Persuader Part 12

He squatted down and emptied the Radio Shack bag on the blacktop. He had a soldering iron and a spool of dull solder. And an inverter that would power the iron from his car's cigar lighter. That meant he had to keep his engine running, so he started it up and reversed a little way so that the cord would reach.

The seal was basically a drawn lead wire with large tags molded on each end. The tags had been crushed together with some kind of a heated device so they had fused together in a large embossed blob. The old guy left the fused ends strictly alone. It was clear he had done this before. He plugged the iron in and let it heat. He tested it by spitting on the end. When he was satisfied he dabbed the tip on the sleeve of his suit coat and then touched it to the wire where it was thin. The wire melted and parted. He eased the gap wider like opening a tiny handcuff and slipped the seal out of its channel. He ducked into his car and laid it on the dash. I grabbed the door lever and turned it.

"OK," Duffy said. "So what have we got?"

We had rugs. The door rattled upward and daylight flooded the load area and we saw maybe two hundred rugs, all neatly rolled and tied with string and standing upright on their ends. They were all different sizes, with the taller rolls at the cab end and the shorter ones at the door end. They stepped down toward us like some kind of ancient basalt rock formation. They were rolled face-in, so all we saw were the back surfaces, coa.r.s.e and dull. The string around them was rough sisal, old and yellowed. There was a strong smell of raw wool and a fainter smell of vegetable dye.

"We should check them," Duffy said. There was disappointment in her voice.

"How long have we got?" the old guy asked.

I checked my watch.

"Forty minutes," I said.

"Better just sample them," he said.

We hauled a couple out from the front rank. They were rolled tight. No cardboard tubes.

They were just rolled in on themselves and tied tight with the string. One of them had a fringe. It smelled old and musty. The knots in the string were old and flattened. We picked at them with our nails but we couldn't get them undone.

"They must cut the string," Duffy said. "We can't do that."

"No," the old guy said. "We can't."

The string was coa.r.s.e and looked foreign. I hadn't seen string like that for a long time. It was made from some kind of a natural fiber. Jute, maybe, or hemp.

"So what do we do?" the old guy asked.

I pulled another rug out. Hefted it in my hands. It weighed about what a rug should weigh. I squeezed it. It gave slightly. I rested it end-down on the road and punched it in the middle. It yielded a little, exactly how a tightly-rolled rug would feel.

"They're just rugs," I said.

"Anything under them?" Duffy asked. "Maybe those tall ones in back aren't tall at all.

Maybe they're resting on something else."

We pulled rugs out one by one and laid them on the road in the order we would have to put them back in. We built ourselves a random zigzag channel through the load s.p.a.ce.

The tall ones were exactly what they appeared to be, tall rugs, rolled tight, tied with string, standing upright on their ends. There was nothing hidden. We climbed out of the truck and stood there in the cold surrounded by a crazy mess of rugs and looked at each other.

"It's a dummy load," Duffy said. "Beck figured you would find a way in."

"Maybe," I said.

"Or else he just wanted you out of the way."

"While he's doing what?"

"Checking you out," she said. "Making sure."

I looked at my watch. "Time to reload. I'm already going to have to drive like a madman."

"I'll come with you," she said. "Until we catch up with Eliot, I mean."

I nodded. "I want you to. We need to talk."

We put the rugs back inside, kicking and shoving them until they were neatly arranged in their original positions. Then I pulled the roller door down and the old guy got to work with the solder. He slipped the broken seal back through its channel and eased the parted ends close together. He heated the iron and bridged the gap with its tip and touched the free end of the solder roll to it. The gap filled with a large silvery blob. It was the wrong color and it was way too big. It made the wire look like a cartoon drawing of a snake that has just swallowed a rabbit.

"Don't worry," he said.

He used the tip of the iron like a tiny paintbrush and smoothed the blob thinner and thinner. He flicked the tip occasionally to get rid of the excess. He was very delicate. It took him three long minutes but at the end of them he had the whole thing looking pretty much like it had before he arrived. He let it cool a little and then blew hard on it. The new silvery color instantly turned to gray. It was as close to an invisible repair as I had ever seen. Certainly it was better than I could have done myself.

"OK," I said. "Very good. But you're going to have to do another one. I'm supposed to bring another truck back. We better take a look at that one, too. We'll meet up in the first northbound rest area after Portsmouth, New Hamps.h.i.+re."

"When?"

"Be there five hours from now."

Duffy and I left him standing there and headed south as fast as I could get the old truck to move. It wouldn't do much better than seventy. It was shaped like a brick and the wind resistance defeated any attempt to go faster. But seventy was OK. I had a few minutes in hand.

"Did you see his office?" she asked.

"Not yet," I said. "We need to check it out. In fact we need to check out his whole harbor operation."

"We're working on it," she said. She had to talk loud. The engine noise and gearbox whine were twice as bad at seventy as they had been at fifty. "Fortunately Portland is not too much of a madhouse. It's only the forty-fourth busiest port in the U.S. About fourteen million tons of imports a year. That's about a quarter-million tons a week. Beck seems to get about ten of them, two or three containers."

"Does Customs search his stuff?"

"As much as they search anybody's. Their current hit rate is about two percent. If he gets a hundred and fifty containers a year maybe three of them will be looked at."

"So how is he doing it?"

"He could be playing the odds by limiting the bad stuff to, say, one container in ten. That would bring the effective search rate down to zero-point-two percent. He could last years like that."

"He's already lasted years. He must be paying somebody off."

She nodded beside me. Said nothing.

"Can you arrange extra scrutiny?" I asked.

"Not without probable cause," she said. "Don't forget, we're way off the books here. We need some hard evidence. And the possibility of a payoff makes the whole thing a minefield, anyway. We might approach the wrong official."

We drove on. The engine roared and the suspension swayed. We were pa.s.sing everything we saw. Now I was watching the mirrors for cops, not tails. I was guessing that Duffy's DEA papers would take care of any specific legal problems, but I didn't want to lose the time it would take for her to have the conversation.

"How did Beck react?" she asked. "First impression?"

"He was puzzled," I said. "And a little resentful. That was my first impression. You notice that Richard Beck wasn't guarded at school?"

"Safe environment."

"Not really. You could take a kid out of a college, easy as anything. No guards means no danger. I think the bodyguard thing for the trip home was just some kind of a sop to the fact that the kid is paranoid. I think it was purely an indulgence. I don't think old man Beck can have thought it was really necessary, or he would have provided security at school as well. Or kept him out of school altogether."

"So?"

"So I think there was some kind of a done deal somewhere in the past. As a result of the original kidnap, maybe. Something that guaranteed some kind of stability. Hence no bodyguards in the dorm. Hence Beck's resentment, like somebody had suddenly broken an agreement."

"You think?"

I nodded at the wheel. "He was surprised, and puzzled, and annoyed. His big question was who?"

"Obvious question."

"But this was a how-dare-they kind of a question. There was att.i.tude in it. Like somebody was out of line. It wasn't just an inquiry. It was an expression of annoyance at somebody."

"What did you tell him?"

"I described the truck. I described your guys."

She smiled. "Safe enough."

I shook my head. "He's got a guy called Duke. First name unknown. Ex-cop. His head of security. I saw him this morning. He'd been up all night. He looked tired and he hadn't showered. His suit coat was all creased, low down at the back."

"So?"

"Means he was driving all night. I think he went down there to get a look at the Toyota.

To check the rear license plate. Where did you stash it?"

"We let the state cops take it. To keep the plausibility going. We couldn't take it back to the DEA garage. It'll be in a compound somewhere."

"Where will the plate lead?"

"Hartford, Connecticut," she said. "We busted a small-time Ecstasy ring."

"When?"

"Last week."

I drove on. The highway was getting busier.

"Our first mistake," I said. "Beck's going to check it out. And then he's going to be wondering why some small-time Ecstasy dealers from Connecticut are trying to s.n.a.t.c.h his son. And then he's going to be wondering how some small-time Ecstasy dealers from Connecticut can be trying to s.n.a.t.c.h his son a week after they all got hauled off to jail."

"s.h.i.+t," Duffy said.

"It gets worse," I said. "I think Duke got a look at the Lincoln, too. It's got a caved-in front and no window gla.s.s left, but it hasn't got any bullet holes in it. And it doesn't look like a real grenade went off inside. That Lincoln is living proof this whole thing was phony baloney."

"No," she said. "The Lincoln is hidden. It didn't go with the Toyota."

"Are you sure? Because the first thing Beck asked me this morning was chapter and verse about the Uzis. It was like he was asking me to d.a.m.n myself right out of my own mouth.

Two Uzi Micros, twenty-round mags, forty shots fired, and not a single mark on the car?"

"No," she said again. "No way. The Lincoln is hidden."

"Where?"

"It's in Boston. It's in our garage, but as far as any paperwork goes it's in the county morgue building. It's supposed to be a crime scene. The bodyguards are supposed to be plastered all over the inside. We aimed for plausibility. We thought this thing through."

"Except for the Toyota's plate."

She looked deflated. "But the Lincoln is OK. It's a hundred miles away from the Toyota.

This guy Duke would have to drive all night."

"I think he did drive all night. And why was Beck so uptight about the Uzis?"

She went still.

"We have to abort," she said. "Because of the Toyota. Not because of the Lincoln. The Lincoln's OK."

I checked my watch. Checked the road ahead. The van roared on. We would be coming up on Eliot sometime soon. I calculated time and distance.

"We have to abort," she said again.

"What about your agent?"

"Getting you killed won't help her."

I thought about Quinn.

"We'll discuss it later," I said. "Right now we stay in business."

We pa.s.sed Eliot after eight more minutes. His Taurus was sitting rock-steady in the inside lane, holding a modest fifty. I pulled ahead of him and matched his speed and he fell in behind. We skirted all the way around Boston and pulled into the first rest area we saw south of the city. The world was a lot busier down there. I sat still with Duffy at my side and watched the ramp for seventy-two seconds and saw four cars follow me in. None of their drivers paid me any attention. A couple of them had pa.s.sengers. They all did normal rest-stop things like standing and yawning by their open doors and looking around and then heading over to the bathrooms and the fast food.

"Where's the next truck?" Duffy asked.

"In a lot in New London," I said.

"Keys?"

"In it."

"So there will be people there, too. n.o.body leaves a truck alone with the keys in it.

They'll be waiting for you. We don't know what they've been told to do. We should consider termination."

"I won't walk into a trap," I said. "Not my style. And the next truck might have something better in it."