Political Suicide (25 page)

Fuck!

Thirty minutes on the road, and the game was already over.

Lou slowed, signaled right, and began searching for a place to pull over. There was still the chance that the trooper would flick on his siren and zoom past, but Lou knew in a second that wasn’t going to happen. For years, he had meant to change to MD plates—not because he wanted protection against getting a ticket while making a house call, but because he wanted people to see that not all docs drove a Mercedes or Lexus. Now it was too late.

The entry to a small strip mall provided a safe landing area. As always when he was stopped, Lou debated whether he’d be better leaping out to meet the trooper halfway or whether he should slouch meekly, license and registration in hand, and wait.

Well, Officer, I was following the man I believe murdered Congressman Colston. No, not the philandering doctor, but the highly decorated marine colonel. I was going exactly as fast as he was, but I guess I’m the one who got caught.

Lou tried out the truth, rejected it, and was searching for a substitute when he was asked for the usual documents.

None of your witty repartee,
he warned himself. In his less mature days, he often managed to convert a minor traffic encounter into a trip to the station. The trooper, an impressively buxom white woman with a pretty enough face, probably would have looked sexy-tough in any garb, but she looked especially so in the black-tie, broad-brimmed hat, and stately olive of the West Virginia State Police. She spent a few minutes in her cruiser checking him out, then returned bearing papers. Four words, “License and registration, please,” were all she had spoken. Now she added a few more. Quite a few.

“You’re not in line to make the drivers’ hall of fame, Doc.”

“I thought I was doing pretty well.”

“What kind of doctor are you?”

Easy …

“Trade. I’ll tell you if you tell me what I was doing wrong.”

“You changed lanes without signaling. We frown on that in West Virginia.”

Damn. So much for wikiHow tips.

“I’m an emergency doc in D.C. Eisenhower Memorial. I promise you, I always signal when I change surgical instruments.”

“That’s funny. Lucky for you I like funny. Well, Doc, this is your lucky day twice over. Believe it or not, but you might have saved my mother’s life last year. Somebody in your ER did. She had a coronary while she was on a Silver Belles bus tour of D.C. Needed to get a shock in the ER for fibrillation. I don’t remember if I ever knew the name of the doctor who gave it to her, but the people at the hospital told me it saved her life.”

“Were they able to get a stent in her?”

“Two.”

“And she’s doing okay now?”

“She’s doing terrific. That was very nice of you to ask.”

“I would have asked even if you weren’t about to add a bunch of points to my insurance record.”

“Well, because you’re a nice guy and you asked about my mom, and you might have saved her life, I’m just giving you a warning. Also because you’re not one of those pompous doctors with MD plates.”

“Thank you, Officer.”

“Lemon. Judy Lemon. Here’s my card, in case you find yourself in these parts again.” She fished one out from what seemed like a stack of fifty. “Also, you might want to slow down. You were five mph away from getting nailed for that.”

“You got it, Officer Judy. Slow.”

Now, just leave me alone.

“No sense in speeding, either. There’s a mile backup ahead. Construction.”

Lou felt his pulse jump. A mile backup. His brain began working through the possibilities. At that moment, he glanced across the road in time to see the Mantis Range Rover approaching from the other direction, headed back toward Hayes. No silver BMW in sight.

Had the king separated from his Palace Guards?

Cautious not to go too far overboard, Lou put himself into modest flirt mode. “Listen, Officer Judy, it’s not the best of circumstances, but I really do appreciate just getting a warning.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You were just doing your job.”

“Sounds like there’s something more you’d like to say.” Her smile oozed pheromones.

“With that construction you told me about, getting stopped has made me hopelessly late for an appointment.”

“So?”

“How about another trade: If you could guide me past the holdup, I promise you dinner at the restaurant of your choice. Believe me, I’m good for it and I’m good, period—especially if I get the position I’m interviewing for.”

The trooper gave Lou’s offer some thought—perhaps a nanosecond’s worth. “You know what they say about scorning a woman with a gun,” she said, playfully patting her hip.

“I don’t know, actually, but I think I can guess. No scorning. Promise.”

“I like steak.”

“You got it. The biggest, juiciest one in the county.”

“Deal. Follow me, cowboy.”

Lou thought he saw a skip in her step as Officer Lemon hurried back to her cruiser. He wondered how many business cards would be left in her stack by the end of her shift. No matter. It seemed fairly certain that this scenario was not among any of the twenty-five million hits in Google.

Judy Lemon’s blue strobes flashed on, and in ten minutes they were an odd, two-car caravan, cruising in the breakdown lane past a long, frustrated line of slowly moving motorists. After half a mile, Lou spotted the silver Bimmer, pulled on his faded Redskins cap, and slouched down in his seat until he was peering between the bottom of his steering wheel and the top of the dash. Clearly, Brody felt the backup tail from the Palace Guards was no longer necessary.

A quarter of a mile past the construction, Lou slowed, pulled off the road, and gave Officer Judy Lemon a thumbs-up and a good-bye wave. Fifteen minutes later, Wyatt Brody sped past. His jaw set with anger, he was paying no attention to anything other than the road ahead.

Traditionally, Lou’s Camry could handle seventy before it began to shimmy. Brody was hitting seventy-five. Lou did what he could to maintain both distance and contact, but it was a struggle. He thought about the irony of having Brody get pulled over by Judy Lemon, but it wasn’t to be. Instead, he caught a glimpse of brake lights and a flash of sun on silver as the Mantis commander turned hard left, following a sign toward Billingham.

With one car between them, they headed west, parallel to a swell of foothills. Eventually, the wooded landscape gave way to a more industrialized section of Billingham. Auto repair shops lined both sides of the road, tucked between a few fast-food joints and a number of warehouses, many of them corrugated steel. Brody’s Bimmer signaled to make a left turn, and Lou slowed to watch the car glide into the parking lot of a large self-storage facility.

Lou got a fix on the unit Brody was interested in, and kept his distance. The outdoor facility was divided into rows, with garage-sized storage structures on either side. Lou guessed there were fifty or so on the premises, each of them featuring a green roll-up door.

He cruised down the access road parallel to the one Brody had taken, then shifted to Park and moved ahead on foot. He was in adrenaline-fueled, high-level, ER mode now, and he loved the tension. Ambulances were on their way in with multiple victims from a major crunch. Keyed up and ready for anything, he worked his way along the side of the last storage unit in the row, inching closer and closer to the corner.

The silver BMW, without a driver, stood idling beside an open storage door. Moments later, a white, windowless panel truck—maybe seventeen feet, no markings—backed out. Brody, looking calmer and more energized than he had when leaving the construction site, pulled the truck over and replaced it in the garage with his Bimmer. Then he used a pull-cord to lower the door and replaced the heavy padlock.

Lou raced back to the Toyota and waited until he heard Brody accelerate. Then he shifted into Drive, inched into the open, waited for a battered pickup to insert itself between him and the van, and followed.

CHAPTER 33

The ride south would have been quite beautiful had Lou taken more than a few seconds at a time to appreciate it. The Monongahela Mountains seemed to be constantly shifting against the pale early-afternoon sun. The road was winding, and he was forced to stay closer to Brody’s van than he would have liked. On one narrow stretch, the side of Lou’s Camry barely avoided a huge, jagged rock. Lou had been following the man for almost two hours. It seemed more as if the Mantis commander was on a schedule than in any particular rush.

A gas station would have been an oasis here. There were no cars to provide any sort of camouflage, and Lou had to back way off his tail. His initial adrenaline rush was gone, replaced by the tension of losing the white van at any turn or, even worse, of being spotted.

He was considering simply taking his chances by speeding up, when he eased around a sharp bend and spotted Brody’s truck several hundred yards ahead. The brake lights were on, and seconds later, the van turned right. As soon as it was out of sight, Lou accelerated. The road, if it could be called such, was an unmarked path cut into the woods—twin ruts that ran upward along the side of a foothill. The frozen snow, an inch or so of it, was much more of a problem for the Camry than it probably was for the truck.

Violent jolts from rocks and holes snapped Lou’s teeth together more than once. The Toyota skidded sideways in places and completely lost traction in others. A quarter of a mile … half. Lou was forced to slow. Then, just as he seemed to have regained control, he veered off the rutted road entirely and slid down an embankment to a parallel pathway on the right—this one actually more navigable than the one Brody was on. It occurred to him that the best he might be able to hope for was leaving the Camry and walking out of the forest. Then he got a break.

Looking upward and to his left, he saw the van brake and then stop in something of a clearing, perhaps a hundred yards ahead.

Cautiously, Lou backed up until the road he was on flattened and widened for a brief stretch. Backing all the way out to the highway or even turning around were now possibilities. In fact, there was enough room behind a huge boulder to pull his car over to the side of the road and conceal it. He opened his door, cringing at the creaks, and eased out into the chilly mountain air. From above and to the left, he could hear that Brody was keeping the truck idling. It appeared he was still behind the wheel.

Lou decided to chance the slope to his right. If he could get high enough, he would be looking down on the van. Pulling himself up by icy tree trunks and rocks, it did not take long for his hands to go numb. Twice he slipped, sliding several feet down on his stomach. It seemed certain that only the reverberating engine noise kept him from being discovered. Twenty-five feet above the van, Lou was able to crawl out onto a rocky bluff that featured enough brush for some concealment. He breathed into the sleeve of his parka and waited.

Five minutes and he heard the rumble of an approaching vehicle. He briefly lamented not having brought binoculars, but gave himself a pass. A second van, identical to Brody’s, jounced down the hill and skidded to a stop almost nose to nose with the van. From his vantage spot, Lou could just make out his Toyota on the road below and fifty yards behind the two trucks.

The doors to the new arrival flew open, and two men stepped out. Moments later, the back of the truck creaked open and three more men emerged, dressed for the cold. All were olive-skinned, with either shaved heads or thick waves of ebony hair. Latinos. Maybe Mexicans. Brody climbed out of his truck. One of the men saluted him.

“Manolo,” Brody said, his voice carrying clearly to Lou.

The other four arrivals circled to the back of Brody’s panel truck and pulled the doors open. Lou noted the lack of small talk. The moves were practiced, choreographed, business. Made perfect sense, he thought. If Brody made this drive nearly every Wednesday, they’d done this dance many times before. Two of the men jumped up into the back of the truck, while two others positioned themselves to receive the cargo within. Brody stood silently beside the man named Manolo: heavyset with a carefully waxed handlebar mustache and a thick neck featuring 360 degrees of tattoos. Lou sensed what the crew were offloading even before he saw one of the wooden cases pried open.

Guns. Sophisticated military weapons, and lots of them.

Brody stood a few paces away as Manolo inspected the cargo.

“These are good,” he said to Brody, hefting one of the rifles. “Very good. Our people in Juárez will be pleased, amigo. All M4s?”

“Easier to get now that we’ve scaled back in Afghanistan.”

Brody spoke mostly English, but used fluent Spanish when he had a mind to. Lou was never a Spanish scholar in school, but he could still handle the simple stuff. He held his breath and stayed low.

Hello, Reddy Creek,
he was thinking, mentally dropping one piece of the Brody puzzle into place. Brody ponies up sophisticated weapons to a Juárez cartel in exchange for … for what?

Soon after the weapons inspection concluded, Lou got an answer—at least a partial one. Manolo signaled to one of his men, who opened the rear of the second panel truck and lugged out a huge cooler. Then another.

As Lou watched from above, transfixed, Manolo set one of the coolers on the ground at Brody’s feet and opened the top. White vapor from dry ice billowed upward.

“This is the best batch we’ve cooked yet,” Manolo said, extracting one of what looked like a number of large plastic freezer bags. “Seven hundred capsules per bag, Señor Colonel. Counted and recounted. Filling the capsules and counting them took my men many hours.”

“I’ve told your boss over and over again,” Brody growled in English, “don’t screw with the formula.”

Formula …
Lou tensed.

“We make it better,” Manolo said.

He whistled loudly using two fingers, and a man, thin as the leafless branches overhead approached.

“Sí?”

This time, Lou could only ferret out a few words—one of them,
Pedro.