Mexico way, p.1
Mexico Way, page 1
A NOVEL BY
Robert Moss
A DELL BOOK
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR 4
NINE
ELEVEN
THIRTEEN
FIFTEEN
SEVENTEEN □ □ □ 1
NINETEEN
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO 2
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-NINE 7
STEPHEN
RAVE REVIEWS FOR BEST-SELLING AUTHOR ROBERT MOSS AND HIS MEXICO WAY:
"It's a credible scenario that Mr. Moss has put together, mostly because he is a suave writer who knows how to create believable characters and take the reader along with them. Mexico Way has its share of action, but the novel has something more: the author takes a thoughtful, sympathetic look at Mexico. . . . This book is very much worth a try."
—The New York Times Book Review
"A winner—his best yet. Thoroughly researched, intelligent, and involving, Mexico Way is the perfect summer read." —Rocky Mountain News
"Utterly readable—violent and sexy in almost a Sam Peckinpah sort of way. Robert Moss is an accomplished storyteller who knows how to lay down a firm enough foundation of fact. It will keep you turning pages through a long summer afternoon."
—Raleigh News & Observer
"The excitement keeps a reader happily involved through 365 pages." —Dallas Morning News
"A Tex-Mex thriller about secession and oil rights and dirty politics on both sides of the Rio Grande in which the hero is, of all things, a decent CIA officer. Original, horrifying, extremely entertaining, and certainly no stranger than any of the bungled real-life geopolitics of the past 20 years."
-Kirkus Reviews
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
666 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10103
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Robert Moss
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Simon & Schuster, New York, New York.
The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
ISBN: 0-440-21341-X
Reprinted by arrangement with Simon & Schuster
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
March 1993
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
OPM
for Pandora, Candida,
and Sophie
God punishes the scandal more than the crime.
—Mexican proverb
If the charge of forraine Espialls and Intelligences be committed unto you, take heede they deale not double with you and abuse you with toyes and matters of their own invencion.
—Instructions for a Principall
Secretarie, observed by R.B.
for Sir Edward Wotton, 1592
ONE
□ □ □
1
The mover's truck lay on its side at the edge of a dirt road north of Amistad Dam. Bob Culbertson, the Border Patrol chief from Del Rio, sat in his clapped-out government mule, squinting at the truck, thinking that this was a helluva way to spend Friday night—the first night of the Memorial Day weekend. The driver—known as a "coyote" in Patrol lingo—had gotten out of the wreck intact, and hared off into the mesquite, running away from the river. One of Culbertson's men loped out of the scrub, sucking his thumb. Those mesquite thorns were wicked.
Culbertson got out of his car. "Throw up on that door handle!"
They wrenched open the back doors of the truck, and Culbertson's nostrils were assailed by the stench of puke and blood and feces. The mojados who could move struggled out into the glare of the flashlights, uncomplaining. Culbertson stared at the dark faces, the centerless black eyes. The women wore shawls, with the points trailing over their shoulders. One was lovingly woven with figures of birds and animals. These people had come a long way. From Oaxaca, maybe. Or Chiapas. Or farther south. Guatemala? What had they forfeited to get to this ditch by the road? A baby shrieked inside its mother's rebozo. The mother did not look up at the tall, hairy blond man—the diablo tejano—in cowboy boots, with a pistol on his hip.
Culbertson swung his flashlight into the interior of
the truck. There were a couple that hadn't made it, and a boy who was bleeding bad.
"You better call up Doc Lapham," Culbertson told Lew Rawlings.
"What about the others?"
"Shit. Push them back through the wire."
"They'll be back tomorrow."
"They always are." He stared across the chaparral, toward the black thunderheads that were leaning out of the north. "If those thumpers are working, we might catch that coyote tomorrow."
"We might," Rawlings allowed, without optimism.
"Let's clean up fast and get home," said Culbertson. "It's getting set to blow."
"See you tomorrow?"
"Not me. I'm dead to the world until Tuesday."
Culbertson climbed back into his car, slipped the clutch, and bumped south along the gullied road. Up in the hill country, the storm was already tearing up stumps along the river valleys, turning dry arroyos into boiling torrents. Against the paler sky to the south, he saw the black speck of a small plane, traveling low and slow without lights. Twin engine. Culbertson figured it had to be a doper, or one of those rich OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) who didn't care what they paid to get into the United States. He had caught an Albanian—an Albanian, for Chrissake!—only last week. Under ten thousand feet, those little birds were off the radar scope.
Culbertson toyed with his radio transceiver.
Why bother? If the plane belonged to a doper, he'd be in and out within ten minutes: a touch-and-go run or a parachute drop. Last time Culbertson had been over at Customs, they had a big map on the wall showing six hundred unlisted landing strips within a hundred-mile radius of the border.
Culbertson was dog tired, and he had better things to worry about than the monthly tally of confiscated drugs. He had received a tip that Internal Affairs were planning to pay him an unannounced visit after the holiday. Someone had been spreading word that he was on the take from coyotes.
He peered up at the plane. It was coming down over the dam, too fast and too soon. The wind wasn't that strong. Must be engine trouble.
They had the wheels down, apparently ready to try for a crash landing. The wind skirled down, and carried the roll of thunder. Culbertson could not see or hear what happened to the plane. He thought it had gotten over the dam, but it would have been a near miss.
He snapped on the transceiver.
"What can I do for you, hon?" came the voice of Pearl, the dispatcher.
"Get me Officer Rawlings."
Rawlings responded through the crackle of static. "Yo."
"What are you doing, Lew?"
"I'm trying to get me a date with one of these-here señoritas."
"Get your ass over to Amistad Dam. I'm on my way there now."
"I thought you were dead to the world."
"We got us a downed plane, and I don't aim to wait until they tote it back to Mexico."
That had happened before. A smuggler's plane had crashed on the American side of the river, on a moonless night, and Culbertson decided to go through the wreckage in the morning. Before his men got to it, scavengers from across the river had humped every usable piece of scrap back to Mexico.
He found the plane nose-down in a gravel pit off Route 349, the back road to Ciudad Acuña, behind the camp ground where those big German girls came on adventure tours and got the goat-rubbers all hot and bothered. The lightning flashed, and for an instant the scene was starkly defined. By some miracle, the gas tank had failed to explode, but the twisted metal around the cock-pit suggested that the chance of finding survivors was slim. The plane looked like a four-seater Piper Navajo.
The rain was coming down in buckets. Leaving his headlights on as a guide for Rawlings, Culbertson hauled on his slicker and scrambled down the side of the pit. He ! wrenched at the door above the wing and it fell out into his hands. He jabbed his flashlight into the cabin, and saw the bodies of two men. The one in the business suit had died open-mouthed, in mid-scream. The aisle and the passenger seats were filled with brown paper packages, the size and shape of seat cushions. There must have been forty or fifty of them. The dopers had made no effort to camouflage their load, but Culbertson reached for his hunting knife and slit open one of the packages, to be sure. It was good stuff. Inside the yellow plastic wrap, smeared with some doper's code—"Baby-3," scrawled by a felt marker—the cocaine hydrochloride was as fine as confectioners' sugar.
Culbertson's attention returned to the two dead men; both their IDs were probably bogus, but they would have to be checked. The man in the suit had a Florida driver's license. The pilot had some kind of Mexican police badge. That, at least, might be genuine, though the Judiciales would deny they knew him.
The suit had a satchel between his knees. He was gripping it so tightly that Culbertson broke two of the dead man's fingers before he got it free. It had to contain money.
The satchel had a combination lock, but Culbertson didn't bother with that. Slitting the box open, he found to his chagrin no cash; only a copy of the Wall Street Journal and an odd-looking pouch, sheathed in something like oilskin, with a wax seal on the back. The pouch was barely bigger than a legal pad, but there were strange protuberances inside. It occurred to Culbertson that the thing could be booby-trapped.
Jeez. What could be worth so much that you hid it in a booby-trapped pouch—the kind of things spooks went in for—when you left thirty or forty million dollars' worth of cocaine lying about on the floor?
"What we got?" Rawlings drawled as he walked up behind Culbertson.
"Look for yourself." Culbertson said as he quickly slid the pouch under his slicker. So far as he knew, it didn't contain money or dope, so he didn't feel guilty about taking it. He couldn't have said at the time why exactly he was concealing material evidence, but he would say later that he acted on gut instinct, the same kind of hunch that tells you to get out of a bar before the quiet guy in the corner decides to do a job on your kidneys. Bob Culbertson relied a lot on gut instinct.
Besides, unless he was mistaken, he had seen something like this pouch once before—when he'd been called in to help a hotshot CIA type who'd got himself into trouble down at the Motel Alaska in Acuña, where the Soviets liked to hang out.
"Start making an inventory," Culbertson told Rawlings. "I've got a call to make."
"You fixing to bring in the Customs boys? DEA's gonna want a piece of this too."
"Yeah? I figure they can sleep in late tomorrow."
By tomorrow, of course, more agencies than you could count off with the fingers of one hand would be crawling all over the scene of the accident. Unless, of course, the thunderstorm and the fact it was a holiday weekend slowed them down. The FAA was supposed to be on the scene of a plane crash within eight hours. The guys from the National Transportation Safety Board would want to poke around too. Under Texas state law, the Department of Public Safety—in other words, the Highway Patrol—was supposed to make out a report. Four Customs men would ride out in a black car, or maybe a chopper if the weather permitted. The presence of drugs meant DEA, if not FBI too. And if they had nothing sexier to do, the Air Force Intelligence types from Laughlin might want to be in on the act as well, since they were in the neighborhood. On top of all that, any number of people with radio scanners might have picked up the signals from the doomed plane—or from Culbertson's call to Rawlings. Newshounds had scanners too. If they hadn't learned of the crash already, they'd hear soon enough. Everyone would want to talk to Culbertson, the first man on the scene.
He was starting to get a headache.
He decided to stop for a quick beer at the bar of the campers' hostel before calling anyone.
A sexy pink-skinned, yellow-haired girl stood by the jukebox; Culbertson gave her an automatic wink and ordered a Corona.
As he sat nursing his beer, his mind focused on the pouch still nestling inside his slicker. The tight seal, the odd shape—everything about it reeked of CIA. All of which made Culbertson doubly determined to find out what was inside. Still, he would prefer not to be dismembered by a charge of plastique.
With his second beer came a bright idea, and Sam Yardley's name was attached to it, in neon lights.
Sam ran the Fit-Rite Shoe Store downtown, about as high-tech as you got in Del Rio, and Sam had a fluoro-scope.
Culbertson called him at home. "I need you to meet me at the store."
"If you think I'm going out in this weather for anything less than what Dolly Parton had before she went on a diet, you're crazier than a peach orchard boar."
Sam worked on his reputation as a local character. Having pissed away the family money and reduced himself to measuring fallen arches, he was entitled to cling to something.
"Sam," said Culbertson. "You do this for me, and I'll lend you my two-seventy. I'll even lend you my wife."
"This must be serious."
"About as serious as it gets."
"You're sure about the two-seventy?"
"What about my wife?"
"I've seen her. I'll take the gun."
As Culbertson rode downtown, he remembered to make his check-in call to Pearl at headquarters. He tried not to make the plane crash sound too exciting. The longer it took the other agencies to muscle in on the case, the better it suited him, but he also had to ensure that the logs left him looking clean as a whistle. With Internal Affairs on his tail, all he needed was for someone to report that he'd ripped off part of a drug deal.
Culbertson squatted among the shoe boxes, while Sam set up the fluoroscope.
"It's all yours," Sam announced.
"Shit, this ain't nothing," Culbertson mumbled to himself after he had taken a good look through the fluoroscope. The booster for the dynamite charge inside the pouch looked like a fountain pen. It was rigged so that if any outsider broke the seal, his face would be churned into hamburger meat. It took Culbertson less than five minutes to disconnect it.
Later, in a booth at Billybob's saloon, Culbertson inspected the contents of the pouch. They consisted of a tight wad of single-spaced, typewritten pages. No spelling mistakes, so far as Culbertson noticed. He did not grasp much else, except that this was heavy stuff. Government stuff. Although the initials appeared nowhere, the document had CIA written all over it. And he had lifted it from a doper's plane.
Culbertson experienced a sudden lift, a burst of euphoria. He ordered a chicken-fried steak, heavy on the gravy, to celebrate.
He had something on Washington. And he knew just where to take it.
2
There was dense cloud cover over Washington, a miserable start to the long weekend. Everything looked out of focus. The river was clothed in olive drab, like a soldier trying to keep his head down in a trench.
Bob Culbertson took a taxi from the airport out to the Virginia suburbs. The driver wasn't sure of the address, but Culbertson said, "It's off Dolly Madison," and that was good enough.
It had occurred to Culbertson that Cousin Phil—as in Philip Taylor, the Commissioner of Immigration and the boss of Culbertson's immediate boss, the chief of the Border Patrol—might have taken his family away for the weekend. He had opted not to call ahead, however, sensing that to do so might have guaranteed that Cousin Phil wouldn't be home. Culbertson knew full well that his cousin regarded him as one of the less desirable of his poor relations.
Taylor lived on a winding road of grandiose villas constructed for the capital's nouveaux riches. The houses parodied—and miscegenated—every style from Tudor to Greek Revival to neo-Moroccan, mostly in red brick. The trees on the lots would not throw shade for another ten years, assuming that the lots had not been subdivided by then.
"Pretty fancy neighborhood," said Culbertson to the cabbie. "Guess these places sell for a couple of hundred Ks."
"You got to be kidding! A million! That's to get heat and running water. What's the number again?"
"There." Culbertson pointed to a mock-Georgian creation with an oculus above the door. There was a three-car garage at the side. The gates were down. No sign of life anywhere. The hall light was on, but people
always left that on when they went away. As if burglars were as dumb as their marks.
"Do you mind waiting?" Culbertson asked.
"It's your money. The meter's running."
Culbertson got out of the cab, trotted up the steps, and rang the bell. No response. Culbertson looked at his watch. Nearly 3 p.m. If only he could have caught the earlier flight! He had turned his back on the door before it opened.
