table. Strand sat down.
“Harry Strand,” he said, introducing himself.
Obando nodded. “Harry Strand,” he repeated. His hair was a natural light caramel, parted on the left, wavy, beautifully barbered. He was forty-two years old but looked younger. “Well, Harry, lay it all out for me.”
Strand had heard recordings of Mario Obando that had been made in Tel Aviv while he was doing business with an Israeli drug dealer. The dealer was the one who sounded like the foreigner. Obando sounded as though he’d been born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. You could have spent an evening with him and never known he was Colombian. Obando’s files recorded how he had hated to be pegged by his accent. He hated the stereotype. So he had worked on it. It had disappeared.
So Strand laid it all out for him. From his briefcase he withdrew all the material he had copied from the Geneva bank vault on the two Obando operations-an arms smuggling conduit and a European drug distribution channel-that had been closed down because of Schrade’s information. He placed a packet of photographs on the table along with a CD, several cassettes, and fifty-seven pages of documentation. He laid them out like a fortune- teller with a deck of cards. He outlined the two failed operations, told him how they had failed, then told him why they had failed.
Obando kept his eyes on Strand. At his elbow was an empty glass with a last sip of a grenadine sirop l’eau remaining in the bottom, an ashtray with one butt in it, an opened pack of cigarettes, and a gold Dunhill lighter.
As he had done with Lu, Strand told Obando who he was and gave him some background on his career in the intelligence profession. By the time he had finished, Obando understood that Strand knew things about his organization that Obando had thought were secure. He also understood that the information inside the material on the table before him would confirm everything that Strand had said. As with Lu, when Strand finally stopped he had not yet given Obando the name of the traitor who had been responsible for creating so much havoc for Obando’s enterprises.
Obando stared at him. His face portrayed no tics, no indication of what he was thinking or how he was feeling about what he had heard. He was simply a businessman listening to business talk.
He took his eyes off Strand and raised a hand. One of his men came over.
“Harry, would you like something to drink?”
He ordered Scotch and ice.
“I’ll have the same damn thing,” Obando said. As the man turned away Obando picked up the cigarettes, offered one to Strand. Strand shook his head, and Obando lighted one for himself and sat back.
“You know, I’m still pissed about that business in Amsterdam,” he said, blowing smoke to one side. “On that one deal, that one deal alone, I lost-” He stopped himself. “I took a very big hit. Not just the money. It destroyed an arms conduit that I’d invested more than a year putting together.” He paused. “You worked on that?”
“I was in charge of the intelligence on it. I was the one who finally took it to the Netherlands’ Centrale Recherche Informatiedienst and worked with them until they closed you down.”
Obando grinned and shook his head. “Goddamn.”
The two drinks appeared. Obando raised his, said, “Prosit,” and took a sip.
He pointed at the material Strand had put on the table. “This is my man, huh?”
“That’s right.”
Obando looked at Strand, saying nothing. Strand’s back was to the light that came in through the front window. Being oblique, the light diminished quickly inside the cafe, so that Obando was softly illuminated, but the surrounding furnishings were quickly lost in a dusky haze. Here and there the edge of a picture frame or the corner of a gilt-framed mirror glinted from the shadows.
“Why?”
“I worked with this man a long time,” Strand said. “There are personal reasons…”
“Like what?”
Strand waited a beat. “The reasons are personal,” he said. “I won’t discuss them with you.”
Obando was very good at keeping his thoughts to himself; neither his body language nor his face gave a hint of what was going on in his mind.
While keeping his eyes on Strand, he drank from his Scotch and took a last drag on his cigarette before mashing it out in the ashtray. Strand noticed that although Obando was a stocky man, not heavy but thick chested, his hands were the hands of a thin man, with long, narrow fingers.
Obando finished putting out the cigarette and opened the manila envelope of photographs. He looked at them one at a time. After he had finished looking at the last one, he reached for his cigarettes again. He lighted one.
“Wolfram Schrade,” he said. He swallowed a mouthful of Scotch, then another. “Life is full of surprises,” he said.
Strand said nothing.
“I didn’t expect it to be him. Never would have.”
“That’s why I’ve provided so much documentation.”
“You worked with him closely, then.”
“I did.”
“How long?”
“Almost a decade.”
“That’s fascinating.” He studied Strand. “But that’s over. You’re out. And Schrade broke off with FIS…”
“Right.”
“Okay. What about now? Anything else along those lines?”
“Probably.”
Obando jerked his head. “Ah.”
“I suspect he’s working with either the British or the French now. Maybe even the Germans.”
“You suspect.”
“I no longer have the ability to get proof of that. But I’d bet money on it.”
“Would you bet your life on it, Harry?”
Strand didn’t hesitate. “There’s nothing in this world that I’d bet my life on, Mr. Obando. Certainly not anything having to do with Wolfram Schrade.”
Obando picked up the last photograph and looked at it again, considering it.
“This is a far from perfect world, Harry.” Pause. “What if I told you this piece of shit lives a charmed life?”
“Which means,” Strand said, “that Wolf Schrade is making himself so valuable to you at this time that, for now, you are obliged to overlook his past injuries.”
“That’s pretty good, Harry. Bottom line: I can’t be your dark angel.”
“Can you expand on that a little?” Strand asked.
Obando shook his head slowly. “It’s personal,” he said soberly and without a hint of irony. “I won’t discuss it with you.”
CHAPTER 35
It was a fine piece of one-upmanship, the sort of thing that was second nature to men in Mario Obando’s line of work. The world of legitimate business provided a warm and fertile environment for male strutting, but it was nothing compared to the showy displays of male ego that occurred in the crime world. In Obando’s milieu, no available opportunity to squirt a few cc’s of testosterone in your adversary’s direction was allowed to pass. For the younger ones, like Obando, a smart mouth was the extra edge that made them feel just that much more clever than their opponents. They had to be smart, look smart, and sound smart. And, of course, they had to be brutal.
“Even if I can’t help you directly,” Obando went on, having made his point, “perhaps I can give you something in return. I know you didn’t do this from the impulse of a warm heart, Harry, but regardless, you did me a favor.”
He dropped his eyes to Strand’s glass. The Scotch was gone, the ice was melting. He looked toward one of
