The Dogs of Mexico Read online

  Shouldn’t you be getting dressed? Susan said.

  She had stepped out of her bedroom into the hallway, tilting her head as she attached antique pearl earrings. At forty-three Susan was still a beautiful woman, especially striking tonight in a new black dress. He went a little mushy against his will. Truthfully, it wasn’t Susan he hated but the weakness he fell prey to in her presence. To his way of thinking, every relationship had its dominant partner. That was the guiding principle on which he had built his career within the confines of the CIA—you were either in charge or someone else was. And while it had been suggested that he might not be a team player, he hadn’t gotten this far by playing subservient. Susan was the only human alive capable of manipulating him, and then only because he cared too much for her. In his weakness he indulged her, then struck out at her in resentment. Susan. His Achilles heel.

  He lifted the Easter basket with its mound of bills. “Just how the hell do you expect to pay for all this?”

  Susan hesitated, her expression falling, beggarly. “Please. Not tonight. Let’s do try to enjoy the evening.”

  He tossed the basket back on the secretary. “You enjoy the evening. I’m not going.”

  “Not going? But…the mayor, he’s expecting you.”

  Duane appraised her, remote, willfully cruel. “You may be interested to know that your VISA and MasterCard are cancelled. Maxed out.”

  She paused. “What’re you saying?”

  “We’re flat on our ass broke. That’s what I’m saying.”

  She went pale, her whole stance suddenly altered. “Duane, what’re we going to do?”

  “I have no idea what you’re going to do. Me, I’m going back to the office.”

  “But, the mayor, Violet…they’re expecting us…”

  “Screw the mayor. Screw Violet too.”

  THE OFFICE, as Duane called it, was a studio apartment in the Kensington District of Inner City Philadelphia, not all that far from Society Hill in terms of distance, but eons in every other sense. In spite of Philadelphia’s model program for the homeless, derelicts still panhandled the streets and slept in doorways. An inordinate number of the old buildings were boarded up. Even so, the studio had become more of a home—more of a refuge, actually—than the big Georgian with all its baggage.

  Duane felt a small stab of guilty pleasure at having left Susan to attend the fundraiser by herself. On the other hand, he had prepaid the tickets and Susan did enjoy that sort of thing—the mayor and Violet, and the rest of that snobby crowd. A thousand bucks a plate? Who the hell did they think he was, Bill Gates?

  ONE OF THE six dedicated phones near Duane’s office bedside rang. A nearby computer screen lit up. The green line. North Africa. That would be Abda Mufi—Eduardo Agustino, as Duane had known him at Georgetown University and then later as a fellow operative. Eduardo’s mother was Lebanese, his father a Mexican diplomat. Eduardo had managed to embed himself in a North African terrorist cell under his uncle’s name on his mother’s side.

  Duane saw now that the call wasn’t from the Cairo sector after all, but was registering Cartagena on the coast of Colombia. His pulse quickened. He dug one knuckle at the sleep in his eyes, touched the incoming scrambler and picked up. “Flax,” he said.

  “Flax is fine but cotton is the thing in Cairo,” Eduardo replied.

  “You’re out of pocket.”

  “Get back to me.”

  “Your number?” Duane jotted it down, though he had it on the screen. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. He hung up and entered the number in the Company’s database. He hardly had time to pull his pants on when HOTEL SANTA CLARA CENTRO, PLAZA SAN DIEGO, CALLE DE TORO, CR 8 … 39–29, CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA, SOUTH AMERICA appeared on the screen.

  Duane tucked a nine-millimeter Sig semiautomatic in his belt and pulled a sweatshirt on over. He keyed the three deadbolts on his way out.

  The streets in the Kensington District were bleak in the first gray light. Delivery trucks clanged over manhole covers. An old Vietnamese man swept the sidewalk fronting a fishy-smelling delicatessen. A couple of derelicts huddled in a shallow doorway on scraps of cardboard in the chill air.

  Duane ducked down a set of steps under the stoop of a boarded-up townhouse he had bought years before on the cheap. He unlocked the iron gate, deactivated the alarm, unlocked the deadbolts and switched on the lights to reveal a plain basement room with a small kitchen, TV, three computers, a shelf of phones and one office chair. Not so different from the studio office, except this basement room wasn’t connected to the Company in any way. It was his view that one couldn’t have too many layers of subterfuge. Not in the business he was in. Deception, artifice—the name of the game.

  He tapped one of the keyboards. The screen blinked on and again displayed the name of the hotel and the number Eduardo had given him.

  Duane dialed.

  Eduardo picked up. “Yes?”

  “What the hell’s up with you?”

  “Listen to me,” Eduardo said, breathless, “this is important.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “You will please shut the recorder off.”

  Duane tapped the set lightly with a fingernail, affecting a click sound. It was a foolish contrivance as all the electronics were soundless. Nevertheless, if it gave Eduardo a sense of security… “So,” he said, “we’re on override. What’s up?”

  “It is what you call the old good-news bad-news scenario, so brace yourself.”

  “Hit me.”

  “I have been outed. That is the bad.”

  “Outed— Shit, Eduardo—“

  “But wait, there is good news.”

  “Dammit to hell shit!”

  “You and I, we have done some things in our day, but this is it. The big one.”

  Duane mentally withdrew, cautious.

  “Fowler,” said Eduardo, “I have had enough. I’m through.”

  “What’re you saying?”

  “This is no life. And you, you are not so happy either.”

  “Hey, speak for yourself.”

  “No, you listen to me,” Eduardo said with growing excitement. “We can help each other.”

  Duane paused. “Good news? What’s the good news?”

  “Are you ready for this? We just took down a De Beers courier, a priceless collection of rare diamonds en route from South Africa to Switzerland. We took them.”

  Duane was jolted by the sheer audacity of it. “Shit, Eduardo. Those people, they’ll nail your ass before you can pucker good.”

  “Several million dollars. But I need your help. The two of us, we can get out of this thankless business once and for all. How is that for good news?”

  “Wait a minute…you’re saying you have the diamonds? Yourself?”

  “Is this not good news?”

  Duane was aware of his accelerated pulse, all receptors alert to the potential for opportunity.

  “But you could dispose of them at any of a hundred places. Why do you need me?”

  “This is true. But you are the only one to give me what I want in exchange. I want you to get me back into the States.”

  “You have connections. You know how to manage that.”

  “Not this. I want also for you to get my family out of Morocco into the US.”

  “You have family in Morocco?” He knew it was a mistake the moment he said it. Slow down, he told himself. Self-control. Think.

  A small silence. Then: “What are you saying? You know that.”

  Suspicion flickered in Duane’s mind at the sharp spike of anger evident in Eduardo’s tone. It wasn’t the first time he’d had such a moment with Eduardo. But then, everyone was suspicious of everyone. The nature of the business.

  “Of course,” Duane said, trying to recall the particulars of Eduardo’s domestic situation. “That can be arranged.”

  “Listen, I have contacts in the diamond district in New York. You do this and we will split the take. The two of us, right down the middle.”


  “Where are you now?”

  Duane heard an audible sigh in the receiver. Then: “Are you in, or shall I look elsewhere?”

  “And you have the diamonds?”

  “Even as we speak.”

  “Mm–hmm. So not only is De Beers after you, but every terrorist in North Africa as well.”

  “Are you in or not?”

  “Give me your number. I’ll make arrangements and call you back.”

  “No, no. I will call you. We meet on neutral ground. I’m thinking Acapulco. I will send information for birth certificates, legitimate citizenships. So, please, you will have everything in order when you arrive.”

  Duane couldn’t help but smile at Eduardo’s attempts at caution. “Sure,” he said. “That’s doable.”

  “This one is going to set us free. Free at last, free at last!” Eduardo sing-songed in a Martin Luther King parody.

  “Call me. Two days.”

  Duane broke the connection, moved to another station, dialed again. He checked with two stringers, one in Cape Town, the other in Gibraltar. From Cape Town: Yes, a well-armed gang thought to be a splinter of some North African terrorist group knocked over a De Beers Consolidated Mines courier and got away with millions in diamonds. De Beers was keeping it out of the news. Bad press.

  The Gibraltar call was less successful, but the stringer promised a callback. In the meantime, Duane checked out the Hotel Santa Clara Centro for any info not in the database: The hotel was once a convent—Don’t miss seeing the downstairs bar with its tombs, the copy read. Duane sighed. The world was full of irony.

  He felt bad for what he was about to do. On the other hand, he visualized Susan’s cheerful smile, credit cards reinstated, heading off to New York for a day of shopping. He hated this in himself. This weakness.

  In less than ten minutes the phone rang. Gibraltar: Yes, Abda Mufi’s mother, wife, and two children were living in Morocco in the old French Colonial district.

  Duane took down the address and hung up. He sat for a long moment, mentally resorting conversations and information. He looked again at the Abda Mufi Moroccan address; finally he entered it in his private database and backed it up on a second drive under Active—North Africa.

  He would do right by Eduardo’s family. See that they got his company pension.

  3

  Wayfarer

  NORMAN SOFFIT PAID the taxi driver. He and the girl got out and carried the bags of clean laundry down the pier to where the Texas Moon was docked. He let his bag down and handed the old man standing watch fifty pesos. The old man nodded once and left and Soffit picked up the laundry again.

  The girl climbing aboard said something and laughed. He started to ask what she was talking about, but he didn’t understand half the stuff she said anyway and he let it go.

  He had picked her up down in Colombia where she was stranded on the beach there, calling herself Mickey Sierra. No money and no way home. He guessed she was fifteen or sixteen, though she claimed to be nineteen. Lying like a dog. She was a crazy kid anyhow in her lowrider cutoffs and junk jewelry, her pins and buttons, black nails dusted with some silver glitter stuff, spiked green and orange hair looking like it been run over by a dull lawnmower. A bunch of rings and studs circled the rim of one ear, an old-timey brass key hanging from the lobe like a question mark.

  She had a good body but still carried some baby fat. Except for that and a tattoo he hadn’t seen but the top half of—this angel floating up behind her low riders to just below her belly button—she might not be bad looking. A gold ring in her navel stood in for a halo over the angel’s head. Crazy kid all right, but he liked her. He couldn’t say why. It sure wasn’t sex. He wasn’t gonna do neither one of them no good in that department. It gave him a headache just thinking about it.

  “I’m for sucking up a monthly,” the girl said.

  Again he started to ask what language she was talking, but then he figured it out. Delicate little flower, this one. He followed her through the hatch and down into the galley. They dumped the laundry, and she set about making bloody marys when his cell phone rang.

  “Ye’llo?”

  “Flax,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Damn,” Soffit said after a moment. “Been a while. I thought y’all might’a done throwed me to the dogs.”

  “How goes it?”

  “Not bad for a old fart. How bout yourself?”

  “I might negotiate a little business your way. Interested?”

  “Here, hold on a minute. Let me take this up to the wheelhouse.”

  “Company?”

  “Just this gal. She’s making up drinks.” He turned to her. “You go ahead there. I’ll be back in a jif.”

  “Ace,” she said over her shoulder, flashing her big openmouthed gum–chewing smile at him, a little shimmy-shake of her ass for added effect.

  He climbed the steps to the deck and went in the wheelhouse and sat in the swivel chair and turned away from the harbor so as not to be distracted. “Okay. I’m good to go here.”

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “Aw, crazy kid. Picked her up down in Colombia.”

  “Um. That might complicate matters.”

  “Naw, hell. She’s just a kid, dumb as a stump. She crews pretty good, but I’ll put her ashore if it comes to that. So, what’re we talking here?”

  “There’s a guy holed up in Cartagena. The Hotel Santa Clara Centro. He’s a terrorist, a ranking member of an al Qaeda cell operating out of North Africa.”

  “Damn,” Soffit breathed. “A terrorist.”

  “He has a canister on him. We need that canister in the worst way. You interested?”

  “Depends. What do you want me to do?”

  “We want this man stitched, and we want that canister delivered to us in Acapulco.”

  “Whoa. A wet one, huh?” Soffit knew the terms. It gave him a sense of belonging. “Sounds big,” he said.

  “This one’s off the books.”

  Off the books? O–kay. “Uh, what’re we talking here, moneywise?”

  “How about fifty grand? I’ll wire you ten now. The rest when you deliver to my man in Acapulco.”

  Fifty grand. Shit, this was big. “Mm–hmm,” he mumbled, “and this terrorist guy, he, uh, gets decommissioned. Kinda like, for good?”

  “His name is Abda Mufi. He’s registered in the hotel under the name of Eduardo Agustino. I’ll give you the address.”

  “I’m in some pepper hole here on the bottom side of Costa Rica. Not all that far back to Colombia.”

  “Good. Why don’t I wire the money to you in Cartagena?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Get in touch with me afterward. Let me know how it went and where to send the rest of the money. You still have my direct line, right?”

  “Might be a few days. I gotta go back through that damn canal.”

  “No, take a flight. This needs immediate attention.”

  “Hot damn, Flax. This is good. Getting paid for doing something for the good old US of A. Shit fire, if I was still a young feller I’d sign on with you old boys myself.”

  When he got back down to the galley, Mickey had the bloody marys made. She had her ear buds plugged in, snapping her fingers, shimmy shaking her flowering delights to the silent music of her iPod. By god, if it wasn’t for his difficulty, he’d give her a turn.

  As it was, he took his drink back up to the wheelhouse.

  The Texas Moon was sixty feet stem to stern and twenty-two abeam. A fully rigged Texas shrimper. She smelled it, too. A 3406 Cat engine with a four-to-one gear ratio, a 30-kilowatt Kubota generator, radar, depth finder and two Lorans. He had won her a couple of years back against sixty thousand dollars in a game of Texas hold ’em at Sabine Pass, just below Port Arthur on the Texas Gulf Coast. He wouldn’t a done such a thing but he had been partying for days and didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Sometimes there wasn’t no rhyme or reason for what Lady Luck was up to—that wanton witch with her unpred
ictable double-dealing two-timing sometime-mistress smile.

  The Moon was registered out of Sarasota Florida, licensed to fish the territorial waters of the United States, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and Costa Rica. But he didn’t know how to operate the son of a bitch. The shrimper that is. And the two niggers he hired on from a pogey boat quit, objecting to his use of the word nigger. He hired a couple of dinks. At first they seemed easier to get on with and he gave it a try. Shrimping. Since they looked to know what they was doing.

  One thing following another, he and the slopes found theirselves off the coast above La Ciba, Honduras where they run into some old boys and first thing you know he had false bottoms in the holds and was hauling arms and ammunition under a few pounds of iced down shrimp. But then the dinks started giving him a hard time, wanting a bigger piece of the pie, so he shot both of them while they slept and sent them overboard to the sharks.

  By then he could handle the boat but, truth be told, it wasn’t no business for an old West Texas goat roper anyhow. He was sick to death of Dramamine and fish, sick of the islands and the voodoo jigs jelly–shaking tit to toe, lopping off chicken heads, telling you they was putting the baaad on you, working their selves into such a state that their eyeballs rolled back in their heads till they passed plumb out.

  Then he made the acquaintance of some other old boys. He about shit his britches when he learned who they was. But they wasn’t after him. They had bigger fish to fry. They put him on retainer and even bailed him out of trouble once when he tangled with the Coast Guard. He didn’t know none of them by name except for this one, Flax. And of course that wasn’t his real name nohow.

  Soffit looked across the bay, abstracted, his mind on the job.

  Abda Mufti, huh? I’ll kill that terrorist sumbitch deader’n hell, he reflected bitterly, still visualizing the girl’s compact ass snapping at the air like a dog grabbing biscuits. His chest felt swelled to busting. His head too. He wasn’t sure whether it was the terrorist, or aggravation over the girl, his inabilities. He hoped she didn’t come up from below and see him—a full-growed, gun-running, terrorist-killing assassin son of a bitch—choking back tears.