Nature of the Game (46 page)

EXPEDITED DEMISE

T
his was the third time in his life that Jud had run away.

The second time had been just weeks before, after the man in the Oasis Bar had died. Jud ran then, found Nora, only to have to run again this third time, leaving her dead in the sand.

The first time Jud ran was Miami, 1978.

Miami, the liquid city. Bright, tropical, the big heat. But the running had been clean, because that first time, in Miami, 1978, it had been all business.

“That's why we're here,” Art Monterastelli had told Jud as they sat at the white-clothed table spread with bowls of fruit and plates of bacon and eggs. Art tilted a silver pot to fill each of their china cups with sweet Cuban coffee.

“Business,” said Art. Whether he was in the jungles of Southeast Asia, on the desert of Iran, or amidst the beaches and sun-bouncing skyscrapers of Miami, blond Monterastelli never tanned, never burned. He wore his smoked sunglasses.

“Aren't we friends?” asked Jud.

In Miami, Art wore his blond hair long and wavy, like a 1950s teenage heartthrob. That day, he wore a pink shirt outside his linen pants. He was thicker in body, more lined in the face.

They sat on the back veranda of Art's Miami home. To be precise, it was Miami
Beach
. Off North Bay Road. They were casual. And too
not-alone
.

In the shadows by the French doors sat Raul, flat eyes, tropical suit, swarthy face. Raul was Art's
numero uno
and an officer in Sigma 77, a paramilitary anticommunist group dedicated to
la lucha
—the struggle. Rumors in Miami said that Sigma 77 helped plant the bomb that exploded that October at a New York City Cuban newspaper that had dared to support
el diálogo
—overtures between exiled Cubans in the U.S. and Castro. A Washington, D.C., policeman once flew down to Miami to interview Raul about the 1976 car bomb that killed the former ambassador from Allende's short-lived Marxist Chilean government a mile from the White House.

In Miami, where a third of a million people were Cuban and from a culture wedded to the romance of
el exilio
and
la lucha
, making Raul his
numero uno
was political genius on Art's part. Raul's Spanish was invaluable in the business. His soul was long gone, lost perhaps when the CIA deserted him with the rest of the 2506 Brigade on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, perhaps afterward in Castro's prisons. Refugees who knew Raul as a boy in Havana whispered that he'd been a monster even then.

Those Miami days might find Raul whispering with other
exilios
in a mirror-walled Little Havana café or on a shuttle flight to Washington, D.C., or Guatamala. He'd worked for JM/WAVE, AM/LASH and MONGOOSE, the CIA's covert wars against Cuba, helped arrange assassination plots the CIA subcontracted to the Mafia. He knew the Cubans arrested as Watergate burglars, fellow
exilios
dedicated to
la lucha
, all of them friends of men in Washington who went to the streets of Cuban Miami when they needed warriors who wouldn't shirk the crusade. Raul knew people everywhere; more importantly, he was
known
, though no one could ever be sure who he was at any given moment: currents within currents in liquid Miami.

Sitting in the shadows, Raul had his suit coat open. Jud saw the pistol in his waistband.

Behind Jud, leaning against the veranda's thin, black, steel railing, was an ex-biker from Carmel who Art had leveraged out of a jam in Mexico. These elegant Miami days, the biker kept his goatee trimmed and wore a sports jacket over his tattooed arms and a slung Uzi.

Over Art's left shoulder, in the far corner of the veranda, Jud saw a wiry ex-South Vietnamese Ranger coiled in a wicker chair. Art had recruited him out of a refugee camp when he heard how the Asian claimed a berth on a refugee boat.

A wide lawn stretched beyond the veranda to a canal. Green water slapped gently against the wood of Art's dock. A quarter mile up the channel from Art's shore, charred pilings from a burned dock poked out of the ripples like stubby black fingers. Raul lived on one side of Art, the only Cuban in the neighborhood. The prominent Florida lawyer who owned the house on the other side of Art secretly derived his wealth from Art. There was a chain link fence surrounding Art's property. The real security was invisible, from infrared cameras and motion sensors to land mines that Art switched off when the Haitian lawnboy came to ride the power mower.

Jud sensed more than saw
something
in the shadows of the gazebo on the lawn between the canal and the veranda.

Kerns
, he thought. The only man in the organization besides Jud who was good enough to guarantee a shot at that range.

Inside the house were a servant and two gunmen Jud had hired for Art. And Monterastelli's seventeen-year-old mistress.

The Miami heat was thick and sweet and as fragrant as the coffee they sipped.

“Friends?” said Art. “Perhaps. But business rules. Your fun days ended when you left the old team.”

“I didn't leave,” said Jud. “They threw me off. Unstable, reductions in force: which of their stories do you want?”

Art sipped his coffee. “You should have picked your time to leave them, not the other way around.”

Casually, as if this were a social breakfast, Art said, “Did the firm pay you much when you were playing locksmith in Washington, black-bagging embassies and other places?”

“I wasn't working for them then,” lied Jud.

“Who did you hang out with in D.C.?” asked Art.

“You got a problem?” said Jud.
To defend, attack:
“You want dates with the women in D.C. I fucked or what?”

“If the
or what
matters.” Art's gaze was flat. “Did someone send you to look for me?”

Jud frowned. “Are you nuts?”

“That's your reputation.”

The two men laughed. The biker behind Jud joined their sanctioned mirth. The Vietnamese and Raul kept silent.

“I found you on my own,” said Jud. “You bought that then because it was true, because it made sense, and because I could run security for your program.”

“But you're walking away from this good deal, just when we're expanding to ten planes of weed a month.”

“Not my fault about the crash,” said Jud.

“I believe that,” said Art. “It was only a matter of time until a plane went down in the Glades. It was coincidence that you were on it. Or convenience.”

“I didn't find it
convenient
,” snapped Jud.

“The police did. They found your driver's license on an empty C-130 with enough stems and seeds to make a case. They picked you up in your penthouse, no problem.”

“You don't kill cops,” said Jud, “you buy 'em.”

“Killing's never bothered you before.” Art shook his head. “That's so unlike you: in the field unsanitized, dropping nondeniable gear.”

He rang a silver bell. The servant cleared the plates. Art leaned back and turned his sunglasses up to the sky.

“Hot,” he said.

“It's Miami,” answered Jud.

“I talked to the Italians,” said Art. “They said no one was ever able to buy that judge before.”

Jud's neck tingled. “Nobody ever met his price before.”

“How did you come up with a million and a quarter?”

“The lawyer handled it.”

“Ah, lawyers. Where would we be without them?”

The two men sat in the heat. Watching each other.

Art spoke first. “So much money passed through your hands and never stuck. You've wasted a fortune—penthouse, Porsches, pussy.”

Jud laughed, and Art laughed with him.

“I'll get by,” said Jud.

“You're broke, but you want to go.”

“I don't want to, I've got no choice.”

“
If
you're right about those cops being pissed off because you walked away. That they want revenge or other meat.”

“You think I'd roll over on you?” said Jud.

“Would you?”

Art's sunglasses never left the sky.

“I'm not that stupid,” said Jud truthfully.

In the shadows, Raul grinned.

For the first time that morning, Art truly smiled. “What would they say about us back on the old team, eh?”

The blond man's smoked glasses stared at Jud.

“You never know what they think,” said Jud.

“They're insulated,” said Art, “not inscrutable.”

Raul spit on the veranda.

“Who ran the show?” asked Jud.

“Don't you know?” asked Art.

They laughed again, neither willing to give an inch.

“You're glad to be done with guys like that,” said Jud.

“Who says I'm done with them?”

“You like your own game too much,” said Jud. “You're too deep in it, and too smart to mix plays.”

“You know that, do you?”

“Yes.”

“But do they?”

“What does it matter?” asked Jud.
Change the subject
. “I've got loose ends to tie up. I'll exfilt day after tomorrow.”

“Where are you going?”

“Boston.” Jud shrugged. “Connections. No heat.”

“You should be more of a lizard,” said Art.

“Gecko, right?”

“Yes,” said Art, remembering with Jud.

Jud stood, carefully keeping his hands in view. He carried no gun, wore no sportsjacket over his shirt. Art rose with him. So did the Vietnamese. Raul kept his chair.

“Come by for lunch tomorrow.” Art shook Jud's hand with a firm, dry grip. “I want to give you some traveling cash.”

“No need for that,” said Jud.

“If you don't take care of your people,” said Art, “they don't take care of you.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Besides, you remember Heather's friend? The redhead with the tight ass?” Art grinned. “I've arranged to send you away with a bang.”

All the men on the veranda laughed. Jud waved good-bye, took his time walking through the house with its Baccarat crystal and abstract art. Three Dobermans were locked in the study. The two bodyguards he'd hired for Art wished him well. The teenage blonde who was too cool to have been a cheerleader strolled to the French windows leading to the pool. She wore a bikini.

“See you tomorrow,” she said.

Do you know you're a liar?
wondered Jud.

He didn't worry about starting the silver Porsche. Parked this close to Art's home, they wouldn't have bombed it. Even in Miami, 1978, that was too bold.

Jud drove south on Collins, cut over to Ocean Drive, where scrawny, gray-haired men sat on the porches of tourist homes, staring out at the waves, not hearing the women chatter.

His mirrors showed no one on his trail.

Be cool
, he thought.
The heat's making you crazy. Art knows nothing. Kerns wasn't in the gazebo, all those guns were there just because. Besides, you'll be gone in six hours, cover Art's curiosity with a phone call: Had to leave early, sayonara
.

He flipped on the radio, cycled the band from the newly labeled genre of light rock to Latin disco to jazz; left it on jazz, a cool saxophone. He rolled up his windows, used the A.C.

“
There are no losers
,” Art had said in Tehran.

The drive between Art's house and Jud's hotel averaged forty-two minutes, from the exclusive homes of Miami Beach, through blocks of decaying grandeur, past downtown's glass and steel buildings that housed CIA airlines and malls where most Miamians couldn't afford to shop. The route passed ornate doors of banks headquartered in Hong Kong and Manhattan and Switzerland. Jud had made the trip a hundred times in the eleven months he'd been in Miami. So had Art.

On Fifth Street, a faded cardboard Santa Claus dangled on a wire strung between a light pole and a palm tree by the freeway.

Ten minutes
, Jud thought.
I've been driving ten minutes
. He loved his silver Porsche. The radio announced a selection by a group called Hiroshima.

If
…

Jud pulled to the curb a block from the freeway ramp.

If
, Art wouldn't do it himself. Too risky. A long shot could work,
an Oswald
, but only Kerns had the gun, and if he missed … Raul or the biker or the Vietnamese couldn't cowboy it with shotguns and Uzis, Jud might spot them, dodge the play. Same with other guns in the organization. Art could contract Colombian shooters or Raul's Cuban friends, but Art believed day labor was unreliable. He wouldn't farm it to the Italians, give them a handle on a fellow
paesano's
business. As the CIA hits on Castro had proved, esoteric stuff such as poison was for the funny papers.

“
I talked to the Italians …
,” Art had said.

Why? Art wouldn't have asked them
unless
he suspected. He didn't believe the judge buy. He went to the Italians to satisfy his suspicions, one way or the other.

Twelve minutes since Jud had left Art's. Raul's being there made sense. But the biker, the Vietnamese, the regular two thugs,
and
Kerns in the gazebo: too many guns for a friend.

“
Did someone send you to look for me?
” Art craved certainty. He believed Jud wouldn't roll over on him—but Jud was walking away broke. Like a loser, and there are no losers, especially not Jud, which meant …

“Ungood,” said Jud, remembering.

Thirteen minutes. Jud's mirrors were empty. Heat waves skittered paper trash down the empty sidewalk.

The Special Forces file on Art Monterastelli noted he was trained as an expert in demolitions.

“
Send you away with a bang …
”

Fourteen minutes and Jud got out of the Porsche, hurried to the doorway of a boarded-up bar.
Damn it!
He wanted a drink—to pass the time, he told himself, not because of his hands or his thirst. This was the end, the exfiltration blues, the last riff of the sax. He'd play out the paranoia, let it tick off the clock for say, an hour, drive away laughing and pick up—