The Dogs of Mexico (2 page)

More than fifteen years before, he and the other FFA boys at the high school had put up a sign between the blacktop and the football field: G
O
M
USTANGS
, and under that, S
EPARATION
T
EXAS
–
P
OP
347
.
 

On his left a brick schoolhouse and gymnasium stood back from the highway. On the right a general store, post office and cafe huddled shoulder to shoulder among a half-dozen little shoebox houses. Here and there a window was lit, TVs flickering behind drawn shades.
 

Five miles farther he slowed and turned in over a cattleguard near a mailbox that still had his name on it. As expected the house was dark. Empty.
 

He stepped down out of the pickup and stood in the yard, listening to the silence, gazing up at the Milky Way—a shower of crushed ice tossed across the night sky. He recalled a night some two years before standing on this same spot with a rapt Nick cradled on his forearm, both of them looking at a big full moon as Robert tried to explain it in terms of the autumnal equinox. But of course Nick was too young to—
Goodnight Moon!
Nick’s picture book. That’s the memento he would take.
 

He removed the spare key from behind the rain gauge on the stone fence and let himself in. Already the house was airless and smelled of dust. He turned the lights on, drawn immediately to the master bedroom where for five years he and Tricia had slept cuddled in intimacy, forever catching up after months of separation. His chest felt constricted. Hard to breathe.
 

He slid open the mirrored doors to Tricia’s closets. Her things were typically disordered. Expensive clothes wadded into closet corners, strewn on the floor. He smelled her intimate musky scent, experienced a moment of déjà vu, the two of them together.
 

Stanford’s banking suits filled Robert’s closets. Neater than Tricia’s.

Robert stepped into the hallway and paused before his son's door. He braced himself for the emotional impact of standing once again among Nick’s things—his bed with its stuffed animals, the toy box with his trucks and balls and LEGO’s, the table with his Thomas and Friends train set—each item so identifiable with Nick that his very presence was palpable. Robert relived moments—tucking Nick in at night, the clean baby-powder smell, the eager, trusting eyes, the mop of unkempt hair.

He pushed the door open and stopped cold. It took a moment to accept that the room was entirely bare. Not a stick of furniture. Not a single Sesame Street poster. Nothing.
 

Robert stumbled back against the wall and slid to the floor, hugging himself, clutching his elbows. A grainy blackness began to materialize in the peripheral of his vision, drifting, floating down like a thin curtain of metal filings. He sat still, barely breathing, determined to keep his wits. The curtain began to dissolve and soon disappeared into nothingness. Willful, scrabbling on hands and knees, he managed to get to his feet.

He tore open Nick’s closets. Empty. He ripped through the hall closets, scattered blankets and sheets, towels, placemats, and tablecloths. He went through the boxes in Tricia’s closets.
 

No
Goodnight Moon.
 

No anything.
 

Tricia’s Honda Pilot was parked in the garage, but his tools were gone. Table saw. Air compressor. Lawnmower. The pegboard above the workbench, empty.

Two cardboard boxes stood at the rear, stacked one on the other. Inside, wrapped in newspapers, he found cut-crystal bowls and porcelain platters that had belonged to his great-grandmother. Folded within a baby blanket was an eight-by-ten framed photo, one of those Olan Mills jobs with the soft background. In the photo Robert stood with Tricia, three-year-old Nick between. She was a beautiful woman, a blue-eyed brunette smiling with what he had once thought of as innocent seductiveness. They had sat for it the previous year when he was home on leave. Later, she sent a copy to him in Afghanistan and the Company forwarded it to his NSP address in Cairo—NSP:
No Such Place
. The photo had been signed:
Love Always, Trish
.
 

He took it back inside and propped it near the front door.

He lit six candles in the candelabras on the teak dining table. After propping open the French doors to the kitchen, he pulled the gas range out of its slot in the island, took hold of the flexible metal line behind and jerked it back and forth until a hissing noise jetted out and he smelled the rotten-egg stink of propane.

He took a last look around. Then picked up the Trish photo, locked the door on his way out and replaced the key behind the rain gauge.

He was driving past the G
O
M
USTANGS
sign when a flare of light blossomed on the horizon in his rearview mirror. Almost immediately a soft thud shivered the pickup.

2

Inner Sanctum

Three Years Later

D
UANE FOWLER
SAT
at the Louis XVI roll-top secretary in his study. The upstairs room was little more than an alcove in a large redbrick 1880s Georgian he shared with his wife Susan in Society Hill, an upscale neighborhood of tree-lined cobblestone streets
near the downtown center of Historic Philadelphia.

It was a house he could scarcely afford, the desk a repository of accumulating bills Susan dutifully collected in an old Easter basket that she kept out of sight beneath the roll-top, awaiting his attention.

At forty-five, when many of his peers were already anticipating early retirement, Duane was wrestling with the specter of financial ruin. He hated the damn house, he hated the faggy Marie Antoinette French Provincial furniture, and at the moment he hated his wife and his two sons. Bankrupting him. His wife by way of Saks and Bergdorf’s, the boys by way of Yale and Purdue.
 

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
H
OTEL
S
ANTA
C
LARA
C
ENTRO,
P
LAZA
S
AN
D
IEGO,
C
ALLE DE
T
ORO,
CR 8
…
39–29
,
C
ARTAGENA,
C
OLOMBIA,
S
OUTH
A
MERICA
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.