Deadly Waters (40 page)

CIX

01/26/11 00:25 PST

Bob Mathers remained close to the rows of private planes at Half Moon Bay Airport after his regular shift began. The news of Mondragon’s escape from his lair on Market Street had not yet spread through the metro area, but the prepped aircraft told Bob that tonight marked the time for the last of the conspirators to attempt to escape to a clime holding more palm trees and fewer federal agents. The small airport was quiet at that hour of the early morning. The two air traffic controllers on duty were snug inside the tower, and the skeleton crew of technicians and mechanics working the graveyard shift were in the break room awaiting the arrival of a charter plane from the east coast. Until then they were playing cards and sipping the very bad coffee their aging percolator made. As for the one other security guard on duty, a boy of nineteen working his first job, Bob had given him the opportunity to get out of the cold drizzle that was falling on the air field.

“Did you check all the hangers?” Bob had asked the young guard.

“I guess,” said the young man. “I made a quick in-and-out. There’s nobody in there.”

“Being thorough never hurts,” Bob told him. “Check and double check. You can get in from the rain for a while. I’ll be fine looking after things out here. Go on. It’s OK. I used to be a cop, you know. I’m always prepared.”

Mathers had discovered that telling anyone on the airport security detail that he had once been a policeman had a magical effect on the other members of the security team.

“Sure,” agreed the young guard, “I guess I can look around where it’s warm and dry.”

Once he was alone beside the parked planes, Bob retrieved the package he had brought with him before the shift began and placed it between the rear wheels of Mondragon’s jet.

CX

01/26/11 00:51 PST

Mondragon parked the rental car in the far reaches of the airport parking lot and walked onto the field carrying his duffle bag on his shoulder. He had changed into black slacks and a light black jacket and was bothered by the steady mist falling across the entire Bay area. The police scanner Mondragon had brought in the rental car told him every squad car in the region was on the lookout for a delivery van driven by a disguised man. They obviously had not located the abandoned truck on Eighth Street, so Erin knew he was light years ahead of his pursuers. By the time they had trailed him to Half Moon Bay he’d be in his plane cruising at 16,000 feet, the blue Pacific below him and Brazil, carnival, and the beaches of Rio immediately before him.

The air traffic controllers inside the airport’s small tower saw the lone figure strolling over the tarmac toward the long row of private airplanes. One of them took another bite of his bear claw and asked, “Who’s that?”

“Company pilot,” said the other. “Daniel Rich. Filed a flight plan to take the Mondragon Lear down to San Diego yesterday, today I mean,” he noted upon checking the wall calendar.

“Isn’t old Mondragon himself in some kind of trouble?” the bear claw eater asked.

“You don’t read much, do you, Mel?” said his co-worker. “He is the news these days. Bigger than ‘Homeless in Paradise.’”

“Nothing could be bigger than ‘Homeless in Paradise,’” Mel assured him of the nation’s most popular new television show. “Except for that girl with the black beret. What was her name?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” said the co-worker. “I guess she wasn’t that big after all.”

The solitary figure walked within a dozen feet of Bob Mathers, unaware the former deputy sheriff was standing behind the fuselage of the plane parked next to Mondragon’s jet. If he had wanted to frighten Mondragon, Bob could have taken a pen from his shirt pocket and flipped it against the back of Erin’s unsuspecting head. When the pilot opened the passenger side hatch Bob could see him in full profile silhouetted against the jet’s interior light and made certain it was Mondragon, and Mondragon alone, climbing into the cabin. Bob waited until the man had sealed the cabin door with a hiss and was busying himself on the rows of buttons and dials on the control panel, and then Mathers went to the small storage door near the jets tail, set the timer on his package, and stuck it inside, snapping the door securely shut at the instant the whining engines came to life.

The technicians inside the tower immediately responded to the electronic buzz that came over their radio intercom when Mondragon signaled them he wanted to begin his pre-takeoff check list. “EDN-195 to tower,” said Erin, “this is Daniel Rich.”

The tower crew ran through the nearly one hundred items the pilot had to check in less than ten minutes and told Mondragon he could take the lighted runway.

“Are you expecting any passengers, 195?” a controller asked him at the last moment, when Mondragon was slowly bringing the jet into alignment with the north-south strip and both the plane’s engines were roaring.

“That’s a negative, Half Moon Tower,” said Mondragon. “I’ll be picking up passengers in San Diego.”

The controller had asked because he had seen someone running on the tarmac close to the Lear jet’s outside wing. He and his partner in the tower leaned toward the glass and squinted to see what this unidentified figure was doing.

“Isn’t that the new security man Peterson?” asked one of them. “What is he doing? 195, please be informed you have a pedestrian on the ground with you. Have you by any chance left something behind?”

Mondragon looked to his left and saw Bob Mathers jogging along the side of the plane. The former deputy sheriff made no effort to stop the aircraft. He could not have halted the big craft anyway; he seemed content to stay even with the cabin window as the plane taxied toward the end of the runway in preparation for final lift off. Erin did not at once recognize the man he knew as the phantom who had pursued him from the Arizona desert, or he did not until the runner turned toward him and waved. Oddly enough, Mathers smiled as he waved, and let the jet pull away from him.

Mondragon swung the jet around at the far end of the runway and began his last, rapid dash to get airborne. The running man who had chased him during the taxi drive had strayed among the ground lights on the east side, and watched the jet zip past and saw its red lights rise into the grey mist south of the airport.

“Good-by, Mr. Phantom!” Mondragon shouted over his shoulder, although no one outside the pressurized cabin could have heard him. “A little late this time, Arizona boy. You should have hit me up for money long before this.”

Erin turned on his conventional one-way radio the moment he got his wheels up. Starting with the big commercial stations in San Francisco and later those in Los Angeles, Mondragon would track his progress down the coast to the point the broadcasts turned to Spanish, and he knew he had entered the Latin American broadcast region. He took off his shoes to relax and took a glance at the pleasing global positioning monitor, which showed him speeding toward the coast and freedom. Mondragon stretched his legs as he sat in the plush captain’s chair and from his duffle bag took a thermos and poured himself a cup of espresso to keep himself awake on the long flight.

*

From the runway Mondragon was leaving behind at the rate of four hundred feet a second, Bob Mathers followed the red lights of the escaping Lear jet as it disappeared in the haze and entered the realm of the stars.

CXI

01/26/11 03:32 PST

Erin Mondragon cruised south/southwest for two hours and twenty minutes. Remaining outside the twelve mile limit that marked the authority of the United States, he watched from his left-hand window the heavily clustered lights of the California coast turn to sparse flickering lights as he passed Tijuana and drew parallel to the Baja coast. He kept an atlas open in the cockpit’s co-pilot’s chair so he could name the towns his GPI showed he was passing: Escanada, Guerraro Negro, San Carlos, and finally Cabo San Lucas.

He thought of the peasants sleeping in their tiny stucco houses and of the Yankee tourists in Cabo still dancing and drinking in the resort town’s discotheques. What were they compared to him as he glided along in his serene, unconquerable plane? What, for that matter, were all the nonentities killed in the dam bombings when they were compared to the story his exploits were going to generate for ages to come? What at long last was that obsessed cop from Arizona back at the Half Moon Bay Airport?

On that morning Mondragon was becoming a legend, a criminal greater than the outlaw Jessie James and more of an enigma than the plane hijacker B.D. Cooper. He dreamed of news magazines publishing special editions next week, his photograph on the cover of each of them; cable news channels talking of nothing else for weeks. The books and movies would appear within a year. A decade later his name would be a by-word in thousands of jokes told at the expense of an incompetent government. He imagined disreputable crowds gathering in the worst bars in America to drink to his memory.

What had happened had not been what Mondragon had desired. He certainly had not wanted to live the latter third of his life in modest luxury inside the safety of some sun-drenched white villa. Yesterday morning he had owned assets worth nearly two billion dollars. This morning he was worth a paltry fifteen million. But he was free and flying into history. Let others try to buy his renown with their money.

At about twenty-two degrees north, Mondragon turned sharply east around Cabo and toward the Mexican coastline. According to his flight plan, he anticipated reaching the Mexican coast south of Mazatlan and landing on the private runway south of Mexico City. Barring any unanticipated delays, he would be refueled and on his way to Brazil before sunrise. He put a Portuguese language tape on a portable cassette player he took from among the $50,000 he had stuffed inside his duffle bag and began practicing his basic conversational skills.

“Repeat after me,” said the girl on the tape: “Could you tell me where it is? Poderia me dizer onde esta?”

“Poderia me dizer onde esta?” said Mondragon who, whenever he heard Portuguese, was bothered by how it sounded to his ear like mushy Spanish.

“Could you tell me what it is?” said the girl. “Poderia me dizer o que e que e?”

“Poderia me dizer o que e qu-- what was the rest of it?”

“Could you tell me when?” the girl rattled on. “Poderia me dizer quando?”

“You ask too many questions, honey,” said Mondragon. “I hate that in a woman. Just tell me how to order a beer.”

At that happy moment, when Mondragon was as close to Heaven as he was ever going to get, the rear half of the Lear vanished in a giant ball of flame that traveled up the jet’s interior and sent Erin Mondragon, his Portuguese language tapes, and his dreams through the plane’s front windshield.

A lonely fisherman sailing in the black waters twenty miles off Teacapan looked up and saw a bright flower of light as large as the palm of his hand open momentarily against the starry firmament. He saw it fade just as quickly. The fisherman knew he was not seeing ball lightning or shooting stars. Seconds after the light was gone he heard a blast echo off the surface of the water, and minutes later he saw some bits of cloth from the jet’s passenger seats come floating down to the water like charred streamers.

Three days later the fisherman was back in port and told his wife he thought he had seen a small plane explode while he was at sea. She said there had been nothing on the radio, and if he had seen something it probably was one of those drug smugglers’ planes, and if that were the case, then an unimportant man like her husband should keep his mouth shut.

The children of Teacapan likewise kept quiet when they found some charred Yankee twenty dollar bills washed ashore on the village’s white sand beaches. These little ones used their secret money to purchase paper kites they flew on the moist wind coming off the ocean and to buy a horde of candy they hid in the trunk of a dead tree near the beach. Their little indulgences were undoubtedly the best uses to which Mondragon’s money had ever been put.

CXII

01/27/11 08:01 EST

In death Erin Mondragon achieved the notoriety he had dreamed of during his last flight. From the time the FBI and the San Francisco Police realized he was gone he became the subject of countless newspaper editorials, television special reports, water cooler bull sessions, late-night radio talk shows, and calls to telephone psychics. Nowhere did Mondragon’s new fame fill more large rooms with more drama than in the nation’s capital, where blame had to be doled out and avoided. There was no player of any stature who did not know the awful details of the west coast disaster by eight o’clock sharp on Tuesday morning. A minute later they were on the phone, naming the names of those who were really guilty and deflecting any criticism that might gravitate toward themselves.

Ronald Goodman, in early 2011 a full Undersecretary of Defense, decided it would be difficult to blame the other party for Mondragon’s escape, as his party was the one in power. So Ron changed parties. He contacted a journalist of national repute Ron knew was sympathetic to the president’s enemies and made a series of revelations that were embarrassing to Ron’s superiors. Ron added that the secrets he told outraged him. By the arrival of spring Mr. Goodman had left the government for a position at one of the opposition’s think tanks and took to appearing at his former political opponents’ fund raising events.

“Out of all the sad and/or sinister figures this failed administration has produced,” the capital’s leading editorialist would write, “only Ronald Goodman has grown during these past five years. A strange new respect has arisen for Goodman. It is whispered by those in the know that when a new administration takes power in 2012 he will again have a home in government, should he then wish to give up his present $500,000 a year job at the Future World Institute and is by then done writing tell-all bestsellers.”

After the Mondragon escape the president held a press conference every day for a month to explain how outraged and innocent he was. The White House’s own pollsters discovered that the public bought none of his spin. This, the nation’s commentators reminded everyone, had happened on his watch, and everyone with a voice protested that this time the buck had to stop at the president’s desk and certainly not at theirs.

“GROSS INCOMPETENCE,” roared the headlines in the nation’s newspaper of record.

All five of the country’s most popular television talking heads agreed that “a fish rots from the head down.”

“Where’s the capital of the U.S.?” asked a late-night talk show host. “A big chunk of it is somewhere in South America with Erin Mondragon,” came the answer, and every clever fourteen-year-old in America repeated the joke in some form.

Unable to save himself, the wounded president’s wrath fell upon the hapless FBI agents and San Francisco policemen who had been on scene at the time of Mondragon’s escape. After congressional hearings revealed how Mondragon had slipped through the scores of officers on the ground at Market Street, the San Francisco Police Department received less federal block money in the 2012 budget than tiny Clear Nearly, Georgia, did for repairing pot holes. Agent Fuller, the agent in charge of the Mondragon watch, was forced into early retirement despite his two decades of service. Agent Thomas, the unfortunate man in charge of the scene during the graveyard shift, was stationed at Thule and told to investigate drug use among U.S. Airmen serving in Greenland.

The jackals continued to circle around the president himself, attacking him not only for his inability to keep the greatest mass murderer in American history from jumping bail, but also for every small indiscretion he may (or may not) have committed. A high school classmate told
The
Times
the president had cheated on a high school math test forty-seven years earlier. A former friend told “Sixty Minutes” the president had as recently as 1980 used the word “Negro,” which showed that the chief executive was as racist as he was inept. Seven separate congressional committees initiated investigations into the president’s travel expenses. The first lady confessed to
The
Ladies’
Home
Journal
that she and her husband were already looking for a place to retire. The thousands of junior members of the administration sent out their resumes. Senior members of the cabinet hired ghost writers to compose books that explained why everything went wrong and how they were merely innocent bystanders to everything that had happened to the nation.