It rang twice before connecting. A man’s voice answered, going a hundred miles an hour.
“Ronnie’s phone. She’s a busy lady and can’t talk right now.”
Quinn could hear the rhythmic beat of music and the buzz and crack of people playing pool in the background. A hundred voices seemed to be talking at once.
“I’ll call back another time,” Quinn said.
“Message?” the man said, shouting over the din.
“No,” Quinn said. “I’m good.”
“Very well, my friend. You have yourself a happy holiday.”
“Yeah, you too,” Quinn grunted and hung up. This guy was far too peppy for his taste. Ronnie wasn’t alone during the holidays after all….
He looked up just as a heavyset person of ambiguous gender wearing a sleeveless mechanic’s shirt and carrying a pastrami sandwich nodded toward the seat beside him.
Quinn stepped into the aisle. Sighing to himself, he turned off his phone for the long flight to Argentina.
Ronnie Garcia walked out of the ladies’ room at the Corner Pocket in downtown Williamsburg and pushed through the crowds to rejoin her classmates. Though it was chilly outside, her roommate had persuaded her to dress to party in tight black capris and an off-the-shoulder red silk blouse.
“What’d I miss?” she said, smiling at the youngsters at her table. At twenty-nine, she was in the best shape of her life, but it was still difficult to keep up with the college crowd that made up the bulk of CIA trainees. Everyone but her had some sort of advanced degree in economics, law, or political science. Some had been interns for powerful senators, others came from rich families, all were incredibly bright. Apart from Garcia and a former Army Special Forces officer, none of her class had ever seen a moment of conflict more violent than a lovers’ quarrel. Just hearing their naïve dreams, Garcia couldn’t help but think of Jericho Quinn and his maxim: Everyone thinks they have a plan until they get punched in the nose.
Sometime it was a fist that gave you that punch, sometimes it was just life.
She scooted back into her seat around the table of eight, showing a tight smile at the thought of another hour with this crew. They were fine in a mock firefight and could interrogate role-players with the best, but she found hanging with them felt like playing Barbie with the twelve-year-olds after she’d already made out with her first guy. It had been a mistake to come, but she just couldn’t bear the thought of being stuck alone in the dorms.
Roger, a dark-eyed frat boy of Persian descent, grinned as she sat down, wagging his finger. He made no secret of the fact that he’d had a crush on her from their first day of polygraph class. She’d let him know right away that she was far too much woman for a youngster like him to handle — which only served to inflame his resolve. She’d been annoyed, but not surprised, when he’d showed up that evening and joined their group.
Smacking the finger away, she looked down her nose at him. “Good way to lose a hand, amigo.”
“You forgot your OPSEC,” he chided, raising his eyebrows as if he had eight-by-ten glossies of her in the shower. There was a cuteness about him, like a Christmas ornament that you could look at for a while but were happy to box up again right after New Years.
OPSEC — operational security — was no laughing matter.
“What?” she said, worried. “What did I do?”
“You could use a man like me watching out for you.” Roger held up her phone. “So many of our secrets are stuck in these little devices… and now I have access to yours, my dear. They say our brains are in our phones now.”
“I don’t think your brains are where you think they are.” Garcia poured her drink in the kid’s lap, snatching the phone away as he worked to catch his breath. “Let me tell you about a man who can handle me, Roger, my dear. When I fall down drunk and naked on the floor in the middle of a party, my man’s job is to stand there and fend all the other bastards in the room off of me. If I leave top-secret files in the penthouse of a foreign hotel, he would go all Tom Cruise and climb up the outside windows with those little sticky gloves to get those files back and save my honor. I don’t give a shit if I leave ten thousand dollars on the table when I go to pee. His job is to guard it with his life. And, he would never, ever, ever touch my phone. Comprende?”
Roger nodded, blinking quickly.
Ronnie turned to her roommate, who sat next to her. Her name was Bev, an Arabic and Farsi speaker from Maryland.
Bev snickered, rolling her eyes at the hapless Roger. “You warned him that you were a hard one to handle.” She put a hand on Ronnie’s arm. “I almost forgot. You missed a call.”
Ronnie got a jolt to the heart when she saw Jericho’s number. She bumped Roger out of the way with her hip as she moved quickly out of the booth, punching the buttons to return the call.
His voice mail answered after the first ring. “Quinn’s phone, leave a message.” She rang it again and got the same response. Turning, she stared back at poor Roger and tried to talk herself out of killing him.
DAKAR
Faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed
overcomes the fear of death.
CHAPTER 27
The journey to reach the most dangerous race on earth was a race in and of itself. A ten-hour flight from Dulles to Buenos Aires saw Quinn standing in line for over an hour and a half to clear customs. He checked his phone and smiled when he saw two missed calls from Ronnie Garcia. He called her back, but got her voice mail. His phone began to buzz in his pocket again the moment he made it to the front of the line. A female Argentine customs officer waved him forward, her face stern though her gaudy red lipstick was painted into a smile. There was no way he would answer a cell phone call on her watch. Ronnie was back in class by the time the customs officer was through with him.
From the international airport it was another hour and a half through the city skirting crowds of out-of-work thirtysomethings who marched in what the cabdriver grudgingly called protest del dia, to Aeroparque Jorge Newbery, where he grabbed a domestic hop to Mar del Plata — the starting line of the Dakar.
A day and half after they’d left D.C., the Quinn brothers and Jacques Thibodaux stood with their orange KTM 450 race bike under the white tent along the breezy beaches of Argentina’s third-largest city. Thousands of people had flocked from all over the world to watch the opening ceremonies. The streets were alive with prerace parties and impromptu tangos. Liquor and maté, South America’s ubiquitous tea-like drink, flowed in abundance and abandon. The fragrant aromas of baking bread and grilled lamb, seasoned with just a hint of motor oil, settled comfortably over the crowds.
It was late afternoon and the area was a madhouse of prerace activity. Judges and engineers from the Amaury Sport Organisation swarmed over each motorcycle, Mini Cooper, Hummer, four-wheeler, and monster truck that planned to compete in the Dakar. The ASO was the same organization that sponsored the Tour de France and they had their bureaucracy well established. It was a nerve-wracking process known as scrutineering. Every item had to be checked, from required safety gear and engine size to the noise level of each vehicle’s exhaust.
The contestants had snatched little more than a few minutes of sleep at a stretch over the past days leading up to the race. The additional stress of having their machines scrutinized by the overly discerning eyes of ASO engineers only added to the growing pit in their collective guts.