Troubleshooter Page 18

  The paint on Tim’s shirt had hardened, staining the fabric Lion’s Tongue Red. A trickle of a less virile tint had dried behind his ear; he’d spent the ride back to Roybal picking bits of windshield glass from his matted hair. Tannino had swapped out his .357 at the command post, wearing a droll expression—“And to think you objected to the nickname.” The marshal was back in his office now, lighting up the phone board.

  Tim and Bear had pulled in Guerrera, who leaned quietly against the bars, preoccupied. Bear had presented him his St. Michael medallion from the Impala’s rearview mirror, and he’d taken it reluctantly, like a war widow accepting Old Glory. The bullet-riddled vehicle had required a flatbed tow.

  “We have you on tape shooting Raymond Smiles.” Bear grimaced and rubbed the red indentation on his forehead. His headache and the ribbing he’d gotten in the command post—Thomas and Freed had wrapped bandages around their heads like turbans, and Jim had adhered a battery-operated police light to his crown with heavy-duty rubber bands—didn’t seem to be helping his mood. “FBI agent you capped in a restaurant in October. You left him facedown in his tiramisu. You remember?”

  Rich tore off a dirty thumbnail with his teeth and spit it on the floor. “He was still on the entrée.”

  “Did you switch teams, Richie Rich?” Bear pressed. “You go on someone’s payroll?”

  Rich gingerly touched the nasty bruise by his temple.

  Tim watched him closely. “You’re undercover,” he said. “Customs or DEA?”

  Rich’s lips barely moved. “FBI.” His first unsnide utterance.

  “FBI?” Bear said. “Great. Spectacular. So now you wanna tell us why we can’t scrape you guys off our boots?”

  Finally Rich raised his head. A blood vessel had burst in his eye, a red flare across his unhealthy-looking, yellow-tinted sclera. “It’s worse than you think.”

  A double knock on the door—the detention enforcement officer’s warning—and the steel swung back with a creak. Dressed impeccably in an olive suit, Raymond Smiles walked into the cell. The black agent paused and raised his hands ever so slightly, a magician’s flourish to underscore his resurrection.

  In a Spanish murmur, Guerrera invoked saints’ names and swear words. Rich held up his wrists, and Smiles unlocked the cuffs.

  Bear stared at the FBI agent, risen from the dead. “What the hell,” he said, “is going on here?”

  Tannino was at the cell door, Jeff Malane beside him. “Why don’t you two come back to my office, and we’ll get this goatfuck untangled as best we can.”

  Tannino had one foot up on his desk, providing the others in the couches and chairs an inadvertently vulgar vantage. He’d cracked a window before sitting, but still the office air was stale and warm.

  “We’ve had our task force on the ground in Los Angeles for three months,” Smiles said.

  “It’s called Operation Cleansweep,” Rich said.

  “We have an operation going on, too,” Bear volunteered from his arms-crossed lean against the wall. “It’s called Operation Take a Fucking Shower.”

  “You got a lotta mouth for a guy knocked himself unconscious with a police light.” Rich’s black eye had gone from purple to an unlikely shade of brown; he’d had to score it with a razor blade to take the swelling down.

  “You were firing an AR-15 at us.”

  “I told you, that was Tom-Tom. I was in the back when the caps started flying.”

  “The roses,” Tim said abruptly.

  His non sequitur drew looks from all quarters.

  “We saw the video clip of your fake hit on Smiles at the restaurant,” Tim continued. “Nice clean angle for the eight o’clock news. But the table you were sitting at”—a nod to Smiles—“had a tall centerpiece. Roses. Live rounds would’ve knocked over the flowers on the way to your chest. Blanks wouldn’t.”

  Rich nodded, impressed. “I’m glad Chief didn’t have your eye.”

  “You knew Smiles was already in Chief’s hit binder, so when given the choice of targets, you picked him.”

  “Only way to make striker and ride with the crew,” Rich said. “Cap a copper.”

  “You did nothing while a pregnant sheriff’s deputy was shot pointblank in the chest.” The intensity of the anger in Tim’s voice brought Tannino upright in his chair.

  Rich spread his hands, palms to heaven. “What the fuck was I supposed to do?”

  The vehicle-cam footage remained vivid in Tim’s mind. The twitch of Rich’s scowl. You’d better back off, bitch. Tim registered the words now as a hidden caution. Rich’s cry the moment before Dray stepped into range had not been an angry shout but a panicked warning—Get the fuck outta here! And after the shotgun blast, Rich’s taut face and bared teeth were, Tim realized, an expression of horror, not atavistic release.

  “Look, my hands were tied at the scene.” Rich’s cheek twitched; the guilt had been working on him. “I took a risk right after and made the anonymous call to the station that probably saved her life.”

  “Let me dust off a medal of valor for you,” Tim said.

  “My hands were tied. There were five of them.”

  Six if you count Marisol Juarez.

  Tim picked up Dray’s rebuke. “Six if you count Marisol Juarez.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “She was the Mexican girl on the back of Kaner’s bike who we found disemboweled last night in a warehouse. You met her at the same time you let Den Laurey shoot Andrea Rackley right above her highly visible pregnancy. Guess your hands were tied there, too.”

  Contrition flashed on Rich’s ragged face, a surprisingly soft expression beneath the scars and stubble. He shored himself back up, adjusting his eye patch with a snap that had to sting. “Some Mexican girl they killed doesn’t make their top ten. These boys’d put a hole in someone’s head just to have a place to rest their beer. A girl who got cut up is— sadly—the fuckin’ least of it. I’ve got bigger responsibilities, a task force living on what I can feed them. I don’t have the luxury of breaking cover just to get myself and their intended victim killed. There are bigger stakes here. I can’t tell you the shit I’ve seen.”

  “You’d better start,” Tannino said. “Right now.”

  The three FBI agents offered one another an array of eye contact that suggested staging, and then Smiles, the head suit at supervisory special agent, cleared his throat and said, “Allah’s Tears.”

  Tannino said, “Huh?” with great annoyance.

  “A new form of extremely fine heroin. The purest to hit our radar. It’s a liquid concentration, translucent like water. AT’s potency, compared to regular heroin, is off the charts. It takes an enormous amount of raw product—the output of hundreds of acres of poppy field—to yield a liter of this stuff. The chem jockeys worked out the production technology so that even saline-diluted to twentieth strength, a milliliter’ll put you on the nod for six hours. It’s highly addictive, makes black-tar withdrawal look like giving up ice cream for Lent. Easier to smuggle, too—requires minimal storage space. You mule in a fist-size shipment, dilute it, dole out drops in vials, and it’ll go like wildfire.”

  Rich took up his hair in a fist, forming a makeshift ponytail. “Think the crack epidemic Supersized.”

  “But this product’s even easier to move. Crack’s appeal is that it’s cheap to the consumer. This is economical for the distributor. And now AT’s ready for a test run. L.A.’s the target market.” Smiles traced his glistening, well-manicured mustache with a thumb and forefinger. “That’s the good news.”

  “The bad news,” Rich picked up without missing a beat, “is that this shit is straight from labs in southern Afghanistan. Affiliated with guess what loosely structured global Islamic terror organization? This particular Hydra head is a Sunni extremist group splintered out of Asbat al-Ansar, call themselves ‘al-Fath.’ Their guy on the ground in L.A. is Dhul Faqar Al-Malik, a Pakistani, alias is ‘the Prophet’s Sword.’ ”

  Tannino’s grimace said he knew the
name. Al-Malik had probably achieved topic-of-discussion status at Head Feds briefings.

  “He’s the point man, tasked with establishing financial and operational footing so they can help generate sleeper cells and bankroll future operations in the city.” Smiles paused, his dark eyes showing the depth of his concern. “We strongly believe that the Prophet has forged an alliance with the Laughing Sinners.”

  “Don’t fundamentalist terrorists have greater concerns at this moment than dicking around with bikers and junkies?” Tannino said.

  “A lot of their assets—particularly those in the U.S.—have been frozen since the post-9/11 crackdown. And since we put the screws to the banks, moving money across borders is harder. We’ve seized more money coming in than I’m at liberty to disclose. AT is the newest wrinkle. It eliminates the need for al-Fath to smuggle large quantities of heroin into the country, or money, and it also cuts the need to set up a false-flag operation.” A hint of admiration found its way onto Smiles’s face. “The money’s made in L.A., and it stays in L.A.”

  “Until it funds God knows what,” Rich said. “L.A.’s been the brass ring for the ragheads since the Towers fell. You saw the contingency plans they squeezed out of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.”

  Malane offered a now-you-see-what-I’ve-been-dealing-with dip of the head. “The Sinners’ drug-distribution network’s already up and running—al-Fath’s just tapping in to it. No start-up costs. No added exposure. In turn the Sinners get a cut of the action and an opportunity to corner the market on AT—everyone wins.”

  “As you well know,” Smiles said, “no one on the West Coast can touch the Sinners when it comes to distribution.”

  Tannino lifted a crime-scene photo from his leather blotter— Cholo corpses baking in the Palmdale heat. “Especially now.”

  A little nod. “Especially now.”

  Rich said, “Since the U.S. invasion, opium production in Afghanistan is up two thousand percent.”

  Guerrera alone looked shocked. “What? Why?”

  “Because the big producers are the warlords we backed to oust the Taliban,” Tim said. “If we cracked down on poppy production, we’d suffer a backlash from our supposed friends.”

  Rich looked at him, as if puzzled by how a mere federal deputy could grasp international intricacies. Then another expression rippled across his face—something approximating respect—and he said, “You were there.”

  “Early days. Through the fall of Kabul.”

  “Army?”

  “Rangers.”

  Smiles said, “The warlords control the areas where the poppies are grown, but they can’t make it into heroin. They used to ship it to Pakistan and other neighboring countries for the refining process. But now it gets trucked to al-Fath-run labs in the nearby countryside, and the warlords get to keep more of the profits.”

  Guerrera again: “So the warlords helped us out until the terrorists made them a better offer.”

  Noting the frustration on Guerrera’s face, Tim thought back to when he, too, had believed that there were clear sides in wartime, that allies aligned based on ideologies, that loyalty and consistency could be factored as part of a strategic equation. It was before he ever saw combat. Where he’d been deployed, the old rules hadn’t held. And so now he found the Sinners no more surprising an addition than the Afghan warlords; the bikers were a terrorist-affiliated group as dangerous as any other. Just because they didn’t cleave to a particular ideology hardly made them less menacing. Or easier to fight.

  “For obvious reasons,” Smiles added, “the shift to domestic heroin refining in Afghanistan has increased pressure for more efficient means of exportation. Thus Allah’s Tears.”

  Night was at the windows and the fluorescents were headache-inducing. Tim’s thoughts wandered to his wife, and he fought them back to the case. “Do you have a bead on the Prophet?” He read the disappointment on all three agents’ faces; it was a case they’d been taking personally for a long time.

  “No,” Smiles said. “With the Sinners running the drug operation, Al-Malik gets to remain in the background. If we roll someone up, odds are he’s wearing originals and long hair. As you’ve seen.”

  “How about bank records? I doubt he’s trusting the finances to Uncle Pete.”

  “The terrorists have wised up. They used to funnel money through Middle Eastern Studies professors or Islamic charities, but they’ve gone another step removed. They put no records under Arab names anymore. No bank accounts, cell-phone bills, nothing. They deal in unattached launderers, pay and play, no zealotry required. All that’s required is a rudimentary understanding of banking, a clean record, and an Anglo-Saxon name.”

  “What’s the size of shipment?”

  “Our intel suggests the package is two liters.”

  “What’s our timeline?”

  “Right fuckin’ now,” Rich said.

  “How do you know the shipment’s not already in the U.S.?”

  “We don’t,” Rich said.

  Smiles intervened calmingly. “We’re taking the prison break as an indication that the Sinners are ready to go live with the next phase. Den and Kaner will likely oversee enforcement for AT’s introduction to the market. And they wasted no time cleaning up the competition, as the marshal indicated earlier.”

  “How’s the product coming in?” Tannino asked. “Obviously it’s not riding the Kabul Concorde to LAX.”

  “From the south,” Smiles said. “Mexico’s easy. Penetrating the U.S. is the challenge.”

  Guerrera piped up for the first time. “How do you know it’s Mexico?”

  Smiles took a deep breath, and he and Malane shared a solemn glance. “A red flag sailed across the desk of our attaché in Manzanillo last Monday.”

  “Day before Den and Kaner’s break,” Bear said.

  Smiles again: “An Afghan shipping company slipped something through a few days prior on a license with a pre-2005 code. Only problem is, the license was ostensibly issued six months ago. Great fake, just two numerals reversed. Our attaché started pulling documents, put together that the company—under ten layers of bullshit—is an al-Fath front. The shipment presumably held lapis lazuli jewelry, but he discovered that an airport security worker was bribed to keep the narcotics dogs clear. Trace elements on the shipping label tested positive for AT.”

  “And the shipment itself?”

  “Lost track of it once it left the premises.”

  Rich said, “The Sinners are taking over the product in Mexico, and it’s on them to mule it into the U.S. My money says the product’s with them already. Or their proxies. Waiting to ship.”

  Malane offered a dry grin. “Ready for the veins of America.”

  “Air, sea, or land?” Tannino asked.

  “We’re not sure, but we’re ready,” Smiles said. “We’re running high alert at the borders. Customs and DEA are ramped up. Plus, AT’s got a few drawbacks that work to our advantage. It gives off a strong olfactory signature that makes it susceptible to narc dogs and electronic noses. And al-Fath can’t afford to lose the product. Way too much raw opium at stake, and way too much of the Prophet’s credibility. Making AT is basically betting the whole crop on a few liters. Not to mention the refining process, which is time-consuming and expensive as hell. A single bust wipes out the season for them.”

  “And it wipes out al-Fath’s burgeoning reputation in the international terrorism industry,” Rich added.

  “Seems like they’re setting up a pipeline that’s full of risks,” Guerrera said.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Smiles said. “They don’t need a continuous pipeline, just a one-off—a single risk with a huge payday. Two liters smuggled in and diluted out will give them a nine-month supply to market.”

  “A lifetime in the drug trade,” Tim said.

  “And about fifty million dollars.”

  “That’s a lotta box cutters.” Ignoring the others’ grimaces, Rich picked something out of a molar with a fingernail. “It’
s high stakes all the way around. The Sinners’ll want to track it in—this ain’t no see-if-it-flies coke shipment in the back of a coyote’s pickup.”

  “So the Sinners’ll be hands-on with it,” Tim said.

  Rich nodded. “We think Diamond Dog set up the operation down there with two other guys from the mother chapter, Toe-Tag and Whelp. They made three Mexico runs before you ventilated Diamond Dog’s chest.”

  The memory of the shooting creased Guerrera’s forehead.

  “Why would Uncle Pete send mother-chapter members instead of nomads?” Tim asked.

  “Fugitives can’t risk border crossings. Uncle Pete had to loan out some of the clean-cut mother-chapter boys.”

  “Regular Cub Scouts,” Bear said.

  “You alerted Border Patrol to log them coming and going?” Tim asked.

  “Of course,” Smiles said. “Those three were frisked head to toe coming back across each time. Nothing on them, nothing on the bikes. Every time.”

  “Which border station?” Tim asked.

  “San Ysidro–Tijuana,” Rich said.

  “How long do they stay in Mexico?”

  Malane handed Tim an interagency memorandum. “About five days. Once in the end of October, once in early November, once at the end of November.”

  Tim studied the dates. “They were down there when Jennifer Villarosa died. October twenty-ninth.”

  “Who’s that?” Smiles asked.

  “We found a hair of hers on the embalming table. Best we can tell, she died snorkeling in Cabo.”

  “Cabo’s a ways down the coast from Tijuana,” Bear said.

  “The mother-chapter boys had five days,” Tim said. “It’s only, what? Nine hundred miles?”