The blinds over the sliding glass patio doors in the living room and master bedroom were drawn shut—Charles couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened them. He didn’t bother turning on any lights until he was in the bedroom, pulling his cell out of his pocket and heading for the charging station on his nightstand.
He’d deleted Ángel’s number from his phone within minutes after leaving Ángel’s apartment that day. When Ángel didn’t show up for work the following Monday, Charles had assumed he’d requested transfer to another office. Charles hadn’t just been relieved, he’d been glad—viciously, spitefully pleased that Ángel had been the one to run away, the one to feel like he couldn’t show his face.
Except Ángel hadn’t transferred offices. While Charles had been going about his daily life in Tucson, filled with self-righteous ire, Ángel had been in Mexico, fucking one of the most violent criminals in North America for access to information that had eventually crippled the cartel’s operations and infrastructure.
Charles’s phone creaked under the pressure of his grip. He shook his head, set the phone in the dock, and stretched out his aching fingers.
Just a few days.
“Looks good,” Ed Campos said, skimming Charles’s signed report. He was a Mexican American man in his early fifties, a bit stout with age but still powerfully muscular, his beard and moustache neatly groomed. “I’ve reached out to Tucson’s RAC as well. She’s new, but she put me in touch with the guy who was in charge when you and Medina worked there. I should hear back from him tomorrow.”
“Has the FBI made any progress in the search for Warner?” Charles asked.
Ed shrugged and dropped Charles’s report onto his desk. “They don’t report to me.”
Keeping a tight lid on his frustration, Charles said, “Medina could still be in danger. There’s no way Warner’s disappearance isn’t linked to his extraction.”
“I agree,” Ed said, “but if Warner was rotten, either he waited too long to flip on Medina or he told the wrong people, because from what I’ve heard, there’s just no way Oscar Palomo knew Medina was a mole at the time of his extraction.”
Charles inclined his head, conceding Ed’s point.
“The other alternative is that somebody figured out Warner knew the identity of a mole in the cartel, snatched him, and he held out long enough for Medina to get clear. That’s bad news for Warner, but Medina should be fine. Even if the cartel got their hands on his file, Warner didn’t know he’d end up in San Diego.”
“Once they know his name, they’ll be able to find him anywhere,” said Charles.
Ed spread his hands. “That’s true to an extent, and of course the agency will do everything within its power to protect him, but we’re going to have trouble proving that Medina is who he says he is. The cartel was floundering before Esparza was assassinated; now they’re fighting over succession on top of everything else. Tracking Medina down under the circumstances would take serious time and resources, not to mention the risks of crossing into other cartels’ territory to confront him here, where he has the full support of the agency behind him.”
He had a point, but Charles didn’t like the loose thread created by Warner’s unexplained absence. An undercover agent’s life depended on a clean extraction.
Watching Charles’s face, Ed’s eyes softened. “Look, I get it,” he said, leaning forward to prop his forearms on his desk. “You know this guy; you worked with him. We’re not gonna just hang Medina out to dry. After he’s been reinstated, I’ll encourage him to choose a posting as far away from the US–Mexico border as possible. New York, Chicago, somewhere interesting.”
“Thank you, sir,” Charles said. Ángel would never go for that; he hated the cold.
“Anyway, he’s taking his polygraph right now. Assuming everything checks out, we’ll set him up in a motel for the time being, give him a stipend for food and clothing. Apparently all his stuff is in storage in Dallas, and only Warner had the key.”
“He’s on the box?” Charles said, his hands tightening around the arms of his chair. “Could I have permission to observe?”
“Sure, knock yourself out.” Ed rose to his feet, gesturing for Charles to do the same. “I’ve gotta get home. I’m supposed to be watching my grandkids today, and my wife is going to kill me if I leave her alone with them any longer. Three-year-old twins are no joke.”
On a Sunday afternoon, the office was quiet, only a few agents and administrative personnel scattered here and there. Charles headed for the interrogation suites in the back and let himself into the viewing room of Ángel’s.
A bored agent—Ángel’s escort—was slumped in a chair in the corner, his arms crossed over his chest. He barely glanced up at Charles’s entrance.
“Campos gave me permission to observe,” Charles said, just in case.
The agent shrugged, and Charles turned his attention to the two-way glass. Ángel sat on the other side, his chair facing away from the examiner’s desk. He had a blood pressure cuff strapped around his right bicep, two corrugated rubber tubes placed over his chest and abdomen, and a couple of electrodes attached to the fingers of his left hand. His eyes were hollowed out with exhaustion, and his oversize clothing made him look deceptively vulnerable.
“Do you know the current location of Special Agent Paul Warner?” asked the examiner, a woman in a fluffy angora sweater and horn-rimmed glasses.
“No,” Ángel said.
“Have you ever physically assaulted another person?” she said next, an irrelevant question designed to provoke a deliberate physiological reaction, so it could be compared against Ángel’s reactions to the relevant questions.
“Yes.”
“How long have they been at this?” Charles asked the observing agent.
“About twenty minutes. Shouldn’t be too much longer.”
Charles watched as the woman interrogated Ángel about his time undercover, based on questions he’d have answered in his pretest and interspersed with irrelevant comparison questions. While the polygraph was required of all returning undercover agents, it was pretty much bullshit, and there was no reason someone like Ángel—a natural-born liar backed up by a lifetime of experience and a master’s degree in psychology—couldn’t get around it if he wanted. After this, though, he’d be thoroughly questioned by a therapist trained to debrief agents who’d been undercover. Charles trusted that a lot more.
“During your time undercover, did you ever find yourself empathizing with Raúl Esparza?”
With a long, slow blink, Ángel said, “Yes.”
“Did you ever provide Raúl Esparza with information you knew would aid him in his criminal activities?”
“No.”
“Did you ever deliberately withhold information from your ATF handler that you knew would have prevented criminal activities from taking place?”
“Yes,” Ángel said, frustration written all over his face. Charles had been there before, in that chair; the requirement to answer yes or no without elaboration could be maddening.
“Did you ever withhold such information in a situation where you did not believe its disclosure would compromise your cover?”
Ángel relaxed. “No.”
“Have you ever told a lie to someone you cared about?”
“Yes.”
“Were you in love with Raúl Esparza?”
Ángel’s entire body jerked. “What the fuck kind of question is that?” he said, looking at the examiner over his shoulder. “That wasn’t in the pretest.”
“Agent Medina,” the woman said primly, “please face forward and only answer yes or no. Were you in love with Raúl Esparza?”
“No,” Ángel snapped.
“You’re having a strong response to this question,” she said, eyeing her laptop.
“Wow, I wonder why?” Ángel said. “Maybe it’s because you’re accusing me of being the kind of idiot who would fall in love with a murderous psychopath through sheer proximity!”
“It’s a question, Agent Medina, not an accusation, and please—”
“Esparza once shot one of his own men right in front of me, just to make a point to his other lieutenants,” said Ángel, talking over her. “Then he turned around and offered me more champagne like nothing had happened.”
The examiner paled, her throat working, and Charles rolled his eyes. How could she not see how Ángel was manipulating her—deliberately making her uncomfortable so she’d lose her motivation to pursue this line of questioning?
“Why don’t you ask me again if I was in love with the man who once fucked me while his hands were still bloody from gutting someone like a fish,” Ángel said.
That clinched it. The examiner grimaced and shook her head, though Ángel couldn’t see her. “Ah, no, that’s all right. Let’s move on.”
Charles stepped away from the glass, noticing that the agent in the corner was no longer quite so bored. The examiner wasn’t going to go anywhere near the subject of Ángel’s personal relationship with Esparza again, though, not after Ángel’s perfect little tantrum. She’d probably end the exam early.
Giving the window one last glance, Charles left the room. He wasn’t going to get the answers he wanted this way.
Of course, it would help if he knew what his questions were.
Much to Ángel’s amusement, the motel room was indistinguishable from the safe house—same oatmeal carpet, bland furniture, and absolute lack of anything resembling a soul. He set down the bags of groceries and clothing he’d bought at Target and gazed around the bleak room.
This was fucking ridiculous. All of his stuff was thirteen hundred miles away, and he couldn’t get to it unless Paul’s frantically worried wife managed to come up with the key to the storage unit. He couldn’t access his own bank accounts because he didn’t have his card or his ID. At least the San Diego office had supplied him with a cell phone—heavily guarded against external access, but linked back to the agency’s servers so they could locate him through its GPS in case of emergency. Or, he supposed, in case he turned out to have gone native after all.
Not exactly the welcome home he’d been expecting.
Ángel was wrung out, worn down to the bone from his sleepless night, that inane polygraph, and the three-hour psych eval that had followed. Standing alone in the motel room, he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to collapse into bed or use the little money he had left from his stipend to get drunk off his ass.
A soft knock sounded at the door. Ángel stiffened and spun around, staring at it with suspicion. He’d surrendered the gun he’d taken off Oscar’s bodyguard, and he wouldn’t be issued a service weapon until he’d been reinstated. The agency didn’t have the manpower to give him a protective detail 24-7, so if the person outside wanted to do Ángel harm, he was pretty much fucked.
Ángel sidled up to the window, twitched back the curtain, and peeked outside. Drawing a sharp breath, he yanked the security chain off the door and wrenched it open.
“Jesenia?” he said incredulously, greeting the DEA agent who’d been undercover with him in the Esparza cartel.
“Ángel, Dios mío, you’re really all right.” Jesenia threw her arms around Ángel, and he returned the hug. “I couldn’t believe it until I saw you myself.”
“How did you know I was here?” Ángel asked as Jesenia stepped back.
“I got out myself a couple of days ago, and when you never showed up in Dallas, I went to Bauer. He told me about Paul and that you’d been diverted to San Diego. I may have pulled a couple of strings to get in touch with your office here.”
“Well, come in, please.” Ángel moved away from the door and shut it behind Jesenia as soon as she’d entered the room, slotting the security chain back in place.
Jesenia Santos had the kind of nondescript features that made her perfect for undercover work, attracting neither negative nor overly positive attention. She had her black hair up in a messy bun, and her lanky, athletic body was clad in a T-shirt and jeans that nobody would give a second glance.
Her role in the cartel had been minor, running drugs north across the border—but she’d been the one to introduce Ángel to one of Raúl Esparza’s lackeys, enabling them to maintain regular contact under the pretext that they’d been friends before. Despite his momentary shock, Ángel couldn’t have been happier to see her here. At least she’d understand some of what he was going through.
“I’m so sorry about Paul,” Jesenia said, her eyes sympathetic. “I can’t imagine what must be going through your mind right now.”
“I’m trying not to think about it, honestly.” There was nothing Ángel could do to help Paul now.
Jesenia frowned as she took in the motel room. “This is where they’re putting you up?”
“It’s just temporary.”
“I have to fly back to Dallas tonight, unfortunately, but will you let me treat you to an early dinner?” Jesenia asked. “I hate the thought of you stranded in this city all alone.”
Ángel smiled. “Sure, thanks.”
There were few enticing options in the strip malls that populated the drab stretch of highway by his motel. Neither of them were in the mood for pizza, Ángel didn’t like Thai, and Jesenia turned her nose up at the cheap, inauthentic Mexican joints.
It had been years since Ángel had eaten a genuine American hamburger, so they ended up at a casual burger restaurant, settling into a corner booth where Ángel could put his back against the wall. Jesenia didn’t comment on his choice of seating.
“So how’d your debrief go?” she asked, skimming the laminated menu.
“About how you’d expect. You’d think I was the first federal agent to use sex to establish and maintain my cover.”
“It is technically against protocol.”
“Which of course has stopped everyone from doing it before,” Ángel said.
Jesenia laughed.
Ángel put down his menu, restless, and looked out the window at the parking lot. It was that awkward period between lunch and dinner, and the restaurant was mostly empty. “If either Raúl or I had been a woman, nobody would say shit about it. Judgmental dicks.”
“They’ll get over it. Nobody can fault your results.”
He sighed. “I wish I’d had more time; we were so close. If Raúl hadn’t been shot . . .”
Jesenia dropped her menu and stared at him. “You can’t be serious. Ángel, you—”
She was interrupted by the arrival of their server. They gave him their orders and handed over their menus, and when they were alone once more, Jesenia lowered her voice and switched to Spanish for good measure.
“You can’t be serious,” she said again. “You didn’t have more time. Three months, tops, and that would have been pushing it. Esparza was falling in love with you.”
“I had it under control,” said Ángel.
Jesenia snorted. “No, you didn’t. Everyone was talking about it. It was one thing for Esparza to keep a pretty boy toy, and a totally different thing for him to fall in love with one. That’s crossing the line for men like that.”
Ángel shifted, the vinyl of the booth creaking beneath his weight.
“A few more months, and you would never have gotten out of there alive,” Jesenia continued, relentless. “Esparza would never have let you go. He’d have sent people after you to drag you back by the hair if he had to. And the other men in the cartel would have killed him and you for that.”
“I don’t think it would have been that dire,” Ángel said, smoothing his hands over the chipped Formica table. He had let things go too far, though; by the time he recognized the shift in Raúl’s feelings for him, it had been way too late to change them without endangering himself further.
“You weren’t watching from the outside.” Jesenia gave a one-shouldered shrug. “This is a terrible thing to say, but you’re lucky Esparza died when he did.”
“Yeah, I feel lucky,” Ángel muttered.
Brushing her fingers over the back of Ángel�
�s hand, Jesenia changed the subject, steering the conversation around to her family’s relief at her return and her plans for the leave she’d been granted before going back to work. Ángel was content to listen, scarfing down his burger and imagining what it was like to return from years undercover to people who welcomed you with open arms. Besides Paul and Jesenia, Ángel had no real personal ties left; his friendships hadn’t been the sort to survive an unexplained two-year absence, and his family was a sick joke. As far as Ángel knew, his parents hadn’t even noticed he’d disappeared, and that was just fine with him.
Jesenia paid the check and brought Ángel back to his motel, where she lingered on the threshold. “I wish I didn’t have to go back so soon,” she said. “I could try to stay a little longer . . .”
“Don’t be silly,” Ángel said. “You have a life to get back to. I won’t be here that long, anyway.”
“All right. Here, let me text my phone from yours so we have each other’s new numbers.” Once Jesenia had done that, she handed Ángel’s new cell back and squeezed his arm. “If you need me, I’m just a phone call away. Any time.”
“Thank you so much for coming,” Ángel said, unable to express the full depth of his gratitude. He felt worlds better now than he had that morning.
Jesenia kissed his cheek before she left, and Ángel locked the door behind her. He turned around to consider the tiny room.
The safest, smartest choice would be to stay in for the rest of the evening, watch some TV, and die a slow and painful death of boredom. Or he could go out—not to get drunk, like he’d been contemplating earlier, but to at least try to get back into the rhythm of a normal life.
Ángel stripped out of his shirt as he headed for the shower. He’d never been much of a guy for the safe, smart choice.
“This is a terrible idea,” Charles said out loud while sitting in his car in the motel parking lot.
Unfortunately, the common sense he prided himself on tended to go on vacation whenever Ángel was in the mix, and it wasn’t going to stop him from knocking on that door any more than it had stopped him from hooking up with Ángel in the first place. He blew out a breath, grabbed the tote bag on the passenger seat, and got out of the car.
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