"Don't you still have a summer place there?"
Burke laughed. "You make it sound like a condo in Vail. 'Place' is a good word, I guess. It's an old farmhouse I fixed up. We haven't had a chance to make it there this summer. Lori and her buddy Chloe Brackin have a better idea for the Fourth."
"The doctor?"
"Yeah. Us and the Doctors Brackin. They want to go to the National Symphony concert on the west lawn of the Capitol. Along with a few hundred thousand other fresh air nuts."
"I thought you liked symphony music," Nate said.
"I do. That was Lori's rationale. Tchaikovsky is one of my favorites. They nearly always do the 1812 Overture as a climax. I get a kick out of the cannons. But this time of year, it's a lot closer for us to go to Wolf Trap for the symphony. Really, I prefer the air conditioned comfort of the Kennedy Center."
"I can agree with you there," Nate said. Then his face was suddenly drawn into a thoughtful frown. "I surely hope the twins are doing all right by then."
Burke nodded. "Thanks. So do I."
The sigh that followed was not occasioned by concern for the twins. It stemmed from the fact that Nate's comment had barely stopped him from blithely stating that Lori had decided to take the kids to the concert. Wouldn't that have sounded great, he thought? That was the trouble with lies. After you told one, everything else you said had to be tinted with the same color scheme or you'd wind up with a red face. At best.
On the way home that evening, Burke was surprised to find a pile of blackened rubble where a vacant service station had sat when he passed it earlier in the day. A band of yellow tape had been strung around the area bearing the warning "Police Line — Do Not Cross." They must suspect arson, he thought.
When he arrived home, he asked Lori if she had heard anything on the news about the fire.
"Explosion," she corrected him, wide-eyed. "I heard the blast. On the news, they reported two charred bodies were found. No identification. Speculation was they were street people living in the vacant building. Some highly volatile materials had been left behind. Probably got touched off when they attempted to cook in there."
"Really a mess," Burke said. He gave her a hopeful look. "Have you heard from the Dolly woman?"
"She called. And she remembered the incident, even recalled the man had given his name as 'Nelson.' I asked if she would check her records for his address, and guess what? She couldn't find any Nelson among the people who worked that night."
"Damn. I'll have to get our security people to contact her for a description. They'll need to talk with Brenda, too. Probably pose as detectives."
He told her of his near slip-up in talking with Nate about the July Fourth concert. "We'd better say the tests were negative so things can get back to normal and I won't have to watch my tongue." That was how espionage agents got tripped up, he reflected. They could go to great lengths to perfect cover stories, then get nailed by some casual, seemingly insignificant slip of the tongue.
Later in the evening, a call came through from Roberto Garcia in Mexico City. Burke took it on his scrambler. The company had uniquely designed fax machines that contained a floppy disk drive and a microprocessor. Special disks were encoded in pairs with computer-generated random algorithms used to scramble and unscramble voice or facsimile transmissions. They were like high-tech versions of the old espionage stand-by, the one-time pad.
"My man Juan just called from San Luis Potosí," Garcia said.
"Where the hell is that?"
"About 400 kilometers northeast of Guadalajara. That's where he ended up. He went to Tequila first thing this morning and located the road leading back into the mountains. He found a family that remembered the truck going in there a couple of days ago. They said it hadn't come back out. Juan staked out the intersection and waited. After awhile, a van leading a yellow dump truck came out and turned toward Guadalajara. He followed them on to San Miguel de Allende, some 360 kilometers to the east."
"What's there?"
"They stopped first at a trucking outfit called Carga la Plata." Garcia described the scene with the crates being transferred to an empty trailer, then the trip to a farm where the trailer was loaded with crates of melons. "Juan determined from the farm workers that the shipment was headed for San Antonio, Texas. Consigned to the Krueger Produce Company. It's due there tomorrow evening around 7:30."
Burke's eyes widened with alarm. San Antonio. Romashchuk was smuggling the chemical weapons into the U.S. "Did he find out where the men went after that?"
"They left the farm as soon as the eighteen-wheeler was loaded. The dump truck turned back toward San Miguel, driven by a big, burly Mexican. The van headed north, apparently with the guy reported to be a German and the Sendero Luminoso guerillas." Garcia hesitated a moment, then asked pointedly, "Are you going to take some action on this, Burke?"
"You're damn right I am, Roberto. But I still don't want anything reported officially. Remember, you gave me a week." This wasn't looking good at all, but he still wasn't ready to approach Nate. He needed more answers first.
"Don't you think the Bureau should be alerted?" Roberto insisted.
It certainly appeared to be a case for the FBI, but the Director of the Bureau, like CIA's Kingsley Marshall and Nate Highsmith, was a member of the Foreign Affairs Roundtable. If Bryan Janney was right about the conspiratorial nature of the FAR, just how pervasive was it? A prominent newspaper publisher had been concerned enough to kill the writer's story. Adam Stern had been concerned enough to kill the writer. The former CIA man, Murray Bender, had given Rodman Burke's name because he didn't trust anyone else.
"Please believe me, Roberto. I've got good reasons for doing it this way. Just stick with me a little longer. Okay?"
"Well, you'd better hear the rest of the story. When they left the farm, Juan followed the van. He had hidden his car in some trees and waited until the van was disappearing around a curve, then pulled out onto the highway. Juan saw the truck in his rearview mirror heading south. About that time, there was a tremendous explosion behind him. When he looked back, he saw the truck had been demolished."
"What the hell happened? Did he have any idea?"
"Juan's an excellent observer. He just reports; he doesn't speculate. Of course, he wasn't interested in staying around there, either. He followed the van on to the San Luis Potosí airport, where they bought tickets to San Antonio. He waited until they boarded the plane, then called me."
"Excellent work, Roberto," Burke said enthusiastically. "Juan deserves a bonus. Anything else I should know about?"
"I guess that's it, Burke. Unless you're interested in murder mysteries."
"What sort of murder mysteries?" Burke suspected that he knew the answer.
"The newspapers here are full of stories about the search for a retired U.S. Air Force colonel. He's wanted for the murder of a prominent Guadalajara businesswoman. Had his picture on page one."
"Where are they looking?"
"They think he's somewhere around Mexico City. There was another American with him. Guy with a Russian-sounding name. He's wanted for questioning."
Damn, that was close, Burke thought. If he had waited any longer, Roddy likely would not have been allowed to board the plane. Or Shumakov, either, for that matter. No doubt they had a description of Ivan Netto. Burke didn't understand why the customs officer hadn't reported their departure on the private jet. Even if he didn't have a good description last night, surely he had seen the newspaper photographs by now. He knew if the little customs agent had made a report, it wouldn't take long for someone to track down the Worldwide Communications Consultants pilots. Then the finger would point directly at Burke Hill.