The Council of Ten Read online

  The Council of Ten

  Jon Land

  IN MEMORY OF MY GRANDFATHER A PART OF THIS, THE ONES THAT CAME BEFORE, AND ALL THAT WILL COME AFTER

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: The Grandmothers

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two: Drew

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Three: Too Jay’s

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Four: Narco-Trafficanté

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Five: White Powder

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part Six: Bonn

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part Seven: Back Country

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Eight: Prudence Island and the Castle of the Moors

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  A Biography of Jon Land

  A Sneak Peek at Strong at the Break

  Prologue

  DARKNESS FELL LIKE a black shroud tossed over the jungle.

  Drew ran. The rain had turned the ground to mud and his feet sloshed noisily through it. He was forgetting stealth, the first lesson. Pursuit was inevitable now. He had to make it work for him.

  How many remained he could only guess. He knew Mace was one of them and Mace was the best. Drew clutched his Uzi tighter and squeezed himself against a tree. Its branches were a partial shield against the torrents.

  Lightning flashed, providing a confusing moment of illumination. Drew stepped softly away from the tree, back onto the path. The rain pounded him again, but he had quickly become used to it. His uniform was soaked through to the skin, his small backpack waterlogged and sagging. Five days in the jungle now and there had been rain during all of them. But the end was coming.

  A branch cracked in the mud behind him. Drew swung. His finger found the Uzi’s trigger. The dark figure covered with mud sprang forward. Drew fired a burst into its stomach. The figure crumbled to the ground, invisible in the blackness.

  Drew stepped backward, his Uzi fixed on the still figure. Thunder rumbled. Trees loomed on both sides of him. Drew started to turn.

  It was the turn that saved him. The man snaking an arm over from behind was forced to alter his action enough for Drew to sense it. Yank the opponent backward at the throat while driving your blade into his spine—the move was as potent as it was classic. But Drew knew it was coming now and twisted away, deflecting the blade as it came up, then ramming the barrel of his Uzi into the attacker’s gut. The man grunted and Drew slammed a knee into his solar plexus. The man went down.

  Drew was behind him instantly, his knife against the man’s throat.

  “How many? How many left?” he demanded in a whisper. Silence was paramount now.

  “Just three,” the man rasped.

  “Who?”

  “You, me … Mace.”

  Drew’s lips twitched at that. It was down to just the two of them, then… . Wasting no time, he stripped the cord from his backpack and tied the man up, lacing his hands and feet together and stringing both to his throat, so any attempt at freedom tightened the makeshift noose. Drew dragged the man into the brush and made sure his face was tilted away from the pooling water. Then he was on his way once more.

  Incredibly, the rain seemed to intensify. He could see no more than a few feet ahead, but using a flashlight here would be like serving himself up to Mace on a silver platter. Perhaps, though, that was the answer. Do something stupid to draw Mace to him. Bait a trap. No, Mace was too clever for such a ploy to work. Drew’s best hope was to keep moving with obedience to the first lesson, his steps sure and Uzi always at the ready. In close, where it would surely end now, Mace’s skills might be less dominant. And the rain might be an equalizer, too. Thunder lashed again and Drew’s heart lurched with it. Back on the path now, he cleared his eyes with a swipe of his forearm.

  His next step felt all wrong. He struck a hard spot in the soft ground. What came next his mind recorded like individual frames from a movie.

  First, Mace’s hands grasping his boot and tripping him up, then Mace rising over him from the gulley where he had waited, and, finally, Mace’s blade angling down for his throat.

  For an instant Drew thought he could stop the thrust. But when his arms came up, Mace’s incredible quickness darted the blade past them and whipped it sideways in a narrow arc. Drew felt the twitch and his hands rushed desperately for this throat. He fell backward in defeat.

  Mace rose to his feet and wiped the mud from his arms and face. His smile turned to a laugh and he extended a hand to Drew.

  “Come on, kid, let an old man help you up.”

  Drew grasped it and let Mace pull him to his feet. “You win. Again.”

  Mace was working the knife over his pant legs to strip the mud. “But you’re getting closer. How many this time?”

  “One captured. Four killed.”

  “I think I got seven. Not sure. Hey, you’re getting better each session.”

  “You don’t get any prizes for coming in second.”

  “You can have my free tuition to the next session, kid. Who knows, maybe that’ll be the time you get lucky.”

  Drew looked into Mace’s eyes, which were the color of mud. He wondered if that was camouflage, too. “Only if you go back to … where? Angola? Chile? Where will it be next?”

  “Nicaragua probably. Lots of demand down there. They don’t pay for shit, though.”

  “Okay, so I’ll spring for your tuition when you get back.”

  “Deal,” said Mace. “Come on, let’s fill the high command in on the final results.”

  They started walking through the rain.

  “First round’s on me,” Mace added.

  “Nope. Loser pays.”

  “Hell, eighteen others went down before you. Stand in line.”

  “I still bought it. Number nineteen or not.”

  Mace stopped. His face turned somber. “It was just a game, kid. Don’t forget that. Reality sucks. Trust me, I’ve been there.”

  “Yeah,” said Drew. “I suppose it does.”

  Part One:

  The Grandmothers

  Chapter 1

  “SO, SOPHIE, YOU GONNA kill him or what?”

  Doris Kaplan grasped her friend’s bony shoulder and squeezed it lightly.

  “Huh? What?”

  “The fly,” Doris said, eyes aiming at the insect creeping up Sophie Guttenberg’s sleeve. “You’ve been watching him long enough. Swat him before he bites.”

  When Sophie shrugged lamely and returned to shuffling her tarot cards, Doris reached across the airline seat and struck out at the fly still meandering about her friend’s liver-spotted arm. The insect avoided the strike easily and flew away.

  “There,” Doris said, “that’s all you had to do.”

  Sophie Guttenberg shrugged again and began laying the tarot cards out in neat rows.

  The NO SMOKING—FASTEN SEATBELTS sign flashed on, and a stewardess announced that they had begun their descent into Palm Beach International. At last, thought Doris Kaplan. The flight had been an hour late leaving Nassau and she had stupid
ly packed her heart medication—“life pills” she called them—in her suitcase. Not that she really needed the red capsules. She was sure the old ticker was fitter than ever despite what Dr. Morris Kornbloom wanted her to believe. Damn cardiologists had to say something that got you back into their office once a month. Still, the bottle of life pills would have made a reassuring bulge in her handbag, as opposed to sitting in her toiletry case deep within the airplane’s cargo hold.

  “Gin!” Fannie Karp screeched from across the aisle, plunging her final discard face down atop the pile resting on a tray table. “How many points, Sylvie? Come on, how many points?”

  Sylvia Mehlman frowned in displeasure. “I don’t know. Let me count.”

  “Count? You don’t have to count,” accused Fannie. “You keep a running tab all the time. Who do you think you’re talking to here?”

  Sylvia feigned adding up the point total of her cards. “Thirty-eight. And I’m finished for today.”

  “Finished? You can’t be finished. You still have me by at least a hundred.”

  “We’re landing, for God’s sake.”

  “One more hand,” Fannie insisted, her arthritic, knobby hands gathering up the cards to be shuffled again.

  Amazing, Doris Kaplan reflected, simply amazing. The Business had made both women rich beyond the measure of most, but death had been threatened more than once as a result of this quarter-cent-per-point gin game. Of course, the gin game had been part of their lives longer than the Business. But old habits die hard once you reach the mystical seventies, where feeling good seems a memory to be catalogued with all the others. Doris supposed that their thrice-yearly Business trips to the Bahamas were as much for distraction as anything else. You could look at only so many condo developments sprouting up along the beach and moving trucks negotiating the narrow coastal roadways before you realized that more than life was passing you by.

  Doris Kaplan felt the plane’s wheels lowering beneath her. Then she heard Sophie gasp.

  “There it is,” Sophie muttered, thrusting a trembling skeletal finger down at her arrangement of tarot cards. “Just like I thought.” Her face was milk-white when she turned to Doris. “Something terrible’s going to happen. The cards say so.”

  “Right,” Doris returned softly, passing her off. “And you’ve been playing with the damn things since we left Nassau. How long did it take you to come up with that combination?”

  “It’s fate, I tell you, fate. We’re being warned.”

  “More like the law of averages.”

  Sophie huffed and turned her attention back to her neat array of cards, focusing on the one marked Death in the upper right. Across the aisle from them, the final gin game was being interrupted by a stewardess insisting that all tray tables had to be placed in their upright, locked position.

  “But I’m only one card away,” pleaded Fannie. “One card!”

  The stewardess smiled as politely as she could manage. “I’m sorry.”

  Sylvia had already seized the opportunity to gather up the cards and snap the tray table home. Fannie let her sure winning hand flutter to the aircraft carpeting, turning away and unhitching her seatbelt in an act of feeble defiance. If a sudden stop sent her lurching forward, it would serve the damn airline right.

  Doris could only marvel at how a woman like Fannie had lasted so long in the Business, where secrecy and discretion were valued above all else. She guessed Fannie would have blurted out everything to her friends long ago, except the only friends she had were her three companions in this plane right now. It was no different for the rest. All the grandmothers had were each other, and mostly that was enough.

  They had first met eight years before at the run-down apartment house that each tried to call home in Miami’s South Beach. Never mind the terrors of being near seventy, widowed, and living on fixed incomes, which never left them enough money to get anything fixed except their teeth. Before long the Cubans had arrived and turned them into prisoners of rickety chaise longues set before a pool with perpetually green water that smelled of too much chlorine. It just wasn’t fair. They had lived long enough to deserve better. At least that was what Doris had told herself constantly over the past five years, and up until very recently, the justification had held fast.

  For the rest of the time Doris had done her best to feel no remorse over the thrice-yearly trips she and the other grandmothers made to the Bahamas. They had the rewards coming to them, didn’t they? Even God Himself would understand that if He spent enough time trapped between stucco walls with Spanish music rising over Collins Avenue.

  Doris’s husband Sam had dropped dead of a heart attack at the tender age of fifty-two. It happened on the sixteenth hole of the members’ course at the Westchester, New York, Country Club ten minutes after he complained of gas and two minutes after he kicked his ball twenty feet closer to the green. Doris took over his manufacturing business, and in a few short months had it running better than Sam had ever dreamed of, only to have a fire destroy everything but a safe containing the insurance policy he had let lapse.

  The fates weren’t finished with Doris yet, though. They sent a drunk driver into her son-in-law’s station wagon on a rain-slicked night two years later. Her son-in-law died instantly, but it was two more days before the doctors could convince her that her daughter’s brain was showing a permanent test pattern and the machines could be shut off.

  So, at the age of fifty-four, Doris found herself raising her beloved five-year-old grandson, making the payments from various life insurance policies last until Andy hit college age. Then she tearfully sold the house she loved and headed south for what she hoped would be a simpler life in the sunshine. Even then, however, there were Andy’s college payments to consider, and after that her insistence on supporting him until his career got off the ground. Doris had promised herself all those years ago that her grandson would never want for anything. The money was just about gone when the Business had started, but now even all the money she had made and good she had done could do nothing to ease the guilt.

  Still, Doris figured that when you came right down to it, it was Andy who gave her an edge on her three friends. They, too, had grandchildren and families of varying sizes scattered across the country. But besides an occasional holiday card, sometimes a call, they were estranged and isolated; forgotten in the great South, which for all of them had once been little more than a mall-filled graveyard they hadn’t known enough to lie down in. They had forsaken the repressed fear of South Beach for various locales throughout the Palm Beaches. The Business required that they spend summers as well as winters in the South, a condition that irked Doris because the summer convention trade spoiled the ambiance of the famed Breakers, where she had taken up permanent residence.

  “Doris, are you all right?” Sophie was asking, all ninety shriveled pounds of her.

  Doris blinked and realized that the plane had finished its taxi and people were crowding into the aisle. They were home.

  “Just daydreaming,” she said. “That’s all.”

  Fannie had plowed a path forward and Doris followed her up the aisle, wondering what Sophie’s tarot cards might have said if placed out five years before.

  The grandmothers made their way slowly through Palm Beach International Airport. Doris would have opted for a quicker gait, except that Sophie seemed forever in slow motion these days and Fannie’s size eighteen bulk had her winded between water fountains. Doris could tell that the early fall day was hot, and she longed for the quiet cool of her air-conditioned Breakers rooms.

  At last they reached the baggage claim area, where the conveyor belt had only just started its rolling display of bags. A number of travelers pushed forward to better their positions. The grandmothers hung back.

  Four nondescript men stood apart from the scene, each with a large suitcase by his side. The casual observer would assume that their bags had been the first off the plane. Only the men hadn’t been on the plane and neither had these particular suit
cases.

  “There’s mine!” Fannie screamed. “Doris, see if you can grab it for me.”

  Doris excused herself forward into the mass and grasped the handle of Fannie’s plaid monstrosity of a suitcase. One of hers emerged swiftly after, and she saw Sophie and Sylvie lifting one of theirs together from the conveyor.

  The grandmothers set these bags back a bit and waited for the rest.

  One of the four men started forward, sliding along a huge plaid suitcase. He feigned deep attention on the conveyor while he shoved his bag up next to Fannie’s. Grabbing the handle of her suitcase instead of his own, he began to back up again.

  Another of the four men approached, this one carrying a perfect replica of Doris’s American Tourister.

  The grandmothers kept their eyes fixed on the conveyor, searching for the rest of their bags. By the time all were accounted for, the nondescript men had melted into the crowd outside the terminal, each with a large suitcase dangling from his hand.

  Doris went for a porter.

  Chapter 2

  LANTOS HELD THE BRIEFCASE tighter as he approached the alley. Not that he sensed danger, but one had to be prepared for it nonetheless, especially because of what his briefcase contained. The Miami drop had been his domain for years, and Lantos had been happy with it. Only as of late—say, the last few years—had the city degenerated into the crime capital of the country. Foreigners were to blame if you asked Lantos; spics, Colombians, Cubans, and combinations thereof. Take them out of the picture and Miami might regain its old splendor and glamour.

  Lantos had often considered requesting a transfer, but he always came up short of making it because he knew Miami and a new territory, even with all his experience, would be difficult to master. He knew every street, side street, and back road in Miami, and he had never used the same one twice. Never a pattern that might allow someone to turn him into a mark. And if they tried—well, Lantos was ready for that, too.

  The problem with holstered or sheathed weapons was drawing them. For a weapon to be effective, you had to have it out at all times. But how? Lantos smiled at the memory of posing that precise question to himself years before. The answer was to rig three razor-sharp, four-inch blades into his briefcase—not at the front or back, but at the side, where maneuverability was at a maximum. When pressed, a button on the latch just beneath the handle forced the daggers to spring out. Assailants never knew what hit them. The very object they were after was turned into the instrument of their death. Lantos liked the justice in that. He had used the case often as a weapon, and always with success.