Authors: Theodore Judson
Deadly Waters (28 page)
11/26/10 15:54 PST
On a Friday afternoon, when his employees were preparing to leave the office for the weekend, Mondragon’s secretary brought a cryptic message to her boss in his singularly vast office. The missive had appeared on her fax machine and read in its entirety: “Time to talk.”
“A friend of mine,” Mondragon had explained. “He enjoys these little jokes.”
After five o’clock he went downstairs to the parking garage and drove alone to a small bar across the bay in Richmond called the Orphans’ Eden. Inside an old fashioned phone booth in the parking lot he dialed a number with a 303 prefix.
“Hello?” said a female voice from somewhere in Colorado.
“Tell the panther I have harkened to his call,” said Mondragon.
The woman on the other end of the line understood at once and said no more. The next day at seven minutes before one in the afternoon, Mondragon’s security guards let Col. Method into a nearly empty office building. Erin was awaiting him behind his desk in the main office.
“What is it you wish to talk about, Colonel?” Mondragon asked.
“I thought we agreed you would address me as ‘Panther’ from now on,” said Method.
“Very well then, Panther,” sighed Mondragon. “This room is soundproof, I might mention. What is it, Panther, that do you want to tell me?”
“Have you heard what Greeley has done?”
Colonel Method was clearly excited, and while Mondragon mistrusted emotionalism in anyone, he hated it when it afflicted a man as dangerous as the colonel.
“Greeley is in Alabama flying airplanes,” said Mondragon. “What else should I know about him?”
“Log onto RATZTALE.com,” ordered the colonel. “You’ll understand then.”
Mondragon leaned back in his chair and counted to ten. Unlike some men, Method would not be intimidated by a flash of anger. Mondragon knew he had to control himself in order to control the conversation.
“I realize this is a Saturday,” said Erin. “I am nonetheless busy. Save me some time and simply tell me what RATZTALE.com is?”
“It’s a place on the web run by Phillip Mason.”
“Who is?” asked Mondragon, and he rolled his hands to indicate that Method should elaborate.
“He has a nationally syndicated talk show broadcast from a little town in Nevada,” explained Method, clearly astonished that Mondragon had never heard of the celebrated Mr. Mason. “He covers subjects like UFOs, conspiracy theories, and such.”
“Does he do Bigfoot?” asked Mondragon. “Bigfoot is my favorite crazy subject.”
“You have to let me finish,” insisted Method, unaware that Mondragon was attempting to be amusing. “Someone whose initials are J.G. called Mason and tells a story about training the Columbians in Venezuela. Then he sends Mason this information and Mason puts it on his website. The creep says two businessmen from California funded the whole operation. He names an engineer, Ed Harris, as the guy who built the torpedoes. He says a former Army colonel--the asshole actually uses the name Method--he says he trained the Colombians. Then on the following night, that was the Twentieth--I neglected to say this first phone call happened on the Nineteenth—”
“You tend to talk faster than you think when you get overwrought, old man,” observed Mondragon.
“So Mason gets a phone call, on the air, from a woman calling herself Lilly, and she said that J.G. was her boyfriend and he flew the Colombians into the country. You should know that Lilly is the name of the widow Greeley has been servicing.”
“Hmm. How do you know that last detail?” asked Mondragon.
“Intelligence,” said Method and didn’t elaborate.
“Are you watching him? How many of us are you keeping an eye on? This is the Thorpes and Abe Wilson all over again, isn’t it?”
“Wilson was shooting his mouth off to everybody that stayed at his bed and breakfast place,” said Method. “I did what was necessary. I would never watch you. I trust you. And young Harris. You claim Taylor is trustworthy.”
“John Taylor is strictly off limits to you, my friend,” asserted Mondragon, for once venturing to give the volatile Method a direct order. “When did you last speak directly to Greeley?”
“I saw him Wednesday,” said Method, clearly not pleased that Mondragon was bossing him about. “He denies everything. He says he doesn’t have a girlfriend named Lilly anymore. Says she breaks bread with other geezers down there in Alexander City. Women are like that. All whores and traitors. A bullet in the brain is the only thing that shuts them up.”
“You have an interesting philosophy,” said Erin, and rapped his chin as he thought out loud. “This is indeed a very dangerous situation. We don’t know Greeley is behind this. Why should he talk? He is in this as deep as we are. You have to take into account, Panther, that this a man with an intelligence background only a few degrees less impressive than yours. He was tortured in prison, and he refused to betray the men who had betrayed him. Now you say he's supposedly shooting his mouth off for no reason? No, it makes no sense. More likely, this is being done by somebody Abe Wilson talked to. He’s trying to set up a blackmail scheme or something of that sort. For the time being, touch base with Harris and Greeley. Tell them to watch themselves.”
“Shouldn’t we make an example of him?” asked Method., who had not shot anyone in months and was feeling out of practice.
“Greeley isn’t a talker,” said Mondragon. “Put a word in his ear if you must. You mustn’t over react, Meth--I mean, Panther. The serious minds in the government have long ago given up on finding any more conspirators. Politicians don’t speak of it any more. The farce is truly over. Should anyone pay attention to this nonsense this nutcase talk show is reporting, those that count won’t think it’s real.”
“We’ll see,” responded Method, and left Mondragon alone in his six thousand square feet of personal office space.
Method had promised he would not harm Kenneth Greeley. He had not persuaded Mondragon he would behave. Method was constantly either outraged or in a state of cold determination, and Erin mistrusted both of the warrior’s moods. The colonel was deadly in any mental state. Mondragon had come to think of Method as being like a cobra. Sometimes he lashed out because he was provoked and sometimes because striking at others was in his nature. Controlling him was not an option.
Mondragon sat in his office thinking of what he should do were Method to use the same excessive force he had used in Washington state. He searched through a drawer at the bottom of his desk and found an old match tablet that had the name Carnie Rogers written inside the cover and an Oakland, California, address beside the name. The thought of Carnie made Mondragon frown; he dialed the home phone of one of his off-duty bodyguards anyway.
“Trey,” he said, “I want you to get in contact with someone. Come up to the office; this will be a little complicated.”
12/01/10 10:15 PST
“He’s done it again!” Method roared into the telephone. “He’s talked to his girlfriend and now she’s talked to that damned talk show host, this time for a whole hour. She named me, Taylor, and you, Mr. Mondragon. Everybody but Harris. They’re clearly in this together.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions again,” said Mondragon. “Didn’t you speak to him? And by the way, weren’t you the one who never wanted to talk on my phone?”
Erin had been talking to a construction contractor he had been thinking of engaging when the call came. He hated having his business proceedings interrupted and was further upset to hear Method’s new tone; this was something odd and unexpected in the Colonel. The man sounded as if he might actually be afraid.
“He claims he doesn’t know anything,” said Method. “The Lilly bitch takes the same line.”
Mondragon was ever reluctant to order his minions to kill someone. The eighty-four thousand deaths the flooding had caused and the thousands more killed by the Colombian bombing sorties were coincidental to achieving larger goals, and Erin had gloried in none of that unfortunate gore. As far as he knew, Kenneth Greeley had been a loyal soldier in his cause; sending Method after him could well bring other complications.
What, for starters, would Taylor and Harris think? Would they become frightened and perhaps alert the government when Greeley turned up dead? On the other hand, he could not allow Greeley and his girlfriend to keep telling secrets to this talk show host. It occurred to Mondragon as he listened to Method rant that he really did not need to make a decision in this instance; Method had already made the choice for him, and Greeley’s death would also be incidental to the larger course of events. Once the other conspirators got wind of this, he could tell Taylor and Harris that this was Method’s doing.
“Do what you think best,” Mondragon told Method, and the colonel was gone from the other end of the line before Erin could have said anything more.
Mondragon put his chin down to his chest and made a single circuit of his office in deep thought. The bewildered contractor he had been negotiating with before Method called sat in the tiny, straight-backed chair in front of Mondragon’s desk and waited until Erin returned.
At the end of his lap about the room Mondragon seated himself in his elevated and very comfortable chair and said, “So, Mr. Anderin, I think we can proceed with your proposal, with one tiny alteration I am sure you will not even notice.”
12/02/10 23:50 CST
For three days Bob Mathers had watched from the small grove of sycamore and ash trees four hundred meters east of Kenneth Greeley’s house outside Alexander City, Alabama. On the last day of November he had found a hairdresser in Talladega who, in return for five thousand dollars, had been willing to call a talk show host pretending to be someone named Lilly, and she had imparted all manner of information concerning a conspiracy to blow up dams on the Colorado River. That had set out the goat; now he was waiting for the tiger to come.
Twice a day Bob made a supply and bathroom run into town. The rest of the time he had sat in his simple blind and endured the cold rain that had fallen nonstop since he arrived in the Heart of Dixie state. The day before, a Wednesday, had been an uneventful day in the rural vista Bob commanded from his hiding place in the grove. The rain had kept the locals out of the stubble fields, allowing Bob lots of occasions to retreat to the rear of the grove, where there was a dirt track on which he had parked his pick-up.
He was inside his truck out of the wet when a tall, older man possessing an athletic build that belied his age arrived in front of Greeley’s home in a blue Honda sedan. Bob had raced back to his blind only to see the back of the tall man’s head as he entered Greeley’s front door. Felix Collins had provided Bob only one ancient photograph from Method’s high school yearbook; the glimpse Bob had was not enough to tell him if this was the mysterious colonel. Using his binoculars, Bob had taken down the license plates and the name of the car’s rental company.
The tall man had stayed for less than ten minutes inside Greely’s farm house; he was wearing dark glasses and had a cap pulled down low on his forehead, which also obscured Bob’s view of him as the stranger left the house. Now, late at night, the same tall, angular man in a different rental car had driven to a point a hundred yards north of Greeley’s home. The driver turned off his headlights and engine and cruised to a silent stop that no one within the sleeping farmhouse would have noticed.
Bob lost track of the tall man in the darkness until he strode into the glow of the single yard light attached to a pole in front of Greeley’s house; Bob could see that the tall man carried an object in his right hand, something that had a long, narrow end the stranger kept pointed toward the ground. The tall man swiftly broke a glass pane on Greeley’s front door and reached inside to undo the locks and let himself inside.
Bob considered charging toward the house, his gun drawn, and making a citizen’s arrest, when the tall man emerged outside. Better judgment told him he could not reach the yard in time. Were this indeed Colonel Method from the computer file, he would be more than Bob’s match in a shoot-out in the dark.
Bob chose to run back into the grove and to his truck. He drove onto Alabama Highway 63, which two miles later emptied him onto US-280, the main road north into Birmingham. The largest local airport and rental car facilities lay in that city. Bob made the risky guess that the tall man would flee in that direction.
The former deputy sheriff pulled onto the shoulder a half mile down the road from where he could watch the traffic flow past. This being a weeknight and almost twelve o’clock, there was little for him to watch. A Volkswagen van, a couple SUVs and nine tractor trailers sped past in the eleven minutes he waited.
Mathers finally decided that he had made the wrong choice. Method must have gone south in the direction of Auburn or southwest toward Montgomery. Bob made an illegal u-turn on the highway and drove back the way he had come. A quick foray to his hiding place in the grove showed him that the tall man’s car was gone and presumably had taken another route from the Alexander City area. As the town of some thirteen thousand inhabitants was too big for him to search by himself, Bob stopped at a small store and made some phone calls that might give him some clue where the tall man was headed.
“If you had to catch a plane,” he asked the young boy in dirty overalls behind the store counter, “where would you go around here?”
“Montgomery or Birmingham, either one,” said the boy. “Both are hub ports, sort of. The big hub is in Atlanta.”
“You mean you can catch a flight into Atlanta from either city?”
The boy had to weigh the question before he answered. “Yeah, into Atlanta,” he said. “Then onto other big cities.”
Bob had been holding a phone book in which he hoped to find the number of a rental car company. He put the book down when he realized he had no idea what office in what city to call. He instead dialed Felix Collins in California.
“Can you get into the data bank of National Rental Car company and find a car for me?” Bob asked. “I don’t know the city he got it from. I do have the license plate number.”
“I’ll save you the trouble of waiting for me to find something,” said Felix. “You should’ve listened to me when I told you about the colonel. This Method guy is big league; there’s no way he’d rent a car under his own name. He’ll drop the car off and be gone before I could get back to you. He’d kill your ass dead if you ever got close to him, anyhow.”
“Can you at least find me another photograph of the guy?” asked Bob. “A high school picture of a sixty-seven year old man doesn’t cut it.”
“Forget it,” said Felix. “I looked. He didn’t even have his picture taken in college. I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to get rid of his old high school yearbooks. Get your ears cleaned out, Mr. Ex-officer. Leave this one be. He’s way too scary. He’s crazy good at what he does, and he’s got a short fuse. You hear me?”
Upon hanging up Bob wondered if he should dial 911 and inform the local police that a murder had been committed at the Greeley home or let someone else find the body.