by Don Winslow
Five hours later, a fishing boat beats its way up from Puertocitos through a heavy headwind. It anchors two hundred yards from shore, puts out its lines and waits for dusk. Then one of the “fishermen” stretches out flat on the deck and trains an infrared telescope on the beach in front of two stone houses.
He spots a woman in a white dress walking unsteadily down to the water.
She has long blond hair.
Art hangs up the phone, drops his head into his hands and sighs. When he looks up again, he has a smile on his face. “We got her.”
“Don’t you mean 'him,’ boss?” Shag asks. “Let’s not lose focus here. Getting Barrera is the point, isn’t it?”
Fabián Martínez is still in his cell, but he’s feeling a little better about life in general.
He’d had a good meeting with his attorney, who had assured him that he didn’t have to worry about the drug charges—the government’s witness was not going to appear, and certain people had been given information about the soplón.
The arms charge is still a problem, but the attorney has a genius idea about that, too.
“We’ll see if we can get you extradited to Mexico,” he said. “On the Parada murder.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“First of all,” the lawyer said, “Mexico doesn’t have a death penalty. Second, it will take years to bring you to trial and in the meantime . . .”
He let it hang. Fabián knew what he meant. In the meantime, things will get fixed. Technicalities will emerge, prosecutors will lose enthusiasm, judges will get vacation ranchos.
So Fabián lies back on his mattress and thinks he’s in pretty good shape. Fuck you, Keller—without Nora you’ve got nothing. And fuck you, La Güera. I hope you’re having a nice evening.
They won’t let her sleep.
When she first got there, they wouldn’t let her do anything but sleep, and now they won’t let her shut her eyes. She can sit down, but if she starts to doze they pick her up and make her stand.
She aches.
Every part of her—her feet, her legs, her back, her head.
Her eyes.
Worst of all, her eyes. They burn, they throb, they feel raw. She’d give anything to lie down and close her eyes. Or sit, or stand—just close her eyes.
But they won’t let her.
And they won’t give her any Tuinol.
She doesn’t want it; she needs it.
She has an awful pins-and-needles feeling in her skin, and her hands won’t stop quivering. Add to that the slamming headache and the nausea and . . . “Just one,” she whines.
“You want things, but you don’t want to give anything,” the interrogator says.
“I don’t have anything to give.”
Her legs feel like wood.
“I disagree,” the interrogator says. Then he starts in again, about Arthur Keller, the DEA, the tracking device, her trips to San Diego . . .
They know, Nora thinks. They already know, so why not just tell them what they already know? Just tell them and let them do what they’re going to do, but whatever it is I can get some sleep. Adán isn’t coming, Keller isn’t coming—just tell them something.
“If I tell you about San Diego, will you let me sleep?” she asks.
The interrogator agrees.
He takes her through it step by step.
Shag Wallace finally leaves the office.
Gets in his five-year-old Buick and drives to a parking lot outside the Ames supermarket in National City. He waits there for twenty minutes before a Lincoln Navigator pulls into the lot, slowly cruises around, then pulls up beside him.
A man gets out of the Lincoln and into the Buick with Shag.
He sets the briefcase on his lap. The latches open with a metallic snap, then he turns the briefcase so that Shag can see the stack of wrapped bills inside.
“Are police pensions any better in America than they are in Mexico?” the man asks.
“Not much,” Shag says.
“Three hundred thousand dollars,” the man says.
Shag hesitates.
“Take it,” the man says. “It’s not as if you’re giving information to the narcos, after all. This is from one cop to another. General Rebollo needs to know.”
Shag blows a long breath.
Then he tells the man what he wants to know.
“We need some proof,” the man says.
Shag takes the proof from his jacket pocket and hands it over.
Then he takes the three hundred thousand dollars.
A south wind blows up the Baja Peninsula, pushing warmer air and a layer of clouds over the Sea of Cortez.
With no more satellite photos, Art’s latest intelligence is now eighteen hours old, and a lot could have happened in those hours—the Barreras could have left, Nora could be dead. The cloud cover shows no sign of breaking up, so the intelligence is only going to get older.
So what he has is what he’s going to get, and he has to act on it quickly or not at all.
But how?
Ramos, the one cop in Mexico he could trust, is dead. The head of the NCID is on the Barreras’ payroll, and Los Pinos is backpedaling on the campaign against the Barreras in six gears of reverse.
Art has only one choice.
And he hates it.
He meets John Hobbs on Shelter Island, the sailing boat marina in the middle of San Diego Harbor. They meet at night, across from Humphreys by the Bay, and walk along the narrow stretch of park that flanks the water on the way out to the point.
“You know what you’re asking me to do,” Hobbs says.
Yeah, I do, Art thinks.
Hobbs tells him anyway. “Launch an illegal strike on the sovereign territory of a friendly country. It violates about every international law I can think of, plus a few hundred national laws, and could trigger—you’ll forgive the unhappy phrase—a major diplomatic crisis with a neighboring state.”
“It’s our last chance at the Barreras,” Art argues.
“We stopped the Chinese shipment.”
“This one,” Art says. “You think Adán will quit? If we don’t get him now, he’ll set up the arms-for-drugs deal and FARC will be fully equipped inside six months.”
Hobbs is silent. Art walks beside him, trying to read his thoughts, listening to the sound of the water as it laps on the rocks beside them. In the distance, the lights of Tijuana sparkle and wink.
Art feels like he can’t breathe. If Hobbs doesn’t go for this, Nora Hayden is dead and the Barreras win.
Finally, Hobbs says, “I couldn’t use any of our normal assets. We’ll have to outsource this, double-blind.”
Thank you, God, Art says to himself.
“And Arthur,” Hobbs adds, turning to him. “This can’t be a bag job. We could never explain to the Mexicans how we got the Barreras into custody. This will not be a law enforcement operation, it will be a covert intelligence action. This will not be an arrest, it will be an extreme sanction. Are you all right with that?”
Art nods.
“I need to hear you say it,” Hobbs insists.
“It’s a sanction,” Art says. “That’s what I want.”
So far, so good, Art thinks. But he knows John Hobbs won’t walk away from this without extracting his price. It doesn’t take long.
“And I need to know your source,” Hobbs says.
“Of course.”
Art tells him.
Callan walks from the beach back toward the cottage he’s renting. It’s a cool, foggy day on the NoCal coast, and he likes it that way.
It feels good.
He opens the door to the cottage, pulls his .22 and points it.
“Eeeeezy,” Sal says. “We’re good.”
“Are we?”
“You walked off the reservation, Sean,” Sal says. “You should have talked to me first.”
“You’d have let me go?”
“With the right precautions, yeah,” Sal says.
“What abou
t the hit on the Barreras?”
“Old news.”
“So we’re good,” Callan says, not lowering his aim. “Thanks for telling me. Now leave.”
“I got a job offer for you.”
“Pass,” Callan says. “I don’t do that kind of work anymore.”
That’s okay, Scachi tells him, because we’re not talking about taking any lives this time. We’re talking about saving one.
They decide to go in from the water.
Art and Sal pore over detailed area maps and decide it’s the only way to get in quickly. A fishing boat will go up from the south at night, and they’ll embark on Zodiacs and land on the beach.
Now it’s a matter of time and tide.
The Sea of Cortez has extreme tides—the low tide can ebb hundreds of yards, and that distance would make a quick raid impossible. They can’t get across hundreds of yards of open beach. Even at night, they’d be spotted and mowed down before they got near the houses.
So the window for a successful raid is narrow—it has to be night, and high tide.
“We have to go between nine and nine-twenty,” Sal says. “Tonight.”
It’s too soon, Art thinks.
And maybe too late.
Nora talks all about her last visit to San Diego.
How she went shopping, what she bought, where she stayed, how she had lunch with Haley, a nap, a run, dinner.
“What did you do that night?”
“Hung out in the room, ordered dinner, watched TV.”
“You were in La Jolla and you just watched TV? Why?”
“Just felt like it. Being by myself, hanging out, vegging out in front of the tube.”
“What did you watch?”
She knows she’s going down the slippery slope. She knows it, but there’s nothing she can do about it. That’s the nature of slippery slopes, isn’t it? she thinks. What I really did that night was go to the White House and meet with Keller, but I can’t say that, can I? So . . .
“I dunno. I don’t remember.”
“It wasn’t that long ago.”
“Dumb stuff, you know. Some dumb movie. Maybe I fell asleep.”
“Pay-per-view? HBO?”
She can’t remember if the Valencia has pay-per-view movies or HBO or anything. She’s not sure she ever even turned the TV on there. But if I say I watched a pay movie, then that would show up my bill, wouldn’t it? she thinks. So she says, “I think it was HBO or Showtime, one of those.”
The interrogator senses that he’s moving in on the kill. She’s an amateur; a professional liar is vague about everything. (“I don’t remember—it might have been this, it might have been that.”) But this woman had been certain and detailed about everything that she’d done. Up until her account of the evening, when she became uncertain and evasive.
A professional liar knows that the key is not to make his lies look like the truth, but to make his truth look like lies.
Well, her truth looks like truth, and her lies?
“But you don’t remember what the movie was.”
“I was, you know, channel surfing.”
“Channel surfing.”
“Yeah.”
“What did you have for dinner?”
“Fish. I usually have fish.”
“Watching your weight.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll be back in a bit. While I’m gone, please think about what movie you watched.”
“Can I sleep?”
“If you sleep, you can’t think, can you?”
But I can’t think if I don’t sleep, Nora worries. That’s the problem. I can’t think of any more lies, I can’t keep them straight, I’m not even sure myself what happened and didn’t. What movie did I watch? What movie is this? How does it end?
“If you can remember what you watched that night, I’ll let you sleep.”
He knows the process. When put under enough pressure, the mind will create an answer. It doesn’t matter if it’s fact or fantasy in this case. He just wants her to commit to an answer.
In exchange for sleep, the woman’s mind will “recall” the information. It might even seem real to her. If it turns out to be so, fine. But if it turns out to be false, she will have given him the crack from which everything else will splinter.
She will fall apart.
And then we will have the truth.
“She’s lying,” the interrogator tells Raúl. “Making things up.”
“How can you tell?”
“Body language,” the interrogator says. “Vague answers. If I put her on a polygraph and ask her about that particular evening, she fails.”
Do I have enough to convince Adán? Raúl wonders. So that I can dispatch this lying bitch without starting a civil war with my brother? First Fabián sends a message through his lawyer saying that the woman is the soplón. Now the interrogator is on the edge of catching her in a lie.
But do I wait?
For Rebollo to get us a definitive answer? If he can get us an answer?
“How long before you break her?” Raúl asks.
The interrogator looks at his watch. “It’s five o’clock now?” he says. “Eight-thirty, nine at the latest.”
Now the clouds are on our side, Art thinks, as the fishing boat cuts through the choppy water. He listens to the rhythmic slapping of the hull against the small waves that break against the bow. The bad weather that had obscured their intelligence-gathering operations is now working for them, hiding them from the view of spotters on the coast as well as other boats, some of them doubtless loaded with Barrera security.
He looks at the men sitting silently on the deck. Their eyes shine bright against their blackened faces. Smoking has been forbidden, but most of the men have unlit cigarettes playing nervously in their lips. Others chew gum. A few talk quietly, but most just sit and stare out at the gray fog glimmering under the moonlight.
The men wear Kevlar vests over black jumpsuits, and each man is his own arsenal, carrying either a Mac-10 or an M-16, a .45 pistol on one side of his belt and a wicked, flat, palm-leaf-killing blade on the other. The vests are festooned with grenades.
So these are the “outside resources,” Art thinks.
Where the fuck did Scachi get them?
Callan knows.
It’s old-fucking-home week, sitting here with the Red Mist boys, some of them his old bunkmates from Las Tangas, waiting to do what they do.
“Interdict the terrorists’ arms supply at its source,” was the way Scachi had put it.
Three Zodiac boats covered with canvas tarps are lashed to the deck. There will be eight men to a boat and they’ll land fifty yards apart. The men in the two northernmost boats will head toward the larger house. The crew of the third boat will make for the smaller cottage.
Whether or not we get there is a good question, Callan thinks.
If the Barreras have been tipped off we’ll be walking into a cross fire coming from stone houses, pinned down on a bare beach with no cover but the fog. The beach will be littered with bodies.
But they won’t stay there.
Sal’s been clear about the spec: No one is to be left behind. Dead or alive or anywhere in between, they’re getting back on the boat. Callan glances over at the pile of cinder blocks on the aft deck. “Headstones,” Sal called them.
Burial at sea.
We ain’t leaving no bodies in Mexico. Far as the world is concerned, this was a hit carried out by a rival narco looking to take advantage of the Barreras’ current difficulties. If you get captured—and don’t get captured—that’s what you tell them. No matter what they do to you. Better idea? Swallow your gun. We ain’t the Marines—we won’t be coming to get you.
Art goes below.
The strong smell of diesel fuel makes his stomach lurch. Or maybe it’s nerves, Art thinks.
Scachi’s drinking a cup of coffee.
“Like old times, huh, Arthur?”
“Almost.”
“Hey, Ar
thur, you don’t want this to happen, say the word.”