Despite everything, though, sometimes you had to just go with the flow. Like today, when he found himself driving around looking for the one thing his daughter wanted most for Christmas, some sort of singing, dancing puppet thing that was overpriced and probably made in Taiwan by slave labor in some sweatshop run by a corrupt dictatorship propped up by American military and financial aid. But Vicky wanted it, so he was going to do his best to find it.
No luck so far. They hadn’t made enough of the little bastards in that sweatshop. Either that, or the company was holding them back to create more demand so they could jack the price up higher.
That was the sort of thing companies did all the time, having learned their lesson from Big Oil. It would serve the corporations right, Burke thought, if everybody stopped buying for a while. Just stopped buying everything, to teach the fat cats a lesson. See how long the consumer-driven economy could stand that. The thought made him grin.
But of course it would never happen, because little girls like his daughter wanted toys. Everybody wanted toys. So the corruption rolled on, and Ellis Burke was part of it whether he wanted to be or not.
If worse came to worst, he told himself as he wiped sweat from his forehead, he knew where he could get the thing Vicky wanted.
They’d have it at the new UltraMegaMart that was about to open just up the road a couple of days from now on Friday. Going to that high temple of American excess would be an ordeal, but he supposed he could do it for his daughter. It would have to be Friday, too, the day after Thanksgiving, because after that they might be sold out of the thing he wanted.
That eased his mind a little. Sure, he hated the thought of braving a crowd of unwashed rednecks, especially after they’d spent the entire day before stuffing their faces with Thanksgiving dinner and drinking beer and rooting for the damned Dallas Cowboys, but he could do it. For Vicky. For his little girl.
How bad could it be?
CHAPTER 10
Traffic was really backed up in the northbound lanes of the interstate. The southbound lanes were moving a little faster. Hamed was grateful for that. He was anxious to reach his destination. Fort Worth was not far ahead of him now. In fact, as his car topped a long rise, he was able to see the tall buildings jutting up from the prairie ahead of him, still some five or ten miles to the south.
He took the prepaid cell phone from his pocket. Before he’d ever entered the country, he had been given a phone number to commit to memory. The plan called for him to use it when he reached the destination to which he was summoned when the call to action came. He thought he was close enough now. He hadn’t programmed the number into the phone; that would have been too risky. But he had no trouble thumbing the ten digits and then hitting the connect button while he was driving.
He heard the phone on the other end ringing. Wherever it was, whoever owned it would see the number of Hamed’s phone and would know who was calling. So he wasn’t surprised when there were no preliminaries, just a neutral-sounding voice that spoke an address when the call was answered. Hamed repeated it back, and the connection was broken. Quickly, so that there was no chance of him forgetting it, he entered the address into the GPS unit mounted on the car’s dashboard. A moment later a map popped up on the unit’s screen.
Hamed followed the turn-by-turn directions given to him by the computer-generated voice. They led him around Fort Worth on a loop to the east, into the densely packed suburbs between the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth. Everywhere he looked were housing developments, apartment complexes, and shopping centers dominated by the so-called “big box” stores. He saw perhaps a dozen different MegaMarts and grimaced each time he passed one of them. These American cities were nothing like Paris. They had no charm, no grace, and the starkly ugly MegaMarts were the perfect symbols of everything that was wrong with the American infidels and their godless culture.
The voice from the GPS unit instructed him to leave the highway. He did so, and followed a route of twists and turns into the mazelike apartment complexes. He recognized the name of the street he was on. He had to be close to the address he was given.
He found it a few minutes later. The apartment complex was not new, not fancy, but it appeared to be fairly well cared for. The parking places were not reserved, so he slid his car into one of them and stopped. He had been on the road for a long time, so his back was stiff when he climbed out of the vehicle. As he stretched, trying to unkink the sore muscles, he was aware of the gun tucked behind his belt at the small of his back, its butt covered by the tails of the loose shirt he wore. He hadn’t carried it there for the whole trip, of course; that would have been too uncomfortable. But as he approached his destination he had taken the weapon from between the car’s bucket seats and concealed it under his shirt. He didn’t know what he was walking into, but he wasn’t going to do it unarmed.
The apartment number was 427, but the building had only two stories. It was arranged in a square around a central courtyard that contained a swimming pool. Signs were posted on each leg of the square, giving the numbers of the apartments it contained, so Hamed had no trouble finding 427. It was on the second floor, overlooking the pool, which had been drained and stood empty at this time of year. It looked forlorn somehow. Dead leaves from the trees in the courtyard had blown into it.
Hamed knocked on the door and was surprised when a woman opened it—a very attractive woman at that, although her long, raven-black hair should have been covered instead of displayed so openly and shamelessly. Hamed concealed his reaction and said in English, “Hi. I’m looking for Steve.”
“Sure, he’s here,” the woman said as she stepped back from the door. “Come in.”
Hamed did so—then froze as the woman shut the door behind him and pressed what felt like the barrel of a gun against the back of his neck.
CHAPTER 11
McCabe was glad to be home. The rest of the run had gone just fine, no problems, after that little fracas a couple of nights earlier at the truck stop. He’d made it on down to Jacksonville, delivered his cargo, and deadheaded back to Fort Worth, something of a rarity in this day and age when every precious drop of fuel had to be used efficiently. Somebody in Transportation up in Kansas City had fouled up, because McCabe wasn’t supposed to pick up another load at the distribution center at Alliance Airport until Monday.
But that was MegaMart’s problem, not McCabe’s. He was just looking forward to spending the Thanksgiving holiday at home for a change, instead of carrying merchandise across the country. Maybe they would even do some shopping. Seemed fair, when you considered that he spent most of his days delivering things for other people to buy.
He’d had his own truck and been an independent for a while after retiring from the military, and he’d liked it. After being part of a group for so long, it felt good to be on his own, responsible for nobody but himself.
Problem was, he wasn’t responsible just for himself. He had a wife and a daughter to take care of, too. And he felt like Terry and Ronnie deserved the best possible life he could give them, since they had spent so many years pretty much taking care of themselves on various military bases around the country, while he was off on the missions that had taken him around the world, to some of the most hellish spots on the face of the earth.
But they’d had it rough sometimes, too. Low pay, endless red tape, frequent moves…Terry and Ronnie had had to deal with most of it alone. They had always come through, though. His guys, he called them because of their masculine nicknames. They didn’t want to be Theresa and Veronica. They preferred Terry and Ronnie.
Not that there was anything remotely masculine about them except their nicknames. At thirty-eight, Terry still had the same earthy, cowgirl-type beauty as the coltish twenty-year-old that McCabe had fallen in love with when he first saw her. She wore her blond hair a little shorter these days, but there was no gray in it and her body was almost as lithe and supple as it had ever been.
Ronnie had inherited her father’s darker looks—and darker moods,