Dark Target (32 page)

“Can I help you?” Huston said, opening the door. Sykes presented his badge and credentials.

“Agent Danforth Sykes, Army Counterintelligence,” he said. “I’m with Agent DeLuca’s team. I was hoping I could have a word
with you. I know it’s Saturday but we were told you wanted to be briefed 24/7 ASAP, and we decided against using even encrypted
phones, at least for the time being. May I come in?”

“Of course, of course,” Huston said. “I apologize for my manners. My wife and kids are up in Telluride skiing today so I wasn’t
expecting anybody. Please come in. Would your friend in the car like to come in as well?”

“My driver needs to wait in the car,” Sykes said.

“Now I’m your driver?” Jambazian said.

“Make yourself at home,” Huston said, leading Sykes into the living room, where the fire was still dying down. “Can I get
you anything? Coffee or tea?”

“I’d love a cup of coffee,” Dan Sykes said.

While Huston was in the kitchen, Sykes surveyed the room. The house was spotless. He wondered where Huston kept his mess.
The book he’d read on obsessive-compulsives said many of them were phobic about other people’s germs but lived quite comfortably
amid their own filth. Perhaps his affliction was something Huston kept secret even from his own family. There were religious
icons everywhere, a Bible on the coffee table as well as paintings on the walls of various familiar Christian images, not
one hung even slightly atilt. All the books on the shelves were neatly faced and arranged in alphabetical order by title.
The arms of the chairs had lace antimacassars, neatly aligned. Christmas music played softly from the next room, even though
it was well past the season.

“What’s keeping him?” Sykes asked sotto voce.

“He’s washing his hands,” Jambazian said. “And if this camera is reading correctly, he’s using water that’s almost scalding.
Five-four-three-two-one…”

Sykes heard the water shut off in the kitchen.

“Three minutes exactly,” Sami said. “He’s either locking or unlocking the sliding glass door to the back patio. I couldn’t
say why.”

“Do you take it black or with cream, Agent Sykes?” Huston called from the kitchen.

“With cream, thanks,” Sykes said.

“Just so you know, he’s using some sort of powdered coffee white,” Sami said a moment later.

Huston set the cup on the table in front of Sykes and sat opposite him, rising briefly to poke the fire in the fireplace.

“So please,” Huston said, seeming more composed now than he had before. “Tell me what you’ve learned. Have you found Sergeant
Escavedo?”

“We have not,” Sykes said. “But we’re starting to think she might have met with foul play, as they say in the Agatha Christie
books. Her roommate went missing five days ago. We found her car on a Navaho reservation in the Four Corners region near Shiprock.
We tracked her to a cabin in a remote canyon and finally to a cave at the base of the canyon.”

“A cave?” Huston said. “This was the roommate, you say?”

“Theresa Davidova,” Sykes said. “A Russian girl. Been in this country for three years.”

“Russian?” Huston said. “You think this is the Russian connection General Koenig was concerned about?”

“Possibly,” Sykes said. He’d found no smoking gun, taking the tack that Davidova had sought out contact with Escavedo, no
note from Leon Lev saying, “Theresa, make contact with this woman for me and I will let you go.” At the same time, the odds
that the sergeant had made a connection with the Russian girl purely at random seemed remotely small. If Sergelin and Koenig
were partners, perhaps the former KGB colonel didn’t completely trust his American counterpart. Perhaps he wanted to gain
some sort of leverage over him. Suppose, DeLuca had said, that Sergeant Escavedo and General Koenig, a married man, had had
an affair and Sergelin found out about it? That would have been useful information to him. Sergelin could parlay information
like that into power—a say over the targets Darkstar chose.

“Davidova had been brought here by a man named Lev,” Sykes told Huston, “who owns a number of strip clubs and brothels in
Juarez. Her boyfriend said she stopped working for him over a year ago, but that she was still afraid of him and that she
thought that Lev was looking for her because he claimed she still owed him money. We think Davidova might have given him the
disks Cheryl Escavedo stole, to wipe out the debt. We’re not sure if Sergeant Escavedo told Davidova about the disks or if
Davidova found them on her own.”

“You don’t think Davidova killed Escavedo, do you?”

“It’s possible,” Sykes lied.

“Do you know what was on the disks?” Huston asked.

“Not yet, but we’re going to take down Leon Lev and shake him until his teeth fall out. The problem is that Lev is ex-KGB.
Did you ever hear the name when you were working in Moscow?”

Huston shook his head.

“Lev is a fairly common name in Russia,” Huston said. “I might have heard it, but I didn’t know the guy.”

“His body temperature just rose,” Sami told Sykes. “He’s stressing. I think he’s lying.”

“That’s probably true,” Sykes said.

“What do you mean by ‘probably’?” Huston said. “Are you insinuating that I’m not telling you the truth?”

“I was just referring to how common the name might be,” Sykes said. “At any rate, we found the girl’s body in the cave. She’d
been shot. Through the head. If Lev did it, we’ll know as soon as we can get a blood sample from him.”

“You need a blood sample?” Huston asked.

“We want to look for mycotoxins in his blood,” Sykes said. “If he was in the cave, he would have been inhaling air that contains
microscopic fungal spores from the bat guano. Once that gets in his blood, he’d develop a disease called histoplasmosis, which
can actually be fatal if it isn’t treated, once the fungus starts reproducing in the bloodstream. The same airborne spores
will be on the clothes he wore and on his boots and whatever, so we should be able to tie him to the cave, and the lab boys
can run the genomes for the specific spores that would connect Lev to that exact cave. We also have the bullet, so if we can
connect it to the gun and the gun is in Lev’s possession, we’ve got him. Of course, that’s if we go by the book. Thanks to
the Patriot Act, we might be able to skip a few steps, plus, he’s not an American citizen so we can classify him as an enemy
combatant if we want to, without having to worry about all the Jewish liberal ACLU media types coming down on us.”

“Interesting,” Huston said.

“His temperature went up again,” Jambazian told Sykes.

“Anyway, I can’t stay, but that’s what we know, Major, and we wanted you to know as soon as we did. We have somebody who’s
going to talk to General Koenig. We have to decide at what point we want to bring the Pentagon in, but my sense was that you
wanted to handle this as much in-house as possible—is that right?”

“I appreciate your discretion,” Major Huston said.

Back in the car, Sykes suggested they relocate and watch the house from somewhere more concealed, but Sami disagreed.

“Let’s stay put for a second and see what he does,” Sami said. “If we sit, he’s forced. He’s aware of us but he doesn’t seem
all that concerned.” They watched the screen, an outline of the house in cool blues and greens, the radiators represented
by orange lines, the fire in the fireplace a bright red.

“Where’d he go?” Sykes said, looking at the screen on the PDA.

“He went down into the basement,” Sami said, pointing at the screen with his finger, then at the kitchen. “This is the stove.
He filled a lobster pot with hot water and turned the heat up under it. Okay—that’s him,” he said, his finger following the
outline of a yellow figure. “He’s in the living room now,” Sami said, narrating what he saw on the screen. “He’s looking at
us through a crack in the curtains. He’s moving to the fireplace. He’s throwing something in the fireplace. Probably the clothes
he wore. Why wouldn’t he have burned them before?”

“Maybe he’s a hoarder,” Sykes said. “He’s back in the kitchen. What’s he got in his hand?”

“His boots,” Sami said, interpreting the image. “He’s putting them in the pot on the stove. He’s making boot soup.”

“I think that was in one of the MREs they gave us in Iraq,” Sykes said. “Do you think he’ll flip on Koenig?”

“Eventually,” Sami said. “Dave DeLuca is the best I’ve ever seen at getting people to turn toward their best self-interests.
I saw him flip all kinds of people as a cop in Boston. Gangbangers, made guys, politicians. The guy could sell snow to an
Eskimo.”

“What’s Major Brent Huston doing now?” Sykes said.

“He’s washing his hands again,” Sami said. “We have three minutes. Wanna pop him?”

“Why not?” Sykes said. “As long as we’re in the neighborhood.”

Sykes approached the front door to make the arrest, drawing his Beretta automatic and chambering a round as Sami circled the
house to cover the back. Sami cursed when a motion detector mounted at the side of the house triggered a set of floodlights
and no doubt an alarm inside. When he rushed through a foot of snow to the patio doors, he found the kitchen empty. Sykes
met him there.

“He’s not upstairs,” Sykes said.

They were staring at the door leading to the basement when they heard an engine roar to life in the backyard. Sykes bolted
down the stairs while Sami rushed to the patio, in time to see Huston racing across the backyard on a snowmobile, spraying
snow behind him as he sped away. Jambazian fired once, and Sykes fired twice from the basement door, both men watching as
Huston disappeared into the pine trees. There was a second smaller green and yellow John Deere snowmobile in the covered area
beneath the back deck where Huston parked his snow machines, but Huston had managed to rip out the ignition before departing
on the larger sled. Sykes ran a hundred yards into the woods, following the tracks Huston had left in the snow, but stopped
where the tracks joined a network of snowmobile trails, with no way of telling which way Huston had turned. He listened, the
far-off whine of the four-stroke engine growing fainter and fainter. When he called Peggy Romano and asked if there was any
aerial surveillance available, she said there wasn’t.

Huston was gone.

Hoolie and Mack managed to get an appointment with Leon Lev when they told the bartender at Club Zorro that they had information
Lev might be interested in buying, a CD-ROM they’d gotten from Theresa Davidova that had formerly belonged to Cheryl Escavedo.
They insisted on meeting in a public place, in neutral territory, and not in one of the clubs Lev owned.

They met at noon at a McDonald’s on Avenida Juarez, a short walk from the bridge. The restaurant was crowded with families
and kids and businessmen on their lunch breaks, the counter manned by a dozen young men in green striped shirts and paper
hats. The boy wearing the headset and manning the drive-thru window was a double for the boxer Oscar De La Hoya, Hoolie thought
as he ordered a chicken Caesar salad for himself and a Coke for MacKenzie. Leon Lev arrived in a massive black Chevy Suburban
with dark tinted windows. He was dressed in a loose-fitting black tracksuit over a red T-shirt, a thick gold chain around
his neck and large silver and turquoise rings on several of his fingers. He was accompanied by a younger man of perhaps forty,
wearing black pants and a black shirt under a silver-gray sport coat, as well as four larger and younger bodyguards, who took
up conspicuous positions by the doors. Lev smelled strongly of vodka when he sat down opposite them at a central table.

“I am Lev,”
he said in Russian. “This is my new friend, Martine Guzman. The colonel is here to make sure you don’t hurt me.” He chuckled
to himself, looking at Vasquez. “Who are you? Are you the one who killed my friend Dushko?”

“Esteban Bernal,” Vasquez said, combining the names of two of his favorite accordion players. “This is…”

“I know,” Lev said. “You are Mila Zukova from Suma. Why don’t I remember you?”

“Why would you remember me?”
MacKenzie said in Russian.
“I was six years old when you left Suma. Unless you were hanging around school yards.”

“My friend Martine is a very important man,” Lev said to Hoolie. “He works for me now, but he is very important. Just ask
him. He could arrest you for killing Dushko if I wanted him to. Did you know that?”

“Your Serbian friend slipped on a bar of soap,” Vasquez said.

“I will tell you the truth. I was tired of him,” Lev said. “Serbs have always thought they’re better than Russians. That’s
why we wipe our feet on them. You want to work for me, Esteban Bernal? I’ll give you a job. I’ll put you in charge of soap.”

“I work for myself,” Hoolie said. “I work with Mila.”

“My God,” Lev said, laughing. “You are in love with this whore.” He turned to Guzman. “They’re in love.” He turned to Hoolie.
“Maybe I’ll fuck your girlfriend just to show you I can. Maybe I’ll fuck her right here on the table. Mila from Suma—have
you ever been fucked at a McDonald’s?”

He laughed.

“Maybe we’ll sell our CD to someone else,” Hoolie said. “I know that there are many other people who would be interested.”

Lev shoved half a cheeseburger into his mouth and washed it down with his Coke, then held his paper cup up for one of his
bodyguards to refill. He picked at his French fries.

“And what’s on this disk?” Lev said, shoving three in his mouth. “I’ve never heard of this Escavedo person. But a friend of
mine says he might be interested.”

“What’s on it is information,” MacKenzie said. “Information you wouldn’t want to fall into the wrong hands.”

“Information about what?” Lev said. “If you want me to buy something from you, you have to tell me what it is I’m buying?”

“Information that proves you shot down Cipriano Cabrera’s helicopter, for one thing,” MacKenzie said.

“I did that?” Lev said, his voice filled with mock indignity at the accusation. “How could I do that? Why would I want to
kill my new business partner? That makes no sense.”

“You think you can control the cartel,”
MacKenzie said in Russian, as if she didn’t want the others to understand. “
You think you can control the consequences of what you did, because you have an illusion about how powerful you are, but deep
down, I think you are afraid. I think you are afraid of the United States government. And I think you are afraid of Miguel
Cabrera, because you know he’ll seek revenge for his father. I think you have a great many new concerns. I don’t think you
want more trouble than you’ve got now.”