Exile Endgame (Kamas Trilogy Book 4), page 18
“Great Britain.”
“Okay,” Werner nodded. “We have several recent examples of messages to Progintern U.K. that we can draw on.”
“Fine, then. This is what I’m looking for…”
For the next three days, Linder spent each morning with Werner at the garden condominium shaping details of the fake Progintern document he wanted. They finished each day at noon, after which Linder joined Annabel for lunch, a siesta, and an hour or two of relaxation by the pool.
On their last day together, Werner brought out a bottle of aged mescal and two glasses. Between sips of the smoky liquor, Linder asked whether the forger planned to attend the Anti-Unionist Congress later that week in Mexico City.
“Not invited,” Werner replied. “The meeting is intended for Fury’s moneymen. And I wouldn’t give the guy a dime even if I had one to spare.”
“Oh? Why is that?” Linder asked, feigning indifference.
“Let’s face it, Warren. Fury is washed up over here. The Canadians have locked him out, now that they’ve signed a peace treaty with the Unionists. And in Mexico, the same is about to happen. You see, during CWII, the Mexican government looked the other way while gringos waged guerrilla war across the border with help from the cartels. In those days, Fury’s people smuggled arms and fighters into the U.S. while the cartels brought refugees out at a tidy profit. Then the Unionists completed the border wall and cut off traffic both ways. Which meant that the rebel payoffs to Mexican politicians also dried up. So, with the money cut off, it’s just a matter of time before the Mexican government throws out the rebels and makes peace with Uncle Sam.”
“So what would peace with the Unionists mean for you personally?”
“Well, I can probably stay here a while longer if I keep my nose clean,” Werner mused before taking a sip of mezcal. “But making a living in the documents business will likely get a lot harder. I may just head back to Cuba. They still have a lively cross-border trade over there.”
“You won’t have any trouble finishing my project before you go, will you?”
“Oh, no, you needn’t worry about that. I’ll have it finished in a couple of days,” Werner replied. “But if I were you. I’d be extra careful at Fury’s soirée this weekend. Never underestimate his capacity for screw-ups. His botched job at Cannes is just the latest example. I’d hate to see something bad happen to you before you paid me.”
Werner offered a smile that was so dissolute and yet so oddly charming that it gave Linder chills.
On the day scheduled for Linder and Annabel to depart for Mexico City, Werner called early to ask if Linder could come back to the condo to settle a final detail. Linder agreed and Werner’s young associate arrived a half hour later to pick him up.
About twenty minutes after her husband left, Annabel’s housekeeper announced that a visitor was at the door demanding to see her on urgent business. The housekeeper’s face was sallow and she seemed unusually nervous. Though the situation was odd, Annabel went to the door.
“Señora Linder?” the visitor asked with a troubled expression. He was a good-looking Hispanic of about forty, dressed in a beige summer suit, and spoke in English with a Mexican accent.
“Yes? How can I help you?”
“There has been an accident on the highway and your husband has been injured,” the man said on a note of urgency. “An ambulance is taking him to the hospital, but he asked me to come find you since I was the first to stop and help him. Can you come with me? My driver spoke with the paramedics and knows the way to the hospital.”
Having learned to look for the DSS’s hidden hand behind unusual events, Annabel was not prepared to accept the stranger’s claims at face value. She began at once to pepper him with questions.
“What kind of accident?” she demanded. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
“Your husband’s car was hit at an intersection just in front of me,” the man explained. “My driver scarcely avoided a collision himself. I cannot say how serious Señor Linder’s injuries might be, but he was still conscious before he left for the hospital and urged me to find you at once.”
The stranger was polite and well spoken, and his car parked outside was a sleek new Mercedes. Given the possibility of serious injury to her husband, Annabel put aside her misgivings and called for the housekeeper to bring her purse. As she followed the man outside, he introduced himself as Diego Machado, a local builder, before opening the car’s rear door for her and circling around to take a seat beside her.
But first, Annabel took her mobile phone from her purse and called her husband’s number. It went immediately to voicemail, as it always did whenever Linder was in a meeting. But why would it do that if he were still en route…?
“Please, Señora Linder, we must hurry if we are to catch up.”
For a moment Annabel hesitated, but as Machado’s tone was solicitous rather than assertive, she entered the Mercedes.
Once the car had left the gated compound, she spoke again.
“Which hospital is it?” she asked.
“The Farallón. It’s quite close. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
In the next moment Annabel detected a slightly sweet chemical odor. At the same time, the car lurched to the right and the stranger was thrown against her. She felt a sharp prick in her thigh and the thought flashed through her mind that she was being drugged. So she reached for the door handle. But the door was locked.
“Stop the car!” she screamed before the stranger held a thick cloth over her mouth and nose. Then the medicinal odor became overpowering, the soft leather seat seemed to slip out from under her, and everything turned black.
Out of the darkness, a beam of light flickered ahead before coming closer. Annabel felt nauseous and imagined that she was in a deep abyss whose walls revolved slowly around her. Then the light grew steadily brighter until it hurt her eyes. She found herself sitting in a folding chair, bent over with elbows on her knees.
“Ah, that’s better,” said a voice nearby. As her vision cleared, she could see a bespectacled older man looking at her with concern. Behind him stood a wall of shelves lined with bottles of every shape and size.
“Drink this,” the old man added in heavily accented English as he held a glass of water to her lips. “You are all right. Don’t be alarmed.”
Annabel opened her eyes wide and realized that she was in a storefront pharmacy and that the old man wore the starched white coat of a pharmacist. His young female assistant watched from behind the counter. A half-dozen curious customers gathered just beyond arm’s reach.
“What happened? Where am I?” she asked the pharmacist.
“You went faint in your car but you’ll be fine,” he replied.
She stiffened when she remembered the needle stick in her thigh and the cloth held over her face, realizing that she must have been drugged.
The pharmacist offered a sympathetic smile and laid his hand on hers.
“Don’t worry,” he repeated. “You’ll be fine now. Your husband has gone to fetch a doctor.”
“Husband?” Annabel bristled, struggling to collect her thoughts. “What husband?”
“The young man who brought you in, of course,” the old man replied with a confused look.
“That was not my husband!”
Annabel reached for her purse and fished out her mobile phone. She dialed Linder’s number again. This time the call went through.
“Annabel, what happened? Are you okay?” he demanded. “I just got back to the villa and heard about your accident.”
“My accident?” she demanded. “What are you talking about?”
“The maid called and said a car hit you while you were out for a walk.”
“But I never went for a walk!”
“Then why did the man who hit you come to the house to find me?” Linder stammered. “He offered to drive me to the hospital. Listen, he’s right here. I’ll put him on."
A moment later, Linder spoke again, more quietly than before.
“He’s gone. And so is the maid. What on earth is going on, Annabel? And where are you calling from?”
“I’m at a pharmacy on the airport road. A man came to the villa claiming that it was you who were injured in an accident. You didn’t answer your cell phone so, like a fool, I let him take me to the hospital. But before I realized what was happening, I felt a needle in my leg and woke up here.”
When Linder spoke next, his voice conveyed relief.
“Now I see. Taking you away from the villa was a diversion to lure me out on a wild goose chase so they could kidnap me. All they needed to do was keep you on ice long enough to get me to go with them.”
Annabel glanced at her watch.
“But I’ve been gone nearly a half hour,” she replied. “So why didn’t their plan work?”
“I think because you woke up too soon. What’s more, you had the presence of mind to ring me again just now. If you had called even a minute later, I would have gone off with the man who said he was taking me to you. And we might never have seen each other again.”
Linder and Annabel finished packing their bags an hour later and called their hired driver to request an early departure for Mexico City. While shaken by her abduction, Annabel recovered quickly and seemed more indignant than intimidated. While it was unlikely that the kidnappers would come back the same day for another attempt, Linder wanted to leave nothing to chance. Once on the highway, he phoned Leonard Fury to alert him that additional security might be needed for his AUC event. He also warned Frank Werner to be on the alert in case the DSS men came after him, too. Werner insisted that he was at no risk, which only tended to make Linder more suspicious of him and his young assistant. Could he rely on Werner to produce the Progintern document he ordered, or might his plan for the forged document be foiled before it started?
Linder and Annabel arrived at their hotel in Mexico City’s fashionable Polanco district just before dinner. After the morning’s events in Acapulco, neither was inclined to leave the building for dinner. So they ate a light meal at the hotel’s gourmet Mexican restaurant and retired early after knocking back some tequila from the minibar. Recalling Werner’s cautionary words about Leonard Fury’s rocky relations with the Mexican government and his propensity for screw-ups, Linder did not have a good feeling about the coming days.
The opening session of the Anti-Unionist Congress Central Committee started early at the apartment of Fury’s leading Mexico-based supporter, located in a gleaming residential tower not far from Linder’s hotel. Linder arrived a half hour beforehand to sip coffee with the other delegates, most of whom were American expatriates residing in Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, or any one of several right-leaning nations in Central and South America. Everyone Linder spoke with over coffee feared the long-term impact of an authoritarian U.S. that sought hegemony over the entire Western Hemisphere. Several attendees asked Linder how much support Latin America could expect from the free nations of Europe, the Russian Federation, India, Japan, and Southeast Asia against growing Progintern subversion.
“Not much,” was Linder’s response. He reminded them that many of those free nations were at that very moment working to expand relations with the Unionist State.
To Linder’s relief, the balance of the day went rather well, with an upbeat introductory speech from Chairman Fury, updates from the AUC’s various standing committees, and presentations about the current state of the Unionist regime and Progintern subversion abroad.
The second day started almost as well, but hit turbulence after lunch, when Mexico’s state news agency released a story that Fury had bribed Mexican officials to allow the AUC to keep its office in Mexico City in the face of demarches from the Unionist regime. Even worse, a second article alleged that one of the criminal border cartels had paid off Mexican police and border officials to allow it to smuggle Fury-backed saboteurs into Texas. At a time when the Mexican president was seeking normalized relations with the Unionists, the revelations embarrassed his administration to the point where news commentators expected him to expel Fury and his devotees at any moment.
That moment came the following morning, when Fury received an order to vacate his offices and leave the country within twenty-four hours. When Linder arrived at the residential tower where the Congress had been meeting, he found a sign in the lobby stating that the group’s final day of sessions was canceled. As if that weren’t enough, a team of uniformed Mexican policemen blocked non-residents from using the building’s elevators and stairways. Linder returned to his hotel room straightaway, where he found Annabel taking breakfast.
“As soon as you finish eating, we’ll need to pack our bags,” he announced. “The Congress is over.”
An anxious look spread over Annabel’s face as she dropped her fork.
“What’s going on? Is there a problem?”
“Yes, a big one. The Mexican government has put its foot down. We’ll need to leave the country right away to avoid being detained.”
“Detained?” she exclaimed. “Whatever for?” Her face grew pale.
“The Unionists have accused the Mexican government of harboring émigré terrorists. They’re demanding that everyone associated with the AUC be held for questioning and possible extradition to the U.S. under the new Mexican-American peace treaty.”
“Oh, my heavens,” Annabel gasped. “The Mexicans wouldn’t really do that, would they?”
“I don’t intend to stay long enough to find out. Let’s catch a flight out while we can.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN: TWO MEN
“Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. Absolute power attracts the corruptible.”
—Frank Herbert
WEDNESDAY, 13 JULY 2033
Linder and Annabel succeeded in catching a midday flight from Mexico City to Panama before an order for their arrest could be carried out. After a stopover in Cuba to recover from the turmoil of the past few days, they arrived safely in London and spent a quiet couple of months close to home.
On a sunny mid-June morning, however, they awoke to news that the British Labor Party, having won an upset election victory over the Tories earlier that week, had agreed to form a new government with the Liberal Democrats.
“What exactly does that mean?” Annabel asked her husband over coffee as he carried a stack of morning newspapers to the breakfast table.
“It means that Humphrey Bledsoe is out as Prime Minister and Robert McKay is in.”
“Not that horrid McKay who proposed the wealth tax?” she protested.
“The wealth tax isn’t half of it,” Linder replied with a scowl. “McKay has also pledged that one of his first acts on taking power would be to expand official relations with the Unionists in Washington. Last month, Labor’s policy forum released a draft treaty giving the Unionists official recognition in return for a promise to guarantee America’s pre-revolutionary overseas debt.”
“So why is that important?”
“Because it means the new government intends to let the Unionists reopen their London Embassy. And once that happens, London will be crawling with DSS agents. MI5 and Scotland Yard can’t possibly keep up with them. And I will be at the top of their target list.”
A troubled look came over Annabel’s face.
“Then you’ll just have to stop them, won’t you?”
Later that day, Linder and Dwight Calder met to craft their battle plan to thwart Labor’s pro-Unionist initiatives. The good news was that they now enjoyed an influx of new consulting clients and their business was thriving. The bad news was that the reopening of bilateral relations with the U.K. would make a similar diplomatic opening with Western Europe more likely, giving the Unionist regime just the kind of boost it needed to secure its grip on power.
Meanwhile, Linder received a series of increasingly desperate appeals from Leonard Fury for more money and a face-to-face meeting. Since Fury was barred from entering Britain, a meeting meant that Linder would have to take time away from his duties to visit Paris. Still troubled over Fury’s recent fiascos at Sanremo and Mexico City, Linder responded to each successive appeal with a terse message claiming that he was unable to travel due to the press of business. Finally, in July, Fury pleaded that Linder come see him “on a matter of grave importance.”
“If he wants to talk, why doesn’t he just pick up the damned phone? He’s got secure commo,” Linder groused to Dwight Calder after receiving Fury’s latest appeal. “I really can’t justify traveling to Paris right now.”
“I understand,” Calder answered in a conciliatory tone. “But Leonard is still your friend. And you are probably one of very few people on earth he can turn to for advice. You’d feel terrible if he did something stupid to further harm himself and the movement. I’m sure the operation here could spare you for a few days if you really wanted to go.”
“Let me think about it,” Linder replied. “I’ll let you know.”
“I truly pity Leonard’s situation,” Linder began a call later that day to Barton Cao, Fury’s other close friend in the émigré movement. “But damn it, he’s brought it down on his own head. He was so desperate to keep his operation going in Mexico that he failed to see how badly the Unionists wanted to shut it down. He completely closed his eyes to how reckless it was to gather the AUC’s leadership there. So now Leonard is persona non grata in Canada, Mexico and in half of Latin America. The only country that will still have him is France. And even the French don’t seem too happy about it.”
“All that may be true, Warren,” Cao replied, “but Leonard remains a symbol of the resistance to many in our movement. It would reflect well on you to lend him a hand in his hour of need. Besides, Leonard’s keepers continue to keep me at arm’s length, so I haven’t been able to get through to him. I think you should pay him a visit. If nothing else, it would be smart to keep an eye on that flock of buzzards circling around him.”
