sorry about your father,” the priest said. “May his soul rest in peace. But your brother, is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I wish you could,” Rita said. “But there is nothing you can do. Your people will hunt him down. They will kill him. If he doesn’t get himself killed first.”

  “Why would my people… What people?” he asked.

  “Your government,” she said. “They have offered a reward of eighty thousand quetzals. Someone will talk. And then they will come and kill him.”

  Eighty thousand quetzals? Lorenzo asked himself, doing the math. Ten thousand dollars. What would…?

  The answer came to him almost as soon as he had asked the question.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not Miguel.”

  Rita’s eyes glimmered with tears, though her face had set hard. “You will see, Padre. They will come and take us all. My entire village. You have come back in time to watch us all die.”

  Boise, Idaho

  The hotel’s Italian restaurant was every bit as good as advertised. Tom was enjoying a three-pasta meal of linguini in clam sauce, lasagna Florentine and penne with grilled chicken and vegetables. The selection had been Renate’s idea; the woman had finally given him a name, though doubtless a phony one. She’d ordered grilled salmon served with angel hair in a white wine sauce.

  She had suggested a bottle of wine, but he’d declined, saying he preferred to keep his wits sharp. That had drawn another of her patented laughs, along with the comment that a meal such as this was not complete without the fruit of the vine. She’d ordered a glass of the house chardonnay. The incident had served to reinforce his impression of her as European, although he hadn’t yet been able to pin down her faint accent, and had no idea where she called home.

  “So, is there more to Renate?” he asked.

  She cocked her head. “In what way?”

  “Well,” he said, “a last name, for example. Most people have them.”

  She smiled. “Yes, there is more. Renate Bächle.”

  She pronounced it Besh-leh. Had he been sufficiently cosmopolitan in background, he supposed, that might have garnered him more information. But having grown up in a small town in Michigan and spent his entire life within the borders of the United States, he was still clueless as to her origins.

  “Interesting name,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds French.”

  Again that laugh. “Well, it isn’t. And if you’re fishing for information, why not just ask?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Who are you? Who do you work for? What’s your angle in all of this? And why me?”

  “Hmm,” she said, sipping her wine. “Let’s work backward. Why you? Because you’re clever, and you have nothing to lose.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you’re on suspension—and for good reason—and you’re angry at the Bureau and the world because of that. You have no living family, and from what I’ve seen, only a couple of real friends, both of whom are out of town at the moment. So what else were you going to do? Sit around and grumble at the futility of existence? I figured you were…available.”

  “You obviously do your homework,” Tom said, once again realizing he was at a distinct disadvantage in this working relationship. If it could even be called that. It felt distinctly uncomfortable to find that this woman might have had access to his very private personnel file. Or, nearly as bad, that someone at the Bureau had been bad-mouthing him. “Let me guess. CIA?”

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t insult my intelligence.”

  “Meaning you’re not CIA, or that you won’t answer?”

  “Oh, I’m definitely not CIA,” she answered. “But you have no need as yet to know exactly who I work for. It’s sufficient to tell you that we both work for the same thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Justice.”

  He twirled pasta around his fork, thinking for a moment before replying. “You’re aware, of course, that justice can have many meanings, depending on one’s viewpoint.”

  “Very true. But in this instance, our desires for justice run parallel. Neither of us wishes to see the government of the United States chosen by a coup d’état.”

  He froze. She had so closely echoed the suspicions in his own mind that he wondered wildly if she was able to read his thoughts. “You have proof?”

  “If I had proof, I wouldn’t need you,” she said bluntly. “But I think we both have information we can share, and that together we can find more. And when we do, Mr. FBI, the collar will be yours.”

  He eyed her with deeper suspicion. “Why?”

  “Because I like to keep my profile low.”

  He doubted this woman’s profile would go unnoticed anywhere in the world. Or that her strange eyes would ever be forgotten. “Why Boise?”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t been checking into Wes Dixon.”

  “How would you know?”

  She smiled. “I have a crystal ball made by IBM. Now, shall we finish dinner and return to the room? There’s much we need to discuss without being overheard.”

  At that point he was so damn intrigued, he would have skipped dinner and resigned from the Bureau just to hear what she had to say.

  He was sure that was her plan. But he didn’t mind falling in with it.

  For now.

  Guatemala City, Guatemala

  Miriam Anson sat as close as she could to the rattling air conditioner as she listened to the briefing. So far, the Guatemalan police had made only marginal progress. The assassination had been carefully planned and well executed. At least four people had been involved, perhaps as many as six, depending on which witnesses one chose to believe. The armored limousine had been stopped by a blast of C4 on the gas tank. Both 9 mm and 7.62 mm rounds and shell casings had been found at the scene, and their distribution pointed to at least three shooters. Add a driver to get them out of the area and, yes, at least four assassins.

  A very professional job, Miriam thought, even if the ambassador had made himself a relatively easy target. He had been an organized man, with a regular schedule. His driver chose one of three routes at random each morning, but a lookout with a radio could easily signal which of the three he was taking on any given day. They might have had three teams of assassins—one along each route—or they might simply have chosen a given route and waited each morning until the ambassador drove into the killing ground.

  “Had anyone noticed anything suspicious in the mornings leading up to the assassination?” she asked via her interpreter. “Anyone sitting around that corner each morning?”

  “No one
has said nothing like that,” the police commander replied in fractured English.

  Miriam reminded herself not to read anything into his syntax. The double negative was both common and correct in Spanish, or so her briefing papers had said.

  “Was it a busy intersection? A lot of pedestrian traffic?”

  “Not too busy,” he said. “But not…how you say…vacant, either.”

  Which might mean no one would notice people sitting at the corner, Miriam thought. But the 7.62 mm cartridges were AK-47 rounds. Even cut down, such a weapon would be too big to tuck under a suit jacket. That meant a bag of some kind. People would have noticed if the same three people were sitting at the same intersection with the same bags on three or four consecutive mornings.

  “They would have been seen if they had been there more than once or twice,” Miriam said. “So unless they got very lucky on their first try, I think we can assume there were three teams. One along each route. Assume each team had three shooters and a driver. Plus the lookout to tell them which route the limousine was taking that morning. That’s thirteen terrorists. At least.”

  “Sí,” the commander said. “We see it that way also. The guerillas are becoming more organized. They could not have done this even five years ago.”

  Miriam turned the operation over in her head. Six gunmen with AK-47s, three with handguns and C4. Careful, precise reconnaissance. Attack plans rehearsed and based upon known protection procedures. Radio intelligence. It was a military-style operation, the type one might expect from special operations forces. Minimal exposure. Maximum chance of success. She had no doubt their escape routes had been planned with equal precision and efficiency.

  “They’re good,” she muttered.

  “Qué?” the commander asked. “Good?”