Bio-Strike

“Nothing stands out in my mind,” he said. “The last time I saw Don must’ve been Friday. Maybe nine o‘clock in the morning, after his sweep. He seemed a little quiet, but that’s how it was with him. I won’t say he got moody. You could ordinarily expect him to be pleasant. He just wasn’t the type to talk about his personal life.”

* * *

“So you’ve told us,” Nimec said.

Hernandez shrugged again.

“The job’s repetitious. You come in, make your rounds, do your paperwork. Most of the guys walk through the door in the morning, pour their coffees, can’t wait to tell each other whether they had a good night, a lousy one, saw a movie, won at poker, got drunk, got laid, you know. And I encourage that.”

“Relieves the tedium,” Nimec said.

A nod. “I’d rather have my people happy than unhappy. The priorities, though, are that they’re reliable and thorough. And Don is. Was. Kept his men on their tiptoes.”

“In what way?” Ricci said.

“Every way you’d want from a team leader. Don was tight about his records. A stickler for equipment maintenance. And nobody was more up on the latest antibug technologies. He knew his stuff, was always requisitioning upgrades.”

“The first time we talked, you acted like it wasn’t anything to set off air-raid sirens about when he stopped calling after Monday. Somebody’s that diligent, how come you didn’t think it was a bigger deal?”

Hernandez looked abashed.

“Honestly, I was damn concerned,” he said. “But I figured that whatever could make him act so out of character had to be pretty serious, and I wanted to give him a little slack. In case it was something personal, know what I mean?”

* * *

Ricci regarded him steadily. “He’s one of your own, you look out for him.”

Hernandez nodded.

“Listen, if you hadn’t beat me to it, I would have headed down to his place tonight myself,” he said. “Been the one to find the poor guy.”

“Lucky me,” Ricci said. He expelled a sigh. “Palardy’s records… where’d he keep them?”

Hernandez waved at the computer against the wall.

“In there. He entered his reports every day, sent copies directly to my terminal at the end of each week. Once a month I’d get his assessment of our surveillance countermeasure protection level, which is standard practice for all team leaders.”

* * *

“Sounds like a lot of typing,” Nimec said.

“That’s true,” Hernandez said. “But it’s how we plug holes. And avoid new ones.”

Ricci was rubbing his chin. “The reports get written up in the building? During business hours?”

“Depends,” Hernandez said. “Sometimes when they’re making their monthly assessments, the team leaders would rather take the work home with them than park it here.”

“Palardy, too?”

“Sure,” Hernandez said. “Detailed as his were, he’d never have left this office otherwise.”

“He must have had a desktop PC at his condo, then.”

Hernandez gestured vaguely with both hands.

“You’re the only person I know who’s seen the inside of the place,” he said. “I can tell you that he brought in a notebook computer every so often.”

“He ever leave it behind?”

“I really have no idea. Suppose it’s possible.”

Ricci glanced around the little room. There was no sign of the notebook and not many spots where it could be. He went over to the workstation, pulled open its drawer. It was filled front to back with carefully labeled file folders. Nothing else. Questions picking at his mind, he recalled the two disconnected cables under Palardy’s bedroom desk.

He turned to Hernandez.

“I need to sit down at his computer and check out what’s on Palardy’s hard drive,” he said. “Might take me a while.”

Hernandez’s expression showed reluctant acceptance.

“You call the shots,” he said. “If I asked you why, would you tell me?”

Ricci looked at Nimec, got his nod, looked back at Hernandez.

“The boss is in bad shape,” he said. “Nobody’s sure what has him down, but we’re afraid it might be the same thing that took out Palardy. And we want to trace Palardy’s contacts. Try to connect the dots before this situation gets any worse.”

Hernandez stood without saying anything for a moment. Then he stepped over to the computer and turned it on.

“It’s all yours,” he said. “You need any help, call me in my office. If I’m not there, page me.”

Ricci nodded. He was thinking Hernandez was okay.

“Appreciate it,” he said, and sat behind the monitor to see what he could see.

* * *

Lucio Salazar met them in Tecate, a small border town and smuggler’s gateway on the Baja Peninsula, about a half hour’s drive east of Tijuana.

Despite the necessity of the trip, Lucio supposed it was only as his driver pulled over to the drab motel on Avenida Benito Juarez that he altogether believed he was about to arrange for the death of Enrique Quiros, son of his old friend Tomas, with whom he’d pilfered fruit and bread from the outdoor market stands of Tijuana when both were ragged strays without a whole pair of shoes between them. The prepubescent Lucio already looking after his younger brothers, looking to survive on the street, long years from becoming the clan leader of Los Magos. Just another cast-off son of a whore and some unremembered clench in the night, insignificant as a stain on a dirty sheet. And maybe it wasn’t until he was in the room with the men he’d hired for the job, looking at one of the guns that would be used for the takedown, that his purpose in coming there really sank into his heart.

He had cause enough to believe things were well beyond any other solution. For openers, Lathrop’s information was always solid, and he had been definite that Quiros meant to put him in the grave. Then, by pure coincidence, the scouts he’d sent to Balboa the night before had spotted a group of Quiros’s men outside the park, skulking around for twenty minutes before they took off. While they could have been there for the same reason as Lucio’s own men, wanting to familiarize themselves with the grounds in case of a double cross, he doubted it, considering what he’d learned of Enrique’s recent maneuvers. And he could not overlook the tunnel raid.

Even so, Lucio guessed some part of him was still holding onto a shred of hope that violence would be avoided in this instance. That their differences could be reconciled out of respect for Tomas’s memory. But again it came down to a matter of survival. At any cost.

Now he studied the weapon being exhibited for him like some enticing rarity, a Walther 2000 sniper rifle with a special optical attachment on the scope. After a couple of minutes, he glanced up at the slight, dark-eyed man who’d laid it across the bedspread.

“Let’s talk money,” he said.

The little man nodded. “We each take twenty thousand. Half up front. The balance when it’s done.”

“Eighty large is high—”

“Not for us, it isn’t. And the total is a hundred thousand. Nonnegotiable. There’s a fifth member of the team at the control station.”

Salazar gave him a look of hard appraisal.

“Nonnegotiable,” he echoed.

“Yes.”

“I don’t like your position, I can take this contract elsewhere.”

The little man’s eyes glittered.

“You can,” he said. “But you won’t get the same thing we deliver.”