I
n front of the Hancock Tower, Danny grabbed a cab to Government Center.
He still hadn’t answered the DEA agents’ text messages. He wanted to surprise them. Catch them off guard. Provoke them into making threats again, if need be. Anything.
The afternoon sun was melting the snowdrifts. Water seemed to be dripping everywhere. A truck plowed through an immense gray puddle on Cambridge Street in front of One Center Plaza, splashing everything within ten feet, including Danny’s shoes and socks. He cursed aloud.
Standing outside the ugly façade, he took out his iPhone and selected one of the recording apps. He recorded a sample and played it back. It seemed to work fine.
Then he started it again and began the recording: “My name is Daniel Goodman,” he said. “I live at 305 Marlborough Street in Boston, Massachusetts.” He gave the date and the time. Keeping the recorder on, he slipped the phone into a front pocket. For evidentiary purposes, Poskanzer had told him, he had to make one continuous uninterrupted recording.
He took the elevator to the second floor. His cell phone rang. He saw
BATTEN SCHECHTER
on the caller ID. Jay Poskanzer.
He debated taking the call. Then decided against it. He’d already begun the recording by stating his name and the date and time. The iPhone was recording. He could talk to Poskanzer when he was finished with the DEA.
He found room 322 and recognized the stain on the carpet. This was definitely the place.
He turned the knob and pulled the door open and looked to the left. The receptionist, strangely, wasn’t at her desk. The L-shaped mahogany-laminate desk was still there, but that was the only piece of furniture in the reception area. The row of chairs was gone. There was an empty cardboard box on the floor. The DEA seal, which had occupied a place of prominence on the wall, was gone. So were all the Most Wanted posters.
No.
“Hello?” he called.
He advanced farther into the room, pulled open the door to the inner corridor where he’d met with the DEA men.
It was empty, too.
A snowdrift of Styrofoam peanuts across the hallway. Another empty cardboard box. The wrapper from a ream of Staples copy paper.
Nothing here. No one.
The quietly bustling office was no more. It had been disbanded, broken down like a stage set at the end of a run.
He stood there, dazed, looking around. His cell phone rang. Batten Schechter again. He picked it up.
He knew what Jay Poskanzer was going to say before he said it.
“Hey, what’s the deal?” he said. He sounded angry. “I talked to my pal at the US Attorney’s office. There’s no special agents named Slocum or Yeager on the DEA payroll. They used to work for DEA, couple of years ago. But no longer.”
D
anny felt a coldness settle over him, icy tendrils reaching inside, freezing and palpating his guts.
If they weren’t DEA, then who were they?
Maybe they were real DEA agents using cover names. That was certainly a possibility. He’d covertly taken a picture of one of them, Slocum, and he mailed it to Jay Poskanzer and asked him to forward it to the DEA. The real DEA.
Poskanzer called back twenty minutes later. “It gets better,” he said. “These guys used to work for the DEA in Mexico, in Nuevo Laredo, and got caught up in a corruption sting. They each got fired seventeen months ago. They’re bad apples.”
“Well, they made pretty convincing DEA agents.”
“Probably because they’ve had practice. Question is, what’s their game? What are they up to? What are they doing it for?”
Danny didn’t reply. He didn’t know.
But he would find out.
His cell phone chimed: a secure text message. “Hold on,” he said. He held it away from his ear, read the message.
From [email protected]:
6 p.m. Home Depot parking lot, South Bay
.
South Bay was a shopping center between the South End of Boston and Dorchester, just off the Southeast Expressway.
“Slocum” and “Yeager” were ready to meet.
W
allace Touhy’s knees hurt like hell.
When the doorbell rang, he got up from the couch and lumbered to the front door. It took him a good minute or so. He groaned. He’d planned to hold off on the knee replacement until he retired, but now he wasn’t so sure he could make it another four months. The soft knee brace didn’t do a damned thing, and the steroid injections were worthless. He gobbled Motrins like popcorn. His doc told him if he lost thirty or forty pounds, it wouldn’t hurt so bad, but he knew better. It was those four years of serious wear and tear, playing football for the Billerica Memorial High School Indians half a century ago. That was what did it. Everything else was just the cherry on the cake.
“Agent Touhy?”
The man at the door was tall and lanky and appeared to be Hispanic.
Touhy elbowed the storm door open. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Come on in. Hernandez, right?”
“Thanks for seeing me.”
“I don’t know if it’s gonna be worth your while, but okay.” He flapped a hand toward the living room. “I’d make coffee, but believe me, I’m doing you a favor not making it. Your stomach will thank me later.”
“Oh, that’s perfectly fine,” the man said. “I suspect you’ll enjoy this more than coffee anyway.”
He handed Touhy an elegant box containing a fine bottle of whiskey.
“Pappy Van Winkle, huh?” Touhy’s mouth came open.
“I hope my intel was accurate. I’m told you love bourbon.”
“I do.”
“That’s a small-batch bourbon that’s—”
“I sure as hell know Pappy Van Winkle. Just never had it before. Can’t find it around here. Awful generous of you. This is a first for me.”
“They were out of the twenty-year, but the fifteen’s supposed to be quite smooth.”
“Much obliged, Agent Hernandez.”
“David. Please.”
“All right, David. Have a seat over there. I’ll get us a couple of glasses.”
Touhy broke the seal on the bourbon bottle and glugged a couple of fingers into two highball glasses. He hobbled over to the visitor and handed him a glass. “Neat okay?”
“The only way.”
Agent Touhy looked easily a decade older than his fifty-seven years. His white hair had a yellowish tinge to it. He had a large, jowly face. His cheeks were taut and shiny and scarlet, evidence of a bad case of rosacea, though years of heavy drinking might have broken a bunch of capillaries, too.
A large flat-screen TV was on, some sort of reality show about two men fighting to survive in the Amazonian jungle.
“So,” Touhy said, sinking with a deep sigh into his favorite chair. He reached for the cable remote and hit the
MUTE
button. “Any reason this couldn’t wait till tomorrow?”
“I apologize for the inconvenience, Agent Touhy. I have to fly back to San Francisco tomorrow morning.”
“Right, right, you said that.” Touhy took a sip of the bourbon. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”
“So glad you like it. I’m sorry I didn’t give you any advance notice.”
“Yeah, well, you really cut into my social life.” Touhy laughed rumblingly and coughed. “Smoke?” He held out a pack of Camel Lights.
“Not for me, thank you.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to go back to Wild Turkey after this.” Touhy tapped out a cigarette and put it in the corner of his mouth and picked up a red Zippo lighter from the end table. He thumbed the Zippo, lit the cigarette, took a deep crackling lungful of smoke. “Trudy never let me smoke inside the house. Now I grab my little pleasures where I can.”
“I’m sorry about your wife.”
“It was a blessing, believe me. The last couple of years were no fun. I wouldn’t wish ALS on my worst enemy.” He blew out a white plume. “So you work out of S.F.”
His visitor nodded.
“How’d you like Mexico City?”
His visitor smiled. “You’ve done your homework. Mexico City was no walk in the park.”
“It’s where the action is. At least you speak the language. My Spanish is crap.”
His visitor shrugged, took a tiny sip from the highball glass.
“I don’t know how much I can tell you,” Touhy said. “I just keep the source files in my office.”
“You’re too modest. You’re the division security officer. You keep the files on the confidential sources updated.”
“There’s barely any updating to do. Which CS are you interested in?”
The visitor pulled a little spiral-bound notebook from his jacket pocket and consulted it as if he couldn’t remember. “SCC-13-0011.”
“That’s one of ours, all right. Number eleven, did you say?”
“That’s right.”
“What kind of background are you looking for?”
“Any criminal background, for example. Anything that might disqualify him. We want to send a team out here to do a joint debriefing of the CS, but I’ll be honest, my ASAC thinks it’s a waste of resources.”
Touhy took a large swallow of bourbon. “I don’t know what I can tell you that might make a difference.”
“Well, I’m not going to ask his name, of course, but maybe you could give me a rough sort of sketch of the man. Some details. What kind of job he has, where he lives, his standing in the community, all that.”
Touhy filled his lungs again with smoke and narrowed his eyes. Then he exhaled slowly, a narrow stalactite of smoke escaping through his pursed lips. “How’s Renny Haberman doing these days? Still a practical joker?”
“He’s great. Yes, still the office cutup.”
“Will you give him my best? We did basic agent training together.”
“I most certainly will.”
“Huh. Renny Haberman is my orthopedic surgeon. He’s not in the DEA.”
A long, long silence.
“Agent Touhy,” Dr. Mendoza said sadly. “I really wish you hadn’t tried to be clever.”
T
he old man had put up quite a fight, lunging toward the console by the front door, where he kept his DEA-issued .40-caliber Glock 23.
But age hadn’t been kind to him. His knees were fragile as glass, and the bourbon had slowed his reflexes.
Dr. Mendoza subdued him well before he got anywhere near the Glock.
Now the man struggled on the wall-to-wall carpeting near the TV. Flex-cuffs bound his wrists and ankles, duct tape over his mouth. A nasty purplish welt appeared on the supraorbital ridge where Dr. Mendoza had struck him with the leather Denver sap.
In the struggle, Dr. Mendoza’s hairpiece had come loose, but he no longer needed to look like a DEA agent named Hernandez in the San Francisco field division.
It was always preferable to extract information by means of social engineering. He never enjoyed the rougher methods and considered having to resort to them an admission of failure.
But when it was necessary, he was good at it.
He’d dragged the DEA agent’s body, with great difficulty, into the nearest bedroom. It was a guest room that appeared to get little or no use. The only furniture in the small room was a queen-size bed covered in a dark blue polyester-blend spread, two small unmatched end tables, and a bureau. The floor was covered in turquoise wall-to-wall carpeting. A fine layer of dust coated the furniture. Agent Touhy was a widower and lived alone, probably had no housekeeper. Maybe he did a quick run-through with a vacuum cleaner every couple of weeks.
Agent Touhy bucked and struggled, which only made it harder to get him onto the bed. Not impossible, though: Dr. Mendoza was strong. By struggling, Agent Touhy made it necessary for Dr. Mendoza to handle him roughly. He had to pull at the DEA man’s arms, wrench him this way and that. This caused pain.
The pain was nothing compared to what he was about to experience, though, if he did not cooperate.
Once he got Touhy onto the bed, he flipped him over with one hard tug. Facedown, Touhy bucked some more and then gave up. He tried to shout through the duct-tape gag, but the noise was nothing more than stifled, strangled nonsense. He was not going to be cooperative, which was too bad.
Touhy fought some more and tried to turn over, but Mendoza held him in place with one knee. Hog-tied with flex-cuffs on his ankles and wrists, the agent was not difficult to maneuver.
“Agent Touhy, you can make this all go very easily for yourself, simply by telling me the real name of confidential source number SCC-13-0011. That’s all I require. Once you give me the name, there’s no point in causing you any harm. I will leave you here, unhurt, until I’ve finished my work. I think you’ll agree this is the preferred resolution. Just a name. That’s all I ask.”
Dr. Mendoza waited for some signal of agreement. A nodding of the head, something. But Touhy simply breathed heavily through his nostrils, his face down on the coverlet. Dr. Mendoza decided to give the man a chance to agree and make things easier. He braced the back of the man’s neck with one hand and carefully pulled off one end of the duct tape.
Agent Touhy blurted out an obscenity.
Dr. Mendoza smiled. This was nothing more than the powerless tantrum of an infant. “You know the identity of all active confidential sources in the Boston division. Number eleven was just queried yesterday by the San Francisco office. The name is quite fresh in your mind.”
“You’re not Hernandez, you slimy little mother—”
Dr. Mendoza, latex gloves on each hand, replaced the flap of duct tape over Agent Touhy’s mouth. He disliked obscenity and had no use for personal slurs in any case.
From his coat pocket he withdrew a small rectangular nylon case. He unzipped it and opened it flat on the side table. He opened a sterile cotton gauze pad and squeezed a few drops of Betadine onto it. Force of habit: Even when he did his work for the cartel, he always maintained a sterile surgical field. He painted an orange oval on the back of Touhy’s neck.
The DEA agent struggled even harder, torquing his body from side to side. He knew something bad was coming; he knew many of the techniques employed by the
sicarios
for the Sinaloa cartel. Dismemberment, say, or decapitation.
But Dr. Mendoza didn’t use chain saws. His methods were more sophisticated and far more effective. And far less bloody.
Agent Touhy continued to struggle violently. He was not going to make this easy. Unfortunate for him, Mendoza thought. But so be it. Mendoza was prepared for all eventualities. He selected a single-dose vial of Amidate, twenty milligrams of etomidate. He carefully pointed the hypodermic needle at the carotid artery on the left side of Touhy’s neck. Behind his duct-tape gag, Touhy roared, but the etomidate worked rapidly. In less than a minute, Touhy lay flat on the bed, calm and compliant.
Now Dr. Mendoza was able to do his work with his accustomed fastidiousness. He untied the agent and then removed his blue button-down shirt, unbuttoning the placket carefully. Now the man’s torso was exposed.
Two more injections, the first a delicate job. He used a Whitacre needle, three and a half inches long, and injected it at the C4 level of Touhy’s cervical spine, about three centimeters deep at the back of his neck. There was a small yet distinct
pop
as the needle point penetrated the dura.
Then he injected the fluid, a local nerve block called ropivacaine.
He stood up, returned the syringes to his zippered travel case, and selected a conventional hypodermic. This one could be injected nearly anywhere. He chose the same carotid artery where he’d injected the etomidate. The damage had already been done. This hypodermic contained naloxone, an opioid inverse agonist. Naloxone was sometimes used to counteract heroin or morphine overdose. Inject it in the bloodstream of someone floating on a heroin high and it would bring him crashing down, make him scream in pain. In a normal person it heightens the sensation of pain.
It would put Agent Touhy into a nightmare from which he could not awaken.
Dr. Mendoza rolled the agent over onto his back. His chest was pale and doughy. Wispy gray hairs garlanded his nipples. His eyes fluttered and then opened as the drug began to take effect. Dr. Mendoza peeled the duct tape back so the man could talk.
“What the hell are you—I can’t—I can’t—”
“You can’t move,” Dr. Mendoza said gently. “You are paralyzed.”
“Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.”
“The pain you are about to experience will be unlike anything you’ve ever felt before. Normally, if you were to drop a brick on your foot, say, or accidentally hit your thumb with a hammer, you’d feel intense pain, but then the pain would subside. Your body secretes endorphins that dull the pain and make it bearable. But the drug that is now in your system blocks those endorphins. You will feel pain with an intensity that human beings are simply not meant to experience.”
He took a number 11 disposable scalpel from the nylon travel case, pushed its blade through the sealed foil pouch, and without hesitation flicked it precisely down the DEA man’s areola and nipple, splitting the nipple cleanly in half. Bright red blood wept from the wound.
Agent Touhy bellowed, his eyes wide, his mouth contorted.
Dr. Mendoza replaced the tape over his mouth. It flapped open, allowing Touhy to emit a full, ear-rending scream of pain. The adhesive had disintegrated, so Dr. Mendoza ripped off another length of the silvery tape and placed it over the agent’s mouth.
The screaming did not stop, but now at least it was muted.
Dr. Mendoza put his index finger to his mouth and made a shushing sound. “You see, the pain does not subside, does it? Sadly, it will continue as long as the naloxone courses through your blood vessels.”
The duct tape wrinkled and belled but stayed affixed.
“If I do nothing, the pain will begin to diminish within five minutes. It will be a very long five minutes, but it will come to an end. If, however, I inject another bolus of naloxone, you will experience excruciating pain. Before long, either your heart will give out or you will simply lose your mind.”
Agent Touhy’s face was purplish red and his eyes bulged. He snorted in a lungful of air.
“Agent Touhy, you have the ability to make the pain go away. All I want is one name. Right now it doesn’t seem a frightfully high price to pay, does it?”
Agent Touhy held out less than one minute more.