by Tom Clancy
Holding his breath once more, and with Ansara still at his back, he slowly ascended the stairs, peered up past the ledge that was in effect the floor, and realized the entrance had been set within some kind of maintenance/electrical/plumbing room lined with pumps and lockers and other construction and custodial equipment. The door ahead was open, allowing him to gaze farther out into a large warehouse with at least a twenty-foot ceiling. Pallets of construction materials—cinder blocks, bags of concrete, stacks of rebar—were lined up in long rows to the right and left, but dead ahead stood a group of men and the Anvil cases containing the weapons, which were being loaded into the back of a Ford Explorer.
Moore turned back down to Ansara, widened his gaze, and motioned for him to hold.
And when Moore turned back, lifting his head just a little higher to get a better view, a thug with a goatee and sideburns that formed a chinstrap suddenly turned into the room—
“Hey, what the fuck?” he shouted, gaping at Moore. “Who are you?”
“We’re with those guys,” Moore answered quickly.
“Bullshit!” The guy spun back toward the others. “José!”
Just then Moore’s phone began to vibrate, and Ansara shouted, “Towers called. They’ve got a big group outside!”
Moore put two rounds in the screamer’s back, then faced Ansara. “Run!”
José broke away from the group as his man Tito collapsed onto his belly. Beyond him was the tunnel entrance, and he couldn’t see who’d shot his man but guessed it was someone who’d come up from the tunnel.
Breaking into a sprint, he hollered back to the three men who’d delivered the weapons, then burst into the maintenance room, searching the areas behind the pumps until he reached the tunnel entrance and the others arrived breathlessly behind him.
José gestured with his pistol. “Get down in there. Clear it out. I want the fucker who did this.”
All three were armed with their mata policías and hustled down the stairs.
His heart racing, José ran back to the others and screamed for them to hurry loading the weapons and that he’d join them in a minute.
Catch your breath, he ordered himself, as he shifted away from the SUV and turned his back on the group. He pulled the detonator from his pocket and switched on the power. The green light cast a glow across his face, and for a few seconds he just stared at it, hypnotized by the light.
And then, imagining that the weapons team was now about a thousand feet into the shaft, he began to chuckle, heady with the power in his hands.
Rojas Mansion
Cuernavaca, Mexico
56 Miles South of Mexico City
Sonia waited at the door while Miguel entered the office and cleared his throat. His father glanced up from the desk and said, “Miguel, I’m sorry, I’m working late tonight and I’m extremely busy right now. Is there something wrong?”
“I want to see the vaults in the basement,” he blurted out.
“What?”
“Take me to the basement right now. Show me what you have in the vaults down there.”
His father finally glanced up from his computer screens and frowned. “Why?”
Miguel could not bear to utter the truth. “I just …I’ve never been down there. I thought I’d show Sonia. But you have a guard there—all the time.”
“Fine, then. Let’s go now.”
“Are you serious? You always say no. How many times have I asked you? At least twenty times over the years?”
“Okay, so now I’ll show you.” He bolted from his chair and stormed past Miguel, wrenched open the door, and startled Sonia, who was texting her father on her smartphone.
“Did you want the tour as well?” his father snapped.
“I’m sorry, señor. We didn’t mean to disturb you.”
His father raised a palm and stormed down the hall.
Miguel gave Sonia a worried glance, then hustled after the man.
They reached the twin doors leading to the broad staircase, and his father ordered the guard to unlock the doors and allow them to pass. “Turn off the alarms as well,” he said.
He tossed a glance back at Miguel. “I know what this is about. And I’m disappointed.”
Miguel bit his lip and averted his gaze. His father stomped past the door held open by the guard, and Miguel and Sonia got on his heels.
The staircase was heavily carpeted in a deep burgundy and turned onto two separate landings before reaching the bottom. Lights set into the ceiling controlled via motion sensors automatically clicked on as they shifted ahead across an ornately tiled floor. Behind them was a garage that again Miguel had never seen. There were at least ten antique automobiles and a lift to carry them up to a ramp leading outside. Miguel thought it amusing and not surprising that the basement of their house was as well decorated as the rest of the mansion.
Two vaults like the ones you’d find in neighborhood banks stood side by side on the far end. Both doors were shut. His father approached a control panel to the right side of one vault. He typed in a code, rested his hand on a dark piece of glass. A light shone in his eye; then he moved his hand to another device, where he inserted his index finger. A computer voice said, “Sampling.” He withdrew the finger, now spotted with blood, and licked it.
The vault door thumped several times, then hissed open, as though propelled by air.
“Go on in. Have a look, while I open the other one,” his father said.
Miguel motioned to Sonia, and they shifted past the giant door and into the vault, which stretched back at least twenty meters and was equally wide. Hundreds of pieces of art stood in rows on the floor or on easels, while in the far corner were at least twenty, perhaps even thirty, pieces of handmade furniture, desks and chests of drawers and armoires Miguel remembered seeing his father purchase but had forgotten about. More guns like the ones he collected in the vacation house were sitting on two long tables, with others tucked tightly in their cases stacked on the floor beside them. From a series of long poles to their immediate left hung twenty or more exotic rugs his father had no doubt purchased in Asia, the documentation for each still pinned in the corners. Still another series of humidity-controlled glass cases held collections of his father’s rarest pre-1900 literature, first editions that Miguel knew were worth a fortune. Sonia gazed in wonder at the items while Miguel turned back to the door, where his father had appeared.
His father’s tone turned accusatory. “What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t trust me anymore, do you?”
“Um, if you’d like me to leave, can I go into the other vault?” asked Sonia, shifting her weight awkwardly from side to side.
“No, that’s okay, you stay,” said Miguel, hardening his tone just a little. “I think maybe the issue is that you don’t trust me. If you’ve had nothing to hide, then why didn’t you show me this place years ago?”
“Because I wanted you to trust me. You have no idea how important that is. Don’t dismiss it. Do you want to see the other vault?”
“It’s just more of the same, huh?”
“I need another house to display all of this. Your mother always said my eyes were too big for my stomach, and that applies to my purchases as well.”
Miguel realized at that moment that he’d been wasting his time. If his father really wanted to conceal something from him, he wouldn’t have done it as obviously as saying No, you can’t see what’s in the vaults. Moreover, he only incited the man. But he still had his doubts. “I’m sorry.”
“Miguel, I want nothing but the best for you. There’s nothing illegal about what I do. The newspapers will print anything to sell copies and sell advertising. They’ve called me a criminal for years, but you’ve seen what I’ve tried to do in our country, how much I’ve tried to give back. I am sincere about that. Your mother taught me more than you know about how to open my heart.”
Miguel looked to Sonia, who was pursing her lips and nodding.
�
��Then I have to ask you something. Before they killed Raúl, he begged them, said the cartel would pay anything. If he worked for us, then why would he ask the cartel to pay?”
His father shrugged. “I don’t know. Fernando recruits many of those people himself. I have no doubt that some may have once belonged to the cartel, and we save them from that life.”
Miguel took a deep breath. “If I ask you something, will you promise to tell me the truth?”
His father nodded.
“Are you doing business with the drug cartels?”
His father grinned weakly and looked away. “No, of course not.”
“All right, then. I’m sorry.”
His father began to choke up. He moved suddenly toward Miguel and hugged him deeply. “You are my only son. You are my world. You have to believe in me.”
The lie caused a deep and terrible pain to wake in Rojas’s heart, and that pain took him to a place where his murdered brother stared back at him with a weird reflection in his eyes and his wife lay motionless in her casket, her beautiful skin now alabaster and lifeless. The lie was death itself.
As he embraced his son, he fought to leave that place, tried to convince himself that he was not, in a sense, murdering them both by keeping the secret, that it was all for the boy’s own good.
But the pain was so great that he wished he could take Miguel and Sonia to the back of the vault, open the well-disguised panel doors there, and show his son the second vault—the vault within the vault—where millions in American dollars were waiting to be laundered …
He should be the one to confess his sins. Miguel should not have to learn from a second party.
But another part of Rojas argued staunchly against that. Everything should be as always. His wife had never learned the ugly truth, and neither should his son.
Rojas released his son and stared deeply into the boy’s eyes as a chill rippled across his shoulders.
Yes, the lie was death.
THE HAND OF FATIMA
Border Tunnel
Calexico–Mexicali
IT WASN’T THAT Moore regretted his decision to flee back into the tunnel. After all, he’d received two simultaneous pieces of information and had reacted to them in an instant: (1) they’d been spotted, and (2) a large group was inside the warehouse.
Fight or flight.
What frustrated him most was that the mission to follow the money was over. The trail had ended the second that punk had spotted them. He tried to convince himself that there was nothing they could’ve done differently. It was simply a matter of bad timing (flashback to Somalia and that fiasco, wherein they sent him in a few days late and a dollar short). Sure, he and Ansara would tell Towers about the Ford Explorer, and they’d track the vehicle with their eyes in the sky and Towers’s civilian informants, perhaps even get permission to intercept it and seize the weapons and maybe even confiscate the cash, but Moore had been counting on identifying a much more definitive link between the cartel and Jorge Rojas, at least via one of Rojas’s businesses.
Ansara was sprinting up the tunnel, increasing the gap, but Moore was beginning to slow as he heard the thundering boots of men coming down the staircase behind them. He stopped, spun around, and dropped onto his belly as, lit by the flickering light from the tunnel entrance, a figure rushed forward, arm extended. For just a heartbeat Moore glimpsed his assailant’s face: the cartel truck’s driver.
Propped up on his elbows now, Moore fired once into the figure’s chest, the round booting him sideways into the panels before he fell onto his back.
From behind him came two more men, the rest of the weapons-transfer crew, their Belgian-made cop-killer pistols flashing, the shots booming through the tunnel as one 5.7x28-millimeter round struck the pipe near Moore’s elbow.
Their winking muzzles betrayed their positions, and drawing deeply on decades of experience—and his rage—he targeted the first man, delivered a pair of rounds into his chest, then panned slightly to the right and unloaded his magazine into the second guy, who staggered backward as though he were being electrocuted.
As Moore ejected his magazine and scrambled to his feet, about to turn back toward Ansara, the far end of the tunnel vanished.
Just like that.
That faint beam of shifting light that had fallen on the wooden staircase had been extinguished in a nanosecond, replaced by a huge wall of earth and dust, accompanied by an explosion that originated from both sides of the wall, sending a blast wave of dirt and rocks and pieces of support beams boomeranging through the shaft.
Moore was intimately familiar with the sound of cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, or C-4 plastic explosives, and as the debris began to pelt him, a second explosion hammered behind him, this one much closer, the ground rumbling more violently, and then a third explosion thundered through the first two, this one even closer, as he whirled back and sprinted, echoing his first admonishment to Ansara: “Run!” That cry was all reflex and reaction; Ansara didn’t need any more motivation.
Even as he shifted past the turns, believing that each ninety-degree angle would further protect him, more detonations tore apart the tunnel, timed to blow in succession and drawing nearer. Up on his right lay the little sanctuary flickering in candlelight. As he passed, he saw Ansara trying to lift Rueben into a fireman’s carry.
Moore cursed but kept running. “Forget him! We gotta go!”
“He’s still not dead!”
The next explosion occurred so closely that Moore thought his eardrums had been blown out. The dust clouds and debris wave filled the tunnel now, dousing the candles and cutting off Ansara as he begged for another second.
Gasping and blinded, Moore ran forward, unsure if his partner was behind him. He banged straight into the ladder as an explosion near where the acoustic panels terminated loosed a wall of dirt that collapsed around him, the musty earth hissing like a chorus of snakes and burying him up to his waist as dust clouds billowed into his face.
He took a breath, tasted the gritty dirt, coughed hard, then tried to breathe again, blinking hard against the burn in his eyes. He tried to turn around, but his legs were pinned by the dirt. He screamed Ansara’s name, but there were easily thousands of pounds of debris between him and his colleague. He screamed again, beat his fists into the fresh piles of sand, knowing that Ansara and the kid were suffocating and there wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do about it. He dug past the dirt and into his pocket, barely noticing the blood dripping down his arm. He took hold of his smartphone, but his hand trembled so badly that he dropped it. Fighting for breath and coughing yet again, he picked up the phone and dialed Towers. “They blew the fucking tunnel. Ansara’s buried. I’m stuck in here, too. Do you hear me? They blew the tunnel …”
“I hear you. A team’s coming.”
“Fuck. They spotted us.”
“They get off with the weapons?”
“I think so. Black Ford Explorer. Probably leaving the warehouse. Check with your spotters.”
“Got it. Now, Moore, you just sit tight. Help’s on the way. And I’m coming down there myself.”
It took him another five minutes to free one of his legs, and by the time he was able to lift that leg in an attempt to wriggle out of the hole, he heard a group moving into the bedroom and a voice he didn’t recognize shouting his name.
“Down here!” he cried.
A flashlight blinded him for a second until the man holding it doused the beam.
Moore glanced up into the eyes of a guy wearing the black helmet and black fatigues of an FBI task force. The guy shouldered his rifle. “Holy shit!”
Moore just looked at him. “Hurry up. My buddy’s down here with a kid. He’s buried. They can’t breathe.”
“Aw, Jesus …”
Within ten minutes Moore was free and climbing the ladder, groaning over the pain in his arm as he tried to cling to the rungs. Metal fragments from one of the trusses had torn through his shirt and lodged themselves in his biceps. The woun
d was nothing. He couldn’t take his mind off Ansara, and as he stood there in the bedroom, pacing, wanting to get back down there and dig through the sand with his bare hands, one of the task force members came back up the ladder and said, “We’ll need a goddamned Bobcat to get them out.”
Moore leaned back on the bedroom wall, cursing and grimacing again over the dirt in his mouth. He held his breath and took himself back into the tunnel, through all that dirt and into a tiny depression where Ansara lay, taking his final few breaths. Moore shuddered. Wanted to scream. Then he just stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him.
Maybe he was just cursed. That was it. If you hung around him long enough, you’d wind up dead. How much more of this could he take? How many ghosts could populate his head?
He found Towers getting out of an unmarked car across the street. “Let’s get you out of here.”
Moore glanced back at the house. “Not till they get him out.”
“All right, just take it easy.”
Moore turned away and marched back toward the house. Other units were arriving, and the entire street would be cordoned off. Welcome to the circus, a police and first-responder big top lorded over by spotters from the FBI and the drug cartels, along with nosy neighbors, kids running around in diapers, and a host of stray cats and dogs.
Moore and Towers returned to the bedroom, where down in the tunnel several agents were clearing away debris with their hands and the butts of their rifles until an excavation crew could arrive.
“He was going to teach me how to ride a mountain bike, did you know that?” Moore asked Towers. “He told me I really sucked.”
Towers shook his head. “Don’t do it, buddy. Don’t torture yourself.”
“He’s dying in there right now.”
Towers hardened his tone. “Are you listening to me?”
The excavation team didn’t reach Ansara and Rueben until nearly one p.m. the following day, and while Moore had been coaxed away from the scene by Towers and had gone to a hotel to take a shower and get some fresh clothes, he’d returned and waited there until both his colleague and the young mule were taken out and set down on the bedroom floor. Ansara’s face and most of the left side of his body had been peppered with shrapnel, so there was a good chance he’d died in the explosion. Rueben, meanwhile, had probably been shielded by Ansara and had only his major stab wound.