Do They Know I'm Running

“My interest is obvious. Yours-”

“As I said, this is my area of expertise. I work in the private sector. When you have the fee structure we do, you’d better know your business. We can’t wait to educate ourselves as circumstances dictate. We’re paid to predict, not react.”

“What concerns me,” Lattimore said, “is why my business is your business.”

“Mr. Sadiq is my business. Any potential threat in the region is. Now, may I continue?”

Lattimore felt outmaneuvered. Still, better to see where the thing was heading.

McIlvaine toggled his glasses. “Where was I? Yes, a foreign affairs officer from the embassy followed up-our embassy, down there, in Santa Elena. The sponsor said he was asked to back Samir because he’d helped the Salvadoran troops in Najaf. That’s all he knew. He preferred not to say who asked him to step up for the sponsorship but claimed it was absolutely not someone who would knowingly get involved in a plot to move a terrorist across three borders into the States.”

Lattimore marveled at the scant reassurance the word “knowingly” provided. Given the capacity for ignorant blundering you saw everywhere, Iraq most of all, what difference did it make what you knew or intended? Still, despite the sense of being outflanked, he took some relief from McIlvaine’s news. It basically confirmed Happy’s version of events.

“El Salvador,” McIlvaine continued, “is relatively enlightened on immigration issues, curiously enough. During World War II, the Salvadoran embassy in Geneva issued citizenship papers to more than forty thousand Hungarian Jews. Of course, most didn’t emigrate. But the citizenship documents kept them from being deported to the camps.” He drummed his fingers on his briefcase. “The curse of all intelligence analysts: I’m a history buff.”

“Fascinating,” Lattimore said.

McIlvaine took no offense. “There’s a word you use for the kind of case you’re working, if I’m not mistaken, where you insert an informant into a nest of bored, restless, vaguely ill-inclined but not yet traitorous young men, with the hope that, given a little stirring of the pot, a dash of conspiratorial brio-a pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda in a warehouse rigged for video, let’s say-you can charge them all for conspiracy to commit terrorism. An acronym, am I right?”

A flume of bile lodged in Lattimore’s throat. “BOG,” he acknowledged.

“And that stands for…?”

“Bunch of guys.”

“Exactly. The full power of the American government brought to bear against… a bunch of guys.”

“Mr. McIlvaine-”

“Boy, if that doesn’t shiver Old Glory right up the flagpole, I don’t know what does.”

Lattimore checked his watch. He was due to meet Happy back at his office in half an hour, review his most recent tapes, which were, by and large, not just boring and repetitive but worthless. “So you didn’t come all the way from Dallas just to show me an essentially meaningless one-page document.”

“As I told you-”

“You came to put me in my place.”

“It’s no secret your bunch-of-guys cases haven’t fared too well. Snitch problems.”

“Snitch problems are a given.”

“The Liberty City trial’s a debacle. What is it now, two hung juries in a row?”

“We got verdicts across the board in Fort Dix. The Toledo case came out okay.”

“Sure, with two full years of video and audio. Two years. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t have that kind of window here.”

Lattimore felt himself recoil inwardly. The guy knew way too much.

“Meanwhile,” McIlvaine added, “your bureau buddies went off chasing vegan bicyclists around Minneapolis trying to recruit snitches before the Republican National Convention. I’m sure that ended well. Is this the best we can do?”

Depends on who you mean by we, Lattimore supposed. “This case was vetted before I moved on it.”

“It makes us look like we’re making this crap up. We’re not. Hezbollah has camps in the Triple Border area. They know we’re watching, too, because some have fled east into the jungles of Brazil, or west into Iquique, Chile’s northern desert. Hezbollah’s also connected to Pablo Escobar’s old cronies who now run cocaine through a paramilitary organization in Medellin called the Office of Envigado. The money gets laundered by Lebanese businessmen in Bogota and Caracas. They have sleepers operating out of Iranian embassies all over the region. They even have websites, no joke, for their presence in several countries, including El Salvador. There’s solid intelligence they’re surveilling U.S. and Israeli targets throughout the subcontinent. And it’s not just Hezbollah we’re tracking. It’s Hamas, the PLO. Given that this Samir Khalid Sadiq claims to be Palestinian, that’s relevant I’d say.”

“I wouldn’t disagree. Look-”

“These groups are trading guns for drugs with the Mexican and Colombian cartels. The markup on cocaine alone in the Middle East is obscene. A kilo of Mexican coke costs them $6,000. You can turn it around for $100,000 in Israel, $150,000 in Saudi Arabia. Imagine what that kind of money buys. You’re seeing a lot of meth over there now too, the jihadis use it to amp up for battle. That’s serious, all of it, especially compared to a bunch of guys.”

At last the bead of sweat slithered down from his temple into the nettles of his beard. Lattimore felt an odd relief. Still, McIlvaine made no move to wipe it away.

“We’re already losing faith with American Muslims, they think we’ve got spies planted in all their mosques. Imagine the intel we’re losing because they no longer trust us. Another half-baked terrorism case won’t help. And the more you lionize Mara Salvatrucha, the more attractive it looks to all the teenage losers needing something to buy into-”

“Mr. McIlvaine-”

“It’s self-fulfilling. Make them out as the next big deal, guess what they’ll become?”

Lattimore found it strange that McIlvaine would play down a threat. In his experience, the private security outfits were more than eager to turn every crackhead lowlife with access to a gun into the next Che Guevara. It was, as McIlvaine would say, their business.

“I’m not going to apologize,” Lattimore said, “for going after the people we’re targeting.”

“Don’t get me wrong. Making sure that Mr. Sadiq is who your informant claims he is? Crucial. But the idiots on this end, I mean, seriously. Linking them to terrorism?”

Lattimore took a second to check his temper. “Maybe you should’ve spent a little more time in court back there. I can show you some of the 302s we’ve got, bring you up to speed.”

“Given what little I heard, I don’t think the defense team would view that kindly.”

“Little Brother and his rat-packers in there dragged a single mom out of her apartment on Shotwell last May, did it in front of her two little girls and just about everybody else in the neighborhood. It was a hot night, folks were out on their stoops, buying helado from the pushcart vendor. Kids, parents, grandparents. One of these Fogtown runts doused this young woman with lighter fluid as she begged for her life, one of the others struck a match. Take a second to imagine that, okay? The sound. The smell. Her two little girls right there. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they also shot her seven times. Not out of charity. They took out her legs, so she couldn’t run. They wanted her to lie there and burn, so everyone could watch. She’d identified one of Little Brother’s zukes as the bagman who, every Wednesday, came into her beauty salon to collect the week’s tax. We were building a case against the crew at the time. No surprise, things dried up pretty quick after that. This time we’ve named every third person in the neighborhood as a smokescreen, figuring they can’t kill them all. I sure hope we’re right. That’s terrorism too.”

“You don’t need to phony up an Arab jihadi sneaking across the border to prosecute it, though, do you?”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Look, street crime is destabilizing, it drives off investment, sucks up public resources, development hits a wall-granted, okay? But street crime isn’t terrorism.”

“To you, maybe.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t a problem, Lattimore. I’m arguing the problem isn’t strategic.” Finally, he wiped the perspiration off his cheek. “People here in the States get the vapors reading the news reports and the embassies