The Cain File (14 page)

Two emails from KachaKachaEc re: Jennifer Lopez-
¡
Qué Bárbara
!

Take me off this email list, spammer!
Followed by a date and time to call. Maggie deducted an hour from the time, and a day from the date, per their agreement, so that anyone who might be watching would see a time well past the actual.

The second
take me off this email list
email had a phone number to call. Maggie subtracted 99 from that, another simple code she had told Kacha to use, for the added security that was in it.

Kacha wanted Maggie to call her late tonight. In a few hours, as a matter of fact. Kacha was obviously anxious for any news of Tica.

Hang in there, Kacha
, Maggie said to herself.

She dressed in slim faded Cavalli jeans with a button fly, espadrilles, and a loose bottle-green sweater, pulled her hair back in a tail, and slipped on big gold hoop earrings and sunglasses to hide the puffiness around her eyes, threw on her favorite leather rock-n-roll jacket, and headed out.

Down Valencia into a local Mexican
checks cashed/phone calls made/letters written
office teeming with illegals calling home. She waited until the rush died down and approached an old codger filling a plastic chair behind the counter. She got out her credit card, sent $2,500 of her own money Western Union to the main office in Quito, care of Kacha. Then she purchased a throwaway phone that had been used by more than a few dishwashers and day laborers to call their respective homes and loaded it up with fifty dollars. She wiped off the grime with a Wet One
from the packet she carried
and slipped the phone in the pocket of her oversized leather jacket.

She had to keep going for a few more hours. On Mission she gulped down a
café cubano
, sweet and thick, at a stand-up coffee place, and thought about dinner with John Rae and his handler.  She needed a new dress to replace the one she’d given Kacha. Something to guarantee an edge.

She walked the Mission, past the illegals trudging to their jobs in the restaurants and sweat shops, past the young
bohos
lugging laptop bags and mongo cups of coffee, chatting at sixty miles an hour on cell phones. The rapid changes taking over her neighborhood. She wound up at the alley-like Capp Street where she climbed the few steps to a door with bars galore and more than a few locks on it, with its sign: Entrance by Invitation Only. She rang a bell.

A buzzer over the door let her enter.

A security guard in need of a shave with droopy eyes and arms crossed leaned against the far wall. He had a wicked-looking magnum in a holster halfway down his thigh.

“Hey, Gus.”

Gus nodded at Maggie’s arrival. “Dimitri’s in back.”

She walked through rooms filled with rolling racks of garments hanging in plastic bags. Designer brands at a mere fraction of the price. Just don’t ask for a receipt. Or tell anyone where you got those Cavalli Jeans that listed for close to a grand. Or that Alexander Wang Maggie was already eyeing.

At eight o’clock exactly the doorbell rang. Maggie examined herself in the hall mirror, her new little black dress almost as gorgeous as she was. She pressed her lips together to get the gloss spread just right.

¡Que wena!

She threw the red mid-length leather coat over her arm, grabbed her bag, and headed out. Clacking down the steps, she got to the front door soon enough.

And when John Rae, wearing a slim-fitting charcoal jacket and bolo tie, saw Maggie in the black cocktail dress, his eyes actually popped. “Wow, Maggie. You clean up pretty good.”

“Why, thank you, sir.” She put her arm out for him to take as they stepped down the stairs.

If John Rae was going to ask for her help, she was going to get the same in return.

And Tica and her compadres would stand a chance of being freed.

“Damn!” John Rae said, setting his oversized ebony-handled steak knife on his plate, parallel to the fork. The tines of the fork were pointed downward in the center of the plate. All that was left of his steak was a well-trimmed bone in the shape of a T. He wiped his mouth with a white cloth napkin and sat back in his chair.

“Where did you grow up?” Maggie asked, swirling a glass of Malbec.

John Rae gave her a wry, crinkled smile. The atmosphere in Lucinda’s, an Argentine steakhouse on Mission, wasn’t exactly quiet, but with the soft lighting and minor chords ringing gently from a piano in the corner, unobtrusive. Meaning that you didn’t have to shout, like so many San Francisco restaurants anymore.

“Geneva,” he said. “If you can believe it.”

“I can,” Maggie said, leaning forward on her elbows. “You may sound like a Texan, but you eat like a European. Why Switzerland?”

“Boarding school. My old man was too busy making money and my mother too busy spending it for either of them to waste much time on their kids.” John Rae picked up a water glass, took a drink. “You don’t miss much.”

“I miss enough,” she said, gazing around the full dining room. For all intents and purposes, she and John Rae looked like any other couple out on a date. “Where is this mysterious handler of yours anyway?” she asked. “This master behind the operation that’s so damn secret I’m not even allowed to know what it is? He’s over an hour late.”

John Rae checked an old-school wristwatch on a black crocodile band. “He’ll be here.”

Their eyes met. Behind his carefully crafted devil-may-care attitude, with his longish hair swept back and designer stubble decorating his fine chin, John Rae was more intelligent than the law allowed, although he did his best to hide it.

“Whatever your decision, Maggie, you can’t tell anyone. Not even Ed—that boss of yours that you trust so much.”

“I trust Ed implicitly. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to jeopardize everything I’ve worked for by telling him I’m going against a direct order. I’d like to stay out of jail if at all possible.”

The busboy stopped by, cleared the table. Then the maître d’, a young Latina in black pants and a crisp white cotton blouse, came over. “Your other guest has arrived,” she said to John Rae.

“Well, it’s about time . . .” Maggie turned in her seat and gave an involuntary gasp when she saw a dour-looking man in his mid-sixties, gray hair combed tightly back from a long aristocratic forehead. His slender worn face had dark bags under the eyes as if he’d been up for days, if not years. He wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, blue oxford shirt with a button-down collar, corduroy slacks. He carried an ancient brown-leather satchel. He looked like a college professor who had just lost tenure and was taking it out on the bottle. His name and face were indelibly etched in Maggie’s brain, although she hadn’t seen him in person since she was a child. Back then, he reminded her of Nosferatu. She turned to John Rae with an open-mouthed look of disbelief.

“Please ask him to join us,” John Rae said to the maître d’. She left.

“Sinclair Michaels is heading up this operation?”

John Rae gave a single nod.

“Why in the
hell
didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t.”

“You mean you knew I’d have turned you down flat if you had.”

“Standard protocol. You’ll learn more about that if you come over to the dark side. Which I hope you decide to do.”

“I’m aware of protocol, John Rae. But Sinclair Michaels and I have a rocky past, to say the least. Not to mention that the Agency let him go.”

“Retired.”

“Is that what they call it now?”

“OK, so he was asked to leave. True enough. But Sinclair’s got a genuine knack for getting things done south of the equator. He knows people, and he knows his way around. He was head of Ecuador Station. Back in the eighties . . .”

“I know all about it. My father reported to him.” Before Sinclair Michaels fired him.

“Then I guess I’m just stating the obvious.”

“It’s been a few years, Maggie,” Sinclair Michaels said.

He was sitting in the chair next to John Rae, across the table from Maggie. In his knobby hand he twisted a glass of amber liquor on the white tablecloth. He’d sunk half the moment it arrived. His drinking was the main reason he was no longer directly employed by the Agency. But his skill as a field op kept him on the contractor payroll and he was brought in from time to time, especially for clandestine ops with which the agency would rather not be associated.

“More than a few years,” Maggie said coldly. “Try twenty-four. You had just sent my father back to the U.S. Released him from his assignment in Quito. One that he had worked so hard for. Because you didn’t think it was appropriate for a State Department employee to ‘shack up with an Indian whore’. I believe that was how you referred to my mother.”

Sinclair Michaels pursed his lips, rotating his glass on the tablecloth. “I don’t think those were the exact words I used.”

“Well, that’s
exactly
how they sounded when I listened to you berate my father in the next room of my mother’s hut.”

Sinclair looked up. “And you were what, Maggie—all of five years old at the time? How much can you possibly remember?”

Maggie returned a hard stare. “I remember just fine. I haven’t been pickling my brains all my life. My mother and I were destitute after you sent my father back to the U.S. with his tail between his legs.” Worse, her poor
mami
was heartbroken. And Maggie? Maggie had just been learning to love the gringo who came and went, but mostly went, leaving
Mami
and her alone while he attended to important worldly matters she didn’t understand. All she knew was that he was always gone. And then he was gone for good.

John Rae stood up. “I’ll go for a stroll around the block while you two clear things up.”

“No, John Rae,” Maggie said, putting her hand on John Rae’s wrist. “You need to know exactly who’s running your little renegade op.”

John Rae glanced at Maggie, then over at Sinclair Michaels. “All right,” he said quietly. He sat back down.

Sinclair Michaels cleared his throat before he spoke to Maggie. “When I was Ecuador Station Chief, we had strict guidelines about employees cohabiting with locals. Any relationship—from simple friendships on up—was thoroughly vetted. I don’t need to tell you that South America Region was, and continues to be, a political hotbed. Under the circumstances at the time, with the Shining Path insurgency farther south, there was too much risk with your father practically living in an Indian community where terrorists came and went with ease and sympathies ran high. Simply too much risk.”

“Despite the fact that he could have been gathering information on those activities.”

“He wasn’t tasked to do that.”

“Do I have to tell you, the
expert
, that the Shining Path were Peru—not Ecuador?”

“The border between the two countries has always been porous. Terrorists came and went freely. Still do. I asked your father to show more restraint. He ignored me. In the end, I had no choice but to send him back home.”

“My mother died a year and a half later. Malaria. We were living in the slums of Guayaquil.”

Sinclair Michaels drained his drink, waved his glass brusquely at the waiter.

“Another one of these,” he said when the man arrived. “A double.”

“Ah, yes,” Maggie said. “The reason they gave you your walking papers.”

“I’ve been keeping tabs on you as well, Maggie. You’re an intelligent young woman. Brilliant, in fact. Undergrad from Stanford: mathematics. Master’s degrees in finance and computer science, UC Berkeley. Star player in the newly minted Accounting Forensics team. But emotionally? Well, I would have expected a little more cool-headedness from someone with your analytical skills, someone who might want to make a name for herself.” The fresh drink arrived. He picked it up the moment it was set down in front of him and took a controlled sip. “I sent your father home because he broke some basic rules. It was nothing personal.”

Maggie had always suspected otherwise. When she was a little girl, it was simple bitter hatred directed at a man who shouted at her father in a drunken tirade, as if he were a child who messed his pants. As Maggie grew older and learned more about Sinclair Michaels, she saw the situation as one of a worried man looking over his shoulder, even envious of a potential rival, invoking a rule many Americans stationed in Latin America openly violated, as a reason to simply get her father out of the way.

But what bit deeper was the fact that her father went back home to the States with his head down, without putting up a fight. She remembered him leaving that day, mumbling his goodbyes, making empty promises to return. While her mother shed silent tears. So Maggie was really angry at two men: Sinclair Michaels
and
her father, an ambitious gringo who left an Indian woman and some half-breed child as if they were an embarrassment.

Anger had a way of spreading like a cancer. And which cancer had grown the bigger of the two? It wasn’t hard to figure. She hadn’t spoken to her father since her graduation. It didn’t matter that he’d brought her back to the U.S. after
Mami
passed, schooled her well, gave her all the advantages an American had. That was his guilt at work.

But the other man she detested was sitting across from her, expecting her to help out on a clandestine project that could easily cost Maggie her career. The man who had helped shorten her mother’s life.

“I was hoping you were as mature as your qualifications make you out to be,” Sinclair Michaels said, drinking.

“Maybe you’re wrong about a lot of things. Maybe the drinking has finally marinated that brain of yours. Maybe it was affecting it back when you let my father go—because you felt threatened and knew you were losing your edge as Station Chief.”

Sinclair Michaels’ face tightened. He polished his drink off in one gulp, set his glass down as if it was a hot pistol. “This is an opportunity for you to serve your country,” he said through his teeth. “Not wallow in self-pity over some half-imagined childhood grudge.” He turned to John Rae. “I hope we’re not wasting our time here with your little prima donna, John Rae. She’s as hot-headed as her mother was.”