“Value for the dollar, eh?”
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Lathrop grinned.
“Believe it,” he said.
Salazar fell silent again. His gold and jewels twinkled in the sunlight pouring through the glass wall that faced the beachfront below and behind him. These days, Lathrop thought, the base price of a Del Mar home with an ocean view was maybe six, seven hundred grand, and that was if you were talking about something the size of Monopoly board real estate, where you had to stand tiptoe on the roof with a set of binoculars just to catch a glimpse of the water. A place like Salazar’s sin citadel here-built to his specs on a bluff, sprawling enough to contain the entire population of whatever burro shit Mexican village had spawned his proud ancestral line of cutthroat thieves, highwaymen, and pimps-a place like this had to have cost him in excess of three mil.
After perhaps twenty seconds, Salazar leaned forward over the table and studied another of the pictures, his eyebrows knitted in brooding thought, slowly shaking his head from side to side as he recognized the body of the coyote Guillermo.
“El muerto nada se lleva y todo se acaba,” he said in an undertone.
The dead take nothing with them and everything comes to an end.
He glanced back up at Lathrop. “You know if Felix was being stupid on his own, or does the stupidity go up the line?” he asked.
“Felix? Come on,” Lathrop said, preparing to stir in the lie. “He might have his boys glom car computers, shake down bodega owners, nickel-dime stuff, on his own string. Might even get away with laying an extra cut on a key before he delivers it, skimming a few
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ounces for himself. But his big cousins are just letting him run off the leash so he feels a player instead of a punk, and even Felix isn’t brainless enough not to realize I* how far to take it before he smacks into a brick wall. What happened at the tunnel-he’d never in his miserable life try it without their endorsement.”
Lathrop watched the thought lines on Salazar’s forehead deepen. He was seething, and with very good reason. In tight with the old-line South American growers and processors from the days when his father headed the clan, Lucio’s organization had been smuggling contraband across the U.S.-Mexico border for over half a century, starting with hot cars back in the fifties, and here in California was the principal polydrug distribution outfit along the Pacific coast, carrying cocaine, dope, pot, methamphetamine, name your favorite poison, from Chula Vista clear on up to Los Angeles and Frisco. The Quiroses were way down the hierarchy, with transit routes inland from northern Sonora into south Texas and sections of New Mexico, and until recently hadn’t done anything to challenge the Salazar empire, sticking to a relatively insignificant share of the coke market. New drug money, you might call them. But since they’d gotten tied in with El Tio’s network a year or so back-it was hard for Lathrop to believe he’d still been with the El Paso special field division at the time, my oh my how things had changed-there had been signs they were looking to make inroads into Salazar’s territory. What was now causing Lucio such profound and well- warranted distress was the sheer nerviness of the act- not only stealing some heavy dope, but intentionally humiliating him in the process, smearing his couriers all over the arroyo, killing his drivers, and leaving them
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with their mouths chock-full of their own privates.
You go dissing someone like Lucio Salazar with that kind of impunity, you’re sending a big, bold-faced message that there’s major juice behind you.
Salazar was still shaking his head with combined anger and dismay.
“I can’t accept this,” he said.
Which, Lathrop thought, was absolutely right on, assuming he wanted to stay in business.
“It’s got to be fixed,” Salazar said.
Which, Lathrop thought, equaled taking serious retaliation.
Salazar looked at him.
“You find out how the Quiroses knew when my shipment was coming, anything else about their setup, I give you my word of honor it’ll be worth a jackpot,” he said.
Lathropr nodded, making an effort not to smile. He often wondered if guys like Salazar copped their dialogue from television and the movies or vice versa. Or whether it was some weird kind of self-perpetuating loop. Reality mimicking fiction mimicking reality.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said and rose from his chair feeling mightily satisfied with his performance … and just as strongly convinced it would lead to the results he desired.
Next stop on the road, Enrique Quiros.
“I’m leaning in favor of Ricci’s idea,” Gordian said to Nimec from behind his desk.
He reached for the container of rolled wafers in front of him, opened it, slipped a wafer out of the container, and stirred it in his coffee so the drink would pick up the flavor of its hazelnut praline filling. This new morn80
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ing ritual was in observance of his wife’s latest dietary commandment: Thou shalt not drink hazelnut coffee. Her prohibition of his favorite blend rose from her theory that its hidden calories and fatty oils were responsible for the five-pound weight gain and slightly elevated cholesterol level revealed by his latest routine checkup.
The flavored coffee of which he’d been drinking three to five cups a day for the past year, therefore, was gone and out, per spouse’s orders, replaced on her shopping list by the cream-filled wafers he was allowed to dip, stir, and consume twice a day to satisfy his hazelnut craving, the equivalent of nicotine chewing gum to a smoker trying to quit the habit.
Admittedly, though, the sweet sticks were tasty, if not to say addictive, in their own right.
“My primary reservations concern the delicacy of placing our RDTs in host countries that might feel threatened by their activities, perhaps with some justification,” he said, letting the wafer steep in his coffee. “Or, trickier still, inserting them into hostile countries where we know in advance that their presence would be unwelcome.”
Across the immense desk from him, Nimec was trying not to betray his delight at now having gotten his second “yes” of the day-albeit another qualified one-with a fair and highly unexpected degree of ease.
“I can relay your concerns to Tom, see that he addresses them in a formal written proposal,” he said.
Gordian pulled the wafer stick out of his coffee and took a bite.
“That would be a reasonable start,” he said, looking happy as he chewed.
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Nimec started to lift himself off his seat, eager to make his exit while the going was good.
Gordian raised a hand.
“One last thing before you go,” he said.
Nimec settled back down, waited.
“I’m with Megan that Rollie Thibodeau has to accept the plan, at least in theory, before we take it any further.”
Nimec considered that a moment, then nodded.
“I’ll ask her to talk to him,” he said.
“No,” Gordian said.
Nimec looked at him.
“No?”
Gordian shook his head.
“You do it,” he said.
Nimec kept looking at him.
“She’s better with Rollie than I am, two of them go way back,” he said. “They’ve got a rapport.”
“And that’s precisely why it’s going to be you and he who have the conversation,” Gordian said. He took a gulp of coffee, the wafer back in his cup like a swizzle stick. “The fractiousness I saw aboard the yacht last week troubles me. If it continues, our organization is going to split into separate camps, and once that happens, we’ll cease to be a functional team. Think about it, Pete. It has to stop.”
Nimec ballooned his cheeks, slowly released a breath.
“Ought to be an interesting chat,” he said.
Gordian smiled.
“Ought to be,” he said and munched down the rest of his treat.
82
SIX
SAN JOSE/SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 4, 2001
every day it was the same, for the whole day.
Trying to work through the deepening bog of paperwork in front of him. Trying to decide which decisions needed to be made first and which could be deferred until later. All across his desktop half-finished fiscal reports and operational plans silently screamed for his attention. Employment applications, personnel evaluations, and equipment requisitions were spilling from his overloaded in box like tenants from a collapsing high-rise. Only the adjoining out box was uncluttered, and that sure as hell wasn’t much encouragement. It seemed sadly neglected, waiting for something to drop into it.
Six months after his elevation to the post of global field supervisor, Rollie Thibodeau had still to feel any balance between the continuous supervisory and administrative demands of an organization as large as Sword and his personal capacity to fulfill them.
It wasn’t that he’d been ignorant of the job’s respon-