[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (36 page)

I was on my way to a meeting with a person ID’ed only as “Granny” by the head of the local DEA
38
office. He’d provided a personal briefing thanks to a call from a top field agent I’ll only call Narco. If you read
Blood Lies,
you met him in Mexico. Narco and I did some subsequent business, and he owes me even more favors since the adventures described in that book. Coincidentally, he recently received a promotion and is now working in Florida, though how that figures as a step up I’ve yet to figure out.

Given that the Allah’s Rule network had been shut down—something confirmed not only by the admiral but by Fat Tony’s death and the arrest of a number of people in Bangladesh and Yemen—you would think that the people on the far end of the pipeline would be looking for either a new supplier or trying to cut back. But Granny was supposedly looking to expand; my source at the DEA had said she was putting out feelers for more business as recently as a day ago.

Posing as a drug dealer from up north, I’d used a connection Danny had in the Miami police department to reach out to an informer named Lion and set up a meeting with Granny. I was surprised when Lion said we could meet that very night, and now as I was driving down the block, alone, I had a strong suspicion I’d been set up.

I had backups less than sixty seconds away, but I was alone in the car and only lightly armed, considering the area and time of night. All I had was my PK on my hip, an MP5 between the seats, and a couple of shotguns in the trunk.

Plus a pair of grenades under the seat. But they were for emergency use only.

The directions took me to a long driveway covered in shadows. One of my guys—JJ—had just run up the block on his motorcycle, checking it out, and Mongoose was sitting in a car in the next parking lot over, slouched in the seat.

“Gotta guy stepping out of the building,” said JJ, turning around on his bike. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour. First Peter, verse eight.”

Short and stocky, JJ is a former marine recon member who grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, but went to school in Miami. He’s as black as night, and as you undoubtedly just realized, a bit of a fanatic when it comes to quoting from the Bible.

I spotted the man he’d mentioned and slowed, lowering my window. The man approached the car.

“Lion?” I asked.

He pulled open the door and got in. “Go.”

“Where?”

“Just drive. I’ll tell you where we gotta go. People follow me all the time.”

From what Danny’s friend had told me, I expected that Lion would be a low-level drug dealer and user, a guy in a hoodie with his pants falling to his ankles. The Hispanic sitting next to me was wearing an expensive silk suit and smelled vaguely of cologne. He was in his forties, tall, thin, and nervous; if he had a weapon on him it was small and well hidden.

“You’re a friend of Coke’s, right?” he asked. Coke was the street name of Danny’s friend.

“Otherwise I wouldn’t be here,” I said.

“Just checkin’. Take a right.”

He had me make a series of turns through shadowy neighborhoods. Here and there, a man or woman would be standing near a corner, but for the most part the streets were deserted. JJ and the others followed a few blocks behind, tracking with the help of a bug and a GPS locator. We’d also rigged a video bug in the radio. The view was fish-eyed and hard to see on the iPads, but they could hear everything we said loud and clear.

“You’re a white guy, which is good,” Lion told me. “Granny likes white guys.”

“I’m not here for sex.”

“You wouldn’t want sex with Granny. Take a left.”

We drove a few more blocks. I’m not sure if we could have shaken a tail, but the turns got me confused.

“Listen, I need you to put a good word in for me with Coke, all right?” said Lion. “Because my trial is comin’ up, and I can’t afford to be—I can’t go to jail, right. And I can’t lose my law license.”

“You’re a lawyer?”

Evidently the question insulted him, and he shut up almost completely after that, except to give directions. He had me get onto I-95, heading north. At that point, he started getting restless again.

“Can’t this crate go any faster?” he asked. “BMWs are supposed to be quick. What’d you do, use regular gas or something?”

“We don’t want to get stopped.”

“Around here, you go the speed limit, you get stopped. Speed up.”

I held steady at sixty, more intent on making sure my people were close by than calming his nerves. Off the highway again, we headed toward the ocean, then entered a development nestled inside a golf course.

Or maybe it was the other way around—the golf course hugged a cluster of McMansions, all lit with floodlights to show off their stucco facades and exotic landscape plantings.

“Stop here,” he told me. “Right here, in the street. Don’t park. Just stop the car and get out. Keep the engine running.”

“What about you?”

“I’m coming. Don’t do anything weird. Better leave your little machine gun.”

I did. As I got out, two men dressed in black tracksuits came out from around the back of the house on my left. They were carrying what proved to be Uzis.

“Up against the car,” barked one.

We went through the frisking routine. The man who checked me was fairly professional, finding the PK without giving me a wedgie. He tossed the gun in the car. Lion wasn’t carrying.

“That an MP5 you got in the car?” asked the other man after checking the interior.

“That’s right,” I told him.

“Nice.”

“You’re not slumming yourself.”

“That way.” He pointed me toward the house diagonally across from the yard they’d come out of. The middle of the three garage doors opened as we approached. Two other men in tracksuits stepped out, Uzis framed in the dull light of a single interior bulb. They gave Lion and me grim looks, then waved us inside.

We walked between two pimped and freshly waxed Cadillac Escalades; the fumes of carnauba were so thick a spark would set the whole place ablaze. A raised wooden platform framed the door at the back of the garage; a man in a sport coat stood in front of the two-step staircase leading to it.

“You the buyer?” he said to me, pointing.

“I hope to be.”

“Hands.” He gave me a perfunctory frisk. “Go.”

He stepped aside and let me pass, but blocked Lion.

The door opened. A man with an electric scanning device stood on the inside threshold.

“Phone?” he asked.

“In my pocket.”

“Give it here.”

He stepped over to the side of the hall and put the phone down into a large metal box. Then he waved the detector around my body.

“You’re clean,” he said.

“What about my phone?”

“You get that back when you leave. It won’t work in here anyway.”

He put a lid on the box. It was large and bulky; I suspect that it used isolated copper foil to create an electronic barrier to listening devices. A bank of electronic equipment was discreetly tucked under the table; I suspect that one of the devices was a cell phone jammer.

“Go to the end of the hall.”

Another man in a suit was waiting for me there. I’ll say this for the illegal drug trade: it sure does employ a lot of people.

“Inside,” said the man, pointing to the room to his right. He had his hands together in front of him; his manner suggested that he worked in a funeral home during the day.

The room was a fair-sized living room, well appointed with Colonial-style furniture, fancy plants, and a large, slow-moving overhead fan. Light came from a fancy glass-base lamp on a black-lacquer Chinese cabinet near the side of the room.

Granny was sitting in an armless chair at the far end of the room.

“So you want pills?” she asked.

Contrary to what I’d expected, Granny
was
a granny. I won’t call her elderly, but I’d be willing to bet she remembered when horses rode down Main Street.

“I represent some people in New Jersey,” I started.

Granny put up her hand. “Stop. I don’t want to know anything except how you’re going to pay.”

“Cash.”

“Too much trouble,” she said. “We work with bank transfers. If I decide to do business, we’ll explain.”

“Banks can be traced.”

“We have ways of fixing that.”

“How?”

“We’ll handle it. Tell me what you want to buy.”

I gave her a shopping list, with Percodan at the top. I “accidentally” mentioned Viagra twice, though in retrospect that probably wasn’t necessary. Granny listened placidly; we could have been talking about yarns and knitting needles.

“We’re interested in a long-term relationship,” I told her. “I can handle whatever you can get.”

“I’ve made some inquiries,” she said. “You’re in Hoboken?”

“And Jersey City.”

“You have competition there.”

“That’s not really a problem.”

She had done some homework, which was good—Danny had woven a tight background story, using the actual names of a Mafia-affiliated group in the two New Jersey cities along the Hudson. He’d also managed to give me a rap sheet, so I wasn’t surprised when Granny asked if I enjoyed stealing cars.

“Way in the past,” I told her. “Misspent youth.”

“You look familiar,” she said. “Have I seen you somewhere? Maybe on TV?”

“I haven’t made
America’s Most Wanted
yet,” I said lightly. “And I don’t intend on it.”

She let the matter drop. We discussed some details about where the drugs would be picked up—she could deliver, which was preferable for me.

“I will decide in three days,” she told me finally. “You will give me a phone number where you can be reached. We will not meet again. Ever.”

“That’s a disappointment,” I told her, rising. “But I’ll live with it.”

*   *   *

I got my cell phone back at the door.

“Don’t turn it on until you’re in the car,” said the man in the suit as he handed it over.

I kept the phone in my hand as I walked out to the driveway. Lion was standing there, practically hopping from foot to foot. I’d say he wanted to get out of there quickly.

I, on the other hand, wanted to take my time. I slipped my thumb on the power button to the phone as we neared the road, then stopped to tie my shoe.

The phone sprang to life. I waited for a few seconds, glancing in the direction of the car.

It wouldn’t have taken too much skill to set up the cell phone to ignite a car bomb. Fortunately, no one had.

“You comin’?” asked Lion impatiently.

“Keep your shirt on.”

“Jeez.”

He marched toward the car. By now, Trace would have launched a UAV and would be watching from nearby. If there was a problem, she would have sent a message while I was inside. I glanced at the face of the phone. No calls, no texts, no nothing.

Lion slammed the door after getting in. He glared at me as I walked slowly over.

I waited until I was back on the highway before calling Trace.

“No one touched the car,” she said. “You’re not being followed.”

“It went well,” I said. “I’ll talk to you when I get back to New Jersey.”

I hung up before she could ask what I was talking about.

“Where should I drop you off?” I asked Lion.

“Ninth Ave. takeout place. I’ll show you.”

The route back was direct. I let Lion out, then drove six or seven blocks to a convenience store. JJ pulled up a minute later. I walked into the store; he followed, meeting me near the chips.

“Direct me in the path of your commands, for there I find delight,” he declared. “Psalm 119:35.”

“Scan the car for bugs. And give me your cell.”

I called Trace and told her to follow Lion.

“Already on it,” she said.

JJ met me inside a few minutes later. “Tracking device under the front seat. Want me to move it?”

“No, we’ll use it,” I told him. “Track me—if I’m followed, text me.”

“In this way—”

“No more Bible tonight, JJ. Save it for the Sabbath.”

“Exodus,” he muttered as he left.

*   *   *

The tracking device was primitive by our standards, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Since according to the video from the UAV no one had gone near the car while I was in with Granny, we assumed it must have come from Lion.

Leaving it in place, I drove down to South Miami to a hotel where Trace had reserved a room. I went upstairs, clunked some things around, then went down to the bar. Within a half hour, two lugs had shown up. One went and retrieved the tracking device from the BMW; the other came into the hotel and looked around for me.

It was one of the men in the tracksuits who’d frisked me on the way in. I had a good view thanks to the video bug I’d planted at the doorway. I sat at the far end of the bar, pretending to fiddle with my phone, as he got a table close to the front.

What were they up to? Checking my bona fides, I figured, since it would have been easy to take me out at Granny’s and there hadn’t been enough time since then for them to decide they didn’t like the cut of my dungarees. In that case, it would be easy to help them along. I waited a few minutes, ordered another drink, then went over to the booth directly behind my friend’s. I took out my cell phone and called Trace. For the next ten minutes, I discussed the logistics of the drug arrangement. By the time I hung up, tracksuit boy had a full rundown of our plans.

He left the bar shortly after I finished the phone call. In the meantime, his friend had been upstairs checking my room. Among other things, the thug had discovered the spare pistol magazine I’d left in the overnight bag: giving us his fingerprints, in case we needed them.

“I’m watching him tidying up now,” said JJ, who was tied into the feed from a bug I’d left in the room. “Doesn’t look like he remembers which way your bag was facing.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Should I follow them?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary. I’ll meet you at the Grant.”

That was a hotel in a much nicer part of Miami where we’d reserved rooms. I finished my beer, threw two twenties on the bar as a tip, and went out to the lobby. As I walked through the door, I noticed two men in dark suits standing by the registration desk. One of them made eye contact. His face seemed to light up, as if he’d just recognized me.