“Where then?” Quinn said. “What did you plan to do before my friend and I entered the picture?”
“Habibullah,” the Uyghur said.
Thibodaux mouthed the word several times, getting it in his head.
“A Tajik,” Hajip went on. “Habibullah is powerful, a man with many connections. If you want a new identity, Habibullah is the man to see. He would know if someone assisted Ehmet Feng.”
“That’s a start,” Quinn said, feeling the familiar flutter of an impending hunt. “Let’s go and talk to him.”
“Oh,” Hajip said, giving an emphatic shake of his head as he spoke in a distraught and rapid-fire pace. “It is too late to speak with Habibullah tonight. He will be sleeping by now. His men would slaughter us if we woke him. The only way to get near Habibullah is to have business with Habibullah. Even then you must go through his men. I could have spoken with him early tomorrow…” Hajip’s gaze shifted to his right side and lingered at his injured arm as if all was lost. “But your interference has ruined my chance to speak with Habibullah!”
“Damn,” Thibodaux whistled under his breath. “I can’t understand a word, but this guy sure likes to say ‘Habibullah.’ ”
The unconscious man began to stir.
“Ayeee!” Hajip threw his head back and cried. “You have broken my arm! I will never be able to get near Habibullah!”
Thibodaux stepped up, taking Hajip’s sudden rise in tone for a threat. “Blah, blah, blah, Habib-blah-blah-bulla! You best calm your ass down, down fast, fast.”
“It’s okay, Jacques,” Quinn said, and translated the last to bring the Cajun up to speed before turning to face the Uyghur. “Why does your broken arm keep you from talking with Habibullah?”
Hajip rattled off his plan in Mandarin, sobbing as much as he spoke. Quinn thought for a moment, then came back with a plan of his own. The Uyghur stopped crying and fired back with a string of curses. When he was finished, Quinn spoke again, and then stepped back, rubbing his chin in thought.
“Dammit, l’ami, but you make my head ache.” Thibodaux rubbed his temples. “I know a scoff when I hear it in any language. It sounded to me like you’re trying to convince this guy of something and he ain’t buying any.”
“You picked up on that, did you?” Quinn grinned.
“Arrete toi,” Thibodaux said, shaking his head. Stop, you. “Every time you get that look in your eye—”
“What look?” Quinn’s mind was already racing, making plans.
“Don’t make me pass you a slap, Chair Force. You know what I’m talking about.” Thibodaux peered at him with his good eye. “That look that says you think you have superpowers. It’s a bad, bad look, I’m telling you straight. What are you plannin’? Pistols at dawn with Habibullah because you broke this dipshit’s arm?”
“A duel…” Quinn looked up and gave his friend a sly smile. “I wish it were something that easy.”
Chapter 15
Former CIA Clandestine Services Officer Joey Benavides hoisted a doughy leg out of the passenger side of his partner’s government-issued Jeep Patriot and unfolded himself onto the quiet residential sidewalk. The little car seemed to squeak with relief as the pressure was taken off the suspension.
Joey B’s partner, former IRS agent Roy Gant, wore a gray blazer that was at least one size too small and caused his fleshy arms to ride up a little farther away from his body than they should have. Agents of the Internal Defense Task Force weren’t known for strict adherence to dress codes, but Gant was one of the few who were slovenly enough to make even Benavides look acceptable. He didn’t even bother to tuck in his shirttail.
A girl on a bicycle, one of the legions of snot-nose kids Benavides saw terrorizing the neighborhoods this time of year, cruised by on the sidewalk.
“I hate summer,” Gant grumbled, glaring at the little girl as she sped down the street.
“Okay, we’re looking for the Thib-o-day-ox residence,” Benavides said, spitting into the gutter as he hitched his slacks over a sagging belly.
“Rhymes with dough,” his partner corrected. “Thib-o-daux.”
“Whatever.”
Joey B stuffed the errant tail of his white shirt back where it was supposed to be. Task Force agents weren’t required to wear ties — which was a good thing, because Benavides hadn’t been able to button the top button on any of his dress shirts in six months. Leaning back into the Jeep, he shrugged on a wrinkled sport coat to cover his sidearm and nodded his jowly head toward the house halfway down the block so his equally corpulent partner would know where they were going.
Younger than Gant by at least fifteen years, Benavides took the lead as they walked to the house. Gant, who didn’t appear to care, plodded along behind with his head down, a hand in one pocket.
“The boss is gonna have my ass if we don’t find something on Garcia,” Gant muttered as they cut across a freshly mowed yard.
The grass was littered with mutilated pieces of green toy soldiers and Hot Wheels cars as if the toys had been mowed over. Plastic guns and wooden swords hung from the handlebars of two bicycles parked in a barren flower bed beside the front porch. “I’m seriously thinking he might take me out back and shoot me.”
“Mr. Walter is a son of a bitch,” Benavides said. “But I doubt he’d shoot you, even if you did let a traitor slip away on your watch.”
Gant stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. He did that sometimes, just stopped moving in the middle of a sentence for no apparent reason. Benavides hated working with him. “Have you heard from Craig Thorson lately?”
“No. Why?”
“Exactly.” Gant nodded as if it should all be so clear. “Thorson let some numbers slip to a Senate staffer about the IDTF budget. Nothing big, but Walter didn’t approve it beforehand so he got pissed — and Thorson hasn’t been answering calls or e-mails for two weeks.”
In reality, Benavides had no doubt the top supervisory agent within the Vice President’s newly formed Task Force would have no problem shooting a colleague in the back of the head. Hell, the sadistic whack job probably had a couple of people chained up in his basement. It was just not something Benavides wanted to talk about. If he agreed with Gant, the other agent might twist his words around and call him a traitor — earning him a bullet in the brain from Walter.
Benavides thought about it a second too long and gave a shivering shrug. “Come on. Let’s go see what this bitch knows.” He read the name he’d written in pen on the palm of his hand, pronouncing it correctly this time. “Camille Thibodaux. The boss says her husband did some work with Garcia. He’s supposed to be a gunny in the Marine Corps, but he happens to be deployed so we can take our time if his wife decides to get pissy with us. If she knows something about Veronica Garcia, we’ll get it out of her.”
Benavides was grinning at the prospect by the time he stepped up on the porch and rang the bell.
A curvaceous woman with dark hair and brooding brown eyes flung open the door — as if she’d been lurking there, waiting. Barefoot, she wore a pair of loose basketball shorts and a red USMC T-shirt. He let his eyes play up and down over the swells of the shirt, then back to the fresh red polish on the woman’s toenails. A snotty toddler clung to the leg of her shorts, pushing them up and giving the agents a tantalizing peek at his mama’s muscular thigh. In between ogling her legs and her toes, Benavides had the fleeting thought that this woman kept her right hand out of sight. She might actually have a weapon hidden back there. Marine wives were a tricky bunch.
Both agents held up their credential cases. It could be pretty gratifying to see people wilt with fear at the IDTF badge.