“Man. Man. Guys! Hold on. Don’t shoot. Please don’t shoot.” He put his hands behind his head, fingers interlocked, and in a moment steel handcuffs bit into his wrists. The guns were put away, although the little woman seemed disappointed that she hadn’t pulled the trigger.
The valets had brought out the cars and were standing beside the doors, gawking at the scene. People who dined at the restaurant normally didn’t carry an arsenal of weaponry when they sat down for a meal. Lucky showed his FBI badge. “No problem, boys. Just a drunk. I’m going to drop him at the cop shop.”
Kyle shoved the man into the back of the silver Lexus and slid in beside him. Lucky got behind the wheel. Janna and Coastie would follow in the Beemer. As the cars moved out, the man was wishing that the cops had shown up. In less than a minute, he had gone from being in control of an easy mugging to being hog-tied in a car with two very unhappy campers.
Kyle ran his hands through the man’s pockets, unbuckled his belt and tore open the waistband, snatched off his shoes and threw them out the window. “Hey!” the man protested, and caught an elbow in the mouth.
“Who are you, and what were you doing?” Kyle gave a painful finger jab into the appendix
“Man. Stop it, okay? Just stop it. I want a lawyer.”
“Don’t blame you for that, but it ain’t going to happen.” Kyle ripped open the dirty shirt to expose a hairy chest. No wallet. No cell phone. No wire. No listening devices. No dope and no needle tracks. “You’re neither a drunk nor a druggie. Good watch, reading glasses, clean fingernails, key ring with a Mazda entry fob, and a wedding ring. You’re a player, asshole.”
The face changed. He said nothing, and struggled against the cuffs. An effort to raise his feet and kick at the driver stopped when Kyle nailed him with a hard bash into his balls.
“Do something like that again and I’ll put a bullet in your stomach, understand? Now, who the fuck are you, dumbass?”
“Richard Dale. Private detective.” The captive closed his eyes and leaned his head back, recognizing that his situation was hopeless unless he gave up everything he knew. Escape was not an option. “Your name is Swanson, right? I’ve been following you for two days. Took pictures, that was all.”
Kyle caught Lucky’s eyes in the rearview and saw the slight shake of the head. “You had a gun. You were going to shoot me.”
Dale gurgled a laugh. “It ain’t even loaded, man. My client said just to wave it around, like, scare you. Said you would get pissed off but not take me down because you’re a pro. Now, that Snow Queen — didn’t count on her. And the little one was about to cool me out until you stopped her. You guys date weird women.”
In the front seat, Lucky got Janna on speed dial and asked her if the weapon she had taken was loaded. “No bullets,” he told Kyle.
They were well away from the waterfront, heading north into the darkness. “You from around here, Dale?” Kyle said.
“Jersey,” he replied. “Trenton.”
“Then you might have figured out that we’re heading out on the Delmarva Peninsula, where there are miles and miles of coastline. Many a body has been found out in those rugged dunes. Who’s the client, Dale?”
“He calls himself Prince — that’s all I know. He pays cash in hundreds, in advance. Baseball cap, sunglasses. No remarkable features. Looks like a million other dudes. I figured you might be screwing his wife or something personal like that. You know, take the pictures and put a scare into you. Routine stuff.”
Kyle paused and thought it over. “Dale, have you ever heard of a guy by the name of Nicky Marks?”
The PI shook his head. “Never. Who’s he?”
“Never mind. Lucky, pull over and let this asshole out.” Kyle unfolded a knife and slit the leather belt. They got him out of the car in the brightness of the headlights from the trailing BMW and made him hobble into the roadside ditch. The pants fell around his feet, which were bare. The handcuffs came off.
“Don’t kill me, man.” He rubbed his wrists. “C’mon. I don’t know how to contact Mr. Prince. He said he would know what happened because he would be watching tonight. I didn’t see him. Dude, he may have been there!”
“You get to go home tonight, Mr. Dale,” Lucky said. “It is a onetime pass. You stepped into a probable terrorist operation, so Big Brother is going to be watching you from now on. If you report this, your next address will be some cave jail in Africa. Understood?”
“Yuh. Got it, man. Thanks.”
Kyle’s cell phone chimed before he got back into the Lexus. Luke Gibson’s name flashed on the call screen. The voice was neither calm nor excited, just a bit out of breath. “Kyle, watch your ass tonight, pal. Somebody just took a shot at me.”
11
The Pamir Mountains around the crossroads town of Girdiwal were pocked with caves, some little more than a few rocks leaning together and others deep and wide. Earthquakes rearranged them from time to time, but, as the Taliban had discovered, they were solid structures that were hidden from the prying eyes of Western satellites. Even if the space birds could somehow see inside, their nations apparently had no interest in doing anything. Anything or anyone could be in those deep holes. The Prince owned a few.
Mohammed Azad, the opium broker, had purchased the crop of gum from Farida Mashaal, packed it with other such harvests until he had a full caravan of plodding, sure-footed mules, and sent it up the scant trails that laced the gray-brown mountains for processing.
A chemical stench permeated the destination, which was the entrance to one of the largest caverns. Despite expensive air purifiers and ventilation, it was still a cave. Workers inside kept their masks on tight, wore white bio-suits and goggles beneath the artificial light. They worked only short shifts in the stifling and dangerous odor of calcium hydroxide, acetic anhydride, ammonium chloride, ether, and other volatile chemicals. No matter that many of them couldn’t read, lived in homes without electricity or running water — they cooked and stirred and strained and distilled and performed a miracle every day.
The raw opium paste became morphine, then it was stepped up to low-grade heroin, and, finally, to brown heroin that was ninety percent pure. The final processing stamped it into bricks that each weighed one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds. The product was ready for sale and consumption, and began its trek to the markets of Europe, Russia, China, and America, once again aboard the backs of the mule train, one treacherous step at a time.
The winded donkeys would finally plod into a receiving chute to be unloaded, and the heroin was prepared for onward shipment in secure warehouses at the end of a small dirt airstrip. Donkeys were good, but they couldn’t fly, and the Prince had long ago arranged the construction of the critical supply port. Unlike the superlab in the cave, the airstrip wasn’t a secret but nonaligned ground where various interests could be accommodated. Everybody used it for their own purposes. Planes brought in chemicals and took out dope. They flew in weaponry and took out dope. Special operators, intelligence agents of various nationalities, back-channel diplomats came in, and the planes flew out dope. They brought in cash, and brought out even more drugs. On all fronts, quality increased and prices fell and global dependency grew.
The unblinking statue of Thomas Jefferson didn’t preside this time when CIA Director of Intelligence Martin Atkins met Kyle Swanson and Luke Gibson in the middle of the night. The lights burned bright in the headquarters building, and security had been heightened after the pair of agents had been tapped on the shoulder by a new person in the game, someone known only as the Prince. By this time, they wouldn’t even have trusted Mr. Jefferson.