Washington, D.C.
Richard Gordon walked down the long hall on the third and top floor of a motel on one of the commercial thoroughfares in Fairfax, Virginia. The place was generic in spades, like a blank piece of paper, or the surface of the moon. But you knew people had been there. The management had tried to cover up that fact by soaking the blue-green carpet in untold gallons of antiseptic air freshener, the spoor of their compliance with governmental health regulations.
He stopped at the door with the right number on it and knocked. The bare walls of the corridor converged in the fluorescent distance in both directions. These motel room rendezvous grew increasingly depressing with the passing years. They typified the whole shabby business he and his colleagues toiled in, as if mocking the high ideals that had launched their careers but which, over the years, they often lost sight of and sometimes even forgot entirely.
When the door opened, he walked into a room lighted only by the cool bluish halogen illumination from the streetlamp on an overpass just outside the window.
“Richard,” a strangled voice said. “Good, good,” and Lex Kevern walked away from the door, leaving Gordon to close it himself, the back of Kevern’s bearish shoulders presenting a bulky silhouette.
They didn’t shake hands, even though they hadn’t seen each other in nearly a year. Despite the fact that they didn’t much like each other they were working together on an operation with a “Sequestered” classification. This was a new and rarefied sensitive compartmented information designation that indicated that the operation was clandestine, rather than covert. That is, apart from it being known to a handful of men, a few in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and a few in the National Security Council, the operation did not exist.
Gordon looked around. No one else was there. The light sifted through open venetian blinds in horizontal bars, revealing furnishings that were wholesale warehouse decor, 1975. The air was stale and heavy, suggestive of rampant flatulence. A small suitcase lay open on the bed, its contents rifled, as if something had been roughly pulled from underneath the carefully packed contents.
Kevern picked up something off an end table and fell heavily into an armchair against the wall, under the window of blue light.
“It’s been awhile,” Gordon said. “Montevideo.”
“Yeah, yeah, Montevideo,” Kevern grunted. With the light coming in from above him, he was more shadow than man. He stretched out his beefy arm, and the television screen flickered. He was already watching it.
Gordon looked at Kevern’s profile in the pale, grainy light from the television. His body was thicker with age, but still in operational condition. The military haircut was gone, but his hair was still neat, trimmed. He was wearing street clothes, not the jeans and muscle-revealing T-shirt of former years, but there was no mistaking the condition of the body underneath the clothes. Lex had been in intelligence and special operations a long time. It would never wear off.
“So what is it?” Gordon asked, taking a vinyl-covered chair. There was a sofa, but he didn’t want to sit on the damn thing. He imagined the fibers caked with the effluvium of an endless parade of transient lodgers with piggish habits.
Kevern had called him on their secure line from Mexico City early that morning and said he wanted a meeting and that he would be there that evening. No explanation. But Gordon didn’t need one. For the last six weeks, the small cadre of people involved in Operation Heavy Rain had all been obsessed with only one thing. Kevern had to be bringing something of extreme importance.
“Got it a month ago,” Kevern said, not answering the question.
“It what?”
“You’d better watch it.”
The CD began playing.
Surveillance camera: Three men sitting at a table. The camera is situated high and behind a balding man whose face is not visible, the image slightly distorted by the wide-angle lens. The two men whose faces are visible seem to be of Middle Eastern descent. Voices outside. A Korean comes into view from the right side, carrying an automatic weapon and followed by an Anglo and another Korean.
Gordon froze but said nothing. He eased to the front of his chair, forearms on his knees as he leaned toward the television screen.
There is an awkward exchange among three of the men; then suddenly the bald man jumps to his feet, upsetting the cups and saucers on the small table, and spits at the Anglo as one of the Koreans grabs the Anglo’s arms from behind and wrenches them behind his back with an audible snap as the Anglo screams in pain. His hands are tied behind him and his legs are taped to the chair legs. “Jasus! Jasus!” the bald man screams as he leans across the table.
“Spy! Spy!” Kevern translated in a low, raspy voice.
Someone appears in a jogging suit and jabs electrical wires into either side of the Anglo’s neck, convulsing his body. Suddenly, the other two men jump up, something is shouted, one man’s arm flies up, and he fires a gun at the man across the table from him, blowing out the back of his head. Once again, the electrical wires are applied to the Anglo, and he is again convulsed. Then the bald man produces a knife, and while someone holds the stunned Anglo’s head, he quickly cuts out his tongue.
“Oh shit!” Gordon blurted.
The bald man hits the Anglo repeatedly in the face with his own tongue, then tosses the tongue to a dog, who immediately eats it.
“Oh! Oh! Jesus!” Gordon fell back in his chair.
The Anglo slowly chokes to death on his own blood while everyone watches. The bald man says something inaudible. Someone else speaks. When it finally looks as if the Anglo is dead, the bald man suddenly plunges his knife into the Anglo’s chest and leaves it there as everyone walks out of the room. The video runs for a few minutes, recording nothing but the silence and the still bodies of the two dead men. Then the screen goes blank.
Kevern flicked off the CD player.
Gordon’s face was burning. They had reluctantly accepted the probability that Jude Lerner was dead, but this was a brutal way to have it confirmed. He stood and went over to the CD player, took out the disk, and then returned to his chair.
“Where the hell did this come from, Lex? What’s going on here?”
“Agencia Federal de Investigaciones,” Kevern said. “They’d been watching these Lebanese for the better part of a month. Didn’t even know what they had. I was down there running traps. Anything new? Anything off-the-wall? Any interesting hits? Agent said, ‘ Pues, tenemos este. ’ I said, ‘Lemme see.’” Kevern gestured toward the television. “This is what the little shit showed me.”
Gordon just shook his head. Good God Almighty.
Kevern rolled his head to the side, grunting softly. God only knew what inspired such a pantomime, or what it was supposed to convey to people.
“Mexico’s got half a million Lebanese,” Gordon said. “Why were they watching these guys?”
“Drugs, my man said.”
“Just drugs?”
“S’what he said.”
“They didn’t know about their ties to Hezbollah?”
“I don’t think they did.”
“So who did they think the gringo was?”
Kevern shrugged. “Some guy trying to make a buck. They were puzzled by the ‘Spy! Spy!’ thing. They had run it by the DEA, which couldn’t ID the gringo.”
Lebanese had begun immigrating to Mexico during the nineteenth century, and today they were a culturally significant force there, representing some of the country’s wealthiest and most influential citizens. As an ethnic subgroup, they were thoroughly integrated into the Mexican social fabric. They were as invisible as the Irish are in the United States, and they presented the same problems to the intelligence community in Mexico as the Irish would in the United States if the IRA suddenly decided it was their moral and religious obligation to kill as many Americans as possible by any means possible. Although 99.9 percent of the Irish would find the idea abhorrent, that. 1 percent who sympathized would be a hell of a problem for Homeland Security. It was the same with the Lebanese in Mexico. Those affiliated with Hezbollah were finding it easy to hide in plain sight. Racial profiling sure as hell wasn’t an issue.
Gordon said nothing. His officer was dead, and a crack Mexican intelligence team trained by the DEA and the French National Police had a digital recording of it. The problem was that Heavy Rain was operating under the radar of all foreign intelligence agencies, including that of the Mexican government. Even more serious than that, it wasn’t even known to the U.S. embassy or the CIA’s own station chief in Mexico City. This was too damned close for comfort.
“Has Mejia seen this?”
Kevern shook his head.
Well, it was all over, finally. But there was one bleak question. He looked at Kevern. “How did Khalil and Ahmad get onto Jude?”
“Don’t have a clue.”
“The bald guy?”
“Not a clue. Look, this came out of nowhere. You can see by the video that Jude didn’t have a clue when he walked in there, either. He was too good for that. If he’d smelled something, he’d never have shown up in Tepito.”
“When did you say you got this?” Gordon asked.
“’Bout a month ago,” Kevern said without a hint of apology.
Jude had been missing six weeks.
Gordon was trembling. The CD had been damned gruesome, but anger had more to do with the way he was feeling.
“You’ve had it a month,” Gordon said, and the two men stared at each other. “You’d better have a fucking good explanation,” Gordon said.
“Two thousand miles of Mexican border, Gordy,” Kevern rasped. He always sounded like he had a raw throat. “Five thousand five hundred miles of Canadian border. Two million railcars and eleven million trucks come into the country every year. Eight thousand ships make fifty-one thousand port calls every year. Five hundred million people come into our airports and seaports every year, over eight million of them illegal immigrants.” He paused for emphasis. “That’s my explanation.
“It took Jude nearly seven months to get in there, gain their confidence, meet Baida, gain his confidence-marginally,” Kevern went on. “Best guy we had, and it took damn near a year to put him in place. Hellacious effort. We don’t want to lose track of these people, Gordy. You know what’s coming out of the Triple Border area. Those guys are on the move; they’re scattering-to Sao Paulo, to Isla de Margarita in Venezuela, to Panama, to Iquique in Chile. Shit. And from those places, they’ll scatter again. The cyst is festering and pus is seeping out. We don’t have much time.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gordon said. “This was always a long shot-and it almost worked. But it was a one-off operation. Jude was the operation.” He held up the CD. “And you just showed me the end of it.”
Kevern sat very still, and Gordon saw the look in his eye, a too-still look, which put Gordon on instant alert. The son of a bitch had already done something extreme. And he had taken a month to set it up and do it.
“Get to the goddamned point, Lex.”
“Ghazi Baida’s about to get a little jolt of enlightenment,” Kevern said, grunting under his breath. “He’s about to find out that Jude’s not dead after all.”