"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 them 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."
"Aye, aye, sir." It was something he'd picked up from the Marines at the White House. They'd even said that to him once in a while, until his father had noticed and put an immediate end to it. Jack turned back to his computer. He kept his real notes on a pad of white lined paper, just because it was easier for him that way, then transferred them to a separate computer file every afternoon. As he wrote, he noted that Tony was leaving their little room for a trip upstairs.