apartment lofts where the Swells can live. Try moving into one of those pads — you need to show your broker that you earn fifty, even a hundred times the monthly rent in income.”
Ricci looked at him.
“Sounds to me you’re on a crusade,” he said.
“Could be,” Glenn said. “But, you know, the Mexican gangs that smuggle drugs across the border into this city, players like the Quiros bunch we brought down a couple years ago, have a Spanish expression,
Ricci sat without offering any comment. The barkeep had dropped onto a chair behind the counter and was watching a ball game on the television above his head, following its action with the volume down — Seattle Mariners, Oakland A’s, forty-three thousand screaming fans. Although it was not yet nine P.M., his smattering of customers had evaporated and left him to tend only the two Sword ops in their rear booth and a skinny old drunk at the bar. The drunk was slouched over a shot glass, mumbling to himself as he threw left jabs and hooks into the empty air. Ricci watched him a moment or two, noticing the punches had snap. Probably the guy had done some real boxing once.
Ricci shifted his attention back to Glenn.
“Your answer to my proposition final?” he said.
Glenn nodded.
“Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it. And if you ever need help with something up north, count on me to be there,” he said. “But this town stays my home base.”
Ricci grunted. He was still rotating his glass between his fingertips.
Glenn leaned forward across the table, pointed to the soda.
“Now you need to tell me if you ever intend to start on that, so I know whether to order another beer or call it a night,” he said.
Ricci regarded him quietly, seeming to consider.
“Can’t say why, but you quoting the Bible off the top of your head, reading papers by university eggheads, somehow it’s no stunner to me,” he said. “Explain how you grew up listening to Barry Manilow without the homies kicking your ass every day, maybe I’ll stick around.”
Glenn grinned, waved his hand in the air to catch the barkeep’s attention.
“Settle back and get comfortable,” he said.
Ricci gave him the slightest of nods, then carefully raised his glass off the tabletop and drank.
A high-intensity electric lantern in his hand, Siegfried Kuhl strode slowly around the white station wagon and utility van parked near his cabin in the late-night darkness. What he saw satisfied him. The PG&E logo on their flanks, the racked ladder on one side of the van’s roof, their yellow safety beacons, every exterior feature was convincing. Indistinguishable from the real thing under his scrupulous inspection.
Kuhl opened their doors one at a time and repeatedly leaned inside with the lantern to examine their interiors from front to rear. Again he was quite pleased. He had studied photographs of the power company’s repair fleet and even the upholstery and carpeting matched.
He turned to Ciras and Anton, who stood a few paces from him awaiting his assessment. They had driven the vehicles from a shop outside Monterey where their subterranean customizers had performed the remodeling work.
“Good enough,” he said. Then he went to stand behind the vehicles and motioned toward their rear license plates. “You’ve checked these, too?”
Ciras gave him a quick little nod.
“I was impressed,” Anton said. “It must’ve been quite some trick getting them down right.”
Kuhl regarded the spike-haired Croatian with a kind of fascination. Anton’s speech bore no trace of the thick Slavic accent, with its hard glottal stops and drawn-out vowel sounds, that had characterized it when he’d been inserted into the United States on a student visa two years earlier. And his capacity to absorb dialect was only part of what suited him for the role of forward scout and intelligence gatherer — the ideal sleeper agent. It was as though Anton could plug into any cultural reservoir and saturate his persona with its mannerisms. While his bluff at the animal shelter had been intended to massage useful information from Gordian’s daughter, the performance had gained results that went beyond Kuhl’s expectations and had been pivotal to his fixing an operational timetable.
Returning his attention to the license plate, Kuhl shone his light directly onto its face. The tag’s reflectorized plastic sheeting material glowed bright under its beam so the alphabetical prefix and serial numbers were illuminated. He stepped back from the rear of the van, moved to one side of the bumper, and again turned his lantern onto the plate.
A vertical row of hidden verification symbols became clearly visible, running down the middle of the tag, dark against its surface. Used by law-enforcement personnel to differentiate authentic license plates from counterfeits, they were composed of tiny glass beads in the sheeting which had been coated with a special polymer that made them nonreflective when viewed at a thirty degree slant. Due to the complex polymerization and embedding processes involved in their production, the coded symbols were the most difficult feature of the plate to replicate. But Harlan DeVane’s resources had proven equal to the task.
Kuhl nodded his approval and looked over at the two men. “Move the vehicles into the trees where they can’t be seen,” he said. “Then join me and the others inside.”
He strode back toward the cabin. It was a pleasant night. The air was cool and fresh and the chirping of insects surrounded him. Somewhere in the distance a night bird whooped. He could see Lido watching his approach through a front window, the brute’s head silhouetted against the light of the room beyond. A good night, yes. Something of its atmosphere hinted at the best moments of his long
Before dawn that morning, Kuhl had gotten into his Explorer and driven west across the Ventana wilderness to the San Antonio de Padua Mission. He carried his fraudulent identification documents in his wallet. Beside him on the passenger seat were his camera and a packet of maps and tourist brochures. The cargo section held a bladdered hydration backpack, a length of rope, hiking boots, his electric lantern, and some basic tools that Kuhl had left in plain sight to ensure they drew no suspicion from military guards — a small wood ax, a collapsible shovel, and a Japanese pull saw.
Kuhl wore an open-collared chambray shirt with a Saint Christopher’s medallion on a silver necklace, and had wrapped a rosary around the stem of his rearview mirror. On the vehicle’s rear section were a pair of bumper stickers Anton had obtained for him in the city of Carmel. One of them pictured a small map of the original Camino Real twining in and out of US 101, the sites of the Spanish missions along the road circled and marked by crucifixes. Splayed across the map in large see-through text were the words FRANCISCAN MISSION TOURS, and, below it in a smaller typeface, the name and telephone number of a local travel agency. The other bumper sticker read: I’M ON A MISSION TO SEE THE MISSIONS. An adhesive plaque with the Greek acrostic IX?YE engraved within the Christian fish symbol was mounted on the SUV’s tailgate.
Out past the cattle and horse ranches, Kuhl had wound through miles of rolling scrub country on a steady climb into the Santa Lucia Mountains, where he had seen the sunlight wash up over the wooded lower mountain slopes to eventually flush their bare sandstone peaks with orange. By full daybreak he had reached the edge of the valley that overlooked the confluence of the San Miguel and San Antonio Rivers, and made his slow descent into the basin following road signs to the army reservation and mission. At length, he stopped at the guard station mentioned to him by Anagkazo, the dog breeder.
The MP inside the checkpoint booth had politely asked Kuhl for his driver’s license and vehicle registration. As Kuhl handed them to him through his lowered window, a second guard had walked around the Explorer, casting discreet glances first over its body, and then through its rear windscreen.
