“How did he meet such people?” she says.
“He was dealing with the same people your father is,” I tell her.
“Yes, but my father has no choice.”
“Regardless, the result may be the same. We need your help.”
“How?”
“We can’t identify either Alim or your father. We need to find them and track the container until we can get the authorities to stop it. If we don’t, a great many people are going to die. Do you understand?”
She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at me. “I cannot believe my father would do something like that.”
“Perhaps, as you say, he has no choice. If that’s the case, we’re going to have to do what we can to help him get free.”
She looks at me, then nods. “Then I will help you,” she says.
“Good.”
Three hours later we land in Mexico City to off-load the first passengers. I tell the pilot that my cell phone is on the fritz and ask him if there is any way he can send a message over the plane’s VHF radio to a friend in San Diego. I can’t very well tell him about the bomb without raising eyebrows and being arrested.
Instead the man lets me use his cell phone. I take it to the back of the plane for privacy.
It is after hours. The office will be closed, so I call in the open to Harry’s unguarded cell line. I don’t have Rhytag’s phone number or I would make the call myself.
Harry doesn’t answer. I can’t be sure if he is even carrying his regular cell phone any longer. Harry hates cops. With the federal government now listening in, he has probably flushed the phone down the toilet.
Nonetheless I leave the message to have Harry call Rhytag and tell him about the bomb. I give him the name of the ship, Amora, and its estimated time of arrival in Ensenada. I am hoping that the feds are listening in.
Then I call Harry’s house. Again he doesn’t answer, so I leave the same message on his home phone. For the moment, at least, it’s all I can do.
Liquida got bounced like a Ping-Pong ball all over the hemisphere trying to get back to northern Mexico. From San José he shuttled to Houston and from there caught a connecting flight to San Diego. He didn’t even try to fly south from there. Instead he rented a car and stopped for coffee at one of his haunts, a twenty-four-hour Internet java shop just outside National City.
Inside he ordered a latte and sat down at a computer to check his e-mail. He was anxious to snag the Arab’s message and read his lies. Liquida knew that between the coffee and the raghead’s brazen deceit, it should be enough to get his blood going again, to keep him awake at least until he could get across the border.
He was feeling pretty good. He had spent several hours snoozing on the planes, dreaming of ways to entertain his employer. He wondered if the man had family, and if so whether they had any money, and how much an ear or part of a nose might go for among relatives in the Middle East. He could give them a discount and sell him by the pound, a piece at a time. Liquida dreamed that maybe he could take the Arab alive, and get him alone somewhere, in which case the one thing he could promise the man was that he wouldn’t die fast.
At least Liquida could now relax. According to the note he took from the dead cartoon critic at the apartment in San José, he had plenty of time to meet the boat at Ensenada. It wasn’t due in until sometime around noon tomorrow.
He punched up the screen on the computer and waited a second to enter the floating ether of his endless e-mail domains. Then he slipped down through the junk mail and found what he wanted.
Liquida opened the message and sure enough there was text on the screen, so he knew that the Arab was lying again. The e-mail was filled with irritating false praise for the fine job he had done. Because of this, his employer wished to reward him with valuable commodities-gold and fully marketable narcotics and hints that they might even throw in the moon and the stars. But Liquida would have to stop by to pick it all up personally since FedEx was balking at delivering the heroin and the springs on their van couldn’t seem to take the weight from the mountain of gold they had for him. They apologized for the inconvenience and said they hoped he’d understand.
Liquida was angry with today’s e-mail provider. If their bullshit checker had been working properly, every word in the message should have been underlined, flashing and depositing little drips of brown down the screen by now.
The Arab translator even gave him an address in Tijuana where Liquida could hook up his trailer to haul this treasure trove home, and told him tomorrow, four o’clock sharp, not to be late. The Arab’s other assassins must charge overtime, thought Liquida.
He wrote down the address, signed off on the computer, finished his coffee, then looked at his watch. He wondered if it was too late to drop by one of his suppliers and pick up some stuff, or whether the guy would still be awake. Then he dismissed the thought; after all, that’s what doorbells were for.
And if he didn’t answer, there was always the fire alarm.
FIFTY-SEVEN
It was edging up toward ten o’clock at night by the time the sleek Gulfstream dropped us at the airport just a few miles south of the port at Ensenada. In less than ten minutes we had our luggage, and had cleared customs as well as immigration. A single sleepy-eyed officer took one look at our bags, then searched for a blank page on our passports, hit them with the stamp, and welcomed us to Mexico.
We took a taxi and laid up overnight in a small hotel on the waterfront near the pleasure-boat docks on the harbor. We booked a separate room for Maricela, while Herman and I bunked together to save cash. We were now down to a little under seven hundred dollars. As a last resort I could always try my ATM card, though by now I am certain that Templeton will have it blocked.
The following morning we get up early and grab breakfast at a small restaurant on the waterfront. Most of the stores and shops aren’t open yet. We find an outdoor market that has what we need.
I open our piggy bank and we use a little over a hundred dollars of the cash we have left to buy a beach bag, some items of clothing for Maricela, and a few snacks. Since the fire, except for a few sundries and necessities she purchased yesterday morning on her way to the phone company in San José, Maricela has nothing.
Back in our room I stand at the window and look out at the small boats in the slips that line the floating docks in front of the hotel. Off to the left is the cruise terminal with its long concrete dock that, at the moment, is empty.
About a mile away on the other side, I can see the international cargo terminal. It lies along a jetty that forms the breakwater between the harbor and the Pacific Ocean. My best guess is that we are now roughly eighty miles south of San Diego.
There is a large container ship the size of a small city tied up to the dock across the harbor and being off-loaded. It is riding high in the water and appears to be almost empty. Four enormous container cranes silhouetted against the open sky stand like steel giraffes. One of them is digging deep into the hold of the ship. It lifts out two containers at a time and stacks them on the dock. Smaller portable gantries roll up and down the wharf lifting cargo onto trucks that are lined up waiting to carry materials to the factories up north.
“What time do you have?” My watch has stopped.
“Ten forty,” says Herman.
By now Harry should have gotten my messages, and Rhytag should be mustering his forces, contacting the Mexican Federal Judicial Police and making arrangements to send agents south from the border.