Lawan stood in the hotel shower for a half hour, washing away the horror with a stream of warm water and a shrinking bar of soap. Jet let her take her time, knowing that she needed to process that she was free, safe from the ugliness that had defined her last week. Hopefully over time, she would put it behind her, as Jet had surmounted the ugliness of her past, although she knew all too well that the scars never fully healed. She wished that she could communicate with the little girl, tell her that it was all going to be okay, that she would never need to go back to the club and that nobody would hurt her any more, but Jet had to be satisfied with whatever her eyes and touch could convey. There would be time in a few hours, when morning came, to hear her story and tell her the news. Matt would help — he’d promised her that he would as part of their bargain, but also because she sensed he was trying to make amends for his associate’s sins, even if he hadn’t participated in them.
Eventually, the water shut off, and Lawan emerged from the bathroom with a towel draped around her tiny frame. Jet had bought a change of clothes and an oversized T-shirt for her, which she gratefully pulled over her head. Jet balled up the filthy rags she’d been sleeping in and threw them into the trash. Lawan gave her a shy smile.
The neon dawn outside the window flickered at the curtains as they lay together on the bed, Lawan’s wet head snuggled against Jet’s shoulder as her eyelids fluttered and she drifted to sleep, her breathing soft as a lamb’s. Jet stroked her hair absently while staring into the void, and then she, too, shut her eyes and quieted her thoughts, secure in the knowledge that for the moment, at least, they were safe.
Chapter 30
“That’s not good enough,” the voice on the phone raged. “I want to see you. Twenty minutes.”
The line went dead, and Arthur stared at the scrambled cell phone with dread.
He had spent years climbing to a point of dominance in the hierarchy of the group that controlled so much of the international drug trade, but he still had to answer to one man. A man who represented powerful interests — interests that were anonymous to all but the most senior in the group — Arthur being the second highest ranking of the CIA group members, and the most active in the day-to-day operations.
He remembered the early days, when he’d been recruited into the scheme by the then number-two man in the agency, who had explained to him why it was necessary for global peace and America’s interests to control the worldwide supply of narcotics, and had invited him to become part of the elite within the elite. Arthur had gladly joined and had pursued his new duties with a vengeance, becoming a trusted confidant to the top brass, and then when they had gotten out of the game or moved on to even more elevated offices, to their replacements.
He’d become a wealthy man in the process, capable of any life he chose. But his physical attributes had made him reclusive, and other than a twice-monthly visit with a five-thousand-dollar-a-night escort, he limited his enjoyment of the finer things to rare wine, wristwatches and antiques, season tickets to the ballet and opera, and his palatial townhome in Georgetown.
But some of his responsibility outside of the official duties he performed for the CIA was to ensure that the business he’d inherited and later built into a powerhouse remained viable, and that any complications were resolved in a timely manner. He’d been sorely tested in the mid-Eighties by the Iran-Contra nightmare but had emerged as a star, the group’s participation in the arms-for-cocaine scheme covered up with a baffling barrage of complex explanations. He recalled the director of the CIA, his superior not only in the agency but also in the group, joking with him one day that even he couldn’t tell what the hell the whole ruckus was about after the press and Congress got done mangling the facts.
That was part of the art that Arthur brought to the table — an ability to hide in plain sight and make even the most obvious indiscretions seem unfathomably convoluted. He’d long ago discovered that the public had no patience for details or complexity, preferring simple sound-bites of easily-digestible spin, so whenever they had a crisis, he engaged what he thought of as his complexity engine, and soon something as simple to grasp as a ton of cocaine stopped in Miami with a CIA asset handling the distribution became a labyrinth of detail and unknowable tangents. Eventually, everyone moved on to something that was easier to grasp, and nobody asked the painful questions he didn’t want answered. He’d watched many a hearing where a simple inquiry from a Congressman was answered in a ten-minute rambling dissertation that would put even a speed freak to sleep. It was a skill. One he’d mastered.
He was also chartered with handling the messier aspects of the trade, including coordinating wet jobs disguised as CIA missions, money laundering, and managing the group’s supply chain. The trading of weapons for diamonds had been a masterstroke. Every wild-eyed despot in Africa wanted bigger and better weapons, and Arthur could supply whatever they wanted, through middlemen, in exchange for blood diamonds. The drug trade profits went to the middlemen who laundered them through Panama and Miami, then bought weapons from U.S. companies with the newly sanitized money, which then went to Africa in return for diamonds that Arthur exchanged for heroin.
In Afghanistan, the laundering and payment mechanisms were different, but in Asia, diamonds were a drug lord’s best friend, and the scheme had worked flawlessly until Hawker had figured it out. If there was a fault in any of it, it was Arthur’s failure to have him killed the second he’d started nosing around, rather than trying to brand the trade as a legitimate op. He’d hoped that he could rely on Hawker’s strong sense of duty to continue as before, but he’d misjudged the lengths to which he would go to discover the truth — a rare quality, fortunately, in his field staff members, who typically followed orders without question.
Arthur punched the intercom and told his secretary to have his car waiting, and then trudged down the long halls to the main parking lot, where his driver sat ready for his instructions. Arthur slid into the rear seat and told him to head to the mall a few miles away, where he would be taking an early lunch at his favorite Chinese restaurant.
Once inside the sprawl of the mall complex, he ducked into a franchise coffee chain and ordered a frozen blended concoction — one of the guilty pleasures that he could manage with a straw. The place was nearly empty at eleven a.m., so he had the lounge area to himself, Billie Holiday crooning over the loudspeakers as truculent youths with multiple facial piercings and flamboyantly dyed hair wiped down the display cases while sneering at passing shoppers.
Arthur watched a heavyset man in a long overcoat move to the register and gruffly order a cup of drip coffee, then flip a bill at the cashier before dropping his change into the tip box and moving to where Arthur sat.
“Explain to me why we haven’t recovered the lost merchandise and put an end to the problem yet,” Briggs said by way of greeting, sitting in an overstuffed chair facing Arthur.
“We’re waiting for more detail.”
“What the hell does that mean? Don’t give me doubletalk. Let’s start with the tracking device that was supposed to lead your secret weapon straight to him. Where is it?” Briggs demanded.
“It’s approximately fifty miles inside Myanmar, in one of the most remote stretches of jungle hills on that continent. Hasn’t moved for four days.”
“So doesn’t that tell you that’s where the bastard is?”
“Not necessarily. I repositioned a satellite over the area and have studied every inch, but all I can make out is the overgrown roof of an abandoned temple.”