The Chevrolet Tahoe blew past a sign on U.S. Highway 59 that read 'Welcome to Arkansas'. The two-lane highway was dark and empty. Bill Blackstone checked his watch. It was 7:45 p.m. He looked over his shoulder at Donahue and Garcia in the back seat. The FBI agent was talking.
Blackstone interrupted. "We'll be in Mena in twenty minutes."
Garcia nodded.
Donahue paused as if waiting for Garcia to say something. When the Cuban didn't speak, Donahue flipped a page in his spiral-top police notebook, the same kind reporters carry. "Gordon McCay has no bank account, no credit cards, not even a cable or Internet subscription. He's what we call off the grid, meaning we can't track him."
"I know what off the grid means," Garcia said as he pulled his Samsonite briefcase onto his lap. "But we don't need to track him because I already know where he's going."
Donahue looked stunned. From the man's blathering, Blackstone knew the FBI agent had spent a good deal of time and energy trying to figure out where Gordon McCay might go. Now he was hearing that the man he had done all that work for already knew the answer. Blackstone almost felt bad for him.
"You know where he's going?" Donahue said.
"Yeah."
"Okay," Donahue said as he snapped his notebook closed. "Where's he going?"
"Dallas," Garcia said.
"Why Dallas?"
Garcia didn't answer. Instead, he opened his briefcase and extracted an unopened pack of cigarettes. Then he pulled off the top of the pack. It just popped loose because it wasn't a real pack of cigarettes at all, Blackstone saw, but a clever fake. The pack was hollow, and inside Blackstone could see the butt of a tiny pistol. "I was afraid the deputies at the jail would find this," Garcia said as he pulled the gun out.
"What kind of piece is that?" Blackstone asked.
Garcia held the gun up for Blackstone to see. It was a tiny black revolver, smaller than a man's hand. "A smoothbore .22 Magnum," the Cuban said. "Made from Teflon-infused polymer and ceramic. No metal parts, not even the cartridges or the bullets. So it can't be detected. Holds five rounds."
"What's the range?" Blackstone said.
"It can penetrate a skull at six feet."
Donahue, who had also been looking at the little pistol, leaned closer and said, "Looks pretty weak."
Garcia cocked the tiny hammer and shot the FBI agent in the face. The report, though not even as loud as a firecracker, filled the car. The driver swerved hard and nearly plowed into a ditch. Donahue slumped back in his seat, blood pumping from the small hole just below his left eye. Blackstone reached for his pistol but it wasn't there. It had burned up in the fire.
"Relax," Garcia said as he slid the revolver back into the fake cigarette pack and replaced the top.
Blackstone looked again at the dead FBI agent. Absent a beating heart, the blood had stopped pumping from the wound. Only a trickle still flowed from the neat little hole. "What the fuck did you do?"
Garcia nodded at the driver, who had the car back under control but whose eyes where darting back and forth from the road to the rearview mirror. "You sure he's okay?" Garcia asked Blackstone.
"He's fine. Now answer my goddamned question."
"He knew too much."
"He was FBI."
"Which made him even more dangerous."
"He was under control."
"For now," Garcia said.
Blackstone stared at Garcia, really, really wishing he still had his pistol. "He was helping us."
"There was nothing more he could do."
"And because of that, you killed him?"
"Like you said, he was FBI. Once he figured out what we were doing, he would have found himself in a moral dilemma. And I couldn't be sure which side he would come down on."
"What about me?" Blackstone asked. "Aren't you worried I might find myself in a moral dilemma?"
Garcia shook his head. "No."
"Why not?"
"Because you don't have any morals."
Nodding, Blackstone said, "But maybe I'd still be better off not knowing what you're doing."
Garcia returned the cigarette pack to his briefcase. "The Sergeant Schultz defense."
"Never heard of it."
"The German sergeant from Hogan's Heroes, who always said, I know nothing." Garcia pronounced that last part with an absurd German accent.
Blackstone didn't know how to respond to that so he didn't say anything.
"Doesn't matter," Garcia said. "It's too late. Or it soon will be."
"Too late for what?"
"Too late to claim you didn't know. Too late to play Sergeant Schultz."
Blackstone looked again at the dead FBI agent. Then he stared at Garcia. "But I still don't know, do I?"
Garcia smiled and Blackstone could see his silver tooth peeking out from beneath his top lip. "You will," the Cuban said. "You will."
***
At 8:15 p.m. the nervous driver pulled the Chevrolet Tahoe to a stop on the apron at the Mena Municipal Airport next to the Gulfstream V, which Blackstone had already ordered refueled and made ready to go.
An Agency front company had moved into the three hangers on the southern edge of the small airport, far away from the commercial and general aviation hangers and the flight operations office. They were the same hangers that, a generation before, another Agency front company had built and used to store the weapons that its contract pilots flew down to the Nicaraguan contras. Small teams of security contractors from Dynamic International rotated in and out of Mena on a thirty-day cycle and guarded the hangers twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the hangers were empty. Sometimes they weren't. Blackstone didn't know much about the Mena operation, except that it involved Mexico. He suspected that it more specifically involved Mexican cartels, but he wasn't sure, and he certainly wasn't going to ask.
He stepped out of the front seat of the Tahoe and opened the back door for Garcia. As the Cuban climbed out, Blackstone noticed that he hadn't even gotten any blood on his jacket or his guayabera shirt.
Wendell Donahue lay slumped against the far door. Blackstone had seen a lot of dead men, many of them ripped apart, and the expressions on their faces were almost universally of horror. But Donahue, even with his eyes open, seemed almost to be resting. At most, he had a look of mild surprise on his face, as if he'd died before the full realization of what was happening had hit him. Blackstone hoped so. The guy was a prick, but...he wasn't that bad. Not really.
Garcia stood at the driver's door, leaning into the open window, forearms resting on the sill, repeating the instructions he had given the driver-an ex-Special Forces staff sergeant-before they had reached the Mena airport. "Make it look like a robbery," Garcia said. "And arrange the scene so that it appears to have been the result of a homosexual tryst."
The driver nodded, then drove off with Donahue's body.
"You think that's going to work?" Blackstone said.
Garcia nodded. "You can always count on the FBI for one thing, and that's to do whatever is necessary to protect its own image. When they hear that the ASAC of the Washington Field Office was found dead in a park with his pants around his ankles, they're not going to look too hard for whoever killed him."
"What about the ceramic bullet rattling around inside his skull?"
"The gun has a smoothbore barrel," Garcia said, "so it doesn't leave ballistic fingerprints."
"Don't you think an unusual round like that might draw some attention?"
Garcia shrugged. "Just one of life's many mysteries."
"That easy, huh?"
"What?"
"To kill a man on your own side."
"It's never easy," Garcia said. "Just necessary."
One cold motherfucker, Blackstone thought. But he didn't say it. Instead, he said, "What's next?"
"We go to Dallas."
"What's happening in Dallas?"
The Cuban gave him a hard stare. His eyes didn't blink. Blackstone could see tiny flecks of yellow in his dark irises.
"Regime change," Garcia said.