The Last Operative by Jerry B. Jenkins

Author:Jerry B. Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781414338200
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers

Attached was a copy of Stu’s hand-scrawled note to a Michala Diego at an apartment in downtown Frankfurt:

The London activity convinces me I’m in over my head. I’m out. Count Florida contact in, the one I told you about. He’ll see you the 20th.

Jordan looked to Chuck. “I’m lost.”

“Don’t feel bad. This one took me six hours and several faxes to Interpol. If this Diego trusted Stu, we’re making progress. If the suicide spooks him or he finds out that the Florida contact—that’s me—goes back a long way with you, he’ll smell a rat.”

“What was Stu saying? And who’s Diego?”

“Okay, my ‘loss’ that he’s despondent over is you. He thinks you were wiped out in the London attack. The ‘Baltimore club’ would be the Orioles, right? The birds. The jets. ‘Alabama’ is obviously a clue to the location of al-Qaeda’s MiG-23s. ‘Sam’s rites’ took me a while, but he’s referring to the death of Uncle Sam if we don’t do something about Alabama. The next part took the longest. I looked up funeral homes in a hundred cities and didn’t find anything remotely close to Maldonado’s or anything at an address like that. I discovered what he was talking about by accident.

“Frustrated, I took a walk through the library, noticed a globe, and found myself staring at the latitude and longitude lines. Guess what’s near 78th and 1st?”

Jordan spoke in a monotone. “Maldonado, Ecuador.”

“Been there?”

“Not right there, but I had those two assignments in Ecuador, one in the late eighties and one in the early nineties that took me south of Quito into that sweep of four fairly big cities—Ambato, Riobamba, Guaranda, and, um, that northernmost one.”

“Latacunga.”

“Hated it. Reminded me of Indonesia.”

“But you got north, near Maldonado?”

“Seems we flew in or out of Ibarra. Probably out, because I remember being happy.”

“That would have been in ’93, right?”

“Probably. They were celebrating some anniversary, I want to say of when the government was overthrown and they went away from the 1967 constitution and back to the 1945 one.”

Chuck nodded. “Good memory.”

“A curse as well as a blessing. So what’s happening there on the twentieth?”

Chuck scratched his head. “Best I can figure, a strategic meeting about the MiGs. If the entire family is there, I expect al-Qaeda and people from Mexico, Cuba, and South America. No Russians, though. I’m still convinced they thought their planes would be used in the Middle East.”

“But where in Maldonado are these people supposed to meet? And what do we do if we find them? You remember how hard it is to get weapons into South America?”

“That’s your job. As to where, that’s mine. I’ll track down this Diego in Frankfurt. Got a lead on him from Interpol. If everything works, I’ll win him over and come to Maldonado with him. You and Roscoe can bring weapons in from the other direction, and we’ll rendezvous.”

“What’s Interpol got on Diego? And how did you know to start there?”

“I didn’t. I tried him with everybody else first. FBI, CIA, NSA. They all had something on him, but of course he uses many aliases.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.