Mexico Way, page 16
They bumped around in the pickup for half an hour, under a velvety, moonless sky. The spotlight stabbed across the fields and poked among the bushes. Colgate was glad he had no near neighbors.
"Gotcha!" Sanchez hissed.
Colgate followed his stare. Three hundred yards away, a ten-point stag and several does stood frozen in the glare of the spotlight. Safety lay at their shoulder, among a copse of trees, but the fierce light had paralyzed their instinct for survival.
"Dead meat," Sanchez pronounced, leaning out the window on the passenger side. He lifted Colgate's rifle.
Though he was not a man who cared about animals, Colgate felt an instant's sympathy for the deer. His last wife had accused him of psychological cruelty to her dog; it was one of the things her attorneys had cited in successive alimony suits. It got to the judge every time.
When Sanchez squeezed the trigger, the echo of the shot as it bounced back and forth inside the cab of the pickup was deafening. Colgate pressed his hands to his ears. He felt as if his eardrums had just been blown out.
Sanchez, seemingly impervious to the explosive sound, jumped out the door and loped across the grass to his fallen prey. The does scattered among the trees. His bullet had taken the stag between the shoulders; its blood fountained across the earth.
Colgate saw Sanchez stooping over the stag, the knife blade shining in his hand.
"Let's get out of here!" Colgate called to him. He reached up and snapped off the spotlight. He did not want to prolong the risk of drawing the attention of some passing highway cop.
In the darkness, Colgate could not see Sanchez clearly until he was next to the driver's window. He opened his mouth to speak, but the raw stench of hot blood floating in through the window made him gag.
"Oh, God . . ."
Sanchez laughed as he threw the stag's head into the back of the pickup.
"Did you have to do that?" Colgate complained, when Sanchez climbed back into the cab.
Sanchez was convulsed with laughter. "I thought for a minute you were going to faint. Like that guy Maury, Maury whatsisface. You remember?"
"Maury Atthowe."
"Yeah, Atthowe." He pronounced it Att-oo-ee. That had always pissed off Maury.
Colgate remembered. In Saigon, Colgate had put a price on the heads of the most-wanted Vietcong leaders and Sanchez had taken him literally. One night, he had come into the Station to claim his bounty. Maury Atthowe had been on duty and had made the mistake of opening the burlap sack that Sanchez dumped on his desk. When a Vietnamese head rolled out, Maury had fallen on the floor in a dead faint.
Colgate had not thought it was all that funny then, and he still didn't. As they drove up to the house, he said to Sanchez, "It wasn't just that one time. You always took the goddamn head."
Sanchez laughed.
"Why did you do that?"
"Tribal custom. You sent me up to the Montagnards. You should know."
"You're not a Montagnard."
"My people did it too. A while back. Ever hear about the Aztecs? They believed the same as the hill people in Nam. You take the head, you capture the spirit. You save yourself from a lot of bad nights. That scares you, doesn't it?"
"No." Abruptly, Colgate stopped the truck and turned off the ignition.
"Talk to me, Arthur. It scares the shit out of you, doesn't it?"
"No! I had to arrange something similar, just a few weeks back." As soon as he had said it, he realized his mistake.
The Headhunter narrowed his eyes. "Tell me about it," Sanchez urged. "Did you enjoy it?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Eating the heart is better."
"Shit. You never did that, did you, Rico?"
Sanchez laughed. It was a hollow sound. Colgate could not remember ever having felt more uncomfortable.
TWELVE
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1
At a disused gravel pit on his own land, twenty miles from the villa, Raúl Carvajal watched the new instructor demonstrate the uses of a C-4 plastic explosive. The C-4 had been shipped from Houston in plastic bags, hidden inside drums labeled "drilling mud." Raúl tapped his earplugs. The roar was still impressive as a derelict bus exploded into whirling shrapnel.
The instructor was ready to demonstrate a new trick. He held up an unmarked bottle. He shouted at the Mexicans that it contained an additive that would turn the gasoline in the tank of a car into flaming napalm.
The man seemed to know his job. Still, Raúl did not care for him. He found the man cold and insinuating, continually seeking more information than he needed to know. He was a Mexican-American, and while his Spanish was fluent, Raúl thought his accent atrocious and his jokes unrepeatable. His skill with explosives, however, would be invaluable when the day came for the north to rise and claim its freedom. A few well-placed charges, at bridges and mountain passes and railroad lines, would isolate the north from any rapid land assault by the government forces. In the meantime, there were other uses for bombs.
With a thump and a WHOOOSH, a pillar of flame burst from an old farm truck and leaped a hundred feet into the air. The men of the Division of the North, fitted out in American-made fatigues and combat boots, applauded. Some of them fired their M-16s into the air, until the instructor barked at them, chastising them to save their ammunition for the chilangos.
Raúl climbed into his Land Cruiser. He felt nervous and on edge this morning. It wasn't because of his soldiers' lousy marksmanship, which he had witnessed earlier. They could shoot as well as Mexican army troops, and when the time came for military operations, some of them would be armed with the new laser-guided weapons Mr. Cantwell had been plugging so hard. With those things all you had to do was put the red dot on your mark and squeeze the trigger. Yes, the Division of the North would fight well enough, and they would last for as long as was needed, but they could not take on the Mexican air force. Of course, the Mexican air force was feeble, even by Latin American standards, but the fleet of Pipers and Learjets and Cessnas was more than a match for the Northern Force.
The requirement for victory, as Raúl saw it, was the involvement of the United States. But even in private, President Butler continued to withhold his endorsement. While the Administration debated option papers, the newspapers were full of reports that fences were being mended between Washington and Mexico City. The bankers were getting together to try to work out a new debt repayment schedule. The Mexican Attorney General had promised full cooperation with the DEA and the law enforcement agencies investigating Judge Renwick's death.
Raúl knew he could no longer rely on the diplomats and politicians. Too much was at stake, and there was not enough time. Other tactics were called for now.
Yes, it was time for Shelley to earn her keep.
2
Chunky men wearing white shirts and hearing aids prowled the hotel corridor, bunching together at the east end, where the first guests were arriving at the Lovell suite. The hotel advertised its discretion. Branch "Charlie" Lovell, ranking senator from Louisiana, had maintained a hospitality suite here since the last election, his monthly bills paid by a non-profit organization whose principal supporter was Hallow Petroleum of Houston, Texas.
While a black butler in a white dinner jacket poured Chivas Regal and Stolichnaya for the senator's guests, a stretch limousine with shaded windows drew up to the hotel's side entrance on Washington's H Street. The vehicle was indistinguishable from a half dozen similar limos whose drivers were contending for space outside the hotel's front doors on 15th Street. A man leaped out of the limousine and vanished behind a protective wall of Secret Service agents.
No one, not even the inevitable streetwalker, had time to recognize President Harry Butler as he swept into the service elevator, held waiting by another man with an earpiece.
With him was Aaron Sturgiss, White House Counselor and the architect of the celebrated crusade to save Disneyland from the Japanese that had helped him win the election. They had been asshole buddies—or so Aaron would boast after enough bourbon—since they had voted the Mexicans for LBJ back in the bad old, good old days down in Corpus. Washington insiders might dispute whether Harry Butler or Ann Travis Butler was the most powerful Texan in the White House. Nobody disputed that Aaron Sturgiss ranked third.
Aaron's clownish features and his down-home similes could be deceptive. He knew where power had gone in America—it had gone into the airwaves—and he had been instrumental in helping Harry Butler snatch it back from the other party. With Sturgiss's guidance, Harry had campaigned for the nomination, and then for the President's job, with the aid of his own video center: a mobile dream machine that transmitted to local TV stations across America via satellite hookup, armed with high-rent apex digital optics machines that could simulate 3-D, flip images on and off the tape, run simulations, or dazzle with arresting cut-ins at the flick of a switch.
Sturgiss had earned his position of power in the President's inner circle, and—right or wrong—Butler trusted him.
"What's Charlie Lovell want this time?" the President asked as the elevator rose to the top of the building.
"Well, he still wants to home-port the Ulysses S. Grant in Louisiana."
"He's drilling a dry duster. We're never going to build that carrier. We don't have the money. Charlie knows that, too. What else?"
"Mexico. I guess Charlie's banker friends are getting pretty scared."
"Aaron, I've got Mexico coming out of both ears. Jonah Pike wants me to resurrect Black Jack Pershing and the goddamn bankers want me to bail them out with taxpayers' money. It would be nice to spend an evening talking about something other than our brown brothers to the south."
"Charlie gives a good party," said Aaron mildly, as the elevator came to a stop.
It was a relevant observation, for in Washington, the influence of a dedicated party-giver can hardly be overstated. Public men need to let their hair down sometime. Harry Butler's campaign ads had touted him as "the President for the 21st Century," but he indulged in a very old-fashioned reverie: that the President of the United States could still conduct his private affairs without running into sightseers, terrorists—or reporters. In addition to his official retreat at Camp David and his private ranch on the Nueces River, two hours' drive from Corpus Christi, the President, with Aaron's help, had established a network of retreats within easy reach of the White House. He called them his "safe houses." They were places where he could relax, let off steam, and maybe even talk Texas friendly to someone, maybe even an unattached young woman, without reading about it in the paper. And without hearing about it from the First Lady over the breakfast table or in one of the dawn ambushes she liked to mount through the door that connected their bedrooms on the second floor of the executive mansion.
Harry Butler's preferred hideaway was truly private: a rambling old center-hall colonial on the Old Lee Highway, hidden from the road by spreading oaks and cherry trees. Getting out there usually meant taking a chopper, however, and that created a blizzard of activity all over the White House lawn. Senator Lovell's hospitality suite at least had the virtue of proximity. That he also served good whiskey and passable jambalaya, and seemed to know any number of good-looking women who didn't talk to reporters, were pluses as well.
The Louisiana senator had no shortage of axes to grind—he sat on both the Finance and Intelligence Committees—but President Butler felt on safe ground in the senator's suite. Charlie Lovell had been the first man in Congress, outside Texas, to back his run for the nomination; he represented the next-door oil state; they had a lot of friends in common; and they had raked hell together down in New Orleans the week after Harry had flunked his first try for the bar exams.
The lines of tension eased from the President's face as he stepped into the Lovell suite. The party was the right size: big enough so you could avoid anyone you wanted to avoid; intimate enough for you to take in all the faces. None of the men present had come with his own wife.
From his earliest mentor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Harry Butler had learned the principle that to succeed in politics, you have to be able to tell the minute you walk in a room who is for you and who is against you. The mature Harry Butler had observed, however, that people aren't generally for you or against you so much as they are for themselves.
He trained his practiced smile on what was clearly a Butler crowd—subject to the qualification mentioned above. The lobbyist for Black & Greenleaf, the giant construction and drilling consortium, had been putting together fund-raising activities for Harry Butler for more than twenty years. The leggy redhead was the socialite wife of a New York banker who never seemed to have time to accompany her to Washington.
In a corner above the bar, a muted TV set carried images from CNN. Or maybe it was C-Span, because there was Senator Jonah Pike, owlish behind his horn rimmed glasses, resurrecting communists most people believed to be extinct.
"Hey, Charlie," the President spoke to his host. "Put on the sound for a minute, will you? I want to hear what that blow-hard is saying about us."
The mute light went out, and Senator Pike, the right-wing tormentor of six administrations, was caught in mid-tremor:
". . . pimping for a bunch of dope-runners and corrupt officials who are turning Mexico over to the communists. Harry Butler makes out that because he's from Texas, he knows how to keep Mexicans in line. That might work on your ranch, Harry, or at Taco Bell, but it sure ain't working across the Rio Grande. The White House policy of cozying up to whoever stole the last election in Mexico is going to give us an Iran next door."
"That's a blivet, Jonah," Harry Butler addressed the TV. "Two pounds of shit in a one-pound sack." He motioned to the bartender to turn off the sound.
"I don't understand," the President said, turning to Senator Lovell, "how a guy who enjoyed getting into bed with Marcos and Pinochet can sound off on Mexico like a long-haired radical. Is anybody out there listening?"
"They're listening, Harry," said Lovell. "Salomon Brothers is trading Mexican bonds for sixteen cents on the dollar. And falling. The Border Patrol caught six thousand wets in one bust last night down by Laredo. Six thousand!"
The lobbyist for Black & Greenleaf homed in. "Mr. President, I hope you're not going to let the Japanese take over down there."
Harry Butler bristled. "Who said the Japanese are taking over?" This was a sore point. Like it or not, his recent career was founded on thumbing his nose at the Japanese, and the President could not afford to be perceived as softening on the Japan issue now. One of the campaign ads the party was market-testing for the midterm election showed teams of flag-carrying Japanese businessmen closing down American factories and directing American workers to the welfare lines. The voice-over began: "You must remember this."
The lobbyist said something about the Canal Project. The plan to drive a canal across the isthmus of Tehuantepec was the stuff of daydreams for anyone in the construction business. If it were ever carried into effect, it would provide one of the biggest engineering and construction contracts in history—perhaps the biggest.
"There won't be a canal," Harry Butler said. "Who needs it, since we got rid of old Pineapple Face in Panama? And who's gonna pay? Those Mexicans are poorer than Job's turkey."
"The Japanese might put up the credit," said the man from Black & Greenleaf. "Big John Halliwell says if we let them get that canal, we better get ready to gas up the Enola Gay."
"Is Big John in with you boys on a canal deal?"
The lobbyist nodded his head.
"Well then," said the President, "you keep Aaron here posted."
Senator Lovell took his arm.
"There's a little lady here who came a pretty far piece to see you, Mr. President. Can't say I don't envy you."
Harry Butler squared his shoulders. He had a reputation in town as a lady-killer, but he had avoided public scandal. He was a beneficiary of the sour backwash from all the sex scandals of the previous decade, which had resulted in a tacit mutual truce between the two major parties. The media went their own way, of course, digging up dirt wherever possible, but Aaron Sturgiss had some clever ways of dealing with the gentlemen of the press. A few months into this Administration, a reporter had called to ask about the President's alleged tryst with a busty blond secretary. Aaron had phoned up the reporter's editor-in-chief and offered to send to a competing publication the credit-card receipts the reporter had signed for a call-girl service.
The President turned to meet his admirer.
She was wearing a basic black cocktail dress, and a double strand of pearls. The simplicity of her outfit enhanced the effect of her shimmering red-gold hair, her wide, gray-green eyes, her fine, glowing skin. Her face had a natural radiance; it seemed to be lit from within.
"Hello, Harry."
The President's smile froze on his face.
"You shouldn't show your teeth like that," Shelley told him. "You looked like that in the Sam Donaldson interview. People can see you're nervous."
Senator Lovell excused himself diplomatically, and drew Aaron Sturgiss away.
"I didn't expect to see you," Harry Butler said to Shelley, still wearing a forced grin. "You look well."
"Someone called me a balzaciana the other day."
"What in hell is that?"
"Something out of Balzac. Don't you read anything, Harry? Ann should set you a reading list."
The President's eyes slid sideways, then back. He gulped at his scotch and soda.
"How long have you been in Washington?"
"I flew up today. I started in Monterrey. Raúl asked me to talk to you."
"Not here," Butler said quickly.
Shelley's eyes flickered toward the door. What was back there? Oh Lord, the bedroom.
