“AB,” I said, my lips moving thickly. “AB negative.”
“Well, thank God for small miracles! A universal recipient! Come on down!”
I WAS GONE a long time after that. When I woke up, I was in a bed in a dingy room. I looked around. Taupe drapes from another millennium. An old television on a cheap dresser. A metal door with a peephole. It was a hotel room.
Dox was in a chair next to the bed, facing the door, his head slumped forward, the rifle set across his lap.
I pulled back the blanket and looked down at my thigh. It was heavily bandaged. Likewise for my wrist. The thigh and wrist hurt, and the ribs were worse, but none of it was terrible. My head felt fuzzy, though, and I realized someone had given me something for pain.
“Hey,” I said.
Dox’s eyes popped open and his head snapped up. “Well, all right,” he said, flashing me the grin. “It’s damn good to see you, man. You had me worried there for a while.”
“Where the fuck are we?”
“A little Motel 6 kind of place on Lantau Island. I didn’t want anyone bothering us while you were recuperating.”
“Who bandaged me?”
“Your uncle Kanezaki made a few phone calls and took care of everything. Got a local doctor out here pronto. He sewed you up, but you’d lost a lot of blood. Luckily I was on hand to lend you a quart or so. So don’t be surprised if your dick’s grown to about twice as big as you remember.”
I laughed weakly. “Am I going to start looking at sheep differently, too?”
He grinned again. “You should only be so lucky. But one way or the other, take comfort from the fact that you’ve got a quart of Dox sloshing around inside you. There’s people who’d pay good money for the privilege, and here it’s yours for free.”
I nodded, taking it all in. “Thank you,” I said, looking at him.
He shook his head. “Forget about it. Like I told you, you were good to me in ’Stan. I don’t forget.”
“Well, I reckon we’re even, then,” I said.
His eyebrows shot north. “Did he say ‘reckon’? My God, son, it’s working already!”
WE CALLED KANEZAKI the next day, after we had changed hotels. We put him on the speakerphone on Dox’s cell phone.
“I was always afraid the two of you were going to join forces,” he said.
Dox grinned. “Well, someone’s gotta save western civilization from the forces of darkness,” he said.
“You’re closer to the truth there than you know,” Kanezaki replied.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I can’t go into it now. But it’ll all be in the news tomorrow. We’ll talk after that.”
“The two hundred thousand?” I asked.
“The balance has already been transferred. Congratulations.”
That was good. In our haste to depart, Dox and I had left behind the binoculars and parabolic microphone, and I had been mildly concerned that Kanezaki might argue that this evidence made things look too well planned to be attributable to the kind of straightforward inside job we’d discussed. Apparently there wasn’t a problem. I was looking forward to finding out why.
“Speaking of the two hundred thousand,” Dox said, “you’ve been shortchanging me, son. My price just went up.”
“See, this is what I was afraid of,” Kanezaki said. “A damn union.”
We all laughed. Kanezaki asked, “How’d that doctor work out?” Reminding me of how he’d come through when I needed him.
“Well, he gave me a quart of Dox’s blood,” I said. “That ought to be grounds for malpractice.”
“Crimson Viagra!” Dox crowed, and we all laughed again.
“Check the papers,” Kanezaki said. “You’ll see what you’ve done. You should be damn proud, no shit.”
IT WAS ON CNN that night. A joint Hong Kong police/ CIA operation had stopped a transfer of radiologically tipped missiles at Kwai Chung port container facility. Several Arab terrorists involved had been killed in a shootout. A CIA officer, whose identity could not be revealed, was wounded in the operation. All missiles were recovered. No one mentioned anything about a duffel bag with five million U.S. in it.
So Hilger must have survived. Maybe he’d finally managed to put a round in the last Arab. No wonder Kanezaki hadn’t been uptight about the abandoned binoculars and parabolic microphone. Apparently their presence hadn’t been inconsistent with the new cover story.
The next morning I checked the appropriate offshore account. The two hundred thousand was in there, as Kanezaki had promised-fifty thousand that had been paid up front, one hundred fifty moved in the day before.
Dox had given me the number of his own account. I transferred him all two hundred. My way of saying thank you.
I called Kanezaki from a pay phone.
“I saw the news,” I said. “Another heroic success for the defenders of the free world.”
He chuckled. “Be happy. The cleanup suits everyone-you, especially. No one here is disputing the official story. They’re all scrambling to try to make themselves part of it, in fact. So no one’s arguing about the definition of ‘natural.’ ”
“What are those missiles?” I asked.
“They’re called Alazans. They’re surface-to-surface rockets with a ten-mile range. They were originally designed by Soviet scientists for weather experiments, but seemed to work better as a terror weapon. Conventional versions were employed by Azerbaijan forces in the war with Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, and by separatists in South Ossetia in clashes with Georgian troops.”
“The news said the ones recovered were radiologically tipped.”
“Yeah, two years ago, we uncovered documents showing that at one time one of the Alazan batteries had been fitted with radiological warheads-turning the rockets into ‘dirty bombs.’ The radiological battery was stored in Transdniester, a separatist enclave that broke away from Moldova twelve years ago. Transdniester is currently recognized by no government but its own, and, with its huge stockpiles of Soviet-era arms, it’s become a clearinghouse for black arms weapons.”
“Those two guys,” I said, thinking aloud. “The Russians. They were from Transdniester?”
“Yeah, the military junta that’s running Transdniester now is pro-Russian. The rest of the enclave speaks Moldovan, which is really just Romanian. It’s complicated.”
“Sounds it.”
“Anyway, what you’ve got now is a small clique that runs the ‘country’ of Transdniester by its own rules. Much of the enclave’s trade is controlled by a single company, Sheriff, which is owned by the son of Transdniester’s president. The son also heads the Transdniester Customs Service, which oversees all the goods flowing in and out of the country. The shipments move through the Tiraspol airport; overland by truck to Ukraine or Moldova; and on a rail-to-ship line that connects the capital to Odessa.”
“Or through Hong Kong.”
“Not a likely route, if you look at a map, but brilliant if you had the local connections that Belghazi was using. He was snowing his handlers in NE Division. They thought he was a ‘good’ arms dealer who was informing on the ‘bad’ arms dealers. In fact, he was informing on his competitors, and meanwhile dealing in whatever would make him the most money. The Alazans were probably just one example. Who knows what he was moving right under the Agency’s nose.”
“Not anymore.”
“That’s right. I meant it when I said you should be proud. The people who he would have sold those missiles to would have used them anywhere they could. If they had been smuggled into the U.S., it would have been catastrophic.”
“The two who died at Kwai Chung,” I said. “What was their connection to Transdniester’s president? And his son?”
“Why?”
“I just like to keep tabs on people who might want to take me off their Christmas card list.”