and polished and used to dealing with high-end customers who’d never buy “party favors” from some slinger with prison ink and low riders. Most college kids and rich kids didn’t like thinking what they did was criminal, really. They considered the goods he sold them just another arbitrarily outlawed delicacy, like Iranian caviar or unpasteurized Camembert. A man like Mauricio made the drug trade seem not unlawful but exclusive.
“For you I’d say it’s pretty much all bad right now.”
On his bedside table was a Nokia cell phone. I grabbed it with my free hand and slipped it in my pocket.
Then I reached behind the headboard and found what felt a lot like a gun duct-taped back there. A very expensive STI pistol, I saw. I pocketed that too, then released my grip on his throat entirely. He drew a deep, rattling breath. His face was deep red, and he looked like he was on the verge of blacking out. Maybe I’d pushed it too far.
“All right,” I said, climbing off and standing beside the bed. “Get up.”
He struggled to sit up, tangled up in the sheets and weak from oxygen deprivation. He was wearing only red Speedos. Weakly, he shifted his legs over the side of the bed. His fingernails and toenails were manicured to a high gloss. “Jesus Cristo,” he gasped, “what you want from me, man?”
“You screwed up,” I said.
He shook his head, eyes terrified. “I gave you—I gave it to—the guy.”
“Which guy?”
“The guy who gave me the phone. You—you guys? What the hell, man? You work for them, too?”
“Which one?” I said.
“No one give me names. What is this? Who are you, man?”
“What was his name?” I shouted.
“I don’t know anyone’s name, man! I can’t talk. The guy got eyes on the back of his head!”
I was about to ask what he meant when I heard the thunder of footsteps on the stairs outside. He heard it too. His face was tight with fear. “Oh, Jesus Cristo, that’s them! That’s them! He said they kill me if I talk to anyone. I didn’t tell you nothing, man!”
Then came a crash and the splintering sound of his door being broken down with a metal ram.
The men who burst into the room were wearing green uniforms with green ballistic vests and black Kevlar helmets and goggles that made them look like giant insects from some bad science-fiction flick. Right behind the breachers came the assaulters with their H&K MP5 submachine guns. The ones with shields carried Glocks. They all had FBI patches on their shoulders and chests.
When he saw who they were, the expression on his face changed.
He looked relieved.
41.
The man was slowly crossing the bare earthen field toward the farmhouse when the sat phone on his belt began to trill. The morning was cold and brisk and the sky was blue glass.
He knew who it was, because only one person had this number, and he knew what the caller wanted.
As he answered the phone, he stopped at the exact center of the hump of earth and made a mental note to take another run at it with the pneumatic backfill tamper. Or just a few passes with the backhoe tires: That should do it.
Not that the girl was going anywhere, ten feet down.
But here in rural New Hampshire, neighbors sometimes got curious, or too friendly.
“Yes?” Dragomir said.
“Nothing yet,” said the man who called himself Kirill. They spoke in Russian.
Maybe that was his real name, maybe not. Dragomir didn’t care. Kirill was nothing more than an intermediary, an errand boy who passed messages back and forth between Dragomir and the very rich man Kirill called only the Client. Never a name. This was fine with Dragomir. The less he and the Client knew about each other, the better.
But Kirill fretted and hovered and yammered like a frightened old babushka. He worried that some detail might go awry. He seemed to think that his constant monitoring, the daily check-ins, would keep everything running smoothly.
He didn’t know that Dragomir rarely made mistakes.
“It’s only been a few hours,” Dragomir said.
“What do you think, the father went back to sleep? He should have sent the file immediately. His daughter—”
“Patience,” Dragomir said.
A plane roared overhead, and the line went staticky. Jets flew by every hour or so, mostly at night, from the air base in Bangor, Maine. They had that big lumbering sound of military cargo transport planes. It reminded him of Afghanistan, the Ilyushin 76s that were always blasting by overhead.