When his drug-smuggling grandmother is murdered for informing on her employers, a journalist takes justice into his own hands
Four old women return from a Bahamas vacation with four more suitcases than they had when they left. They leave them behind at baggage claim, and a stranger picks them up—disappearing with the extra suitcases and the hundreds of pounds of cocaine they hold. The grandmothers are smugglers, supplementing their social security with criminal income, but one of them is tired of the deception. Doris goes to the DEA to out her boss, a vicious drug lord named Trelana, and when he learns she has snitched, her age does not buy mercy.
Doris’s grandson, Drew Jordan, is a journalist with fantasies of life as a commando. Now it’s up to him to avenge the woman who raised him, and get retribution even if the whole international drug trade stands in his way.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jon Land including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
When his drug-smuggling grandmother is murdered for informing on her employers, a journalist takes justice into his own hands
Four old women return from a Bahamas vacation with four more suitcases than they had when they left. They leave them behind at baggage claim, and a stranger picks them up—disappearing with the extra suitcases and the hundreds of pounds of cocaine they hold. The grandmothers are smugglers, supplementing their social security with criminal income, but one of them is tired of the deception. Doris goes to the DEA to out her boss, a vicious drug lord named Trelana, and when he learns she has snitched, her age does not buy mercy.
Doris’s grandson, Drew Jordan, is a journalist with fantasies of life as a commando. Now it’s up to him to avenge the woman who raised him, and get retribution even if the whole international drug trade stands in his way.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jon Land including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
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Overview
When his drug-smuggling grandmother is murdered for informing on her employers, a journalist takes justice into his own hands
Four old women return from a Bahamas vacation with four more suitcases than they had when they left. They leave them behind at baggage claim, and a stranger picks them up—disappearing with the extra suitcases and the hundreds of pounds of cocaine they hold. The grandmothers are smugglers, supplementing their social security with criminal income, but one of them is tired of the deception. Doris goes to the DEA to out her boss, a vicious drug lord named Trelana, and when he learns she has snitched, her age does not buy mercy.
Doris’s grandson, Drew Jordan, is a journalist with fantasies of life as a commando. Now it’s up to him to avenge the woman who raised him, and get retribution even if the whole international drug trade stands in his way.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jon Land including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781453214398 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 412 |
| Sales rank: | 963,099 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Jon Land is the USA Today–bestselling author of The Tenth Circle, Pandora’s Temple (winner of the 2012 International Book Award and nominated for a 2013 Thriller Award for Best E-Book Original Novel), and five other books featuring Blaine McCracken, Land’s iconic series hero, for Open Road Integrated Media. He also pens the critically acclaimed Caitlin Strong series, which includes Strong Rain Falling and Strong Darkness, winners of the USA Best Book Award in 2013 and 2014, in the Mystery and Thriller categories, respectively. Now with thirty-seven books to his credit, Land will soon be working on a new title for Open Road, in which McCracken teams up with Land’s other bestselling series hero, Jared Kimberlain (The Eighth Trumpet and The Ninth Dominion). Land lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and can be found at jonlandbooks.com and on Twitter with the handle @jondland.
Read an Excerpt
The Council of Ten
By Jon Land
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1987 Jon LandAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4532-1439-8
CHAPTER 1
"SO, SOPHIE, YOU GONNA kill him or what?"
Doris Kaplan grasped her friend's bony shoulder and squeezed it lightly.
"Huh? What?"
"The fly," Doris said, eyes aiming at the insect creeping up Sophie Guttenberg's sleeve. "You've been watching him long enough. Swat him before he bites."
When Sophie shrugged lamely and returned to shuffling her tarot cards, Doris reached across the airline seat and struck out at the fly still meandering about her friend's liver-spotted arm. The insect avoided the strike easily and flew away.
"There," Doris said, "that's all you had to do."
Sophie Guttenberg shrugged again and began laying the tarot cards out in neat rows.
The NO SMOKING—FASTEN SEATBELTS sign flashed on, and a stewardess announced that they had begun their descent into Palm Beach International. At last, thought Doris Kaplan. The flight had been an hour late leaving Nassau and she had stupidly packed her heart medication—"life pills" she called them—in her suitcase. Not that she really needed the red capsules. She was sure the old ticker was fitter than ever despite what Dr. Morris Kornbloom wanted her to believe. Damn cardiologists had to say something that got you back into their office once a month. Still, the bottle of life pills would have made a reassuring bulge in her handbag, as opposed to sitting in her toiletry case deep within the airplane's cargo hold.
"Gin!" Fannie Karp screeched from across the aisle, plunging her final discard face down atop the pile resting on a tray table. "How many points, Sylvie? Come on, how many points?"
Sylvia Mehlman frowned in displeasure. "I don't know. Let me count."
"Count? You don't have to count," accused Fannie. "You keep a running tab all the time. Who do you think you're talking to here?"
Sylvia feigned adding up the point total of her cards. "Thirty-eight. And I'm finished for today."
"Finished? You can't be finished. You still have me by at least a hundred."
"We're landing, for God's sake."
"One more hand," Fannie insisted, her arthritic, knobby hands gathering up the cards to be shuffled again.
Amazing, Doris Kaplan reflected, simply amazing. The Business had made both women rich beyond the measure of most, but death had been threatened more than once as a result of this quarter-cent-per-point gin game. Of course, the gin game had been part of their lives longer than the Business. But old habits die hard once you reach the mystical seventies, where feeling good seems a memory to be catalogued with all the others. Doris supposed that their thrice-yearly Business trips to the Bahamas were as much for distraction as anything else. You could look at only so many condo developments sprouting up along the beach and moving trucks negotiating the narrow coastal roadways before you realized that more than life was passing you by.
Doris Kaplan felt the plane's wheels lowering beneath her. Then she heard Sophie gasp.
"There it is," Sophie muttered, thrusting a trembling skeletal finger down at her arrangement of tarot cards. "Just like I thought." Her face was milk-white when she turned to Doris. "Something terrible's going to happen. The cards say so."
"Right," Doris returned softly, passing her off. "And you've been playing with the damn things since we left Nassau. How long did it take you to come up with that combination?"
"It's fate, I tell you, fate. We're being warned."
"More like the law of averages."
Sophie huffed and turned her attention back to her neat array of cards, focusing on the one marked Death in the upper right. Across the aisle from them, the final gin game was being interrupted by a stewardess insisting that all tray tables had to be placed in their upright, locked position.
"But I'm only one card away," pleaded Fannie. "One card!"
The stewardess smiled as politely as she could manage. "I'm sorry."
Sylvia had already seized the opportunity to gather up the cards and snap the tray table home. Fannie let her sure winning hand flutter to the aircraft carpeting, turning away and unhitching her seatbelt in an act of feeble defiance. If a sudden stop sent her lurching forward, it would serve the damn airline right.
Doris could only marvel at how a woman like Fannie had lasted so long in the Business, where secrecy and discretion were valued above all else. She guessed Fannie would have blurted out everything to her friends long ago, except the only friends she had were her three companions in this plane right now. It was no different for the rest. All the grandmothers had were each other, and mostly that was enough.
They had first met eight years before at the run-down apartment house that each tried to call home in Miami's South Beach. Never mind the terrors of being near seventy, widowed, and living on fixed incomes, which never left them enough money to get anything fixed except their teeth. Before long the Cubans had arrived and turned them into prisoners of rickety chaise longues set before a pool with perpetually green water that smelled of too much chlorine. It just wasn't fair. They had lived long enough to deserve better. At least that was what Doris had told herself constantly over the past five years, and up until very recently, the justification had held fast.
For the rest of the time Doris had done her best to feel no remorse over the thrice-yearly trips she and the other grandmothers made to the Bahamas. They had the rewards coming to them, didn't they? Even God Himself would understand that if He spent enough time trapped between stucco walls with Spanish music rising over Collins Avenue.
Doris's husband Sam had dropped dead of a heart attack at the tender age of fifty-two. It happened on the sixteenth hole of the members' course at the Westchester, New York, Country Club ten minutes after he complained of gas and two minutes after he kicked his ball twenty feet closer to the green. Doris took over his manufacturing business, and in a few short months had it running better than Sam had ever dreamed of, only to have a fire destroy everything but a safe containing the insurance policy he had let lapse.
The fates weren't finished with Doris yet, though. They sent a drunk driver into her son-in-law's station wagon on a rain-slicked night two years later. Her son-in-law died instantly, but it was two more days before the doctors could convince her that her daughter's brain was showing a permanent test pattern and the machines could be shut off.
So, at the age of fifty-four, Doris found herself raising her beloved five-year-old grandson, making the payments from various life insurance policies last until Andy hit college age. Then she tearfully sold the house she loved and headed south for what she hoped would be a simpler life in the sunshine. Even then, however, there were Andy's college payments to consider, and after that her insistence on supporting him until his career got off the ground. Doris had promised herself all those years ago that her grandson would never want for anything. The money was just about gone when the Business had started, but now even all the money she had made and good she had done could do nothing to ease the guilt.
Still, Doris figured that when you came right down to it, it was Andy who gave her an edge on her three friends. They, too, had grandchildren and families of varying sizes scattered across the country. But besides an occasional holiday card, sometimes a call, they were estranged and isolated; forgotten in the great South, which for all of them had once been little more than a mall-filled graveyard they hadn't known enough to lie down in. They had forsaken the repressed fear of South Beach for various locales throughout the Palm Beaches. The Business required that they spend summers as well as winters in the South, a condition that irked Doris because the summer convention trade spoiled the ambiance of the famed Breakers, where she had taken up permanent residence.
"Doris, are you all right?" Sophie was asking, all ninety shriveled pounds of her.
Doris blinked and realized that the plane had finished its taxi and people were crowding into the aisle. They were home.
"Just daydreaming," she said. "That's all."
Fannie had plowed a path forward and Doris followed her up the aisle, wondering what Sophie's tarot cards might have said if placed out five years before.
The grandmothers made their way slowly through Palm Beach International Airport. Doris would have opted for a quicker gait, except that Sophie seemed forever in slow motion these days and Fannie's size eighteen bulk had her winded between water fountains.
Doris could tell that the early fall day was hot, and she longed for the quiet cool of her air-conditioned Breakers rooms.
At last they reached the baggage claim area, where the conveyor belt had only just started its rolling display of bags. A number of travelers pushed forward to better their positions. The grandmothers hung back.
Four nondescript men stood apart from the scene, each with a large suitcase by his side. The casual observer would assume that their bags had been the first off the plane. Only the men hadn't been on the plane and neither had these particular suitcases.
"There's mine!" Fannie screamed. "Doris, see if you can grab it for me."
Doris excused herself forward into the mass and grasped the handle of Fannie's plaid monstrosity of a suitcase. One of hers emerged swiftly after, and she saw Sophie and Sylvie lifting one of theirs together from the conveyor.
The grandmothers set these bags back a bit and waited for the rest.
One of the four men started forward, sliding along a huge plaid suitcase. He feigned deep attention on the conveyor while he shoved his bag up next to Fannie's. Grabbing the handle of her suitcase instead of his own, he began to back up again.
Another of the four men approached, this one carrying a perfect replica of Doris's American Tourister.
The grandmothers kept their eyes fixed on the conveyor, searching for the rest of their bags. By the time all were accounted for, the nondescript men had melted into the crowd outside the terminal, each with a large suitcase dangling from his hand.
Doris went for a porter.
CHAPTER 2LANTOS HELD THE BRIEFCASE tighter as he approached the alley. Not that he sensed danger, but one had to be prepared for it nonetheless, especially because of what his briefcase contained. The Miami drop had been his domain for years, and Lantos had been happy with it. Only as of late—say, the last few years—had the city degenerated into the crime capital of the country. Foreigners were to blame if you asked Lantos; spics, Colombians, Cubans, and combinations thereof. Take them out of the picture and Miami might regain its old splendor and glamour.
Lantos had often considered requesting a transfer, but he always came up short of making it because he knew Miami and a new territory, even with all his experience, would be difficult to master. He knew every street, side street, and back road in Miami, and he had never used the same one twice. Never a pattern that might allow someone to turn him into a mark. And if they tried—well, Lantos was ready for that, too.
The problem with holstered or sheathed weapons was drawing them. For a weapon to be effective, you had to have it out at all times. But how? Lantos smiled at the memory of posing that precise question to himself years before. The answer was to rig three razor-sharp, four-inch blades into his briefcase—not at the front or back, but at the side, where maneuverability was at a maximum. When pressed, a button on the latch just beneath the handle forced the daggers to spring out. Assailants never knew what hit them. The very object they were after was turned into the instrument of their death. Lantos liked the justice in that. He had used the case often as a weapon, and always with success.
He heard the footsteps to his rear an instant before they were upon him. Lantos felt the hair on the back of his neck rise as he pressed the button. The three daggers, spaced inches apart, leaped out. From there he wasted no time, turning and swinging the now deadly weapon up in the same motion, the object being to take the assailant utterly by surprise.
But the assailant was already gone, a blur whirling by with something shiny in his band, a shape more than a person. Lantos swung his deadly briefcase in a wide arc. It swished through the air, again finding nothing as a big arm grasped him from behind and yanked backward. The knife bit into his back and made a neat slice straight into his heart. Lantos was dead instantly, even his grip on the cherished briefcase relinquished in the end.
The shape stooped to retrieve it and walked away into the night.
Doris Kaplan felt that Wednesday was going to be a bad day even before the phone call came. She had retired early Tuesday night, but by three A.M. had given up fighting to sleep and switched on the cable news channel. She watched it mindlessly until the sky showed its first brightness beyond the blinds, finally drifting off into an uneasy slumber with the words of the anchorman forming her dreams.
Awakening alone, in the darkness of her bedroom, was far more frightening than not being able to sleep at all, and it had been Sophie, of all people, who had advised her in this regard: Always sleep with a glass of water on your night table. Drinking water, Sophie said, was the best way to settle yourself down once coming awake in the black loneliness. Doris had found that the water worked exactly as Sophie had promised. She stored her red life pills next to the glass on the distant chance that they might be needed some night as well.
The phone's chiming shook her awake, stiff and cold in her chair, just after nine. Joints rebelling, she stumbled to the phone at her bedside.
"Hello?"
"Doris." The voice was soft between what sounded like sobs.
"Who—Sylvia, is that you? What's wrong?"
"She's dead, Doris," Sylvia moaned. "Sophie's dead...."
The police were already there when Doris arrived at Sophie's home on Embassy Drive in West Palm. Sylvia, seated in the living room, was being comforted by a police officer. Didn't she remember that Sophie never used the living room? When company came over, they sat in the kitchen or den, never here. Otherwise there'd just be another room for Sophie to clean.
"Oh, Doris!" Sylvia shrieked and Doris hugged her, smelling the too sweet perfume she had loaded on even at this early hour. She and Sophie went for a walk every morning at nine sharp. It must have been then that she ...
"Mrs. Kaplan?"
Doris turned to her left and saw an overweight man wearing a sports jacket with a badge pinned to his lapel.
"I'm Sergeant Nickerson, Mrs. Kaplan. Mrs. Mehlman informed us you'd be coming."
Doris eased Sylvia away from her. When Sylvia tried to cling, Doris grasped her shoulders firmly. "I'll be right back." She moved to Sergeant Nickerson, not caring about the makeup she had neglected to put on, and sighed. "How did it happen?"
"The doctors are with her now," Nickerson reported. "We think it was a heart attack. We're almost certain. Did she have a history of heart trouble?"
"Can you name me a seventy-six-year-old woman who doesn't? I'm sorry, Sergeant. Yes, she had a slight history. Nothing to speak of, though."
"It happened in her sleep, Mrs. Kaplan. She went quickly."
"Where is she?"
"Well, Mrs.—"
"I want to see her."
Sergeant Nickerson had started to object, but he silenced himself and nodded. "In the bedroom. Just as we found her."
There were no ropes or uniformed police anywhere on the stairs or on the way into Sophie's bedroom. This was not a crime scene, after all. It was a simple investigation of a natural death. Doris reached the doorway of Sophie's overly large bedroom and gazed in. The drapes were still drawn. Two men were hovering over the raised shape of her friend, who such a short time ago had claimed that the tarot cards predicted something terrible was going to happen. One man was taking notes while the other seemed to be performing some sort of perfunctory examination. Doris entered without announcing herself and moved to the foot of the bed where she could view her friend clearly.
The sight made her grasp her own heart fearfully and realize that her life pills were back in her room next to her water glass. There was never anything pretty about death. Sophie's eyes and mouth hung open in a twisted mask of frozen agony, her last instant of pain captured forever. Her eyes looked more sunken than Doris had ever seen them before. She had died lying on her back, most of her body under the covers. Doris caught the soft whirl of the air conditioner humming and smelled the sweet lavender that Sophie oversprayed throughout the room.
"Was it a heart attack?" Doris asked.
The men at Sophie's bedside seemed to notice her for the first time.
Yes," one of them said flatly, retrieving his medical bag from her night table.
"Aren't you going to close her eyes?"
"I'm sorry?" said the other.
"Her eyes. Aren't you going to close them?"
The two doctors looked at each other and shrugged. One of them leaned over and shut Sophie's eyelids.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Council of Ten by Jon Land. Copyright © 1987 Jon Land. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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