“You get used to it,” Dominic promised.
“Thanks, but I like the extra six rounds in the magazine.”
“Well, it’s what you like.”
“What’s with all the head-shot stuff, anyway?” Brian wondered. “Okay, shooting sniper rifle, it’s the surest one-shot stopper, but not with a pistol.”
“When you can do a guy in the head from fifteen yards,” Pete Alexander answered, “it’s just a nice talent to have. It’s the best way of ending an argument I know”
“Where did you come from?” Dominic asked.
“You didn’t scan, Agent Caruso. Remember that even Adolf Hitler had friends. Don’t they teach that at Quantico?”
“Well, yes,” Dominic admitted, somewhat crestfallen.
“When your primary target is down, you scan the area for any friends he might have had. Or you get the hell out of town. Or both.”
“You mean run away?” Brian asked.
“Not unless you’re on a track. You make your way clear in such a way as to be inconspicuous. That can mean walking into a bookstore and making a purchase, getting a coffee, whatever. You have to make your decision based on circumstances, but keep your objective in mind. Your objective is always to get clear of the immediate area as quickly as circumstances allow. Move too fast and people will notice. Move too slow and they might remember seeing you and your subject close together. They will never report the person they didn’t notice. So, you want to be one of those. What you wear out on a job, the way you act out in the field, the way you walk, the way you think—all of that must be designed to make you invisible,” Alexander told them.
“In other words, Pete, you’re saying that when we kill these people we’re training for,” Brian observed quietly, “you want us to be able to do it and walk away so that we can get away with it.”
“Would you prefer to be caught?” Alexander asked.
“No, but the best way to kill somebody is to pop him in the head with a good rifle from a couple of hundred meters away. That works every time.”
“But what if we want him dead in such a way that nobody knows he was killed?” the training officer asked.
“How the hell do you manage that?” This was Dominic.
“Patience, lads. One thing at a time.”
THERE WERE the remains of some sort of fence. Ricardo just walked through it, using a hole that did not look recent. The fence posts had been painted a rich green, but that had mainly rusted off. The fencing material was in even worse shape. Getting through was the least of their problems. The coyote went a further fifty meters or so, and selected a large rock, then sat down, lit a smoke, and took a drink from his canteen. It was his first stop. The walk had not been difficult at all, and clearly he’d done this many times. Mustafa and his friends did not know that he’d brought several hundred groups across the border along this very route, and had only been arrested once—and that had not amounted to very much, except for stinging his pride. He’d also forfeited his fee, because he was an honorable coyote. Mustafa went over to him.
“Are your friends okay?” Ricardo asked.
“It has not been strenuous,” Mustafa replied, “and I have seen no snakes.”
“Not too many along here. People usually shoot them, or throw rocks. No one cares much for snakes.”
“Are they dangerous—truly, I mean?”
“Only if you are a fool, and even then you are unlikely to die. You will be ill for a few days. No more than that, but it can make walking rather painful. We will wait here for a few minutes. We are ahead of schedule. Oh, yes, welcome to America, amigo.”
“That fence is all there is?” Mustafa asked in amazement.
“The norteamericano is rich, yes, and clever, yes, but he is also lazy. My people would not go there except that there is work the gringo is too lazy to do on his own.”
“How many people do you smuggle into America, then?”
“I, you mean? Thousands. Many thousands. For this, I am well paid. I have a fine house, and six other coyotes work for me. The gringos worry more about people smuggling drugs across the border, and I avoid doing that. It is not worth the trouble. I let two of my men do that for me. The pay for that is very high, you see.”
“What kind of drugs?” Mustafa asked.
“The kind for which I am paid.” He grinned and took another swig from his canteen.
Mustafa turned as Abdullah came up.
“I thought this would be a difficult walk,” his number two observed.
“Only for city dwellers,” Ricardo replied. “This is my country. I was born of the desert”
“As was I,” Abdullah observed. “It is a pleasant day.” Better than sitting in the back of a truck, he didn’t have to add.
Ricardo lit up another Newport. He liked menthol cigarettes, easier on the throat. “It does not get hot for another month, perhaps two. But then it can be truly hot, and the wise man takes a good water supply. People have died out here without water in the August heat. But none of mine. I make sure everyone has water. The Mother Nature, she has no love and no pity,” the coyote observed. At the end of his walk, he knew a place where he could get a few cervezas before driving east to El Paso. From there, it was back to his comfortable home in Ascension, too far from the border to be bothered with would-be emigrants, who had a bad habit of stealing things they might need for the crossing. He wondered how much stealing they did on the gringo side of the line, but it was not his problem, was it? He finished his cigarette and stood. “Three more kilometers to go, my friends.”
Mustafa and his friends fell in and restarted the trudge north. Only three kilometers more? At home, they walked farther to a bus stop.
PUNCHING NUMBERS into a keypad was about as much fun as running naked in a garden of cactus. Jack was the sort to need intellectual stimulation, and while some men might find that in investigative accounting, he was not one of them.
“Bored, eh?” Tony Wills asked.
“Mightily,” Jack confirmed.
“Well, that’s the reality of gathering and processing intelligence information. Even when it’s exciting, it’s pretty dull well, unless you’re really on the scent of a particularly elusive fox. Then it can be kinda fun, though it’s not like watching your subject out in the field. I’ve never done that.”
“Neither did Dad,” Jack observed.
“Depends on which stories you read. Your pop occasionally found his way to the sharp end. I don’t imagine he liked it much. He ever talk about it?”
“Not ever. Not even once. I don’t even think Mom knows much about that. Well, except the submarine thing, but most of what I know about that comes from books and stuff. I asked Dad once, and all he said was, ‘You believe everything you see in the papers?’ Even when that Russian guy, Gerasimov, got on TV, all Dad did was grunt.”
“The word on him at Langley was that he was a king spook. Kept all the secrets like he was supposed to. But he mostly worked up in the Seventh Floor. I never made it that high myself.”
“Maybe you can tell me something.”
“Like what?”
“Gerasimov, Nikolay Borissovich Gerasimov. Was he really the head of KGB? Did my dad really drag his ass out of Moscow?”
Wills hesitated for a moment, but there was no avoiding it. “Yeah. He was the KGB chairman, and, yes, your dad did arrange his defection.”
“No shit? How the hell did Dad arrange that one?”
“That is a very long story and you are not cleared for it.”
“Then why did he rat Dad out?”
“Because he was an unwilling defector. Your father forced him to bug out. He wanted to get even after your dad became President. But, you know, Nikolay Borissovich sang—maybe not like a canary, but he sang anyway. He’s in the Witness Protection Program right now. They still bring him in every so often to get him to sing some more. The people you bag, they never give you everything all at once, and so you go back to there periodically. It makes them feel important—enough that they sing some more, usually. He’s still not a happy camper. He can’t go home. They’d shoot his ass. The Russians have never been real forgiving on state treason. Well, neither are we. So, he lives here with federal protection. Last I heard, he took up golf. His daughter got married to some old-money aristocrat asshole in Virginia. She’s a real American now, but her dad will die an unhappy man. He wanted to take the Soviet Union over, by which I mean he really wanted that job, but your father screwed that one up for all time, and Nick still carries the grudge.”