work. You might have thought that Liquida would be happy, but he wasn’t. His first response was caution.
Ordinarily he would have called the courier service and made arrangements to have the stuff in the box collected and delivered by giving them a temporary forwarding address, someplace where Liquida could move in and out quickly and safely.
But things were now much more complicated. The U.S. government had put a price on his head. Liquida had seen it earlier that morning, using one of the guest computers in the hotel lobby to check the FBI’s website. It was something he did on a frequent basis. It wasn’t there yesterday. But this morning he turned up, not on their most wanted fugitive list, but instead, on their terrorist site. There was no picture or sketch, at least not yet. But they were offering two million dollars for tips that would lead authorities to a man known only under the alias of “Muerte Liquida.” There was other information, some of it accurate and some of it not. That was the thing about government; they had a hard time getting things right. If Liquida could have figured a way to stay safe and collect on the reward, for that kind of money, he might have called in a tip or two himself.
Now he had to worry about Bruno. In Liquida’s line of work, two million dollars could turn an associate into beef on the hoof in less time than it took to say the word tip.
His natural paranoia was telling him that the stuff in the drop box could be a trap. He looked at the date on the message. It was two days old. Unless Bruno somehow knew about the reward before it was posted on the FBI’s site, he could not have known about it when he sent the message. In which case it might not be a trap at all. Or else
… Liquida’s mind searched for the hook and its jagged barb.
What if the message wasn’t from Bruno at all? What if the FBI had somehow found the box? Liquida had been using the drop box for about seven months. That was too long. It was time to get a new one, to find a fresh location. But it was too late to think about that now. If the message was real, then the money was there. But if the FBI knew about the box, they could know about the messaging service as well. They might be using the box as bait.
Chapter Ten
How many times do I have to tell you? I just want to go home,” said Raji. “This is not going to work. That’s all there is to it.”
“It will work if you help us,” said Bruno.
“I already told you, no. I made a mistake. I admit that. I should never have come to Paris.”
“It’s too late for that,” said Leffort. “There’s no way back. They already know. The authorities will be looking for both of us by now.”
“I’ll take my chances,” said Raji.
“Unfortunately, that is no longer possible.” Bruno Croleva was an equal opportunity merchant of death. There was no cause he would not fuel with guns or munitions. He was totally nonpartisan in the same way politicians are who take donations from all sides on every issue. Bruno was in it for the money. Warm bodies or cold steel, it didn’t matter to Bruno. If there was a profit to be made, he would deliver it.
“You know what I think?” said Bruno.
Raji sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. “No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“I think you are a little homesick, is all. Maybe you have someone waiting for you back there. A nice woman perhaps?” Bruno wrinkled an eyebrow at him with the delivery of this diagnosis.
Raji looked up at him and winced, as if to tell Bruno that he had an air bubble trapped somewhere between his ears. “No. You’re wrong.” Raji shook his head.
“No need to be embarrassed.” Croleva fancied himself a mind reader, a delusion fostered by the fact that most people were sufficiently terrified of him that any semicivil suggestion from Bruno was generally followed by the word yes.
Larry Leffort sat on the couch against the far wall in Raji’s Paris hotel room. He knew that playing twenty questions with Bruno could end with piano wire being used to make something other than musical notes.
“Listen to me,” said Raji. “You don’t understand.”
Bruno’s forced smile compressed the furrows above his eyebrows. The no-man’s-land between there and the shiny bald dome up top looked like a crooked plowed field. “Tell me. What is it that bothers you? Why do you want to go back?”
“I just want to go home, that’s all.”
“There is nothing there for you,” said Bruno.
“I want my life back. Can’t you get that through your head?” Raji was afflicted more by anger than fear at the moment. “I know that coming here was a mistake. We all make mistakes. I’m sorry if I caused you problems. But now I just want to go home. That’s all there is to it. Understand?” Raji looked up at Bruno, all three hundred and sixty pounds of him and gave the man an annoyed expression, like what part of no don’t you understand.
“I knew it,” said Bruno. “It is a woman. I can see it in your eyes. You miss her. You are in love. Admit it. Dat’s only natural. Young man like you. But soon you will be a rich man. You must learn to cast your net into the open sea, where there are many fish.” Having divined the problem, Bruno’s brain didn’t allow for conflicting messages even from the patient. “You want a woman, I get you one. Beautiful woman. No problem.”
“I doubt he’s ever been with a girl,” said Leffort.
“Fine. You want a boy, I get you…”
“No!!!” Raji glared up at Bruno and shouted. “You’re not listening.”
“OK, OK. You want more than one woman? I can do that.”
Raji just sat on the bed, looking up at the ceiling and shaking his head.
“How many can you get?” asked Leffort. “Women, I mean.” Leffort knew there had to be piercing and tattoo parlors in Paris. Just think what he was missing.
Bruno shot him a harsh glance that crossed the room like a bolt of lightning. The two Americans were driving him crazy. He couldn’t wait for Liquida to arrive so the Mexican could take them off his hands.
“You, outside!” Bruno gestured to Leffort. “You stay here. I’ll be back in a minute,” he told Raji.
Croleva and Leffort stepped from the room into the hallway outside. Bruno said something in Russian to the man seated in the chair at the end of the hall. They had already bolted the window in Raji’s room closed so that he couldn’t crawl out on the ledge and try to escape.
Leffort and Bruno walked a short distance down the hall, out of earshot of Bruno’s thug sitting in the chair.
“We are going to have to put something in his food to sedate him,” said Bruno.
“You think that’s necessary?” said Leffort.
“Yes. And you will have to keep an eye on him.”
“Why me?”
“Because you are his friend. He trusts you.”
“Right,” said Leffort.
“And because, if you had done your job, you would already have the rest of the materials, in which case we wouldn’t need him any longer.” Bruno was talking about the final targeting programs. “You are certain that he has them?” Croleva watched Leffort’s face closely as he asked the question.
“Yes. Absolutely. He has them. I know it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he told me. And because he ran the programs and plugged in the targeting data for a computer simulation the day before we left. And it worked.”
Bruno studied Leffort’s eyes for any hint of deception.
“He completed the programs three weeks ago.” Leffort couldn’t afford to show even the slightest equivocation on this. If Bruno thought for a moment that Raji didn’t have the final targeting software, he would kill both of them now and make whatever excuses were necessary to his clients. Without that software the rest of the project materials were worthless, and both Leffort and Bruno knew it.
“You say he loaded them into a computer for the simulation? Then why couldn’t you get them from the
