Dead Ends by Jeffery Deaver

Author:Jeffery Deaver [Deaver, Jeffery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2024-06-12T17:00:00+00:00

Friday

At 1 a.m. Cuchillo washed for bed and climbed between the smooth sheets, not silk but luxurious and expensive cotton.

He would read something calming to lull him to sleep tonight. Not War and Peace. Perhaps some poetry.

He picked up his iPad from the bedside table, flipped open the cover and tapped the icon to bring up his e-reader app. Cuchillo, of course, generally preferred traditional books for the most part. But he was a man of the twenty-first century and found e-books were often more convenient and easier to read than their paper forebears. His iPad library contained nearly a thousand titles.

As he looked at the tablet, though, he realized he must have hit the wrong app icon—the forward camera had opened and he found he was staring at himself.

Cuchillo didn’t close the camera right away, however. He took a moment to regard the image. And laughed and whispered the phrase he’d used to describe himself earlier, “Not so bad, you old devil.”

• • •

Five hundred yards from Cuchillo’s compound, Alejo Díaz and P.Z. Evans were sitting in the front seat of the big Mercury. They were leaning forward, staring at the screen of Evans’s impressive laptop computer.

What they were observing was the same image that Cuchillo happened to be basking in—his own wide-angle face—which was being beamed from his iPad’s camera to the laptop via a surveillance app Evans had loaded. They could hear the man’s softer voice too.

You old devil …

“He’s in bed, alone,” Evans said. “Good enough for me.” Then he glanced at Díaz. “He’s all yours.”

“Sí?” asked the Mexican agent.

“Yep.”

“Gracias.”

“Nada.”

And without any dramatic flair, Díaz pressed a button on what looked like a garage door opener.

In Cuchillo’s bedroom, the iPad’s leather case, which Evans had stuffed with the potent incendiary explosive last night, detonated. The explosion was far larger than the American agent had expected. Even the bulletproof windows blew to splinters and a gaseous cloud of flame shot into the night.

They waited until it was clear the bedroom was engulfed in flame—and all the evidence of the attack was burning to vapors, as they’d been instructed to do by Washington—and then Díaz started the car and drove slowly through the night.

After ten minutes of silence, looking over their shoulders for police or other pursuers, Díaz said, “Have to say, amigo, you came up with a good plan.”

Evans didn’t gloat—or shy with false modesty either. It was a good plan. Data mining had revealed a lot about Cuchillo (this was often true in the case of targets like him—wealthy and, accordingly, big spenders). Evans and Díaz had noted not only his purchases of collectable books, but his high-tech acquisitions too: an iPad, an e-reader app and a number of e-books, as well as a leather case for the Apple device.

Armed with this information, Evans duplicated the iPad and filled the case with the deadly explosive. This was the actual weapon that Díaz smuggled into the compound and swapped with Cuchillo’s iPad, whose location they could pinpoint thanks to the finder service Evans had hacked into.

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