Sphere Of Influence (52 page)

"Of course."

"Then, I'll coordinate the shift in supply to my Asian associates and give you my word that all of this"--he waved his hand in a lazy arc, indicating Castaneda's involvement in his kidnapping--"is behind us."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then you'll continue to be tied to an increasingly unstable heroin supply under the intensifying spotlight brought about by al-Qaeda's terrorist activities. And then, of course, there's Mark Beamon. I'll be dead, but you'll still have him to deal with. I honestly don't know how he'll react."

"This is absurd," Holsten said as Castaneda sank further into his soft leather chair. "We can help you stabilize your Middle Eastern supply lines and we're asking almost nothing in return. Why would you bend over backward for Charles Russell--an elected official--at the risk of making an enemy of the CIA?"

Castaneda finally met Holsten's gaze. "I'm beginning t
o
think that you don't speak for the CIA, Alan. And what Russell has offered me is quite valuable."

"What?"

"In return for my cooperation, he has guaranteed the certification of Mexico's antinarcotics effort for as long as I am in office. Are you prepared to offer more?"

Chapter
65

CHRISTIAN Volkov twisted his head slowly back and forth, trying to relax the knot in the back of his neck. Thanks to the eminently reliable Mark Beamon, he had arrived back at his home in nearly untouched condition. The one exception was a light bruise on one cheek, thanks to Alan Holsten, and the inexplicable ache in his neck that accompanied it. Well, not entirely inexplicable. He just wasn't as young as he once was.

The expansive room was dimly lit, making the myriad monitors and television screens more easily visible. There were no fewer than ten people lined up along the wall, most sitting in front of computer terminals with headsets similar to the one he was wearing. Volkov walked toward the open door leading to a broad terrace but didn't step through. He just turned and stood with his back to the doorway, letting the breeze chill his sweat-dampened skin and listening to the chorus of Spanish voices filling the room.

As expected, Castaneda had enthusiastically accepted Charles Russell's offer of guaranteed certification for Mexico and the opportunity to replace the volatile and highly public Afghans with the efficient and shadowy Asians. Now all Volkov had to do was perform the nearly impossible task of coordinating the end of Mustafa Yasin's brief narcotics career.

Surprisingly, the only disastrous glitch so far had been Volkov's inability to convince Castaneda to keep Alan Holsten incommunicado during the transition. It seeme
d
that holding the CIA's deputy director of operations against his will was too much to ask. Not surprising, but it added yet another facet to an already insurmountably complex situation.

"We've got a plane with a mechanical problem stuck in Panama," Volkov heard Elizabeth say. She sounded a little panicked. "Can we cover it?"

Joseph spoke quietly to one of the people sitting along the wall as he gazed at the computer screen in front of him. "I'm not sure. . . . We might be able to bring in a cargo plane we have on the ground in Nicaragua. Are we in contact with them?"

Volkov wiped the perspiration from his upper lip and listened intently to his assistants' conversation. He had been entrusted with literally hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of product and virtual control of Mexico's military and law enforcement, based on his insistence that he would succeed in this. If he didn't, he'd spend the rest of his short life running from the people he'd failed.

Elizabeth tapped a button on the phone attached to her hip and started speaking quietly into her headset, pacing back and forth across the room.

"Elizabeth?" Volkov prompted.

She held up a hand and continued to talk, finally clamping a hand over her headset's microphone. "We're okay. They can be in the air in a few minutes. We're looking at no more than an hour's delay."

"Let the people on the ground know and tell them the price of the shipment will be cut by one-third for the inconvenience," Volkov said.

She nodded and went back to speaking quietly into her headset.

With the latest of what seemed like a hundred problems averted, Volkov tried to calm himself and focus on the big picture for a moment.

His entire future was to be determined by two critical hours, one of which was already gone. Timing was everything now. The literally hundreds of drug traffickers, Mexican police, and soldiers had to be coordinated with absolute precision. Once the Afghans had been led to th
e
slaughter, Volkov immediately had to appease an extremely nervous Mexican narcotics machine with hundreds of tons of Asian heroin. And all of this had to be accomplished so effectively that resistance to the new order of things would seem completely pointless.

"Joseph! Have you located that ship yet?" Volkov said. The young man spun around to face him and shook his head. "I've been on to everyone, Christian. The Mexicans have flown all over the area and it's just not there. It could have sunk, but the weather's calm and clear."

The ship in question was part of an Afghan heroin shipment that was scheduled to come ashore in half an hour to rendezvous with a group of Mexican smugglers. Of course, that plan had changed a bit. During the exchange of something like three tons of heroin, the Mexican police would descend, confiscate the product, and arrest everyone involved--all under the watchful eye of a CBS camera crew. And then, after all the pictures had been taken and interviews given, the media would be escorted away and the Mexican traffickers would be freed along with the heroin and their money. The Afghans, on the other hand, would not fare so well. They would disappear forever.

"If the Afghans don't arrive, we are going to have to take responsibility for filling the order."

"We're down to one backup plane in the area, Christian. If we use it now . . ."

"Do it," Volkov said. "If we have any more problems, we'll have to solve them as they arise. Reroute the American television crew to Belao and notify the police there to be mindful that they're being watched."

"Okay, Christian."

"And find that damned boat!"

Joseph gave him a frightened nod and leaned over the shoulder of a man staring into a computer screen.

The crux of the entire operation was knowing the precise moment that the Afghans discovered that their people were being captured and killed all over Mexico. When that time came, Yasin would order them to pull back and be ready to defend
themselves: The
element of surprise would be gone.

"Do you think they're on to us?" Elizabeth said. "Do you want us to go to phase two?"

He honestly didn't know.

"Christian?"

"No. Not yet. We're going to stay with our original plan." The phone on Volkov's hip began to ring and he jabbed a button, activating his headset. "Go ahead."

"We have completed number fourteen," a deep voice said in Spanish.

Volkov jogged over to an empty computer terminal and scrolled down, skimming the various operational summaries until he got to fourteen. It was a raid on an airstrip in central Mexico that the Afghans used as a transition point.

"What did you find?"

"Four men and approximately one ton of product." "Hold on. . . . Joseph! Fourteen's completed--they've got one ton of product."

"One moment, Christian."

He tapped a few commands into a laptop and concentrated on the screen. "Okay, Christian. Just tell them to leave the stuff there. We can use it as a backup in case we run into any more problems."

Volkov reactivated his headset. "Clear the area and leave the product in place."

"Understood. What about the four men?"

Volkov frowned. There was really only one possible answer. "Make sure they're never found."

The line went dead and he pulled the mike away from his mouth. "Joseph! What about that ship?"

"Still nothing, Christian."

Volkov took a deep breath and let it out. "Where's Mark? Is he on the ground in Mexico yet? Are we in contact with him?"

"Who knew the Mexicans even had helicopters that could get off the ground?" Mark Beamon shouted, taking a drag on his cigarette. The young blond man sitting across from him had an intense mix of fear, determination, an
d
nausea on his face that prompted Beamon to move his feet out of the kid's likely vomiting range.

The large airship was being buffeted around like a badminton birdie and there were no windows, leaving their location and ultimate destination a complete mystery. In addition to the two of them, there were fifteen Mexican soldiers crammed into the cargo hold, increasing the ambient temperature to over a hundred. Beamon's cigarette deadened his sense of smell a bit, but the stench of sweat and bad breath--some of it his own--was still nearly unbearable.

The thing that kept him from beating the blond kid to the punch and throwing up on his own shoes was the fact that his curiosity was powerful enough to keep him distracted. What the hell was he doing here?

Castaneda had obviously gotten a good story from the FBI, because he'd dusted Christian off and sent him on his way pretty quickly after their conversation. Beamon saw it as a testament to his criminal talent that he could pluck Volkov from certain death with a mere phone call. His resume was starting to look pretty good if he just left off all the FBI crap.

The problem was that Volkov, after arriving home safely and without so much as a thank-you, had banished Beamon to a run-down military base in a region of Mexico that even scorpions avoided. He'd spent a few hours on the ground there and then had been herded onto this helicopter with a bunch of people he couldn't communicate with to fly to God knows where.

The obvious implication was that he had served his purpose and Volkov wanted to be rid of him. Hopefully the obvious answer wasn't the correct one in this case. Try as he might, though, he couldn't come up with another explanation. Beamon lit another cigarette from the embers of his first one and looked up at the blond American kid in front of him again. Nausea had now overtaken determination as the easiest thing to read in his face. The pale green hue was hard to miss.

"What's in there?" Beamon shouted, nodding toward a hard suitcase on the young man's lap.

"Camera," he managed to get out.

"A camera for what?"

Talking seemed to make him feel better and his voice gained strength. "I work for Fox. I'm here to get the story." "What story?"

He shrugged. "Whatever story there is, I guess. Do you know where we're going?"

"Nope."

Beamon felt his phone start to vibrate and he plugged it into an elaborate set of headphones that canceled out the noise from the helicopter.

"Hello? Hello?" he said into the mike hanging in front of his mouth.

"Mark?"

It was a little hard to hear but not too bad. Laura's voice was clearly recognizable.

"How are things going out there?" he said. "Are you okay?"

"We're still in position around the Afghans' house. It was quiet until about two minutes ago. Suddenly we're seeing a hell of a lot of activity."

"Shit," Beamon muttered and looked at his watch. An hour and fifteen minutes into Volkov's operation.

They'd been working on the assumption that when Yasin figured out he'd been screwed, the first people he'd warn would be his holy warriors in America. This was the signal that it was time for a blitz.

"Laura! Laura--are you still there?"

"I'm here, Mark. I can barely hear you."

"Go ahead and move in. But be careful--they're probably expecting you."

"Are you sure we should go now, Mark? Look, there's still no sign of the launcher. Maybe--"

"Trust me, Laura. It's not going to get any better--it's only going to get worse."

"Okay, Mark. We're on it."

Beamon clicked off the line and stared down at the phone for a moment. What now? Did he warn Volkov, the man who was probably sending him to his death? As much as he didn't want to, he had little choice. In the end, his an
d
Volkov's interests were more or less the same: They wanted al-Qaeda crushed.

He dialed the phone and listened to it ring. When he leaned his head back, he saw that the young man in front of him had his camera out of its case and was aiming it right at him.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?"

The line picked up and Christian Volkov's voice came over the headphones. "Mark? Mark? Are you there?" "Hang on." Beamon grabbed the lens of the camera and pushed it away. "I'm not the story you're looking for. You got that?"

The young man took his words for the threat they were and laid the camera in his lap.

"Yeah, I'm here," Beamon said into the mike. "Yasin's got us. If I were you, I'd light a fire under this thing."

"I understand. Hold on. . . . Elizabeth! Call everyone in, right now. We aren't going to be able to coordinate things from here anymore. Tell them it's possible that the Afghans will be ready for them. . . ."