Crosswhite stared him in the eye. “Because I’m the guy who’s gonna pull the trigger.” He postured up on the sofa. “Look, the quake down in Mexico City has wiped out the CIA intelligence network for the foreseeable future. Tens of thousands are dead — maybe more — and that mounting body count will hold the world’s attention for the next ten days or so. All I need from you is—”
“This is Pope’s idea?”
Crosswhite shook his head, knowing that lying to Castañeda could prove deadly. “Pope has me working with the PFM to bring Serrano down legally, but I think it’s better to take advantage of the quake: to use the chaos as cover. Serrano is still an unknown politico in the eyes of the outside world. Why not kill an ugly baby in the crib before it starts walking and talking and making a name for itself?”
Castañeda switched his gaze to Mariana. “Why are you willing to act without first getting Pope’s consent?”
She saw clearly that Castañeda had grown suspicious. If he realized that she and Crosswhite had gone completely off the CIA reservation, he might have Crosswhite killed and take her for himself. Mariana and Crosswhite had discussed this forbidding possibility ahead of time and decided that, in the event the meeting took a bad turn, Crosswhite would kill her instantly and try to kill Castañeda before his guards could enter the room and shoot him dead.
Dominating the fear rising up in her gut, she gazed calmly back at the man she knew to be a butcher. “Because Pope is hedging his bets,” Mariana said easily. “He wants to be in position to call the shots along the border no matter who controls the North. And while I would never say that I completely trust you, Antonio, I do believe you’re much more reliable than either Lazaro Serrano or Hector Ruvalcaba.”
Castañeda chortled, remarking, “Más vale malo por conocido que bueno por conocer,” which translated roughly as, You prefer the bad guy you know to the good guy you don’t.”
She smiled. “Más o menos.” More or less.
“It appears, then, I have no real choice,” he said, resting his elbows on his knees. “Your man Pope respects the truce but shows me no loyalty. Whereas you, my beautiful Mariana, you understand the value of trust.”
“We have always been honest with each other,” she said, ignoring his flattery as usual. “And I think such a rapport is worth something, yes?”
He nodded, shifting back to Crosswhite. “Suppose Pope is angry with you for killing Serrano — or the PFM comes after you?”
“That will be my problem,” Crosswhite said. “As I’ve told you already, your name will never be mentioned.”
Castañeda sat mulling the circumstances, seeing clearly that foreigners were still using the tactic of divide and conquer to manipulate the destiny of Mexico — and seeing equally that he was in no better a position to alter that paradigm than any of his predecessors. At length, he picked up his glass, finished the tequila, and set the glass back down.
“Very well. How I can help rid my country of the dog Serrano?”
32
Gil and Lena sat across from each other in the back of a prop-driven P-750 XSTOL aircraft, their knees almost touching, flying twenty thousand feet over Hamburg, the second largest city in Germany. Each wore a composite wing suit, sometimes called a “bat suit,” which had extra fabric between the legs and under the arms, adding greater surface area to the human form for the purpose of creating lift. This allowed for a human being to glide, or “fly,” two and a half meters horizontally for every meter of vertical drop, often at speeds greater than a hundred miles an hour, before finally having to deploy a BASE-jumping parachute in order to land safely on the ground.
Gil’s suit was black with red fabric between the legs and arms; Lena’s, white with blue fabric.
“Nervous?” she said over the rush of the wind coming in through the open door.
He grinned. “You bet.”
She smiled back, liking him very much. “You look like Die Fledermaus in that suit with those colors.”
“Like who?”
“Die Fledermaus: The Bat. It’s a German opera — or an operetta, rather.”
He laughed self-consciously, having no idea of the difference between the two. “Well, a bat knows a helluva lot more about flying than I do.” He tested the zippers on his arms to make sure he would be able to free them easily when the time came to steer his parachute. “You know, doin’ this without a formal lesson is really kinda stupid.”
“But more fun!”
“For you,” he chuckled. “Not for me. I’m a trained paratrooper — not a bat.”
“Well, that’s about to change.” She leaned across and kissed him. “You’ll do fine. Just remember to fly the suit like I told you: make your body like a wing. You have to keep rigid; concentrate on strength of muscle.”
“Strength of muscle,” he muttered, feeling guilty as hell over the fact that Lena excited him much more intensely than his estranged wife, Marie, ever had. They were two entirely different types of women: Marie, loving and gentle; Lena, sexy and adventurous. He reflected briefly on the high divorce rate among Navy SEALs, now understanding it on a visceral level. He told himself that he deserved to die on the jump he was about to make — for many reasons — and with that thought, all nervousness left him.
“Have you done this with Sabastian?” he asked idly.
“With who?”
“Sabastian.”
“I don’t know anyone by that name.” She got to her feet and grabbed the rail mounted along the fuselage just above the windows, offering her hand. “The light is red. Almost time.”
He took her hand and got to his feet.
She put her face very close to his, their noses millimeters apart. “Don’t ever mention that name outside of business. We’re moving forward — you and me — every second from this day on. Agreed?”
He felt the energy of her personality, their mutual attraction, in the pit of his stomach. “Yes, ma’am.”
A few seconds later, the jump light turned green, and they were out the door.
Gil spread his arms and legs, feeling immediately the strong resistance of the air. Lena streaked past him, her white-and-blue suit shimmering in the bright sunlight. He formed his body to match hers and soared after her, bringing his legs up too far behind him and falling forward into a brief tumble before regaining control and leveling off again.
With no hope of catching up to Lena after that, he decided to experiment with the suit, testing its limitations against his free-fall skills, based on his experience as an expert parachutist. The wing suit had long been employed by American Special Forces, but Gil’s own focus had been that of a sniper, so wing suit infiltrations had never been incorporated into his training.
He saw at once the potential for such a swift and accurate infiltration system, knowing that the perfection of a chuteless landing technique must still be the ultimate military goal.
Gil soared after Lena’s shimmering form, banking left and right, testing the performance capacity of the suit, and found that his extensive free-fall experience very definitely helped to cut the learning curve. As the ground drew within a thousand feet, he deployed the parachute and unzipped the wing sleeves so that he could reach up and grab the steering toggles.
He touched down lightly within a few hundred feet of Lena in a snowy field at the base of a mountain and quickly gathered the chute into his arms. Gil pulled off the helmet and stood looking around at the beauty of the countryside, which was not unlike the Montana of his youth.
She walked up to him with her chute and helmet under one arm, her blond hair blowing in the wind. “So what do you think?”