by Tom Clancy
One of the kid’s hands was balled tightly in a fist, while the other was limp, and that struck Moore as a little odd. He dropped to his knees and delicately pried open the kid’s hand to find a gold pendant covered in dirt.
Moore breathed another curse, because he knew exactly what he was looking at: an eighteen-karat-gold Hamsa, a Middle Eastern symbol also called the Hand of Fatima, named after the daughter of the prophet Mohammed. The pendant was shaped like the back of a human hand and included delicate filigree work that suggested lace. It was worn by Muslims to ward off the evil eye.
The tunnel had been dark. Moore and Ansara had never noticed Rueben’s other hand. He’d grabbed Moore and had been desperately trying to tell him something, perhaps give him something.
Moore closed his eyes and squeezed the pendant tightly between his fingertips.
Farmacias Nacional
Avenida Benito Juárez, near the Santa Fe Bridge
Juárez, Mexico
Pablo Gutiérrez had murdered an FBI agent in Calexico during a mission to help Pedro Romero scout out homes for the workers on the Juárez Cartel’s new tunnel project. The agent had confronted them, pretending to be a sicario, but he hadn’t realized that his cover had already been blown and that Pablo knew exactly who he was. While Romero watched, Pablo had duct-taped the man to a chair inside one of the houses the cartel owned near the border fence.
The agent had been full of bravado and had pretended that he did not work for the U.S. government, even after Pablo removed both of his pinkies with a pair of hedge clippers he’d found in the garage. The blades were caked with rust and dull. After two more fingers were removed from the federal agent’s right hand, he began to babble like a little boy, confessing all he knew about the cartel’s operations in the area—or at least his story sounded good enough. Pablo didn’t care either way. His job, according to Corrales, was to kill, not interrogate, the man, but he thought he’d have a little fun first. Pablo thanked the agent, then lifted an ax to the man’s neck and made a few practice swings while Romero turned away and put a hand to his face.
The agent released a bloodcurdling cry as Pablo raised the ax and told him to be still.
It took five solid blows before the man’s head toppled to the floor. Pablo had never before seen that much blood, and there was a strange odor coming from the body, almost like raw seafood.
He ordered Romero to help him carry the chair and body out to the curb as though they were putting out the trash and recyclables. He pinned a sign on the headless corpse: FBI Agents Leave Calexico Now.
They mailed the head to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., the headquarters of the FBI, but it wouldn’t arrive for three to five days. However, less than an hour later, neighbors coming home from work spotted the grisly sight at the curb, and within minutes after Pablo left, units were on the scene.
That night, Pablo had laughed his ass off as he’d watched the story on CNN, with tickers flashing ridiculously obvious statements, such as “Trending: Mexican drug war crosses border into the United States.” Did they think it would never happen? What kind of fantasy land were the Americans living in? Dumb fuckers.
That was the night that Pablo had become a wanted man in the United States because a teenage boy had photographed him near the house and had surrendered that picture to the American authorities (Pablo had killed that kid as well). Now he realized that those were the good old days, and that his involvement with Corrales and Los Caballeros and the cartel tore at him from both sides.
He’d agonized over where his loyalty should lie: to Corrales, his immediate boss, the man who’d taught him everything and had made him a trusted right hand, rescuing him from a life of mowing lawns as an eighteen-year-old illegal immigrant in Las Vegas …or Fernando Castillo, the man whose identity Pablo had only recently learned and who had been repeatedly calling Pablo. That he’d finally decided to answer one of the calls was a well-kept secret from Corrales, who had cloistered all of them away in a pair of apartments above Farmacias Nacional.
Corrales had said that the cartel would not find them because they were unaware of his friendship with the apartment owner, and Pablo believed him. The owner of the pharmacy, also one of Corrales’s friends, ran a prescription-drug-smuggling operation to foil U.S. customs regulations that stated you could carry only the amount of a prescription for personal use back into the United States and that you needed a copy of the prescription. The pharmacist had partnered with a doctor, and together they wrote and sold thousands of dollars’ worth of falsified prescriptions that moved across the border. They were small-time smugglers but proud of their business, and thus far not a single one of their mules had been caught—a remarkable record. Corrales had laughed at them, because what the cartel smuggled was worth millions.
Dante Corrales wouldn’t be laughing for much longer, though.
“Where are you going?” the man asked, sitting on the sofa in a tank shirt and jeans, a bottle of Pacífico propped on his knee. He’d been on that sofa for the past few days, watching soap operas, going into rages, then calming down. His left arm was still in a sling, the bandages on his shoulder changed daily.
“I’m going to get some lunch,” Pablo told him.
“Get enough for all of us, okay?”
“Okay.”
Pablo shuddered and headed out into the hallway. He entered the stairwell, reached the first floor, and when he opened the back door leading into the alley behind the pharmacy, Fernando Castillo’s men were already waiting. Three of them. They wore long jackets to conceal their weapons.
“He’s up there?” asked one of them, a young punk named José who had once challenged Corrales during a smuggling run in Nogales and who Castillo said was now taking over the gang.
Pablo nodded. “There are two cameras. Look for them. And God forgive me.”
“God has nothing to do with this,” said José. “Nothing at all …”
Pablo walked away and dialed the number. “It’s me.”
“Are they going up?” asked Castillo.
“Yes.”
“Good. Remember. I want to see a picture of the body.”
“You don’t even want to talk to him?”
“What good would that do?”
“Maybe he’s sorry. Maybe he’ll pay you back.”
“Oh, he’ll pay us back. With interest. Right now.”
Corrales rose and went to the bedroom, where María was still lying sideways across the bed, still wearing her negligee and reading one of her fashion magazines. Her panties rode high up her ass, and for a second or two, Corrales thought of jumping on her, but she’d fight him off, piss and moan like the depressed bitch she’d become, and he’d tell her once more to be patient, that Zúñiga would come around, that he’d take them in as allies and finally be convinced that he could help them. They had plenty of money to live off for now, but they wouldn’t dare go near the hotel to get any more out of the safe there. Those fuckers had already killed Ignacio, and Castillo was watching the place twenty-four-seven for Corrales’s return.
Corrales saw no way to survive other than to join the rival cartel. He needed protection, because Fernando had the manpower and the money to hunt him no matter where in the world he chose to hide. Deep down he knew he would one day turn his back on the cartel that had murdered his parents. He had used it for all it was worth. His reckless decision to use the cartel’s money to finance his hotel restoration instead of paying off the Guatemalans was probably born in his subconscious. He wanted to get caught. He wanted things to go south so that he’d be forced to get out. That’s why he’d prepared for this day by spending years gathering crucial information: the identities of suppliers and smugglers around the world, including their main contacts, Ballesteros in Colombia and Rahmani in Waziristan; bank account numbers and deposit receipts; and recordings of phone calls and copies of e-mail messages that could incriminate both Castillo and Rojas himself. Corrales would offer Zúñiga inside information on
the workings of the Juárez Cartel so that he could help the man he once hated take over operations in the city.
But Zúñiga had thus far failed to answer any of his calls. Corrales had even sent Pablo to his house, and the man would send out his thugs and tell Pablo to leave or suffer the consequences.
Corrales had set up two wireless battery-powered surveillance cameras around the apartment and pharmacy: one in the hall outside their apartment door, the other in the main stairwell leading up from the back alley door. The small monitor that sat on the bar near the kitchen sink showed static, and Corrales caught that screen from the corner of his eye. He swore and dragged himself from the sofa to investigate the problem.
That his FN 5.7 pistol was lying on the counter beside the monitor was the only reason why they didn’t kill him immediately.
A shuffle of feet just outside the front door caught his attention. He reached for the gun.
José, the little rat that Corrales had trained himself, kicked in the door and leveled his gun on Corrales, who was already bringing his pistol around.
There was a half-second of recognition and an almost guilt-stricken sheen appearing in José’s eyes before he yelled Corrales’s name.
Corrales fired once—a lightning-fast headshot—as two more bastards rushed in behind José, but Corrales was already ducking away, behind the bar, taking good cover. José hit the floor, a gaping wound above his left eye.
María screamed from the bedroom, and one of the guys broke off and ran down the hall.
Corrales hollered her name, drawing fire from the other guy, who’d dodged into the living room and thrown himself behind the sofa. Corrales burst from behind the bar, and releasing a cry that came from deep within his gut, he rounded the sofa and came face-to-face with the punk, who took one look at him and lifted his gun in surrender.
He was sixteen, if that. Corrales shot him twice in the face. María screamed his name.
Two shots rang out. Corrales bounded into the bedroom, just as the last sicario, a heavily tattooed guy with a potbelly whom Corrales had never seen before, turned toward him.
It took but a fraction of a second for Corrales to see María splayed across the bed with blood seeping through her negligee. She mouthed his name.
Then two things happened at once.
The guy cried, “Fuck you, vato!” and lifted his pistol.
Corrales opened his mouth, rocked by the sight of his woman lying there, dying, as he jammed down the trigger of his pistol while rushing toward the guy, thrusting the gun into the guy’s chest as though it were a sword, the last two rounds muted as they slammed into his flesh, the muzzle burning the guy’s shirt even as he fired two rounds into the ceiling. The guy crashed backward into the flat-screen television, knocking it onto the floor as he tumbled and landed facedown on the carpeting. The stench of gunpowder and burned fabric and flesh was enough to make Corrales gag.
Shouts came from the hallway outside, Paco the pharmacist, along with his wife, screaming for their two sons to get out of the apartment next door.
Corrales stood there, his chest rising and falling, the very act of breathing almost too painful to bear. He choked up, and tears that had been held back for years finally stained his cheeks as he climbed onto the bed and put his hand on María’s face. He was trembling now, lip quivering, his thoughts swirling in a vortex of anger as he flicked a glance at the dead sicario and fired three more times, but his pistol clicked uselessly. What now? Another magazine. There could be more of them outside. He tore off his sling and, with a dull ache in his shoulder, raced back into the kitchen, reloaded his gun, then returned to scoop María into his arms and carry her out of the apartment, the shoulder now on fire, his pistol clenched in his hand.
The pharmacist was screaming at him as he hit the stairwell and made it outside, but when he turned back to where he usually parked his car in the alley, he found it there—with Pablo leaning on the hood.
“We just got hit!” he cried. “Get in the car! We have to leave now!”
But Pablo just looked at him, stunned, then reached back into his waistband and drew his pistol.
No, Corrales hadn’t seen this coming, and the betrayal robbed him of breath. He turned away, back toward the door, while trying to get his arm high enough so he could fire at the young man he’d called a trusted friend.
Pablo got off the first round, but it struck María; then Corrales fired two shots as Pablo started around the car, trying to duck behind the trunk. One round caught him in the abdomen, the other in the arm. He slumped to the ground, groaning, lifting his pistol again, and Corrales squeezed off two more shots that drummed into Pablo’s chest. He staggered to the car, reached it, set María on the ground, and, weeping once more, he opened the back door and strained to drag his dead girlfriend into the backseat. Once he got her inside, he climbed into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine. The sirens were wailing in the distance as he left rubber on the pavement and a cloud of exhaust fumes pouring over Pablo’s body.
Zúñiga Ranch House
Juárez, Mexico
Spotters from the Juárez Cartel were watching Corrales drive up the dirt road toward Zúñiga’s house, and there wasn’t anything he could do about them. The two men had been posted in the small apartment complex where the turnoff toward the dirt road began, and he noted them on the rooftop. They, in turn, were being watched by Zúñiga’s men, who were no doubt positioned along the fence perimeter, in a dirt parking lot beside a detached shed on the north side of the house.
With a dust trail clearly marking his path, Corrales roared up to Zúñiga’s newly repaired front gates—the ones he’d blown up that night to send a message to his rival. He rushed out of the car, grabbed María, and carried her toward the gate, looking up into the security camera and screaming, “Zúñiga! They killed my woman! They killed her! You have to talk to me. Please! You have to talk to me!”
He fell to his knees and began to sob into María’s bloody chest.
And then something thumped and motors began to whine. He looked up through the tears as the wrought-iron gates parted, and up ahead, far down the long paved driveway, came Zúñiga himself, flanked by two guards.
REVELATIONS AND RESERVE
DEA Office of Diversion Control
San Diego, California
MOORE WAS SITTING in a cubicle he’d borrowed from one of the diversion investigators who was in a meeting. Moore had never been in this area of the building, where the special agents, chemists, pharmacologists, and program analysts had set up shop. Their mission was extensive, to coordinate operations with Homeland Security and the DEA’s own El Paso Intelligence Center. Computerized monitoring and tracking of the distribution of controlled substances was all in an effort to provide tactical intelligence to their partners. They even drafted and proposed congressional legislation from this location. It was an impressive collection of experts—an office bustling with round-the-clock activity because, as Moore had overheard one analyst say, “The cartels never sleep.”
And neither did the Taliban.
The pendant Moore had taken from Rueben’s hand had already been turned over to one of the Agency’s mobile labs, which had arrived thirty minutes prior. The techs inside the step van were using a new rapid DNA analysis platform that was fully automated; it had been developed by the Center for Applied NanoBioscience and Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. The techs were running the samples through multiple national databases, including the DEA’s and the FBI’s, as well as international lists such as Interpol’s (whose members included Pakistan and Afghanistan), so that within a few hours they’d have results—instead of the weeks or months sometimes required in the past. A new security consortium established through the European Commission’s Seventh Framework program (which, among many other things, bundled together all research related to European Union initiatives) was helping to fund the project, which could, in turn, lead to the creation of an even more accurate and comprehe
nsive criminal database.
And therein resided the problem. DNA analysis would reveal his prints, Rueben’s, but he doubted that any of the terrorists that he suspected had passed through the tunnel would have samples on record. The techs said they could run an “ancestry test” developed by DNAPrint Genomics of Sarasota, Florida, that would examine tiny genetic markers on the DNA molecule that were often common among people of certain groups. If they had a good sample, they said, they could tell if a suspect’s heritage was Native American, Southeast Asian, sub-Saharan African, European, or even a mix of those. Traits such as skin pigmentation, eye color, hair color, facial geometry, and height could be predicted through analysis of DNA sequences.
Moore had argued with Towers, who’d told him that the pendant alone was not enough proof that terrorists had passed through and that perhaps Rueben had bought it from someone and had been using it as a good-luck charm. He’d been stabbed and perhaps held the pendant in his hand to try to ward off death. Towers had gone on to point out that lots of young Mexicans (and young Americans along the border, for that matter) had a keen fascination with terrorists and terrorism. Some mules had even shown up in jail with tattoos in Farsi on their forearms, though investigations to try to definitively link them to terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and others repeatedly turned up empty. They were just kids who’d turned from Scarface to an even more ruthless “hero.”
Moore had told him that if Ansara was still alive, he’d agree that terrorists had come through the tunnel. Ansara knew the kid. There was no fascination with Middle Eastern thugs. Somehow the kid had acquired the pendant, whose bail contained scratches, as though it had been hung from a chain and been wrenched from someone’s neck. That was Moore’s belief, and he called Deputy Director O’Hara at the Special Activities Division to share his thoughts. O’Hara said he’d take it as high as the President if Moore was that certain, but at the very least Homeland Security’s four mega-centers in Michigan, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Maryland (whose analysts were already monitoring the joint task force’s activities) had been alerted of the possible breach. The threat level for all domestic and international flights was already at orange/high, and O’Hara would argue to have the national threat level raised from yellow/elevated to orange as well.