The Dark Root Read online

  “If Truong’s such a saint,” Spinney came back, “why does Nguyen feel his family might be toast if he talks?”

  I shrugged. “I think that’s more of a cultural reaction. From what I was told, Truong never made any threats. Nguyen just knows that’s a traditional way of doing business—you do the boss dirt, he makes the penalty up close and personal. Besides, Nguyen did confirm that Truong iced all those people, from Johnny Xi onward. That kind of behavior lends itself to some serious loyalty.

  “Speaking of which,” I continued, “it turns out we were right about the bank. That was Truong’s one pile, and he’s feeling the pinch without it. Nguyen agrees with us that Truong’s two best options now are to fold or try a massive border crossing. ’Course, he also said Truong was capable of anything—that vengeance is all he lives for—so who knows?”

  The conversation ended there, the victim of a mutual need for reflection.

  I made no pretense of understanding the rules of conduct that seemed to drive the dreaded Dark Root. I could see how it had come about, however, and why it was still so successful many generations later. Our own crooks and their spurts of chaotic, bloodthirsty mayhem were a reasonable reflection of our often careless, spontaneous society. Why shouldn’t the same be true for the Asians, rightly famous for their hard work, determination, family loyalty, and ambition?

  · · ·

  The Border Patrol’s sector headquarters are located in a solid brick building just south of Swanton center. Self-effacing physically, it is in fact the vessel of an impressively complex and well-managed communications center, linking it within the sector to substations stretching from New York State to Maine. Involved are almost a hundred and fifty highly sensitive infrared monitors, magnetic detectors, seismic sensors, and discreetly placed, low-light television cameras, all of which are strung strategically along the border, some so well camouflaged that they are literally invisible. In addition, several computer consoles, fax machines, and high-security, scrambled radio frequencies keep the center in touch with a coterie of other agencies with an ease I knew Dan Flynn would envy.

  The building was also the home of the sector’s intelligence unit, as well as a relatively new brainchild called the Canadian Border Intelligence Center, or CBIC for short, which was the primary reason Spinney and I had made the trip.

  CBIC had been created as a sort of informational lending library, along the same lines as Dan Flynn’s VCIN. But where Dan had to watch out for a small army of potentially fractious personalities—all worried that the other cop’s department might try to steal his case by using the system—CBIC was significantly less encumbered. More than a clearinghouse for information, it was an actual depository, where statistics gathered from both the U.S. and Canada could be crunched to form a better picture of who was moving what, or whom, across the border, and where.

  Walt Frazier had preceded us to CBIC to see if the Sonny network had begun to leave any kind of recognizable—and predictable—fingerprint.

  Spinney and I were logged in at the security window in the lobby, met by an escort on the other side of an electronically operated door, and led through the building to the CBIC office. On the way, we took a shortcut through the windowless dispatch center—the heart of all those various monitors and communications devices. Sitting at a semicircular console looking exactly like some space-age movie set, were two men on rubber-wheeled chairs, sliding back and forth with effortless, practiced ease, talking on radios, answering phones, entering data into computers, all in the eerie glow of some fifteen television monitors that were perched along the top of the console like silent witnesses to the world outside, mundanely observing roads, fields, and bridges, some of which were scores of miles away.

  I was suitably impressed, all the more so when I realized that this northern border was by far the lesser of the two this agency was sworn to protect. In rough numbers, for every two illegal crossers each Border Patrol officer caught coming over from Canada, four to six hundred were collected by their southern-based colleagues.

  We ended up in a room with a table covered in maps and charts, surrounded by six people: Walt Frazier; Judy Avery, the Border Patrol’s “Intel” officer and CBIC liaison; Bob Carter, the Border Patrol sector’s agent-in-charge; Abe Gross, one of the two INS investigators assigned to Vermont; Andy Marconi, from U.S. Customs; and Steve Moore, who headed up the Vermont State Police barracks in Derby. Since INS was interested in bodies, Customs in inanimate objects, and the Border Patrol in catching both as they slid in between ports of entry, these three particular agencies interacted on a routine basis, as did the state police when any one of them needed assistance. It was a congenial group, long past caring politically who worked for whom.

  Carter, as host, rose when we entered and shook hands with both of us. “Gentlemen, come on in. Walt’s been stealing your thunder a bit with a sneak preview, but you’ll be glad to know we haven’t decided everything without you.”

  The slightly forced laughter that generated told me how close it could cut to the truth. One egomaniac with clout in a group like this would be like the proverbial rolling grenade, sending all parties running for separate shelters.

  “We’ve got one late arrival to go,” Carter continued. “Jacques Lucas is coming down from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Should be about another fifteen minutes. But we can get things started. Have a seat.”

  I was pleased to hear Lucas’s name. He’d been recommended earlier by Lacoste in Montreal as someone with Frazier’s degree of generosity in interagency cooperation. Given the vastness of the RCMP—they were the Canadian equivalent of the DEA, FBI, Secret Service, Border Patrol, ATF, and most everything else, all rolled into one—a helpful, willing contact would be nice to have. Of course, the size of their organization tended to make the Mounties about as fast and flexible as a supertanker in mid-river, but it also endowed them with quasi-supernatural powers—and computers to match.

  Judy Avery, still bearing the stylistic rigidity of a military background, began by curtly nodding in my direction when we’d all sat back down after formal introductions. “Nice job on your interrogation. From what Walter’s been telling us, your source sounds pretty reliable. We checked out what he told you of past crossings and found several corroborations with our own data.” She pulled a map out from under the other paperwork strewn across the table and laid it open. “Within the last month, here, west of Richford, and here, not far from the railroad tracks west of North Troy, we picked up probes from what we thought might be the Sonny network, and which your efforts have just confirmed. Those were individual crossings, probably made to test our reaction.”

  “We know they’ve been successful elsewhere, though,” picked up Abe Gross, from INS, “because we talked to a couple of newcomers twelve days ago, and they were not professional crossers.”

  “Right,” added Carter. “One of our agents took ’em near Highgate Springs, just north of here. They came in skirting the water, along a footpath where we had a mobile sensor just a few weeks before. It was dumb luck we caught ’em. One of our units drove up before their ride did, on routine patrol.”

  “You got no information on who was supposed to pick them up?” I asked.

  Gross answered for him, “They didn’t know. They’d been told where to go, and to wait for a ride—”

  “Which we provided them,” Carter added, to general laughter again.

  Judy Avery pointed to her map. “That’s another confirmation by your source, of course, since he mentioned Route 133, too. But apart from one other crosser who was caught wading along Mud Creek, just east of Province Hill Road, who did trigger one of our monitors, those were the only entries we knew about. These other spots you’ve identified are news to us, and some of them are located right where we have sensors.”

  “Infrared units,” Carter mused, “which means if you know where they are, you can step around to their back.”

  I had gotten to my feet by now, to gain a better perspective on
the map. “Can we back up a little? I see a lot of roads that cross the border. Where exactly are the points of entry, and how’re the Border Patrol units deployed?”

  Avery was across the round table from me and guided me from her seat, even though the map was upside down to her. “Here we are at sector headquarters, just below Swanton. Our substations in Vermont are east of Swanton on Route 78, and in Richford, Derby, and Beecher Falls, right next to New Hampshire.”

  Andy Marcotti of Customs, looking slightly bored, was sitting next to her. He suddenly joined in, adding, “We’ve got twelve ports of entry altogether. Most of them aren’t manned twenty-four hours, though. They’re just little outposts—one-person operations that handle the odd car or pickup now and then. If there’re any immigration problems, they’ll either call for help or direct the vehicle to the nearest large port where INS has people working alongside ours, usually Highgate Springs or Derby Line, near Newport—those’re the two flagship ports.”

  Steve Moore, the Vermont State Trooper, added, in direct answer to my implied question, “Which means that a lot of those roads you mentioned are just there, open for grabs.”

  “Well,” Carter protested gently, “not exactly. Most of them have barriers across them, or will have soon.”

  Moore laughed. “Right, and the others have little signs telling you to go to the nearest port and report in.”

  “Those are monitored, though,” Avery explained, unamused, “for the most part with cameras, so if the crosser doesn’t show up at the nearest port, we know who to go after.”

  There was a telling pause, during which a small element of embarrassment in the air told me that everyone had perhaps overstated their case just a little.

  Avery, whose intelligence job allowed her the broadest overall view of reality, confirmed that impression. “It’s got its holes, and where we’ve tried to plug them, things aren’t always perfect. But our figures tell us our apprehension rate’s pretty high.” Here, she finally yielded to a self-deprecating smile. “But like they say—there are white lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

  There was a knock on the door, and a small, gentle-looking, rather dapper man, wearing a suit and a mustache, was ushered in, looking more like a lost European tourist than one of the Mounties of lore. Carter stood up and waved him over. “Jacques—glad you could make it. You know everyone here, right? These two are Joe Gunther and Lester Spinney. They basically got this whole ball rolling in the first place.”

  Jacques Lucas shook our hands, smiling softly, and murmured in a thick French accent, “I have spoken with Lacoste. You are to be congratulated.”

  I smiled in return, my mind abruptly reaching back to when I’d been a boy, visiting my Uncle Buster in Vermont’s so-called Northeast Kingdom. The subject of Mounties had come up, as it did with a lot of boys near the border in those days, and my uncle had reacted impulsively as usual, piling me, my brother, and a cousin into his truck, and taking us across the border to the nearest RCMP outpost he knew of. We’d marched across the threshold with bated breath, fully expecting a room filled with scarlet-clad, blond-haired young gods, all standing at least six and a half feet tall, and were met instead by a single, older, slightly rotund corporal, sitting at a desk, dressed in a uniform about as colorful as a tree trunk. He’d been very kind, and had showed us recruiting posters of the ideal we’d come to meet—had even pulled out his dress uniform, hanging in a closet—but we’d never recovered, and it wasn’t until I was a cop myself when a variation of the same awe I’d once felt for them returned with the realization of just how huge and powerful their organization was.

  As a result, despite his demure appearance, I shook Jacques Lucas’s hand with respect. I also responded to his praise. “I’m not sure compliments are in order. We may be zeroing in on a whole lot of nothing.”

  Lucas waved away my pessimism and settled into the last chair at the table, nodding and smiling at the others in a generalized greeting. “I would like to say to all of you that I wear today two hats. The Québec Provincial Police know that I am here, and I am expected to report back to them also.”

  Avery was back at her map, brusquely efficient once more. “We were just discussing the points of entry the Sonny network has supposedly targeted. It is pretty obvious to me, at least, that more has gone into the choosing of these spots than just running a few people across and seeing if they get caught. As Bob just pointed out, some of the infrared sensors are being bypassed surgically, which indicates a precise knowledge of their location and orientation. And judging alone by the small number of people we’ve caught, we know that information wasn’t obtained by blind luck. That implies help from local residents, perhaps on both sides of the border.”

  Bob Carter spoke up again, since it was mostly his troops who maintained relations with the people whose properties straddled or abutted the boundary. “We looked into that as soon as we heard about this network. Comparing that list with the geographic points your Nguyen Van Hai gave us, we did come up with a few that match.” He stabbed the map with a blunt finger at three points.

  “I don’t think Truong’ll use those,” I said softly. “He’d have to assume that any contact he’d heard about and used through the Asian old-boy system would be known to Da Wang or his confederates and open to attack if things got hot. It makes sense that he would’ve kept a private route or two up his sleeve.”

  Judy Avery immediately seized on the idea. “How would he develop them?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “The safest approach would be to find someone who lives on the border, but who’s never been involved in Asian smuggling before—or maybe any smuggling at all—and who could be bought.”

  Carter, ever gregarious, laughed. “Hell—sounds like me.”

  Marcotti, of Customs, whose presence here was obviously a polite formality, let out a gentle sigh. “Let’s look at the ‘when’ for a minute.”

  Steve Moore spoke up immediately. “The Grateful Dead concert.”

  Heads nodded all around the table. Carter agreed. “It’s already giving us fits. We don’t know if there’ll be sixty thousand attending that thing, or a hundred and sixty. As it is, we’ve canceled all leaves, stolen people from other substations, and coordinated with every law-enforcement agency north of Burlington, including you folks.” He nodded at VSP Lieutenant Steve Moore.

  With everything else I’d had to focus on, a Grateful Dead concert rang only a vague bell. “When is this, and where?”

  Surprisingly, I thought, it was Jacques Lucas who answered. “In two days. We and the QPP have also gathered as many men as we can. It will take place in Swanton.”

  “At the fairgrounds, east of town,” Carter added. “Right next to our substation there. In fact, we’re telling the whole Swanton crew to bunk in for a couple of days, ’cause getting back and forth by car’s going to be a joke.”

  There was a moment’s silence as we all considered the obvious—the concert was a custom-made opportunity for Truong to make his move.

  “Yeah,” Spinney asked, “but does he melt into the crowd, or cross over as far away from the action as he can, where we got one cruiser covering twenty miles?”

  Almost simultaneously, several voices answered for one choice or the other. Avery straightened from studying the map and looked around. “Guess we’ve got a problem.”

  I leaned toward Spinney and whispered in his ear, “Hold the fort—I want to give Dan a call.”

  He nodded, and I slipped out to find a phone. Dan Flynn answered, as usual, halfway through the first ring, “VCIN—Flynn.”

  “It’s Joe. Can you put Digger on the other line?”

  “Shirtsleeve.” Digger’s voice had all the enthusiasm of a bored morgue attendant.

  “I think Truong’s going to bypass everything Nguyen gave us. He knows damn well we’ll make an offer, and he knows what Nguyen’s got to trade. Who do you have in your system up here who’s really wired to the locals—goes to church with ’em, maybe busts th
eir kids when they get drunk, remembers birthdays? Somebody who’s as local as they are.”

  I could hear Flynn start to type in the background, but Digger merely growled, “Richard Boucher—Border Patrol. Works out of Derby.”

  “He’s tied into the locals, including the ones living on the border?”

  Digger sounded disgusted. “That’s what you wanted, right?” The line clicked as he hung up his extension.

  Dan laughed a little nervously, no longer typing. “Well, I guess there you have it.”

  It being near the end of his shift, Richard Boucher was still at the Derby substation. I explained who I was, what I was up to, and why I was calling. He’d already heard the first two pieces of information—no surprise considering that we’d used his substation to store the contents of Truong’s fire-blackened safe.

  His voice was low, slow, and oddly comforting. He picked up immediately on the kind of person I was after. “Someone we’ve never thought twice about—maybe the average honest citizen who’s suddenly in a financial jam and has something Truong could buy.”

  There was a thoughtful pause. “There’s Eugene Blood. He lives alone with his sister, and she’s dying of Alzheimer’s. He’s had to mortgage his farm to pay the doctor bills. He’s got a hundred acres east of Derby Line, and the boundary cuts right through the middle of ’em.”

  “What made you think of him?”

  “I don’t know how much you know about me, but I was born up here and I’ve lived here all my life, except for the first few years as a patrolman on the southern border. So I’ve known the Bloods since I was little, and I’d never seen Gene so low as these last months. It got so I dropped by their place almost every time I went on patrol, just to give a little support. About three days back, Gene seemed a whole lot happier. But when I asked him why, all he said was that he’d sold some equipment and come into a little money. He wouldn’t go into details and tried to get away from the subject as quick as he could. I hate to say it about an old friend like that, but what you just asked me fits him pretty well.”