Brotherhood of the Silent Hand

By Avon J. Bellamy

It's the story of Garfield Peterson, an African American super agent charged with disabling a Colombian cartel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543920093

Book preview

t was dark and tomb quiet in the palm grove. The starlight filtering through palm leaves overhead gave it the look of an ancient cathedral masterfully crafted by the hand of an extremely gifted artist with gothic leanings working with sand, bay water, swaying palm trees, and dark sky. At 4 a.m., with the trees dancing in soft wind, its mystical beauty belied the deed it was selected to host.

A lone, black-clad man sat in the grove, his buttocks pressed comfortably into the sand and his sinewy back resting against the hard bark of a palm tree. A light breeze fluttered his mustache; the full lipped mouth beneath it was drawn in a hard tight line – the man was on a deathwatch.

A long, black flat bag lay at his feet as he sat quietly watching the beach below for any sign of movement through his night scope. He knew he would eventually see forms break from the trees bordering the beach. His information was exact, and for as much as he knew, reliable. He would be one step closer to Juliano Guillermo.

They had picked a good night for the drop. No moon. He wondered if it had been planned that way. If it had, he was dealing with very thorough people. Professionals.

He didn’t personally know Guillermo. The dossier given him said he was a Central Intelligence Agency operative turned rogue. He had been trained by the Agency or Company as some members of the intelligence community referred to the CIA, during the years prior to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He had become a bona fide agent after the invasion failed. That they still wanted him after a failed operation said something for his skills or his usefulness. In spy craft even fools have their value, he thought sardonically.

Tackman, Director for the United Field Enforcement Unit (UFEU), said Guillermo was one of the best field agents the boys at Langley had ever run; that he was clever, resourceful and highly skilled – he used to work for them so he should know. According to him much of the information for the Bay of Pigs operation had been channeled through Guillermo and that, in fact, he had been a key strategist in developing the invasion plan.

If Guillermo was a key planner the man mused, Bay of Pigs did not speak well for his ability. The invasion crew was caught on the beach and cut to ribbons; it was a miracle that any of them escaped. Castro had a field day. Instead of toppling his government, the invasion strengthened his hold on it. The so-called Cuban liberators said Kennedy betrayed them and swore revenge. Dimmer bulbs in the intelligence community believed they had gotten it.

The man grew restless, but not careless; he had been waiting for awhile. Sniper training had equipped him to be patient and still. Even slight movements on a stalk could herald one’s death.

Maybe they got the time wrong he thought as he very slowly reached for the cigarettes but thought better of it. The gum would have to do; no flame to pinpoint his location. He hated his cigarette addiction. Here he was at a kill site actually considering lighting one; You asshole, he softly chided himself. If these were careful men he reasoned, they would have someone watching the drop sight for any activity around or near it.

Sliding down behind the palm tree, he crouched and, slipping more deeply into the foliage, he pulled a stick of Doublemint gum from the pack, savored its sweetness and placed the gum-paper into his jacket pocket. He didn’t want to leave evidence anyone had been here.

The assassin re-focused on what he knew about the target. His dossier read like a revolutionary primer. He had been with Che Guevara training guerrillas, and the major players in coup operations all over South and Central America. The man in the shadows was impressed that Guillermo had done all of this in his mid-twenties, early thirties. He was less impressed with his current activity. Guillermo was training members of a Colombian drug cartel in very sophisticated tactics that were helping them become a major pain in the ass for America and several other world governments. His job was to relieve that pain.

Tackman had briefed him on just how bothersome the drug problem was becoming. The cocaine lords were shipping hundreds of thousands of metric tons all over America and Europe. Men who had once been poor farmers, small-time restaurateurs, and petty gangsters on the streets of Medellin and Cali had become multi-billionaires trading in the illicit, but profitable, commerce found in the processed residue from the Coca plant; a plant the original Inca inhabitants of the area comprised of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, thought to be a gift from their gods. That gift had now been revealed for what it was – a curse from hell, demons and all. Its growth, processing, distribution and sale had led to untold drug related murders, deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, crimes of every imaginable kind and the decimation of countless lives, including those of some members of royalty. Cocaine use had wound its way from the gutter to Ivy League bastions of education and power. Students at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Georgetown universities had begun to party with coke. The Coca Cola Corporation’s slogan, Things Go better With Coke, was now a slang that had taken on a new, more insidious meaning among the off-spring of the wealthy.

Cocaine use had lured middle-class housewives into prostitution. Kids who started using marijuana in high school and college because it was the in thing to do, switched to cocaine and were taking their habits to work in the legal and business communities.

Cocaine users were serving in the U.S. Congress. In some prominent law firms you couldn’t spit without hitting a recreational drug user. Not only were many of these men, and some women, users, but they had formed alliances with the Colombians to help them hide their illicit profits within legitimate enterprises; and in the process, became multi-millionaires by taking commissions of eight to twelve percent of the money laundered through legitimate financial institutions; some of these institutions were now owned by drug cartels. The Ivy League preppies as they were called helped drug lords slip billions in profits beyond the reach of U. S. authority, and aided their filth reaching Wall Street, the economic hub that dictated the ebb and flow of financial markets worldwide.

Who knew what this would lead to? Who was to know when some narcotized asshole, at a level senior enough to do damage, while in a state of cocaine induced derring-do, would plunge the world into economic chaos? The power to do this could now conceivably be in the hands of Colombian drug dealers, and that was too much influence to have for men not controlled by greater authority.

The truth of his thoughts alarmed him. Informed sources in the intelligence community believed Juliano Guillermo to be one of the reasons for the growing power of this corruptive influence. He had trained his deadly students too well and he was going to die for it.

Lifting the night scope to his eye again, he thought he saw movement on the beach below, and tensed, the adrenaline causing the vein in his forehead to pulse with anticipation.

He surveyed the area closely taking great care to examine every inch of it thoroughly. Just my imagination he thought as he relaxed and returned to his personal synopsis of the case.

Guillermo had become a real embarrassment to the CIA at a time when they could ill-afford it. Their political capital had become sparse since it was discovered that they were conducting illegal clandestine activities in the U.S. It was bad enough that they stepped on toes outside the country using the coverall of in the interest of national security, as a bad conduct pass. Now they wanted to use it to conduct clandestine operations – black-ops – on national soil to neutralize situations or people believed to constitute a danger to American interests.

Guillermo’s activities with the cartel were known, and some CIA heads had already begun to roll. Should it become known on Capitol Hill that a former CIA operative of high rank was training cocaine dealers in skills dangerous to the stability of a sovereign government and that that individual’s activities might even be having a negative effect on U.S. social and financial institutions, there would be hell to pay. The assassin laughed softly to himself, he could hear the squeezing of sphincter muscles at the Agency; if this got out they would need government permission to pee.

The darkness began to yield to the ever increasing advance of day. The agent, looking to his left through the trees, could see the sky starting to glow beautiful lavender at the horizon’s water line. He knew it was very near sunrise. Something must have gone wrong, he thought, lifting his body from the foliage.

Again picking up his scope, he scanned the landing area. Seeing no movement, he stretched and looked at the luminous dial of his watch. 5:10 AM. He rubbed his hands together briskly to warm them. The water chilled breeze blowing off the bay had made him shiver under the Kevlar body armor. He wondered how much longer he had to wait for his package to fly landward from out over the bay and land, step from the helicopter onto the beach, and have his head blown off.

His patience was waning. He had taken a Benzedrine tablet to ensure his wakefulness, but there was no pill for boredom. That was the damnable part of operations like these – the still, patient waiting for your quarry. His hands were cold and he didn’t want them cold for the shot. Again he rubbed them vigorously together, felt them warm, and stuffed them into the pockets of the camouflage windbreaker he wore – who would think that it would be chilly in Florida?, he thought. His mind went back to the United Field Enforcement Unit briefing on Guillermo eleven days earlier.

According to Tackman, the CIA, acting through Guillermo's former handler, a station chief and former decorated naval commander named Stevenson, had asked Guillermo to stop his activities with the cartel twice. They explained to him what was at stake for CIA operations given their current circumstances. Guillermo told them he would. They gave him money and he took it to seal their understanding. But he didn’t stop, he continued with greater caution. That’s when they authorized the order to Terminate With Extreme Prejudice; a Tag. They tagged you when you were out of control and knew too many secrets; and they did the same when bringing you to trial would create havoc in National Security circles. Guillermo’s star lit up in both categories. He knew names, dates, places and faces. He was a black ops professional and no stranger to Tags. According to the record, he was expert at them.

A few years back, the agent reminisced, a troublesome dictator, General Ghuyya, head of a small oil producing African nation, almost fell victim to a CIA Tag, but it was poorly planned. The planners missed and killed one of the General’s kids. The man in the grove knew the men who had planned it. Real old school hardballers; a couple of macho renegades who believed in force and not finesse. UFEU had offered to let them use him to resolve the problem. He spoke five Arabic dialects like a native; he even looked the part and he had done some work for the General and his boys as a part of an arms operation UFEU ran to bring down Walid Khoshoggi. But the cowboys wanted to get the sand nigger themselves. Now they had an enemy for life. Scuttlebutt had it that the General had placed a $2 million price on their heads. The UFEU agent’s bet was that neither of them would live to retire. He knew men who would have no scruples about cashing in on a $2 million retirement bonus. It beat working as security consultants, industrial spies or mercenaries, the usual retirement offers given most spies and wet work boys. If they had used him like Gil Tackman offered, the General would be dead and they would be breathing easier.

Up on his elbows with the morning wind from the bay whipping about his face, the agent wondered what had turned the handsome man with the light-eyes, penetrating gaze and a smile that made him look almost boyishly innocent, into an accomplice of drug dealers. But being in the business he could understand how someone, frustrated over the never-ending paranoia of suspecting everyone you came in contact with, and the bureaucratic stupidity and meanness of some superiors, would want to break away. It was hard at times to know the bad guys. They sometimes held law degrees and good guy credentials, and worked with you.

The Sun hovered at the horizon while its pinkish yellow glow shimmied across the bay’s water marching toward the shoreline in a light that dazzled on the softly lapping waves. He had been lost in thought, but every inch of him was alert now as he picked from among the sounds of the wind in the trees and the water breaking against the shore, the faint beat of a rotary propeller. A helicopter. His quarry was near.

Scanning the tree-line, he saw a faint movement about 450 yards up the beach; a place he had made reconnaissance of earlier as being the most likely spot for a landing. He lifted the scope to his eye. The scope illuminated the landing spot with the clarity of noonday because even though there was advancing daylight, shade from the covering palm trees, left part of the landing area in shadows.

Through the scope, the assassin examined the place were he had seen the movement. He saw a man in the trees. Closer scrutiny showed two more, both positioned a little to the left and behind the man he had first seen. All three were lying flat on the ground looking out over the bay. One of them, obviously the leader of the small band, peered through binoculars.

There were three of them. His information said there would be six. He pulled himself into kneeling position and drew the gun bag to him. Unzipping it, he pulled its contents out; he had kept the weapon covered to keep it dry. Plenty of time, he thought, his hands moving with practiced efficiency.

The smell of bay water mingled with the scent of gun oil, grained oak, and blue steel. His motions were quick, economical; the assembly, skilled and efficient. He fitted the scope into its groove, lowered himself into firing position, lifted the rifle to his face and re-adjusted the scope.

Sighting by a coconut he had set on the beach earlier, he re-calculated range and windage. There had been three coconuts. Two were destroyed by practice shots.

The assassin’s view of the beach from the grove gave him a shooting field, from water’s edge to trees, of about 80 yards. That gave him more than enough time to spot his quarry and set the shot before his target made it to the trees and out of sight.

When he was comfortable with the scope and his wind adjustments, he cradled the rifle in his arms and waited. Sweat was beginning to bead on his caramel brown forehead, having slipped through the black, tight hair and from under the camouflage head gear. He quickly wiped it away, remembering the time in Calcutta. He had been too impatient then, too eager for the kill, and when he felt the perspiration starting to drip down his forehead, he had not taken the time to wipe it away. At the moment of trigger squeeze, sweat had seeped into his right eye blinding him momentarily. By the time he recovered, Ali Faraqua was gone. It took him another three weeks, on a quiet street in Monte Carlo, before he could get another shot at the terrorist planner. By then, Faraqua had bombed a hotel in Geneva where a select team of Mossad agents from Israel had gathered to finalize plans to mete out revenge to one of the Munich terrorists who had killed Israeli athletes in the 1974 Olympic Village.

The bomb meant for the agents missed them by a matter of minutes, but not the 18 innocent people, some on vacation and some hotel staff, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It had always bothered him that had he wiped the sweat away when he felt it beading upon his brow, those 18 people would, in all likelihood, still be alive. It was a hard lesson well learned.

The UFEU assassin could see the helicopter clearly now. It had come in low and now hovered over the beach. The men he had seen earlier were running to it from the trees, a tan cloud of sand whipping furiously about them.

When it set down, there was a flurry of activity at the open door as bundles of what was certain to be cocaine were hurled onto the shore for pick-up. The helicopter’s blades continued spinning, but more slowly as the pilot adjusted their beat to an idle. From the beach, the trio of men caught in the whirling sand kicked up by the helicopter’s prop, could not see the man in dark camouflage clothing making minute adjustments to his silencer fitted rifle.

When the bundles had been cleared from the door, a man appeared there wearing an Army camouflage jacket. His information told him that only Guillermo would be wearing camouflage apparel.

The man paused to look carefully about, and then jumped running for the trees. The helicopter revved its engine and immediately leaped into the air like a startled deer, veering north and arcing away from the beach, again belching sand into the air in a cloud.

Juliano’s move was unexpected and for an instant the gunman was caught off guard. Many hours of training under every conceivable scenario allowed the agent to make almost instantaneous adjustments and center the man running along the beach in his crosshairs.

In the space of heartbeats, two very explosive bullets filled with a highly poisonous extract from shellfish, hurtled toward Juliano Guillermo's running form and slammed into his body spinning it around in mid-stride. Death came in a supersonic rush as the bullets struck their target and released their venomous cargo. Guillermo fell in a kind of limp pirouette, his dead body hitting the sand like a puppet with cut strings. Even if a bullet only scratched him, he would die from the poison in seconds.

The assassin watched as one of the men ran out of the trees to help Guillermo, believing him to have stumbled. Satisfied, the gunman silently made his way from the grove running in long, effortless strides to a small rubber boat hidden in the underbrush 500 yards down the beach.

He felt a strong sense of accomplishment as he dragged the rubber escape raft from its hiding place and pulled it to the water’s edge. That completed he retraced his steps to the under brush where the raft had been hidden, snapped off some foliage close to the ground where its disturbance would be more difficult to spot, and used it to sweep away all signs of his footprints and the broad stripe left in the sand by the dragged raft. That done, he pushed the raft into the water, climbed aboard, and rowed away.

Garfield Peterson, Mr. Garfield Peterson, please pick up the nearest courtesy phone.

It was strange hearing his name blared over the Miami Airport’s public address system. He knew it had to be the office. It could only be Gil Tackman. No one else knew his itinerary. He found a phone.

This is Mr. Peterson. I believe you have a message for me.

The answering voice was polite, female and husky. You have a call from a Mr. Carter. You are to call him at this number. Area code [phone].

Peterson wondered what was up. Whatever it was, it was a high priority matter. Tackman had made contact with him in the field by other than secure means.

The name Carter was the UFEU quick contact code for danger and was only used for ultra-sensitive agency business. The call would be handled on a sanitized scrambler line impossible to tap or trace. He found a pay phone and dialed the sanitized number. Recently the Research and Development guys had earned their money and come up with a device that would automatically change any UFEU coded telephone number once it was used. There were always ten numbers available for use in a random select pool; the Ten Commandments as they were called by the eight field agents. Ten seconds after Garfield hung up, 633-1223 would respond as a non-working number and the UFEU director would be assigned a new Carter code number known only to him. Another number would enter the pool to replace the discarded one.

The device that re-routed phone numbers also secured the line against penetration. Any attempt to tap in would crash the line and the caller would be re-connect into a replacement line with no interruption to the scrambled conversation.

Mr. Carter, please, he said when the phone was answered.

Speaking. It was Tackman, voice low and edgier than usual.

Do we have a problem?

We don’t have a problem. You have a problem, Tackman said, placing emphasis on his enunciation of the word you. You Tagged the good guy.

Bull, Garfield exclaimed. I saw him. I made sure. It was Guillermo, camouflage gear and all.

Did you see his face?

Gil, the guy was 450 or more yards away; who do you think I am, Superman? He was the only one with camouflage on, the assassin said, exasperated at being doubted.

He was a DEA informant. Julio Mendez, one of their best. Guess who wants your skin for this?

Raymond Fergers, said Peterson, annoyance and disgust sounding in his voice. That's all he needed. Fergers. The man didn't like him and the feeling was mutual.

Right the first time. Gar, Tackman’s voice had taken on a serious quality. Get back here as quickly as you can. I don’t have to tell you how serious this one is. Something is wrong here. Really wrong. It stinks to high heaven and I am suspicious, he said, his voiced concerned trailing off into silence.

Peterson knew Tackman; he was processing the situation at hand looking for patterns, intrigues, subterfuge of any kind.

We will debrief you whenever you arrive, so get some sleep on the plane.

Gil… Garfield Peterson tried to say more, but the line went dead. He would have to wait until he got to Baltimore to give more details about the Tag. He was disquieted to learn that he had taken the life of an innocent man, an asset who was of value in the drug war.

He retraced his instructions in his head searching for where things could have gone awry, but could find nothing. He had as always followed the plan to the letter improvising only where necessary. Tackman was a stickler about following the plan. Though he gave Peterson more latitude to make alterations to plans in the field without checking with him than he did the other seven agents, he none-the-less expected him to have a well thought out reason for any changes. Tackman trusted Garfield’s field experience and instincts about penetration situations more than he trusted his own plans. Some times. Not often.

Peterson’s changes to this operation were minor; none could have resulted in him tagging the wrong man. One of the German generals in WWII, he believed it was Rommel, had a saying, no plan survives contact. He had found the same truth in his exploits in the field. Contact with the enemy always changed the plan, sometimes completely.

Peterson pulled a cigarette from the pack that once occupied the inside pocket of his suit. He lit it and inhaled deeply, hating the weakness even as the smoke filled his lungs, all vows of quitting suspended. He walked over to an empty airport lounge seat and eased wearily into it. He had been a UFEU agent for fifteen years. He was the first of eight field agents. His success as a field operative opened the door for the other seven, and he had been their training officer. With the exception of the Faraqua affair, he had never made a serious mistake in the field. And this was a serious mistake. You don’t whack a good guy without a helluva lot of crap to walk in before it’s made right, he thought to himself. Friendly fire is not a term embraced by the intelligence community – people working in it were paranoid about everything; every mistakes carried with it a suspicion of incompetence or betrayal. There would be an investigation and if he knew Fergers, the man would try and make his life miserable. The snotty bastard.

In fifteen years, he had worked all over the world in every major country from England to Iran. He had a facility with languages. They came easily to him and he spoke eight, six of them without a trace of accent. He was good at what he did. Tackman said so and Tackman was difficult to please. It was after the Faraqua incident, in an effort to help him through it, Tackman told him he was the best agent he had worked with in his 31 years at spy-craft. Learn from the mistake and go on; we all do, was all Tackman said. It was a vote of confidence Peterson never forgot.

The American Airlines flight to Baltimore would not leave for another hour. Garfield let his lithe, muscular body sink deeper into the lounge chair, wrestling with whether to discard the cigarette or not. It was 1PM Miami time. By 6:30PM, he would be in Baltimore. He was tired and needed a nap to re-sharpen his focus. He crushed the cigarette out and set his internal clock like Chien Lui Ping, his guardian, taught him so many years before, and dropped off to sleep knowing that he would awaken in enough time to board the flight home without incident.

Peterson awoke just as the plane was boarding. The nap made him feel sharp and focused despite the fact that he had gotten only six and a half hours sleep in the last two days. He had not felt the fatigue until the operation was over. Adrenaline does that to you. Over the years, he had learned how to minimize the effects of fatigue. Lui Ping had taught him meditative techniques which replenish the body's energy flow quickly. Lui Ping called it purification of the energy pool. It was accomplished by unleashing Chi power. The ancient Asian art of Acupuncture accomplishes the same using hair thin silver needles. Garfield felt his shirt sticking to him under the powder blue seersucker suit. He had perspired a little while asleep in the Miami heat. He rose, adjusted his regimental stripped tie, smoothed his coat, and taking his place in the line of boarding passengers, watched the herd of people passing along the airport’s crowded corridors rushing to departing or arriving flights.

With the exception of the small carrying case filled with toiletries, a change of clothes and shoes, money ($5,000 in emergency funds), and some special effects built in by the Research and Development department at UFEU, he carried no other baggage.

He had destroyed all the outfits and equipment used in the Tag, including the rifle, a HK .308 sniper weapon, dropped into the bay in its weighted carrying case. It was standard operational procedure – change clothes, get rid of the weapon and any witnesses. Clothes are what people are most likely to identify. With the exception of law enforcement personnel, artist and people like himself, ordinary people rarely identified perpetrators by facial recognition.

A very pretty dark-haired stewardess, Peterson guessed that she was Hispanic, took his boarding pass. She smiled pleasantly and told him he was in the first class section and that they would be eating immediately after take-off. He was glad to hear they would be eating soon. He was famished.

Slipping his 5-foot, 11-inch, 175 pound, body comfortably into the seat, Garfield watched from the window as the ground crew began the preparations that would allow the Boeing 747 to taxi for take-off.

He was athletically built – narrow hipped, flat stomached, broad shouldered, with unusually thick arms and neck. An assortment of physical and mental exercises kept him in excellent condition, many of them, again, taught to him by Chien.

Peterson, along with the other seven operatives, stayed in excellent physical and mental condition because UFEU operatives were required to requalify every two years. If you failed the requalification, you were out. Neither he nor Tackman would tolerate anything other than complete physical, mental and emotional fitness on any agents’ part. Anything less put the small, but able team at risk. Theirs was a profession requiring highly skilled, well equipped participants. Peterson called them the Magnificent Seven after a western film that was based on a Japanese film about Samurai.

Operatives were tested on procedures, ingenuity, given intense medical and psychological examinations, put through grueling physical exams that included unarmed combat techniques (Garfield handled all unarmed combat instruction personally), and put through their paces with every conceivable type of weapon from knives and guns to sniper rifles and anti-tank assault weapons.

The experimental MX-77 (nicknamed The Mother) was the most deadly of these. It was an ingenious weapon. No larger then a .44 Magnum and concealable under normal suitcoats and jackets, it fired a 3-inch carbon steel projectile packed with a new, more potent form of plastic explosives. It was accurate up to 750 yards. Its use in penetration situations was unlimited. Garfield had been amazed to see it blow a beachball sized hole in the side of a tank. Anything easily concealed with that kind of fire power was like manna from heaven in a field operation.

The Re-Q as it was called lasted for seven days. Its hardships included being placed naked in a wilderness area with nothing but an 18-inch survival knife equipped with a compass, and given 20 hours to find your way out; one scenario required operatives to locate and defuse a bomb in the dark and use it as an offensive devise.

In the blue seersucker suit, regimental stripped tie and expensive black Italian loafers, he looked like any one of the thousands of businessmen who flew, and did business all over the world. A close look at his eyes told a different story: There was a veiled, dangerous quality about them even when the face, with the scar running along the left side of the chin just at the jaw-line, was smiling. The medium brown eyes, couched under thick black eyebrows, warned that their owner could be a hard and difficult man to deal with. Aside from this, they weren't mean eyes. In fact, there was a glint of humor set in them that left one with the impression that their owner was having some kind of secret laugh at the observer’s expense; like he knew some tremendously funny fact he was amused to keep to himself.

In spite of the cut and the eyes, the face was handsome with a full, black, well groomed mustache. The dark caramel color of his smooth skin made a striking contrast against the light-blue suit. He was very masculine looking, and women noticed.

Most of the passengers were seated now. A petite blonde stewardess with exceptional legs asked if he wanted a pillow. He did. She fluffed it and smiled politely as she moved on to help others.

Finally with everyone seated and belted, the stewardesses carried out the safety and emergency routine necessary to passenger preparation. The singsong delivery revealed their boredom at having to repeat this necessary evil which, for some of them, amounted to several thousand times over the years.

At last they were finished and the powerful plane taxied, sped down the runway, and leaped into the sky, its escape velocity pressing him firmly back in his seat. In seconds, he could see Miami far below.

Peterson finally had time to think about what, if anything, had gone wrong with the Tag. Fergers, the DEA Area Director, was making very bad noises to Peterson's superior about a screwed up hit made on their most useful informant. That bothered him. He and Tackman had gone over the plan and verified all of the intelligence UFEU had concerning the Tag. They had been told the target, the site, the strength of the entourage Guillermo was to be traveling with, the general staging area for the Tag, the weapon, the escape route, and the contingency plan should something go wrong. There had been no plan for this contingency. Even Tackman couldn’t have anticipated this bizarre turn of events.

Tackman would have checked and rechecked the intelligence around the operation before he began to plan. Whatever reservations he had about the operation would have been discussed before he involved Garfield, and provisions made to eliminate them. Peterson knew this because of the man's sometimes insulting preoccupation with the smallest details of even the simplest assignment. He was a What If man – what if this or that happens, what will we do then? Tackman always came up with strategies for dealing with his what ifs and worries. Good strategies; some of them ingenious.

Peterson observed that Gil Tackman had this incredible knack for putting himself into the mind-set of the person or persons he was going after and imagining how they would think. He could perform this feat of mind without gender restriction, and across cultures.

Peterson believed the ability sprung from Tackman being an amateur archeologist/anthropologist; the man prided himself on his understanding of various cultures, their peoples, psychologies and mores. Garfield thought of all the times he had heard Tackman say, If I was this mess-up (he never cursed), I would …, and be invariably correct about the subject’s actions many more times than he would be wrong.

Peterson tried to imagine what piece of information was left out of the intelligence analyzed by Tackman but could think of nothing. He needed more information. His training had taught him to act on hard facts and accurate information; an innocent man was killed. A mystery was not an acceptable answer as to why.

His thoughts were interrupted by the dark haired stewardess smiling down at him and asking if he wanted a drink. He declined and returned to his thoughts.

Raymond Fergers was another matter. He considered Fergers to be an arrogant, pushy man with a large ego. And from what he knew of the man professionally, Fergers had some right to be. He was a large, quick man at 6’3", 245 pounds. Fortyish, with a full head of dark brown hair, and menacing dark eyes peering out of a round clean shaven face. A former SEAL and Delta Force commando, he had been instrumental in the training of an elite group of operatives working out of the U.S. Marshall’s office; the Black Ninjas. The group’s success was laudatory, and Fergers used it to push his way up the DEA career ladder.

Peterson had to admit the group he trained was good. They provided protection for prosecution witnesses in government cases and for federal agents who had received death threats. No one had ever breached their security and gotten to a witness or an agent.

The Ninja also had an excellent record as clandestine operatives. They were skilled in all forms of stealth maneuvers; and rumor had it that they had occasionally gone out of the country to get a bad guy and bring him back for trial. Their record spoke well for them and Fergers.

Despite his respect for the man's accomplishments, Peterson did not like him. The man was an un-abashed racist. His attitudes toward Blacks and his undisciplined and unprofessional behavior coupled with his tempestuous outbursts, were legend. On the three occasions Tackman and he had met with the man to discuss coordinating operations of interest to both agencies, Fergers spent more time questioning Garfield’s fitness as a field agent then he did examining the operational details. Angered by his manner, Peterson had quietly challenged the man to find a field agent in anyone's service with a better field record than his own. He felt the pressure of Tackman’s foot on his as Fergers glared across the conference table at him. Peterson met the glare evenly, but acquiesced when Gil Tackman’s foot pressure increased. This was a team play and he would do his part to keep the peace; the two agencies needed to work together. The man’s face held an almost imperceptible sneer of superiority when Garfield dropped his gaze to the folder he held. It was as if Garfield’s looking away had given him some kind of victory. It had taken great self-control not to spit in the bastard’s face. After that meeting, he told Tackman he did not think it wise for him to be involved in any further meetings with Raymond Fergers because if the man ever disrespected him again he would reach across the table and tear his throat out. Tackman knew his killer meant it and agreed.

The blond stewardess, great legs and all, returned with the menu. He opted for the broiled salmon with Dijon mustard sauce, wild rice and greenbeans. The Benchley lemon tea with honey successfully served his drink taste and in short order he had finished the meal. Dessert was a poorly conceived chocolate pudding someone was trying to pass off as mousse – one small taste was enough to cancel any thought of finishing it.

Peterson looked out of the window at the cotton-puff clouds stringing themselves across a royal blue sky and thought how silly it was to be doing his kind of work. He damaged and killed people secretly for the government. He wondered if his government sanction made him different from other killers. If the American people knew what he did, he doubted they would approve. Tackman knew precisely what he did. He sent him to do it.

His eyes fell to the Rolex Oyster. In a few hours he would be in Baltimore. He would sleep until then.

uliano Guillermo was a small, wiry man just over 5-feet 8-inches in height and had never in his life weighed more than 160 pounds. As a boy growing up in the barrios’ of Venezuela with just a mother and a sickly sister, Eunestra, he had no older male to protect him. Using intelligence rather than brawn, stealth rather than frontal attack and maniacal brutality when all else failed, he had learned to protect himself and feed his family. His was truly a dog-eat-dog world and he had been able to win the respect of the big dogs in it.

His barrio experiences had taught him valuable lessons, and he had honed his survival skills based on them. Major among them was to never rely on just intelligence and logic alone; that there were other human elements to consider – instinct and gut feeling he gave high regard. In fact, many times during his life instincts and feelings had sheltered him from death. He had survived as a young guerrilla with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara using them. Therefore, he relied on them more than he did intelligent analysis. Because of his reliance on them, Julio Mendez lay dead on a Miami area beach and he was alive to fly away.