Deadly Waters (39 page)

CVI

01/23/11 21:05 PST

Erin Mondragon refused to turn himself into a desperate man. Finding himself in a situation that would have seemed an escapable trap to another man, he had the
sang
froid
to make detailed plans for a future everyone else in the world was doubting. Late Sunday night he sat at his grand office desk and charted a flight route to Sao Paolo, Brazil via a refueling stop near Mexico City. His Airstream could not make the full passage on a single tankful of fuel. Thankfully, he knew of some people south of the Mexican capital city who would allow him to land on their private strip and sell him whatever he needed; from there he would make one final eight hour flight to the land of samba and Sugarloaf. He knew enough Portuguese to order food in a four star restaurant and enough to solicit the favors of a woman. During his sojourn in South America Erin had discretely made contact with several Brazilian attorneys who could secure his freedom after he arrived in their country.

Weeks before, Mondragon had transferred fifteen million dollars into a subsidiary of Mondragon Corporation and then quietly moved the money into a Zurich account. He fretted to consider the frugal life he would be forced to lead with a mere fifteen million dollars to his name, He realized the dollar was currently strong and that the standard of living in Brazil was much lower than in the U.S., but still...

Would he be able to buy one of those fortified compounds on the outskirts of Sao Paulo where everybody who was anybody lived? And afford one of those helicopters other rich Brazilians used to fly over the dangerous barrios? What was the cost of a month of blondes? He pictured himself living in the quiet solitude of Sao Paolo’s street level cafes and tiny city parks, an outcast among the aging Nazi war criminals and fugitive drug dealers the city’s respectable rich kept at arm’s length.

It meant living in the shadows, slowly rebuilding his position until the day came when he could leverage himself back to a level of real wealth. By chance on Saturday night he had watched a History Network documentary on the latter life of Dr. Mengele, the murderous physician of Auschwitz, and had seen how the old Angel of Death had hidden in South America for years, shifting from Argentina to Paraguay to Brazil and Bolivia, Israeli agents in pursuit until the day he drowned in a jungle river. Mondragon tried to put himself in Mengele’s place, tried to make himself a little apprehensive about his future. He realized he would land on his feet no matter in what circumstances he found himself. Mengele, he decided, was in the end merely another chump who started strong but did not know how to react when the rules of the game were altered. He, on the other hand, would do quite well in a new environment.

“Life is funny,” thought Mondragon, and while he realized the sentiment was trite he concluded that there was not much more that could be said on the subject. “It’s unfair that I must flee the country at the point in my life when I should be playing golf in Pebble Beach or fishing for bone fish off Boca Raton.”

Mondragon followed the line of his flight plan across his desk map, through Mexico and the Caribbean, to Brazil and then beyond the corner of his map to a photograph one of the security cameras in the parking garage had taken that afternoon. The picture showed the new delivery man for the Hong Lee Chinese restaurant in profile as he walked up the concrete steps leading to an interior entrance, a cluster of white cardboard boxes hanging from both his hands. Erin did not know the man’s name. He assumed--with good reason--that he was a federal agent. All the new faces Mondragon saw about the building this past week were surely those of federal agents. Mondragon ran his index finger across the outline of the man’s jaw; next he ran the same finger along his own jaw. The man was partly of European descent; his hair and skin were lighter than one might expect, and he was tall, a good four inches taller than Mondragon. Erin took out his pocket comb and tried parting his hair in the same manner as the man in the photograph.

“Those years in community theater will not be for naught,” he told himself.

He went to the office restroom, put the photograph on the mirror, and set up his theatrical make-up kit on the sink. He first tested several shades of greasepaint on the back of his hand until he found an approximately correct hue. Before he applied this hue to his face, he put some strips of tape at the corners of his eyes to give them a narrower, slightly slanted affectation. Mondragon attempted with the same tape to tighten the wide nostrils of his formidable nose, and he found that a small strip across the bridge did the trick as well as he could manage.

After he had patted a bit of putty over the white tape, the change still did not look natural and would not, in his estimation, withstand close examination. He applied the greasepaint, blackened and trimmed his already dark eyebrows, and then combed his hair again so that it resembled the wig the agent was wearing over his regulation FBI haircut.

Mondragon tried on a girdle intended to give him a waspish waist similar to the man in the photo. Much to his displeasure, he could see in the mirror that this was not the case. His pudgy middle stuck over the top and bottom of the girdle like loose meat sprouting from a sausage casing. Mondragon decided he would have to wear the delivery man’s loose jacket unzipped in order to hide his midriff.

Using a recorder also taken from the parking garage, Mondragon practiced aping the few words the agent had said as he drove out the parking garage door.

“Number Five, over and out,” the agent had said to the two uniformed cops standing guard at the open door.

“Number Five, over and out,” repeated Mondragon, and turned his head to the right. Why couldn’t he have been more foreign sounding? he thought. Foreign accents are easy to do. This Number Five is pure Californian; his unaccented vowels all sound the same.

Mondragon scowled at the face he saw in the bathroom mirror saying, “Number Five, over and out.” It had better be dark, he thought.

Erin had made no effort to duplicate the agent’s delivery uniform; Number Five was definitely taller than he, and with the aid of a couple safety pins to shorten the pants legs, Mondragon planned to use the man’s clothes when the time came. He made a few more touches to his face and checked in the mirror, then cleaned himself off and returned to his plans at the desk.

CVII

01/25/11 21:48

At that moment Bob Mathers was sleeping in his bed at the Imperial Hotel in Montara, a small town between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay. The dripping sink in the kitchenette and the fighting couple in the room next door to him in the rent-by-the-week establishment had kept him awake most of the evening, as he tried to get some rest before he went on duty at midnight. He had drifted off for a few minutes when the black rotary phone rang.

“Hello, Frank Peterson here,” mumbled Bob, using the name he had given at the airport.

“Mr. Peterson,” said an adolescent voice on the other end of the line, “this is Jerry Luchowser out at Half Moon Airport. You asked me to call you if anybody prepped any of the private jets.”

The young man was a maintenance worker Bob had given fifty dollars to call him in case anything happened at the airfield while Bob was not present.

“Yeah, good,” said Bob, now becoming fully awake.

“Well, they’re fueling the Mondragon Corporation’s plane right now.”

“Who is ‘they?’” asked Bob.

“I guess somebody from the company,” said Jerry. “Up at the tower they submitted a flight plan for a Mr. Rich, a company pilot going down to San Diego.”

“Is that so? I’ll be in a little early tonight.”

Bob pulled on his clothes and drove the four miles down Highway One to the airport. The two security men on duty before the graveyard shift began were, as usual, in the tower break room drinking coffee. There was no one on the ground to see Bob take a shoe-box-size package from the passenger side of his pick up and carry it into an open hanger on the north side of the tarmac.

CVIII

01/25/11 23:20 PST

“Sundown, we’ve got a delivery headed for M.,” crackled the radio in Agent Thomas’ ear.

As agent in charge while Fuller was not on scene, Thomas had to sit in the observation post on the twenty-seventh floor in the hotel across from the Mondragon Building and monitor anyone entering or leaving the suspect’s domain.

“What does he want at this time of night, Eagle?” asked Thomas, looking through the blinds with his night vision binoculars.

“Sundown, it’s an order of Mo Goo Gai Pan and Shrimp Fried Rice from the Hong Lee Restaurant,” radioed the uniformed agent on the ground.

“He’s hungry?” asked Thomas. “M. must be up tonight. Who is the designated delivery man?” he asked the other two men in the observation room. “Is Number Five still on duty?”

“Andrews is on call till morning,” said one of them. “Number Six won’t be here till eight.”

“His lights are on,” said Thomas looking across Market Street at Mondragon’s penthouse. “All right, get Number Five up. Tell everybody heads up. I don’t like this. Do you read, Eagle?”

“Roger, Sundown,” replied one of the uniformed cops in front of the parking garage door. “Number Five will be fifteen minutes inside.”

Agent Andrews was found napping on a cot inside the ground floor suite the FBI was using as a rest area for the scores of operatives they were keeping on Market Street. He was up and about in time to meet the Hong Lee’s delivery truck at the corner and to drive to the wide parking garage door of the Mondragon Building. Andrews’ family had long lived in Sacramento and had never had strong ties to the old country and its culture. He hated Chinese cooking, in fact the strong smell of cabbage, water chestnuts, and peanuts that met him inside the delivery van made him somewhat nauseous. Nor did he care for the real delivery man’s heavy Cantonese accent or how the man smiled and bobbed his head when Andrews looked directly at him.

“This is so nineteenth century,” he told the man. The real delivery man’s English was none too good, and Andrews spoke not a word of Cantonese. “Get over!” he told the man as he took the driver’s seat. “Get out! I’ll bring the truck back later.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said the man and smiled and bobbed his head, which Agent Andrews considered a personal affront.

At the parking garage one of the two uniformed cops on duty stopped the van with a sleepy raised hand. “You bring anything for us?” they called into the van’s open side window.

“Any food eaten after eight PM goes directly into your fat cells,” Andrews told them.

“Excuse us for asking, Dr. Atkins,” joked one of the cops. “You mean this clown up there is going to miss a lousy egg roll, maybe a fortune cookie?”

“He counts everything, boys,” said Andrews and drove on.

He parked in a service space and took an elevator through all thirty-one floors of the empty building. The elevator doors opened automatically on the first, fifth, and twenty-first floor, but peering outside Agent Andrews could see only the silent hallways partially illuminated by the weak emergency lights. The penthouse door was left ajar. Rather than enter Andrews called inside:

“Delivery for Mr. Mondragon!”

No one responded. Andrews thought he might leave the food inside the door and have the restaurant call back to tell Mondragon they had added the meal to his bill. He also wished that Fuller had allowed delivery men to wear their ear radios inside the building, then he could have called Sundown to ask what to do.

“Delivery for Mr. Mondragon,” he called a second time.

The agent took a couple steps forward and peeked into the fully lighted outer room of the penthouse, a spot in which Mondragon’s bodyguards usually lurked, but at the time held only some Barcelona chairs and a couple chrome-stemmed lamps.

“Anyone here?” asked Andrews.

He stuck his head inside the room and beheld a large glass tumbler sitting on the arm of a chair in the corner. It held the melting ice cubes. Andrews considered having a closer look at the glass, and thought he should set the food on an end table and leave.

What is going on here? he thought.

His first guess was that Mondragon had somehow taken flight. He pondered running downstairs to an office telephone and notifying Sundown. He put that notion aside upon spying a duffle bag leaning against the leg of the chair holding the drained tumbler. Cops, including the grand cops called FBI agents, are driven by curiosity; the urge to uncover secrets is the reason they became policemen in the first place. When Andrews saw the fat duffle bag sitting in a place it should not have been, he really had no option but to take a couple steps further into the room to check the object at closer range. He did remember to stay alert. So alert that he heard the creak of the door as Mondragon stepped forward, and the agent had turned his head part way around in time to see the shadow of the blackjack as Mondragon brought it down on his head.

When he awoke he was gagged and bound hand and foot and stripped to his underwear. Mondragon had on his shirt and pants and was struggling to get on the jacket.

“Ah, you’ve come back to us... Special Agent Troy Andrews,” said Mondragon, reading from the FBI identity card and badge he had found in the agent’s wallet. “You’ll survive this, I’m sure. Say what they will about me, I’ve never killed anyone, not personally. I do wish you weren’t in the good shape you’re in, Troy, old man. You’re clothes are too damn tight.”

Troy’s head was swimming, and he thought he could see several matches burning between himself and Mondragon. The most he could tell of Mondragon was that his skin looked strangely yellow that night.

“They give you fifteen minutes, don’t they?” asked Mondragon, not expecting the

gagged agent to answer. “I’m running a bit late. I have two minutes left,” he said, checking his watch. “Well, if I’m a minute late I doubt they’ll have a cow.”

He put Andrews’ cap on his head and started for the elevator door, the duffle bag slung over his shoulder. “You’ll feel better in an hour or so, old man,” he called back to Troy. “I’ll send you a postcard from... wherever.”

*

Erin Mondragon took the elevator to the basement and hopped into the delivery van. On the elevated ramp leading to the exit he took care to turn to his right, away from the two uniformed policemen standing outside on the sidewalk.

“Number Five, over and out,” he said as he passed them and simultaneously spoke into his portable radio.

Mondragon drove the van at a steady thirty miles an hour down Market Street to Eighth Street, at which point he made a left turn and parked behind a rental car his bodyguard Trey had left for him that evening. Mondragon quickly transferred to the rental, and drove away in the direction of I-280, leaving the radio crackling inside the cab of the empty van.

“Come in Number Five. This is Sundown, over.”  Back on Market Street Agent Thomas was calling on the radio and wondering why Andrews did not respond.

“Ah, sir, I think we have a problem,” an agent behind Thomas said.

A Chinese man who bobbed his head and smiled when the FBI men looked directly at him had shuffled into the command room and was asking why he had not been given back his delivery truck. “You always return it to me,” he said and smiled. “I was waiting on the corner, and this time he kept right on driving.”

Thomas dropped his radio on the floor, and stared open-mouthed at the man from the Hong Lee Restaurant. “Get the copter up and on that truck!” he commanded. “Get out an APB.” he added, waving his arms. “The goddamned van’s got a dragon painted on its side. The son of a bitch won’t get too damned far.”