The snoring stopped for a moment, then charged on as if to make up for lost sound.
Howie turned the key in the lock and heard a soft click. He rotated the knob and the door eased inward. Now Howie wished he had his night-vision goggles. Some light came in the window. A double bed sat against the far wall. One figure on it sprawled over most of the bed. He wore only pajama bottoms, and used no covers.
Howie walked to the edge of the bed and lifted the Ruger. He eased the end of the silencer against the side of the man’s head.
“Amigo, it is time to come awake one last time,” Howie said in colloquial Spanish. The cucillo mumbled and tried to roll over. The force of the silencer against his head brought him awake. His eyes snapped open, and he saw his situation even in the faint light.
“Hey, hey. What’s this? You playing games? I am Cuchi. What the hell you doing?”
“You were Cuchi, amigo. El Padre doesn’t like the way you’re moving in on other men’s territories, especially his. El Padre wanted me to tell you before you die. Good-bye, asshole.”
Cuchi’s eyes went wide for a millisecond, then his muscles tensed, but before he could move the Ruger spat twice. The muzzle blast even through the silencer left two deeply burned powder circles on the side of Cuchi’s head. He died before his muscles could react. Two rounds to the head. It would look like a Mafia hit.
The two fssssssst, sounds could not be heard outside the room. Howie nodded, turned and retraced his path down the hall, past the dead guard, and through the storeroom. He stepped out the window to the roof, then gently closed the double-hung window. He didn’t think about the dead men. He didn’t know either of them. They were criminals who sold dope that killed hundreds of men, women, and kids every day. They deserved no sympathy. Howie shrugged. Hell, it was just a job, an assignment, a mission.
He crouched by the window, and looked quickly at every potential trouble spot. No noises, not even a dog. No late-night drunk getting home. He crept to the edge of the shed and crawled down the same way he had gone up. There was no evidence that anyone had climbed up this side of the wall.
Howie walked down the alley at his foot-dragging rate. If anyone saw him they would look right through him. Street bums were of no consequence, especially in Tijuana. It took him twenty minutes to go down the two blocks to where he had left his car. Actually it wasn’t his. He had “borrowed” it in Coronado, and changed the rear license plate to one he had taken off a wrecked car in a junk yard a month before. It always paid to be prepared. He’d drive the ’92 Chevy back to Chula Vista, just over the border on the U.S. side where he had left his Ford Mustang the night before.
Leave nothing to chance. Plan, plan, plan, and then work your plan. He had the system down. It worked. He stopped two miles from the kill house and cleaned up his face and hands with baby wipes, changed into a sport shirt and perched a Padres baseball cap on his head covering up his military crew cut. He had no trouble crossing the border.
An hour later he came out of the shower in his Coronado apartment. It was nothing fancy. He could afford much better, but it wouldn’t fit in with his public middle-class lifestyle.
He checked a small book that looked as if it held times and distances of his daily workouts and runs. The book showed a date last week and 112.6. He would call the bank tomorrow night and have the computer voice read off his balance. Then he would write down the new time for a run. It should be 122.6. Yes, ten thousand dollars in two e-deposits would be added to his bank account tomorrow morning. This was in a bank he didn’t use regularly and where he didn’t put down his real name. The name and numbers were hidden in the book of running times dating back five years.
Howie had stashed the Ruger and its silencer in a secret compartment he had built into the floorboards of his 1998 Mustang. The hiding place was barely three inches deep and eight inches wide. The top was designed to look like an access panel under the floor mats.
Now he toweled off, checked the news on the all-night TV station and looked at his hand-held computer calendar.
Today was Monday, nearly 0330. The platoon would have muster this morning at 0700. He wouldn’t be late. Had never missed a roll call since the day he signed on with SEAL Team Seven four years ago.
2
Dushan, People’s Republic of China
United States Senator Gregory B. Highlander stared at the paper a Chinese soldier had just given him at the door of the small house they had been provided in this remote village 20 miles northeast along the coast from Zhanjiang in south China. They were a 150 miles southwest of Macao in one of the poor peasant backlands of China. Senator Highlander knew the message had to be bad news.
The Republican senior U.S. senator from Idaho couldn’t believe it. He had his wife read the formal document for him a second time. It was written in Mandarin and she was half Chinese. They had come to this small, poor village a week ago to track down his wife’s last known relatives. Several had been killed in the great Mao purge, others sent into the countryside. Some simply disappeared.
“The orders are clear, Greg. It says we are considered enemies of the Chinese people, and we are required to stay within our house until further notice. We are not to contact any Chinese in the area and may leave only with an escort to obtain food. It doesn’t say how long this house arrest will last.”
“Surely our embassy—” The senator stopped. The State Department and the embassy in Bejing had argued against this trip by the chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. They told him he was the most important man in the Senate for getting military expenditure bills through Congress and that a person with his knowledge of the U.S. military establishment and weaponry simply shouldn’t go on a tourist jaunt into the People’s Republic of China, which had remained belligerent.
Now he sat heavily in one of the three wooden chairs in the sparsely furnished living room of the modest house that his wife’s distant cousin had arranged for them to use for their stay. It was owned by another distant cousin, and there had been a lot of bowing and chattering as the cousins met for the first time in their lives just a week ago.
Senator Highlander had believed that he, his wife, and their daughter would be in no danger on this visit. He was an important person in the U.S. government. The Chinese would not dare think of curtailing his travel or do anything that might make him uncomfortable, let alone that he might complain about to the embassy. Yeah, he had been dead wrong on that one. He winced at the word dead. No he couldn’t think that way. Now he realized that he had been wrong to agree to come. His wife thought that things had loosened up enough in China for a trip she had been planning for over fifteen years.
He was an idiot. Now what he had to do was think of some way that he could get out of this burning house situation. Contacting the embassy was out. The house didn’t even have a telephone. He wouldn’t play his ace card unless he had to. As a powerful U.S. senator he had grown accustomed to getting his own way, of winning fights in the Senate about military spending, and even having his own way at home with his wife and daughter. He had earned the right, damn it. He had come up the hard way, from a farmer father who was blown out of the Nebraska dustbowl in 1937. Then the long trip to Oregon, where the family had done a little better; but still they ate a lot of grapefruit and oatmeal that first year of 1937–1938, mainly because it was cheap and good for them. He had made it through high school, played in the band, and graduated somewhere in the middle of his small-town high school class of ninety-eight seniors.