Deadly Waters (29 page)

LXXVIII

12/06/10 09:21 PST

“When I told you you can call me at my office,” said Mondragon, “I didn’t mean every day. I only now got off the phone with a reporter from some silly tabloid; he wanted to know if I was a part of an anti-government conspiracy. That fool, or someone just like him, could be watching me right now.”

“The talk show host I told you about got another e-mail,” said Colonel Method, speaking from a pay phone along the side of Interstate 80 in Grand Island, Nebraska. “From a party in Wisconsin. Repeat: Wisconsin. Who do we know in Wisconsin?”

“Whom do we know?” said Mondragon.

“That little coward Harris!” barked Method. “He and the traitor Greeley became very close when they were in Venezuela. Greeley bought a silly airplane from him.”

“Speaking of Greeley,” interjected Mondragon, “I am rather uneasy about what you did down south, my friend. He was not a particular danger.”

“I followed operational procedure,” said Method, “as set down by you, my commander-in-chief. I did no less when the two operatives tried to escape Montecual, or when the Indian became an inconvenience.”

Mondragon had not had his second cup of coffee that morning. He hardly felt like having a conversation with a psychopath at that delicate hour when he should have been studying the midday stock reports from Wall Street.

“That’s very well, very well,” he said. “You must appreciate that I and John and, for that matter, young Harris, have ordinary lives to lead. We aren’t living underground somewhere in the American West, not that I’m condemning your mode of living, you understand. A reporter or a federal agent knows where they can find us, don’t you see? A great disadvantage for us, really. I think, therefore, perhaps, you should lay low for a time, Panther, my friend. I think definitely you should stay away from Ed Harris.”

“He’s obviously the one talking,” persisted Method. “He talks to the FBI, and you’ll be wishing I dealt with him as I did with Mr. Greeley.”

Mondragon wished the colonel was taking Prozac like everyone else in Twenty-First Century America. Erin had read in the newspaper that morning of grade schools forcing psycho-tropic drugs onto fourth grade would-be killers who had displayed potentially anti-social tendencies. He regretted he could not sign Method up for a similar program.

“You must promise me, your commander-in-chief, as you insist on calling me, that you will stay out of Wisconsin,” he said to Method, making himself sound as soothing as a psychiatrist speaking to a client. “Someone might be watching him,” he warned, although he strongly doubted anyone was spying on Harris.

“If he further compromises our post-operation mission,” said Method, “I will have to take the necessary actions.”

“What does that mean?” asked Mondragon, understanding at once what Method had in mind. “Method, rather Panther? Don’t hang up! Damn!” he swore as the other end of the line went dead.

Method had clearly become the loosest cannon in an artillery battery Mandragon had hoped was long retired from combat. Here was a man without a known address, having no living relative or any other connection to the future other than the preparation he made for his next mission. He knew how to kill others with mechanical efficiency and was roaming about the nation only too delighted to demonstrate his skills on anyone he thought might be betraying him.

Worse still, Method was becoming more frightening, and hence more powerful, than Mondragon was. Look, thought Mondragon, at the senseless murder of poor Greeley and the pathetic trailer park woman named Lilly old Greeley happened to have in bed with him when Method came to call. Ed Harris had to have already learned of the crime. Despite the alcoholic fog John Taylor dwelt in, he too would read of the grizzly tale and perhaps become so scared he would run to the police for protection.

Being a much deeper and less paranoid thinker than Method, Erin was able to sense the presence of another player in the game. Mondragon reasoned that the happily semi-retired Greeley had no motive to leak secrets. Neither did Harris, who had avenged his father and gained new wealth for himself. Mondragon’s security men watched John Taylor day and night. So who was this phantom who knew too much?

Erin Mondragon paced the blue and white Italian tiles on the floor of his office balcony and considered both the identity of this new nemesis, and how to neutralize the colonel. He had made two complete circuits of the office floor before he concluded the phantom making these embarrassing leaks and the colonel were one and the same.

Who else could have known so much and also felt safe regardless of what outsiders knew? The only question, Mondragon decided, was what sort of payoff was the old military man angling for.

LXXIX

12/06/10 11:22 PST

“Yes, it’s very shocking,” agreed Mondragon, stifling a yawn. Note to self, he thought: send girl home earlier tonight. I need more sleep.

“Why did you kill Kenneth?” asked Harris, speaking on his home telephone. “He never did anything to you.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” said Mondragon. “That man... is that a cell phone?” he asked when he heard a crackle on the line. “People can eavesdrop on cell phone conversations without the use of an electronic bug.”

“I understand about cell phones,” said the engineer. “This is a protected conventional outlet.”

“You can never be too careful,” said Mondragon. “Greeley was Method’s doing. Taylor and I had nothing to do with it. That’s why I called you, Ed. You have to be on the outlook for him. Do you have a bodyguard? I think perhaps you should consider hiring someone.”

“I’m considering leaving Oshkosh for a while,” decided Ed. “When you get that maniac under control again, or you kill him, I’ll get back to you.”

“That’s not a wise choice,” said Mondragon, but Harris was gone before he could say why it was not wise.

This too, thought Mondragon, was out of his hands. If Ed thought he could play hide and seek with Method, then that was his business. He, Erin Mondragon, needed to think of something else. His masseuse had told him some new age methods of concentration, yet thinking for Mondragon meant pacing the floor and forcefully beating the ideas around until something sensible emerged from the carnage. He considered the individuals he and his confederates had dealt with in the past six years and guessed who among them knew enough of their operation to be leaking secrets.

“Mrs. Avery,” he called to his secretary over the speaker phone, “please have my security people in my office at, oh, say three-twenty-one-ish.”

After a catered lunch of fresh Nova Scotian salmon and cream cheese, followed by a butterscotch mousse washed down by a bottle of white Riesling from a winery he owned, Mondragon made some purchases on the market and conducted the rest of his daily routine, while he tried to concentrate on things other than the identity of his unknown opponent. When 3:21 PM rolled around he made the beefy men in his security team sit in folding chairs too small for them and addressed them in short, simple sentences a third grade teacher might use while speaking to a class of not very bright eight-year-olds.

“I want you to think, gentlemen,” he told them as he strode around them and they wrenched their thick necks to follow him. “Did someone suspicious ever speak to Mr. Taylor while you were watching over him? This could have happened at any time. Perhaps when you went to the bathroom. Mind you, I’m not blaming anyone. I’m sure this was an accident, if it happened. David,” he said and a large man twitched the side of his face in response, “let’s start with you. Could Mr. Taylor have spoken to someone he shouldn’t have, while you were following him, I mean?”

Mondragon’s security men knew nothing of the attacks on the dams. They knew only that when John Taylor was in his cups they were supposed to keep him away from strangers. Most of them had become security guards after they failed numerous times to pass the police academy’s entrance exam. That aside, none of them was so stupid he thought he could disappoint Mr. Mondragon and remain in good health for very long. Certainly none of them was going to confess right to the boss’s face that he had failed to protect Taylor. David set the pattern for each of their responses to Mondragon’s question.

“No way, Mr. M.,” said Dave. “I can hold my bodily fluids for sixteen straight hours if I have to. I never let Mr. Taylor out of my sight.”

“Thank you for sharing that with the group, David,” said Mondragon. “Tony, how about you?”

Tony assured Mondragon and God above he had hovered over Taylor like the angel of death each time he drew the assignment.

“On the Twenty-second of October, according to my records,” drawled Mondragon, “you, Anthony, began following Mr. Taylor for two straight days. Reggie was sick, and you did not have relief.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tony. “I stayed awake and right on his ass...I mean I kept, like, my eye on him. I drank protein supplement and peed in a cup.”

“I hope you never got the can of liquid protein and the cup confused,” said Erin.

The other security men in turn swore they had eyes like hawks and bladders as big as those in whales. Then Mondragon came around to Trey, the man Bob Mathers had drugged in the Blue Horn.

“I never left him, Mr. Mondragon,” he said as perspiration ran down his pants legs.

“You’re positive?”

“I’ll take a lie detector test,” said Trey, and he blinked because Mondragon had turned on his heels and was looking straight into Trey’s eyes.

“That won’t be necessary,” said Mondragon.

He interrogated the other men and dismissed the entire host within the space of four minutes. As the group was filing out the door, Mondragon called Trey back into the room.

“Is there something else you wished to tell me, Trey?” Mondragon asked after the others were gone. “Something you did not wish to say in front of your co-workers?”

Trey’s face turned ashen, exactly as the third grade’s very dumbest student’s face would do when the teacher called him to the blackboard. “I contacted those two men you asked me about,” he said.

“Carnie Rogers and his friend Mr. Paterson?” said Mondragon.

“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir.”

Erin had expected more. Carnie was the man whose name he had kept on the ancient match book in his desk drawer. He did not need Trey to tell him anything about them. Carnie had already been in touch, in the secretive, roundabout way men of his ilk use.

“Nothing else?” asked Mondragon.

“No, I... I really don’t know nothing,” stammered Trey.

“I believe that,” said Mondragon, after a pause.

LXXX

12/06/10 16:00 EST

The Secretary of Defense was uncertain how to present the situation to the members of his senior staff. He knew as well as anyone in Washington DC that several of the people in his office owed their positions to the successful handling of terrorist attacks of 2009, Under Secretary Margaret Smythe especially. Sitting inside his Pentagon office in her blue wool suit, she cut a figure that was both alluring and terrifying to everyone present. Like everyone in Washington, he dreaded bringing her discouraging news.

“I have to touch on this,” he began. “Bring everyone up to speed on the matter. You must, I know, have read these things in the paper regarding the Colorado River dams.”

Margaret was not going to let anyone, not even the secretary himself, get a step ahead of her. This was her issue and ultimately the basis of her reputation. She defended herself before anyone had launched a real attack.

“Rumors,” she sneered. “The source was a radio talk show, for God’s sake!”

Ronald Goodman, once Margaret’s lover and now special assistant to her, pointed out that other members of the media were picking up the same story.

“
The
Times
is reporting tomorrow,” he said, “that there are these two businessmen in California said to have some connection to the terrorists.”

“One is a chronic alcoholic and the other is a tax cheat,” chimed in Margaret. “Real James Bond types.”

“Both men have gotten quite wealthy since the disaster,” read Ronald from an inter-office memo. The rest of the staff knew he was animated more by his jealousy of Margaret’s success than by his sense of duty. “Look at the investments they made; they seemed to know what was going to happen. They positioned themselves exactly right months before the dams were hit.”

“A couple hundred thousand other people also made money by positioning themselves the right way,” said Margaret, which the assembled under secretaries agreed was true. In fact, gratis their exalted positions, the under secretaries were among the elite who had profited from the catastrophe, for in government, doing well is one of the primary benefits of doing good, much as Mondragon himself had once observed.

“This man Greeley, the pilot, the one the paper says was murdered in Alabama,” said NSA counter terrorist chief Henry Bartlet, “he had an outstanding military background. Once, when functioning as one of our operatives, he endured two years in a Central American prison and betrayed no one. He doesn’t seem to be the sort of man to kill his girlfriend and then shoot himself, as the local coroner has ruled. The situation doesn’t feel right.”

“Forty-five thousand people kill themselves every year,” argued Margaret. “They each do it only once, and rarely does anyone see it coming. I might add that a lot of them take loved ones with them when they go. And where is there any connection between this man and the men in California?”

“That would be, perhaps, Ms. Smythe, Col. Michael Method,” said Bartlet, the NSA man. “Not that I’m saying that this Method is, or was, anything to our government’s intelligence community.” He glanced at the CIA executive representing that agency at the meeting and at Margaret, and both appeared as unhappy as Bartlet himself was. The NSA man wondered if he should have mentioned the colonel at an informal conference. “If he were—”

“Yes?” said the Secretary of Defense, brought to the edge of his chair. “If he were what?”

“If he were technically alive, or had ever been,” said Bartlet. “Technically, he never was.”

There was a flurry of shuffling feet, rustling papers and clicking teeth in the room.

They knew what it meant when an intelligence chief began hemming and hawing around a former asset who was potentially embarrassing. They knew also that this inquiry was going nowhere. Margaret Smythe understood the same and was greatly relieved, so relieved she slyly showed Ronald Goodman her middle finger as she pushed her reading glasses back onto her nose.

“He might, had he ever been... working for us, or for a related agency, he might have been in Honduras with the late Mr. Greeley,” explained Bartlet. “As I say, he wasn’t with us, so he wasn’t with Greeley.”

“He still isn’t?” asked the Secretary of DoD, and rapped on the table to show he wanted the rustling, shuffling, and clacking to cease.

“He isn’t in every sense of word... or of any other words, or any way you want it, sir,” said Bartlet. “Colonel Method never existed. The record shows that.”

“I think we can safely say there is nothing to this story,” said the Secretary, not one to pursue anything he should not. “As Ms. Smythe has said, it comes from some silly talk show.” He nodded to Margaret. “Let’s all get to work, people, and I don’t want to hear anything more about this.”