Under Siege (14 page)

“What’s the name of this place?”

“Second Potomac Savings and Loan.”

Where had he heard that name before? Yocke asked himself as he pocketed his notebook and checked his pocket pencil supply. Oh yes, that Harrington guy who was killed on the bettway-he’d worked there, hadn’t he?

The wind made the bare tree limbs wave somberly back and forth under the gray sky. Sitting under an ancient oak just inside the tree line, Henry Charon listened intently to the gentle rattling and tapping as the limbs high above him softly impacted those of other trees. The noise of traffic speeding by on the interstate eighty yards away muffled all the lesser forest noises, the rustle of the leaves, the sound of a chipmunk searching the leaf carpet for its dinner, the chirping of the birds.

The hunter tried to ignore the drone of the cars and trucks. He paid close attention to the gusts and swirls of the wind, subconsciously calculating the direction and velocity.

The rest area in front of him was almost empty. At the far end sat a ten-year-old pickup with Pennsylvania plates and sporting a camper on the back. The driver was apparently asleep inside. Closer, facing the highway, sat the rental car that Charon had driven to this rest stop halfway between Baltimore and Philadelphia. He had rented it using one of his fake driver’s licenses and a real Visa card in that name.

A station wagon chock-full of kids and pillows and suitcases came off the highway and pulled to a stop in front of the rest rooms. Youngsters piled out and ran for the little brick building. New Jersey tags. Three minutes later the wagon accelerated past the pickup toward the on ramp. Henry Charon adjusted the collar and fastened the top button on his coat. The wind had a chill to it, no doubt due to its moisture content. Yet it didn’t smell of snow.

What if snow came while he were still in Washington? How would that affect his plans? Charon was still considering it when another car came off the interstate and proceeded slowly through the parking area. One man at the wheel. Tasson. He drove slowly through the lot, looked over the rental car, and braked to a stop beside the pickup. After a moment Tassone’s car, a sedan, backed the hundred feet to the rest room building, where he turned off the ignition and got out.

Tasson glanced around as he walked toward the rest rooms. In a few moments he came out and strolled over to where Charon was sitting.

“Hey.” Tasson lowered himself to the ground and leaned back against a tree trunk six feet or so from Charon. “How’s everything?”

“Fine,” Charon said.

“Gonna snow,” Tasson said as he pulled his coat collar higher and jabbed his hands into his pockets. “I doubt it.”

Tasson wiggled around, trying to find a soft spot for his bottom. “Wanta sit in the car?”

“This is fine.”

“What d’ya think about the job?”

“You’ll have to make a list.”

Tasson fumbled inside his coat for a pencil. From an inside jacket pocket he produced a small spiral notepad. “Shoot.”

Charon began to recite. He had not committed the items to paper since the possession of such a list would inevitably be incriminating. Tasson could write it down in his own handwriting and take the risk of the list being discovered on his person. Charon could still deny everything.

It took five minutes for Tasson to list all the items.

Charon had him read the list back, then gave him two more items, with careful descriptions.

Tasson looked comover the list carefully and asked a few questions, then stored the notebook in his pocket.

“So it’s feasible?” he asked the hunter.

“It can be done.”

.”…When?”

“When could you deliver everything on the list?”

“Take about a week, I think. Some of these things will take some work and some serious money. I’ll call you.”

“No, I’ll call you. A week from today, at precisely this time.” Both men glanced at their watches.

“Okay.”

“No names.”

“Of course. You’ll do it then?”

“How many people know about me, counting yourself as one?”

“TW-O.”

“Only two?”

“That’s right.”

Something was stirring in the leaves behind them. Henry Charon came erect in one easy motion and, with a tree for cover, stood looking carefully in that direction. Then he saw it, a flash of brown. A red squirrel. “Ten million, cash, in advance.” Tasson whistled. “I-was

“That’s for the first name on your list. One million for each of the others, if and when. No guarantees on any of them. You pay a million for each one I get. Take it or leave it” his

You want the bread sent to Switzerland or what?”

“Cash. In my hands. Used twenties and fifties. No sequential numbers.”

“Okay.”

“Ybu have the authority to make this commitments’ Now Tasson stood. “You ain’t going to pop anybody until you get paid, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m telling you you’ll get paid. How long before get started?” “A week or ten days after I get the stuff on that list. Two or three weeks would be better.”

“Better for you. Not for me. We want you started as soon as possible.”

“Let’s see how you do getting the equipment I requested.”

“Okay,” said Tasson, and dusted off his trousers. “Okay. You call me in a week.”

When Jake Grafton returned to his office in the Pentagon, there was a message waiting. The chairman wanted to see him. He called the chairman’s office and reached an aide. They agreed he could probably get in to see the general in fifteen minutes or so.

This would be only the fourth occasion on which Jake had met General Hayden Land. For most of the officers on the Joint Staff a meeting with the senior officer in the American military, even with all the Joint Chiefs present, was a rare occurrence. As he walked out of the office this morning the other six officers in the antidrug section appeared and formed a line of sideboys at the door that Jake would have to walk through. They did some pushing tilde and shoving, then came to rigid attention and saluted with mighty flourishes beis Jake walked between the rows. “You guys!”

The other naval officer in the antidrug section whistled, imitating a boatswain’s pipe.

“Carry on,” said Jake Grafton with a wide grin and headed for the corridor.

Grafton was the senior officer in the group, which spent its time doing the staff work required to allow the Joint Chiefs to make informed decisions about military cooperation with antidrug lawenforcement efforts. When Jake reported to the Joint Staff a year ago he came to this billet for the simple reason that the 0-6 who held it was completing tilde his tour and leaving. Grafton had no special training for the job-indeed, he spent the first two months simply trying to understand what it was the military was doing to assist the various lawenforcement agencies-but no matter. Leaming on the job went with the uniform. And this past year the job had grown by leaps and bounds as an increasingly alarmed public demanded every federal resource be harnessed to combat the narco-terrorists, and the reluctant Joint Chiefs had finally turned to face the pressure. So Jake Grafton had been busy.

The first black man to hold the top job in the military, General Hayden Land was reputed to be as sharp as they come, an extraordinarily fast study on the intricacies of military policy. He was also, rumor said, very politically astute. He had come to his current post from the National Security Council where he had personally witnessed the meshing of politics and national security issues and the resultant effects on the military.

As he. walked out of the Joint Staff spaces just ten minutes after he had entered, Jake was again hailed by name by Mr. James, the portly door attendant who had been greeting members of the Joint Staff for over twenty years. He seemed to know everyone’s name-quite a feat considering that there were 1,600 officers on the Joint Staff-and shook hands right and left when they streamed past him into the secure spaces in the morning. “Short day, eh, Captain Grafton?”

“Some people have all the luck,” Jake told him.

The foyer of General Land’s E-Ring office was decorated with original paintings that depicted black American servicemen in action. As the aide informed the general that he was there, Grafton examined them again. One was of union soldiers in the crater at Petersburg, another was of cavalrymen fighting Indians on the western plains, and a third was of Army Air Corps pilots manning fighters during World War II.

“He’ll see you now,” the aide said, and walked for the door. That was when Jake’s eye was captured by the painting of a black sailor defiantly firing a machine gun at attacking Japanese planes. Dorrie Miller aboard U.s.s. West irginia at Pearl Harbor.

“I like the general’s taste in art,” he muttered to the aide he passed into the chairman’s office.

“Captain Grafton, sir,” the aide said to the general behind the desk, then stood to one side. The general carried his fifty or so years well, Jake thought as he scanned the square figure, the short hair, the immaculate uniform with four silver stars on each shoulder strap.

“Come in, Captain, and find a chair. I called down to your office this morning to suggest you go see Aldana, and they said you had already left.”

“Yessir, I went over there.” Jake sank into a chair with the general’s gaze upon him. “Just curious, I guess,” Jake added. “The prosecution asked for a gag order and got it. That might help keep the lid on, at least for a little while.” General Land turned his gaze toward the window, which looked out across the Pentagon parking lots at the skyline of Arlington. “You really think it’ll come out?”

“If only American soldiers knew, sir, I’d be more hopeful. They know what classified information is. But with all those Colombian cops and Justice Department lawyers in on it, there’s just no way. The press is going to get this and probably pretty soon. Who knows? Aldana’s lawyer, Liarakos, may want to make a motion to have the court consider the legality of the arrest. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know any to ask, but Liarakos looks like the type of guy who will throw every stone he can lay hands on.”

“Oh, but surely it’s got to be legal,” the general said. “The attorney general is the one who requested our help.”

“All I’m saying, sir, is that Liarakos may raise the issue with the court. In fact, the press may have already caught the rumblings of this. This past weekend a reporter, one of my wife’s language students, was at a party at my house. He saw me today in court and buttonholed me afterward.”

“Reporter for whom?”

“The Washington Post, sir.”

Land grinned. “God,” he said, “I feel like Dick Nixon. Think Deep Throat’s been whispering?”

Jake laughed. “I don’t think Gideon Cohen is going to have a heart attack if he reads in the newspapers that American Special Forces troops captured Aldana with the cooperation of Colombian police. I told him that it would come out eventually and he shrugged it off. He knows.”

“What about this Aldana?”

“A psychopath.”

“Umm. When he was captured he told the major leading the raid he was going to see them all dead.” General Land showed his teeth. It was not a nice smile. “I was against us getting into this mess. The military has no business in law enforcement. Won’t work, can’t work, isn’t good for the military or the country. But when I heard that scum threatened our men, my doubts got smaller. Maybe Cohen’s right. Maybe we need to go in there and kick some ass.”

“General, if you want my opinion, you were right the first time. These cartel criminals have bribed, threatened, bullied, and occasionally subverted the Colombian authorities. They haven’t gotten to our men yet, but now they’re going to try. We’re not set up to investigate our own people. We take any eighteen-year-olds who can pass the written test and the physical and turn them into soldiers, sailors, and marines. Background checks and loyalty investigations are messes we shouldn’t get ourselves into.”

“We may have to,” General Land said. “The world’s changing and we may have to change with it.”

When the attorney general walked into William C. Dorfman’s White House office, the morning paper was on the desk, open and folded, displaying Mergenthaler’s column. Gideon Cohen sighed and sat while he waited for the chief of staff to finish a telephone call.

“No, we are not going to release a text of the indictment. s sealed. And no, we are not going to ask Mexico to hand over any of its citizens. We have no extradition treaty with Mexico.”

He listened for several seconds, then spat into the phone, “Fuck no!” and slammed it down.

“That bubble-brain wants to know if we are really offering rewards for these guys”-Dorfman stabbed the newspaper with a rigid finger-“and paying bounty hunters to bring them to the U.s. for trial.”

Cohen pursed his lips and crossed his legs. Ottmar Mergenthalet’s column in the Post this morning had revealed, for the first time, that a federal grand jury in Los Angeles had handed down a secret indictment several weeks ago bringing charges against nineteen former and present members of the Mexican government for drug smuggling and complicity in the kidnapping and murder of U.s. Drug Enforcement Administration undercover agent Enrique Camarena, whose body had been discovered near Guadalajara in March 1985, over five years ago. One of those indicted was the former director of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police-the Mexican equivalent of the FBI’-AND another was his brother, the former head of the Mexican government’s antidrug unit. And one of those indicted was a medical doctor who had been arrested just yesterday in El Paso. It seemed that several unknown men had accompanied the good doctor on a plane trip from Mexico, turned him over to waiting federal agents, then immediately reboarded the plane for the flight back to Mexico. “Are you going to pay bounties?”

“Why not? It’s perfectly legal to pay rewards to people who deliver fugitives to lawful authority. That principle has been firmly embedded in the common law for hundreds of years.”

“Oh, spare me the lecture. What in hell are you trying to do, anyway?”

Two years ago Cohen would have bristled. Not anymore. “Enforce the law,” he said mildly. “That’s still one of the goals of this administration, isn’t it?”