One of the two other Americans in the audience raised her hand and asked what was going on with the phones. She hadn’t been able to call the U.S. for the past few days. Not even her cell phone worked properly.
“The workers at Telmex are on strike,” answered the rep. Telmex was the telephone company. “It is regrettable. They will solve it soon, I’m sure.”
“Cell phones, too?”
“The area has never had good coverage,” said the rep apologetically. She changed the subject, asking if there were any volunteers for a neighborhood watch program. Saul’s hand shot up almost involuntarily.
“Very good, very good,” said the lawyer.
“I don’t know how good a lawyer she was, but she had a hell of a smile,” said Saul. “I felt things I hadn’t felt in twenty years.”
“You got a couple of guys heading your way out of town in a charger all duded up like a police car,” warned Shotgun over the radio.
“Are they police?” I asked.
“That’s what I said.”
“No. You said they looked like police.”
“Well, there’s no Dunkin’ Donuts in town, so how can I tell?”
“They’re private security,” said Saul, listening in on my side of the conversation. “They work for the company. They’re coming out to check on me.”
“Shotgun, get ready to get out here if I need you.”
“You got it. By the way, this little café is a hell of a place. You know the lady who owns it cooks up these tiny little honey ball things that are even better than Drake’s pies.”
I put a knife through the tire and slid it out on the ground where it would be visible. Veronica went to the car and pushed back her seat, making it look as if she were taking a nap. Saul leaned against his front fender, watching me work.
The police car—you had to stare closely at the insignia to realize it was private security—rounded the corner and came up slowly. As it slowed to a halt, Saul went over and spoke to the officers. They laughed, then drove on.
“They may be back,” he said. “I told them you have trouble with the nuts.”
“Story of my life.”
* * *
Saul was the only member of the neighborhood watch program. The security people mostly just humored him, letting him fill the truck up with gas whenever he wanted.
“What do they think about your shotgun?” I asked.
“They don’t know about it. I don’t tell them.”
I suspected they did know about it but chose not to make an issue.
“You know who bought the development?” I asked.
“No. But I have a good suspicion.”
“What’s that?”
“Drug dealers. Cartel. Trying to go legit. They probably see it as an investment. Shelter their money. Like the mafia did. Take over everything, then pretend they’re legal.”
“Did you know my grandparents?” Veronica asked.
“To nod at, sure. But they moved away months ago.”
“Where to?”
“Just left, as far as I know.”
“What about Arabs?” I asked.
“Arabs? Like with turbans and camels?”
“I doubt there’d be camels. People from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen maybe. Egyptians?” I named a few more countries in the Middle East.
“The only place you might find foreigners like that,” said Saul, “is out at the chicken farm. They produce Halal food, and sometimes the imams come out. I’ve seen one or two in town, on their way out.”
“Where’s that?”
“Other side of the hills, that way.” He pointed southeast. “I haven’t been there myself.”
“How do you know about it?”
“You hear about it. Every so often. In town. The Mexicans know everything, but they’re scared. They never talk to whites, not even me.”
I was done with the tire, and pretty much done with Saul as well. If the Mexicans were letting him roam around pretending to be the neighborhood watch, they must have him pegged as inept, harmless, or both. I put the tire I’d punctured in the trunk, slammed it closed, and got ready to leave.
“Thanks for the help,” I told him.
“Wait—don’t you want to know why I stopped you?” asked Saul.
“We stopped you,” I said.
“I need your help. I want to organize the rest of the citizens. We want to kick the cartel out.”
“That’s a pipe dream,” said Veronica. “You’re better off just getting out.”
“It sounds to me like you can leave anytime you want,” I added, opening the car door. “Just get in your truck and keep driving.”
“I can’t. They never gave my ID back. I can’t get across the border.”
“Frankly, I don’t think that’s much of a problem,” I told him.
VI
Neither I nor Veronica spoke as we headed toward Mexico Federal Highway 2, the main road to the south. We’d reserved some rooms at a small motel about ten miles away; we could rest there while I decided what to do next.
Frankly, it didn’t look good for her grandparents, though she didn’t need to hear that from me.
“I last checked with Social Security two weeks ago,” said Veronica after we got on the highway. “They’re still depositing checks.”
“Are there withdrawals from the account?”
“I don’t have access to it, so I can’t tell.”
“We can fix that.”
“That will raise suspicions at the bank. You’d need a subpoena…”
“I don’t need a subpoena. I have Shunt.”
I got on the sat phone and told our resident geek to get into the accounts. Veronica volunteered their Social Security numbers, but Shunt, being Shunt, found them online before she finished. Then he went to work.
“Deposited and withdrawn the next day,” he told us a few minutes later.
“In cash?” Veronica asked. “Where?”
“Not cash—transferred. I’m running it down. Couple of different banks involved.”
Shunt tracked the withdrawals to three different cambios, where it disappeared as a series of cash disbursements.
“I’ll look and see what I can find,” he told us. “This thing is like a tangle of yarn though. I don’t know what I’ll see.”
“Concentrate on the grandparents,” I told him. “Go from there.”
Shunt used the information from the first account to find other accounts, starting with their credit cards. He tracked credit card activity—none in the past six months—and looked at bills that had been paid to see if he could cross-reference to other accounts.
More importantly, he looked for parallel accounts, trying to track the cartel’s money flow. He would be especially interested in anything terrorist-related.
“While you’re at it, I need some other stuff,” I told him. “Sat images of the area near Angel Hills. Most recent you can get.”
“No sweat. I’ll download them to your phone.”
“Run a series,” I added. “Go back as far as you can.”
“I’m looking at the most recent one now. Kind of a dinky farm thing.”
“See any people?”
“Nada. This is the camp?”
“Could be.”
“Maybe. You know, if they’re halfway intelligent, they could figure out when the satellite passes and avoid it.”
“Check anyway.”
* * *
The motel was a low-slung, one-story building with eight units on one side and another ten on the back. Take the lowest-rung American discount chain and divide by ten, and that’s what Peso de Jesus looked like. Built in the fifties or maybe the early sixties, the outside walls looked like they had been sandblasted to a fine dull gray. The interior walls hadn’t seen a coat of paint in twenty years at least.
Veronica’s face reddened when I told the clerk we only needed one room. I could feel her eyes burning through the back of my head as I took the key.
“
Dick,” she hissed as I headed down the hall.
“We’re supposed to be married,” I told her. “That was the cover story.”
“For a cover, yes. Not for sleeping.”
“We won’t be sleeping here, don’t worry.”
Somehow, that didn’t quite calm her fears. But she relaxed when she saw there were two beds in the room. While it smelled more than a little stale, the sheets were crisp and clean.
“I wouldn’t mind taking a shower,” she said, going into the bathroom.
The next thing I knew, she was screaming. I drew my pistol and ran in.
A large iguana stood guard near the bathtub. It blinked its eyes lazily, unsure what humans were doing in its room.
I took a step toward it. The lizard whipped its spiny tail back and forth.
“I don’t think it likes you,” said Veronica.
“The feeling is mutual,” I said.
“Watch out!” Veronica yelled, jumping out of the way as the lizard darted for the door. I stepped aside and watched as it moved faster than a jackrabbit out into the room.
“Close the bathroom door,” I told her.
“Gladly.”
It slammed behind me as I went out. The iguana was standing in the space between the beds, glowering at me.
I opened the door to the room. There was barely enough time to get out of the way as it bolted out into the hall.
“Oh, senor, senorita, I am so sorry,” said the motel clerk from down the hall. “I forget that Senor Fred is in the room. Sorry, sorry.”
Senor Fred was the iguana.
“He will not bother you anymore, I promise,” said the clerk. “But you can think of this—he will have killed all the insects.”
“If I knew we were getting the lizard suite,” I told Veronica when he left, “I would have asked for a discount.”
Veronica still wanted to take a shower, but that didn’t work out—the water that spilled from the spout was orange and hot besides. And “spill” is not a metaphor: it would have taken a good three minutes to fill an average-sized coffee cup.
Seeking a different sort of refreshment, we ambled across the street to a combination café and bar. The only person inside was a girl maybe twelve or thirteen years old, who served as the waitress and bartender.
The odds of the place being bugged were pretty slim, but I checked anyway, running my little handy detector all around the place. The girl came out with our beers as I was finishing up.
“Your best luck is near the window,” she told me, thinking I was fishing around with my phone for a signal. “But the reception will not be too good there either.”
I smiled and thanked her. The place was clean—electronically, if not in terms of actual dirt.
Shotgun came in a short time later and proceeded to order everything on the menu. While the girl was in the kitchen preparing it, I downloaded the satellite images to my sat phone.
There was a farm in the shadow of the hills on the other side of the development, but it was very difficult to see because of the way it was situated. When we think of satellite images, we think of them as being shot directly overhead. But that’s not true much of the time. Depending on the location and the time of the day, a considerable part of any given area may not be visible. (There are ways around this, most notably by using multiple satellites or cameras. But that wasn’t possible here.)
I could see all of the buildings and a perimeter fence; objects on the south side of the buildings and a good part of the hill were in heavy shadow and essentially invisible. Still, the place didn’t look like a booming terrorist training camp. It didn’t even look like much of a farm. There were only six decent-sized buildings. Of these, one was missing a roof, and the other looked as if it had caved in. There were animals in a small pen, and a cultivated plot of land about the size my aunt uses to plant green beans.
Shunt had helpfully annotated the images, IDing the animals.
“PIGS,” he’d typed in big red letters, circling three creatures in the lower left-hand corner of one of the images.
Not the best evidence that this was a halal farm, actually.
* * *
A single road ran to the farm from the highway. It was long and narrow, easily seen from the property. But there was a back entrance: a dirt trail started a hundred yards or so from the southern border of Angel Hills, ran up through the hills, and then down to a trail that led to the northern edge of the farm. While it was hard to judge from the images, it looked as if you could get vehicles across from the back end of the development, though the road was much easier.
The west side of the farm was in full view of the road, across a patchy desert that offered little cover. The area to the immediate east of the farm had been quarried for some sort of rock; there were sharp crags and a sheer cliff between them, a natural barrier to anyone who dared to go that way.
Obviously, that was my best choice.20
A half hour after sunset, Shotgun and I set out from the café to see if it really was possible for pigs to be raised on a Muslim farm. We traveled light: rucks, submachine guns, and for Shotgun only enough snack food for a month’s survival.
Our route to the camp began on an old mining road about three miles southeast of the farm. Veronica dropped us off near a dry gully that led to the old quarry. The route was actually five miles long, counting all the twists and turns: a leisurely stroll on a moonlit night.
Shotgun kept up a running patter as we walked.
“Hey, Dick, you want some of these spearmint leaf jellies? They’re really good.
“Feel like a sugar donut, Dick?
“How about a Slim Jim?”
Finally, I had enough. “Shotgun, if you don’t shut your mouth, you’re going to be eating shoe leather in a minute.”
From that point on, he munched in silence.
We reached the quarry a short time later. The moon, which had started out so full I didn’t need my night vision, was now playing hide and seek in the clouds. What had looked like a fairly easy climb on the satellite image now looked damn tricky, a hand-over-hand scramble the higher we went. The side of the hill had been chiseled into large squares of uneven depth. Some held my entire foot; I could barely get a toehold in others. The rock poked out in places, adding a touch of vertigo to the ambience.
I was about thirty feet from the peak when it started to rain. If you’re wondering how often it rains in the desert, join the club. I wasn’t sure whether to blame Murphy or global warming.
Practically crawling before, I barely moved at all as the water made the rocks more slippery than a West Texas politician. Before, the sweat in my hands had turned the grit to a pasty glue. Now it was as if I were trying to climb on Vaseline.
The rain seemed to help Shotgun somehow, and within minutes he had passed me as if I were standing still. I finally found him at the top, a good half hour later. His feet dangled off a rock and he was munching on a Tootsie Roll.
“Checked for lookouts,” he told me. “Nothing.”
“Tell Veronica where we are,” I said, sliding off the rock onto a narrow but substantial-looking shelf. “I need to get a short rest.”
“Already gave her the dope,” said Shotgun. “Junior launched a Bird from the ranch. It oughta be overhead in twenty minutes or so.”
“Great.”
I sat down on a ledge overlooking the farm property. Between the darkness and the run of trees ahead, I couldn’t see anything.
The next thing I knew, I was on my butt heading downward. Murphy had kicked away the shelf I was sitting on.
Fortunately for me, the slope was smooth and not all that steep. Even so, I skidded a good 150 feet, plunging like a kid who lost his sleigh on the town’s best hill. I hit a few rocks on the way down, but the main injury was to my dignity and my lungs, which filled with dust from the rock slide that accompanied me. I was still coughing and trying to clear them when Shotgun came down to me.
“I thought we were waiting,” he said.
>
“I got impatient. Come on.”
Tacking to the south, I found a gentler slope and began working my way across the face of the hill. My boots slipped on a few of the rocks, but I managed to remain upright and reach a wide though shallow creek that fed into the back of the farm. A trickle of water ran through the rocks at the center.
The rain made the Bird’s IR sketchy, and Junior warned us that he wasn’t sure he’d have an image even when it arrived on station above. I didn’t mind, though. If we didn’t have IR, neither did they. The rain would also make it more likely that anyone inside the buildings would stay there.
I reached into my rucksack and pulled out my poncho. Shotgun did the same. His was the size of a parachute; if the wind kicked up I was sure he’d be blown away.
The farm was surrounded by a tall fence of very thin wire similar to a deer fence. Beyond that was a chain-link fence about eight feet high, but topped by barbed wire. We used a small pair of wire snips to cut through the outer fence, then made our way between the scrub brush to the second one. Here Murph decided to give me another little tickle—the jaw of the wire cutters snapped as I cut through the second link.
“Betcha those snips were made in China,” said Shotgun, handing over his.
I went back to work, faring much better this time—I got three pieces cut before the replacement snips fell apart as well.
“I think it’s the fence,” said Shotgun.
I’m allergic to barbed wire, and if possible I prefer to avoid it. But the fence was buried in the dirt; I kicked at it in a few places but it had been put in so deeply that it didn’t budge.
Shotgun pulled out his Teflon blanket, fanned it, then lay it out over the top of the fence.
Teflon is an amazing substance. You can fry an egg on it; you can sleep in it when you go to the moon. We like it for covering barbed wire because it’s incredibly tough but not as heavy as some other choices. (If you’re in the market, don’t buy the cheap knockoff stuff from China unless you really trust your supplier.)
The Bird came overhead, and Junior gave us a sitrep. The place looked empty, except for the two-story house near the road at the front of the farm. There were lights on inside, and while he couldn’t pick up a heat signature on the second floor, he assumed there was someone on the first.
Blood Lies - 15 Page 16