South

by Lance Charnes

  TUESDAY, 4 MAY

  The Customs and Border Protection trooper handed the ID back to Luis without comment after a Level 2 scan, then moved on to the old Ford two-door next in line.

  The trooper’s buddy wasn’t done with Luis’ Cartel-loaner Hyundai Tucson SUV. He was a Latino kid, head shaved almost bald, probably just over the minimum height requirement of five-six. A surgical mask covered the bottom half of his face to filter out the smog, just like so many other people on the streets now. His tan utilities had turned brown with sweat even though the morning wasn’t all that hot yet.

  “What’re you guys looking for?” Luis asked. “When I worked El Paso, we never searched outbound, just inbound.”

  The young guard hauled his stick-mounted mirror out from under the Tucson and peered over his sunglasses at Luis. “You was an agent?”

  “A few years ago.” More than one person had told Luis he looked like a cop when he put on reflector shades and a button-down shirt. He wore both today, along with a battered CBP ball cap. It used to work wonders while he hunted intel. Had that changed too?

  “Huh.” The kid chewed his gum a few times. “Ragheads. They skip on a camp, we get BOLOs, you know.”

  “Oh, yeah. I heard about that.” Luis glanced back at the Ford. He could just make out the red warning box on the trooper’s slate, signaling a busted scan. The driver—a young, dark-haired woman—was about to have a real bad day.

  “You’re clear, mister.” The kid shouldered his mirror and headed for the Ford.

  Luis checked his watch: ten to nine. Ninety-plus minutes in line waiting to get to this point. He was committed to crossing now, which meant another hour-plus down the drain waiting to come back in. He still had nearly two hundred miles of shitty roads to cover to hit all the border posts from here to the Colorado. Since he was considering moving Nora during the daytime, he needed to finish recon before sunset. He couldn’t afford to miss two days of work for this; the Cartel was going to get all the money, not him.

  A few minutes later, he broke free from the traffic on Boulevard Ganta de Otay heading into Nuevatijuana. He cut east on the broad, jumbled De las Bellas Artes until he reached a knot of semi-new clinics and dentists’ offices. He stopped outside a farmacia, picked up some Piraflox antibiotics for Bel’s medical bag—his cover reason for being here—then found a panadería and got a café de olla and pan dulce to help him think.

  If a boat was still doable, this would be the perfect job for one. He’d used that option a dozen times or more before the blockade went up. Now the Navy and Coast Guard had a picket line of ships stretching fifteen miles out to sea off the border, and Border Patrol boats infested the water off Imperial Beach south of San Diego. Anything going either direction got boarded and searched with dogs or thermal scanners. Officially it was to catch refugees or drug shipments from down south, even though the drugs moved up in semis or were made in the U.S., and refugees knew better than to come north.

  Twelve years ago, armed shakedowns by Mexican border police were the biggest danger at the land crossings. Hardly anyone cared who went south; it would’ve taken maybe ten minutes to get across the border. Then CBP started scanning IDs, supposedly so it would be easier to tell if tourists fell into the shit down here. Few people noticed that the change happened when hundreds of Muslims were fleeing the camps every day, causing a PR nightmare on YouTube or foreign news shows once across the border. Luis noticed; he’d barely escaped arrest on his third run south because of it.

  Two years ago, CBP checked only IDs. Now they were giving southbound traffic the same going-over as northbound. Tijuana and Otay Mesa—the two busiest crossings in California—were both backed up for hours. Busy was okay to a point; people could get lost in it. But every minute spent waiting in line was one less minute before your luck ran out. Pass.

  Luis threaded through the rocky, drought-baked foothills of the Laguna Mountains on State 94, eastbound to Tecate, eighteen miles from Otay Mesa as the vulture flies but forty by road. The roads hadn’t been repaved since he was a kid, so a drive that had once taken an hour now needed twice that. His windows radiated heat that the A/C was just able to beat down.

  An oncoming county black-and-white SUV with a low-profile light bar closed slowly enough for its forward-facing camera to suck up his license plate. After re-entering at Otay Mesa, Luis had switched the electronic plates to a number used by another Tucson of the same color, but didn’t have any control over which one. This cop might run his tags just for fun, see that this car was registered in San Francisco and decide to find out what it was doing down here.

  Luis’ hands clamped hard on the wheel. He checked his speed, watched the cop’s brake lights flare in the mirror. The Cartel’s on-board license-plate app didn’t check the owner’s record. Was the registered owner wanted for something?

  The deputy—a contractor, according to the corporate logo decals on the SUV’s tailgate—disappeared around a corner. Luis pried his hands from the wheel one at a time and wiped his palm-sweat on his jeans. Welcome back to the family business.

  He remembered these mountains well. Years ago, his dad had taken him on long hikes out here, taught him how to read maps and navigate at night. He could still hear the coyotes yip, the moan of a startled cow, scree skittering downslope under his feet. Hiding from the occasional San Diego County sheriff’s car or Border Patrol cruiser rolling by, always too close, too slow.

  Luis had known Alvaro was training him for something. He didn’t know what exactly until that first night when he helped his dad herd twenty-some migrantes into Imperial County. Luis had been ten years old and nearly as terrified as the people he’d been guiding.

  He helped on his father’s last half-dozen runs before the cartels moved in on the work and border security became too difficult to avoid. The experience helped him on those long route marches up and down the jagged landscape of Afghanistan. It had also drawn Tavo’s attention. Not for the first time, Luis wished Alvaro had pushed him into playing soccer instead.

  Luis reached Tecate by 12:30. It was little more than a collection of scrubby lots, a few sagging ranch houses and a diner. Two CBPs in utilities circulated around the half-dozen cars waiting to pass through the sleepy two-lane crossing. This could work.

  Another hour and thirty-five road miles brought him to Jacumba, a recent ghost town smashed against the border. A swarm of tan Border Patrol Humvees and contractors infested the weedy main street. The sun glinted off the standing-seam metal roofs on the guard towers. Luis didn’t bother to stop. Pass.

  Eastbound Interstate 8, Imperial County. Pavement choppy from the triple-bottom semis. Glare from the sinking sun fired the dust on the Tucson’s back window. The hacked FasTrak pass beeped every couple miles, spitting out garbage data to the toll sensors. The sprawling, boxy factories and warehouses to the north blushed slightly in the mid-afternoon light. To the south, beyond the worker slums and shanty towns, the dark mountains of Mexico floated above the haze.

  Luis switched the car to autodrive, stretched and twisted to work the kinks out of his back and butt, which had turned to lead. He couldn’t afford to stop for a rest.

  Cabbage and onion fields used to stretch green to the horizon on both sides before the maquiladoras came up here to escape the Mexican civil war. Smog and garbage stink had replaced the old, inescapable smells of fertilizer, dirt and ripening vegetables. His dad had worked the fields out here the first year after he’d come to El Norte. Alvaro still had the wide-brimmed straw hat he’d worn during harvest, just to remind them all how far he’d come.

  Calexico West, Calexico East: Otay Mesa all over again, mile-long lines of semis hauling cheap stuff from the maquiladoras southbound into Mexicali. CBP contractors hassled drivers, poked through trunks and cargo beds. Pass.

  Andrade, fifty miles and seventy-five minutes east of Calexico. It was a dusty wide spot on State 186, a casino and two trailer parks, all three full of snowbirds who’d spent their last dime to get this far and
couldn’t afford to fly back home or keep going. The thermometer on the rear-view mirror said it was 107o outside. Thank God he had this Cartel loaner. His old truck’s A/C didn’t cool anything anymore.

  Luis paid his ten bucks to park in the huge lot the Quechan Indians ran at the border. He found a spot near the CBP booth. From there he could watch from behind the safety of the Hyundai’s blacked-out windows as a line of people stuttered through the checkpoint to see a doctor or dentist in Los Algodones on the Mexican side. A much longer line of people across the street waited to come back in.

  While he watched—tracking the guards, timing the lines—he took stock.

  The big crossings were out. The easy overland routes were walled up tight. In the old days, he’d used a couple of his dad’s tracks through the Sierra Juarez east of Jacumba, but those required heavy hiking. Adults could do it, babies could ride, but four-to-six-year-olds were at that awkward age when they’re too small to walk far and too heavy to carry. That left Tecate and this place. Not much of a choice.

  There was always Arizona.

  Luis turned his head toward the black spew from the big, new coal-fired powerplant by Yuma’s airport, seven miles away. It was tempting. Once inside, there were plenty of options for crossing. The Arizonans didn’t care who left, just who came in.

  No, Luis warned himself. That’s like going back to the Wild West. Hostile natives, brutal cops. He didn’t like to take travelers into the state; one wrong word or move and they might get lynched, him along with them. That gabacho contractor had shot him over there, just yards from the border.

  And crossing from Arizona would put him into Sonora. Zeta country. Enemy territory.

  Pass. Big time.

  The easy way out was the old-school way: go through a friendly guard at a crossing. The Cartel had compromised all the border stations in California; it was high time he took advantage of it. Nora and Company wouldn’t stand out the way a mixed group of women, teens and old people would. They’d need only one or two guards on the Cartel’s payroll to pull it off. Someplace small and quiet, like here or Tecate. Maybe Ray could use his juice and be helpful after all. This could be faster and easier than he’d figured.

  Luis cranked the Hyundai to life. With any luck, he’d make it back home before Bel went to bed. He left the parking lot and drove into the setting sun.

  13

  Following its suborning of over half the regular Mexican army, the Zeta cartel’s armed wing has returned to its roots as a special operations force. It is also tasked with intelligence, electronic warfare, internal security and targeted assassinations…These forces are assessed to be responsible for most of the atrocities associated with the Zetas.

  — “Unclassified Key Judgments (from October 2030 NIE),” National Intelligence Council

  TUESDAY, 4 MAY

  Tavo watched the two bloody, naked men twist slowly from the chains linking their wrists to the barn’s roof truss. Their blood dripped onto the concrete pad a few inches below their feet, dribbled into the drain in the center. During fiestas, he butchered hogs here for roasting. “Anything new?” he asked the thin man standing between his two projects.

  Ruelas methodically rubbed a wet towel over his bare chest and fire-scarred left arm. The towel was nearly pink by now. “No, patrón. Tenorio and Flores are the only two they named. They know nothing else.”

  That was bad enough. He’d seen the dark looks and subtle signals those two had been throwing during Nestor’s funeral that morning. Now was the time to deal with them, as they slept off the food and drink from the reception. Rebellion was contagious.

  “Is there anything left to be got from them?” he asked Ruelas.

  “No, patrón.”

  Tavo grabbed the five-pound sledgehammer leaning against the nearby wooden table, circled behind the hanging men and slammed the hammer’s head into the backs of their skulls. Just like killing cattle. “Good work. Feed them to the sharks.”

  He dropped the sledge by the drain, pivoted and marched toward the stripe of night showing between the barn’s big doors. His bodyguard slotted into step behind him. Since his lieutenants in Baja Sur and Nayarit refused to accept his succession to Nestor’s position, he’d fire them. Permanently. He tapped his phone pod. “Jericó? I have a job for you.”

  Outside, the loamy smells of earth and grapevines overlaid the smoke drifting from the fire pits of his Ensenada vineyard’s fiesta ground. All the lights were off in the house on the rise ahead. That was odd. “Jericó?”

  A splat sound, then the thud of a body. Tavo spun to find his bodyguard splayed out on the ground, a dark patch covering much of his forehead.

  Before Tavo could react, a bullet smashed through his right shin. Instantly he was face-down on the ground screaming from the pain, his lower leg useless and on fire. He managed to roll on his side, grit his teeth. He’d dropped his gun. “Jericó! Where are you?”

  His chief of security didn’t answer. Instead, a dark human shape grew out of the ground about ten meters to his left. Then another. And another. Small red dots danced over his chest as the men drew near.

  Tenorio’s and Flores’ men? No, too fast. They’d hardly had time to make this move …unless they’d planned to eliminate Nestor themselves, before he did.

  Five men converged on him out of the night: tactical gear, balaclavas, night-vision goggles. Their boots rustled against the gravel. Tavo considered pretending to have a gun, making these bastards shoot him instead of letting them capture him. Before he could push that thought through his stuttering brain, he was surrounded.

  The man in front of him stepped forward casually. He dangled a bulging plastic Walmart bag from one hand, shone the beam of a Mini Maglite in Tavo’s face with the other. Tavo tried to shield his eyes with his hand.

  “Octavio,” the man said with a smile in his voice, as if greeting an old friend. “We missed you at the house. A very handsome house.”

  “Just kill me, cabrón,” Tavo growled through his pain. “I won’t tell you anything.”

  The man laughed. “No, no, no, we won’t kill you yet. We need you. And yes, you’ll tell us everything eventually. Everyone does, you know.”

  Tavo struggled to prop himself up on his elbow. “Who sent you? Tenorio? Flores?”

  “No, no.” The man shook his head. “You had a very beautiful wife, Octavio.”

  It took a moment for the word “had” to seep into Tavo’s head. Anger mixed with horror exploded inside him. Then he knew: these were Zetas. “What have you done to Pilar? Where is she? You—”

  The man upended the Walmart bag. Its contents thumped to the gravel half a meter from Tavo’s face.

  Pilar’s dead eyes watched him scream.

  14

  “The Bureau’s ability to track and arrest fugitives has improved by an order of magnitude in the past ten years…We can seize and monitor a person’s entire electronic footprint in less than an hour. This capability helps us to apprehend the average fugitive in less than three days.”

  — Director of the FBI, in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, 22 February 2030

  WEDNESDAY, 5 MAY

  One a.m., and Nora was wide awake, staring at the dark ceiling. Paul buzzed softly next to her, on his side facing away. She’d always envied his ability to sleep no matter what. The whispering and giggling out in the suite’s living room had died out, meaning the kids had finally gotten over the excitement of going to that live pirate dinner show and now slept on the sofabed.

  She was too wound up to even close her eyes. The reality of what she’d done, what she was about to do, crashed in on her after meeting Juan on Monday. She’d hardly slept since. In a few days, they’d be leaving this country forever. Leaping into the unknown.

  Nora slid out of bed, padded to the window, and peeked out through the blackout curtains as she had for half the night before.

  Their hotel was a few blocks south of Disneyland; their room was on the fifth floor at the front. A long
driveway stretched empty to the big street—Harbor Boulevard—and a platoon of palm trees stood in neat lines. The Indian restaurant on the corner was dark, as were the businesses across the street. The orangeish streetlights (they worked here) glared off the occasional passing car. Hardly any windows in the two hotels on either side of theirs had lights on. Even the pools were dark.

  Stop making yourself nuts. It’s going to work.

  Something caught her eye to her left. She moved to the far right-hand side of the windows and squinted into the floodlit night.

  A reflection on a wall. A flashing blue light.

  Then she noticed the back end of a black SUV and a man in a dark windbreaker, “FBI” in large, yellow letters on his back.

  Her heart plummeted to her knees.

  “Paul, get up!” she barked. “They’re here. They’re coming for us.”

  “Wha? Honey, how—”

  “Get up! Get the kids up! We have to go!”

  She jumped into a cleanish pair of jeans, tucked in her sleep shirt—no time for underwear—jammed on her gym shoes and Disneyland ball cap. Paul was already in the suite’s living room, rousting the kids. Nora dumped all their toiletries in a plastic hotel laundry bag, stuffed it into her carry-on bag with the slates, her purse, pendant, burner phone, and weapon.

  “Mommy, what’s happening?” Hope whined when Nora rushed into the living room.

  “Just get dressed, Cupcake.”

  They were in the corridor overlooking the enclosed atrium in less than five minutes. Nora took point, led them into the nearest stairwell. Multiple sets of heavy, echoing feet jogged up the stairs below. She led her family on tiptoes up to the seventh-floor landing. No cameras here. The feet and jingling web gear burst through a door two floors below.

  Safe. But only for a moment.

  The Bureau, here? Her stomach started the slow process of turning itself inside out.