Steve Martini - The Enemy Inside

Ana’s eyes were glued to the action in the bin. After a few minutes the man hoisted himself up out of the large container, over the edge and down to the ground. He grabbed the trash bag from the open edge and quickly headed out toward the street.

She was behind him in a flash. She watched as he entered the passenger side of a car parked halfway down the block toward Orange Avenue. It was a large dark cross-country vehicle, what the Americans called a four-by-four. The driver had the engine on in a second and they pulled away from the curb.

Ana turned and ran for her own car parked just down the street. In less than half a minute she was after them. At this hour there was almost no traffic, only one other vehicle on Orange Avenue that she could see, and it was well out ahead of the 4x4 she was following. Keeping them in sight was not a problem. They crossed over the bridge from Coronado and headed north up I-5.

Ana hung back, following from a distance so as not to alert them. They took the interchange at 94 East. From there they headed north, up 805. They took the exit at Miramar Road. They drove some distance east before taking a right.

As Ana approached the intersection where they turned she saw a sign: MCAS MIRAMAR. It was a military base. As she looked off to her right she could see the car with the two men in it stopped at a kiosk in the center of the road, a small guardhouse. A few seconds later they passed through. Ana didn’t take the turn. She couldn’t follow them there, but to her it all made sense.

The fear growing in her mind was the possibility that the American military, or one of their intelligence agencies, held the equipment that the French techs had designed for her. If that was the case, the authorities already had it. If somehow they used it to their own embarrassment, they might decide to tie it to her. She had to get it back, but she couldn’t go here.

Early morning, and the Eagle was back on the phone. This time it was an encrypted and scrambled line, but the headache coming over it was just as bad.

“It seems we’ve lost him,” said the man on the other end. The “him” he was talking about was Alex Ives. “We’ve got a blanket over the house. According to the information from the surety who wrote the bail bond, that’s where he’s supposed to be. We see the old man and his wife. They keep coming and going, but no sign of the kid.”

The Eagle thought for a moment. This can’t be happening. “Maybe he’s hunkered down inside the house, doesn’t want to come out,” he said. Always think positive.

“I don’t think so.”

The Eagle was almost afraid to ask why.

He didn’t have to, the man on the other end volunteered it. “This morning we waited ’til the parents left, and we entered the house. The place was empty. Nobody there,” said the man.

“Son of a bitch!” said the Eagle. “You’re sure? You checked the entire house?”

“Top to bottom,” said the man.

To the Eagle, the answer was simple. The idiots working for him were too busy cleaning up the mess they’d made at the gas station in San Diego, too distracted by their own fireworks to bother watching the house until it was too late. The damn lawyers had spirited the kid away. Where was anybody’s guess. “What about the parents? Did you follow them?”

“Yeah! They went to the store. She got her hair done. They dropped off the dog at the groomer. .”

“Great!” said the Eagle. “Next time I need a good groomer to clip your ass, you can tell me where to go. What about the lawyer? What’s his name?”

“There’s two of them,” said the other man. “Madriani. .”

“That’s the one.”

“And Hinds.”

“Anybody bothering to watch them?” Sarcasm dripped from the Eagle’s voice.

“We’re on it,” said the guy. “One of them is at the office in Coronado as we speak. Hinds. The other one, Madriani, boarded a plane early this morning headed for Washington.”

“D.C.?”

“He wasn’t goin’ to Seattle,” said the guy on the phone.

“I take it it’s too much to ask whether you might know what he’s up to? Could it be he’s going on vacation?”

“We don’t know. I doubt it,” said the guy. Sometimes it was hard to know when the Eagle was serious and when he was just screwing with your head. “We think whatever arrangements he made he probably did them over the landline from his office.”

“And I take it you didn’t have a tap on the phone.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Most people don’t realize,” said the guy, “it’s harder to get a tap on a landline these days than a cell phone. First off, you have to find somebody old enough who knows how to do it. Not as simple as you think. We’re working on it. We’ll get it done.”

“Some time this century, I hope,” said the Eagle. “Stay on top of the lawyers, especially the one on the plane. I want to know what he’s up to.”

“Got it!” It was the way the guy said it, such certainty and assurance. The last time they voiced such confidence they blew up half a block of San Diego and burned down the other half. It prompted the Eagle to stop and reconsider.

“On second thought,” he said, “leave the lawyer, the one named Madriani, to me.” He collected the name of the airline and the flight number from the man on the other end along with the ETA, estimated time of arrival, looked at his watch, and told him, “I’ll take it from here. You! Your job is to find the kid. Get on it! Find him!” Then he slammed the phone down.

The rippling thermal currents rising off the sidewalk made it look like the griddle on a stove. The small shopping center with its bright-colored walls reflected the intensity of the sun so that it heated Herman’s body like a tanning bed. It felt good. He was happy to be back in a place that was so familiar.

Wearing a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops, Herman trudged down the burning sidewalk and toward the two-story white structure with the red-tiled roof. The red and yellow sign out front read DHL. Inside, the air conditioner was humming, the temperature a good forty degrees cooler than on the cement outside.

Herman wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief, then gathered the supplies he needed from the shelf against the wall. He took four of the cardboard letter packs so that if things got dicey, he could seal up any future message on the run and, if he had to, ship it on the fly from the front desk of any of the resort hotels in the area. DHL, for a price, would pick up.

He took the pen from his pocket along with one of the blank forms, an international air waybill, and completed the information on the form. He entered his name as “H. Diggs” and used the address of the DHL office as the sender’s address. He didn’t want to use the actual location of the condo. He entered the law firm’s DHL account number to pay for it.

He completed the customs portion of the form, declaring no value, then completed the rest of the form and signed it. Then he took the note from his pocket and checked it one more time. It was obscure to the point of being bland, the length of a message from a Chinese fortune cookie. “Package arrived safely. All well this end. H.”

It was written in Herman’s scrawl with a pen on a piece of otherwise blank paper. He folded it up once more, put it in one of the open letter packs and sealed it. He slipped the waybill inside the plastic window on the outside of the envelope and got into a line behind two other guys. Herman folded his broad arms across his barrel chest and waited.

The trio, Paul, Harry, and Herman, had worked out the details over the kitchen table at Ives’s parents’ house the night the girl named Ben and her driver were killed. They kept his parents out of it, so they would know as little as possible, sent them to the other room where they could not hear. If questioned by authorities, they could honestly say they had no idea where their son was. Besides, the fewer people who knew, the better, less chance for a mistake.