Duel to the Death Read online

  On the drive Ali dearly missed her Cayenne’s updated music system, which she usually played at full volume, singing along with some Broadway show tune or other. The antique AM/FM radio in the Bronco’s dashboard was one thing Bob Larson hadn’t quite gotten around to replacing. With no music surrounding her, Ali had nothing to do during her open-highway commute but drive and think.

  She had come a very long way in the past several years. After earning a journalism degree at NAU in Flagstaff, Ali had spent years in the television industry, working as a well-respected newscaster, first on the East Coast and later as a local anchorwoman on a station in L.A. That part of her life had been blown to smithereens when she hit her early fifties and was suddenly deemed “too old” to be on the air. At almost the same time, Ali had learned that her second husband, the late and unlamented Paul Grayson, was a philandering piece of crap. She had folded her tent in California and had come back home to Arizona to recuperate and figure out what to do with herself.

  Now, years later, Ali was living a reinvented life. She’d gained a daughter-in-law, Athena, and a pair of grandchildren—the twins, Colin and Colleen. Along the way, she’d bought and refurbished the home on Manzanita Hills Road where she now lived with her third and, as B. himself liked to put it, “final” husband.

  Theirs had been an unlikely romance, and one Ali had resisted initially. For one thing, B. was fifteen years her junior, but love had won out in the end. They were full partners now, both in life and in High Noon Enterprises. B. was the public face of their booming cyber security firm while Ali worked mostly behind the scenes.

  The public part of the business meant that B. had been on the road, mostly overseas, for the better part of two weeks, renegotiating contracts in back-to-back, eyeball-to-eyeball meetings. He was due home tonight, and Ali was looking forward to the two of them being able to spend some quiet alone time together. The need for constant travel wasn’t B.’s first choice or Ali’s, either, but for right now, that was the way it was. While B. was out and about, Ali stayed home, minding the store, handling a myriad of administrative functions, making sure the bills got paid and the lights stayed on, and doing whatever else needed doing, which today meant helping Stu Ramey get a driver’s license.

  5

  When the call ended, Graciella Miramar checked the charge on her encrypted phone. It was low. After switching it off, she hooked it up to one of the charging cables in the small, specially designed safe concealed under the hardwood flooring in her bedroom closet. “Come home to Sinaloa,” she muttered under her breath. “Not bloody likely.”

  That may have been her father’s plan, but it wasn’t hers. For one thing, Graciella had never even been to Sinaloa. El Pescado’s armed compound certainly wasn’t home to her, and she had no intention of living there in what would amount to little more than a glorified prison. However, just because she refused to live in Sinaloa didn’t mean Graciella had no interest in taking over the Duarte Cartel.

  In her estimation, the use of human mules to lug backpacks loaded with illicit product back and forth across international borders was a business model that needed to be relegated to the history books. Graciella wanted to be in charge of something far more elegant than that. When El Pescado’s gang came under fire, as it inevitably would, Graciella had absolutely no interest in being gunned down by automatic weapons fire in some kind of Wild West shootout with either the federales or else members of some rival gang. That kind of an ending might be suitable for her half brothers, but not for her.

  Long term, Graciella wanted to be out of the drug business entirely but with her own money and that of her father’s collapsed drug cartel still intact. In order to do that, she would need a suitable partner, and she already had one in mind. For the past week, while home on bereavement leave, she’d worked feverishly to that end, and bit by bit the pieces were falling into place. If everything worked out the way she hoped, Graciella’s new partner would be an artificial intelligence named Frigg. The AI had once belonged to a client of hers who was now deceased.

  At the moment Graciella wasn’t even sure Frigg still existed. If she did, she was most likely in the care and custody of a guy named Stuart Ramey who lived in Cottonwood, Arizona. Graciella had already embarked on the mission to find out for sure because, if Frigg was still extant, Graciella was determined to make Owen Hansen’s AI her own—with or without Stuart Ramey’s help.

  Yesterday had been Graciella’s last full day of bereavement leave. Today she was due in at the office. And by this afternoon, the surveillance feeds she had ordered would be up and running in both Stuart Ramey’s residence and at his place of work. When she knew for sure that Frigg was operative again, Graciella would determine her next move.

  Once dressed, Graciella called the office. Naturally, her boss answered the phone. Just hearing Arturo Salazar’s voice was enough to make her skin crawl. “I’m on my way in,” she told him, “but I’m going to be a few minutes late. I have to make arrangements to ship my mother’s ashes home to her family.”

  “If you need to take another day off, do so,” Arturo told her.

  “That’s very kind of you,” she said, “but really. I’m ready to be back at work. Being home here without her is just too hard.”

  “Of course,” Arturo said. “I understand.”

  Out in the living room the funeral urn still sat next to the front door in exactly the same place where the driver from the mortuary had placed it when he delivered Christina Miramar’s cremains. When the man from the funeral home had called late the previous afternoon to say that the ashes were already en route, Graciella had wanted to tell him to go ahead and keep them, but she had realized just in time that a reaction like that would most likely arouse suspicion and get people started asking too many uncomfortable questions.

  Once the urn arrived, Graciella wasn’t sure what she should do with it. Put it on display somewhere in the living room and tell anyone who asked that she was honoring her mother’s wishes, or hide it in the back corner of a closet? Now, though, she was grateful that El Pescado’s unexpected request had solved the problem.

  Bending over to pick up the urn, she was surprised by how much it weighed, but she shouldered the burden with a happy heart. The shipping office was just up the street. She wouldn’t have to carry it far.

  6

  When Ali drove through the entrance to the Mingus Mountain Business Park that Friday morning, she caught sight of Stu, pacing back and forth. She couldn’t tell if he was eager or anxious about getting started.

  In the preceding year, High Noon’s landlord, the business park’s former owner, had gone through financial straits. That had occurred at a time when B. and Ali had been hoping to change their lease and take on additional space inside the facility. Instead of negotiating a larger lease, they had purchased the property outright.

  Of all the original businesses in the complex, only High Noon remained while the complex underwent extensive renovations. With the other offices vacant, there were very few vehicles in the parking lot. The cars belonging to High Noon employees were parked close to their entrance at the far end of the building. The other vehicles present belonged to various contractors and construction workers, and those were clustered toward the north side of the building. Since the parking lot was essentially High Noon’s private property these days, Ali deemed it a suitable site for Stu Ramey’s stick shift driving lesson.

  Pulling up next to him, Ali rolled down the Bronco’s driver’s-side window. “Ready to rumble?” she asked.

  “I guess,” he said dubiously. “I hope so.”

  “Don’t worry,” she assured him breezily. “You’ll be fine.”

  Except Stu wasn’t fine—not even close. The man was a certifiable genius when it came to operating computers. He was also a self-taught and very capable musician who could play the piano like nobody’s business. But when it came to operating a standard transmission, he was utterly hopeless. It was impossible for him to get the hang of coordi
nating the movements of both feet in order to operate both the gas pedal and the clutch at the same time. Every attempt to change gears was greeted by howls of protest from the old Bronco’s transmission. Time and again the aging vehicle shuddered, shook, and stalled out, killing the engine. Throughout the ordeal, Ali silently thanked her lucky stars that her father was back home in Sedona and well out of earshot.

  No amount of verbal coaching on Ali’s part seemed to do the trick. Finally, giving up, she dropped to the floorboard and grabbed Stu’s ankles, bodily lifting and lowering them as required. Fortunately casual dress was a way of life at High Noon Enterprises, and the jeans Ali had put on that morning ended up being no worse for wear. By the end of a humiliating thirty-minute-long struggle, Stu was finally beginning to get the idea, enough so that Ali was able to return to the passenger seat. She remained there while they did two more relatively smooth circuits of the parking lot with Stu starting, stopping, and shifting up and down as required. His performance wasn’t absolutely perfect, but it was good enough for Ali to declare the lesson over.

  “That’s it for today,” she told him. “You’ve made great progress.”

  “Really?” Stu asked, sounding uncertain.

  Despite the fact that the windows were rolled down and the outdoor temperature was in the mid-60s, Stu was drenched in sweat.

  “Really,” she answered. “You’re probably not ready to take my dad out for a joyride anytime soon, but here’s the thing. You know for sure that if you’re ever faced with a situation where it’s a choice between driving a standard transmission or walking, you’ll be able to make it work. Over time, we’ll be able to practice as needed, but as far as your driver’s test is concerned, no one is going to make you use a standard transmission.”

  “What do you think I should do?” Stu asked.

  “Grab the first available test appointment and get it out of the way once and for all.”

  “Okay,” Stu agreed. “I’ll give them a call.”

  He pulled into one of High Noon’s designated parking places and brought the Bronco to a stop in a reasonably competent fashion. Handing the keys over to Ali, he hurried inside. As Ali started to exit the Bronco, her phone rang with B.’s phone number showing in caller ID. She was accustomed to keeping two time zones in her head at any given time—where she was and where B. was.

  “Hey there,” she said in greeting. “Are you at the airport getting ready to board?”

  “Hardly,” B. grumbled. “I’m in a cab headed back into London. Fortunately, I was able to call Claridge’s and grab a hotel room before they filled up completely.”

  His reply left Ali puzzled. “Grab a hotel room?” she asked. “Why? Aren’t you supposed to be coming home tonight?”

  “Slight change of plans,” he said. “I guess you haven’t exactly been glued to the news.”

  Ali felt a sudden clench in her gut, fearing that somewhere in the world there had been another awful terrorist attack. Unfortunately those were becoming the norm these days.

  “I’ve actually been giving Stu a driving lesson, so no, I haven’t seen the news. What’s up?”

  “British Airways is having some kind of major computer glitch that has shut down their operations worldwide. Heathrow is a war zone, and it’s going to take days to untangle all the canceled flights. There was no point trying to get booked on something else. I was already in the check-in line when it happened. Fortunately, I still had my luggage with me. The best course of action was to make my way back to the hotel and wait it out. All I wanted was to be home, have a chance to sleep in my own bed, and enjoy the comfort of a home-cooked meal. Is that too much to ask?”

  Ali had stayed at Claridge’s and had dined there as well. It didn’t exactly qualify as a hardship posting. She was tempted to call B. out for unnecessary whining, but she didn’t, and she didn’t laugh at him, either. He was traveling, weary, and frustrated, and he wanted to be home.

  “Look,” she said, “how about if I get on the phone and see if I can stitch together some kind of program that will get you home as early as possible?”

  “Would you?”

  “As in spare no expense?” she asked.

  “As in,” he murmured.

  Knowing she’d just been green lighted to utilize a chartered jet if needed, Ali headed into her office. She settled in at her computer terminal. First she sent a text to Alonso, letting him know that B.’s flight had been delayed and that he should ditch their dinner plans.

  After that Ali did a quick survey of the news surrounding the chaotic situation at Heathrow. Things had obviously gotten much worse between the time B. had called her and now. Fistfights had broken out inside the airport, and authorities were having to deal with near-riot conditions among the ranks of angry stranded passengers. Ali could see that B. had been incredibly lucky to have snagged both a cab and a hotel room.

  7

  When Owen Hansen had first brought his book of business to Recursos Empresariales Internationales at number 18 Vía Israel in Panama City, Panama, he didn’t win any popularity contests. The people who worked there discovered that as a client he was demanding, exacting, and unreasonable. He ran through three different account managers in very short order.

  Of all the account reps who worked for Arturo Salazar, Graciella Miramar was by far the top producer, but that didn’t make her Arturo’s favorite, not by any means. For one thing, he’d been pressured into hiring her by none other than one of his best customers, Felix Duarte, who had then insisted that his accounts be assigned to this dowdy new hire. Arturo wondered about why El Pescado would take such a singular interest in someone like Graciella, who was the antithesis of hot. Arturo’s initial assumption was that she must have slept with Felix, but when she absolutely rebuffed Arturo’s own amorous advances, he revised that suspicion and settled on the idea that Graciella had something else on Felix that he wanted kept quiet. In Arturo’s playbook, if sex wasn’t the answer, blackmail was always an excellent alternative.

  Faced with the dilemma of retaining a valuable but difficult new customer while at the same time preventing a revolt among his unhappy employees, Arturo had passed Owen Hansen and his unreasonable demands along to Graciella. Arturo didn’t make that change as a favor to Graciella, and at the time he wondered how long it would be before Owen Hansen took his business elsewhere, but that didn’t happen because Owen Hansen and Graciella seemed to hit it off immediately.

  For one thing, they were two sides of the same coin, and each had only one interest. For Owen it was himself. For Graciella, it was accumulating money. Graciella appreciated the fact that, in all their dealings, Owen—unlike some of her other clients—never once made a pass at her. She accepted the fact that he was a braggart, but there was plenty for him to brag about. He knew everything there was to know about computers. As far as Bitcoins were concerned, he was both a visionary and an early adopter who established one of the first and most efficient Bitcoin mining operations. That aspect of his business alone had turned him into a highly profitable client.

  Owen had other investment accounts in addition to his Bitcoin holdings. Graciella watched those without necessarily managing them, and was always amazed by the astonishing rates of return in which his accounts routinely outperformed everyone else’s.

  But there was another part of Graciella’s dealings with Owen Hansen that never made it onto the books at Recursos Empresariales Internationales. While working there, Graciella had earned a well-deserved reputation as a logistics expert. Some of the arrangements she made—property transfers and aircraft purchases—were totally aboveboard. But many of the transactions she conducted, both for El Pescado and his associates and later on for Owen Hansen as well, were negotiated as a side business and conducted over the dark Web.

  When Owen was in town, they often went across the street to the Multiplaza Pacific Mall and had lunch at P.F. Chang’s. The restaurant was one Arturo was known to use as a launchpad for his various work-based amorous adventures
. Graciella didn’t care for the place, but since it was one of Owen’s favorites, too, she accompanied him there without objection.

  At one of those lunches, on a day when the latest quarterly earnings reports had been posted earlier in the morning, she had noticed that, as usual, Owen’s investment accounts were the hands-down winners. “How do you do that?” she had inquired.

  “Do what?”

  “Find investments that consistently outperform everyone else’s?”

  “That’s not me,” he told her, “that’s Frigg.”

  “Frigg?” she had asked. “Who’s Frigg?”

  He looked around the restaurant and when he was satisfied that no one was listening, he answered her question in a hushed voice. “Not who is Frigg,” he corrected with a smile and the easy confidence that came from having done business together for years. “You should be asking me what is Frigg.”

  “And?” Graciella interjected.

  “She’s an artificial intelligence, one that I created all by myself. She manages the collection of computers that do all my blockchain processing. She also manages my investment accounts. She’s so damned smart, that if I needed her to, I think she could help me get away with murder.”

  “An artificial intelligence,” Graciella repeated. “Like a computer program, you mean?”

  “She’s actually a lot more than that,” Owen said. “Would you like to meet her?”

  “I guess,” Graciella replied.

  Owen reached into his pocket, pulled out a cell phone, and pressed the speaker button. “Good afternoon, Frigg,” he said. “I’d like you to meet a business associate of mine, Graciella Miramar. Would you mind saying hello?”

  “I’m happy to meet her,” Frigg said. “Would she prefer to conduct our conversation in English or Spanish?”

  Graciella shot Owen a questioning look. “How does she know I speak Spanish?”