necessity, had been involved in the government.
Through all of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, a man in the Guerrero family would push out his chair from the big mahogany desk in the office, take his hat and cane from the rack near the door, light a cigar, and walk up the street to government headquarters to protect and further the interests of the Guerrero family companies. The building had an impressive but low baroque facade, a set of double doors that were so heavy that Sarah Allersby had to have an electric motor installed to help her push them open, and floors of antique tiles made and decorated by the same craftsmen who had done the Iglesia de La Merced. The ceilings were fifteen feet high, and every few feet a big lazy fan still provided the proper subtropical atmosphere even though the air it circulated was air-conditioned to seventy-two degrees.
Sarah used a 1930s-era desk telephone with a scrambled line that was checked by her security people twice each day to detect a change in ohms of resistance that would indicate a listening device. She said, “Good morning, Russell. This line is safe so you can speak freely.”
The man on the other end had a contract with the Estancia Guerrero, but Sarah’s family had used his services many times in the years before they had acquired the Guatemalan holdings. He was the man who had impersonated an FBI agent in San Diego. “What can I do for you, Miss Allersby?”
“It’s more trouble over the item we picked up in San Diego. Sam and Remi Fargo have been here in Guatemala and even managed to find their way onto the Estancia. They’ve been defaming me and my company to anyone who will listen. They seem to think that the marijuana operation on the Estancia is mine, as though I were some tawdry drug dealer. They wanted the police to search my house and all of my properties, if you can imagine.”
“Is there any chance the police will do that?”
“Of course not,” she said. “But I can’t simply ignore them. They left for the United States yesterday. I know they won’t get anywhere with the authorities here, but I have no way of knowing what they can do there. I need to have them watched for a while.”
“Certainly,” he said. “There are two ways to go about this kind of thing. We can simply hire some local San Diego private detectives. That would mean leaving a record that we had hired them and taking the risk that they might have to reveal who hired them in court sometime. Then there’s—”
“The other way, please,” she said. “What we’ve already done in San Diego could generate terrible legal problems. And I worry about this Sam Fargo. He’s vindictive. He won’t be able to let this go. And if he wanted to, his wife wouldn’t let him. I think she’s developed a jealous fear that I’m a threat to her marriage. She’s got nothing going for her but her looks, and as soon as somebody prettier is around, she knows she’s in trouble.”
“All right,” Russell said. “The Fargos haven’t seen me. I can do this myself with one good man. We can be in San Diego in a couple of hours.”
“Thank you, Russell. I’ll have some money sent to your company to cover the initial expenses.”
“Thank you.”
“Just knowing you’re personally paying attention to the problem will make me sleep better. I’m just one person, and I can’t be expected to pay attention to everybody everywhere who wants to harm me.”
“Would you like to set a limit on how expensive this gets?”
“No. If they leave the United States, send people wherever they go. I want to know where they are. And I never want them suddenly showing up on my doorstep again. But I don’t want to leave a record that I had them followed. I really can’t have them ruining my reputation.”
Russell was already preparing for the trip while he listened. He took a suitcase out of his closet and set it on the bed. “I’ll let you know as soon as there’s anything to report.”
“Thank you, Russell.”
Next, Russell called the number of Jerry Ruiz, the man who had impersonated the Mexican Minister of Culture when they had confiscated the codex. “Hi, Jerry. This is Russ. I’d like you with me on a surveillance job.”
“Where?”
“It’s back in San Diego, but it could go anywhere from there. We’re to keep track of a couple, period. We can split what Sarah gives us, even.”
“It’s for her? Okay, I’m in.”
“I’ll pick you up in a half hour.”
Russell hung up and returned to his suitcase. He packed the sets of clothes he used for surveillance — black jeans and navy blue nylon windbreaker and black sneakers, baseball caps in several colors, some olive drab hiking pants that unzipped into shorts, a couple of sport coats in navy and gray, some khaki pants. He and Ruiz would fly down and rent a car and after a couple of days he would turn it in and get another one. He had found over the years that even a minor change in his appearance had a dramatic effect. Just putting on a hat and a different jacket made him a new person. Alternating drivers, getting out of the car and sitting at a restaurant table, made him invisible.
He completed his packing by throwing in some equipment: a shooter’s 60-power spotting scope, with a small tripod, and his personal weapons and some ammunition. He knew that Ruiz would come prepared. Ruiz habitually carried a pistol, even in Los Angeles, and had a boot knife, because that was the way he had come up. He had been a collector for a street gang as a teenager and then he became a cop for a while. It was a strange twist that as he’d come into middle age, he had begun to look like a Mexican politician or a judge. His appearance made him a good man for the job. He wasn’t automatically a suspect. He was also fluent in Spanish and that helped many times.
When Russell took this kind of job, he liked to have more time to prepare, but he would manage. He threw in his passport, five thousand dollars in cash, and a laptop computer. He closed his suitcase and went out to his car. He locked the house, then stopped for a second to be sure he’d forgotten nothing essential. Then he got into the car and drove toward Ruiz’s house, thinking about the job.
Sarah Allersby was on the verge of taking a big step toward learning who she was. That was the way he thought about it. He had worked for many bosses over the years and he had seen the way they learned. They started out with the proposition that they were better than other people and therefore had a responsibility to lead them. In exchange for that brave work, they gained most of the available wealth. Once they had the wealth, it was theirs, and they had a right to protect it and the privileges it bought. If that was true, then they also had a right to get more in the same way — or, really, in any way, including taking it. They got involved in businesses that killed people indirectly, where they didn’t have to see it. Diego San Martin, the drug lord who paid Sarah for the security of being able to raise marijuana on the land of a rich, respectable woman, had killed people. He was probably killing people all the time. Little by little, she was getting used to the idea that it didn’t matter. Russell had met Sarah’s father after Mr. Allersby had already reached that point. Russell’s first job for the older Allersby was to kill a man — a business rival who was preparing to file a patent infringement suit.
Russell knew, although Sarah hadn’t taken the step yet, that she was very nearly ready to buy the deaths of these Fargo people. That could happen at any time. It occurred to him that he had better stop at the office and pick up a couple of additional items. He drove to the back of the building and went up the exterior stairway, unlocked the door and turned on the light.
He went to a locked filing cabinet and opened it. He took a pair of razor-sharp ceramic knives, which wouldn’t set off metal detectors, and a diabetic’s travel kit, with needles and insulin bottles, in a leather case. The insulin in the bottles had been replaced with Anectine, a drug that surgeons used to stop the heart. They would restart it with Adrenaline, but, of course, restarting hearts wasn’t the business Russell was in so he had none of that. He opened the leather case and looked at the prescription date. It was the new one, only a month old. He took the kit with him and put it in his suitcase.
As Russell drove on toward Ruiz’s house, he felt better. When Sarah got around to recognizing what she really wanted done, Russell and Ruiz would be able to take care of it without uncertainty or delay. Upper-class customers like her hated uncertainty, and they hated waiting. They wanted to be able to signify their will and have it carried out right away, like gods.
Chapter 17
