The Swamp
0430
It was a tangle of trees artfully positioned to give definition to an exquisitely landscaped garden that lay behind the main house, perpetually damp from water seepage, giving it the nickname The Swamp. Tactically, its great advantage was that it could be accessed on the crawl, unseen by any of the night sentries who roamed the property on predictable paths, which Juba had noted.
Thus, when he saw Alberto approaching, even on a night without a moon, he knew that the transaction went unobserved. And before the man reached the edge of the brambles, Juba attracted his attention with a small snort, diverting him yet again to the lee of a small tree.
“Nobody saw you?” he asked.
“No one. I don’t think there are security cameras in my wing of the house. His fear is, people coming in from the outside, not betrayal from the inside. But he is a very paranoid man.”
“Indeed,” said Juba.
“What is this about?”
“Your future.”
“Meaning?”
“That I suspect you want one. If that is so, you will have to perform certain tasks. Otherwise, you will be dead, cut to ribbons by the freak in the sock.”
“I have done nothing to—”
“It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you know. They will kill you within seconds after they kill me.”
The Syrian-Mexican could make no sense of this.
“What? Why would—”
“He cannot let me go on my mission. It’s too big a risk. Wichita changed everything. Suppose I am captured? Suppose the Americans offer me a deal to testify against him and identify him as the instigator of the Wichita thing? They offer me a new life, as opposed to sending me to some black site where Serbian mercenaries blowtorch my secrets out of me. That is now a more serious problem for him than any damage my people will do to him in suspicion of a betrayal. And, in any event, my murder will be disguised as some kind of mishap, a chance encounter with a policeman, an auto accident. He will pay an indemnity, but in that lies survival for him. He knows it. I know it. He just doesn’t know I know it.”
“I am only half Arab, so I lack your gift for cunning.”
“I need two things from you. First, I have to know when that screwball in the sock is out of the picture or indisposed in some way.”
“Easy. Two Mexican women come to him at six each evening. He must either have sex or kill somebody every single day or it is said he becomes irritable.”
“Six, then. And second: tunnels. These Mexicans, they make their living in tunnels. Illegals, drugs, whores—what have you—they move it underground. They are also escape-obsessed. They worry about the Americans, they worry about their competitors, and now that they’re involved with us, they worry about us. They fear surprise attack at any moment. When Menendez took this place over, the first thing he would have done is move his engineers and construction people in and had tunnels dug. Do you know about them?”
“I know areas I have been advised to avoid.”
“I need more than that.”
“And I need an incentive.”
“How about this? If you don’t help me, I’ll behead you.”
“Or, how about this? You take me with you. This whole thing is beginning to feel more and more fragile. When it collapses, many will die. I have no desire to be among them. Only with that in mind can I act . . . heroically.”
“I appreciate your lack of grandeur. No false idealism for the translator.”
“Call me what you will, I understand that translators have a short life expectancy around here.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“No. Too soon. My explorations must be tomorrow. I will have no results till the day after, maybe the day after that.”
“Work swiftly, little man.”