Freeze Frame (19 page)

When we concluded with the Ampere
introduction tomorrow night and the airing of the new commercial,
Garry sat staring at us, chin still resting on his hands. Rosie D
saved the day.

"Garry, how can you sit there with your head
up your rear when this whole thing is so obvious?"

Garry’s head shot up, his chin coming off his
hands.

"Why, everybody in the country's going to be
watching that game tomorrow night. Isn't it perfectly clear they're
going to run one of those...those sub-whatever commercials."

I could have kissed her. Whether because of
Rosie's prompting, or some underlying desire to believe in me,
Garry began to nod his head.

"Is there any way to get a look at the exact
copy of the commercial they'll be airing?"

A call to Matt Carter indicated there was.
Maybe. If it were scheduled for telecast from the Media Center at
half time, the commercial would most likely be logged in tomorrow
morning. Carter was confident he could sneak Garry in to view it
during lunch hour break.

75

I still can’t explain what happened later
when Garry and Rosie D left Sean and me alone.

Maybe it was the frustration, the situation,
the fact we had our backs to the wall. But, as we found ourselves
alone in Rosie’s apartment, the atmosphere suddenly became tense,
awkward and extremely uncomfortable.

It was difficult to figure why. We had spent
five days together up north. Outside of kissing, nothing sexual had
gone on between us. Absolutely nothing.

Yet, the minute the door closed, I felt like
a ninth grader on my first date. Tongue-tied, halting in my speech,
tripping over myself. I would have felt more comfortable addressing
AVC's Board of Directors naked than to find myself here, alone with
the man I found so captivating.

At first, I told myself my attraction to Sean
Higgins was simply a product of our situation: two people thrown
together, shut away from the rest of the world. But now, I wasn't
so sure. My feelings seemed more and more like the real thing.

And now, as we were finding our relationship
had depth, it had no time. My ex-husband had given us twenty-four
hours to come up with proof of our true but highly improbable
story. If we failed, we would spend the next twenty years or more
in prison.

This could very well be our last night
together.

I confess. I suggested we adjourn to Rosie
D's bedroom, where we experienced a slow, deliberate love making
that each of us found immensely satisfying.

When we finished, we talked, wrapped
comfortably in each other's arms. We spoke of our pasts. We shared
experiences and talked of hopes for the future, when and if this
experience ended. Each of us listened intently as the other spoke,
hungry to know more.

During a pause, Sean leaned over and kissed
me. As the kiss lingered, I began to explore his mouth again with
my tongue.

"Does this mean the conversation is coming to
a close?"

"Just postponed."

Our limbs intertwined one more time, and I
felt Sean’s body press tightly against mine. We were soon lost in
an enjoyment of each other, better even than the first.

We both knew if tomorrow went wrong, this
could well be the last time we made love.

76

Monday, Oct. 25 8:48 a.m.

The white-haired man nodded at the smiling
flight attendant, stepped through the doorway of the plane, down
the narrow tunnel, and into the bustling McNamara Terminal of
Detroit's Metropolitan Airport.

Anyone who saw him leave Detroit little more
than a week ago would have difficulty recognizing him. He had aged
twenty years: his mustache gone, his straight black hair now snow
white. His hairline had been shaved back three inches to the top of
his head. Contact lenses turned his brown eyes brilliant blue, and
he wore rimless spectacles. He stood two inches taller, thanks to
lifts in his Italian loafers.

People passing the elderly, kind looking
gentleman toting a small black bag would have guessed him a doctor.
He attracted no more attention than he had leaving Washington's
Dulles Airport earlier that morning. There, he had passed easily
through security even though the weapon he carried rivaled any
pistol in its ability to inflict death. Inside the black bag rested
a vial of the poison ricin, a KGB favorite. Fused with an
oleomargarine base, it formed a combination so deadly that an
untraceable amount would provoke a massive heart attack, while
leaving no clue in the body of the victim. It was the poison that
had killed Darren Cato.

Outside the terminal, the man shivered in the
cold rainy October day. He cursed the United States and its
weather. Pulling his coat tight around him, he waved down a
courtesy van to take him to his waiting rental car.

77

11:34 a.m

The blood red Dodge Intrepid stopped dead in
the narrow cement driveway of a two-story brick home on Detroit's
near east side. The white-haired man emerged from the car, the
small black bag in one hand, a paper sack in the other.

Roland answered the knock, but not until the
man spoke his name did he know who stood on his front porch.

"Damn, Bacalla, your own mother wouldn't
recognize you."

The visitor maintained his deadpan expression
as he walked past Roland into the sparsely furnished living
room.

"I hope you came to get me the hell out of
here," Roland said. "I'm tired of baby-sitting that damn Russian. I
can barely understand a word the SOB says."

The white-haired man ignored the comment. The
Russian had served them well, but had also served his purpose. He
would be taken care of, today. Andre Kursov, a world-renowned
authority on the science of subliminal persuasion, had used the
method to cure drug addicts, and his work had been reported in
virtually every international medical journal. When funds for
research ran low in his native country, it took little to persuade
him to continue his work in the United States. Here major
television networks were his laboratories, American voters his
guinea pigs.

"Are the Ampere dubs taken care of?" the
white-haired man asked.

"Yeah, yeah. I took Kursov to the agency, and
your friend there did the rest. Got him into the Media Center to
fix the duplicate DVDs. Had some trouble, though. That young
producer stumbled over the finished product inside the control
room. But that's taken care of. No one's going to find them where
they're at now. And they go to the stations Tuesday morning."

"Very good. Here, I brought this." The man
handed Roland the brown bag. He opened it and extracted a fifth of
Johnny Walker Red. His hands began to shake.

"Thanks, thanks," he repeated, eyes glued to
the bottle. "Scotch, not whiskey, but it'll do." Roland laughed to
himself. "Yeah, it'll do just fine."

He headed for the kitchen, breaking the seal
and screwing off the cap as he walked. He found an empty glass on
the counter and poured it full. He took a drink, then others in
rapid succession.

The white-haired man watched for a moment,
then walked across the small living room and into the bedroom. He
closed the door carefully and locked it. He set the black bag on
the bed and went to the closet. Reaching up and as far back as he
could, he withdrew a nine-millimeter pistol. He reached again and
his hand felt the silencer. He attached it to the pistol
barrel.

No hurry. He'd wait until tonight to make his
move: to kill Manny Rodriguez in his hospital room. Then it would
all be done. Niles VanBuhler would be elected President of the
United States, and they could return to Mexico knowing the border
would soon be open to the drugs that poured billions of dollars
into the three major Mexican drug cartels. He laughed to himself.
Mendoza and Lobo.
The Monster and the Wolf
. Soon they would
be back home. They had done their job well.

78

When the American President declared war on
narcotics, doubling the country’s efforts to block drug trafficking
along the U.S.-Mexican border, the Arellano Felix brothers who ran
the Tijuana cartel declared war on President David Nordstrum. They
sent for the man whose name was spoken in whispers.

Mendoza. The Monster.

The only son of an affluent Marxist lawyer,
Ernesto Mendoza had been born in Colombia. His mother died when he
was six. A rebellious youth, ignored by a father more dedicated to
his causes than to his only son, he joined a gang at ten and killed
a man by the time he reached the age of eleven.

Mendoza's father sent him to the Jesuit
school in Bogota where his IQ tested at 182. A brilliant student,
but an incessant problem, he skipped school and harassed his
teachers constantly. He was accused, but never convicted, of
killing an instructor who failed him. He left the school shortly
afterward.

He traveled to Europe, living for a while in
London. Proficient in half a dozen languages by his twenty-third
birthday, he found his way to the Patrice Lumumba University in
Moscow, notorious training ground for Third World terrorists and
future KGB agents. By the time he reached thirty, he found himself
in demand as a paid assassin on three continents. Soon afterward,
he settled in Colombia, becoming personal assistant, bodyguard and
confidant to Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellin cartel. There, he
met Lobo.

Lobo had been a child of the streets, born
out of wedlock to a mother who died giving him birth. He, too, had
learned to kill early, and was employed as a bodyguard to Pablo
Escobar. At twenty-five, Mendoza became his mentor. Mendoza saw
himself in the younger man, the way Lobo killed without remorse,
and schooled him in the arts of terrorism.

In 1993, Pablo Escobar sent Mendoza to
assassinate the head of the Cali drug family. The day Mendoza left
Medellin, Escobar himself was gunned down by Colombia's anti-drug
forces. His death caused a shift of power, with the Cali drug
cartel now dominating the South American narcotics trade. Lobo
found work with them, but when word of Mendoza’s intent to
assassinate the head of the Cali family leaked out, it forced the
man they called “Monster” to flee to Europe.

During the early nineties, the Cali cartel
depended on the Mexicans to smuggle cocaine across the U.S. border,
then hand it over to their representatives in the United States. At
first, they paid the Mexicans in cash, then in cash and cocaine.
This opened an entirely new avenue to the Mexicans; they began to
trade in cocaine independently.

By the late nineties, with most of the Cali
leadership in prison, the balance of drug activity shifted to
Mexico. Lobo followed, finding work with the notorious Arellano
drug family. Their Tijuana organization ranked as the second
largest drug cartel in the country, and the most vicious. Lobo soon
became chief bodyguard for Ramon Arellano.

President Nordstrum's action in sealing off
the border sent the Arellano family's revenues into freefall. Lobo
suggested calling in Mendoza from Europe to assassinate Nordstrum.
But Mendoza arrived in Mexico armed with a different plan.

"Assassinate the American president, and you
will make him a martyr," he said. "Nordstrum’s anti-drug policies
will be cemented in place. You must make certain he is not
reelected."

"But how can we do that?" Arellano asked.
"Supporting a candidate in an American election is very expensive.
It cost us thirteen million dollars just to ensure the election of
Niles VanBuhler, a congressman from a small district in
California."

"I am not talking about simply supporting a
candidate," Mendoza said. He told them of the work of Andre Kursov,
the Russian expert in subliminal persuasion under whom he had
studied at Patrice Lumumba University. The Russians had begun with
the discoveries of the Americans’ MKULTRA Project and built on them
with experiments that made the CIA program seem like a tea party.
Parents had been programmed to kill their children, and visa versa.
But there had been positive results too: Mendoza described how
Kursov cured patients with drug addictions by inserting messages
into the videos they watched.

“Americans too have an addiction,” Mendoza
told Arellano. “They are addicted to television. But instead of
curing that addiction, we will use it to our advantage.”

79

Ramon Arellano called a meeting of the three
major cartels, the families that ran the Mexican drug trade. Ramon
and his brothers Carmen and Thomas of the Tijuana cartel attended,
along with three members of the Fuentes family of the Juarez-based
Chihuahua cartel, and Juan Garcia Abrego representing the Matamoros
Gulf cartel.

The seven sat in the back room of one of
Tijuana's finest restaurants, a room with white walls, white
cabinetry and a snow white linen cloth covering the large oval
table in the center. They wore expensive suits and handmade shoes,
smoked hand-rolled Cuban cigars and eyed each other with
suspicion.

In a drawing room just outside the door their
bodyguards waited, watching each other with the same cold
expressions.

In normal times, this meeting could never
have taken place. These were men who coveted each other’s
territories, and would kill each other gladly to obtain them. But
these were not normal times. The American President had to be dealt
with and they had come to hear Ramon Arellano's plan.

Arellano rose to speak. David Nordstrum would
be defeated in the next election, one year away. Further, their own
candidate, California congressman Niles VanBuhler, would be
elected.

Arellano called on Mendoza who spoke of the
Russian Kursov and his work in subliminal persuasion. He described
a plan to spread subliminal messages through the commercials of a
large American advertising firm.

Mendoza's talk generated a predictable degree
of skepticism and arguments from strong-willed men not accustomed
to working together. But in the end, they embraced Mendoza's plan
as the sole alternative to watching their money drain away.