Shit, Walter. Why weren’t you careful like always?
Several of the officers looked at him with a sad, unwavering gaze, and one man put a hand on his shoulder. Nick knew they would have liked to offer words of comfort but didn’t know how.
Suddenly a car pulled up about a hundred feet from where he was standing. Two women emerged, one in combat fatigues. He immediately recognized Kelly Marcovich by her cropped brown hair and lean muscular frame; the other woman was her assistant, an evidence technician. Kelly was one of his key U.S. counterparts in the fight to control people smuggling on both sides of the border. She called out to him and waited for him to catch up.
“I’m sorry, Nick.” She wrapped both arms around him.
“I’m all right, Kelly.”
Together they stooped under the yellow tape and entered the crime scene.
Allan Engle, the district director of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, turned to greet Nick as they approached. “I’m sorry about Walter, Nick. Good man, he was.”
Nick nodded. No one was in the mood for small talk. When he found his voice, he put the question directly to Engle. “What’ve we got?”
“Several cartridge shells around the area where the shooting happened. And another on the boat.”
“How many shots were fired on each side?”
“About fifteen cartridge cases on their side. Automatics and semis down below. A high-powered rifle hidden in the galley. The usual stuff you’d expect to find. Everything’s being tagged and bagged to be shipped to our forensics centre. We’ll e-mail you the list.”
Nick would have preferred to send the evidence to the forensics lab in Canada, but he only said, “Put a rush on the results.”
“The best part of it is, we found a box full of phony Canadian visas to enter the U.S. There was also a box of Ontario driver’s licences complete with photos of the migrants.”
“A lot of work went into producing that,” said Nick. “Photo ID with their names. Authentic or phony?”
“If it’s phony, it’s pretty good copy. We won’t know for sure until we do testing,” replied Engle.
“Did you manage to get anything out of that snakehead?” asked Nick.
“Nope. And we’re not interested. He’s all yours,” replied Engle with a shrug of his shoulders.
“Why the Christmas present?”
“’Unofficially, Uncle Sam isn’t interested in paying his medical bills. Officially, it’s jurisdictional. The snakehead has landed status in Canada.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“The guys back at the station are trying to confirm it as we speak. And if that’s the case, I don’t need the hassle of dealing with your justice department.”
Nick met his gaze.
“Marcovich here will process the paperwork so we can ship him to you.”
“We’ll take care of it,” said Kelly. “Top priority. I don’t need more headaches for my officers. The month’s just beginning and already we’ve intercepted over a dozen smuggling jobs. Five were booze and cigarette related. Lots of drug trafficking and other illegal substances.”
“You know what they say — with smugglers, the commodity is incidental,” answered Nick. “Have you interviewed any of the undocumented aliens yet?”
“Yeah, but they ain’t talking. Not even to a woman. Too scared. We’ll have one last go at them before we deport them back to their country of origin. If anything of interest comes up, I’ll keep you posted.”
“Thanks, Kelly.” He joined the evidence tech who was combing the area one last time.
Later that evening, driving back into Canada alone, he felt suspended in the darkness of the night, strangely detached even from the fatigue and grief he was experiencing, while another part of his mind was actively engaged with the realities he came face to face with every working day. In the world of human cargo trafficking, borders and security checkpoints had become mere inconveniences to be circumvented with forged passports, lies and guns. The going rate to be smuggled out of a country like China was fifty grand. The illegal-alien smuggling racket was hugely profitable, generating roughly $580 million a year for its bosses. It was a syndicated multinational operation stretching from China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka right into Central America and Eastern Europe.
In the past fifteen months alone, four converted cargo ships had beached in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. And it was Nick’s job to stop the relentless wave of illegals from rolling into Canada. He had set up a surveillance operation and put Walter Martin in charge. Walter’s team had set up wiretap surveillance on the dead snakehead, Shaupan Chau. Now both men were dead.
He’d have to start all over again. From the beginning. Except this time he was going after the ringleaders.
chapter two
When counsel was inept, when the witnesses were lying or had destroyed crucial evidence, when the asylum seeker had extreme criminality attached to his name and file, Grace Wang-Weinstein still did her best to keep the displeasure from her voice, and allowed no impatience or anger to show in her face. She did her damnedest to treat everyone who appeared in her hearing room with fairness and dignity. But the deck was pretty much stacked against petitioners who tried to cheat their way past her. It had not always been easy, but over the years Grace had learned how to assume the mask of judicial calm, and to cloak her feelings in the language of due process, procedural rules, and penal proportionality.
This morning’s case, unpoetically titled B45690, promised to be a severe test of her acting ability. The police had barricaded the street below on either side. Only officially sanctioned vehicles could park in the metered spots. A squad of RCMP officers maintained crowd control in front of the building, while inside a retired Russian civil servant, his face twitching in the bright light of the hearing room, sat nervously in a witness chair, waiting to testify.
After taking the oath to tell the truth, he tried to explain how when he arrived in Canada he had a savings account stuffed with twenty-one million dollars. Grace listened patiently to his attempts to be ingratiating as he described his wonderful good luck in his financial ventures in wonderful, welcoming Canada. Maybe if she was younger she’d be gullible enough to believe that being a Russian bureaucrat was a lucrative proposition. Here was a refugee claimant with no visible means of support, and yet within a year his $21 million had grown to $90 million. His counsel made his arguments in a bullying tone, perhaps hoping to impress this female judge, who was probably a financial ignoramus, with his assertion that the money came from market gains on technology stocks. But the wiretap evidence was irrefutable. Months of eavesdropping by RCMP agents had established that in Russia he had had ties to the KGB, and that he now had even closer ties to a biker gang, with whom he had been setting up a merchant bank on a Native reserve for the purpose of laundering drug money.
Scattered on the table before her were fat accordion folders bulging with loose-leaf documents — immigration officers’ observations and notes, pleadings, news clippings, and FBI wiretap evidence. You would think, Grace silently complained, keeping her irritation to herself, that it was a black-and-white case for deportation. Add four lawyers and you had anything but. Money could buy you a lot of things, including in this case two pre-hearing conferences and two six-month delays while the claimant consolidated his financial gains in the country of his choice. His legal advisers were past masters at the art of stalling. By the time the case was wrapped up, it could be five years. Grace knew damn well that if she rendered a negative decision this morning, the high-priced lawyers would immediately file for leave to appeal her judgment at the federal