THE TUNNEL WAS ABOUT TEN FEET DEEP AND RAN for two miles toward the United States under the sage-brush desert midway between Tijuana and Mexicali. Its southern opening was accessible through a trapdoor in the rear of a barnyard storage shed. Its northern opening was a small cleft in the hillside at the bottom of an arroyo within eyeshot of the California border. The old tales said it had been dug by Jesuit priests wishing to secrete away a portion of their abundant wealth—al—leged to have been gathered through outlawed trade with pirates and Manila galleons—when the jealous Spanish crown ordered its confiscation in 1767. Over 230 years later, it remained a busy conduit for smuggling operations, although the clandestine traffic was now in narcotics and illegal immigrants bound for America. “The occasion makes the thief,” went the Mexican saying.
Tonight, some thirty yards from the tunnel’s northern entrance, two stripped-down, lightweight all-terrain vehicles and a dusty old Chevrolet pickup sat hidden from Border Patrol agents by a carefully arranged screen of manzanita and chamiso. The truck’s windshield had been blown out, and broken glass was sprayed all over the hood and interior. Both men inside were dead, slumped backward in their seats, the woven upholstery soaked with blood and chewed to ragged scraps by the fusillade of bullets that had passed through and around their flesh. Their pants were drawn down over their ankles, their severed genitals stuffed into their gaping mouths. Each of the lifeless ATV drivers had been shot, mutilated, and left sitting in an identical fashion.
Above the blind of shrubbery that surrounded the vehicles, a dozen men were positioned on sandstone ledges along the east and west walls of the gulch, the four-by-fours in which they had arrived from Tijuana parked at a distance. They carried Mendoza bullpup submachine guns with tritium dot sights and lamp attachments. On the outcropping nearest the tunnel mouth was a wiry, dark-skinned young man with a neat little chin beard and coal-colored hair swept straight back from his forehead. He stood flattened against the slope in a toss of shadows cast by the dim light of a quarter moon. Beside him on the rock shelf was a can-shaped metal object with a thin telescoping antenna on top. His weapon against the leg of his blue jeans, he studied the tunnel mouth from his elevated vantage, not suspecting that he, too, was being observed.
Higher up the arroyo’s western slope, Lathrop crouched behind a wide slab of rimrock, his mouth slightly open, his upper lip curled back, almost seeming to sniff the air as he watched the men below with intense fixation. It was an attitude queerly resembling the flehmen reaction in cats—the detection of airborne trace molecules with the Jacobson’s organ, a tiny, exceedingly acute sensory receptor in the roof of the mouth that, like the tailbone, remains vestigial in humans, and whose function is something between smell and taste, endowing the feline with what is often taken for a sixth sense.
Lathrop had held an affinity for cats since childhood, was fascinated by their ways, owned three of them even now—though this was in all probability nothing but coincidence with regard to his own flehmen, of which he was altogether unconscious.
Calm, motionless, wholly focused in on his surveillance of those below, Lathrop watched from his solitary position of concealment. His face was daubed with camouflage cream. He had on lightweight black fatigues and tactical webbing with a .40 caliber Beretta in a hip holster. Lying beside him on the ground was his SIG-Sauer SSG 2000 sniper rifle. The firearms had been brought only as a precaution. If he were forced to use either of them, it would mean he’d botched the whole setup.
Peering into the eyepiece of his miniature DVD camcorder, Lathrop switched it to photo mode and made a minor adjustment to the night-vision scope coupled to its lens.
He’d have a lot of extra material on disk before he was finished, but better that than to take the chance of missing something important. Anyway, whatever was nonessential could be edited out when he input the digital images to the wallet-sized computer on his belt.
“Okay, Felix, let’s do it with feeling,” Lathrop whispered under his breath.
He zoomed in tightly on the bearded man and pressed the Record button.
Guillermo hated going into the hole. Hated entering a shed piled with swine feed to lower himself onto a precarious wooden staircase that creaked, swayed, and buckled with each downward step. Hated the stifling heat inside by day, the miserable cold by night. Hated the low roof pressing down overhead, forcing the tallest men to stoop as they walked. Hated the close dirt walls, crudely shored up in places with wood and concrete but still looking as if they might collapse around him without warning. Hated the skitter of rodents and insects in darkness so thick you could almost feel it pouring over your skin, smothering you like black sludge. Perhaps more than anything else, though, he hated the fetid odor of sweat, unwashed clothing, and bodily wastes that permeated the narrow tunnel despite the swamp coolers used to pull fresh air through ventilation shafts along its entire length.
He hated going into the hole, yes, hated every moment of every passage he’d made through its cramped, stinking twists and turns, but he knew with an absolute certainty that without it he’d never have lasted a decade, more than a decade, in an occupation that had put many behind prison bars in a fraction of that time. It was because of the hole that he’d had unmatched success at eluding the border patrols, because of the advantage it gave him over the competition that the Salazar brothers had turned an ever-increasing volume and diversity of trade his way. There were dozens of coyotes on the peninsula to whom Los Reyes Magos de Tijuana granted their blessing and protection, but Guillermo was sure that none besides himself would have been entrusted with this latest bulk shipment, sixty kilograms of high-quality black-tar heroin, worth a fortune on the norteamericano wholesale market. And while the job was far riskier than others he’d carried out for them in the past, it was also less work than having to hustle together enough people who could afford his thousand-dollar-per-head fee to make a border crossing worth the trouble. Most often he was booking agent and conductor rolled into one. Tonight, the train had been filled prior to his involvement, and he had merely to bring it up to the line to receive his payment from Lucio Salazar.
Un coyote, sí, Guillermo thought reflectively. This was the popular label for a smuggler of human beings and contraband, and he was well aware not all its connotations were flattering. Fast, canny, and dangerous, wise to the lay of the land, the creature was also an opportunist that scavenged its meals wherever and however it could. Sí, sí, why take shame in it? The environment Guillermo inhabited tolerated moralists poorly, and he much preferred survival to becoming a righteous casualty.
His flashlight shining into the gloom now, he moved through the tunnel ahead of the Indians who had back-packed the heroin from Sonoma—thirty-five villagers by his hasty count, none older than twenty, most teenagers, perhaps a third of them girls—the youthful couriers themselves followed at gunpoint by a half dozen of the Salazars’ forzadores, their enforcers. It made for, what, fifty people, give or take, double the number he’d brought down with him on any previous run, easily double. Madre Dios, he hoped these walls could withstand the tread of all those feet.
Imagined or not, the increased danger of a cave-in during this particular run only worsened Guillermo’s usual state of unease. As, he supposed, did the rifles being leveled at the niñas. One of them in particular, a pretty fourteen- or fifteen-year-old, had reminded him of his own angelic daughter, who was about her age and had hair that was the same length, that even fell over her forehead in an uncannily similar way ... though he wasn’t willing to let their resemblance lead him to any exaggerated assumptions. The government was fond of propagandizing that the Salazars had turned remote villages in the Gran Desierto and further south across the Sierra Madres into armed camps and sources of slave labor. But why did that portrayal make no mention of the abominable conditions that the inhabitants had endured before their “occupation,” of families starving in shelters pieced together from the remnants of cardboard boxes until the Salazars arrived and replaced them with permanent dwelling
s? Which alternative left them better off? Guillermo didn’t know, hadn’t enough information to form a balanced opinion, and at any rate, it was truly none of his affair. The train was not his. He had only to mind his business and guide it along toward Estación Lucio, as it were. And collect.
Guillermo rounded an abrupt bend in the path, widening the variable focus of his flashlight. It revealed countless overlapping footprints in the earthen floor, some of them fresh, others little more than faded scuffings that were probably generations older than he was.
Then the conical beam glanced off a heap of scattered rubble that Guillermo recognized as a trail marker of sorts. He was nearing the last portion of the underground march. In another fifty, sixty yards, the tunnel would ascend to its exit on the western side of the arroyo, where Lucio’s men would await him with their transport vehicles. Guillermo would have a short rest as they loaded up, and then it would be back into the hole for the return trip with the villagers and forzadores, tiring work for the fittest of men—and the growing paunch above his belt was conspicuous evidence he had never been especially good at self-maintenance.
Guillermo continued on for another fifteen minutes or so before the ground began to rise, and the tunnel’s stagnant atmosphere was relieved by a stream of fresh air from outside. Soon afterward, he noticed a wash of spectral moonlight through the break in the rock face that opened into the gully.
He increased his pace despite his weariness, impatient to reach it.
Felix Quiros had been patient. Resisting any impulse to act prematurely, he had waited for several breathless moments after Guillermo appeared from the tunnel’s entrance, waited until the long line of mules had filed into the arroyo behind the stupid fucking cabrón, even waited until all but a few of the Salazar forzadores had emerged—which was to say, until he was positive that the entire shipment of heroin had been carried out—before he reached a hand down to the radio detonator’s transmitter unit on the ledge beside him.
Then, with a quick tug on its antenna to be certain it was fully extended, he flipped the device’s firing switch.
Inside the tunnel, its receiver sent a jolt of current through the wires leading to the multiple TNT satchel charges that Quiros and his men had planted along the final yards of the passage, covering them from sight with stones and loose earth.
The explosion was virtually instantaneous. It clapped and rolled through the arroyo, shaking its very walls, a fantastic claw of flame and smoke lashing from the tunnel’s entrance. Debris pelted from the spiky edges of the fireball like meteors, buffeting the forzadores who had been last to exit the tunnel as its sides came tumbling down in a cascade of blasted rubble, slamming some to the ground.
Felix aimed his bullpup at Guillermo and opened up on him, taking him out with a rapid volley that knocked him onto his back, his legs jerking and kicking, his hands on his spurting chest. Felix poured several more rounds into him and, when he finally stopped moving, began to rake the bottom of the gully with fire, raising little geysers of sand and pebbles into the air, fanning his weapon from side to side even as his men did the same from their own perches. Screaming in pain and terror, the helpless young mules were cut down where they stood, some crawling on the ground under their bulky loads in futile attempts to reach cover.
Meanwhile, the handful of stunned forzadores who remained on their feet had begun blindly triggering their own weapons at the outcrops, but they were easy, exposed targets for the scissoring barrage from the ambush positions.
The men on the slopes continued to lay down fire until all movement in the gully had ceased. Paused in the echoing, smoking stillness. Reloaded. And on Felix’s signal chopped out another sustained hail of bullets, emptying their magazines into the sprawled bodies below, making sure every one of them had been left a corpse.
The slaughter had taken less then ten minutes from beginning to end.
Lathrop kept recording for a while longer, wanting to catch a scene of Felix and his men as they descended into the arroyo for the scag. They worked fast, cutting the straps of the dead couriers’ bundles with folding knives, then tearing them from their backs and gathering them into a single huge mound. While this was going on, a few of Felix’s hombres split off from the rest and went scrambling toward the north end of the gulch, presumably to bring the vehicles they’d use to haul away their score.
Lathrop considered waiting for them to return, maybe taking a shot of them in the process of loading up, but rejected the idea almost immediately. He’d got Felix hands down for the killings and the snatch, got what he needed from A to Z. Why push the envelope? Sometimes there was a temptation to make too much of a game out of things. He knew his weaknesses and had to be careful about giving in to them. No way a guy in his position could afford that.
Not unless he wanted to join Guillermo and those other victims who’d come out of the tunnel with him in the great hereafter.
Carefully detaching the night scope from his camcorder, Lathrop put both back into their cases, shouldered his weapons, and silently retreated into the darkness.
FIVE
VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 2, 2001
“ANY SUCCESS CONVINCING LANG TO PAY FOR HIS chits?” Nimec asked, and held up his punch mitt.
“You’re starting to sound like Roger.” Megan threw an off-balance left jab that barely nicked the padded leather.
“Shit,” she muttered, winded. Her face was glistening with perspiration.
“Let’s go, keep your rhythm.”
“We’ve been at this for almost an hour, might be a good time to call it quits—”
“Uh-uh.”
“Pete, I’m bushed. It isn’t coming together for me this morning, and I still have to get showered for work—”
“What I hear, you were tired in Kaliningrad when you took down an armed assailant. Way before you started these lessons.”
“I had no choice then.”
“You don’t now, either,” he said, sidestepping to the right. “Breathe deep. And stay on me!”
Megan opened her mouth and swooped in some air. Keeping her left foot in front of her right, she pivoted toward him and took another shot. It landed more solidly, closer to the white target dot in the center of the mitt.
“Better,” he said. “Again.”
Her fist snapped out, caught the edge of the dot.
“Again! Keep that arm in line with your lead foot!”
Her next punch was precisely on the spot.
“Good,” Nimec said. He stepped in closer, pressing her, flicking the mitt past the side of her cheek. “Cover up, I could’ve nailed you right there. And what do you mean ‘like Roger’?”
Megan raised her arms, tucked her chin low to her collarbone. Her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, she was wearing a white sweatband around her head, a white tank top with an Everlast logo in front, black bike shorts, and Adidas sneakers.
“I mean that you’re both assuming Bob feels he owes us,” she said.
Bob, Nimec thought.
“Doesn’t he?”
“I think he thinks we’re even.”
“With regard to what? The time we saved a nuclear sub from being hijacked with the President aboard? Or found out who did the Times Square bombing after his people got steered down the garden path?”
Megan let his question ride, bouncing on her knees to stoke her energy. They were in a regulation fight ring on the top level of his San Jose triplex condominium, the entire floor a sprawling rec/training facility that included, in addition to the professionally equipped boxing gym, a martial arts dojo, a soundproofed firing range, and an accurate-down-to-the-reek-of-cigarette-butts-awash-in-beer reproduction of the South Philadelphia pool hall where the blush of youthful innocence was slapped off Nimec’s cheeks by the harsh red glare of neons when he was fourteen or so. Megan had never spoken to him about that period of his life at any length, never gotten the gist of why he looked back on a past that included being the junior member of a father-son hustling team
, a borderline juvenile delinquent, and, by her standards, a victim of child exploitation—what else would you call being kept truant from school to hold a cue stick in a dive full of chronic gamblers?—with such obvious fondness. Whether this was because her own upbringing was so different from his, she couldn’t really say for sure, but Ridgewood, New Jersey, might as well have been worlds away from downtown Philly, and while she’d taken courses on Old and Middle English at Groton prep, there had been nary a mention of draw, follow, left, or right English in the offered curriculum.
She concentrated on her workout now, measuring Nimec with repeated flicks of her outthrust fist as he continued side-shuffling to her right, protecting the outside margin of the defensive circle he’d taught her to imagine around herself.
“Back to Lang,” he said. “We have to utilize the NCIC database if we’re going to get the intelligence we need.”
“And his inclination is to ask the director to okay us,” she said. “Right up to the highest classification levels.”
“Up to,” he said.
She nodded.
“But not including.”
She nodded again.
“That won’t cut it,” he said. “Your average uniformed cop can input the overall system from his prowl if it’s got an onboard computer. I want Lang to arrange for unrestricted access.”
Nimec lifted both mitts in the air. She threw a one-two combination, followed through with a straight left, and blocked another swipe at her head without surrendering any canvas.
“It gets sort of complicated,” she said. “National security’s foremost with him.”
Nimec looked confused.
“He doesn’t trust us?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then complicated how?”
“I’d rather not explain it right now.”
She saw his frown of confusion deepen.
“Leave it alone, Pete. I’m flying to D.C. again in a couple of days. We’ll see what Bob’s got to say.”
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