The Jake Fonko Series: Books 1 - 3 Page 27

  Alverson was holed up behind a broad oak door, as alleged. The only identification on it was a small, brilliantly polished brass plate engraved “Petrex Corp.” I identified myself into the intercom and, following the sounds of several deadbolts being drawn, the door edged open, still secured by an industrial-strength chain. “You’re Fonko?” he verified, peering through the crack. “Boy howdy, you’ve arrived in the nick of time.” The gap between jamb and door closed briefly as the chain was drawn, then re-opened. “C’mon in,” he said, and, clamping a hearty grip on my right hand, he drew me into the room, then turned and quickly shut and re-bolted the door. He was taller than me, tending toward beer-bellied, tanned, and balding under long strands strategically combed over to cover it up. Also, he was sweating profusely. The several other people in the office stopped their work to give me a once-over, then resumed squeezing profits out of God knows what.

  Petrex Corporation occupied a small suite. An interior designer had done what I could see of it in “upscale office modern”—lots of chrome, natural teak and oak, leather, and track lighting. Brightly colored carpets, some with delicate, colorful floral patterns and others with bold, geometric designs, covered the parquet floors and draped down the off-white walls. The outside wall—mirror-coated glass—looked north toward the San Gabriel Mountains, and we sat high enough above the smog that Mount Wilson loomed up in sharp detail. I noted several computer workstations and quite a bit of communication gear—telexes and faxes and switchboards.

  “Them Eye-ranians are after my scalp again,” he declared nervously, “and I’ve got to tend to some urgent bidness down to Newport Beach. If I had time I’d just wait ‘em out—they never parade around more’n a few hours or so—but today I got to move along. They know me by sight, know my car, too. I bet they got lookouts down there right now, to spot me if I try to get away. Who knows what the hell they gonna do if they catch me. Ev Wheeler said you were just the man for the job. Glad you were available.”

  “What’s the job?” I asked.

  “Well, hell, buddy, just get me down to my car and safely out of here, that’s all. I’m gonna lose a mess of money if I don’t make that appointment and close that deal. Lemme get my stuff, and we gone—runnin’ late as it is.” He planted a proud-looking ten-gallon hat on his head and snatched up an ostrich leather briefcase. “Ev told me you were some kind of commando in Viet Nam,” he said. “I figured I better get some effectives on my side. Those security jerk-offs ain’t no good for nothin’ at all. Boy, you don’t know what these Eye-ranians are capable of. I got caught by a mob of ‘em in Tehran my last trip over there, they rocked my car fit to make me seasick, stoned the car, broke a window. Mebbe would have tried to burn it, too, if the driver hadn’t gunned it right over a bunch of ‘em—and serve the greasy bastards right, it sure did!”

  We elevatored down to the basement garage where his car, a big white Caddy, was parked. I could appreciate his problem—those sentries would spot him in a minute in that land yacht. The LAPD may have judged them harmless, but personally I don’t trust guys who parade around wearing ski masks in 90 degree weather. Once their brains are baked, who knows what they might do? “What do you think, Jake,” he asked nervously. “We gonna have to shoot our way out?”

  Just what I needed—another John Wayne fan. This was a job for…Clint! I ceremoniously opened my briefcase, pulled out my combat knife and shoved the handle into Chet’s shocked hand. “Here, you hang onto this,” I commanded. Then I hoisted my big, silvery automatic up into the dim basement light. “Chet,” I said solemnly as I slowly rolled it from one side to the other for his perusal, “this is an Israeli Desert Eagle .357 magnum automatic, the most destructive handgun in the world today.” I’d gauged him right: his eyes had suddenly doubled in size. “It holds 15 of those big, high-powered rounds. (Or maybe nine? It’d been a while since I’d taken it to the shooting range.) On full-auto that’s enough to carpet the sidewalk out front with wall-to-wall gutshot ragheads, it surely is. But my last shoot-out, well, I sort of lost count of how many rounds I fired, and I don’t rightly remember how many I’ve got left. Maybe it’s enough to clear out that lot, but maybe there’s only one or two in here, just enough to rile ‘em up, and we’re dealing with some real savage characters, genuine barbarians. They’ll likely go crazy-wild with bloodlust, you know what I mean?” He nodded breathlessly—oh, he knew, he knew.

  “Chet, do you feel lucky today?” His furtive eyes blared out the obvious answer. I let the question hang in the air, so the part about “crazy-wild with bloodlust” could sink deep into his gut. Just as he started to open his mouth, I cut in low and solemn-like, “Neither do I, Chet, neither do I. No, I have a feeling Lady Luck would not be inclined to smile on me today. Tell you what, we’ll just do this job the other way.”

  Chet looked greatly relieved. “What other way?” he asked me. I returned the gun and the knife to my case, then led over him to my Corvette, sitting there, top down and highlights gleaming.

  “How’d you like to run down to Newport Beach in style?” I offered, gesturing toward the driver’s door. His mood improved immediately. I wrestled the top up and locked it in place, then handed him the sunglasses I’d worn when I came in, and told him, “Give me your hat. Here’s my shades. Put these on and keep your head down ‘til you round the bend, and you’re outta here. Can you drive a stick shift?” He damn well could. “Try to keep it under 70,” I advised him, “it has a way of attracting CHIPs. I’ll create a diversion with your Caddy while you scoot. Where are the keys?”

  He fished them out and forked them over. “Ev sent me the right man, that’s for damn sure,” he exclaimed delightedly. “Okay, Jake, we’ll swap back tomorrow. Them ragheads’ll be gone by then.”

  “That’s a deal, Chet. Happy trails. Let me get up to the top of the ramp, then squirt out around me. See you tomorrow.” He contorted his big frame into the Corvette’s cozy cockpit, fussed with the seat adjustments until he was comfortable, started it, and tapped the accelerator pedal tentatively. I put on his hat (a size too big, but at least I could peer out from under the sweatband), sidled back to his Big White Cadillac and climbed in, slamming the door with an echoing thud. I started it and gunned the engine loudly a few times, then screeched it backwards out of its space and lurched it up the exit ramp, crowding the curb on the side toward the demonstrators. I jerked it to a stop out front of the building. The lookouts converged on me and the crowd paused to see whether it was time to rampage. Chet purred the Corvette up the exit ramp a little distance behind me. As I opened the door and climbed out, he seized the moment and slipped around me, streaming out into the Wilshire Boulevard traffic. I took the ten gallon hat off, tossed it back onto the front seat, and gave the sentries a top-of-the-line shit-eating grin. “Say, you guys happen to know the way to Wilshire Boulevard?” I asked them. They looked at each other, then back at me, bewildered. We all smiled and nodded at one another for about twenty seconds. The demonstrators stood around looking confused. One lookout pointed down the street in one direction, while the other indicated the other, saying, “Go to the fourth traffic light.” I thanked them warmly, hands pressed together prayer-style, then climbed back into the Caddy and eased it toward the street. It reminded me of the amphibious landing craft we used in Ranger training. The students regrouped and resumed their chant—”Shah ess a mur-dur-ur!”—with a little less resolve, while I took off west toward the beach. The TV crew still hadn’t showed up.

  A few weeks later Evanston called and asked me to come see him at the house. When I showed up he guided me into his study, shut the door and poured us drinks. He told me Chet had some good words to say about the escort job I’d done. I passed it off as a rent-a-car gig. But, between you and me, I was grateful for the easy money—Chet did express his gratitude tangibly. We small-talked for a few minutes, and then Evanston said, “Chet told me about an overseas assignment that might interest you. Are you booked for the next few
months?”

  “Oh, I could re-arrange my calendar if the right job came up,” I replied. NO PROBLEM! I’d been spending altogether too much time hiking, surfing and hanging out. My occasional jobs, such as bodyguarding businessmen or accompanying Eddie Lipschitz on location trips where he thought my sense of terrain might come in handy, had become ‘way too occasional. Maintaining a half-decent lifestyle in spite of inflation had eaten into my bond investments. Thanks to the meager fees I’d been picking up, my bank account was down to small change instead of flat stone empty. No, you could hardly call me overworked.

  “It’s a rather unusual assignment,” Evanston explained. “A friend of his needs an American advisor to help him with matters of, well, let’s say information gathering and interpretation. It doesn’t really fit into any ordinary classification, such as business, or law, or military. I asked around, and certain friends of mine suggested that it might be something you could handle.”

  “What kinds of friends do you have, that would suggest me?” I asked. “Do you mean these guys that I babysit when they travel overseas?”

  “No, not them. Other friends, in, well…I never told you what I did during the War. I was in the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services. It was the forerunner of the CIA. No, I wasn’t a spook. The OSS had a lot of irons in the fire back then, and covert ops were the least of it—that cloak and dagger stuff was deliberately built up as myth, to help the CIA get congressional support. I was just a junior attorney, doing what I could to help the war effort, working in propaganda, destabilization, intelligence, what have you. In those days it was pretty freewheeling, as you might imagine. Hell, we were founding a brand new government function. Most exciting years of my life, thinking back on it. A lot of high-powered DC attorneys in my field got their spurs with the OSS, including Bill Colby, the current director. So, I’ve got friends going way back.”

  “What’s the assignment? This doesn’t involve the CIA, does it?” My stomach tensed, as it always did when thoughts of my erstwhile employer crossed my mind.

  “No, no, of course not. Let me…well, okay, consider this situation, purely hypothetical—supposing a man had been able to infiltrate the innermost circle of a closely knit and secretive foreign government by impersonating…well, let’s say an agricultural expert from, oh, let’s say Albania. Would it then be very difficult for a man like that to blend in with a crowd like this and do a bit of intelligence gathering?” He showed me a photograph of an angry mob of swarthy young people, mostly men, holding signs and banners in some strange sort of writing and waving their fists in the air. Some of them had pictures of that same old rag-head guy with the white beard. Like myself, they had olive skin and dark hair. It was a role I could have sailed through back in my days as a movie extra. But…how in the hell had Evanston gotten wind of my masquerade in Cambodia, where Soh Soon and I escaped from the Khmer Rouge by palming me off as an Albanian rice advisor? I thought Todd Sonarr had disguised that fiasco and buried it deeply enough that daylight would never again fall on it. Just what kinds of spooky friends did Evanston have?

  “Hypothetically speaking,” I said, “I don’t think a person who could pull off a stunt like the one you described would have much trouble navigating in this lot. What kind of people are they?”

  “Iranians. This picture is of a bunch of Iranian student demonstrators.”

  Chet Alverson’s playmates with their ski masks off? “This assignment is in Iran? Who would I be working for?”

  “The Shah,” said Evanston. “The Shah of Iran.”

  2 | Beverly Hills

  Was this a stroke of luck, or what? It had to be more than an afternoon’s work, and if anybody could afford my modest fees, the Shah of Iran could. It was the kind of job I’d been gunning for all along. Finally, just maybe, I’d get my business off the ground.

  I called Chet Alverson and arranged to drop by for a fill-in on the job. No Iranian demonstrators ushered me down the ramp into the underground garage this time. I noted a new Corvette sitting in the space that Chet’s big white Cadillac had formerly commanded. Not having his life under threat improved Chet’s disposition—he greeted me jovially at the door of the PetrEx office suite, back to being the hearty Texas oil man. He took me into a windowless conference room, shut the door and turned on a radio, and we settled into leather swivel chairs. “So, what’s it all about?” I asked him.

  “The Shah needs a little advice, and what he needs is way out of my range, and it’s got to be somebody he can trust, and also somebody I can trust. I like the way you handle yourself, Jake, and Ev Wheeler tells me you’re a top-notch Army intelligence man, so I figured maybe you were the man for the job.”

  “That was my training,” I agreed, “but what kind of advice could I give the Shah?”

  “The problem is, there’s already too many Americans trying to give him advice, and the Shah thinks, rightly in my opinion, that a lot of that advice is what’s good for them, not what’s good for him. He wants an American with a good head on his shoulders to sort what all those other Americans are telling him.”

  “What Americans?”

  “You name it. Guys from the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Air Force, Defense Intelligence, the defense industry contractors, Big Oil companies, they’re all buzzing around him like flies at a honeypot, and every outfit has its own axe to grind. The Shah can’t tell one end from the other.”

  “Where do you fit into this, Chet?”

  “Oil broker. I trade petroleum on the international market. The Iranians have set up their own oil exporting business, the National Iranian Oil Company. But they have to sell it to somebody, and that’s where I come in. I line up the buyers. The Shah likes the way I do business—no muss, no fuss, no complications, just strike a good deal and move it out of there by the tanker load. He asked me to find him somebody, and I thought of you.”

  “How much will this pay? How long an assignment are we talking?”

  Chet chuckled. “Pay? The Shah of Iran? You’re kidding. Believe me, Jake, it’s gravy. He didn’t tell me any exact amount, but the Shah always pays top dollar for top quality. How long it’ll last, I can’t tell you, but it’ll be for a while—several months, at least.”

  “So I just fly over to Iran and start work as the Shah’s intelligence analyst? Simple as that? Nothing military? No weapons?”

  A frown sped across Chet’s face, quickly replaced by his jovial grin. “Not quite that simple. These guys are all telling what they want to him to hear, but he wants to know the truth, at least he thinks he does. You’d have to tell him a version of the truth that he’d be willing to stand for, and that’s no easy deal, as I found out a time or two. So you’d first have to find out the truth, and that means going out and mixin’ it up with the natives. Another reason I thought you’d do for this job is, you look sort of Iranian, so’s you could blend in with them.”

  “But I don’t speak any Iranian—could be a problem?”

  “Nah—whenever you’re blending in, you just keep your mouth shut. But otherwise, well, we’ve dreamed up a cover story for you. You’ll go over there as an American carpet buyer.”

  “Carpets?”

  Chet made a quick eyeball survey of the conference room—the bright, bold carpet covering the floor, two smaller, dazzling floral carpets draping from the walls, a few of throw-rug size here and there. “Yeah, carpets, like these. Oil and carpets—that’s two things Iran is famous for. So you wander around, scope out carpets, check things out. Who’s going to suspect anything about a carpet buyer? And we’ve got it figured out how you can get in to advise the Shah without drawing attention. Isn’t that a perfect cover?”

  Far from it, but who am I to argue? “Okay, I can buy it. But if I’ll be operating under the cover of a carpet buyer, I ought to know something about that business. Any way I can get a briefing on that?”

  “Wel
l, now, most of these ones in the office, I brought back direct from Iran, they being a lot cheaper over there, and a better selection. But folks come in here and get interested in getting some for themselves, so I take them down to a shop in Beverly Hills. Some nice fellers run it, and I’ve steered a little business their way. Lemme see if I can arrange for them to talk to you.”

  Thus it was that three days later I pulled into the parking lot of “Ali bin Suleiman Palace of Fine Oriental Carpets,” situated on one of those streets crossing between Wilshire and Beverly Boulevard. Large, bright, intricately woven carpets basked in spotlighted glory in picture-windowed display. Large signs proclaimed EVERYTHING ON SALE, MID-YEAR CLEARANCE and DISCOUNTS UP TO 70%. Waist-high stacks of carpets reached back to the rear of the shop. All along the walls stood rolled-up carpets, grouped by height. Hanging carpets covered every square inch of wall space. No doubt about it. These guys did carpets.

  As I eased the door closed behind me a short, swarthy man in white cotton pajamas, tooled-leather slippers with up-pointing toes and a little embroidered white beany covering his pate, glided toward me. “How may I assist you, sir?” he hissed, bowing slightly with hands before him prayer-style.

  I looked at my notes. “I’m looking for Ben?” I asked. “A friend of mine, Chet Alverson, sent me over. He made an appointment with Ben. He was going to tell me something about carpets.”

  “I’m Sol,” he said, standing up straight. The hiss disappeared from his voice, replaced by the remnants of a Brooklyn accent. “So, Chet sent you over? Good customer, Chet. Just a sec, Ben’s in the back. I’ll go get him.” He threaded his way through the piles of carpets and returned momentarily with another guy, also swarthy but dressed more like you’d expect to see on the streets of LA.—slacks and a short-sleeved polo shirt, open at the collar. He was pudgy, beady-eyed and balding, mid-50’s I estimated. He gave me a big, friendly smile, held out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Ben Millstein. Chet sent you over? You’re Jake? Put her there. What can I do for you?”