Two cars waited for us on the edge of the private airstrip when we touched down in France. Three men in dark suits and dark sunglasses stood beside two black cars parked by the runway. I looked up as we walked down the stairs and saw the two F-16s scream by overhead.
“You guys must be wiped out,” Mike said. “Come on. It isn’t far from here, I promise.”
He opened the rear door of one of the black cars. I looked at Bennacio. He nodded and I slid in. He sat down beside me and one of the dark-suited guys got behind the wheel. Mike sat beside him up front and we started to drive. The other two guys followed us in the second black car.
Mike opened the glove box and pulled out something black. It looked like a rag.
“Al,” he said to me. “I really hate to do this, but it’s a secure location, you know?”
He reached over the seat and, before I could put my hands up, he had slipped the cloth over my head. I couldn’t see a thing. I started to yank it off, but felt a hand on my arm. Bennacio. He patted me as if to say, It’s going to be all right.
“Hope you guys are hungry,” Mike was saying. “Jeff joined us from Istanbul yesterday and he is one heck of a cook. We’ll grab some grub, and then you can take a shower and change your clothes. Al, you especially look like somebody’s chewed you up and spit you out.”
“Where is Mogart?” Bennacio asked.
“No idea, man.” He didn’t sound too concerned about it, but that may have come from the gum-chewing. “We know where he isn’t, which is Játiva. Our folks went in yesterday, took out the whole compound, but he and his boys had already cleared out. Found Samson. Or what was left of him. Man, talk about freaky. You guys operate on a whole different level, don’t you? What in the dickens was that about?”
Bennacio didn’t say anything. I wondered what Mike was talking about. What did Mogart do to Samson that was “freaky”?
I was having a hard time breathing inside my hood. It took everything inside me not to pull it off. I wondered what Mike would do if I did. Maybe shoot me. Casually, though, the way he talked and smacked the gum, like it was a summer afternoon and all he was doing was watching a baseball game. My voice was muffled by the cloth when I said, “Samson was Bennacio’s captain; you shouldn’t talk about him like that.”
He ignored me. “We think he may have slipped into Morocco or maybe even Algeria. Anyway, every border in the free world’s been locked down, but that’s a lot of square footage to cover and not everybody’s a friend of truth, justice, and the American way, if you know what I mean. Anyway, yesterday we get the call he’s ready to deal. Tells us to sit tight and he’ll be back in touch with the final figure and location of the exchange. Don’t know where it’ll be or what the final price tag is—they don’t tell us much at our level, but we’ve got a pool going if you want in on it. The rumor is— and this is unconfirmed and classified, by the way—the rumor is one hundred billion dollars. That’s billion with a capital B, man. You wanna know my personal opinion? I think he did all this just to make the Forbes list.”
I heard a cell phone ringing and then Mike talking quietly. It seemed like we had been driving for a long time, but it was hard to tell with the hood over my face; time passes differently when you can’t see. We went fast, then slow, then fast again, like we were hitting highways, then getting off again onto lesser roads. Then the engine revved as we climbed up a steep incline. Once we leveled off, I heard the engine stop, and my door opened. A hand reached in, grabbed my right arm, and pulled me out.
Somebody said, “Watch your head,” and guided me by the elbow along a rocky path. The rocks or gravel crunched under my feet and I thought about my dream and scrambling up the slag heap to find the Lady in White with her long black hair and dark eyes staring sadly into space, waiting for the Master to come.
“Step up,” the same voice said, and now I was walking on wooden planks. I shivered in the cold. The air around me suddenly got warmer; I was inside. Somebody pulled the hood off. I squinted in the light, though it wasn’t really that bright inside.
We were standing in a little entryway to a cabin, or maybe in France you call it a château. Wooden floors, a cathedral ceiling, and a huge fireplace. About a dozen guys milled about and I could smell bacon frying. Suddenly I was the hungriest I had ever been in my life. My knees were actually weak.
“So what would you guys like? Shower first, or breakfast?”
“Alfred needs to eat,” Bennacio said.
“All I had was some cheese and grapes,” I said to no one in particular. No one in particular seemed to be listening.