Do They Know I'm Running? (21 page)

“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 Khalid 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 outmaneuvered. 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.”

“Exactly. The full power of the American government brought to bear against … a bunch of guys.”

“Mr. McIlvaine—”

“Boy, if that doesn’t shiver Old Glory right up the flagpole, I don’t know what does.”

Lattimore checked his watch. He was due to meet Happy back at his office in half an hour, review his most recent tapes, which were, by and large, not just boring and repetitive but worthless. “So you didn’t come all the way from Dallas just to show me an essentially meaningless one-page document.”

“As I told you—”

“You came to put me in my place.”

“It’s no secret your bunch-of-guys cases haven’t fared too well. Snitch problems.”

“Snitch problems are a given.”

“The Liberty City trial’s a debacle. What is it now, two hung juries in a row?”

“We got verdicts across the board in Fort Dix. The Toledo case came out okay.”

“Sure, with two full years of video and audio.
Two years
. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t have that kind of window here.”

Lattimore felt himself recoil inwardly. The guy knew way too much.

“Meanwhile,” McIlvaine added, “your bureau buddies went off chasing vegan bicyclists around Minneapolis trying to recruit snitches before the Republican National Convention. I’m sure that ended well. Is this the best we can do?”

Depends on who you mean by we, Lattimore supposed. “This case was vetted before I moved on it.”

“It makes us look like we’re making this crap up. We’re not. Hezbollah has camps in the Triple Border area. They know we’re watching, too, because some have fled east into the jungles of Brazil, or west into Iquique, Chile’s northern desert. Hezbollah’s also connected to Pablo Escobar’s old cronies who now run cocaine through a paramilitary organization in Medellin called the Office of Envigado. The money gets laundered by Lebanese businessmen in Bogotá and Caracas. They have sleepers operating out of Iranian embassies all over the region. They even have websites, no joke, for their presence in several countries, including El Salvador. There’s solid intelligence they’re surveilling U.S. and Israeli targets throughout the subcontinent. And it’s not just Hezbollah we’re tracking. It’s Hamas, the PLO. Given that this Samir Khalid Sadiq claims to be Palestinian, that’s relevant I’d say.”

“I wouldn’t disagree. Look—”

“These groups are trading guns for drugs with the Mexican and Colombian cartels. The markup on cocaine alone in the Middle East is obscene. A kilo of Mexican coke costs them $6,000. You can turn it around for $100,000 in Israel, $150,000 in Saudi Arabia. Imagine what that kind of money buys. You’re seeing a lot of meth over there now too, the
jihadis
use it to amp up for battle. That’s serious, all of it, especially compared to
a bunch of guys.”