In Desperation

59

Near Phoenix, Arizona

A ngel dragged the back of his hand across his mouth to contend with his mounting tension.

Could he trust the priest?

It didn’t matter. Angel knew that the cartel was going to kill him when this job was finished.

That he had enacted his survival plan gave him a measure of relief as he walked across the abandoned hangar, focusing on Limon-Rocha and Tecaza ready at the small table. They’d changed into their police uniforms and looked like real cops sitting there, listening to emergency scanners, checking their weapons, waiting for a green light.

“They’ve got an alert out for a license plate belonging to Galviera.” Limon-Rocha tilted his head to the scanners. “Nobody can find him. Maybe he did the smart thing and changed the plate, or his vehicle.”

“So, do we go now?” Tecaza asked.

“Did you secure the girl?” Angel asked him.

“Yes.”

Angel’s cell phone rang. It was Thirty.

“Are you set?”

“We’re ready.”

“I’ve just contacted him and set up the meeting. Do you have a detailed map?”

Angel snapped open the new fanfold map. With one hand, he spread it over one end of the table and pinpointed where Thirty directed them to go.

“He will be at that location in two hours.”

“We’ll leave now.”

“And bring the girl. Let him see she is alive. He’ll be cooperative if he thinks he is returning with her. Then you do your job and come home. Twenty-five will want to thank you personally.”

“Personally?”

“You know he thinks you are the best.”

Angel swallowed the lie, tapping the phone against his leg as he studied the map before making precise folds.

“It’s time,” he said to Tecaza. “Get the girl.”

Tecaza, keen to get back to Mexico, strode to the room where he’d chained Tilly to the pipe. A moment later, a stream of cursing filled the empty building as he ran back to the table and riffled through the equipment bag.

“She got away.”

Incredulous, Limon-Rocha and Angel ran to the room. After confirming what they’d been told, they’d returned to see Tecaza climbing the stairs to the roof, a small case slung over his shoulder.

“She could not have gone far,” Tecaza said. “Ruiz, get your night-vision goggles! Help me look for her!”

Both men had military-issue binoculars that enabled them to see human images in the dark by perceiving thermal radiation or body heat. On the roof, goggles pressing over their eyes, they scanned the empty, flat land surrounding the abandoned airfield. Limon-Rocha searched clockwise, while Tecaza, cursing the whole time, searched counterclockwise, finding nothing but a sea of black, the edges occasionally dotted by distant lights.

A tiny flicker of brilliant white shot by the rim of Tecaza’s lens.

He froze.

He moved back slowly until he found it again.

Then another tiny white light shot across his lens, then another.

Like minuscule white orbs rising and falling.

Then a larger one between them.

They were hands. The middle glowing orb was a face.

All several hundred yards away.

“That’s her!”