Jack Ryan 12 - The Teeth of the Tiger (23 page)

“We are here, my friends,” he announced. “I hope you are ready to walk.”

All four of them got out, and as before they stretched their legs and looked around. A new man walked in their direction, as the other three SUVs parked and disgorged their passengers.

“Hello, Pedro,” the new Mexican greeted the lead driver, evidently an old friend.

“Buenos dias,
Ricardo. Here are the people who want to go to
America
.”

“Hello.” He shook hands with the first four. “My name is Ricardo, and I am your coyote.”

“What?” Mustafa asked.

“It is just a term. I take people across the border, for a fee. In your case, of course, I have already been paid.”

“How far?”

“Ten kilometers. A modest walk,” he said comfortably. “The country will mostly be like this. If you see a snake, just walk away from it. It will not chase you. But if you get within a meter, it can strike you and kill you. Aside from that, there is nothing to fear. If you see a helicopter, you must fall to the ground and not move. The Americans do not guard their border well, and, oddly enough, not as well in daylight as at night. We have also taken some precautions.”

“What is that?”

“There were thirty people in that van,” he said, pointing to the large truck they'd seen coming in. “They will walk in ahead of and to the west of us. If anyone is caught, it will be them.”

“How long will it take?”

“Three hours. Less, if you are fit. Do you have water?”

“We know the desert,” Mustafa assured him.

“As you say. Let us be off, then. Follow me, amigo.” And with that, Ricardo started walking north. His clothes were all khaki, he wore a military-style web belt with three canteens attached, and he carried military-style binoculars, plus an Army-style floppy hat. His boots were well worn. His stride was purposeful and efficient, not overly fast for show, just to cover ground efficiently. They fell in behind him, forming a single file to conceal their numbers from any possible trackers, with Mustafa in the lead; about five meters behind their coyote.

THERE WAS
a pistol range about three hundred yards from the plantation house. It was outdoors, and had steel targets, a set just like those at the
FBI
Academy
, with headplates, circular and roughly the size of a human head. They made an agreeable clang when hit, and then they fell down, as a human target would do if hit there. Enzo turned out to be better at this. Aldo explained that the Marine Corps didn't emphasize pistol shooting too much, whereas the FBI paid particular attention to it, figuring that anybody could shoot a shoulder weapon accurately. The FBI brother used the two-handed Weaver stance, while the Marine tended to stand up straight and shoot one-handed, the way the services taught their people.

“Hey, Aldo, that just makes you a better target,” Dominic warned. “Oh yeah?” Brian rippled off three rounds and got three satisfying clangs as a result. “Hard to shoot after you take one between the running lights, bro.”

“And what's this one-shot/one-kill crap? Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice.”

“How many did you give that mutt in
Alabama
?” Brian asked.

“Three. I didn't feel like taking any chances,” Dominic explained. “You say so, bro. Hey, let me try that Smith of yours.”

Dominic cleared his weapon before handing it over. The magazine went separately. Brian dry-fired it a few times to get used to the feel, then loaded and cycled the action. His first shot clanged a headplate. So did his second. The third one missed, though number four did not, a third of a second later. Brian handed the weapon back. “Feels different in the hand,” he explained.

“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.”

“I'll be damned.”

“Anything new with Sali?” Wills asked, bringing things back to reality.

“There's some little stuff. You know, fifty thousand here, eighty thousand there—pounds, not dollars. Into accounts I don't know much about. He goes through anywhere from two to eight thousand pounds a week in what he probably considers petty cash.”

“Where does that cash originate?” Wills asked.

“Not entirely clear, Tony. I figure he skims some off his family account, maybe two percent that he can write off as expenses. Not quite enough to alert his father that's he stealing from Mom and Pop. I wonder how they'd react to that?” Jack speculated.

“They wouldn't cut his hand off, but they could do something worse—cut his money off. You see this guy working for a living?”

“You mean real work?” Jack had himself a brief laugh. “Somehow I don't see that happening. He's been on the gravy train too long to like driving spikes into the ties. I've been to London a lot. Hard to figure how a working stiff survives there.”

Wills began humming. “'How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they seen Paree?”'

Jack flushed. “Look, Tony, yeah, I know I grew up rich, but Dad always made sure I had a summer job. I even worked construction for two months. Made life hard for Mike Brennan and his pals. But Dad wanted me to know what it was like to do real work. I hated it at first, but, looking back, it was probably a good thing, I guess. Mr. Sali here has never done that. I mean, I could survive in a real-world entry-level job if I had to. It'd be a lot harder adjustment for this guy.”

“Okay, how much unexplained money, total?”

“Maybe two hundred thousand pounds—three hundred thousand bucks, call it. But I haven't really pinned it down yet, and it's not all that much money.”

“How much longer to narrow it down?”

“At this rate? Hell, maybe a week if I'm lucky. This is like tracking a single car during New York rush hour, y'know?”

“Keep it up. Isn't supposed to be easy, or fun.”