Bio-Strike

She nodded with understanding and carefully placed the box and envelope into her purse.

“I’ll be sure to read it back in my room.” She was looking into his eyes again, her own eyes shining, the smile on her lips no longer contrived for the benefit of idle viewers. “I wish you could be with me.”

Kuhl acknowledged a stirring inside him.

“Soon,” he said.

“Tell me when—”

“After this is done, I promise,” Kuhl said. “We can go to Madrid, if you’d like.” He paused a moment. “It is special to me.”

She looked at him.

“Madrid,” she said, raising the wineglass again, touching its rim to her bottom lip, letting it rest there a moment before taking a sip. “Yes, I would like that very much. Would like it to become special to both of us.”

Kuhl watched her and nodded.

“Surely,” he said, “it will.”

“How long you been sitting on this?” Lucio Salazar said, the fingers of his right hand digging into the arm of his fleecy burgundy sofa, his other hand holding the last of the digital prints Lathrop had given him to scrutinize, the rest of the infrared photos on the coffee table in front of him.

“What do you mean?” Lathrop said, answering Salazar’s question with one of his own, knowing damn well what he meant. This asshole had the balls to think he was going to interrogate him. It was pretty funny. “Your load was grabbed last night, I’m here today.”

Salazar looked at him. He was a large man in his late fifties wearing a cream-colored tropical suit, a pale blue shirt open at the collar, and tan Gucci loafers. There was a Rolex with an enormous diamond-crusted gold band on his right hand, a diamond ring on his left pinkie, a diamond stud in his right earlobe. A gold figure of some saint or other hung from a chain around his thick neck.

“I was asking when you found out these fucking maricones were going to make a move on me,” he said. “If I had known sooner, I’d have been able to do something about it.”

Lathrop’s expression was calmly businesslike.

“You can get furnished with bad information from any weasel on the street and wind up chasing your own tail.” He leaned forward and tapped one of the snapshots on the coffee table with his finger. It showed Felix Quiros and his men cutting the knapsacks off the backs of Salazar’s massacred Indian couriers outside the smoking ruin of the tunnel entrance. “I get a tip, I check it out before coming to you with it. That’s quality, Lucio. And it’s what I provide.”

“Value for the dollar, eh?”

Lathrop grinned.

“Believe it,” he said.

Salazar fell silent again. His gold and jewels twinkled in the sunlight pouring through the glass wall that faced the beachfront below and behind him. These days, Lathrop thought, the base price of a Del Mar home with an ocean view was maybe six, seven hundred grand, and that was if you were talking about something the size of Monopoly board real estate, where you had to stand tip-toe on the roof with a set of binoculars just to catch a glimpse of the water. A place like Salazar’s sin citadel here — built to his specs on a bluff, sprawling enough to contain the entire population of whatever burro shit Mexican village had spawned his proud ancestral line of cutthroat thieves, highwaymen, and pimps — a place like this had to have cost him in excess of three mil.

After perhaps twenty seconds, Salazar leaned forward over the table and studied another of the pictures, his eyebrows knitted in brooding thought, slowly shaking his head from side to side as he recognized the body of the coyote Guillermo.

“El muerto nada se lleva y todo se acaba,” he said in an undertone.

The dead take nothing with them and everything comes to an end.

He glanced back up at Lathrop. “You know if Felix was being stupid on his own, or does the stupidity go up the line?” he asked.

“Felix? Come on,” Lathrop said, preparing to stir in the lie. “He might have his boys glom car computers, shake down bodega owners, nickel-dime stuff, on his own string. Might even get away with laying an extra cut on a key before he delivers it, skimming a few ounces for himself. But his big cousins are just letting him run off the leash so he feels a player instead of a punk, and even Felix isn’t brainless enough not to realize how far to take it before he smacks into a brick wall. What happened at the tunnel — he’d never in his miserable life try it without their endorsement.”

Lathrop watched the thought lines on Salazar’s forehead deepen. He was seething, and with very good reason. In tight with the old-line South American growers and processors from the days when his father headed the clan, Lucio’s organization had been smuggling contraband across the U.S.-Mexico border for over half a century, starting with hot cars back in the fifties, and here in California was the principal polydrug distribution outfit along the Pacific coast, carrying cocaine, dope, pot, methamphetamine, name your favorite poison, from Chula Vista clear on up to Los Angeles and Frisco. The Quiroses were way down the hierarchy, with transit routes inland from northern Sonora into south Texas and sections of New Mexico, and until recently hadn’t done anything to challenge the Salazar empire, sticking to a relatively insignificant share of the coke market. New drug money, you might call them. But since they’d gotten tied in with El Tio’s network a year or so back — it was hard for Lathrop to believe he’d still been with the El Paso special field division at the time, my oh my how things had changed — there had been signs they were looking to make inroads into Salazar’s territory. What was now causing Lucio such profound and well-warranted distress was the sheer nerviness of the act — not only stealing some heavy dope, but intentionally humiliating him in the process, smearing his couriers all over the arroyo, killing his drivers, and leaving them with their mouths chock-full of their own privates.

You go dissing someone like Lucio Salazar with that kind of impunity, you’re sending a big, bold-faced message that there’s major juice behind you.

Salazar was still shaking his head with combined anger and dismay.

“I can’t accept this,” he said.

Which, Lathrop thought, was absolutely right on, assuming he wanted to stay in business.

“It’s got to be fixed,” Salazar said.

Which, Lathrop thought, equaled taking serious retaliation.

Salazar looked at him.

“You find out how the Quiroses knew when my shipment was coming, anything else about their setup, I give you my word of honor it’ll be worth a jackpot,” he said.

Lathrop nodded, making an effort not to smile. He often wondered if guys like Salazar copped their dialogue from television and the movies or vice versa. Or whether it was some weird kind of self-perpetuating loop. Reality mimicking fiction mimicking reality.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said and rose from his chair feeling mightily satisfied with his performance… and just as strongly convinced it would lead to the results he desired.

Next stop on the road, Enrique Quiros.

* * *

“I’m leaning in favor of Ricci’s idea,” Gordian said to Nimec from behind his desk.

He reached for the container of rolled wafers in front of him, opened it, slipped a wafer out of the container, and stirred it in his coffee so the drink would pick up the flavor of its hazelnut praline filling. This new morning ritual was in observance of his wife’s latest dietary commandment: Thou shalt not drink hazelnut coffee. Her prohibition of his favorite blend rose from her theory that its hidden calories and fatty oils were responsible for the five-pound weight gain and slightly elevated cholesterol level revealed by his latest routine checkup.

The flavored coffee of which he’d been drinking three to five cups a day for the past year, therefore, was gone and out, per spouse’s orders, replaced on her shopping list by the cream-filled wafers he was allowed to dip, stir, and consume twice a day to satisfy his hazelnut craving, the equivalent of nicotine chewing gum to a smoker trying to quit the habit.

Admittedly, though, the sweet sticks were tasty, if not to say addictive, in their own right.

“My primary reservations concern the delicacy of placing our RDTs in host countries that might feel threatened by their activities, perhaps with some justification,” he said, letting the wafer steep in his coffee. “Or,