Do They Know I'm Running?: A Novel Page 15

  “A week later, the Jaish al Mahdi drove me out. Three of them showed up, dressed all in black, the oldest maybe twenty-one. They pounded on the door, spat at my feet when I opened it, then handed me a bullet soaked in blood, told me I had three hours to get out or die in the street. I left behind everything I owned but what I could jam into a suitcase. I began sleeping on pallets of rice at the warehouse in Abu Ghraib, until they found a bed for me in the worker compound. That was when Happy and I got to know each other. I went to work for the Salvadorans because they were the only ones left. The Spaniards, the Hondurans, the Nicaraguans, all gone. Everybody was getting out if they could. The thing was a disaster. And everybody figured the Americans bungled their way in, let them bungle their way out.”

  A stray dog poked its head through a hole in the hedge of veranera surrounding the garden, sniffing the air, eyes glimmering. Tío Faustino hissed, raised his hand in almost comic wrath. The dog shrank away. “Why didn’t you try working for the Americans?”

  “Of course I tried, the Americans and British both. They would have nothing to do with me. I know Israel gets blamed for everything, not wrongly in my view, but I have to believe my being Palestinian was why I was shunned. The Salvadorans, praise God, took pity on me. They were in Najaf, rebuilding the airport, the hospitals, a few small refineries. None of the roads into Najaf were safe. Muqtada al Sadr and his thugs put up their own barricades. And if they weren’t shaking you down, the Badr Brigade was. I told you, your son was very brave. I grew to respect him very much. Entering the city took hours sometimes. Bribes just vanished, they did nothing, but without a bribe you sat there all night or got dragged away to a secret prison, ransomed off. Or got to star in one of those special videos, where your head disappears.”

  A sudden stirring in the mango tree lifted everyone’s gaze. A garrobo scurried among the branches, scaly and brown, staring back at them with elfin dinosaur eyes.

  “Not to sound morbid,” Samir continued. “I just want you to understand, your son—”

  A car roared up the hill, crunching to a stop in the gravel beyond the hedge. Doors opened, slammed closed. The scuffling of feet, harsh voices.

  Lonely appeared, clutching Lupe by the arm with one hand, the other grabbing her hair as he dragged her forward. She bucked against his grip. Sisco lingered behind, hands buried deep in his pockets.

  On impulse Roque stood up, regretting the move instantly. Who did he expect to fight, who would it save? He could feel the adrenalin crackling in his blood. Tío Faustino just sat there slack-jawed. Samir stared blankly.

  Lonely shoved Lupe forward and she stumbled, trying to keep her feet. Even in the candlelight, Roque could see the fresh damage, the glistening lip, the crimped eye. He envisioned killing the two mareros right there, bare hands if need be, knew as well it was his powerlessness triggering the fantasy, triggering all his fantasies.

  Lupe dropped uneasily to one knee, her breath ragged. Eyes blazing, Lonely stepped forward, rocking his hip as though to kick her. She recoiled from him and he laughed, then looked up and met Roque’s stare.

  “Like the way she looks, jodido? She’s yours. All the way to Agua Prieta. You deliver this pinche putilla to a dude called El Recio. He’s your man, you wanna cross over. She gets handed over to him or your uncle and Turco the motherfucker there don’t make it home, get it?”

  Tío Faustino rose from his chair, came around to see if Lupe needed any help. Easing the girl to her feet, he took her chin in his hand, regarded her face. She seemed responsive to the kindness. Roque thought: Hand her over, and then? Meanwhile, Samir’s whole demeanor had changed. He seemed coiled, ready to lash out if need be and yet also indifferent. The look of an animal, Roque thought.

  “Where are her things?” He felt the stupidity of the question instantly but couldn’t help himself from clarifying: “Her clothes, I mean. Her stuff.”

  “Her stuff?” Lonely cackled like a magpie. “You wanna talk about her stuff?”

  “You know what—”

  “Pack up your own fucking stuff and drag your punk ass outta here, mamón. You gotta head for San Cristóbal. Guy you’re gonna meet there, his name is Rafa. He’ll be looking for your car. Pull up about half a mile shy of the border, his gas station’s there, blue lantern in the window. You see the bridge up ahead, you’ve gone too far, turn around and go back. And try not to be too fucking obvious about it.”

  He took one last glance at Lupe, looking like he was gathering saliva so he could spit. Tío Faustino moved between them. Lonely grinned, turned on his heel and plodded back to the car.

  Sisco lingered, hands still balled in his pockets. “You know the secret of getting past the checkpoints, right?” His eyes focused on some nebulous point outside the circle of candlelight, a grin on his lips, childish and taunting and strange. “No matter what they do, or how they ask, just keep smiling.”

  THE COURTROOM DOOR WHISPERED OPEN, THUDDED CLOSED. Turning to glance over his shoulder, Lattimore spotted the strange man enter timidly under the indifferent eye of the bailiff, who sat perched on a stool at the back, thumbing through last month’s Ebony.

  The newcomer had a wonkish dishevelment, bristling salt-and-pepper hair, a close-cropped beard, gold-rimmed glasses that sat cockeyed on his face. His jacket, tie, shirt and slacks looked like they’d mugged him in the closet that morning. The man’s glance met Lattimore’s, followed by an unsettling smile. Lattimore turned back toward the proceedings.

  “We’re not asking for any more than the court provided in U.S. v. Fort, Your Honor.” Pitcavage stood at the prosecutor’s table, hands clasped behind him, a skipper on deck. His trial team, a claque of mannequins with law degrees, sat to his right. “We have no obligation to provide police reports or 302s to the defense any earlier than the Friday before testimony.”

  “We can’t prepare an adequate defense under those restrictions, Your Honor.” This came from Tony Torreta, lead defense counsel, representing Hugo “Little Brother” Rodriguez, the shot caller for the Fogtown Brujos, a Mara Salvatrucha clica that ran a car-theft ring and various shakedown rackets plus good old-fashioned dope in the Outer Mission and Visitacion Valley. He was on trial with two of his lieutenants for the murder of a witness in a federal racketeering trial last spring. “We get, what, two days?” Torreta continued. “Two weekend days at that, to track down and interview more than one hundred witnesses. In an excess of caution, or bowing to the government’s paranoia, we’ve agreed not to share the witness names with our clients.”

  “An inadequate prophylactic, Your Honor. Again, U.S. v. Fort—”

  “This sabotages a deal made only a week ago.”

  Feeling the pressure of the stranger’s gaze boring into his neck, Lattimore decided what the hell. He rose, eased his way past two other agents in attendance and headed down the center aisle toward the courtroom door, avoiding the stranger’s eye, choosing instead to cock his hand into a gun, then firing at the bailiff who glanced up from his Ebony just in time to die.

  Lattimore waited in the corridor, figuring it would take only seconds. True enough, the door eased open, the rumpled man with the scratchy beard and off-kilter glasses materialized, breaking into an ample smile, teeth the color of butterscotch, plowing forward, hand outstretched. His footsteps echoed brightly in the empty corridor, a sound like he was tap-dancing across a shower stall.

  “Jim Lattimore? My name’s McIlvaine, Andy McIlvaine. I’m with the Banneret Group.”

  They shook hands. “Can’t say I know your outfit.”

  “We’re security specialists, out of Dallas.”

  Lattimore was thinking Midwest, not Texas, given the accent. And he would have guessed OGA, Other Government Agency, the new nickname for the CIA. As though changing acronyms hid anything. Maybe he was a cutout. But a security firm, what kind of cover was that?

  “Might I have a moment of your time?” McIlvaine at last let go of Lattimore’s hand. “It concerns your interest in a man by the name of Samir Kha
lid Sadiq.”

  Lattimore led him to the prosecution conference room. It was clubby in atmosphere and no one else was there at the moment, the day being set aside for pretrial motions and other drudgery. Lattimore gestured McIlvaine into a plump leather chair and dropped into the one opposite, saying, “Not to be rude, but could I see some form of ID?”

  McIlvaine hefted his battered leather briefcase into his lap as though it contained a bowling ball, unhitched the clasps and withdrew a business card. “If you call the home office, ask for Ron Stillwagon, he was with the bureau’s Houston office for quite a while. I think he might be able to fluff your comfort level.”

  “Give me a minute.” Lattimore rose, thumbing his cell phone, but the number he entered wasn’t the one on the card. He called the secretary for his unit, ran the company and its numbers past her, then the names McIlvaine and Stillwagon. “Text me back if it all checks out. Call otherwise.” He flipped the phone closed, walked back to his chair and sat. “Sorry.”

  “Not at all. I’d do the same.”

  For the first time, Lattimore noticed that one of the man’s ears was half an inch lower than the other. It explained the crooked glasses. He had to resist an impulse to dock his head, render the face plumb. “Mind if I ask why you’re interested in Samir Khalid Sadiq?”

  “We have units stationed in Iraq, doing both VIP transport and antifraud. We work closely with the bureau over there, among other agencies. One of our men in the Green Zone is an old Urgent Fury pal, the two of us were intelligence analysts with the Second Fleet, we stay in pretty regular touch. Your inquiries came to his attention and he thought, given the fact your case touches on matters relevant to my region of interest—that would be Mexico, Central America—that I might want to connect with you, see if I could be of any assistance.”

  Lattimore felt vaguely backdoored. The bureaucratic merry-go-round in this thing was already mind-numbing. Beyond the guys on the ground in Iraq whom this McIlvaine bird had already mentioned, there was the counterterrorism desk in Washington, the Transnational Anti-Gang Task Force in Los Angeles, and outside the bureau he’d had to involve ICE on the immigration angle—without a significant public benefit parole, Happy Orantes would get grabbed right out of Lattimore’s office and deported so fast his head would spin, no matter what he had to say or who he had to offer. Then there was Homeland Security’s inspector general on the corrupt border agent angle, and if they decided to pass—he was still waiting for an answer—it would be back to ICE, their office of professional responsibility. And then there was the Pentagon, the NSA, even the OGA/CIA, who’d be tracking the cousin Roque through his cell phone and informing trusted local contacts in Mexico and Central America of his whereabouts in case something went sideways. The State Department insisted on notification too, since they were permitting known criminals to enter a sovereign ally, and most likely they’d inform the MFJP, the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, the gold standard for south-of-the-border corruption, something to put off as long as possible.

  He felt his cell phone vibrate in his breast pocket, pulled it out. A text: “All OK.” He dropped the phone back in his pocket.

  “So then, Mr. McIlvaine—”

  “Andy. Please.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  The bristly face rubbered up another butterscotch smile, further skewing his glasses. He fussed again with his briefcase clasp, rummaged about inside, finally extracting a thin sheaf of papers. With no more exertion than that, a bead of perspiration formed in the hollow of his temple, hanging there, a minor defiance of gravity. “This may still be making its way to your desk.” He leaned forward, holding the documents out. “I thought I might facilitate.”

  Taking the papers, Lattimore noticed the cover sheet bore no agency heading or seal, just a line at the top for subject reference—in this instance, the name Samir Khalid Sadiq—then another line for the date, a third bearing a source code he couldn’t decipher. He pictured the original gathering dust on somebody’s desk in Baghdad. Typical, he thought, and yet the poverty of detail on the face sheet suggested clandestine channels, spooks in the ether, dead drops. OGA. How many lies would he have to sit through, he wondered, if he asked Mr. Itchy Teeter-Peepers how he got his hands on the thing?

  The second page was in Arabic, the third a translation. It appeared to be a data sheet of some sort, for an employee, a contact, maybe the target of an inquiry. Lattimore’s eye, trailing across the page at random, quickly settled on the word “Mukhabarat.”

  “You may or may not know this,” McIlvaine ventured, the lone bead of sweat still hovering at eye level. “Forgive me if I’m belaboring the obvious. After the fall of Baghdad, coalition forces took control of various government ministries, including the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police. By the time they arrived, unfortunately, many of the files had been destroyed in the invasion’s first wave of bombings. Most of the rest were boxed up by loyalists and hustled away or carted off by looters. In the weeks after Baghdad fell, some files resurfaced, many of them ransomed off to the families of men who had disappeared. Some were sold to journalists—it was practically a cottage industry. It’s difficult to know the value of what remained. This, for example.” He wiggled his hand at the sheaf of papers. “Your man Samir was on the payroll, that much appears certain. What does it mean? He may have been an interpreter through the foreign press office or a minder for a foreign journalist. They may have enlisted him as an informer, they kept a close eye on the Palestinians in-country. Or he could have been nothing more than a driver for one of the car companies the Mukhabarat operated.” He shrugged, then crossed his legs, revealing a bright hairless shin above the bunched gray sock. “Maybe he collected payoffs. Maybe he was an assassin. Maybe this document is fake.”

  Lattimore had to resist an impulse to reach over and wipe the drop of sweat away, maybe straighten the man’s glasses while he was at it. He handed the papers back. “You came all the way from Dallas to tell me that?”

  McIlvaine’s smile turned sly. “A link to the Mukhabarat is, of course, inherently significant. Top to bottom—analysts, case agents, drivers, torturers, common thugs—they were jobless after Baghdad fell. Many went to the Americans hoping for a job and got brushed off. That left the resistance, which they flocked to, angry, humiliated, out of work, but also well informed and lavishly armed since neither the Third Army nor the First Marines were assigned to guard the weapons depots.”

  Lattimore studied the man’s eyes, which had hardened almost imperceptibly behind the old-fashioned lenses. Anyone who’d served in uniform couldn’t look at that war and not turn bitter at the recklessness, the idiocy, the arrogance. But that wasn’t quite relevant to the matter at hand. “The fact we can’t be sure exactly who this man is as yet,” he said carefully, “argues for the greater control we can exert by keeping tabs on him, which this investigation does. What would you rather have us do, let him move at will?”

  Another smile from McIlvaine, less sly than indulgent. “We’ve learned Mr. Sadiq was sponsored by a prominent Salvadoran of Palestinian descent for his visa, not someone we know, exactly, but a friend of a friend, let’s say, two or three degrees removed from people we trust. That doesn’t mean he’s a genius or a saint but he’s on our side, as far as we can tell.”

  “Let me stop you for a second. Tell me again, this is all of interest to you why?”

  “To be honest, I thought the more relevant issue would be its interest to you.”

  “My interest is obvious. Yours—”

  “As I said, this is my area of expertise. I work in the private sector. When you have the fee structure we do, you’d better know your business. We can’t wait to educate ourselves as circumstances dictate. We’re paid to predict, not react.”

  “What concerns me,” Lattimore said, “is why my business is your business.”

  “Mr. Sadiq is my business. Any potential threat in the region is. Now, may I continue?”

  Lattimore felt outmaneuver
ed. Still, better to see where the thing was heading.

  McIlvaine toggled his glasses. “Where was I? Yes, a foreign affairs officer from the embassy followed up—our embassy, down there, in Santa Elena. The sponsor said he was asked to back Samir because he’d helped the Salvadoran troops in Najaf. That’s all he knew. He preferred not to say who asked him to step up for the sponsorship but claimed it was absolutely not someone who would knowingly get involved in a plot to move a terrorist across three borders into the States.”

  Lattimore marveled at the scant reassurance the word “knowingly” provided. Given the capacity for ignorant blundering you saw everywhere, Iraq most of all, what difference did it make what you knew or intended? Still, despite the sense of being outflanked, he took some relief from McIlvaine’s news. It basically confirmed Happy’s version of events.

  “El Salvador,” McIlvaine continued, “is relatively enlightened on immigration issues, curiously enough. During World War II, the Salvadoran embassy in Geneva issued citizenship papers to more than forty thousand Hungarian Jews. Of course, most didn’t emigrate. But the citizenship documents kept them from being deported to the camps.” He drummed his fingers on his briefcase. “The curse of all intelligence analysts: I’m a history buff.”

  “Fascinating,” Lattimore said.

  McIlvaine took no offense. “There’s a word you use for the kind of case you’re working, if I’m not mistaken, where you insert an informant into a nest of bored, restless, vaguely ill-inclined but not yet traitorous young men, with the hope that, given a little stirring of the pot, a dash of conspiratorial brio—a pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda in a warehouse rigged for video, let’s say—you can charge them all for conspiracy to commit terrorism. An acronym, am I right?”

  A flume of bile lodged in Lattimore’s throat. “BOG,” he acknowledged.

  “And that stands for …?”

  “Bunch of guys.”