Authors: David DeBatto
“Listen to me, you piece of shit whore,” Lev said in English, grabbing MacKenzie by the wrist and pulling her toward him.
“I’ll tell you what I think. I think you have no idea what’s on that disk, because if you did, you’d know the United States
is the last place that I would be afraid of. We’ve been taking girls just like you out into the desert and using them for
target practice for years. So you watch out who you think you can threaten.” He released her, regaining his composure. He
laughed again. “And as for Little Mickey, man, that’s funny. I knew Miguelito since he was five years old. He used to call
me Uncle Leon, and right now, I think he would rather be down in Desemboque making his Girls Gone Wild videos with drunk American
college girls. I killed his father and I will kill him, too, if he even comes close to me.”
“How close do you need him to be?” MacKenzie asked in unaccented English. “Because he just made that sandwich you ate. And
he heard every word you said. And I’m guessing he’s just dying to tell you what was in it.”
From behind the counter, the Oscar De La Hoya lookalike waved to him, removing the headphones and holding them up for Lev
to see. At the same time, MacKenzie produced the transmitter she’d worn on her bra strap.
“Buenas tardes, Tio Leon,”
Miguel Cabrera said.
If Lev had been paying attention, or had he been less drunk, or less cocky, he might have noticed how, gradually, all the
children at the McDonald’s had been ushered outside, their mothers given fifty dollars American to take them somewhere else
for lunch. He would have noticed that the restaurant was full only of men, young men with bulges beneath their shirts. Three
of the men behind the counter leveled Tec-9 machine pistols at Lev, while a fourth aimed a Striker 12-gauge “Street Sweeper”
shotgun at his head from the soda station. Guzman got to his feet, then stood at attention and saluted both Vasquez and MacKenzie
before moving to the bodyguards, handing each of them a stack of fifty hundred-dollar bills. He returned to Lev, reached into
the pocket of his sweatshirt, grabbed the keys to the Suburban, and tossed them to one of the bodyguards.
“Good-bye, Leon,” Guzman said, leaning over and speaking into the Russian’s ear. “It was a pleasure working for you. Be sure
to give my regards to Cipriano when you see him.”
MacKenzie and Vasquez stood as well.
“Tell me what happened to Theresa Davidova and I’ll ask ‘Little Mickey’ to be gentle with you,” she told Lev.
“I don’t know anything about that whore,” Lev said. “She called me and asked me if I could get her a gun and I told her to
go fuck herself. I don’t know any more than that.”
“Who in the United States government are you working with?” Vasquez asked.
“I don’t know,” Lev said.
“Miguel,” MacKenzie said, turning to the man behind the counter.
“Would you please go easy on my friend Leon?”
She turned to Lev again. “Sorry, but it appears he doesn’t speak Russian. Enjoy your Happy Meal. Don’t forget the toy. Maybe
the genie from
Aladdin
will grant you one last wish.”
Crossing the bridge back into the United States, she and Vasquez agreed that Lev was telling the truth about Theresa Davidova,
and about not knowing whom his partners in the American government were.
“What do you think they’re going to do to him?” MacKenzie asked.
“I don’t know,” Hoolie said. “But I think I’d want to wait a couple months before I ate at that McDonald’s again. You never
know what’s in the ground beef.”
DELUCA STOPPED FOR GAS IN LAS CRUCES AND picked up three e-mails on his PDA while he waited for the tank to fill. The first
was from Ben Yutahay.
David,
Would you give me a call when you get a minute? I know how busy you are. A friend of Marvin’s told me that my son told him
he was going to Ajo to see somebody about Cheryl. My son’s friend admitted that Marvin and Cheryl Escavedo were seeing each
other but Marvin couldn’t tell me because of his wife. He was afraid I would be ashamed of him. Do you know who in Ajo he
might be going to see? I’m going to go there to ask around but please give me a call if you know anything.
Ben Yutahay
The second e-mail was from Walter Ford. It read:
David,
Had some of my kids working overtime on this, though they didn’t know the full import of what they were discovering, as I
kept them intentionally uninformed.
Sorry if you were looking for something sexy here. The document your friend P. Romano sent contains accounts and bookkeeping
information, going back thirty years. Most of the accounts are numbered so I couldn’t begin to tell you what’s what, exactly,
without the key, but it appears to be several subaccounts connected to a larger budget. You’d probably want a bunch of accountants
to go over it in detail to really tell you what it means.
There is, however, a file containing a summary that was last opened a week before Cheryl Escavedo disappeared. Part of it’s
a spreadsheet listing total annual disbursements to companies like Lockheed-Martin and TRW and Boeing and Raytheon—I would
assume the figures are supported in the rest of the document. We’re talking about billions of dollars, David. In short, three
things of note.
* First, payments to GNA, which is Global Netherlands Atmospheric—you said a Dutch weather satellite went out shortly after
D1/D2 launched. They owned it. They’re owned by Kirkos Industrial, which is owned by Vitaly Sergelin. Question: Who profited
from loss of satellite? Conclusion: GNA/Kirkos (satellite was insured for $250 million)—or this was a way to conceal transfer
of funds.
* Second, this program was spending more money than it was budgeted for. That may be more the rule than the exception for
government programs, but how were overruns met?
* Third, one of the smallest accounts on the spreadsheet, only $23 million (only!), is described as “Home improvements / Nantucket.”
That’s a lot of bathroom tile—doesn’t Koenig have a house in Nantucket? This one is underscored with three question marks
after it, the author’s, not mine. Here’s my guess: Escavedo was trying to document expenditures Koenig made, appropriating
government money for work on his house. Question: What is the reason for this? Conclusion: It gave her leverage. Question:
How was she using this leverage? Conclusion: Blackmail is a possibility, but that doesn’t sound like her. Self-protection
is another.
Another point of interest. The summary lists dollar amounts, to the unrounded penny. For example, 1998, Lockheed-Martin, $12,587,905.32.
Also totals, very precise. Those totals appear, digit for digit, in a speech given at last month’s Union of Concerned Scientists
meeting in Denver, where the costs of the space race were discussed. The person giving the speech was Dr. Penelope Burgess.
Question: How did she arrive at these figures, if this information is/was classified? Conclusion: Cheryl gave her the information.
We looked at Dr. Burgess’s phone records and e-mail accounts (just the AOL one, not the unm.edu account) but cannot verify
contact.
Walter
P.S. Your boy Dan asked me to pull Congressman Benson’s voting record regarding military expenditures. He might have gone
to Decatur Academy with Koenig, but I don’t see any current possible connection. He’s voted against every proposed Space Defense
Initiative program he could, tried to kill MIRACL, tried to cut the budget for THEL to next to nothing, etc. That bill, by
the way, was cosponsored by Bob Fowler. UCS loves ’em both. I agree in general with the idea that Koenig might have friends
in high places, but Benson isn’t one of them. Koenig had a “secret club” or society at Decatur they called the “Key Club.”
Young conservatives filled with conspiracy theories and love for Richard Nixon. Benson was kicked out. Looking into membership
roster.
P.P.S. Did a little more looking into Shijingshan Entertainment. The intellectual properties lawsuit against them was brought
by Dimension Video, a big DVD distributor in the U.S. Koenig is a major shareholder in Dimension, whose stock went up when
SE went down.
The final e-mail was from General LeDoux’s office, written by his aide, Captain Martin.
Agt. DeLuca,
The general said you were asking about NORAD with questions as to alternative command and control. Such capabilities exist
wholly or in part at NASA in Houston, at Vandenberg/Edwards in California, at NSA, and in the White House operations center,
with a hierarchy of override and security protocols. Recall that part of the Reagan Space Defense Initiative was a recognition
of the need to build greater redundancy into the system, multiple launch sites, multiple C&C centers, etc., given proliferation
and/or increasing accuracy of Sov./Sino ICBM targeting capabilities. This was when the Global Positioning System was on the
drawing boards, but it was coming, and both sides knew it. Space Command at that point prepared for the possibility of the
catastrophic loss of the Cheyenne Mountain facility by installing a second backup site at the former Sinkhole Laboratory in
Carlsbad, which is nearly a mile underground. The White House also wanted another option if executive branch relocation were
required, beyond the current (then) options. Sinkhole’s computers were upgraded, post-9/11, but other than a skeleton crew
of maintenance personnel that visits only sporadically, it is unmanned and nonoperational. Officially, the existence of Sinkhole
is denied.
Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to assist you.
Yours truly,
Captain Charles C. Martin
DeLuca called Ben Yutahay and arranged to meet him in the parking lot of a pancake house in Ajo, a desert copper mining town
(the mine now closed) of four thousand people centered east of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, south of the Barry
M. Goldwater Air Force Testing Range, north of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and west of the Tohono O’Odham Indian reservation,
in the valley between the Sauceda and Growler mountain ranges. He’d put nearly seven hundred miles on the odometer of Gary
Burgess’s truck, driving through the night and reaching Ajo as the sun was rising. He stopped first at a local real estate
office to ask for directions to the Koenig ranch. The woman he spoke with, a gravel-voiced blonde woman named Rita, said she
was well aware of the Koenig ranch, which, at nearly three hundred square miles, was the largest piece of privately held land
in Pima County and one of the largest in Arizona.
“One of the least friendly, too, if you ask me,” she said. “Every once in a while they might send a man into town for supplies
or call a local plumber if something breaks, but as a rule they fly everything in and out on their own private airstrip and
act as if the town wasn’t even here. That and the eight-foot fence don’t add up to coming off as exactly neighborly, but that
ain’t changed in fifty years, so why should it now?”
“Why an eight-foot fence?” DeLuca asked.
“Keeps the game in,” Rita said. “Too high to jump. Tom Koenig’s been growing exotic Asian speckled deer and African antelopes
and what have you so his old schoolmates and Army buddies can come in and hunt ’em. Nothing is so thrilling as murdering an
endangered species. The rumor is that he’s got an albino elk in there, too, which the Indians consider sacred.”
“There’s nothing illegal about owning a private game preserve,” DeLuca said. “Even with exotics.”
“Illegal, no,” Rita said. “Just unfriendly. Most ranchers around here let the hunters and the hikers and the gem hunters have
access, unless they have some sort of protected Anasazi or Hohokum sites on the property. Or they make arrangements to let
their neighbors run stock, if they’re not using it. They even got a lake three miles long up there that sits full while we’re
suffering down here from droughts. The Koenigs have never let anybody pass. The new one is worse than his father was.”
“Thank you, Rita,” DeLuca said.
“Any time,” she told him. “If you ever want to get a winter place, you give me a call. Average home price in town is under
sixty thousand.”
“I will,” he said.
“I have another idea—why don’t you come over to my place and I could make you dinner?” She smiled. “I could use a fresh conversation.
Everybody local has already said everything they have to say to everybody else, and the snowbirds are useless.”
“No thanks,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be staying.”
He found Ben Yutahay sipping coffee in a booth at Jose’s Casa de la Waffle, recognizing his black cowboy hat from across the
room. The parking lot was filled with motor homes and campers, the restaurant crowded with white-haired retirees shuffling
along the breakfast bar.
“How are you, David?” Yutahay asked.
“Good,” DeLuca lied, sliding into the booth opposite the Cocopah policeman and ordering coffee and a short stack of pancakes
from the waitress, who had so many rings in her ears it looked as if silver caterpillars were crawling up the side of her
head. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I think I got here at five, and the place was already hopping with old people here for the early
bird special. I don’t get it. When my people get old, we know how to spend our final moments with dignity.”
“You go sit on a mountaintop until the great spirits carry you away?”
“No,” Yutahay said. “We go to Florida. I have a lot of friends around the Boca area. I have to tell you, I’m worried about
Marvin. Nobody here seems to have seen him. I thought maybe I’d get lucky.”
“Did you learn any more about what his relationship with Cheryl Escavedo might have entailed?”
Yutahay nodded, then laid a manila envelope on the table.
“This is for you, if you want to read it,” Yutahay said. “I’m afraid I was a prying old man but I went into Marvin’s computer
and found out that he’d saved all the instant messages that he’d exchanged with Cheryl. I can summarize for you if you’d prefer.”