“Where are the police?” shouted Mobili.
“Don’t know.”
“What about that man and woman? Give me back to them.”
“You really don’t want that,” Jim answered. “Pair of badasses, the both of them. Kill you without a thought. You better off ridin’ along with us for a while.”
“Hey, Jim?” Buster’s deep voice came from inside the ventilated trailer. “We already got a dead piggy back here. Damn.”
“Can’t sell a dead pig,” Jim explained to the prisoner. “We do our best to get them all to market alive, but they are fragile little things. Even these two-hundred-pounders.”
“I demand that you give me back to the police! My lawyer!”
“We don’t use electric prods or slap ’em around. Grow up on our farm and they get treated pretty good. We even work close around them so they get used to being near humans. They’re afraid of their own shadows, and getting them to market is a chore in itself, ain’t it, Buster?”
Mobili heard the other man rattling things around inside the truck. Pigs were squealing and snorting. “Sure is. Can’t be too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry. Just the right kind of bedding. Partitions to keep the groups separate so they don’t fight and bite tails or kill each other. OK, hand him up here, brother. We can put him in with the dead one.”
Mobili squirmed, but Jim Lincoln easily lifted him up, and Buster caught him under the arms and hauled him in the rest of the way. “No! Please!”
The brothers securely tied him in strips of silver duct tape. When he continued to shout, Buster hit him hard in the stomach.
“Kyle said we shouldn’t kill him.”
“I know, brother. I just had to do something … for Beatrice.”
“I understand. Slap some tape on his mouth and let’s get going.”
While Buster applied the gag, Jim lifted the partitions in the surrounding pens. Then they jumped out and closed the door. The Iranian had been thrown onto the cold dead pig, and now other swine began to snort and stumble around him. When one snot-covered snout licked his face, Mobili began to cry.
Colonel Yahya Ali Naqdi dismissed the major for the day, then took a minute to encrypt a message and download it into the micro SDHC memory card of his cell phone before leaving for dinner with the two visiting admirals at the Pool Grill on the fifth floor of the Four Seasons Hotel. Following the main course of stuffed sea bass, but before dessert of cinnamon rice pudding, he excused himself to use the bathroom. After washing his hands, he received a warm towel from a wizened old man who was there to attend the customers, and in doing so, exchanged his cell phone memory card for an identical one.
It was good to have a lot of different friends and contacts in this new world in which everything he had ever known had changed; up became down, backward was forward, and there was no right or wrong anymore in politics and power, only survival. The very sands of the desert seemed unsteady after the coups of the Arab Spring, and nothing was ever certain.
Several months earlier, during the initial planning stages for his ultimate actions, Colonel Naqdi had opened a secret line of communication with British intelligence in London. He fed them just enough background information concerning the turmoil in Egypt to keep them interested, although it was usually delivered after an event had happened. It was still worthwhile, because it was always detailed and had proven to be accurate, so the British considered their new agent to be intelligence gold. They knew the material came out of Egypt, but they didn’t know who he was, so they gave him the code name of Pharaoh.
A few hours after the dinner, as Naqdi prepared for bed and the tremendous events that would happen tomorrow, his latest message reached MI6 in London. The Pharaoh had confirmed that the sniper arrested in America was an operative of Iran’s Army of the Guardians, and the assassination of the accountant had been carried out on orders of an intelligence officer named Major Mansoor Shakuri.
Kyle Swanson was at a large rectangular table in the kitchen of Janetta Lincoln, drinking strong coffee with a taste of chicory and slicing bright red tomatoes the size of softballs. Warm aromas of a home-cooked meal clouded the air. Sybelle Summers was washing huge leaves of lettuce that had come straight from the family’s hydroponic greenhouse and joking with the Lincoln girls, Mara, fourteen, and Becky, sixteen, who swirled around her in a friendly storm of energy.
He and Sybelle had driven straight from the rendezvous to the Lincoln home, where a long three-rail white plastic fence lined the road for about two hundred yards. A spacious open gate was anchored by decorative rock columns. The SUV bumped across the cattle guard when they turned beneath a large sign that read LINCOLN PRODUCTS. The grounds were winter bare but neatly laid out, with a number of barns and metal warehouse outbuildings flanking a spacious brick and wood home set back on several hundred acres of prime dirt. A greenhouse was attached at the rear of the house, and two more were in the distance. The girls had come charging across the broad porch to bring them in when Sybelle parked beside the wide stairs. They had not seen each other for about two years and had a lot of girl-talk catching up to do. Both had lost their baby fat and had the long-legged, coltish figures of two beautifully developing young women.
The kitchen was a madhouse for a while, then settled down as routine kicked in and a big lunch was prepared, and conversation became less excited. Another thirty minutes, and Kyle heard the downshifting grumble of a big truck and saw the ventilated pig-hauling trailer maneuvering into the driveway, then branching off on another path to one of the more distant barns. It disappeared inside, and the door was closed. Buster Lincoln emerged from the barn and stopped in an outbuilding near the house that served as a giant mudroom, where the dirt and grime and stench were washed away before setting foot in the house. He wore jeans, a faded wool pullover, and clean boots when he came through the door and pecked his daughters on their foreheads before sweeping Janetta into a hug and spinning her around the kitchen. The table was almost filled to its length with dishes and pans and plates when they were all seated, and Janetta closed her eyes and said grace.
“Isn’t Uncle Jim coming in for lunch?” asked Mara. “Did you know Sybelle carries a gun? She’s like some kind of cop!”
“We have a visitor who is interested in the Hogzilla Project. Maybe an investor. Jim is giving him the tour. He’ll be in later.”
“Eewh. I hate those big hogs. They stink.”
“I told you, little girl. They smell like money.”
Kyle took his cue to change the subject. “How’s the Hogzilla thing going? I mean, making a commercial product out of wild boars has got to be pretty challenging.”
“It’s a start-up enterprise, so we go one step forward and two steps back and throw a lot of money into the pigpen. Actually, some upscale restaurants are showing interest, and zoos and nature parks have bought some. Big rascals, though. Some more than five feet long, up to four hundred pounds.” He laughed. “Janetta raises giant vegetables, and I raise giant hogs.”
Sybelle finished a bite of salad and asked, “Why bother?”
“Why not?” Buster replied. “I studied business, and Jim did animal husbandry, and we’ve got ten years of experience now building on what our family left us. We think it might be an opportunity. Nothing is ever a guaranteed success. Maybe we’ll find a slot somewhere for them.”
“Meanwhile, they still stink.” Becky crossed her arms and rolled her eyes.
Jim Lincoln was standing on a concrete floor, with a rack of sharp knives within reach and blood pooling around a drain as he butchered the pig that had died on the truck. He worked methodically beside a set of four pens, each containing a wild boar excited by the feeding. Lincoln stripped out the guts and hurled them into a pen, and a huge hog would attack the food in a frantic rush. The big shoulders would hunch over as the tusks on the bottom jaw helped scoop the meat into the chewing mouth. Their bodies were smeared with the bloody offal, and they banged against the gates, wanting more.