They settled into another silence, less tense and more companionable.
From time to time, Ben found his gaze drifted toward Anna. Despite all
they had been through today, she was extravagantly beautiful. At one
point, their glances met; Anna defused the faint awkwardness with a
crooked grin.
“Sorry, I’m still trying to get used to your new Aryan officer look,”
she said.
Some time later, Anna fished her cell phone out of her handbag and
punched in a number.
David Denneen’s voice had the tinny, artificial clarity conferred by
decrypted telephony. “Anna!” he said. “Everything O.K.?”
“David, listen. You’ve got to help me–you’re the only one I can
trust.”
“I’m listening.”
“David, I need whatever you can get me on Josef Strasser. He was like
Mengele’s smarter older brother.”
“I’ll do whatever I can,” Denneen replied, his voice tentative, baffled.
“Of course. But where do you want the material sent?”
“BA.”
He understood the abbreviation for Buenos Aires. “But I can’t exactly
send the file care of the embassy, can I?”
“How about care of the American Express office?” Anna gave him a name
to use.
“Right. Low profile’s a good idea down there.”
“So I hear. How bad is it?”
“Great country, great people. But some long memories. Watch your back
down there. Please, Anna. I’ll get right on to it.” And with that
Denneen clicked off.
The main border-control security room of the aero port Line-Lesquin was
a drab, windowless interior space, with low acoustic-tiled ceilings, a
white projection screen at one end of the room. Color photographs of
internationally sought criminals hung beneath a black-and-white sign
that read defense DE fumer. Nine immigration and border-control
officials sat on folding chairs of tube metal and beige plastic while
their boss, Bruno Pagnol, the director of security, filled them in on
the new advisories of the afternoon. Marc Sully was one of them, and he
tried not to look as bored as he felt. He had no love for his job, but
wasn’t eager to lose it, either.
Just in the past week, Pagnol reminded them, they had arrested seven
young Turkish women arriving from Berlin with illicit cargo in their
bellies: having been recruited as “mules,” they had swallowed condoms
packed with China White. Finding the seven was partly a matter of luck,
but credit had to go to Jean-Daniel Roux (Roux gave a slit-eyed nod when
the boss singled him out, pleased but determined not to look it), who
was alert enough to catch the first of them. The woman had looked
visibly woozy to him; as they later learned, one of the knotted condoms
in her colon had started to leak. In fact, the woman almost overdosed
on the contraband. In the hospital, they’d retrieved fifteen small
balls, double-wrapped in latex, tied off with fishing line, each
containing several grams of extremely pure heroin.
“How’d they get it out of her?” one of the officers asked.
Marc Sully, sitting in the back, farted audibly. “Rear extraction,” he
said.
The others laughed.
The red-faced director of airport security frowned. He saw nothing
funny. “The courier nearly died. These are desperate women. They’ll
do anything. How much money do you think she was paid? A thousand
francs, nothing more, and she almost died for it. Now she’s facing a
very long jail sentence. These women are like walking suitcases. Hiding
drugs in their own shit. And it’s our job to keep that poison out of
the country. You want your kids hooked on it? So some fat-ass Asian
can get rich? They think they can promenade right past us. Are you
going to teach them better?”
Marc Sully had been a member of the police aux frontieres for four
years, and sat through hundreds of briefings just like this one. Every
year Pagnol’s face got a little redder, his collar a little tighter. Not
that Sully was anyone to talk. He himself had always a little weight on
him, wasn’t ashamed of it. Bit his nails to the quick, too, had given
up trying to stop. The boss once told him he looked “sloppy,” but when
Marc asked him how, he just shrugged. So nobody was going to put him on
a recruitment poster.
Marc knew he wasn’t popular with some of his younger colleagues, the
ones who bathed every single day, afraid of smelling like a human being
instead of a walking bar of deodorant soap. They’d walk around with
their quills of freshly shampooed hair, smiling nicely at the prettier
female passengers, as if they were going to find dates on the job. Marc
thought they were fools. It was a dead-end job. Giving strip searches
might be a way to get a sniff, especially if you were into third-world
cul, but you weren’t going to bring anybody home that way.
“Now two advisories fresh from la DCPAF.” The Direction centrals de la
police auxfrontiere was the national bureau that gave them their orders.
Pagnol pressed a few switches, and was able to project photographs
directly from a computer. “Highest priority. This one’s an American.
Mexican ancestry. She’s a professional. You find her, you be very
careful. Treat her like a scorpion, right?”
Grunts of assent.
Sully squinted at the images. He wouldn’t mind giving her a taste of
his baguette.
“And here’s another one,” the security director said. “White male in
his mid-thirties. Curly brown hair, green or hazel eyes, approximately
one and three-quarters meters in height. Possible serial killer.
Another American, they think. Very dangerous. There’s reason to
believe he’s been in the country today, and that he’ll be trying to make
his way out. We’ll be posting photographs at your stations, but I want
you to take a careful look right now. If it turns out that they left
through Line-Lesquin and that the people here let them slip through, it
won’t just be my job on the line. Everybody understand?”
Sully nodded with everyone else. It annoyed Sully that Roux, that
apple-cheeked hard-on, was still riding high for having lucked out with
that Gastarbeiter whore. But who knew? Maybe it was Sully’s day to get
lucky. He took another look at the photographs.
Ben dropped off Anna by an airport shuttle bus stop, and deposited the
blue Renault at the long-term parking lot at the aero port LilleLesquin.
They’d enter the airport separately, and taken different flights.
They agreed to meet in Buenos Aires within ten hours.
Assuming nothing went wrong.
Anna looked at the blond, crew-cut American officer, and felt confident
that he’d elude detection. But despite her brave words to Ben, she felt
no such confidence herself. Her hair was neither cut nor colored. It
was combed out, and she had changed her garb, but otherwise she was
entrusting her camouflage to something very small indeed. She felt a
knot of fear in the pit of her stomach, and the fear fed on itself, for
she knew nothing would betray her faster than the appearance of fear.
She had to focus. Her usual hyper attentiveness to her surroundings
could now be her undoing. Before she stepped into the terminal, she had
to let every bit of fear and anxiety wash from her. She imagined
herself traipsing through meadows filled with Bermuda grass and
dandelions. She imagined holding hands with somebody constant and
strong. It could be anybody–it was simply a mental exercise, as she
was perfectly aware–but the person she kept imagining was Ben.
Sully kept a sharp eye out at the incoming passengers by his station,
alert for signs of anxiety or agitation, for customers traveling with
too few bags or too many, for customers who fit the description they’d
received from DCPAF.
The man, third from the front of the line, caught his attention. He was
the approximate height of the man they were looking for, had curly brown
hair, and kept jingling the change in his pocket, a nervous tic. From
his dress, he was almost certainly an American. Perhaps he had reason
to be nervous.
He waited until the man showed his ticket and passport to the airline
security officer, and then stepped forward.
“Just a few questions, sir,” Sully said, his eyes boring in on him.
“Yeah, all right,” the man said.
“Come with me,” Sully said, and drew him to a station post near the
ticket counter. “So what took you to France?”
“Medical conference.”
“You’re a doctor?”
A sigh. “I work in sales for a pharmaceutical company.”
“You’re a drug dealer!” Sully smiled, though his eyes remained wary.
“In a matter of speaking,” the man replied wanly. He had a look on his
face like he’d smelled something bad.
Americans and their obsession with hygiene. Sully scrutinized his face
for a moment longer. The man had the same angular cast to his face,
square chin, curly hair. But the features didn’t look quite right–they
were too small. And Sully didn’t hear real stress in the man’s voice
when he answered questions. Sully was wasting his time.