Category: Action/Thriller Publisher: Steve Haberman
ISBN-10: B0081SO1XA
Type: Fiction
Pages: 292
Copyright: May 8, 2012
A CIA agent, haunted by a past failure, discovers inner strength one lonely morning, when he most needs it.
Pablo de Silva is an agent in the CIA’s Eyes and Ears Unit, whose work includes surveillance and killing. But on a Berlin mission he fails to save a fellow agent, who’s also his lover.
Tormented by this, sick of violence, held now in low regard by his colleagues, he gets transferred to recuperate till his former mentor/head of the Unit calls him home with a new assignment. Liaise with the San Diego FBI and see why two Defense Department contractors, headquartered in that city, were murdered abroad. Are terrorists behind it? If so, inform the Unit’s head, and he’ll take over.
To de Silva, the task seems simple. Off he goes to San Diego and beyond, not realizing he’s slipped again into a dangerous world. Who are his true allies? Should he watch his back as well as his front? Not until the shocking conclusion of his mission one lonely morning does he find out. And not until that morning do his allies discover Pablo de Silva is much more than he seems.
Excerpt
Chapter 1, DIRTY WORK
Outside his hotel, Pablo de Silva paused. Too many daiquiris last night, and his reflexes weren’t as quick as he’d like. What if the police catch me loading the drop site with the envelope? No diplomatic immunity, if arrested. Maybe prison. Maybe the Agency will disown me. Respected Guatemala City hotelier unmasked as CIA spy, caught with---No, he warned himself. Forget any sensationalist headline. Focus on delivering the photos at the cemetery. He set off for Avenida La Reforma.
Minutes later along the tree-lined avenue of grand hotels, he was sweating. He slowed to catch his breath in the Monday morning heat.
In the distance at her daily post to waylay passersby, plump Marta stooped with baskets of trinkets to sell to feed her kids. What he wondered as he strolled closer, did I give the Agency that might have caused her husband’s murder?
He fumbled in his pocket for his roll of American twenties, while waving a greeting, when he heard a mechanical rattle behind. He noticed then she didn’t, as usual, smile at him. He glanced sharply left, toward the boulevard. But it was too late.
Marta screamed.
Two men leaped from a dark sedan at the curb.
A heavyset man hit him side on like a football player, lunging for a tackle. Instinctively, de Silva jabbed an elbow into the man’s stomach to defend himself.
The heavyset man howled in pain.
“Get him into the car,” another man, this one with an American accent, shouted.
“I’m trying, but he’s stronger than he looks,” his accomplice said and kneed de Silva from behind.
De Silva felt a leg buckle. He back kicked with his other leg, but couldn’t stop himself being dragged toward the sedan’s rear passenger door, then pushed inside.
He heard the car doors slammed shut and locked. Handcuffs clamped on. The heavyset man threw him onto the floorboard and pinned him down with a boot. The driver jammed the gas. The car shuddered, stalled.
“Gun it!” the man with the accent shouted from the front passenger seat.
Marta kept screaming.
“This Chevy the best you could hot-wire?” The driver stomped again on the pedal. Once. Twice. A third time. The engine caught, back-fired, then the Chevy lurched ahead in a sudden burst.
A boot heel jammed hard against de Silva’s temple. His arms went limp from pain. The heavyset man roughed around in his jacket and snatched the envelope of photos from his inside coat pocket.
Several blocks from the hotel they slowed to lose themselves in traffic, and that tactic heightened de Silva’s alarm. They must be professionals, he realized. You train for a possible abduction. You think you’re prepared. Yet when it happens, you’re trembling, and your heart’s pounding. But you stay calm. You do what Langley taught. You remember for any post-kidnap debrief, if you’re lucky to survive.
The man in back, about two hundred pounds. Reeks of sweat. Wears a leather jacket, middle button missing. Gold ring, third finger, left hand. A digital camera on his lap.
The driver, thin as a pole. An unlit cigarette stuck in his mouth. Sunglasses propped on his bald head. Cadaverous, dark eyes.
The man in the front passenger seat. Kinky, grayish brown hair tied into a pony tail. A diamond stud in his right ear lobe. Probably the leader and watcher for police or roadblocks.
Each captor likely armed.
“Read me his particulars,” the man with the American accent said.
“One gold membership card to a polo club,” the heavyset man said.
“Bingo, we use it. What else?”
“One voucher for whitewater rafting.”
“His name on it?”
“No, nothing.”
“His name, his name, we want things with his name.”
“Here, we go. A wrinkled black-and-white of a lovely brunette with”—he flipped it over—“’to Pablo, my love. Katarina’ on the back. She the girlfriend a terrorist took out in Berlin?”
“She’s the one. Bingo for that for proof of ID. What else?”
“A credit card and press clippings about his hotel.”
“Into the envelope, all those particulars. That should do it.”
He went quiet, and so did his accomplices. In the silence, de Silva heard a riot of honks from cars, as they drove along a downtown thoroughfare. He heard street vendors cry out tamales for sale. Children screamed with joy, as they played at a school playground or park. But as they zigzagged through the boulevards and streets, he couldn’t pick up any marker to orient himself in a city of several million.
After a time he inhaled a nauseating stench, and he had his marker. He knew where they probably were, somewhere in Zone 3 in the northwest part of the city that housed the largest garbage dump in Central America.
The stink got stronger, and he realized they must have neared its vicinity.
“Christ almighty,” the heavyset man said. “It smells like gaseous shit.”
“Don’t you puck on us,” the man with the accent warned. “Cover your nose with your handkerchief. We’ll be in and out in no time.”
De Silva felt his stomach heave. His scalp prickled sweat. For a moment, he feared he might throw up and choke on vomit. But he pressed his nose into his jacket’s sleeve, took in small breaths, and the queasiness passed.
They braked at one of the gates to the dump. The driver spoke Spanish to a female guard, bantering, de Silva thought, as if he knew her. American dollars exchanged hands, and they were again on the move, this time into a wasteland that sprawled, he had heard, over forty acres that could encompass twelve football fields. As they drove, he believed it. They cruised through the stench and grinding whine of garbage trucks unloading trash, the man in the front passenger seat instructing the driver, “Not here,” and, “Keep moving,” as though reconnoitering a choice area…to murder me? de Silva wondered.
Outcasts live in this landfill of used syringes, broken glass, and decomposing human and animal bodies, he thought. And here, I might be killed. And the police will ignore whatever any dump dweller witnessed.
“This spot,” the man with the American accent said at last. “It looks deserted enough.”
This is it, de Silva thought, as they wrenched him out of the car. They kicked him as he stumbled through mounds of garbage, and he understood. They want a look of terror of my face for a ransom photo or for sadistic pleasure before they shoot me. Don’t give them what they want. Don’t show fear. Whatever happens, meet it with dignity.
The man with the accent led the way up a hill of refuse. The heavyset accomplice, his kerchief pressed to his face, and the driver yanked de Silva along by his arms, his hands still cuffed. On the backside, they planted their feet forward carefully as they descended so they wouldn’t fall onto crates with protruding nails. Finally they reached a valley of sorts, where several mutilated cats lay.
“Hey you,” the man with the American accent shouted.
De Silva glanced across to the top of the opposite hill of debris. A tiny woman, a bucket in one hand, a baby strapped to her back, stared down at them.
“Get out of here,” the man ordered in Spanish, waving her away. “Get!”
Then they were alone. Now a blindfold, though not stretched tightly to hurt his eyes, which de Silva thought odd. Tied loosely, as though for effect, and over the top of the cloth off to his right, he glimpsed a flock of vultures, flapping enormous wings, alight on a tree limb.
With dignity, he reminded himself. He straightened his back. He tightened his mouth into stoic determination, bracing.
The heavyset man took two frontal snaps of him.
“That’ll do it.” The man with the accent whipped off the blindfold. In minutes, they were in the Chevy and out of the wasteland into a maze of boulevards and streets to a new destination.
A cell phone went off in front. “We’re on our way to La Aurora International with your guy,” the man with the accent answered into his phone. Your exfil point was spot on, George. His attention was diverted. Poor kid never saw us coming.”
De Silva felt a needle sting his arm. And more confusion. Had the man been speaking to George Hart?
“Go, go!” de Silva heard the man in front shout to his driver, as he drifted off. “No one’s on our tail.”
And with wheels squealing, the driver geared to a higher speed.
Professional Reviews
"fast paced and full of action and danger...a good spy and drama story." Mary Bearden
Intricate plotting is probably more necessary in a spy novel than in any other story and The Killing Ploy has it in spades.
While there are many characters including the good, bad and ugly, CIA agent Pablo de Silva is our main man as he journeys from Langley, to San Diego, Tijuana, London, Paris, Brussels and Vienna in pursuit of an American-born jihadist who might be preparing to raise the body count in his war against America.
Unbeknownst to Pablo and while he thinks he is being given a second chance after a screw-up that cost lives, he is actually being used as bait to flush out and fiend the jihadist whose whereabouts and current appearance are unknown.
Suffice it to say Pablo does have his talents. He is fluent in four languages, is patient and very observant, and is desperate to clear his reputation as he plays the deadly cat and mouse game of espionage.
