The Jury Master (18 page)
Sloane grew tired, the sedative increasing in intensity. He saw a duck, a yellow plastic duck, floating on the surface of a body of water—a kid’s bathtub toy. He felt himself drifting, floating, eyes heavy . . . a sleeping duck . . . a sitting duck.
The man had not continued down the stairs to his van. He had not tried to get away. He had come down the landing, gun in hand.
He had come to kill Sloane.
Sloane opened his eyes. The foreboding sensation he had felt so strongly in the mountains, the knowing certainty that someone was stalking him, enveloped him. The man could have turned and left. He had chosen instead to come for Sloane.
And he would come again.
Sloane looked down at the red nylon straps binding his wrists.
A sitting duck.
Highway 5,
Dunsmuir, California
A
LEX SLID ONTO
the cherry-red vinyl seat in the booth at the back of the diner. They had driven through Washington and Oregon without stopping. After nine hours Jenkins had conceded to their bladders and hunger pangs when the roadside diner appeared like an oasis in a desert. At minutes after noon the temperature outside was approaching ninety-eight degrees. Having grown accustomed to the Pacific Northwest’s mild climate, one that rarely exceeded eighty degrees, Jenkins felt as though he had driven into a furnace.
“Sore?” he asked.
She felt the bandage beneath her shirt. “My shoulder is fine. My head’s killing me. I feel like I have a hangover. Where did you get that remedy, anyway?”
“My grandfather liked to say enough beer cured any ailment.”
“I feel like someone hit me with a two-by-four.” She let out a breath of air and shook the cobwebs from her head. Then she pointed to his hand. “Arthritis?”
He had been flexing his fingers to relieve the stiffness in the joints. It was worse the day after he worked in the garden.
“My hand just fell asleep.” He folded them in his lap. He considered arthritis an old man’s disease.
“My father used to do the same thing,” she said, smiling.
A young woman in a pink-and-white-striped uniform set two Cokes in old-fashioned glasses on the table, along with two straws, the paper partly torn off. Jenkins ordered a sandwich; Hart, a salad to go. He ignored the straw, drinking from the glass. A rare deviation from his diet, the Coke tasted as sweet as maple syrup, but this morning he needed the sugar and the caffeine. He turned his head to stretch his neck and watched a young man dressed in a thick army fatigue jacket hitchhiking along the side of the road—perhaps another ghost from the 1960s, a decade no longer willing to let him be.
“Vietnam,” he said to himself.
“Vietnam?”
He looked back at Alex. She had her hair pulled back with a tie, revealing the soft line of her neck, the straw in her mouth. He hesitated to think it, but she looked like a little girl.
“Little skirmish in Southeast Asia slightly before your time,” he said.
She gave him a patronizing smile.
“I was just thinking I haven’t been in weather this hot since Vietnam,” he said.
She drank from the straw. “You don’t look that old.”
“Thanks.”
She winked at him. “Were you drafted?”
“I volunteered,” he said. “Seemed like the right thing at the time, fighting for my country. Too many of my friends didn’t have that option. I was eighteen when I stepped off the plane in-country at Da Nang, and middle-aged when I stepped back on American soil thirteen months later. The last two days there were the scariest moments of my life. I was sure I was going to die. It took me thirty-eight hours of flying and driving to get back home to New Jersey, and I promptly fell asleep on my parents’ couch smoking a cigarette and nearly burned to death.”
“How did you end up working for the Agency?”
He put his hands on the table, playing with the paper from the straw, rolling it between his fingers into a ball. “Two months after I got home I could still feel the stares of the people on the street and in the mall. People I’d known most of my life suddenly were looking at me differently, and I saw them differently, too. Things were not the same, and they never would be again. I didn’t fit in, and they didn’t want me there, a visual reminder that young men—good young men—were dying over there and they were too busy going about their day to give a damn. Then two guys showed up on my porch, asking me if I might be interested in government service. I figured they weren’t talking about the French Foreign Legion. Since I wasn’t employed and had no immediate prospects, I thought, what the hell? I had to do something to get the hell out of there.”
“Recruiters?”
“They’d already run a complete background check on me.”
“Before you said yes—why?”
“They were in a hurry and they were looking for someone fluent in Spanish and tactically trained.”
She nodded.
“Yo hablo español.”
“Not very well any longer.”
“That’s how you ended up in Mexico City.”
“My first foreign assignment.”
“And that’s where you met Joe?”
“Yeah,” he said, turning and watching the hitchhiker continue down the road, the asphalt shimmering ghostly waves all around him. “That’s where I met Joe.”
She seemed to consider this for a moment, then asked, “Why Mexico City?”
“Ironically, because of what was happening in the Middle East. That was right about the time that the Saudis were realizing that the value of their oil exceeded just billions of dollars and that they could use it to assert influence on the world political stage. The royal family began to make not-so-veiled threats that if the United States did not withdraw its support of Israel, Saudi Arabia would nationalize its petroleum industry, just like Mexico. That kind of talk makes a lot of wealthy stockholders nervous, and since they are largely responsible for putting presidents in office, things usually begin happening. Nixon tried a strong hand at first and told the Saudis to pound sand. No pun intended. The Saudis responded in kind, raising the price of a barrel of oil seventy percent. When that didn’t end the standoff, they ordered Aramco to cut off all oil supplies to the U.S. military. With the cold war at its peak and Russia backing the Palestinians and working to establish a foothold in the region, we needed a response the Saudis would understand.”
“We needed something to bargain with,” she said, sipping Coke through the straw. “An alternative oil source.”
“Exactly. We suspected that when push came to shove the royal family would be more committed to making billions of dollars than to supporting the Arab cause.”
“And that was also right about the time Mexico started discovering vast reserves of hydrocarbons and natural gas beneath the lush savannas of Tabasco State and in the Campeche Sound of the Gulf of Mexico,” she said.
“Very good. Initial estimates were upwards of sixty billion barrels, perhaps a hundred billion.”
“The answer to Nixon’s prayers.”
“That’s what we needed to find out. The oil was there. The question was whether we could develop the technology to get at it and whether Mexico would ever allow us to do so. Necessity being the mother of invention, we figured the technology part would take care of itself.”
“We needed to find a way to convince Mexico to reopen its oil market to foreign interests.”
“And you may also recall from your history books that Mexico was having its own share of problems at that same time. Student and labor uprisings were becoming more frequent and more violent. There were reports of communist insurgents from Cuba and the Soviet Union working to turn Mexico into another Vietnam. It was one thing to have that threat in Southeast Asia, Alex. It’s a whole other ball game when it’s in your own backyard.”
“And you and Joe were trying to determine how legitimate the threat was,” she said, the realization dawning on her. “You and Joe were monitoring these groups to determine those likely to cause civil unrest if the United States and Mexico entered serious discussions.”
“Our job was to preserve the status quo in the event the Saudis didn’t flinch.”
“History repeats itself,” she said.
“It always does.” He sat back, an arm on the top of the seat. “So I need to know what you and Joe were working on, Alex. I need specifics to determine if it’s related to what he and I were doing.”
She took a breath and sat back, settling in. “We were working with Mexican intelligence to identify certain organizations, revolutionaries that could impede the current ongoing negotiations. Joe asked me if I would assist him. He said his Spanish was rusty after thirty years and he needed someone to interpret conversations and documents for him.”
He laughed. “Joe’s Spanish wasn’t rusty—it was never any good. Tell me, did these organizations you were monitoring include el Frente de Liberación Mexicano?”
Her brow furrowed. “What’s going on, Charlie?”
“Was it one of the organizations Branick had you look into?”
“Yes.”
“What did you find?”
“You know what I found. The MLF is supposed to be extinct. Nobody has heard from it in thirty years, which is right about the time you and Joe were there.” She raised her eyebrows in question.
Jenkins picked his words carefully. “The organizations die out, but not the philosophy, Alex. Splinter organizations rise from their ashes. We’re getting a healthy dose of it now in the Middle East with the Islamic extremists. They call themselves something different, but their philosophies are the same—they want to take down Western culture.”
She nodded. “It’s been rumored that the National Labor Party has some historical connection to the MLF,” she said.
Knowing Mexico’s history, he had already suspected as much. The National Labor Party happened to be the party of Alberto Castañeda—the only political party in eighty years to overcome the corruption embedded in Mexican politics enough to defeat the PRI. Castañeda was referred to as the
destapado,
the uncovered one, because he had come out of obscurity to win the presidency. His primary support had come from Mexico’s indigenous people and lower classes: union members, factory workers, farmers. It was normally the element of Mexican society least likely to vote. This time they had. They were also the same groups of people to whom the MLF had appealed in the 1970s, when it was causing considerable unrest, particularly in the southern region of the country.
“The leader of the MLF was a man known as el Profeta
,
” Jenkins said.
“The Prophet?”
“He preached, primarily to the lower and middle class, that Mexico could not be free until its leaders were free of all outside influences, and that together they had the power to do it. He proclaimed that he had the power to deliver Mexico from centuries of bondage to outside forces, most notably the United States. At first no one in the government paid him much attention, but when the MLF started assassinating government officials and wealthy landowners for treason, the Mexican government took notice. The people, particularly those in the villages in southern Mexico, seemed emboldened and organized. Something had given them hope that a change was on the horizon. The government pulled out all stops to get him.”
“Who was he?”
Jenkins shook his head.
“You never caught him?”
“No. Despite employing what were normally highly effective interrogation techniques, they had no success identifying him. Neither did we.”
“So what happened to him?”
“Until you showed up at my door,” he said, “I assumed he was dead.”
D
ESPITE THE VIGOR
of Sloane’s pleas, Dr. Knight refused to allow him to speak to the police. She told him it was ill advised in his present condition. When he demanded that she release him from the hospital she quoted the law to him, calling his situation a “classic fifty-four fifty” and telling him she could hold him indefinitely. Rationalizing with her was pointless, and getting angry only made her want to increase the sedative, and he was having enough trouble fighting off its effects, struggling to stay alert.
Dr. Knight closed the file and held it against her chest. “We’ll run a series of tests and talk afterward,” she said. Then, before he could further protest, “Your wife is here to see you. I’ll allow it, but only if it’s brief. Right now what you need is to rest.”
She opened the door to his room and spoke to someone in the hall. A moment later Tina stepped in.
“Keep it short,” Knight said, one hand holding the door open. “Ten minutes at the most.” Then she handed Tina a card from the front pocket of her smock. “When you’re finished, I’d like to talk with you. My office is upstairs.”
Tina walked to the foot of the bed as the door swung shut. She looked uncertain, worn out. Her hair was flat, her eyes hollow and bloodshot. “They wouldn’t let me in unless I was a relative.”
“How did you find out?”
“You have me down as your emergency contact, David. They called me in the middle of the night. All they would tell me was that you had been brought in by ambulance. I thought you’d been in a car accident. I expected to find you breathing on a ventilator. I’ve been outside, waiting all morning to see you.”
When he had filled out the form at work he never thought his emergency contact would be an issue. He had chosen Tina by default. He had no one else. Melda could never have handled it.
“I’m sorry, Tina, I should have asked.”
“I don’t mind, David, it’s just . . .”
He knew what she was about to say. This was his other secret, one he had not revealed to anyone but Melda. “I don’t have any family. My parents died in a car accident when I was six or seven. I was raised in foster homes. There
is
no one else. Melda was the only family I had.” The thought saddened him. His chest heaved.
“David, I’m sorry.”
“The police think I killed her.”
She sat in a chair near the bed, exhausted. “You loved Melda, David. I know that. I know you didn’t do it.” She let out a breath of air. “David, your dream. How did you know?”
He shook his head, uncertain how to explain it to her, certain he didn’t have the time. The foreboding that the man was coming grew stronger.
