Labyrinth (48 page)

Land pictured in 2007 with Fabrizio Boccardi, the Italian investor and entrepreneur who was the inspiration for his book
The Seven Sins
, which was published in 2008.

Land emceeing the Brunch and Bullets Luncheon to benefit Reading Is Fundamental at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in the spring of 2007.

Land and his classmates and fraternity brothers celebrating their thirtieth class reunion during Brown University's Commencement Weekend in 2009. He was a member of the Delta Phi fraternity.

In the fall of 2010, Land attended the first ever Brown University night football game, which he coordinated in his position as Vice President of the Brown Football Association. Brown beat rival Harvard 29-14.

Land's most recent publicity shot, taken in late 2010, when he was having, he says, a good hair day.

Acknowledgments

ALL MY BOOKS ARE,
in a sense, collaborative efforts, for the knowledge, expertise, and patience of many others are duly tried and given. Listing all is not possible. The names that follow are the most select who deserve far more than this simple mention. Any mistakes that appear in
Labyrinth
are wholly mine.

For assistance in the scientific realm, thanks once again to John Signore and especially to Emery Pineo, who never fails to solve even the most impossible problems.

For help with the economic end, thanks to Robin Dumar.

Thanks to the
real
Colin Burgess for his help with England's landscape and geography.

For technical assistance on the names and capabilities of World War II fighter planes, I am especially indebted to Martin Caidin for his excellent book,
Ragwings and Heavy Iron
(Houghton Mifflin, 1984).

For advice on things medical and for providing moral and editorial support, I owe a special debt to Dr. Morty Korn, the only reader to have suffered through all my works.

I am also ever so grateful to a superb editor, Daniel Zitin, and to Ann Maurer for her creative genius along the way.

As usual, my deepest appreciation to a miraculous agent, Toni Mendez, who puts everything together.

And last, an extra special thanks to Elmer Blistein, a man who believed I could do it when no one else did even after weeding through a dismal first novel for my senior thesis at Brown. Enjoy your retirement, Professor, you've earned it!

A Sneak Peek at
Strong at the Break

Turn the page for a sneak peek at Jon Land's new book
Strong at the Break
, coming in 2011

Chapter 1

Quebec; the present

FROM THE STREET THE
house looked like any other nestled around it in the suburban neighborhood dominated by snow cover that had at last started to melt. A McMansion with gables, faux brick and lots of fancy windows that could have been lifted up and dropped just about anywhere. The leaves had long deserted the tree branches, eliminating any privacy for each two-acre spread had the typical neighbors been around to notice. Problem was the neighborhood, part of a new plot of palatial-style homes, had been erected at the peak of a housing boom now gone bust, so less than a third were occupied.

Caitlin Strong and a Royal Canadian Mountie named Pierre Beauchamp were part of a six-person squad rotating shifts in teams of two inside an unsold home diagonally across from the designated 18 Specter, the marijuana grow house they'd been eyeballing for three weeks now. She'd come up here after being selected for a joint U.S. and Canadian Drug Task Force looking into the ever-increasing rash of drug smuggling across a fifteen-mile stretch of St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation land that straddled the border.

Beauchamp lowered his binoculars and made some notes on his pad, while Caitlin looked at him instead of raising hers back up.

“Something wrong, Ranger?”

“Not unless you count the fact I got no idea what we're trying to accomplish here.”

“Get the lay of the land. Isn't that it?”

“Seems to me,” Caitlin told the Mountie, “that the DEA got that in hand already. You boys too.”

“It's Task Force business now. We need to build a case for a full-on strike.”

“You telling me the Mounties couldn't have done that already, on their own?”

“Not without alerting parties on the other side of border who'd respond by dropping their game off the radar, eh? When we hit them, the effort's got to be coordinated and sudden. That doesn't mean two law enforcement bodies working in tandem, it means two
countries
. And that, Ranger Strong, is never a simple prospect.”

“So we've got to tell both sides what they know already.”

Beauchamp shrugged. “Put simply, yes.”

“I guess I'm just not cut out for this sort of game,” Caitlin said and sighed.

The thunk of car doors slamming froze Beauchamp's response before he could utter it. Both he and Caitlin had their binoculars pressed back against their eyes in the next instant, watching five big men in black tops, black fatigue pants and army boots approach the grow house from a dark SUV lugging assault rifles and what looked like gasoline cans.

“Uh-oh,” said Beauchamp.

“Hells Angels?” asked Caitlin, following a bald pair of black-garbed figures who looked like twins.

“Yup.”

“What exactly they doing here now, while there's people and drugs still inside?”

The Mountie moved his gaze back to her, his expression flatter than she'd seen in the three weeks they'd been working together. “Only one thing I can think of.”

Chapter 2

Mohawk Indian Reservation; three weeks earlier

THE DEA'S LEAD AGENT
, Frank Gage, drove Caitlin out to the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation first thing when she reached St. Lawrence County in upstate New York, her unpacked bags stowed in her motel room. They turned off Route 37 down a bumpy road formed of cracked pavement lost to the snow the further they drew into the woods. March was the absolute dead of winter in these parts, and Caitlin had never seen so much snow and ice in her entire life, enough of it to make the trees sag under its weight.

“Peak of the season, this road's got more snow than you can imagine,” he said, finally snailing his car to a halt in a clearing that opened into a picturesque, white-encrusted scene of a frozen river that somewhere contained the border between the United States and Canada.

Caitlin followed Gage out of the car and down a slight embankment atop snow that crunched underfoot before hardening into ice. Her boots had the wrong tread for this kind of ground and she found herself slipping, unsure exactly of where the land ended and frozen water began beneath them.

“Welcome to the source of our problems, Ranger,” Gage told her.

“Where's the border exactly?”

“There isn't one. That's the problem,” he said, pointing across the vast whiteness to the woods on the other side. “That's Canada over there, but it's also part of the Mohawk Reservation on their side of the border too.”

Caitlin followed Gage's gaze and spotted an old Indian man cutting a hole in the ice. He had a fishing pole resting on a foldout chair behind him and, if he was aware of their presence, chose not to acknowledge it.

“Who's that?”

“Old tribal cop. A legend in these parts who hates the druggers almost as much as he hates us. Comes pretty much every day to catch his dinner. Locals say he might be as much as a hundred years old.”

Caitlin watched the old man plop down in his chair and ready his pole over the perfectly circular hole he'd fashioned in the ice.

“That all makes this a virtual sovereign nation the Canadian authorities are reluctant to violate even more than we are,” Gage said, picking up where he left off before Caitlin had been distracted by the old Indian. He turned toward her, breath misting in front of his face. “More drugs come into the country over this and other frozen rivers, what we call ‘ice bridges,' than any other spot in the country.”

“Excluding Mexico.”

“No, Ranger, not excluding Mexico at all, no offense to you.”

“None taken,” Caitlin said, trying to make sense of what the DEA man was telling her.

“We estimate fifty-five billion dollars a year in drugs now comes in through Canada. Compare that with forty-five, maybe fifty, through Mexico.”

“You telling me we been fighting the war on drugs in the wrong place?”

“I'm telling you a new front's opened up in that war over the past five years or so and you're looking at it. Starts with the grow houses, pharma and meth labs organized throughout Quebec and parts of British Colombia by the Hells Angels.”

“Same biker gang we got?”

“They operate on both sides of the border. An elaborate network of fully franchised businessmen backed up by the usual armed sons of bitches riding Harleys. Angels are responsible for manufacture and shipment across Mohawk land here with the Natives' full blessing, since plenty of them end up as major distributors of the product themselves. I'll show you some of the homes of biggest suppliers later. Goddamn mansions sitting just down the road from shacks generally unfit for human habitation. Tribal dealers use runners to sell their product to networks loyal to Russian organized crime throughout New York, Ohio, and Michigan. And that's just for starters since it doesn't even include the truck loads bound for other suppliers.”