“Where the fuck are you?” Neto asked urgently. “What happened? Where’s Ritchie?”
“He’s with me. He’s injured. We need to get him to an emergency room ASAP!”
“What’s your current location?” Neto asked.
“I’m in a stolen military jeep. I’m about a mile or so west of the country club.”
“Use the GPS on your phone and give me the name of the street.”
Crocker checked as sirens screamed in the distance and echoed off the walls around him. “We’re on Calle Garcia, near Avenida Cuello.”
“All right, turn onto Cuello,” Neto said. “Take the first left. There’s a restaurant on the corner. Pull into the parking lot. Find a dark corner in the back. I’ll meet you there in five.”
Chapter Eleven
Despite all these lucky breaks, why do I still feel that I got screwed somehow?
– Woody Allen
The light from the fluorescent bulbs burned Crocker’s weary, bloodshot eyes. He leaned on the edge of a gurney at a comfortable angle for his aching back while a nurse with thick glasses used cotton swabs dipped in alcohol to clean the blood off his chest. His mind shifted to the golf course, to the meeting with Rappaport, to the fevered drive in the jeep, in no rational order, picking up speed. A voice in the background screamed, Why did you do it?
He didn’t have an answer. The green curtain parted and Mancini stuck in his head, looking like a cartoon criminal with his neck and face covered with a dense stubble of dark whiskers. He said, “Boss, they’re about to wheel Ritchie into surgery. He wants to see you.”
“Where?”
The nurse tried to stop Crocker from pulling on a light blue robe and following Manny out of the room, but she failed. They trotted down a yellow hall to a little room where Ritchie sat in a wheelchair with a white bandage covering half his face.
“Ritchie?” Crocker whispered. “How’s it hanging?”
He opened his left eye, tried to smile, mouthed the words “It’s still hanging,” then pointed to a yellow legal pad and pen on the table to Crocker’s right.
“You’ll be fine,” Crocker said as he gave it to him and noticed Ritchie’s dried blood all over his hand. Hiding it behind his back, he said, “There’s no major structural or neurologic damage. They’ll patch you up, fix that ugly mug of yours, and you’ll end up looking better than before.”
Ritchie’s concentration was focused on the pad and what he was slowly writing. He held it up for Crocker to read. The letters were thin, long, and slanted to the right. They read: “I saw Alizadeh, the Falcon. He was in the house.”
Crocker felt a sudden burst of energy. “Alizadeh? You sure it was him?”
Ritchie nodded and attempted to mouth the word “Yes.” He wrote, “I’d know his ugly face anywhere.”
Crocker wanted to hug him, but only said, “That’s great, Ritchie. Very important. Good job.”
A doctor and orderly in white jackets arrived to wheel Ritchie away. He quickly scribbled one last message, which he handed to Crocker. It read: “Tell Monica we have to postpone the wedding, if she still wants me like this.”
“I’ll tell her, Ritchie. Don’t worry about anything. You’ll be fine.”
Crocker wanted time to sit back, process, heal, and think, but events were moving too quickly. Seconds after Ritchie was wheeled into surgery, he telephoned Neto to tell him the news about Alizadeh. Neto spoke to Melkasian at the station, and a meeting was set for midnight.
Crocker grabbed a few winks in the car. He woke up remembering that he had never had a chance to do his Christmas shopping-an iPad for Jenny, a crystal-and-amethyst necklace he’d picked out for Holly at a Virginia Beach jewelry store. He hated being late with presents but couldn’t help it this time.
As soon as they arrived at the office in the Banco Popular building, Neto ordered pizza with everything and sodas from an all-night fast food joint. They were chowing down when Rappaport and Melkasian walked in clutching briefcases and dressed in rumpled business clothes. It looked as though they’d been working all night.
Rappaport said, “You sure kicked up a shit storm, Crocker.”
“Couldn’t avoid it.”
“Who authorized you to go into the colonel’s house?”
Neto spoke up. “I did, sir.”
Crocker cut in, “That’s bullshit. I did. I take full responsibility. I felt that it was important to try to identify the Iranian, and I ordered my man to scale the wall. Unfortunately, he had an accident and was discovered and shot. I deeply regret that now. But I’m also pleased that we’ve established that it’s Alizadeh himself who is setting up the Unit 5000 operation here.”
“It often works that way, doesn’t it, Crocker?” Rappaport asked. “The good mixed with the bad.”
“Yes it does, sir,” Crocker replied, struck by the sincere tone in his voice.
Rappaport reached across, laid a hand on Crocker’s shoulder, and said, “I’m sorry about your teammate. I pray he recovers quickly.”
“I appreciate that, sir.” Maybe Rappaport wasn’t a total asshole.
“As far as pissing off the Venezuelans, I say: fuck them,” Rappaport growled. “They had it coming. And as far as the Falcon goes, I’m ready to go to war.”
Crocker liked Rappaport’s new attitude and nodded in agreement. “Me, too, sir. Let’s kick his ass.”
Briefcases clicked open, pizza boxes were cleared from the table, and a secure phone line was opened to Langley, where an analyst named Sue from the Crime and Narcotics Center (CNC) reported that the names of three of the individuals mentioned in the Xeroxed documents captured in Petare had been matched to a computer printout of recent arrivals to Mexico from Venezuela.
“What’s that mean?” Rappaport asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have any idea where they are now?” Melkasian asked, using a device to project a map of Mexico on the screen at the front of the room.
“Mexican PFM has tracked them to the town of San Miguel de Allende, which is about a hundred and seventy miles north of Mexico City,” Sue said over the speakerphone. PFM was the Mexican version of the FBI.
At the mention of San Miguel de Allende, Crocker smiled inwardly. Before they married he and Holly had spent a romantic week in that village in an inn overlooking the lake.
“What are they doing there?” Rappaport asked.
“We’ve been treating them as potential drug traffickers,” Sue answered. “They claim to be Venezuelan financial advisors looking for business investments. Their behavior is suspicious because they stick together, spend a lot of time in their hotel room, eat at cheap restaurants, don’t drink alcohol, and are constantly looking over their shoulders to see if they’re being watched.”
“Potential drug traffickers?” Melkasian asked skeptically.
“Yes, our intelligent operational probabilities computer program gave that a probability of forty percent, which is high. But it’s possible they could be up to something else.”
“You mean some other sort of illegal activity?” Rappaport asked. “And you say Mexican PFM is keeping an eye on them?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
“Can they be trusted?”
“Not really, no. That’s why we’ve dispatched a two-person DEA team from Mexico City. They should be there within the hour.”
“Good,” Rappaport said, checking his watch. “We think these men might be Iranian members of the IRGC, so inform us immediately regarding their movements or anything else you learn.”
“I will, sir.”
“You have anything else?” he asked.
Sue said, “The names of two other individuals on the list you sent us-Jorge Alvarez Nazra and Raul Abaid Lopez-correspond to two men who recently passed the PPL and CPL exams in Venezuela.”
The speed of the new information was dizzying.