Филип Керр - A Five Year Plan

From headquarters on North-west Second Avenue it was only a couple of minutes’ drive east to Kate’s Williams Island apartment home. At least it was her home until the divorce came through. Howard, her husband, and a partner with one of Miami’s smartest law firms, had paid almost $900,000 for the place. Her own lawyers had told her there was a chance she might get to keep the apartment as part of the settlement. But she was thinking that it hardly seemed fair he shouldn’t get half. Besides, it wasn’t as if she actually wanted to stay there in view of all the secretaries in his office that Howard had been balling there when, as on this occasion, Kate found herself working late.

‘This information must have got out to someone in one of the other cartels,’ Bowen continued, with one eye on Kate. ‘Someone who wanted asshole dead. Take your pick. Hell, there’s enough of them. Anyhow, whoever it was, they were real clever. Set it up while asshole was back in Bogota. The Delray place was well guarded on the highway side. Cameras, sensors, the whole protection package. But light on the ocean side. Like the stupid schmuck had never heard of boats. Anyway, CCGD Seven reports seeing some kind of high performance sports boat anchored a couple of miles up the coast, off the municipal beach, the night before asshole got hit. Sam Brockman figures they must have put a diver into the water who crawled ashore at the Suarez place under cover of darkness. There was only the one guard on the beach front. The guard says he saw nothing. Kate?’

Kent Bowen wanted her attention and approval most of all. She was one of the Miami Bureau’s brightest agents, not to mention one of its great beauties and he had a thing about her. She snapped her attention back to Bowen and his interminable story.

‘Here’s the clever part,’ he said. ‘Guy gets in the house. A real pro. He selects his picture — no idea what it was — takes it off the wall and flattens out about 250 grams of C5 plastic onto the back of the canvas. Then he tapes a simple tilt detonator onto the inside of the stretcher. Just a ball bearing inside a test tube, two needles, a little battery and a blasting cap. And that’s his bomb. Beautiful. A really neat job. He leaves the picture hanging slightly crooked and then skedaddles out of there. He’s long gone by the time asshole returns from Colombia.’ Bowen shook his head as if still amazed at the assassin’s ingenuity. ‘As usual the sniffer dogs go in first, but they can’t get the scent of any explosives because the picture’s about five feet up the wall. The asshole walks into the room and sees the picture hanging squint as Quasimodo’s dick. And being the obsessive he is, right away he’s over there to straighten it.’

Bowen sat back in his chair, grinning sadistically, to savor the climax of his story.

‘The ball bearing rolls along the test tube, touches both points of the needles, completes the circuit, and karaboom! blows the guy’s head clean off his fucking shoulders.’

Kate caught Bowen’s eye and smiled thinly as he and the rest of the guys in the room laughed some more at that.

‘The crime scenes investigation unit spent forty-five minutes looking for Bolivar’s head. They were beginning to think one of those Colombians must have taken it for a fucking souvenir when they found it floating in the goddamn aquarium. The blast had carried it right across the room, like a basketball.’ Bowen pretended to make a basket. ‘Field goal, two points.’

He cackled some more, wiped a tear from his eye and thinking of another wisecrack, said:

‘Now that’s what I call a really mind-blowing picture.’

Bowen guffawed loudly and helped himself to a glass of water, like he’d just told a really funny story on Jay Leno. Balding and fiftyish he reminded Kate a lot of Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. He had the same kind of hard-ass attitude to the enemy and the same love of his staff. As soon as she started to speak she felt like the guy who wouldn’t surf at Kilgore’s beach party.

‘Bolivar Suarez’s assassination—’ she began.

‘Hey, what has two asses and no head?’ chuckled Bowen. ‘The assassination of Bolivar Suarez.’

‘Since his death would seem to leave Rocky Envigado as Miami’s undisputed Citizen Cocaine,’ she persisted, ‘it may be that we need look no further than that particular quarter when searching for a perp.’

‘One way of getting your head round modern art,’ said someone else and Bowen found himself trying to keep a straight face in the presence of Kate Furey’s more businesslike demeanor.

‘Citizen Cocaine,’ Bowen repeated. ‘I like that. Did you think of it yourself?’

‘No, I think I read it in a British newspaper,’ she explained, aware that she could easily have got away with claiming it for herself. There were times, she knew, when she could be too honest, even by the standards of the FBI. ‘When I was on vacation there last year.’

The one and only time she had been outside the States, and the last good time she had enjoyed with Howard. And yet it had been a vacation only in part. The main purpose of her trip to London and Paris had been to visit with British and French police forces who were worried about the amount of cocaine now arriving in Europe from Colombia, via Florida. But after Miami it had seemed like a vacation.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I mean when I was visiting with NCIS and Interpol.’

‘Aha,’ grinned Bowen. ‘Now we learn the truth, Agent Furey. You were holidaying at the expense of the American taxpayer.’

Kate smiled politely and hoped that they could get on with the meeting in progress. Its purpose was to share new intelligence about drug traffickers who used South Florida as an entrepôt for their activities. Information received from other agencies, at home and abroad. Now that Kent Bowen had told his story she could table what she had learned and then maybe go home and soak in the tub. It had been a long day.

‘I had lunch with Peter van der Velden today and—’

‘How is Dutch?’

Van der Velden was a detective inspector with Holland’s BVD, on a two-year attachment as special liaison officer at the Netherlands Consulate in Miami.

‘He’s fine.’

‘Go somewhere nice?’

‘Don’t worry, he paid.’

‘I bet I know where you went. That place in Coral Gables. Le Festival. Dutch loves that place.’

‘Yes, Le Festival.’ She felt herself coloring a little as she made her reluctant admission.

‘Is that good?’ This was Special Agent Chris Ochao, a half-Cuban guy with his arm in a sling.

‘Excellent,’ said Bowen. ‘Best soufflés in town.’ He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively and added: ‘Romantic too.’

‘Can’t say as I noticed,’ said Kate.

‘No?’

Someone sniggered.

Kate looked Bowen squarely in the eye. She knew it was generally suspected around the office that she was having an affair with Peter van der Velden. Every year all the liaison officers from the various consulates in Miami got together and hosted a party at the Doubletree Hotel in Coconut Grove. It was only two or three months since the last one, at which Kate had been seen leaving with the Dutch policeman after talking with him alone for almost an hour.

‘Y’know, I think there’s something I ought to clear up,’ she said, smiling coolly. ‘A little misunderstanding I know’s been going around. Just for the record, I am not fucking Peter van der Velden. Nor have I ever fucked Peter van der Velden. Nor do I have any intention of fucking or being fucked by Peter van der Velden. Moreover our lunch appointment was not made for the purpose of his suggesting that he might get to fuck me, but that we might come together in a spirit of co-operation and diplomacy and get to fuck some major-league drug traffickers and bad guys. Do I make myself clear?’ She looked from one end of the table to the other. Nobody said anything for a moment.