Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (84 page)

“But what if we do decide to take it back to the Golden Arrow to drop it off?”

“Then daytime only.  Early morning would be best.  Take Interstate 8 east all the way, and keep your speed over 100.  Don’t stop for anything.”

“What about the cops?”

“What cops?” he scoffed.  “Over there, there’s no cops.  That’s why you’re better off just leaving the car here in La Jolla, and phoning it in.  Be smart: take the helicopter back to the Golden Arrow, and pick up your deposit.  Okay?”

“Okay,” agreed Alex.

“That’s it then, enjoy your stay in San Diego, but above all, be safe, all right?  There’s nothing east of I-5 you want to see anyway.  There’s places over there you wouldn’t last five minutes, day or night.”

They loaded their luggage into the back of the SUV, and left the delivery man standing behind the restaurant.  The tags and window stickers were current, and would permit the vehicle to cross freely into downtown, by showing that the owner was a resident of coastal La Jolla.  The Durango came equipped with a color GPS map display built into the center of the instrument display for navigation.  It had heavily tinted side and rear windows, as specified by Alex.

Alex drove on a winding tour of La Jolla, doing a surveillance detection run.  Then he parked the Durango in an empty garage behind an upscale apartment complex, removed a device like an electrician’s Ohmmeter from his luggage, and thoroughly examined the car for bugs or tracking devices.  It was clean.  There was no built-in cell phone, and the Durango’s GPS was strictly a receiver, with no transmit capability.  Finally satisfied, he headed out of La Jolla, southbound along the coast. 

***

“You know, I never saw the Pacific before today,”
said Ranya, sitting in the Durango’s front passenger seat, staring out the window to her right. They were passing through Pacific Beach on Mission Boulevard, just a block away from the cliffs overlooking the ocean.  “It’s totally different than the Atlantic, at least around Virginia.  It’s all flat back there, just straight flat beaches.  Not like this.  This is much prettier.”

“It’s not all like this,” observed Alex.  “Some parts have flat sandy beaches like back east.”

They drove in silence, stopping for frequent lights.  Surfers in black wetsuits carried their boards toward the beach, adults on long skateboards rolled right down the street alongside of cars.  There seemed to be a tattoo parlor, a taco stand, a bar and a surf shop on every block.

“You know,” said Ranya quietly, “I don’t feel too good about yesterday.  I didn’t know I’d feel this way.”

“What way?”

“The Blackhawk.  I killed people yesterday, I know I did.  I aimed right at the pilots, I could see their helmets, I could almost see their faces. There’s no way a helicopter goes down like that and people don’t die.” 

She sighed, and continued.  “You might not understand this, but the Falcons weren’t all bad people, not really.  I didn’t hate them.  Basilio Ramos, I hated him, sure, but not all of his troops.  Most of them were just soldiers, soldiers fighting for what they thought was their land. I mean, they really believe it, they really do.”

“I don’t hate them either,” said Alex.  “How can you blame them for wanting to take New Mexico, for wanting some free land to call their own? I blame our politicians—they held the door open for the invasion.  If they couldn’t see what it would lead to, they should have.  Protecting the country from invasion is right in the Constitution, in black and white. That’s one of their most basic responsibilities, and they blew it.”

Ranya recalled the ‘ten blind men,’ the worst shots of the Falcon Battalion, and their punishment run up the mountain trail behind the Comandante’s villa.  It now seemed like ages ago. She remembered these Falcons with some fondness, how they had welcomed her on the run and treated her with respect, and she wondered if any of them were on the helicopter she had shot down.  Then there was the Blackhawk’s aircrew, and the pilots.  Flying the helicopter was just their job, and now wives and children were probably grieving for fathers they would never see again. She had taken careful aim at them, pulled the trigger, and sent their helicopter crashing into the ground.

“Can we stop for a few minutes?” she asked.  “I want to see the beach.” Mission Boulevard was high above the ocean here, and they could only catch glimpses of the distant horizon between the low buildings.

“Okay, sure.” Alex made a right turn between a bicycle shop and an Irish pub.  The road dead-ended in a turnaround circle, between two small hotels.  Ranya stepped out, and walked across the cement boardwalk to the edge of a bluff.  The white sand beach was fifty feet below her.  The waves rolling in a hundred yards away made the same surf sound she had grown up with in Virginia.  She stood with her arms folded, the steady sea breeze lifting strands of blond hair around her face, the smell of the salt air bringing back a flood of memories.

Alex locked up the Durango at the end of the cul-de-sac and joined her after a minute, standing quietly off to her side.  

“Did you ever kill anybody?” she asked, without turning to face him.

“No.”

“Well it’s not a good feeling.”  She didn’t mention the people she had killed before, six years ago. That had been different, that was war.  Maybe only a dirty war, but war.  They had it coming, after what they did to her father.  Yesterday was different, somehow.  The Falcons were not all her enemies.  Yes, the Falcons were fighting a war…but it was not
her
war.

“They were soldiers, with rifles,” said Alex.  “They would have killed us or captured us, if you hadn’t of done what you did. It was us or them. Kill or be killed. You’re the reason we got away.”

She sighed.  Kill or be killed? She had heard that line before.  Heard it, said it, seen it, done it. There was Kalil, at the wall:
kill, or be killed
. She heard El Condor’s words:
so far, I have not been killed.
  She thought of Warden Linssen, back in D-Camp.  The assistant warden’s death had been the price of Ranya’s freedom.  There were no easy answers, no formulas to apply in every case.  After several minutes of staring down the coast toward downtown, she asked, “Do you recognize that fishing pier?”

“No,” he answered.  The wooden structure was a half mile to the south, extending a few hundred yards out over the ocean, the surf tumbling through its hundred spindly legs.

“It’s the one in the Homeland Security commercial.  ‘Hi, I’m Bob Bullard.’  That one.  They filmed it from the other side, from the south, but it’s the same pier.”

“I recognize it now.”

She said, “We’re close, aren’t we? Close to Brian.”

“Very close.”

“He’s just a few miles away…”

“Yeah, he is.  Come on, let’s go find him.”  Alex turned away from the ocean, and a few seconds later Ranya followed.

39

The last time that Basilio Ramos
had flown low over San Diego in a prop plane had been two decades ago, during the golden years of his youth. That had been in a much smaller twin engine Piper Navajo, and he’d never forgotten the experience.  A television producer, a ‘friend’ of his mother, had flown them from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas in his private plane.

From 5,000 feet the city looked the same as he had remembered it: not quite as dry as Albuquerque, a series of small mountains and foothills descending to the ocean. Most of the houses were crammed onto flat-topped mesas, with wide canyons and deep ravines splitting them into distinct areas.  Highways furrowed the canyons, exit ramps led to roads that followed smaller side canyons up to the mesa tops.  

Some things were clearly different this time.  For one thing, there appeared to be many more houses than he had recalled seeing before. Seemingly, every acre of every mesa that was less than vertical was jammed with a half dozen or more tract homes.  The flat bottoms of the empty canyons were now covered with blue tarps and tents, cardboard and plywood shacks.  These were familiar to him from Central and South America: squatter camps.  Another difference struck him as well: mile after mile of the highways crisscrossing San Diego had high cement barrier walls on each side, giving them the appearance of industrial chutes carrying ore to a smelter.

“Can you put us into a pattern for a go-around?” he asked his pilot on the intercom.  “I want to get a good look at the city.”

“I’m already assigned.  We’re going out to the ocean and back for our approach. We can’t go south, it’s restricted air space around San Diego International.”

They were taking the Otter into a general aviation airport ten miles northeast of downtown. 
Aeropuerto Chavez
occupied its own mile-square mesa, surrounded by steep slopes and ravines.  On the instrument panel GPS display, they could select English or Spanish, and Ramos had been amused to see that in the English version the airport was still called Montgomery Field.  He could only guess if
Aeropuerto Chavez
was named after Cesar or Hugo, or someone else altogether.

They flew parallel to and beyond the east-west main runway, while descending through four thousand feet of elevation toward the ocean five miles beyond.  One more highway divided inland San Diego from the two-mile-wide coastal strip: Interstate 5.  Ramos remembered it well.  It ran from Seattle to San Diego, and terminated at the border with Mexico at San Ysidro, twenty miles south. The crossing there into Tijuana was said to be the busiest in the world.

Over the ocean, Corky put the Otter into a left bank and turned south, presenting Ramos with a direct view south toward San Diego Bay, the Coronado Bridge, and the dozen skyscrapers dominating downtown.  One of those high rises contained the five-year-old Brian Garabanda, the key to finding Ranya Bardiwell and the FBI agent.

The thought warmed him that he was on her trail, and she had no idea. She had ruined his life, blackmailed him, wrecked his reputation as a leader of elite troops, but soon he would have her in his grasp.  She would not enjoy his grasp, oh no, she would not! He thought of the final minutes of the Zionist traitor Luis Carvahal, chained to the tree by his neck, screaming as he burned.  He remembered the cocky attitude of the radio talk show host Rick Haywood, before he had been dragged behind a truck and skinned alive.  Then he thought again of Ranya Bardiwell, and how much more he hated her.

After less than a minute, Corky made another banking left turn, heading east again over the mesas toward the foothills.  They flew beyond Chavez field, made the final turns to pick up the approach, and lined up on the runway once again heading westward. They were flying at just over a thousand feet above the ground when the airport’s mesa loomed in front of them, and suddenly they were over the runway.  The Twin Otter touched down with a slight jolt and bounce, and the Zetas were in San Diego.

***

A room on the fifth floor
of the downtown Holiday Inn became Alex and Ranya’s command post. It cost Alex one gold dime above the advertised $799 a night price to obtain a room with a view of the Pacific Majesty. Their room’s grimy window looked south down Harbor Drive, across three blocks of cruise ship terminal parking lots toward the Fed Tower.  Alex was comfortable in Holiday Inns.  They had served as operational bases throughout his FBI career.  They were low profile, but had the high-speed internet connection he needed to set up his surveillance gear.  His own laptop, once hooked up, became the nerve center of their effort.

Ranya watched him quietly, while he methodically plugged accessories into his computer on the room’s desk.  Her blond wig was thrown on her bed, her own short brunette hair was pressed flat to her head.

“Okay, I’ve got Karin’s cell phone number locked in.  Any calls to or from her phone, and we’ll be silent third parties.  We’ll hear everything, and it’s all recorded.”

“Will they be able to tell you’re doing this?”

“They who? Karin? No, nobody can tell.  If you have the right equipment and the right accounts, you’re good to go.  I’m not even using my own account, I have a couple of dummies.  They’ve been dormant, but they’ll work, and they can’t be traced to me.  Trust me—this is all basic

stuff.  This is what I do.  At least, it’s what I used to do.”

“So we’ll hear every call that Karin makes?”

“And the Beast.  Gretchen Bosch.  In or out.  And anybody they talk to, we can capture those numbers too.”

“Don’t you need a warrant or a judge to do this? You know, a court order?”  Ranya was smiling coyly when she asked this.

“Oh yeah, I must have forgotten,” Alex said, slapping his forehead. “It was on my to-do list.  I guess it slipped my mind.”

“Just add it to the other hundred laws we’ve broken.”

“Why not?”

She said, “In for a penny…”

“…In for a pound,” he finished for her.  “They can only hang you once, right?”

“That’s right, they can only hang you once.”  There was no humor in her voice when she said this.

“Now when they use their cell phones to make plans, we’ll know. If we get lucky, we’ll hear them talk about where they’re going, and we’ll get there first.”

“You can do this for anybody’s phone?” she asked. “Anytime?”

“Pretty much, but cell phones are the easiest.  Of course, normally I’d need a warrant.  But there’s no physical reason why you can’t. You just need this equipment.  That’s what we used the dummy accounts for: fishing expeditions.  Once we made our case, you know, sort of ‘unofficially,’ we’d scrounge up some probable cause to get a court order.  Then we’d use our regular accounts and start recording all the calls.  You know, legally.”

“Man, that sucks so bad.”

“It’s been this way for years,” Alex said.  “It’s not exactly a secret. And it’s not just for listening to calls.  Cell phones have GPS built in now, so I can tell where Karin is to within ten feet.  At least, I can tell where her phone is.  Look, I’ll show you how easy it is.”