Persuader

by the elbow.
    "I made some calls," she said. She held up her Nokia like she was proving it to me.
    "Good news and bad news."
    "Good news first," I said. "Cheer me up."
    "I think the Toyota thing might be OK."
    "Might be?"
    "It's complicated. We got Beck's shipping schedule from U.S. Customs. All his stuff comes out of Odessa. It's in the Ukraine, on the Black Sea."
    "I know where it is."
    "Plausible point of origin for rugs. They come north through Turkey from all over. But Odessa is a heroin port, from our point of view. Everything that doesn't come here direct from Colombia feeds through Afghanistan and Turkmenistan and across the Caspian and the Caucasus. So if Beck's using Odessa it means he's a heroin guy, and if he's a heroin guy it means he doesn't know any Ecstasy dealers from Adam. Not in Connecticut, not anywhere. There can't be a relationship. No way. How could there be? It's a completely different part of the business. So he's starting from scratch as far as finding anything out goes. I mean, the Toyota plate will give him a name and an address, sure, but that information won't mean anything to him. It's going to be a few days before he can find out who they are and pick up their trail."
    "That's the good news?"
    "It's good enough. Trust me, they're in separate worlds. And a few days is all you've got anyway. We can't hold those bodyguards forever."
    "What's the bad news?" She paused a beat. "It's actually not impossible that someone could have gotten a peek at the Lincoln."
    "What happened?"
    "Nothing specific. Just that security at the garage maybe wasn't as good as it might have been."
    "What does that mean?"
    "It means we can't say for sure that something bad didn't happen." We heard the truck's roller door rattle upward. It banged against its stop and a second later we heard Eliot calling us urgently. We stepped over there expecting to find something good. We found another transmitter instead. It was the same tiny metal can with the same eight-inch filament antenna. It was glued to the inside of the sheetmetal, near the loading door, about head height.
    "Great," Duffy said.
    The load space was packed with rugs, exactly the same as we had seen before. It could have been the same van. They were rolled tight and tied with rough string and stacked on their ends in descending order of height.
    "Do we check them?" the old guy asked.
    "No time," I said. "If somebody's on the other end of that transmitter they'll figure I'm entitled to maybe ten minutes here, nothing more."
    "Put the dog in," Duffy said.
    A guy I hadn't met opened up the rear of the DEA van and came out with a beagle on a leash. It was a little fat low-slung thing wearing a working-dog harness. It had long ears and an eager expression. I like dogs. Sometimes I think about getting one. It could keep me company. This one ignored me completely. It just let its handler lead it over to the blue truck and then it waited to be told what to do. The guy lifted it up into the load space and put it down on the staircase of rugs. He clicked his fingers and spoke some kind of a command and took the leash off. The dog scampered up and down and side to side. Its legs were short and it had a problem making it up and down between the different levels.
    But it covered every inch and then came back to where it had started and stood there with its eyes bright and its tail wagging and its mouth open in an absurd wet smile like it was saying so where's the action ? "Nothing," its handler said.
    "Legit load," Eliot said.
    Duffy nodded. "But why is it coming back north? Nobody exports rugs back to Odessa.
    Why would they?"
    "It was a test," I said. "For me. They figured maybe I'd look, maybe I wouldn't."
    "Fix the seal," Duffy said.
    The new guy hauled his beagle out and Eliot stretched up tall and pulled the door down.
    The old guy picked up his soldering iron and Duffy pulled me away again.
    "Decision?" she said.
    "What would you do?"
    "Abort," she said. "The Lincoln is the wild card. It could kill you." I looked over her shoulder and watched the old guy at work. He was already thinning the solder join.
    "They bought the story," I said. "Impossible not to. It was a great story."
    "They might have looked at the Lincoln."
    "I can't see why they would have wanted to." The old guy was finishing up. He was bending down, ready to blow on the join, ready to turn the wire dull gray. Duffy put her hand on my arm.
    "Why was Beck talking about the Uzis?" she asked.
    "I