In Desperation

33

Juarez, Mexico / El Paso, Texas

At 5:00 a.m., at the edge of Juarez, in a squalid house on a hilly dirt street of decaying adobes, burned-out cars and yapping dogs, Angel Quinterra lay in bed, waiting in the stillness.

He had not slept.

Again, as with every night, he was visited by the faces of the dead, telling him that death was coming for him.

Last night, two soldiers from the cartel had picked him up in an SUV near Lago de Rosas and brought him to this place.

“Sleep here,” they’d told him. “You will be called at 5:00 a.m. with instructions.”

When he’d arrived, the nervous man and woman who lived in the house had said little. Angel was told to refer to the couple as his “uncle and aunt,” and they gave him a small room with a bed. Above it was an ornate crucifix and a rosary draping the framed photograph of a smiling woman in her twenties.

Angel had no idea who she was and didn’t care.

This run-down shack was a far cry from the palatial ranch-the safe house-where Angel had been staying. As the cartel’s top sicario, he had grown accustomed to luxury while waiting between jobs. The cartel had placed him in the mansions of drug lords in Mexico or South America. Sometimes he took trips to Las Vegas, New York, Rio de Janeiro, or London. Always first class and the best hotels. Once he went to Barcelona to watch bull-fights, then to Monte Carlo to see a Formula One race, where he stayed on a private yacht.

At twenty, Angel had enjoyed his life as a cartel assassin.

But he knew it would end and was secretly working on his exit strategy with the priest.

His cell phone vibrated with a call. It was 5:09 a.m.

“Sí.”

“Are you ready for work?” Thirty asked.

They never used names. Thirty was Deltrano, the number two man in the Norte Cartel. He was Angel’s main contact. The head of the cartel, Samson, was known as Twenty-five.

“Sí.”

“You will be a student today, are you ready for school?”

“Sí, I’m ready.”

“Twenty-five says you will take a school trip into the United States.”

“Where?”

“First, go to your new school in El Paso. Don’t forget the backpack your uncle has prepared for you. Everything you need for this trip is inside. Now listen to my instructions…”

Afterward, in keeping with cartel practice, Angel destroyed his cell phone. In most cases, they were only used for one call. Then the woman made him breakfast. The man explained that he and his wife worked as janitors in the U.S. Consulate and had access to government forms. The cartel had murdered one daughter and threatened to kill the rest of the family if they didn’t pass blank government papers to their people, for them to make official documents.

The man gave Angel a backpack containing a new cell phone, T-shirt, jeans, a forged student visa and other records. The records confirmed Angel was registered as a new student at Azure Sky Academy, the private religious school in El Paso. Several hundred students from Juarez crossed the bridge to attend it every day. As the sun rose, the man showed him where to catch the school bus to the border.

Angel started walking to the stop.

As dawn painted the barrio in gold, he was reminded of how people here were forced to live. The smell of sewage hung in the air. The dirty faces of children picking through garbage were an outrage.

Where was God?

It was understandable to him that the young people saw the narcos as righteous rebels, exposing corrupt politicians and police, refusing to be exploited in the U.S.-run factories, battling oppression, injustice and rising above poverty. To many, the narcos were heroes.

At the bus stop, Angel saw his reflection in the store-front glass between its security bars just as he boarded the bus. He showed the driver his papers and took a seat, still seeing his reflection through the window as the bus rolled and memory pulled him back through his life to the time he was ten years old…

They are living in a ramshackle shanty near the dump. His mother works in a maquiladora. His father, a security guard, has lost his job to drinking. He spends his days sifting through trash, seething at his life and polishing his gun.

He beats Angel and his mother every day. At supper he’s raging at Angel’s mother. “You stupid bitch! You and the boy are holding me down.” She’s serving him beans. “These beans are cold, bitch!” Before Angel’s eyes he pulls out his gun and shoots her in the head.

She falls dead on the table, eyes wide, staring at Angel, who turns to face the muzzle now aimed at him. The barrel shakes. Angel waits for the bullet, glaring at his father. His boiling hate eclipses any fear as Angel’s fingers tighten on his knife.

“Kill me, too!” Angel screams at his father, whose face dissolves into tears, and in one swift move he thrusts the gun into his own mouth, pulls the trigger, splattering his brains on his mother’s picture of the Blessed Virgin.

Where is God?

Angel’s bus drove through Juarez, picking up students. As it filled, it buzzed with chatter in Spanish and English. No one noticed him. He was alone, as he’d been in the days after his mother’s murder.

He was taken in by his mother’s church, where he’d learned English from the priests who delivered him into a foster home. Over the years, Angel pinballed through the system, feeling unwanted and unloved. Finally, he ran away to live on the streets of Juarez with other outcasts. He formed a gang that broke into the homes of rich people to steal whatever they could.

One night Angel and his two gang members were caught by men who were asleep inside a house they had broken into. The men took them in a van to an abandoned building where several narcos with AK-47s were gathered around a young man tied to a chair.

Angel and his cohorts were held at gunpoint while the group’s leader was told what had happened at the house. He assessed the boys, considered the situation carefully, then considered the prisoner.

“This piece of excrement in the chair stole from me, too,” the leader said. “Only he stole much, much more than you little dogs.” The leader ordered that a handgun be placed on the ground in front of the captive man.

“Which of you dogs has the balls to pick up that gun and shoot him for me? Which of you has what it takes?”

Angel’s first friend started to cry and pleaded to be freed and Angel’s second friend stood there trembling. Angel looked at them, looked at the leader, then at the prisoner. Angel picked up the gun, raised it to the man’s forehead, imagined his father’s face and squeezed the trigger.

The explosion was deafening.

The man’s head dropped. His blood dripped steadily to the floor.

Nodding, the leader smiled. “Now, shoot your dog friends. They are witnesses.”

Angel looked at the leader, raised the gun to the head of the first boy, who pleaded as the other narcos held him: “Angel, please, no!”

Angel squeezed the trigger and it clicked. The gun was empty.

All the men laughed as the leader patted Angel’s head. Then he looked deep into Angel’s eyes, his face softening as if he’d found something sad and distant.

“What is your name?”

“Angel.”

“Angel, you have the stone heart of sicario. From now on, you work for me.”

Angel was thirteen.

That night he had found his family.

Over time he’d learned that cartels employed young assassins because they worked for less than an ex-cop or soldier, because they could get access to most places without raising suspicions and because they could be controlled.

But not Angel. He was smart; he liked killing. He was good at it, was paid well and had earned his status as a force to be feared.

Now he was twenty and felt as old as the mountains, aware death was near because rivals were not his only threat. When cartels brought in a new assassin, their first job was to kill their predecessor, who usually knew more than anyone about the organization.

It was business.

The man in the chair Angel had killed that night was an eighteen-year-old sicario, who tried to steal from the cartel for his own escape.

As the school bus traveled through downtown Juarez, Angel watched the Mexican soldiers patrolling the streets. Lines of traffic started backing up as the bus neared the bridge to the United States. Soon the students got off and joined the long lines of people waiting to walk over the muddy Rio Grande on the pedestrian bridge, a virtual tube of wire security fencing.

On the American side, U.S. border agents with drug-sniffing dogs surveyed the line advancing to the checkpoint. When his turn came, Angel presented his passport and student visa. The U.S. officer examined them, checking Angel against his photo before clearing him.

It was over quickly.

Angel entered the U.S. and walked to the intersection of Sixth Avenue and El Paso Street, glancing at the greeting on the sign that said Welcome to Texas!

As instructed that morning, he reached for his phone and made a call.

“Go to the bus station. A man wearing a Dallas Cowboys T-Shirt and hat will ask you for the time. He will give you cash and new phones.”

“That’s it?”

“Buy a one-way ticket to Phoenix.”

“What is in Phoenix?”

“Your next job.”

34

Apache Junction, Arizona

A half hour east of Phoenix, in the lobby of the Grand Cactus Motel, a computer station offered free internet access for guests.

Lyle Galviera was using it to catch up on news reports posted online, a recent story on Tilly’s abduction from W-Cero News.

Salazar was dead. Johnson was dead.

They were found in the desert south of Juarez.

Their heads had been removed.

Oh Jesus.

Pictures of Salazar and Johnson were shown over the murder scene in the desert. Then Galviera stared at a photo of himself over a caption: Lyle Galviera, Person of Interest. The report said Galviera disappeared with five million in cash stolen from the Norte Cartel, reputed to be one of Mexico’s most powerful and vengeful cartels.

The story said two men posing as police officers invaded the suburban Phoenix home of Cora Martin, Galviera’s secretary. After binding Cora and ransacking her home in vain for the Norte Cartel’s cash, the men kidnapped Tilly. There were images of Tilly, images of Cora pleading at the FBI news conference.

The report ended with the Norte Cartel’s ultimatum to Cora: she had five days to find Galviera and their cash or risk never seeing Tilly again.

Time was running out.

Gooseflesh rose on Galviera’s arms as he sat at the computer, transfixed.

My only cartel contacts are dead. Salazar and Johnson were going to help me process the money. I needed them to fix this whole thing, to find Tilly, to bring her home. What if Tilly is already dead? It would be on the news, wouldn’t it? No, only if they found her. They found Salazar and Johnson. If the Norte Cartel found those two guys, then they were going to find me. Oh Christ.

“Are you going to be much longer, Mister?” A boy about twelve, his face splashed with freckles, tapped the note taped on the frame:

Please Be Considerate of Other Guests and Limit Your Session to 10 Minutes. Thank You, Management.

Galviera logged off.

Still stunned, he joined the small line of people waiting to be seated inside the motel’s large restaurant.

I’ve got to do something.

Galviera knew about the Norte Cartel but never suspected that Salazar and Johnson had been stealing from them.

He had to find a way out of this.

“Table for one, sir?”

The hostess led him through the crowded dining room. With his dark glasses, ball cap and unshaven, tanned face, Galviera blended in with the tourists. She seated him at a small corner table next to one with four grandmothers nattering about their visit to the Grand Canyon.

“My Bert always wanted to see it.”

“So did my Edgar. It was so beautiful. I sent my granddaughter in Hartford a picture.”

Galviera excused himself after his chair bumped Grandma Hartford’s chair. She’d used the nearest empty seat at his table for her purse and travel bag so stuffed with souvenirs it was close to tipping.

“Not a problem, dear.” The old girl gave the bags a cursory adjustment.

Galviera looked at the menu for answers.

Could he stay on the run with five million dollars? Find some quiet place and disappear? How long would he last? Not long. He was not a criminal. All he’d wanted was to save the business he’d built. When the waitress came, he ordered a chicken sandwich and struggled to stay calm.

He could reach out to the Norte Cartel and give them the money in exchange for Tilly’s life. Give them some of the money. He needed his two million. He could say Salazar and Johnson took the rest, that all he had was three million.

Who was he kidding?

Look what they did to them in the desert.

He could surrender to police. Then what? Go to jail? Lose his business? Besides, how would that help Tilly? No, he had to reach out to the Norte Cartel.

How?

With Salazar’s secret cell phone number. It was all he had. The one he was told never to call unless it was life and death. Well, it was over for Salazar, but someone would have his cell phone, either police or the Norte Cartel.

Galviera had no cell phone, no BlackBerry, no laptop, nothing wireless that could be traced to him.

His attention went to Grandma Hartford’s bag.

He had noticed when he took his seat that her cell phone was atop her bag of souvenirs. She and her friends were absorbed in looking at a brochure about Superstition Mountain.

Galviera glanced around. No one would notice. He coughed, palmed the phone and went outside toward the small park by the pool. He fished Salazar’s number from his wallet.

He looked at the phone and prepared to dial.

Wait!

Think this through. The police could put a trace on all calls received by Salazar’s phone. They could triangulate the call signal to its origin and get on Galviera’s trail so fast.

What if the Norte Cartel had the phone and they answered? Then what? What would he say-give me Tilly, I’ll give you your cash and we’ll call it even?

Would that work?

Not likely.

Was there any other way?

He didn’t have any time. He had to make a decision now. His hands started shaking.

Suddenly the phone started ringing in his hand.

“Susie” came up on the call display.

35

Mesa Mirage, Phoenix, Arizona

Hope flickered.

They did not find Tilly at the Sweet Times Motel but they did find her pajama top. The top, the take-out food wrappers and the status of the room indicated that she had been there recently and was likely still alive.

Cora, overcome at the scene, was now resting in her bedroom.

Gannon would have to wait to pursue asking her about Donnie Cargo and San Francisco.

While paramedics watched over her, Gannon worked on his laptop in the living room, words blurring on his screen as he scrolled through the material he’d requested from the WPA news library. Like a prospector panning for gold, he reviewed stories on cold cases in San Francisco, and old stuff on Salazar and Johnson.

Nothing.

Who was Donnie Cargo? Why wouldn’t Cora talk about him? Was Lomax feeding him BS? Was the incident in her past linked to Tilly’s kidnapping? The creeps from her former life had taunted him about a connection. Could those sleazebags be trusted?

Gannon was at a loss.

Should he pursue Cora’s secret, or Salazar and Johnson’s connection to Lyle Galviera?

He looked across the room at Hackett and his task force, remembering Isabel Luna’s warning that someone among them could be on the cartel’s payroll.

Did one of them tip the kidnappers at the motel?

They seemed to have gotten away with no time to spare.

Gannon’s cell phone rang. The caller’s ID was blocked.

“Gannon.”

“Is this Jack Gannon, the reporter whose niece was kidnapped?”

It was a male voice, early thirties. Sounded sharp.

“Yes. Who’s calling, please?”

“Do you protect sources, Gannon?”

“Yes, if it is crucial.”

“This is crucial. I have information related to the case for you, but I have to remain anonymous and protected.”

“What is it?”

“Not over the phone.”

“I don’t have time to waste.

“Meet me alone within an hour.”

“Tell me what you have, please.”

“Something on the people who took your niece.”

Within fifteen minutes Gannon was driving across Phoenix.

He’d had the foresight to park Cora’s Pontiac Vibe in a neighbor’s back alley a few doors down and cut through backyards unnoticed. He pulled out of Mesa Mirage without being followed by any of the reporters at her house.

He worked his way to the 1-10 north, then took the Black Canyon Freeway west. His caller had provided no details, only instructions to meet him on the hour at a specific bench in the southwest area of Harmon Park. Upon arriving, Gannon parked on Pima and walked the rest of the way to the bench, carrying a copy of the Arizona Republic, as the caller had specified.

The guy had refused to give up any data over the phone. He sounded halfway articulate and credible, but it was a crapshoot gauging people in these situations. Odds were this was all bull. Gannon knew how some people, sickos, liked to get involved in high-profile cases.

They were a waste of time.

But a good reporter never dismissed a tip without checking it out, and with Tilly’s life on the line Gannon had to follow through. Waiting at the bench, he inventoried the area: a mom with a baby in a stroller, two girls sitting on the grass in the distance playing guitars.

Gannon glanced through the newspaper and reread the Republic’s last story on the case. Was there anything they had that he could use?

“Jack Gannon?”

A man in his early thirties sat next to him. He wore a navy suit jacket, matching pants, blue open shirt and dark glasses. He’d recognized the voice of his caller.

“That’s right. And your name?”

“Forget that.”

“Come on. I didn’t come here to play games, pal.”

“Neither did I. This is serious shit, Gannon, very serious.”

He talked rapidly, as if he’d downed five energy drinks.

“I’ve been watching the news. I saw you on TV with your sister. I read your news stories, even the old ones. You’ve been places. You’re pretty good, almost won a Pulitzer.”

“What is this about?”

“Jack, did they figure out how the kidnappers found your sister’s house?”

“No. Well, if they did, they didn’t tell us.”

“They hired my firm, the firm I work for. I’m a private investigator.”

“What?”

“Don’t blame me. We didn’t know anything at the time.”

“Hold on. Back it up. Who the hell are you? What is this?”

“The only thing I’m giving you is information, so unless you want to end this now, I suggest you listen.”

“Go ahead.”

“A few days before the kidnapping, a woman with a Hispanic accent comes into our office, wants to hire us for a ‘very urgent job.’ She said she was with an export company in Mexico City that was about to enter into a deal with Lyle Galviera’s company.”

“Quick Draw Courier?”

“Yes. She said her people were having last-minute doubts about Quick Draw and wanted a full background on Galviera and his executive office. She said her clients had to know now before they would sign the deal in a few days. To confirm her connection to the export company, she presented me with a letter on letterhead from Mexico. I even called the number. It all checked out. Now, we’re licensed to lawfully look into the conduct, whereabouts, affiliations, transactions, or reputation of any person or group.”

“A background check?”

“Exactly. So in the time we have, we provide as much detail as we can on home addresses, financial, social standing, everything on everyone in the exec office-twelve people in all-and give her the report. We tell her Galviera is divorced, no kids. But his credit card records show jewelry purchases and flower deliveries, and through our calls to the florist, we learn he is dating your sister, who has an eleven-year-old daughter, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Jesus.”

“The woman thanks us, pays us in cash, and a short time later, your niece is kidnapped. I just about upchucked my lunch. I called the number on the letterhead in Mexico City again, and guess what?”

“No longer in service?”

“That’s right.”

“Jesus. You have to go to the FBI with this.”

“That’s exactly what I told the owners of the firm.”

“And?”

“They said, look, we provided a service. What the client does with the information is on the client, not the firm.”

“That’s not right. Don’t you have some duty to report this?”

“Exactly, I told them. I thought we were close to committing some kind of felony, aiding and abetting or something, and we should report this and cooperate.”

“So what happened?”

“I was ordered to shut up and advised to forget about it.”

“Why?”

“Let me tell you about the people I work for. They do some pretty sketchy work with drug dealers and coyotes, the guys who smuggle illegals into the U.S. Very, very dark stuff. I only joined them three months ago. Now, I don’t want to lose my license, or go to jail, or worse. So I’m quitting today, taking a job with a friend in corporate security in Tucson.”

“Wait. Why don’t you go to the FBI?”

“I’ve got too many other issues with law enforcement.”

“Where does this leave me? Who was the woman who came to you?”

“I poked around in the files and was able to get a number. I needed to clear my conscience. Here you go. You’re on your own with this.”

The guy passed Gannon a slip of paper, then left.

It was a telephone number in Juarez, Mexico.

36

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Arriving for her shift at the Forest Valley Hospice, Olivia Colbert went to the small office and reviewed the patient notes.

She had volunteered here a year ago, determined to offer the same compassion the staff had provided her mother before her death. They took exceeding care in preparing people dying of cancer for their final days.

And they helped their families, too.

It was not easy. Facing people in pain took an emotional toll but Olivia was strong, like her mother, who’d been a nurse. Olivia was completing a nursing degree at the University of Ottawa and dedicated her work to her mother’s memory.

Here we go.

Olivia came to today’s notes for Mr. Montradori. She was especially concerned about him because he was alone. Since he’d arrived a month ago, Olivia had tried her best to help him. While all of her other patients had relatives, or a friend, Mr. Montradori had no one.

He was not married. He had no children. No friends.

“Been a loner all my life,” he’d told her the first week. “Just me and my sins to keep me company.”

He was fifty but so ravaged by his cancer he looked like an eighty-year-old man. He’d been a small-engine mechanic, fixing lawn mowers and snowblowers in his small shop in Alta Vista.

“Was wild in my younger days before I toned things down,” he said. “When the doctor gave me the news, he gave me a brochure for Forest Valley. I liked the pictures. Seemed like a nice place to die.”

Olivia smiled to herself, logged off, slid the keyboard tray under the desktop, collected her notes and started her duties.

The hospice was a stone building located in the eastern suburb of Orleans atop a hill, nestled among a pine forest. It overlooked the Ottawa River, Quebec and the Gatineau Hills, which turned into a patchwork quilt of color in autumn.

The building had twelve patient rooms. Seven were occupied. Olivia took her time checking on each one. She helped those facing death contend with their fears and the concept of the end. Many reconciled unsettled matters, unresolved relationships; made their peace and planned their memorials. While making her rounds, Olivia was pleased that each patient had a friend or relative with them. No patient was alone, except for Mr. Montradori.

He’d preferred it that way.

“Hello, Mr. Montradori.”

Olivia smiled when she entered his room. He was in bed, watching TV news. His eyes brightened slightly above his breathing tube, his way of acknowledging that he was happy to see her, but they remained fixed to the newscast.

He never asked much of her, never talked much. He was just glad that she was near, so that he was not really ever alone. He liked news channels and old Western movies like The Searchers and True Grit. Olivia took care of that and gave him a headset so he could watch them without disturbing the others.

Olivia read over his chart and refilled his ice water, glancing at the TV. There was another report on the case in the United States, the kidnapped girl in California, or was it Arizona? She wasn’t sure. Something about the desert in Mexico. They were repeating that clip of the mother at the microphones pleading for her daughter’s return. Such a terrible story, it broke Olivia’s heart.

Just like Mr. Montradori broke her heart.

Yesterday, Olivia had helped him decide on his final arrangements. He wanted to be cremated. That was it. Olivia had arranged for a lawyer to bring the papers later today for all the final adjustments.

“Can I get you anything, Mr. Montradori?”

He blinked.

His breathing was labored. Olivia sat next to him and took his hand. His voice rasped but he was clear.

“I need to get something off my chest, something I’ve been carrying for a long time, Olivia.”

“Would you like me to call the priest, or the counselor?”

A long moment passed and he gave his head a very slight negative shake.

“Call the police.”

Olivia thought his medication was confusing him.

“You want me to call the police?”

A single finger trembled as it rose from his free hand resting atop his blanket to indicate the TV news report on the kidnapped girl in the U.S.

“I have information on a case,” he said. “That case.”

37

Clarksburg, West Virginia

“What the hell’s the holdup?”

Phone pressed to his ear, Steve Pollard, a latent fingerprint specialist at the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, shifted uncomfortably at his workstation.

Earl Hackett had ignored procedure and called him directly.

Again.

“I’m sorry things were miscommunicated,” Pollard said. “We advised ERT in Phoenix that their first submission was rejected. The prints were not legible.”

“What about the others?” Hackett said. “There has to be something there to identify these guys. I can’t believe that it’s taking us this long to get a hit. What about the stuff from the motel? ERT found prints on all the items in the trash.”

Pollard eyed his computer monitor, the split screen showing enlargements of two fingerprints.

“Yes, these newer samples are clear. We’re processing them now.”

“How much longer?”

Both men knew that electronic submissions typically received responses very quickly, within two hours at most. Typically.

“We’re moving as fast as we can. We had a system crash.”

“Do you grasp what’s at stake here?”

Pollard glanced at the framed picture of himself with his wife and their ten-year-old son at the West Virginia Blackberry Festival. Since the Phoenix case broke, Pollard and his team had been putting in fourteen-hour shifts supporting the Phoenix investigation, going flat out to process every impression they submitted in order to get a lead on the suspects who kidnapped Tilly Martin.

He’d taped her photo next to his son’s.

“I’m aware of the stakes, Agent Hackett. I’m aware everyone’s on edge. We’re working as hard as we can.”

“Just be damned sure you alert us the instant you’ve got something.”

After hanging up, Pollard looked out his window at the hills of West Virginia. He massaged his temples, repositioned his glasses and resumed working. Pollard’s section, known as the IAFIS, was part of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services and was housed in a sprawling three-story modular complex, some 250 miles west of Washington, D.C.

The IAFIS used state-of-the-art hyperfast databases designed to match latent fingerprints. Pollard’s job as a specialist was to analyze impressions, study comparisons and help with identification for the requesting agency.

The information Pollard obtained was processed through regional, state and national crime databases, such as the National Crime Information Center and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which was a repository for details on unsolved homicides. And he could make requests through international agreements to search databases of other countries.

At the outset of Tilly Martin’s kidnapping, crime scene techs had tried to get clear impressions off the duct tape the kidnappers had used to bind Cora. The techs had also tried lifting prints from the kitchen table, chairs, counters; off the furniture in Tilly’s room; everywhere in the house.

But nothing was usable.

All Pollard had was the set of elimination prints, those from people whose prints would be expected in the house. Cora and Jack Gannon had volunteered theirs. Tilly’s were lifted from her dresser mirror. Lyle Galviera’s were taken from the fridge door in his condo.

Pollard would later compare those prints with any new ones that emerged, then run the new ones through the gamut of databases.

The development concerning the Sweet Times Motel had yielded a break. The FBI’s Evidence Response Team had lifted a series of good, clear impressions from the right hand off soda cans discarded in the trash.

Pollard made a visual point-by-point comparison between the impressions on his monitor, studying the arches, whorls and loops, and compared them with the elimination prints.

He determined that some of the smaller latents matched Tilly’s, confirming she had been in the motel room. Two other sets of latents were unidentified.

Now we’re talking.

With the first, he started with the right thumb, which in a standard ten-card is number one. He coded its characteristics, then those of the other fingers. Then he scanned the prints and entered all the information into his computer.

Then he submitted it to the automated fingerprint-identification system for a rapid search through massive local, state and nationwide databanks for a match. Then he did the same with the second set and his computer hummed as it processed his data for a list of possible matches to study.

It would take some time. The IAFIS stored several hundred million impressions from law enforcement agencies across the country.

Pollard went to the coffee room to start a fresh pot of coffee, then returned to his workstation. The search was done. In the first set, he was given a list of three possibilities that closely matched his first unidentified submission.

He started working on it right away.

Again, Pollard made a visual point-by-point comparison with the first set of soda can mystery prints and the three offered by the database as potential matches. This was the part of the job Pollard loved, concentrating with enormous intensity on the critical minutiae points, like the trail of ridges near the tip of the number two finger. No similarities, there. That eliminated the first two candidates right off. For the last one, he enlarged the samples to count the number of ridges on the number three finger.

Pollard’s eyes narrowed. All the minutiae points matched. The branching of the ridges matched. He began tallying the clear points of comparison where the two samples matched. Some courts required ten to fifteen clear point matches. Pollard stopped at twenty, knowing that one divergent point instantly eliminated a print.

All right.

He had a match on the first print.

For the second mystery print, the databases offered two possible matches.

For the next ten minutes, Pollard when through the same exacting process until he was satisfied he had a match.

Pollard then confirmed the identification numbers of the matching prints and submitted a query for each of them into a number of databanks.

It shouldn’t take long. He reached for his coffee.

In about a minute, the first result came back and the hardened face of a man in his thirties stared back at Pollard from his monitor. He went to the subject’s file summary. It came through a DEA database by way of Interpol and Mexico’s Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional.

The man was Ruiz Limon-Rocha, a Mexican National. The second result brought a younger face, which glowered at Pollard. He was Alfredo Hector Tecaza, a Mexican National. Pollard had their photos and abstracts of their files.

This was the break that Hackett needed. These two should be run through the Intelligence Center in El Paso.

Pollard reached for his phone.

38

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

Death was never far from Rosalina.

The sound of power tools and the smell of fresh-cut wood when she passed by the coffin maker’s shop was a chorus to her grief as she hurried through the barrio market to her meeting.

Today, Rosalina was taking a stand against the narcos.

No mas, she promised her dead child, no more blood.

Rosalina’s world had ended six months ago with the murder of Ivette, her twenty-two-year-old daughter.

Ivette was an aid worker killed in a drug gang’s attack at the clinic where she had worked with her younger sister, Claudia. Rosalina and her husband, Ruben, believed Ivette was targeted because she and Claudia were outspoken against the narcotraficantes.

After her death, Rosalina and Ruben sent Claudia to live with a cousin in the country. The gangs had sent Ruben a message: they would spare pursuing Claudia through their network, if Rosalina and Ruben stole documents for them from the U.S. Consulate where they worked at night as cleaners.

Ruben agreed to comply-“we need to be free of them”-but Rosalina wanted to refuse. The gangsters were cowards. Thugs. She hated them and was proud that her daughters had inherited her moral backbone.

“Look at what they’ve taken from us, Ruben,” she told him. “We will never be free of them unless we fight back. And I will fight back, even if it kills me.”

For Rosalina, the tipping point was not stealing the documents but being forced to harbor a sicario-in her home-so he could go off and kill. The final outrage: he’d slept in Ivette’s bed.

Now, she was taking a stand in Ivette’s memory.

She was fighting back.

Not long after the sicario had left, Rosalina gathered her things, rushed to the local grocery and used the public phone to make a call. Then she caught a crosstown bus. Now, walking through the market, Rosalina tightened her grip on her bag. It held documents she would pass to the one person who could help.

Isabel Luna was almost trotting through the crowded market when she was stopped by the voice at her back.

“Hold on.”

She turned to Arturo Castillo, the chief photographer with El Heraldo, who was failing to keep up with her.

“Come on, Arturo, we’re late. I don’t want to lose this one.”

Solid leads to El Heraldo’s newsroom were rare these days, so when Isabel received one from a female caller claiming to have documented information on “something big” involving a cartel, she took action. She took the usual precautions in not going by herself to meet the source, in case the cartels were attempting to lure her. While traveling in pairs or small groups was no guarantee against any attack, the practice was to never travel alone and always leave details with your news desk.

In Juarez, many people went about their daily lives in trepidation, never knowing if that person staring at them was part of something suspicious, or if they should fear that car behind them.

Journalists tried not to be conspicuous. Arturo kept his cameras out of sight using a small bag, not the obvious bulging camera bag and certainly nothing around his neck.

Not for this assignment, anyway.

“Where are we going, exactly?” he asked Isabel. “There, ahead.”

She pointed with her chin, then led him past the stands and overturned wooden crates tilted to display tomatoes, bananas, potatoes, carrots, zucchini, cabbage, corn. Isabel searched the crowd and the vendors-farmers in jeans wearing straw hats or ball caps, women wearing aprons over print dresses-until she came to the vendor selling large baskets, stacked in columns reaching to the green awning.

Standing alone near it was a woman in her forties. She was wearing a white shirt over jeans, a brown-and-white sweater, and was holding a large canvas bag with a blue-and-white square pattern.

Isabel approached her and used the identifying phrase.

“Are you waiting for Isabel?”

“Sí.”

“I am Isabel. We spoke,” she said, discreetly showing her ID. “And this is my friend Arturo. He works with me.”

Arturo gave her a small smile.

The woman assessed them. She read and trusted the work of the people at El Heraldo. “I am Rosalina.” She glanced around, comfortable in the noise and activity of the busy market. “I will talk to you right here, and quickly.”

Isabel nodded and listened as Arturo kept an eye on their area.

Because of the din, there was no risk of anyone overhearing Rosalina as she related her family’s tragedy and current situation. Isabel listened without taking notes, nodding, saying little, asking an occasional question.

Rosalina explained how her daughter’s killers threatened her surviving daughter in an extortion bid to force her and her husband to steal U.S. government documents and harbor a sicario “for something large.”

“We overheard the gang members talking when they dropped off a school backpack at our home with items and the completed documents for the sicario. We know this young man was posing as a student when he entered.”

“Which school?”

“Azure, in El Paso. I think this sicario is being sent on a very big and very bad job in the U.S.” Rosalina opened her bag and pulled out a smaller bag with a large brown envelope. “The cartel does not know but I made copies of everything and I made notes. It is all in here for you. We know El Heraldo is the most courageous newspaper in all Juarez, and I am counting on you, in the memory of my beautiful daughter Ivette, to do the right thing through your connections and stop him and his cartel.”

Isabel did not look at the documents in the market.

It was not the appropriate place.

Luna had to trust her instincts about Rosalina, had to trust what she heard in her voice. She saw the pain etched in her face, and her hands, scarred from solvents and nearly arthritic now from years of scrubbing toilets in office buildings.

Isabel looked into Rosalina’s eyes that were brimming with anguish and burning with the same fire that burned in her own heart-the righteous fire that raged to cleanse Juarez of the poison that flowed through its streets, carrying the evil that was destroying a generation.

United by death, the two women hugged.

“I give you my word, I will do all I can,” Isabel said.

39

Mesa Mirage, Phoenix, Arizona

Something was up.

When Jack Gannon called Melody Lyon at WPA headquarters, her voice carried an uneasy undertone. She was cool to his updates on Tilly’s abduction until he abruptly shifted the conversation.

“What’s going on there, Mel?”

As a journalist, Lyon never shied from a tough question.

“All right, here it is. Jack, do you have anything to do with this kidnapping?”

“Me?” Gannon struggled to keep his voice low.

“Even after the fact? Like maybe your sister and her boyfriend got caught up in a bad drug deal or debt, and they asked you to help them before it went wrong with the kidnapping? We need to know.”

“What is this? Are you serious?”

A moment passed.

“Mel, didn’t you hear what I was telling you? The cartel behind Tilly’s kidnapping hired a P.I. firm to get info on Cora in order to pressure Lyle.”

Another moment passed.

“What’s going on, Melody?”

“FBI agents from the New York Division just left our office. They grilled people here individually, Jack-me, George Wilson, Al Delaney, Carter O’Neill, Beland, the people who handle your copy.”

“On what?”

“Your character, your habits. They wanted to know if we thought you could be involved. They’re likely going to talk to the staff at your old paper, the Buffalo Sentinel, too.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Jack, tell me the truth. Are you involved?”

“You really have to ask? You of all people know what I’ve been through to get here. Now you think it’s possible that I’ve got the inclination, time and stupidity to be a drug dealer?”

“But your sister…”

“My sister and I have been estranged for over twenty years. I was twelve when I last saw her, Mel. Twelve. She’s a stranger. I am getting to know her and getting used to the fact I have a niece. Hell, a few days ago I believed I had no living relatives. Under the circumstances, this is a bit of a challenge.”

“I understand that, but I need your answer, Jack.”

“Is someone there with you? Are you recording this for the FBI? Well, my answer is no, goddamn it! No, I am not involved. Christ, you’re the one who assigned me to Juarez. Then, out of the freaking blue, my long-lost sister, who apparently had been watching my bylines over these years, calls me for help. I told you all of this.”

A long silence passed before Lyon exhaled slowly.

“I believe you. But listen, if this ever comes back on you, it comes back on the WPA. And the damage to you and to this organization would be monumental.”

“This is not about me or the WPA, Mel. It’s about a kidnapped child and we’re wasting time.”

“Agreed. Let’s go over the status of things again.”

Lyon updated him on how the WPA was continually filing everything it could on the case from its bureaus in Phoenix, California, Texas, Washington, D.C., and Mexico. Gannon went back to telling her about his tip on how the cartel had hired a private detective agency to locate Cora’s home and that he was working to determine the location of a contact number he’d obtained.

Gannon carefully withheld any mention of his own suspicions about Cora or the allegations Peck and Lomax had made about Donnie Cargo and her troubled past. First, he had to keep pushing Cora for answers.

That was his next step.

After he finished his call he went to Cora’s bedroom. A paramedic had just left it, closing the door softly behind him.

“I need to talk to her,” Gannon said.

“Give it time. The sedative is still working on her. She needs to rest.”

Frustrated, Gannon returned to working on his laptop, feeling the eyes of the investigators on him. He didn’t care. He needed to check with Adell and Luna.

You do your job, I’ll do mine.

Cora was in her bed, floating on a cloud of sedation.

Everything was going away. Everything was going to be all right. Her breathing was calm. She saw her ceiling in the soft light through her eyelids, big black wings scraping her face. She was imagining…her phone ringing…is it ringing now…no, it is not ringing…oh yes it is…no…please…Tilly’s calling… Tilly’s safe… No…Tilly, accusing her… It’s because of you, Mommy…your fault…because of what you did…pictures…memories are swirling…with distortions…ears are pounding…in the rain…it’s karma…going to get you…raining in San Francisco… Donnie and Vic…oh shit…what are you doing…there’s a man with a gun over there… Donnie, what is it?… Vic says hold this…what…please, no…it’s so heavy…Cora…stop the car, Donnie…stop the car…what just happened…running in the rain…crying in the rain…on her knees…in the rain…stop the rain…her heart is bursting…her pulse is racing…she wants to scream…needs to scream…oh God…what…happened…the hard rain…blood…so much blood…oh God…oh Jesus…her hands…blood all over her hands…what did you do…it won’t go away…it’ll never go away…

40

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico / El Paso, Texas

Arturo Castillo positioned the last document in the high-speed scanner.

Across the newsroom, Isabel Luna worked at her keyboard while talking on the phone to an important source.

After their clandestine meeting with Rosalina in the market, Castillo and Luna had rushed back to El Heraldo’s offices.

Now Luna, her handset wedged between her left ear and shoulder as she typed, was stressing the urgency of her information to the only Mexican cop she trusted: her stepbrother, First Sergeant Esteban Cruz.

“I’m sending it now.” Luna signaled Arturo that she’d received his last scan. “Nine attachments, including his photo. I’m certain it’s him. Stay on the line.”

In the time it took for the attachments to transmit, Isabel explained how her source had obtained the documents before Cruz cut her off.

“Got them,” he said.

Luna and Cruz went through each one together. Isabel blinked at the photograph. He was so young, a face to fit any one of the young men she saw in Juarez every day, yet in her heart she knew him.

“It’s him,” she said.

“Are you certain, Isabel?”

“Yes. Based on what I see and based on what I know, this is him. Look at him, posing as a student. He’s killed nearly two hundred people. Think of all the suffering, Esteban. Look at the notes. It’s the sicario, The Tarantula.”

“This photo for the counterfeit passport is the first we’ve ever seen of him. This could be a big break.”

“My source says he crossed into El Paso-” she glanced at the time “-less than two hours ago, maybe. They’d have a record. He could be on his way to the next killing in the U.S. We have to find him.”

“I’ll take care of this.”

“Keep me informed, Esteban.”

At his desk, Cruz cupped his hands over his face, peering over his fingertips at the revelation on his computer monitor.

A thousand thoughts streaked through his mind, but with a Herculean effort he deflected the most painful ones to concentrate on his job.

He’d led the investigation into the murders of the two American ex-cops in the desert, Salazar and Johnson. Judging from Isabel’s source’s documents and based on what Cruz knew from the murders, he agreed.

This was The Tarantula.

And if Salazar and Johnson were tied to the Phoenix kidnapping, as investigators in the U.S. and Mexico believed, then this could mean the cartel has dispatched their sicario to finish things there.

To kill the girl.

Or Lyle Galviera.

Or both.

Either way, Cruz had to act fast. How should he put this break into play? I could take care of it myself. Cross over on police business and find him. I have friends in the U.S. who could help quickly with all I would need. I could resolve it the narco way. No, stop thinking like that. You’re taking things personally and that can be dangerous.

Besides, he was obligated to share the intel with the FBI agents working with his team on the murders. He would do that through proper channels, even though it entailed FBI bureaucracy.

He would do the same with his own bureaucracy.

But he was uncomfortable sharing the information. He feared infiltration. The information could be intercepted by someone on the cartel payroll. There was always risk everywhere. No one knew that better than Cruz and his stepsister. For a moment he pictured his father’s grave in the cemetery.

Then it became clear to Cruz who he needed to call first.

The El Paso Intelligence Center was ensconced on the secured grounds of Fort Bliss in a squat light brick building with beautiful palms at the main entrance.

The EPIC’s parking lot offered a view of Juarez, just across the brown shallow water of the Rio Grande. The staff often changed shifts to the echo of gunfire rising from Juarez, a reminder that while U.S. law enforcement went about its work, the cartels went about theirs.

The installation was the nerve center of the U.S. government’s war on drugs and global crime. It was operated by the Drug Enforcement Administration, supported by personnel from nearly twenty federal agencies, and a number of state, county and local departments.

Using a network of cutting-edge law enforcement databases, it connected the dots in real time to help track the history of a suspected terrorist detained at an airport, or aid a patrol officer who has just made a routine traffic stop, or anything to help an investigation.

Some three hundred analysts, intelligence experts, federal agents and a spectrum of other specialists examined a galaxy of information scraps, pulling them together to provide fast tactical support to investigators across the U.S. and around the world.

One of EPIC’s best analysts was Javier Valdiz, a DEA intelligence expert. A short time ago, he’d received an urgent query submitted by the FBI’s fingerprint lab in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Latent prints collected at an Arizona motel identified Ruiz Limon-Rocha and Alfredo Hector Tecaza as suspects in the kidnapping of Tilly Martin.

Valdiz was coordinating queries related to her abduction when the FBI requested he analyze Limon-Rocha and Tecaza’s backgrounds.

Valdiz had to be careful, as EPIC analysts, depending on their level of security clearance, had access to extremely sensitive intelligence, some of it arising from live, undercover operations.

In the case of Ruiz Limon-Rocha, Valdiz’s research showed that he had been a sergeant and a member of the Airmobile Special Forces Group in the Mexican military. Research on Alfredo Hector Tecaza revealed that he had been an infantry corporal in the same branch of the military. Further EPIC analysis showed that, one year ago, Limon-Rocha and Tecaza were recruited to join the Norte Cartel by an upper-tier member.

Who brought them on?

Valdiz wondered about that just as his line rang. “Valdiz.”

“Esto es Cruz, cómo es usted, mi amigo?”

“Esteban. Very busy.”

“You may not know, Javi, but I am working on the case of the two American ex-cops south of Juarez. I am not supposed to call you directly.”

“For you, my door is open.”

Before being assigned to EPIC, Valdiz had worked as an undercover agent until a bullet during a gun battle with a cartel put him in a wheelchair. Valdiz would have bled to death in the desert if the Mexican state cop partnered with him had not risked his life to carry him to safety.

That cop was Esteban Cruz.

“What do you need, Esteban?”

“This is urgent.” Cruz explained quickly, then emailed Valdiz the attachments. “We need to get an alert out. We need to intercept this sicario.”

Valdiz read through the information.

“If our guy entered at El Paso and was going to fly to Phoenix, the flight itself is ninety minutes. Then add at least an hour for security screening and check-in,” Valdiz said.

“They might still grab him at the airport.”

“They might. But if he drove, it is a six-or seven-hour drive. We’ve missed him.”

“Unless he took a train, or a bus.”

“The border guys would have scanned the passport,” Valdiz said. “We can get people to the terminals to check with ticket agents, look at security cameras. We’re talking only a few hours. We can do the same at the airport. Hang on.”

Valdiz took care to submit his analysis on Limon-Rocha and Tecaza to his supervisor to approve and forward to the FBI in Phoenix.

Then he turned to another monitor and launched into rapid typing, working on the alert for the sicario.

41

Phoenix, Arizona

The secretary waved Hackett into ASAC Bruller’s office.

Seth Bruller-Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix Division-was standing alone at his desk, sleeves rolled up, on the telephone.

He shot Hackett a look that made it clear: he was not enjoying this end of the conversation.

“Understood…yes, sir…I appreciate that…we will, sir.” Bruller ended the call, undid his collar button, loosened his tie and glared at Hackett.

“That was headquarters. They’re not happy, Earl.” Bruller snatched the file containing the inventory of items and material collected from the motel by the Evidence Response Team from his desk. “Damn it, where’s our lead on this?”

“We’re waiting for Clarksburg to process the latents,” Hackett said.

“Still?”

“They’ve been promising it momentarily for the last three hours.”

Bruller dropped the file, shaking his head. “Have we got anything else? A plate, a sighting, anything?”

“Nothing’s surfaced. We’re going to informants in Tijuana, Juarez, Phoenix and L.A.”

“And?”

“We’re leaning on them.”

“Not hard enough.” Bruller seized a printout of a news story. Hackett saw the logo for the WPA newswire. “What about Gannon, the brother who’s running all over the place. You get anything from him?”

“Just attitude. If he’s got anything, he’s not saying.”

“His niece’s life’s at stake. Why doesn’t he work with us?”

“Gannon doesn’t trust us.”

“He doesn’t trust us?”

“That’s right and I don’t blame him.”

“What?”

“Look at the facts-Salazar and Johnson were American ex-cops.”

“They were bad cops. It happens.”

“And you recall that little memo warning us of cartel infiltration of U.S. law enforcement?”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know what happened with the motel, Seth. It was almost like they could hear us coming. We were so close, their coffee was still warm.”

“Are you saying these guys were tipped from inside the task force?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“I’ll tell you what to think-think about doing your damned job by looking for criminals, rather than looking for blame!” Through his glass walls Bruller saw heads turn to his office. He sat down, repositioned the two framed photos of his boys in their Scout uniforms and pursed his lips. “You say Gannon doesn’t trust us. Well, I don’t trust the fact he just happened to be in Mexico when all this came down with his sister. It’s just a little too coincidental, don’t you think?”

“The New York Division interviewed his editors,” Hackett said. “Gannon’s reason for being there checks out. Our people found no red flags in his background. He was on assignment in Juarez when this happened.”

“What about Galviera? What did we find on him?”

“Nothing other than what we know.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s already in the report you have, Seth. He had financial trouble. He gambled. He was going to lose his company and sought relief through Salazar and Johnson.”

“And who else? Did you pursue that? Where are your informants? Who else did Galviera associate with? For Christ’s sake, Earl!”

A soft rap on the open door interrupted them.

“Excuse me,” Bonnie Larson said. “I thought you’d like to know we’ve just received confirmations from the lab and EPIC. The prints of our kidnappers belong to two Mexican nationals in the Norte Cartel.”

“Get on it.” Bruller reached for his phone. “I’ll advise NHQ.”

Returning to their desks, Larson pulled Hackett aside, dropped her voice. “Thank God I got you out of there. With all that yelling, I was afraid.”

“For me?”

“For Bruller.” Larson rolled her eyes. “The last time he was operational, cell phones were just a dream.”

Upon examining the new analysis, Hackett’s stomach tightened.

The first man was Ruiz Limon-Rocha, a Mexican National. DOB: 14 July 1980. Height: 5'11". Weight: Unknown. Hair Color: Black. Eye Color: Brown.

The second was Alfredo Hector Tecaza, a Mexican National. DOB: 03 December 1986. Height: 5'10". Weight: 170. Hair Color: Black. Eye Color: Brown.

Limon-Rocha and Tecaza were ex-military recruited by a high-ranking member of the Norte Cartel. The two dead guys in the desert were American ex-cops, believed to be working for the Norte Cartel before betraying them.

Hackett also reflected on the task force, now hitting upward of seventy people from a range of jurisdictions.

Unease gnawed at him. The Norte Cartel was known for infiltrating law enforcement agencies.

His phone rang. Bruller wasn’t finished. He had a question.

“What about Cora, the mother?”

“What about her?”

“How deep did we go on her background?”

“We’ve been through all this. You saw our reports. No record, no warrants. She admitted to her past addiction to hard drugs but has been clean for over eleven years, since her daughter’s birth.”

“She admitted to knowing drug dealers.”

“Yes, in the past, but her neighbors told us she is a clean-living, churchgoing single mom.”

Larson’s line rang. She picked up the call, then started waving frantically at Hackett.

“Right,” Bruller was saying into Hackett’s ear, “but her boyfriend was a money man for the Norte Cartel. We need to polygraph her. Let’s get that set up.”

Hackett hung up, knowing Bruller was right. He should’ve trusted his instinct and polygraphed Cora earlier.

“Earl!” Larson cupped one hand over the receiver. “It’s EPIC. They just got a lead that a sicario for the cartel just entered the U.S. at El Paso. They think he’s our guy for Salazar and Johnson and he’s on a bus to Phoenix now. Arizona DPS is talking to the bus company and the driver. They’re getting set to take it down now!”

42

Willcox, Arizona

Angel watched the desert roll by his window.

The bus, westbound on I-10, had just left New Mexico. It was nearly full with weary passengers: leather-skinned men in faded denim shirts, young mothers with small children, a few students, and a few grandmothers; people running away, or going home, people who kept to themselves. When they spoke, they talked softly in Spanish, their privacy protected by the drone of steel belts on asphalt.

Angel was alone.

The seat next to him was empty. He was taking in the wide-open landscape and mountain ranges, the territory where Cochise and Geronimo once rode.

But every few seconds his eyes shifted to the driver.

Something’s wrong.

Angel had been watching him in the big rearview mirror and, when the light was right, studied his reflection on the windows.

It was essential to Angel’s survival that he be aware of every sound, action and reaction.

Yes, he’d entered the U.S. earlier in Texas without incident. But his counterfeit documents had been scanned into computers. And the bus terminal went smoothly, but he’d noted the security cameras and an intelligent ticket agent who seemed capable of remembering faces when he glanced at him. “Just one way to Phoenix, sir?”

Angel took nothing-absolutely nothing-for granted as he continually assessed every iota of information to determine if it was a threat.

And now, he may have detected one.

Through the driver’s body language.

A short time ago, somewhere around San Simon, something twigged. The driver had taken a call on his cell phone. Angel could not hear any of it over the rush of the wheels and the fan pushing conditioned air, smelling of fabric freshener and diesel, through the old bus. But in seconds, the driver’s reaction to his call telegraphed alarm in a million ways.

While on the phone, he’d glanced into his mirror and quickly inventoried his passengers, nodding as he spoke. Angel noticed how, upon ending the call, the driver repositioned his grip on the wheel with both hands, then licked his lips. Then he dragged the back of one hand across his mouth as he constantly checked his side mirror.

As if he is expecting to see someone come up beside them.

The warning signs accumulated.

Trouble’s coming.

Angel had to act but he needed to keep calm. He controlled his breathing the way he’d been conditioned since his first days as a professional assassin.

At that time, the cartel had sent him to a secret training camp, where for several hard months hired mercenaries from around the world taught him how to maintain and shoot with accuracy every kind of gun, from pistols to assault rifles. He was instructed on how to use knives, bows and employ everyday items as weapons. Here is how a paper clip can be used to puncture an eyeball. The mercenaries taught him self-defense, how to read and escape dangerous situations and survive as a fugitive. They taught him the art of killing hand to hand, but not how to live with death on his conscience.

Angel had soon understood that killing was not possible for all the prospective hit men at the camp, where cartel enemies had been delivered for execution.

Some could not do it.

They could not look into the eyes of their target, a defiant man, a sobbing woman, even the pleading child of an enemy kneeling before them, and end their life. Some broke down, lost their minds.

They were the first to be executed.

Angel was different.

He held enough hate in his heart, knew the smell and taste of it, so that squeezing the trigger was a release.

An embrace.

But with time, killing had exacted a toll, and now he knew that his days as a sicario were numbered. He was tired of the torment, tired of living in the crosshairs, of facing eternal damnation. That is why he brokered his deal with the priest.

That is why he would bring it all to an end after this final job.

But it would end on his terms.

Not here.

Not with a white, potbellied bus driver squirming in his seat. Angel continued studying his actions for the next few miles and contemplated his options.

Since departing El Paso, Angel had used the bathroom a few times, familiarizing himself with the layout of the old bus, a Strato AirGlider, and the distribution of passengers, mentally noting which ones were using wireless laptops or cell phones, possibly watching news sites.

He was vigilant. None of the passengers, so far, posed a threat.

They were passing the Dos Cabezas Mountains and, according to the signs, nearing the exit for Willcox. That’s when Angel noticed a car had materialized alongside the driver’s left, then eased its way ahead of the bus, giving Angel a clear view.

It was a gleaming white Ford.

A Crown Victoria, no markings, no roof lights. But the push bars on the front bumper and back dash lights were telltale indicators of an unmarked police car.

Then the bus driver lifted two fingers in a subtle wave.

Angel very calmly collected his bag and headed to the bathroom. The passengers, many of them dozing, were oblivious to what was transpiring.

The bathroom was locked. It was occupied.

Angel waited.

Then he felt the bus decelerate.

He rapped softly on the bathroom door. Through the windows he could see the bus was leaving the interstate. Angel heard movement in the bathroom just as the public address system in the bus crackled with the driver’s voice.

“Ladies and gentleman, we’re making an unscheduled stop in Willcox to have a mechanical issue checked. It will not take long. Please remain on the bus and accept my apologies for any inconvenience.”

The bathroom door clicked and a large grandmother navigated her way out, muttering in Spanish. Angel waited, then entered the small room, holding his breath.

Inside, Angel locked the door and stood on the lid of the toilet seat. Above the toilet, in the ceiling, was a combination vent and escape hatch. The hole was about eighteen-by-eighteen inches, covered with screen.

The hatch cover was open, tilted upward toward the front of the bus. Angel noticed the wires that likely connected to an indicator light on the driver’s console. He used his small knife to cut them.

He removed the screen, hooked a long strap of his pack to his shoe then hoisted himself smoothly through the hole, pulling his pack after him. He lay flat on his stomach, keeping low to the bus roof, hanging on the lip of the hatch as the wind rushed over his body.

The bus turned on to the business loop. As it crawled along, Angel glimpsed a scattering of settlements before it approached the downtown and clusters of sleepy low-rise buildings.

Over the noise outside he could hear someone knocking on the locked bathroom door, then a man’s voice, muffled but impatient.

The bus stopped at a traffic light beside a large dump truck loaded with fine gravel or sand. This was Angel’s chance. Keeping close to the roof, he waited for the right moment, slid to the side and leaped into the truck.

Angel’s pulse raced.

Sand stuck to his moist face and hands as he waited in the dump truck, waited for voices, for a siren, for a commotion, for an ending.

Then the dump truck jolted and its transmission grinded as the driver upshifted. The truck rolled slowly through downtown Willcox.

Angel peered over the side, saw his bus disappearing as the dump truck turned and headed out of town.

He was now two hundred miles from Phoenix.

43

Clarksburg, West Virginia / El Paso, Texas

Steve Pollard had to be certain.

At the FBI’s crime data center outside Clarksburg, the fingerprint analyst needed to check another aspect of the Phoenix kidnapping.

Pollard’s standard operating procedure was to leave no stone unturned.

He’d already identified the two kidnapping suspects, Ruiz Limon-Rocha and Alfredo Hector Tecaza. Check that off. But he was troubled by the elimination prints from the Phoenix case. Pollard had used them to compare with Limon-Rocha and Tecaza’s impressions but was uncertain if the elimination prints themselves had been submitted through the network of crime databases.

Pollard was submitting them now. Better to do it twice than risk an oversight, he thought. Even though he didn’t expect anything, he had to exhaust all possibilities.

After submitting the elimination prints, Pollard was about to check the daily email on success stories circulated to all the fingerprint examiners in the section. But he didn’t get the chance. One of the databases yielded a hit on one of the elimination prints Pollard had just submitted. His eyes narrowed at he concentrated on the result.

What the heck?

It came out of the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, the national database that held details on a range of violent crimes, including serial murders and unsolved homicides, some going back over twenty years.

One of the submissions had yielded a possible match from an unsolved case. Pollard sat up, went to work making comparisons.

I don’t believe this.

A few minutes later he started making phone calls.

At that moment, in Texas at the El Paso Intelligence Center, DEA analyst Javier Valdiz was drafting a new intelligence note on the Norte Cartel for FBI Special Agent Earl Hackett in the Phoenix Division. This one would expand on the summary he’d sent earlier on Ruiz Limon-Rocha and Alfredo Hector Tecaza.

Valdiz worked quickly, marrying up-to-the-minute raw data with the history of the Norte Cartel. He consulted the org chart of cartels in Mexico, Central and South America and criminal networks throughout the Caribbean and their tentacles into the U.S. and elsewhere. The latest edition was complex, starting with leaders and commanders, flowing to plaza bosses, gatekeepers, soldiers, enforcers, transportation chiefs and sicarios. The genealogical aspect to the charts showed bloodlines going back generations, family networks, affiliations.

The Norte Cartel, also known as the Zartosa Cartel, arose from the barrios of Ciudad Juarez to challenge all existing cartels in a battle for control of the prized shipment routes into the U.S.

The Norte Cartel trafficked in marijuana, Colombian cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. It controlled major distribution hubs in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, California, and in Chicago, New York, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid and Rome.

It was effective at bribing and threatening government officials, infiltrating police agencies and operating a near-perfect unit of elite, young, highly-trained assassins. Its membership was said to number two thousand, making it among the most powerful, deadly and vengeful of all the major narco organizations. To steal from the cartel meant grisly death. To challenge them in any way ended in torture, mutilation and decapitation, with corpses displayed as warning. The cartel had no alliances and waged war with all rivals, Valdiz wrote.

The Norte Cartel was led by Samson Zartosa aka Twenty-five, El Monstruo. DOB: Unknown. Height: Unknown. Weight: Unknown. Hair Color: Unknown. Eye Color: Unknown. Second in Command was Garcia Deltrano aka Thirty, Comandante. DOB: 16 July 1967. Height: 5'10". Weight: 180. Hair Color: Black. Eye Color: Brown.

Cartel history, intelligence and legend indicated Samson Zartosa rose from the gutter of a Juarez barrio to become one of the world’s wealthiest and most-feared drug lords.

Samson Zartosa’s father, a carpenter, was stabbed to death in front of his wife and their three sons by two men who’d come to their home demanding money. Samson, the eldest, was fourteen. He led his two younger brothers to find and kill their father’s killers, and their families.

It turned out that the two men were thugs in a feared gang.

Consequently, the Zartosa family’s stature and respect was instant. At fourteen, Samson assumed control of the murdered men’s barrio gang, and in a few years built it into a merciless drug cartel.

Along the way, tragedy befell the Zartosa family three more times. The boys’ mother died young of a heart attack. Eduardo, the youngest brother, was in his late teens when he was killed while on vacation in California. Hector, the middle brother, died two years ago during a gun battle with Mexican military forces that left twenty Norte members dead.

When Samson learned Hector had been betrayed by a DEA informant, he ordered the decapitation of the informant’s family members. Next, through threats and bribery, the Norte Cartel determined the informant was being guarded by Mexican and U.S. officials in a mountain hideaway. On the day a convoy was to transport him to an airstrip, two hundred Norte Cartel members surrounded the vehicles, extracted the informant and executed him on the spot.

This was the last known betrayal of the Norte Cartel until the recent rogue action by Salazar and Johnson. The latest up-to-the-moment intel showed that Salazar and Johnson were working for the Norte Cartel, handling security for the San Diego and Phoenix cells, when they attempted to set up a rival route and the upstart “Diablo Cartel,” using Lyle Galviera’s courier company.

Their operation, said to have involved upward of five million in stolen Norte Cartel money, resulted in their murders, Tilly Martin’s abduction, the disappearance of Lyle Galviera and the dispatch of a Norte Cartel assassin, believed to be destined for Phoenix.

Valdiz exhaled and began reviewing his note to clear with his supervisor when his computer pinged. He’d received an encrypted email from the FBI’s fingerprint unit in West Virginia.

His attention was drawn to the subject line: Alert re Phoenix Kidnapping & Cold Case.

What’s this?

He opened it and began reading when his phone rang.

“Valdiz.”

“Hey there. Steve Pollard, FBI’s fingerprint section in Clarksburg. I just sent you an alert on the Phoenix kidnapping.”

“It’s a hell of an alert.”

“I’ve alerted ViCAP people, everybody. We need to talk about this.”

“I think so. This changes everything.”

44

San Francisco, California

In the hours before Donald Montradori died of cancer, he gave Ottawa detectives details of an unsolved murder that happened near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park more than twenty years ago.

His deathbed revelations set a series of events in motion.

The Ottawa investigators had recorded his sworn statement, obtained his signature and, adhering to procedure, alerted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP administered the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System, known as ViCLAS, Canada’s enhanced version of the FBI’s ViCAP system.

The Mounties operated the program in the force’s Technical and Protective Operational Facilities base. The facility sat some sixty miles north of New York State’s border with Canada on Ottawa’s east side, amid sprawling suburbs, a few fruit orchards and disappearing dairy land. A bison head, the seal of the RCMP, rose specter-like out of the building’s soft gray stone over the entrance. Inside, RCMP Sergeant Andre Caron, a ViCLAS expert, assessed the new information, then immediately contacted Stan Delong, the FBI’s ViCAP coordinator in Quantico, Virginia, who handled RCMP submissions.

Delong listened intently as Caron told him about the break in the old case.

“Shoot everything to me ASAP, Andre. I’ll get that into our program right away and contact our people so it gets to the lead at SFPD. We see all kinds of stuff, but this is a hell of a thing. Thanks, Andre,” Delong said.

Delong called the San Francisco FBI’s ViCAP coordinator, who called Arlene Stapleton, his counterpart at the San Francisco Police Department, who immediately put out a call to SFPD Homicide Inspector Paul Pruitt.

Delong reached Pruitt on his cell phone in Chinatown. He was off duty and shopping with his wife and their daughter.

“Inspector Pruitt, this is Arlene Stapleton, SFPD ViCAP coordinator. Sorry to intrude on your time but we’ve received significant new information on a cold case and you are identified as the lead.”

“Which case?” Pruitt raised his voice over the street noise.

“Eduardo Zartosa.”

“What’s the information?”

“It looks like your shooter’s been identified.”

“I’m coming in. I’ll call my partner. Thank you, Arlene.” Pruitt hung up and turned to his wife, who already knew that she was losing her husband for the rest of the day. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to go.”

“It’ll be quicker for you to take a cab. We’ll take the car home.” She kissed his cheek. “Call me. Let me know how it goes.”

In the cab, Pruitt alerted his partner, Russ Moseley, and their lieutenant.

Headquarters for the San Francisco Police Department was located at the Hall of Justice, a grim Stalinesque building rising from Bryant Street amid the low-rent units, office towers and high-tech firms in San Francisco’s Soma district.

Pruitt hustled up the steps of the Hall’s grand entrance to the polished stone lobby, flashed his badge at the security check and took the elevator to the fourth floor and Room 450-Homicide Detail.

Pruitt went to the file cabinets, pulled out everything on the old murder, settled into his desk and set to work reviewing the case. In a short time, Moseley and Jim Cavinder, their lieutenant, arrived and joined Pruitt in reacquainting themselves with the ancient case.

Eduardo Zartosa, a twenty-one-year-old Mexican national, was visiting the city on vacation with friends when he was shot to death. His body was found in an alley adjacent to a parking lot in The Haight on Waller. A Smith & Wesson.38 Special, stolen from a pawnshop a year earlier, was found in a trash bin on Belvedere. The autopsy and ballistics determined it was the murder weapon. A set of unidentified latents had been collected from the weapon and submitted to ViCAP, along with other details.

Zartosa’s friends said he’d left a party at an apartment to buy something to eat. There were no incidents at the party. No witnesses to the crime. Relatives arranged for the body to be flown to Mexico. Early on, Zartosa’s uncle would call for updates on the case, then the calls ceased. Contact information for the uncle and friends was no longer valid.

“When’s the last time anybody’s looked at this case?” Cavinder asked.

Pruitt struggled to remember.

“About two years back, an old-time gangbanger facing a charge tried to barter a lead on it, but it fizzled,” Moseley said.

The case was twenty years old. Over that time, it had been passed around to a lot of detectives.

The three of them gathered in Cavinder’s office and reviewed the material sent by the Canadians. They watched Montradori’s account of what happened the night Zartosa was murdered, with Pruitt taking notes, until it ended.

“All right, I want to move on this. I’ll call the D.A. You guys better look into a flight out to Phoenix tomorrow. Hold up,” Cavinder said as his phone rang. He took the call, listening for a full minute. All he managed at the end was, “Uh-huh. What? Right. Thanks.” Cavinder put the phone down and started working at his keyboard.

“I don’t believe this.”

“What’s up?” Pruitt said.

“That was the Captain. We’ve just got a call from the FBI crime lab. They’ve identified prints on the gun used for Zartosa.”

“What the hell?” Moseley said.

“And the Captain says SFPD also got a call from the El Paso Intelligence Center with new intel tied to our case. I’m flipping the material to you now.”

“What’s with that?” Moseley said.

“This case is erupting,” Pruitt said.

“Did we ever establish where Zartosa’s family tree reaches?” Pruitt and Moseley exchanged glances.

“It’s so old, I don’t think anyone’s checked, not in recent years. Why?”

“It goes deeper into that Phoenix kidnapping and it’s not good. Look-” Cavinder glanced at his watch “-you guys need to get to Phoenix ASAP. Get home and pack. I’ll get Shirley to check flights. I’ll call ahead, tell the FBI you’re coming. We need to work with them on this and we don’t have time to lose.”

45

Phoenix, Arizona

Hackett stood at his desk, twisting a rubber band, staring at the map of Arizona covering the wall.

This was taking too long.

His phone should be ringing, confirming an arrest.

The last word came thirty minutes ago from Arizona DPS. They had the bus stopped at the Willcox terminal.

Why was it taking so long?

The border people and EPIC had confirmed the passport for a Carlos Manolo Sanchez, likely an alias. But they had a photo. At El Paso’s bus terminal, the ticket agent, aided by the photo and security cameras, assured two El Paso detectives that Sanchez had boarded the express bus for Phoenix with thirty-six other passengers.

Arizona DPS had made cell phone contact with the bus driver a few miles east of Willcox. The driver had confirmed that there were thirty-seven passengers aboard, including a passenger fitting the suspect’s general description. The driver had agreed to use the ruse of a mechanical problem to make an unscheduled stop in Willcox.

DPS was supposed to grab him.

EPIC’s intel indicated this was the hit man for the Norte Cartel, who was suspected of killing Salazar and Johnson in the desert.

We need this arrest. Come on. Come on.

Hackett’s land line rang.

“Hackett.”

“Agent Hackett, this is Sergeant Tim Walker, DPS Highway Patrol in Willcox. Our subject was not on the bus.”

“What?”

“He was not there.”

“What do you mean, he was not there?”

“Only thirty-six people were on the bus when we stopped it. Our people conducted a thorough search, confirmed IDs, tickets of every passenger. No Carlos Manolo Sanchez. Nobody came close to the photo. We found an open ceiling ventilation door above the bathroom.”

“That’s just great!” Hackett slammed the handset into the cradle.

“What happened?” Larson approached his desk.

“He slipped through our fingers. How in hell did he know to run?”

Larson cursed under her breath.

Hackett surveyed other agents working in the Bureau, considered the task force members at Cora’s house and shook his head.

You never know who is on your side, he thought bitterly.

Hackett looked down at his files, including the one holding that Bureau-wide memo on cartel infiltration of U.S. police ranks. Was his task force compromised? Or was his paranoia entwined with his guilt over Colombia? He glanced at Tilly’s enlarged photo on the board across the room. He could not bear to have another case end with an innocent victim’s funeral.

“Did you hear me, Earl?” Larson had her hand cupped over the phone. “Bruller’s calling from his car. He just heard what happened and needs to talk to you. Says it’s important.”

“He just wants to get in my face. Tell him I’m on another line, I’ll call him back.”

After Larson dealt with the ASAC, she got Hackett to focus.

“We’ve got work to do, Earl.” She opened a folder. “Look. We’ve got photos for Limon-Rocha, Tecaza and now Carlos Manolo Sanchez. We can run them with Tilly and Galviera’s picture, get it out in a release to the news media. Get everybody looking for these guys.”

“All right.”

“Good. I’ll get moving on that.”

Hackett then consulted the EPIC file and revisited his concerns about Gannon and Cora. If there was one thing Hackett had learned as an investigator, it was that no one ever told you the truth.

Not the whole truth.

Cora had hesitated to give up a fingerprint. Why?

Hackett was tired of being fed BS.

In his gut, he knew that something beneath the surface was at work with Cora and he vowed to find out what it was. His mood brightened when he spotted a slim, bespectacled man in a tan suit making his way to his desk; the man who would help him find the truth.

“Oren. Good to see you.” Hackett extended his hand to greet Oren Krendler. “I’ll make some calls and we’ll get things rolling as quickly as possible.”

Krendler nodded and adjusted his glasses.

He was the Phoenix Division’s polygraph examiner, a legend for having obtained more admissions than any other examiner in the Bureau.

46

Mesa Mirage, Phoenix, Arizona

“There’s been a troubling break in the case.”

That’s what Isabel Luna’s last text to Jack Gannon said. Luna gave him no other details, saying only that she would call later.

That was over an hour ago.

Gannon was hammering on his laptop and burning up cell phone minutes in Cora’s living room, going full tilt at everything and getting nowhere. He’d struck out on tracing the phone number tied to the woman who’d hired the private investigation agency to find Cora’s home.

He got nothing.

He called his best source, Adell Clark. She’d struck out. “I suspect it’s a cartel number, Jack. Could be a prepaid phone. Or a case of phone companies being paid to act as if these numbers do not exist.”

Confusion and anger welled in his chest as he reexamined the allegations by Peck, the man Cora said was Tilly’s father, and Lomax, Cora’s pimp. “Your sister got into trouble with a cartel a long time ago-the worst kind.” What happened? And who was Donnie Cargo? Why had Cora refused to talk about him?

Was this linked to Tilly?

Increasingly, the FBI was looking harder at Cora. The mistrust swirling about the case was deepening.

Gannon looked at the photo of Tilly, the niece he didn’t know, and tried to make sense of it all, tried to make sense of Cora. At one point, she had been the most important person in his life. Now she was alien to him.

How had their lives changed so much?

He had always figured the critical moment was that night at their home. He was eleven years old, Cora was sixteen. She was flitting between the bathroom and her room getting ready for her first official date, carefully applying makeup, spritzing perfume, putting on jewelry, dressing up.

Looking different.

That’s when he knew that Cora was no longer the older kid who knew how things worked in the family, how things worked in life. She was no longer his big sistermentor. She had been transformed into someone else. She had other priorities. In taking her first steps to becoming a young woman, she had started her journey away from him.

Leaving him behind.

Leaving him alone.

Then came the night of Cora’s Armageddon with Mom and Dad-the night she left and never came back.

That was that.

And now after all these years, Cora needed him. Needed him. The ghostly reminders of their mother and father were surreal-in her face, her voice, every little thing; the way she moved, even the way she’d arranged her kitchen. Canisters this way, pot holders here, the kettle there, all the same way Mom set up her kitchen.

It haunted him.

As for what was happening, he stared blankly. He had no control anymore, no control over who he was, over the situation, the story, over anything.

All he knew was that a clock was ticking down on Tilly’s life.

Cora woke and in that millisecond of torpor before the nerve cells in her brain connected, everything was right in her life.

Tilly is home. Safe. Happy.

But the instant everything registered, the terrible reality crashed on her.

Tilly is gone. It’s my fault because of the life I’ve lived.

The sedative had enabled Cora to rest, but it was useless against her anguish. How could she live, how could she go on with her daughter stolen from her life?

How?

She couldn’t make sense out of what went wrong with Lyle. She ached to talk to him.

If only she could wind back time, go all the way back to every mistake she’d made that had led to this horrible point. There would be no drugs, no leaving home, no leaving her parents, Jack, no addiction, no pain and no shame. Only Tilly and the good life they’d built together, just mother and daughter. They’d been doing fine.

Until this.

Cora groaned and thrust her face in her hands.

She had to keep going.

You have to be strong for Tilly. Tilly was a fighter.

Tilly is a fighter.

Cora sobbed into her pillow for several minutes before she found the will to shower and get into some clean clothes. No one seemed to notice when she padded to the kitchen to make tea. While she had no appetite, she ate some saltine crackers.

All the detectives, including Jack, were watching a TV news report. Through the forest of bodies, Cora saw it was a “Live Breaking News” report on one of the all-news networks. She glimpsed Tilly’s face on the screen and nudged her way to the set.

Seth Bruller was at a podium making a public appeal for help locating Tilly. Then he said the FBI was also seeking the “public’s help locating the following individuals, who are persons of interest in connection with Tilly Martin’s kidnapping.”

Once more, they showed Lyle’s picture. Then three more photos appeared-the faces of Ruiz Limon-Rocha, Alfredo Hector Tecaza and Carlos Manolo Sanchez.

Cora stared into the eyes of the two men who had invaded her home-the bastards who stood in this very space-bound her, stole Tilly.

She gasped and steadied herself against the back of a chair.

How did the FBI get their photos? Why did they identify them without telling her? Before Cora could react, the TV footage cut to a shaky live aerial angle from a news chopper.

“Now stay with us,” the news anchor said. “We have just learned…have we got it? There it is. Our affiliate in Tucson is reporting out of Willcox, Arizona, east of Tucson, that a bus traveling from El Paso, Texas to Phoenix was believed to have been carrying one of these men as a passenger and was stopped earlier. Sources tell us the FBI, or rather the DPS, did not locate him but is still processing the bus for evidence. That would indicate he was on the bus and somehow eluded police.”

Cora couldn’t stand it.

“Did you find Tilly?”

One of the task force investigators shook his head.

“Ma’am, we just have more information on the people we’re looking for.”

Cora went to her brother but his cell phone rang.

Gannon answered.

“Jack, its Henrietta.” Her voice was low. “I’m at the FBI news conference. New York is asking what you know about the bus and the other suspects.”

“Zero. I know what’s being reported.”

“That’s it?”

“No one’s told us a damn thing.”

“Okay, I’ll tell them, but they’re getting impatient.”

“I don’t care.”

Upon ending Henrietta’s call, Gannon had another one.

“This is Isabel Luna in Juarez. Can you talk now?”

“Hang on.” Gannon raised a give-me-a-moment finger to Cora and excused himself to a quiet corner of the house. “Isabel, do you know about the bus in Willcox?”

“Yes. The suspect, Sanchez, is using an alias. The face is a true picture. It’s The Tarantula.” Gannon listened as Luna continued. “He is the Norte Cartel’s top sicario, the top assassin. Based on the crime scene and their sources, Esteban and his team believe he killed the two Americans in the desert south of Juarez, the men associated with Lyle Galviera.”

Gannon’s breathing quickened; a picture began emerging as Luna continued. “The sicario entered the U.S. at El Paso and took a bus to Phoenix. American police were advised and they stopped the bus but he got away, as the networks are reporting. Jack, we believe he was dispatched to kill Lyle Galviera.”

“Jesus.”

“And Tilly.”

“Oh Christ.”

Gannon’s eyes swept the room until he found Cora and swallowed.

Could he tell her? An assassin’s coming to kill your daughter. Maybe this was the time to push Cora to answer Lomax’s allegation.

Luna continued, “The FBI and Arizona authorities are obviously taking matters seriously, with a dragnet, while gathering all the information they can. But sicarios at this level are impossible to find. They blend in like chameleons.”

During his conversation Gannon noticed that Hackett, Larson and other people had entered the house through the back door, approached Cora and took her aside. They looked grave.

This could be it, Gannon thought.

“Isabel, thank you. I have to go. Please contact me the moment you have any new information.”

“Of course.”

Gannon joined Cora and the others.

“Sorry,” Hackett said to Gannon, “we need to speak to Cora alone.”

She shook her head, trying to read the faces confronting her for what was to come.

“Whatever you have to say, I want Jack with me.”

“Very well,” Hackett said. He turned and introduced a slender man in a well-cut suit. “This is Oren Krendler, our division’s polygraph examiner.”

“Polygraph examiner?” Gannon said.

“We’re requesting Cora submit to a polygraph examination as soon as possible.”

“A lie detector? Now?” She half turned to the TV. “I don’t understand. Shouldn’t you be concentrating fully on finding Tilly? I mean-”

“We talked about this earlier with you, Cora. We have some uncertainties in the case that we need you to help us clarify, so we can concentrate fully in the proper areas. This is just a tool we use to be sure our investigation is thorough. Now, it is strictly voluntary. You can refuse, but it would be helpful in our investigation of your daughter’s kidnapping. It could lead to her safe return. You want to do all you can to help us return Tilly, don’t you, Cora?”

Cora glanced at Jack, immediately irritating Hackett.

“I don’t understand,” Hackett said. “Why do you need to get direction from your brother on this, Cora?”

“Because we know what this means,” Gannon said.

“Oh? And what’s that, Jack?”

“You consider her a suspect.”

“I didn’t say that. What I said was that this is a tool. We need to clarify things so we can focus our investigation effectively.”

“Do it, Cora,” Jack said. “But get a lawyer first.”

“A lawyer?” Hackett repeated.

“Come on,” Gannon said. “You all know that if you’re going to do this right, you should Mirandize her. So she should have a lawyer, and not feel pressured, since it’s strictly voluntary.”

“Fine,” Hackett said, “but we need to get moving. So get your lawyer ASAP.” Hackett’s phone started to ring and he turned to answer.

“Jack,” Cora seized his wrist hard and whispered, “I don’t have a lawyer.”

“I’m going to help you, Cora.”

As Gannon started to make a call himself, he overheard Hackett say into his cell phone, “Say that again. Who’s here from San Francisco?”

47

Phoenix, Arizona

Upon returning to the FBI’s Phoenix Division, Special Agents Hackett and Larson were summoned to the ASAC’s office.

Two men in suits stood to greet them.

“Our friends here are with San Francisco P.D., Homicide Detail.” Seth Bruller flashed his diplomatic smile.

“Paul Pruitt,” the first man said.

“Russ Moseley,” said the second.

Hackett and Larson introduced themselves, shook hands.

“How is it looking for the polygraph?” Bruller asked.

“Good to go once she consults a lawyer,” Hackett said. “Oren’s ready.”

“Good.” Bruller nodded to the California detectives. “We need to move on this. Especially after we dropped the ball with the bus takedown.”

“That was DPS, Seth. We weren’t there.”

“Regardless. The ball was dropped, but this new twist gets us back on track. As I told you on the phone, our colleagues are here to share some important pieces of the case. In fact, they flew to Phoenix once they’d learned of the development in their cold case and its impact on ours. Let’s go to the small conference room. Kelly’s put out fresh coffee.”

“Coffee would be good.” Pruitt reached for his briefcase.

In the brightly lit meeting room, the investigators helped themselves to the ceramic FBI mugs and coffee on the credenza, then took seats at the polished table.

“If this is going to have a bearing on the polygraph, I think Oren should be involved now to expedite things. Oren Krendler is our division’s polygraph examiner. I’ll get him.”

“Paul, Russ, any objections?” Bruller asked.

“None.”

Once Krendler joined them, Pruitt began by summarizing the homicide of Eduardo Zartosa. He distributed old reports, maps, crime scene photos, explaining how the case had dead-ended.

“It went into a deep freeze for nearly twenty years, until now,” Pruitt said. “Things just started happening, cracking it wide-open, to the point where we think we can finally clear it.”

Pruitt said Donald Montradori, a drug dealer known as “Donnie Cargo,” was in San Francisco at the time of Zartosa’s murder. Montradori, a Canadian national, returned to Canada after Zartosa’s homicide and lived a quiet life until he recently passed away. Before he died he gave Canadian police a sworn statement on the crime.

“Let’s view that now,” Pruitt held up a flash drive.

Larson installed the drive in the meeting room’s laptop and the group viewed Montradori’s twenty-three minute deathbed statement.

“To me, the question is,” Hackett said, “whether he’s telling the truth.”

“That’s the reason we’re here,” Moseley said. “We need to be certain, just as you do.”

“Montradori indicated that the high-profile coverage of your kidnapping had weighed on him,” Pruitt said, “because of its connection to the old case and the fact that his conscience had never been at ease since the murder. Our receipt of the statement from Canada came at the same time your fingerprint lab and ViCAP got a hit on latents from your case, matching those on the murder weapon in our cold case.”

“This is wild, Earl,” Larson said, “just wild.”

Hackett nodded, concentrating on the files in the San Francisco case, the photos of the murder weapon, a Smith & Wesson.38 Special, a set of clear latents obtained from it. There were pictures of other items in the file-a wallet, a ring, a crucifix and a lighter. Hackett was unsure of the importance of each to the case.

“Then,” Pruitt added, “the El Paso Intelligence Center kicked out a little family history on Eduardo Zartosa. Admittedly, this aspect was lost on our people back then. But we’ve certainly grasped the significance of his family ties to your case now. We think we can help each other.”

“What do you propose?” Hackett said.

“We don’t want to get in your way,” Pruitt said. “Your case is more pressing. If you’re going to polygraph Cora Martin, consider weaving some of the questions we have into it. We’d need to do this delicately but we think it would also help your case.”

“Sure,” Hackett said.

“Then let us interview her afterward. We’ve spoken to our D.A. on charges and the way to proceed, depending on what we determine.”

“I don’t have a problem with that,” Hackett said. “Do you, Seth?”

Bruller stuck out his bottom lip. “It should be fine. I’ll call the Assistant U.S. Attorney and brief the office. Start working with Oren here on your approach. We need to keep moving on this.”

As the investigators worked with Oren Krendler on developing a line of questioning, Hackett grew confident that this was the break they needed.

He knew that Krendler-calm, cool, nonthreatening-was a master at obtaining admissions.

Yes, Hackett thought, something’s going to pop.

But will it come in time?

48

Mesa Mirage, Phoenix, Arizona

“Why do you need the names of the top defense attorneys in Phoenix? What’s happened, Jack?”

In the dead silence that followed Henrietta Chong’s question, Jack Gannon realized that he’d made a mistake.

“Forget it.”

“Is it for Cora?” Chong asked. “What’s going on? Are they going to charge her?”

Gannon squeezed his phone, retreating from the request he’d made.

“No, no, nothing like that.” Chong’s not stupid and she’s not my confidante. She is a WPA reporter. What was I thinking? “Forget I asked, just forget it. Did anything more come out of the news conference, the search for the suspects?”

“No-”

“Okay. I have to go. Thanks, Henrietta.”

“Wait, Jack! What the hell’s going on? Asking me to recommend a lawyer is more than weird, given that I’m reporting on your sister. It raises questions and puts me in a conflicting situation.”

“Just drop it, Henrietta. Forget it, all right? Have you never had a source backpedal on you? We’re under the gun, please drop it.”

“What would you do if you were me?”

“Christ, forget it.”

Gannon hung up. Angry at himself for not thinking clearly, he cupped his hands to his face and exhaled. He was in Cora’s bedroom, trying to arrange an urgent meeting with a lawyer, a good lawyer. But he didn’t know anybody in Phoenix.

Still, going impulsively to Henrietta for help on this was like putting out a fire with gasoline.

He had to regain control but he didn’t know who to trust, where to turn.

The FBI was pressuring them, an assassin was coming, Cora was not telling the whole story, no one could find Galviera. He’d already seen two headless corpses. Would they find Tilly next?

Gannon resumed searching for a lawyer on his laptop when Cora stuck her head in the door. “I called Amy Henson next door. They’ll let us borrow their Honda when we’re ready. We can cut through the side yard by the garden shed. No press should see us.”

“Great.” He didn’t look up from his typing. “I need more time.”

It took another twenty minutes of scouring news articles on recent high-profile criminal cases in Phoenix before he found something. There was the case of a welfare mother wrongly accused of murdering her baby boy. Turned out the injuries could have been caused by a neighbor’s dog. A note to that effect in an autopsy draft report was overlooked by police. And in another case, a man imprisoned for twenty years for kidnapping and murdering a college student was set free after DNA exon erated him. Both cases were handled by Augustine Goodellini, a top-notch criminal defense attorney with Goodellini, Pereira and Chance.

Gannon called the firm.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Goodellini’s not available.”

Gannon was connected to a senior attorney in the firm, Lauren Baker-Brown, who, after listening to what he had to say and recognizing Cora’s case, cleared her calendar and instructed them to come to their downtown offices immediately.

Gannon got Cora and they left.

“You know our prayers are with you,” Amy Henson said, handing Gannon the keys to her white Honda and hugging Cora. “Good luck.”

Gannon entered the law firm’s address into the GPS before they slipped by the press unseen and cleared the neighborhood.

As they merged with freeway traffic, Cora started to cry.

“I’m so sorry, Jack. You’re a good brother.”

He said nothing as buildings flowed by them, like so many past hurts. He just wanted to get Tilly home safe, deal with the truth-whatever it was-and then get on with his life.

His cell phone rang and he passed it to Cora to read the call display.

“It says, WPA NY Lyon,” she said.

“Don’t answer.”

The offices of Goodellini, Pereira and Chance were on North Central Avenue. The firm’s reception area held an air of solemnity.

“Please be seated. I’ll let Lauren know you’re here,” said the wispy, twentysomething man at the front desk.

Gannon and Cora barely had time to take in the polished stone floor, thick leather sofa, light wood walls and a floor-to-ceiling painting that resembled a tiger’s hide.

“This way, please.”

The young man led them down the hall and into a corner office that conveyed a sense of ordered diligence. Two walls of windows overlooking the city; a wall of mahogany bookcases; a neat desk, everything organized and in place; a framed photograph of a handsome man and a girl who looked about the same age as Tilly. That’s good, Gannon thought.

“Lauren Baker-Brown.” A woman in a peach suit with a pleated skirt came from around her desk to greet them.

“I know this is serious and urgent. Thank you, Chad, please close the door.” Baker-Brown took her seat and provided a brief résumé. She’d been a county prosecutor seven years and private criminal attorney for six years. She was seasoned. She took up her pen and made a note of the time on her yellow legal pad. “Let’s get started. Bring me up to speed.”

For the next thirty minutes, Baker-Brown listened to details of Cora’s situation, including a brief history of her life as a drug addict. She made notes to outline a defense, if it went that far.

“Okay, let me give Special Agent Hackett a call, then we’ll talk again. You can wait in the conference room. There’s a TV in there. You can watch news or whatever you’d like.”

Half an hour later, Gannon and Cora were back in Baker-Brown’s office.

“All right, seems we have a new wrinkle. Two detectives from San Francisco have just arrived in town. They want to interview you about your time there, once you’ve taken your polygraph test.”

Gannon’s attention pinballed from Baker-Brown to Cora.

“What happened there, Cora? Is it connected to Tilly’s kidnapping?”

“Maybe,” Cora said.

“Maybe?” Gannon said. “Is that the most you can tell us?”

“Cora,” Baker-Brown said, “is there something more you think I should know? We could ask Jack to excuse himself. It’s all lawyer-client privilege.”

Cora stared into her empty hands. Her past had caught up to her.

“No, let them ask their questions. I will answer as best as I can. San Francisco was twenty years ago, a bad time.”

Gannon said nothing, prompting Baker-Brown to resume steering the session.

“Here’s how I see things, Cora. The FBI is either going to clear you as a potential suspect, or, acting on their suspicions that you may have been involved in your daughter’s kidnapping, they will start to build a case against you, likely by tying your time in California to Lyle Galviera’s dealings with the Norte Cartel. Now, in my view, based on what I could garner from Hackett, much of what the FBI has at this time seems flimsy, circumstantial, which does not bode well for them. But you say your memory of your time in San Francisco is hazy. And, you’ve said that, despite your past, you had no knowledge of Lyle’s relationship with the cartel. That’s a stretch for a jury, which would not bode well for you.”

Gannon and Cora said nothing. He glanced at his sister. She was trembling, gripping the arms of the chair as Baker-Brown continued.

“To take the polygraph would demonstrate that you have nothing to hide and are willing to do whatever is necessary to help find Tilly. To refuse is your absolute right. But a refusal will stigmatize you in the court of public opinion. It creates the impression that you do have something to hide. Any innocent, concerned parent would take a polygraph in a heartbeat to find their child, that sort of thing. And believe me, even though juries are supposed to be impartial, they are in step with the emotions of a community, often by osmosis.”

“I want to take the test now. Anything to find Tilly.”

“All right. I will alert the FBI and we’ll call a cab.”

Few words were spoken during the ride to the FBI’s office. Cora sniffed and twisted a tissue in her hands. Gannon’s phone rang with two more calls from the WPA in New York and one from the bureau in Phoenix. He didn’t answer any of them.

The cab stopped in front of the FBI’s Phoenix headquarters on Indianola Avenue. As Baker-Brown, Cora and Gannon walked the few steps to enter the brick-and-glass building, Gannon heard his name called.

It was Henrietta Chong and a WPA news photographer, who fired off several rapid shots of Gannon, Cora and her defense attorney entering the FBI building.

Chong and the photographer were approaching them.

“Any comment on speculation the FBI now has Cora under suspicion?”

No one responded.

“Jack? Any comment on this turn in the case?”

Gannon knew this was his fault, unless Hackett had tipped them.

He shook his head, his stomach tightening.

49

Las Vegas, Nevada

Tilly Martin’s face beamed at Vic Lomax from the big flat-screen TV.

It was followed by the scowling mugs of Ruiz Limon-Rocha and Alfredo Hector Tecaza of the Norte Cartel. Then Carlos Manolo Sanchez, the young one. Then Lyle Galviera stared at him. Then the replay of Salazar and Johnson, the dirty cops murdered in the desert south of Juarez.

And here again was the footage of Cora pleading alongside the FBI.

That stupid fucking bitch.

Lomax had canceled his meeting on wagering trends and revenue-per-room percentages, locking himself away in his glass-wall office overlooking The Strip to replay the latest network news reports on the Phoenix kidnapping.

This new information disturbed him. He watched, tapping one of his business cards on his chin.

Lomax knew the drug trade well and figured the young one, Sanchez, was likely a Norte hit man. This was not good. The heat was increasing, all of it brought on by that fool, Galviera, and his stupid bitch.

Cora.

Never in a million years did Lomax expect to see that skank again.

Then, after all these years, comes this shit with her kid, and her reporter brother comes right to his house.

Right to my goddamn home! I should’ve killed the fucker.

Now the shit keeps piling up and the Norte Cartel has gone into full vengeance mode on Galviera.

And now it’s getting too close to me.

Lomax had his own operations with his own business partners.

But his connection to Cora would cost him. Those Mexican motherfuckers were going to drink Galviera’s blood and cut off the head of anyone remotely linked to him. There are truths in the universe that must never be challenged, and one of them is that you do not rip off the Norte Cartel and expect to live.

No matter what he did, his connection to Cora was a liability. He had to do something to remove the risk.

The best defense is a good offense.

He turned the business card over.

A phone number was penned on the back, a very important phone number that Lomax had paid fifty thousand dollars to obtain.

He had a cell phone on his desk, one he’d taken from his casino’s lost and found. He’d use it to call the number, then have a staff member toss it in the fountains at the Bellagio.

Calling the number was dangerous, but it was Lomax’s only way to get his message to the very highest levels of the Norte Cartel-to its very heart.

Because the information he had exceeded any rip-off.

Lomax knew about Cora, Donnie Cargo and the mystery surrounding the murder of Eduardo Zartosa-little brother of Samson Zartosa, the head of the Norte Cartel.

Whether Lomax’s information was true or not didn’t matter to him.

As long as it’s true enough to save me.

He held the phone steady, checked the card and started pressing numbers on the keypad.

50

Chihuahua, Mexico

The mansion stood on a craggy palm-shrouded hill with a sweeping view of the mountains, fifty miles west of Ciudad Juarez.

The only way to access the property by ground was a winding road whose entrance was gated and guarded by private security officers, ex-soldiers armed with AK-47s.

Other security officers patrolled the grounds on all-terrain vehicles and by horseback. The entire property was fenced with razor wire and necklaced with motion sensors, laser-activated trip wires and several dozen security cameras.

Ownership of the land was not listed on any government records. On paper, the estate of Samson Zartosa, leader of the Norte Cartel, did not exist.

His security was formidable.

His fortress had never been penetrated, although two idealistic federal drug agents on a rogue operation drove near it one night, determined to arrest Zartosa for the cartel’s murders of their fellow officers.

Soon after, their car was found parked at a federal police station-their corpses in the trunk.

Zartosa’s compound was a small village of buildings for his cars, his security team, their quarters and vehicles, their equipment, the servants and other compound staff. Zartosa’s house was a three-story, ten-bedroom colonial hacienda overlooking a man-made pond, gardens, two swimming pools, a private zoo and a small amusement park.

The house had several offices. The largest was Zar tosa’s. Next to it was the office for his second-in-command, his Comandante, Garcia Deltrano.

Deltrano was on the phone, managing a shipment with a troublesome contact controlling Norte routes into New York City. A problem had arisen from a greedy distributor, an ex-Wall Street player whose voice dripped with arrogance toward Mexicans.

“Give me bigger numbers or nothing moves,” he said. “That’s the deal.”

The cartel had taken steps in advance and Deltrano would resolve matters with a few sentences and a few mouse clicks.

“Is this not your nine-year-old daughter entering her private school?” Deltrano sent a photo, then another. “And is this not your wife, only thirty minutes ago, shopping for your daughter’s birthday?” Deltrano sent one last photo. “And here are the overweight, overpaid security men you hired to protect them.” Two white men, naked and bound, guns held to their heads stared in fearful humiliation at the camera. “Do you wish to accept our new number?”

Deltrano quoted a figure that halved that of the original shipment.

Stunned, the American said nothing.

Deltrano whispered a command into a second phone and the head of one of the naked men exploded from a gunshot. The man beside him, drenched with warm visceral matter, screamed for his life.

“This is the last time I ask. Do you accept our new figure?”

“I accept. Yes, God, yes.”

Deltrano ended the call, went to the kitchen and got a cold Canadian beer, a gift from a distributor in Toronto. Upon his return, one of his secure lines was ringing. He didn’t recognize the number. Deltrano checked his state-of-the-art call tracking system. The call was coming from Las Vegas, Nevada. Deltrano answered.

“Sí?”

“My Spanish is not so good, so I’ll say this in English, okay?”

The voice was coming through a voice changer, making it sound digitized, robotic. Deltrano listened.

“This is for Samson Zartosa and concerns the unsolved murder of his brother Eduardo twenty years ago in San Francisco. Fate, it seems, has delivered an answer. The mother in the Phoenix kidnapping, Cora, is responsible for Eduardo’s murder. She was there.

“Tell Zartosa that no matter what he hears or sees, all of his attention should be focused on Cora. To prove the validity of my information, tell Zartosa that I know Eduardo died with God in his hand.”

The line went dead.

Who was this caller? How did he get this number? Was this a police tactic? Deltrano’s mind raced. He used the most current phone tracking program, obtained from a military intelligence source; he had linked it to credit card and financial databases obtained through several international banks controlled by the cartel.

The number came up for a cell phone owned by Harry Burgelmeyer, of Muncie, Indiana. A deeper check showed he owned a tow truck company in Muncie. Recent credit card use showed he was a guest at Caesars. Deltrano called the cell phone number. It rang through to the message: “You’ve got Harry. You know what to do and I’ll get back to you. If you need service, call the shop’s twenty-four-hour line.”

Deltrano went with his instinct: Harry’s phone was stolen for the call.

By who? Why? And was the information true?

After ruling out Harry Burgelmeyer, Deltrano continued using all of the cartel’s resources to try to track down the person behind the call. He worked at it in vain for some forty-five minutes until he heard distant thunder, rising until it grew deafening.

Paintings rattled on the walls as the helicopter ferrying Samson Zartosa from his private airstrip landed on the compound’s helipad. He was returning from a business meeting in Buenos Aires.

Deltrano’s hair lifted in the prop wash as he greeted Zartosa, taking his bags as he walked with him into the house.

“I need to piss, then a little swim and eat, Garcia. Then we’ll talk.”

Twenty minutes later, servants brought them club sandwiches at the poolside. The two men sat alone, working, while armed guards patrolled the grounds.

Deltrano had two laptops showing Zartosa the latest shipments, updating him on issues and outstanding security matters.

“You’ve taken care of the asshole in New York, Garcia?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I am growing tied of our situation in Arizona. On the plane I saw the latest news, all those pictures, all this attention on us. I don’t like it, of course. We need to end it.”

“Just before you landed, I got a call, a strange call. I’m sorry to speak of this, but I think you should be aware. It was about Eduardo’s murder.”

“Eduardo?”

As Deltrano recounted the call, he watched a dark curtain fall over Zartosa. It was Samson who had flown alone to California to bring the body of his little brother home.

“The caller said to tell you that he knew that Eduardo had died with God in his hand. What does that mean, Sam?”

Zartosa’s gaze bored into Deltrano, who then watched pain seep into Zartosa’s eyes.

“It means the information is true. Only those who witnessed Eduardo die would know what was in his hand. Do we know who called?”

“We’re working on finding out.”

“And the caller said the mother in the Phoenix kidnapping case is behind Eduardo’s murder?”

“Yes. What do you want me to do?”

“I need to be alone, to think.”

Samson Zartosa looked to the mountains and back on his life, back to when he was a boy growing up with his brothers in the barrio in Juarez. For a few joyous years, they were so happy, never realizing how poor they were because everybody was poor.

Samson, Hector and Eduardo did everything together-played together, ate together, bathed together, slept in the same bed and dreamed together. Eduardo was always in the middle, safe between his two older brothers.

“I want to be a pilot and fly jets when I grow up,” he said.

“I want to be a bullfighter,” Hector said.

“I want to lead an army like Zapata,” Samson said.

Then came the night of their father’s murder, the night the Zartosa family’s destiny was written in blood.

They were all gone now, his mother, father, Hector and Eduardo.

While Zartosa could do nothing about his mother’s death, he had avenged his father’s murder and his brother Hector’s murder. He thought back to that long flight from California with Eduardo’s coffin in the belly of the plane-I want to be a pilot-thought back to the cemetery where Eduardo was buried.

Who would have thought that in all the galaxies of chance that this arrogance by the Americans-Salazar, Johnson, this Lyle Galviera-to plot a betrayal of the cartel, would actually lead him to Eduardo’s killer?

Anger began to bubble in the pit of Zartosa’s stomach.

At first Zartosa only wanted to use Galviera’s girlfriend’s daughter to draw him out, to retrieve their stolen millions and teach them all a lesson about the Norte Cartel.

He had even contemplated returning the girl-if they’d cooperated.

But now this happens.

Zartosa thought of Cora, thought of the piece of information the caller had given: Eduardo died with God in his hand.

This changes everything.

Zartosa picked up his house phone and pressed a button.

“Garcia?”

“Yes.”

Garcia was like a brother to Zartosa. Garcia had grown up with him, with Hector, with Eduardo and was the first to join their little gang after they’d avenged their father’s murder.

“Garcia-” Zartosa cleared his throat “-is everything still in play for Arizona?”

“Everything is in play.”

“You know Eduardo was the best of us all.”

“He was, Sam.”

“You know when we lowered him into the ground I made him a promise.”

“I was there beside you when you made it.”

“It is time to honor my promise.”

51

Phoenix, Arizona

As Cora, her lawyer and her brother were led through the FBI offices, she remembered that distant night when she’d given birth to Tilly.

She recalled the antiseptic smells, the blinding lights, everyone masked, leaving her afraid and alone, until the moment she held her baby in her arms.

Now her fear that she would never hold Tilly again grew with each step she took. It carried her along a blue hazy stream of sounds and images that flowed to the truth buried in her past.

They’d arrived at a large meeting room.

Here again were Hackett; Larson; their boss, Bruller; and the two San Francisco inspectors, Paul Pruitt and Russ Moseley.

“We’ll be observing,” Pruitt said after the usual greetings. “We helped Agent Hackett with some questions. Then we’ll talk to you afterward about your time in San Francisco.”

Cora nodded before turning to Oren Krendler, the FBI’s polygraph examiner. On the polished table beside him was a collection of files next to a hard-shell case.

“I will need some time alone to chat with you.” Krendler offered Cora an officious smile.

After the others left, he acknowledged her anxiety. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I know you’re nervous-that’s expected.” He unscrewed a fountain pen and for the next twenty minutes, asked her about her medical history, about medication, if she felt rested, able and willing to help with the investigation by undergoing the examination.

Satisfied that Cora was a capable subject, Krendler then snapped open the latches of his case and showed her his polygraph machine. He tried to make her comfortable with it, telling her that it was an older standard five-pen analog that he swore by.

“These models are very efficient.”

The machine worked by using instruments he would connect near Cora’s heart and on her fingertips to electronically measure her breathing, perspiration, respiratory activity, galvanic skin reflex, blood and pulse rate, recording her responses on a moving chart as she answered questions.

Krendler said the questions would concern her original statements to the FBI about the kidnapping, her relation to it and her time in San Francisco. He would look at how her answers fit with the facts and known evidence, analyze her chart and determine one of three possible outcomes: She was truthful, untruthful, or the results were inconclusive.

Cora understood and was ready.

When the others returned, Hackett came to her and said, “Before we get started, I want to advise you of your rights.”

She glanced at Baker-Brown, who nodded, and Hackett proceeded.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you…” How did her life come to this? “Do you understand each of these rights I have explained to you?” No, I do not understand any of this. “Having these rights in mind, do you wish to proceed?”

“Yes.”

Hackett and the others took seats at one end of the room, behind Cora, who sat in a chair facing Krendler. As he connected her to the machine, she tried to remain calm.

This was her moment of reckoning.

Krendler began with establishing questions, reminding Cora to answer “yes” or “no.”

“Is your name Cora Martin?”

“Yes.”

“Did you change your name from Cora Gannon?”

“Yes.”

“Were you born in Buffalo, New York?”

“Yes.”

“Are your parents deceased?”

The needles scratched the graph paper. “Yes.”

“Do you have any sisters?”

“No.”

“Do you have any brothers?”

“Yes.”

“Is Jack Gannon your brother?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

Cora hesitated.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“I did.”

“Answer yes or no, please.”

“No.”

“Are you employed at Quick Draw Courier?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know Lyle Galviera?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have a romantic relationship with Lyle Galviera?”

“Yes.”

“Was your daughter kidnapped from your house?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in any way responsible for her kidnapping?”

Cora hesitated for one moment, then another.

“Are you in any way responsible for her kidnapping?”

A tear rolled down her cheek.

“I feel that I am.”

“Answer yes or no, please.”

“I don’t know.”

Krendler made notations on the graph paper with his fountain pen.

“We’ll move on. Prior to your daughter’s kidnapping, were you aware of Lyle Galviera’s involvement in any illegal activity?”

“No.”

“Did you know he associated with people involved in criminal activity?”

“No.”

“Do you presently know the whereabouts of Lyle Galviera?”

“No.”

“Since the kidnapping, have you had any contact with Lyle Galviera?”

“No.”

“Do you presently know the whereabouts of your daughter?”

“No.”

“Do you know who is responsible for your daughter’s kidnapping?”

“No.”

“Have you ever used illegal drugs?”

“Yes.”

“Are you currently using illegal drugs?”

“No.”

“Do you know Octavio Sergio Salazar?”

“No. Wait, yes. No. I mean I know that name from the news reports on the men murdered-”

“Answer yes or no, please. Do you know Octavio Sergio Salazar?”

“No.”

“Do you know John Walker Johnson?”

“No.”

“Do you know Ruiz Limon-Rocha?”

“No.”

“Do you know Alfredo Hector Tecaza?”

“No.”

“Do you know of Carlos Manolo Sanchez, or anyone using that alias?”

“No.”

“Did you ever reside in San Francisco, California?”

“Yes.”

“Were you residing in San Francisco in 1991?”

“Yes.”

“Were you using illegal drugs at that time?”

“Yes.”

“Did you commit any criminal acts at that time?”

Cora’s chin crumpled.

“Did you commit any criminal acts at that time?”

“Yes.”

“Were you ever arrested for your crimes?”

“No.”

“Do you know Donald Montradori?”

“No.”

“Do you know a man named Donnie Cargo?”

“Yes.”

“Did you associate with Donnie Cargo in San Francisco?”

Cora hesitated and started breathing a little deeper.

“Yes.”

“Did you and Donnie Cargo associate with a man named Vic?”

“Yes.”

“Did you associate with Eduardo Zartosa?”

“No.”

“Did you ever know a person named Eduardo Zartosa?”

“No. I don’t know who that is.”

“Yes or no, please.”

“No.”

“Were you, Vic and Donnie Cargo ever in the vicinity of Haight-Ashbury in 1991?” Cora hesitated.

“Yes.”

“Were you in the vicinity of Belvedere and Waller?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Was a fourth person present?”

“Yes.”

“Was a gun present?”

“Yes.”

Tears rolled down her face. It was raining so hard that night…

…Donnie wheels the car hard…there’s a shadow standing under the building’s overhang…taking shelter from the rain… She’s with Donnie and Vic. Vic’s angry. Crazy mother is dealing on my territory… Donnie and Vic leap out…don’t leave me alone…she’s so wired…wired to heaven she floats from the car…floating…everything turns blue…shouting…arguing…she’s there…no, she’s not anywhere… Vic’s shouting, swearing… What’s happening…a gun…the muzzle flashes fire in the night… CRACK…groaning…

“Was someone shot?”

“Yes.”

“Were you present when someone was shot?”

…screams…now there’s a hot gun in her hand and someone’s squirming on the ground… Donnie…Vic, what’s happening…she’s holding the gun…why…why is the gun in her hand…did she fire the gun…the car is leaving… Donnie and Vic are leaving…leaving her behind… DONNIEEE… VIC…

“Were you present when someone was shot?”

…everything is blue…confusing in the rain…who’ll stop the rain…trouble on the rise…a hand seizes her ankle…a voice gurgling…begging…pulling her down to her knees…to see that he’s young like her…scared like her…eyes blazing…help me…he squeezes…God help!!… por favor…touching him…warm blood on her hands…so much blood…help me…he’s been shot…somebody help…the rain glistening on his face…he’s young like her…begging in Spanish…por favor…por favor…he’s praying in Spanish…he’s dying…I’m sorry…por favor…she supports his head…I’m so sorry…holds his hand…sirens approaching…por favor…sirens getting louder…she’s alone with him…with the gun…blood on her hands…sirens…I’m sorry…they’re coming…por favor…he’s calling his mother…he’s dying…she has to go…por favor… I’m sorry…she has to run…but she can’t leave him to die like this…I’m so sorry…she removes her necklace…a crucifix…he receives it…crushes it hard in his hand…blood to blood…I’m so sorry…blood on her hands she runs away…por favor…his pleas echo…follow her, haunt her in the rain…rip into her…por favor…she throws the gun into the trash and runs…God please forgive me…and runs…leaving him to die…alone in the rain clutching the crucifix her mother and father gave her for her fourteenth birthday at the kitchen table in their home in Buffalo…she ached for home…sirens are screaming…she is screaming…and running…running for her life…

Krendler is asking her…

“Was someone shot?”

“Yes.”

“Were you present when someone was shot?”

“Yes.”

“Did you shoot someone?”

The needles of the polygraph swayed wildly as if scratching in desperation.

“Did you shoot anyone?”

She turned in her chair. Her eyes filled with pain, she found her brother.

“Cora, please face me and answer the question,” Krendler said. “Did you shoot anyone?”

Cora did not turn back. She met the stares of Hackett, Pruitt and the other investigators.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

Krendler disconnected Cora from the machine. Then, against Baker-Brown’s advice, she began recounting all she could of that rainy night.

“I was so stoned. I nearly died later when Vic told me that I shot the guy, that I took the gun from them and shot him. I don’t remember doing that. I really don’t think I did that. I was so wired. Donnie disappeared. I never saw Donnie again. But Vic told me I did it.” Cora sobbed. “Maybe I did. Vic said that the kid was connected to very bad drug people who would come after me, come after my family in Buffalo. So I could never go home again. Never contact my family. Vic said he would watch over me, that what happened would be our secret, that I had to hide and never breathe a word to anyone. I was terrified. He sent me to New York, then Miami. Then I went to L.A., where he had set things up.”

Cora was anguished by what she’d done.

“I never should have left him to die alone. After the shooting I wondered about him. Who was the young man who died on the street in the rain? Did he have a family? I was going to check the San Francisco papers to see what they’d reported, but I didn’t. It was too painful. I didn’t want to know. I never knew anything about him.”

While Cora was running, she had no one to turn to. Vic had sent her money, which she used for drugs. She was so messed up and so scared. She ached to go home but thought she would be followed and killed, along with her family. Vic had control over much of her life because he knew about that night in San Francisco.

Cora looked to her brother for understanding but his face betrayed nothing.

“For ten years I drifted,” she said, “scraping along the bottom, believing I had taken a life and wasted my own. Then I was given a miracle. I had Tilly. She was my salvation, my chance to start over. I pulled myself together for her.”

Still, for some twenty years Cora had been tormented by guilt. Struggling to build a good life, she never told a soul about her past.

“I know I was wrong not to tell you when you were trying to help me find Tilly. I kept this one secret to protect Tilly, to keep anyone, especially cartels, from knowing my connection to the San Francisco murder because that would guarantee her death. If no one knows, then there’s hope they might let her go.

“I swear to you that I am not involved in Tilly’s kidnapping. I’ve worked hard at making a good life for her. I know nothing about what Lyle was up to. Nothing. Yes, I did dream that maybe I could have a better life with him, for Tilly, but that dream died the night she was kidnapped. Over the years, I read legal stuff about murder, about participating in crimes that result in murder. Before you arrest me, I beg that if you find Tilly safe, you will let me hold her one last time.”

A long moment of silence passed before Hackett shot Pruitt a glance.

“Cora,” Pruitt said, “Donald Montradori, the man you knew as Donnie Cargo, died a short time ago in Canada.”

“What?”

“Cancer. Before he died, he gave us a sworn statement about what happened that night. After seeing you pleading for your daughter on the news, he wanted to clear his conscience. All I can tell you is that he said that you did not fire the gun. After the shooting, the gun was placed in your hands. He and Vic knew that you were too high to remember anything. He said you had nothing to do with the murder and that Vic knew the truth.”

“Is this true?” Cora asked the investigators.

Moseley nodded.

“Then why all this?” Cora indicated Krendler and the polygraph.

“We had to see if your account of that night fit with Donnie’s and all the evidence.”

“Evidence.”

“The fingerprints you submitted for your daughter’s case matched those on the murder weapon and this.” Pruitt passed her a large color photograph of the crucifix. Her crucifix. “This was held back. Very few people knew what the victim held in his hand, or what he told paramedics before he died.”

“He spoke before he died?”

“He said an angel put him in God’s hands.”

Cora covered her face with her hands.

“Cora,” Pruitt said. “We’re not going to arrest you or charge you. Not at this time. You were present at the commission of a crime and you fled the scene, but we’ll talk to our D.A. There are plenty of complications and mitigating factors. We need to talk to other parties. We’ll be in touch.”

“Hold on. With regards to the victim…” Hackett, who had not eased off on his suspicions entirely, folded his arms across his chest, turned to Cora and said, “The man who was murdered in San Francisco was Eduardo Zartosa, the youngest brother of Samson Zartosa, leader of the Norte Cartel. The men who have your daughter work for him.”

All the color drained from Cora’s face.

A soft knock sounded at the door and a man opened it. “Sorry to interrupt but the task force at the house just received a call for Cora. The caller said he was Lyle Galviera.”

52

Six Feathers, Arizona

Lyle Galviera was under siege.

A couple of boys were kicking the shit out of the soda machine outside his room at the Sleep City Motel because it had swallowed their money without giving up a drink.

Galviera had been striving to find a way out of his situation with the cartel but the assault outside on the machine was interfering. “Come on, you stupid freaking-” The earsplitting racket, the vibrating floor, as if forces were coming for him.

His chest was tightening; he couldn’t think.

Since the kidnapping, his face had appeared in the news next to Tilly’s, then Salazar and Johnson’s. But he had cut his hair, had stopped shaving, wore a ball cap, dark glasses and managed to move around freely.

For how much longer? I don’t know.

His entire room shook.

Christ, he wanted to go outside and slap those little assholes, but he couldn’t afford to cause a scene, to give anyone reason to remember him. He turned back to the TV to face himself on the news again, then concentrated on his work on the desk.

He’d emptied all the contents from his wallet-not his fake wallet, but the real one that he’d kept hidden in the liner of his travel bag. The desk was layered with credit cards, membership cards, cash, business cards, worn tattered bits of paper with notes scrawled on them.

Where is it? It has to be here.

He inspected each item, looking for an elusive scrap of information he had seen before. He’d placed a mental flag on it. He reexamined each business card, searching for the one possibility, the tiny thread that could lead him out of this.

His attempt back at Apache Junction to contact the cartel by trying Salazar’s secret number, using the phone he’d stolen in the restaurant, had failed.

The line just rang and rang.

He’d gotten nervous and given up. He’d left Apache Junction and driven aimlessly, trying to find a way out, until exhaustion stopped him here.

He wasn’t sure where here was but it seemed fitting for the hell he was in. The room smelled bad, there were cigarette butts in the corner of the bathroom floor, the ceiling was scuffed and the sheets were frayed.

Is this it?

It was a card Johnson or Salazar had given him long ago for their hotel, one he’d overlooked because it had been compressed against another card. He turned it over to a faded notation. A telephone number and next to it Thirty, penned in ink and crossed out.

Was this his link to the Norte Cartel?

Galviera recognized the area code as Ciudad Juarez. He knew that major cartel operators used numbers for aliases. Studying the number, he came back to his dilemma. If he surrendered to police, it was over. He’d lose his business, go to jail and risk Tilly’s life.

If he could reach the Norte Cartel, reason with them, put this all on Salazar and Johnson, give the cartel the money in exchange for Tilly, he might be able to make it work.

What do I do?

He returned to the all-news channel as once more it replayed the most recent development: the identities of Tilly’s kidnappers, who were known to belong to the Norte Cartel. And there was a new suspect, a young one, who’d been on a Phoenix-bound bus before eluding arrest. Then he saw Tilly’s face again.

Oh Jesus, should I go to police or try the cartel option?

Either way, I’m dead.

Time was running out.

Do something. Now.

Galviera gathered his wallet items, locked his room and drove through town until he found a bar that looked like it would do: The Cha Cha Club. Chicken wire covered the windows. The linoleum floor was warped. A few people were inside. A sign over the bar said Cash Only. There was a jukebox playing something painful, a pool table, two TVs mounted in the far corners, and there was a pay phone in a booth with a folding privacy door.

Galviera got change from the bartender, got into the booth, held his card up to the neon to read the number, checked with the operator, deposited coins and placed his call. The number clicked, followed by long-distance static, then it rang.

He licked his lips. He’d expected a recording, a disconnection, a wrong number, but it rang two, three, four times, then, “Sí?”

Galviera’s heart skipped and he focused his thoughts. This was it, his shot. He spoke in Spanish.

“This is Lyle Galviera.”

A long, cautious silence.

“Who gave you this number?”

“Salazar, before he was murdered in the desert.” Another long silence passed before Galviera broke it. “It’s very important that I speak to Thirty now.”

“Speak.”

“Your people are looking for me.”

“My people are concerned about the theft of our property and are holding an asset for return of that property.”

“I am an innocent third party in this dispute,” Galviera said. “So are the others connected to the asset. But I have a solution.”

“And what is it?”

“That we meet in the Phoenix area. I will return your property in exchange for the asset, undamaged. Then the matter will be closed.”

“That is desirable. We wish to resolve the issue quickly, amicably. I assure you no damage has been done to the asset.”

“I will give you an email address and propose the time and location.”

“No. We will tell you the time and location, in the Phoenix area as you prefer. Your email?”

Galviera gave him an email address from an online account he used under another name.

“If this is a setup, the asset we’re holding will be destroyed.”

“I assure you, this is not a setup.”

“Good, Mr. Galviera, we’ll contact you. We’ll finish this within the next forty-eight hours.”

The call ended.

Did that happen?

Adrenaline pumped through Galviera, blood drummed in his ears. He sat at the bar, ordered a Coke and took a few minutes to let his pulse level off.

“You all right there, pal?” the bartender asked.

“I lost my cell phone and need to buy a new one. Is there a good place around here?”

“Six Feathers Mall, down the street. Can’t miss it.”

The clerk at the Six Feathers Mall cell phone store fixed him up quickly with a top-notch, good-to-go, prepaid plan for a phone. Galviera paid cash for it and felt relatively safe with a new phone under an alias. He knew that you did not have to be making a cell phone call for the location of the caller to be tracked; something about triangulating the roaming signals. So to be safe while driving to Phoenix, he shut it off and removed the battery when he wasn’t using it, to ensure he did not accidentally switch it on.

When Galviera got to the outskirts of the city, he went to JBD Mini-Storage and found the self-storage unit he’d rented. He collected the nylon gym bags containing the $1.1 million in cash. Then he drove across the metro area to another self-storage outlet and collected more bags until he had a total of $2.5 million in brick-sized bundles of unmarked tens and twenties.

He checked his email.

Nothing had come in.

Sweat beaded on his upper lip as he drove along the edges of Phoenix. From the news reports, seeing Cora begging for Tilly, urging him to go to police, he knew Cora was in agony. That Cora and Tilly were suffering because of him was tearing him up.

God, he was so sorry. He’d never, ever meant for any of this to happen.

He scanned the streets, thinking that whatever Cora thought of him now, she had to know that he was doing all he could. First, he needed gas. He spotted a service station.

One with a pay phone.

While filling up he decided he had to tell Cora, he had to risk the call being traced. He’d do it to give her some relief. After filling up, he went to the phone and called her number. A man answered, put him on hold, then-

“Lyle! Oh my God! Oh my God, Lyle!”

“Cora, I’m so-”

“Do you have Tilly?”

“I’m working on it… I-”

“Where are you?”

“Cora, listen, I am so sorry…this is all so complicated. I know we had dreams-”

“Turn yourself in now! Tell the FBI where you are. We have to find Tilly! Where are you?”

“I’m going to see Tilly soon, Cora. I swear to you I am going to fix this!”

53

Somewhere North of Phoenix, Arizona

Soon it would be over.

Ruiz Limon-Rocha finished his call and switched off the stolen cell phone. After taking the precaution of removing the battery, he hurled the pieces into the river, looking at the silvery rush of water for relief from his apprehension.

Considering their recent narrow escape from the motel and their brush with the patrolmen at the gas station, Ruiz figured it was a race between completion of the job or their luck running out.

Ruiz would be glad to return to Mexico; for the first time he missed the low-paying job of a soldier in the military.

It was a much simpler life.

Now they were wanted, hunted men in America and the FBI was gaining on them, given that Ruiz and Alfredo’s faces were as prominent in news stories about the kidnapping as the girl’s.

Since fleeing the motel, they had lain low, awaiting orders here on an isolated back road east of Interstate 17. They’d found sanctuary among a stand of mesquite trees. Their twisting branches offered cool shade. Nothing and no one else in sight.

“Was that Thirty again?” Alfredo said from the car’s reclined passenger seat.

“Yes. He said the sicario is coming, that he is close.”

“That’s what he said an hour ago. Does he have our coordinates?”

“Yes.”

“We should abort the operation. There is too much heat.”

“They don’t care. The operation will be completed. It’s a matter of honor for them. Remember, they want everyone to get the message.”

Ruiz narrowed his eyes, keeping vigil on the long dirt road.

“I have never killed anyone, Ruiz, have you?”

“Yes.”

“Who did you kill?”

“I don’t wish to talk about it,” Limon-Rocha said.

“If it comes down to us, I cannot kill a child. I have children.”

“Alfredo, I told you we do not do this, the sicario does it. We follow his orders. That is how it is done. And he does it in the most stunning way. You saw the news. You saw what he did to the American cops.”

“The Tarantula.”

“Yes.”

“He is a legend, there are narcocorridos written about him. Have you ever met him?”

“Yes, I helped him once before.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“He is a perfect assassin.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He will kill anyone. He is hollow, nothing inside.”

Ruiz nodded to the distance. Alfredo sat up and saw the rising dust clouds. After a long moment, a battered pickup truck emerged. As it drew closer they distinguished an old man in a straw hat behind the wheel.

The brakes creaked as it came to a halt with the engine running.

The young man in the passenger seat gave the driver cash and got out. He retrieved a backpack from the bed of the truck, tapped it with his palm, waving to the driver as the truck disappeared down the road, leaving his passenger standing before Ruiz and Alfredo.

Wearing sunglasses, a Lady Gaga T-shirt and torn, faded jeans, his pack slung over his shoulder, Angel Quinterra-the most feared cartel assassin-looked as if he’d just come from a high school class.

“Hola, Ruiz.”

54

Somewhere North of Phoenix, Arizona

Tilly could hear the creeps.

Beyond the metal walls of the trunk, their voices were clear, but they were talking so fast in Spanish she couldn’t understand everything they were saying.

Something about the legend of a dangerous spider, a tarantula.

Now she heard the crunch of wheels on dirt; a car was approaching, coming very close then creaking. It stopped but a motor was running.

A door opened then shut and the car drove away.

A new voice-it sounded younger.

Was this help? Or was this danger?

Fast talking in Spanish that Tilly could not understand before the voices faded and the talkers walked away, leaving her on the brink of tears.

Alone in this hot, dark, stupid coffin.

She wanted to scream at them.

Let me out! Let me go! I want my mom!

But she kept quiet. Noise made them angry.

Her eyes stung.

How long had it been? What day was this? She didn’t know how much longer she could last.

Don’t cry. Don’t give in. Be strong. Be smart.

The creeps fed her by placing bags of hamburgers, French fries, tacos, potato chips, chocolate bars and cans of soda in the trunk. Then they removed her gag and stood over her, watching for anyone approaching until she finished. Then they’d replace the gag. And she had no privacy. For a toilet, they’d take her to rest stops, one of them always entering with her, keeping the stall door open, making her hurry, making sure no one saw. It made her feel like an animal.

But she got used to it.

It was a little better now-now that they’d stopped cramming her into the suitcase. When they’d let her out, her hopes rose with the glowing interior trunk-release handle. Tilly pulled it but it didn’t work because the creeps had cut the cable. They’d put thick blankets and pillows on the trunk’s floor, letting her stretch out. They’d still kept her gagged with a bandanna and bound with duct tape. It was a bit cooler, too, but it was still stinky like rubber tires, exhaust and gasoline.

What’s going to happen? What’re they going to do to me?

A wave of sadness rolled over her.

Tilly missed her mom. She was the best mom in the world.

“Sweetheart, if you see me, I love you. We’re doing everything to bring you home safely…” When Tilly saw her on the TV news, she knew her mom would never give up looking for her.

And Tilly knew her mom would tell her the same thing she’d always told her: “You shouldn’t think about what you don’t have. Instead, you should thank God for what you do have-a mother who loves you and will always love you, no matter what.”

There were a few other things Tilly had learned from her mother.

Never ever give up on the important things, because they don’t come easy.

Tilly’s heart began to beat faster. Her pulse quickened.

Always fight back.

Like the day she showed Lenny Griffin how wrong he was to try to drown her in the pool.

Anger bubbled in the pit of Tilly’s stomach, anger at Lenny Griffin, anger at these creeps who’d taken her. She began kicking and pounding the trunk, rage burning through her as she writhed and struggled with her bindings.

The fury she’d unleashed strained the tape around her wrists. Her sweat and the wear had transformed it to material akin to fabric that now gave her enough play to nearly work her hands out.

Oh! Almost free! Please! Oh, please!

Tilly froze.

Footsteps of people approaching, the trunk’s lock being keyed. Don’t let them see my work on the tape. She held her breath under an explosion of sunlight diffused through the trees.

She shut her eyes tight for a long moment before gradually relaxing them to squint at the silhouettes looking down on her.

There were three people now.

Who was the third person?

Her eyes adjusted to the new face, which belonged to a man who was younger than the creeps.

He stared at Tilly as if she were something more than an eleven-year-old girl who’d been kidnapped.

Much more.

55

Near Phoenix, Arizona

Angel gazed upon the girl in the trunk.

So this was the famous face that had stared at him from newscasts. He took his time appraising her, the way a collector assesses art.

She exuded fear.

But he saw something more. A mixture of courage, defiance and, despite her ordeal, the polish of a privileged middle-class American life that was a universe away from the barrio he had known at her age.

Bound with silver tape, gagged with a blue bandanna, packaged in jeans and a pink embroidered T-shirt, this was the prize in his final job, his ticket out of narco world before someone put him in his grave.

He lowered the trunk with consideration, closing it gently with a snap.

“Let’s go,” he said to Limon-Rocha and Tecaza.

Angel sat in the rear seat of the car among their luggage and the equipment he required for finishing the job. Tecaza, behind the wheel, found him in the rearview mirror.

“Where are we going?”

“Head for Phoenix.”

“What are the next steps for the operation?” Limon-Rocha asked.

Angel looked away, preferring not to talk about a job. Instead he reflected on the landscape and how he’d escaped capture; how he’d traveled by using his youth to persuade strangers to give him a ride.

“I beg you. My mother is dying. I have no money.”

The incident on the bus had been a close one but Angel was confident in his training, proud of his survival skills. He didn’t know about these two ex-soldiers, who’d had their own narrow escape from FBI, as he’d seen on a news report he’d watched on a TV in a diner at a small-town gas station.

Assassinations in the U.S. were always a problem.

Unlike jobs in Mexico, they had no guarantee of support from dirty cops on the payroll, and now, because this one was high-profile, they were more exposed. Everyone’s picture was shown in the press. Angel shrugged.

They still held the most vital piece: the girl.

He considered her again.

She did not come from the drug world like most of his targets. Yet in the moments he’d studied her, he’d found something about her he resented. As a top sicario for the cartel he had enjoyed the world in luxury, but looking upon the girl, this innocent from a wealthier class, took him back to what he had come from.

Angel could smell the dump, taste the despair of the tumbledown shack his family had lived in, feel the shame of other kids laughing at his drunken father picking through the trash.

No, Angel would have no trouble completing this job. It was just a matter of choosing a method, a thought that gave rise to a familiar worry.

Will she haunt me like the others haunt me?

Angel’s cell phone rang and he fished it out of his backpack. The phone was a special design costing about $35,000 and stolen from the U.S. military. The cartel had obtained ten through a black market source. The phone’s signals were scrambled, encrypted, then scrambled and encrypted repeatedly. For now, the calls were untraceable.

The instant Angel answered, Thirty said, “Did you find them?”

“Yes.”

“And did you inspect the asset?”

“Yes. It looks good.”

“There’s been a twist.”

“What is it?”

“The man with our property has finally contacted us. He wants to make your job easier for you.”

“How?”

“He wants to meet, to exchange our property for the seized asset. As we’d planned, he feels pressured to come to us. We will arrange it. One of the soldiers will know the locations. Are they present?”

Angel glanced at them in the front of the car.

“Yes.”

“Put the older one on.”

“Ruiz, for you.”

Angel passed up his phone and watched several moments of nods punctuated with, “Si, si. I know it. We will.” When Ruiz returned the phone, Angel asked a question of Thirty.

“How do we know our contact won’t bring problems wearing badges with him. They are getting closer.”

“We possess the asset-that’s our strength. His weakness is his greed. We know that he needs the asset and our property. If he involves other parties, he will not achieve his goal.”

“It’s dangerous for us.”

“There is no other way. We have arranged shipment of the special material for you to ensure that he will surrender all of our property. It is all in place, waiting for you.”

“All right.”

“We are not happy about the close calls we’ve had. This attention creates difficulties. But we must use it to our advantage. We must not back down. This is a time of intense interest. It is precisely the time to tell the world that if you fuck with us, you die. The arrogance of the dirty American cops and the sniveling messenger, to steal from the Norte Cartel, the cartel Zartosa built upon the graves of his family, is an insult. We are at war. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Zartosa’s orders are to kill them all.”

56

Metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona

Lyle Galviera was still on his call to Cora when the FBI took action to arrest him.

Task Force members who were monitoring Cora’s home line knew he was calling from the pay phone at the FirstRate Gas Station on Old Gatehouse Road, at the city’s southern edge.

Before patching it to Cora at the FBI’s divisional office, they’d alerted the Maricopa County 911 Center to send police units to the gas station, stressing that they not use lights or sirens. After dispatching cars, the emergency coordinator phoned the gas station directly to request staff make a visual of the person using the pay phone.

The coordinator’s call was answered on the first ring. A male voice said: “I told you we are through, Darlene!”

The line clicked dead.

The dispatcher tried again but the line rang unanswered because Sheldon Cardick, the twenty-six-year-old clerk, was breaking up with his girlfriend. Actually, she’d dumped him and was now sorry. Well, tough titty.

Let the phone ring.

To calm down, Sheldon went outside to sweep the front walk, waving to his last customer as he drove off in a beat-up Cherokee after using the pay phone. Not many people used that phone these days, since everyone had a cell phone. After cleaning up, Sheldon returned to the counter and his manager-trainee binders, still pissed at Darlene.

She was the loser. Despite what her mother said, Sheldon Cardick was not going be “just a clerk all of his sad little life.” He was studying to be an executive with FirstRate. A lofty goal, Sheldon thought, just as a commotion outside pulled him from his binder.

What the-?

Four sheriff’s cars had materialized.

Two large deputies entered, their shoulder radios squawking. They were pumped.

“Can you tell us if you saw anyone using the pay phone out front in the last few minutes?”

Sheldon craned his neck, seeing the other deputies unrolling police tape around the area by the phone. What’s up with that? A knuckle knock on his counter got his attention.

“Hey, skip, eyes front! Did you see anybody on the phone?”

“Yeah, some guy, bought gas, driving a shit box Cherokee.”

“What color and year?”

“White, 1990s I would guess.”

“You’d guess?”

“What’s going on?”

The second deputy was taking notes and talking in his radio as the first continued questioning Sheldon.

“Did the phone guy use a credit card?”

“Cash.”

“Any chance you got a license plate?”

“No. Why? What’s this about?”

The deputy pointed at the security cameras. “Those work?”

“Yes.”

“You going to volunteer your tapes, or do we need to get a warrant?”

“I, uh…well, I have to call my manager.”

“Do it now.”

Across the city in the FBI’s Phoenix offices, Jack Gannon and Cora demanded to know what Hackett and the task force had learned in the wake of Galviera’s call.

It was a major break.

They’d put the call through to this meeting room where Cora had taken her polygraph exam. Gannon checked his watch. Some twenty-five minutes had passed since Cora had spoken to Galviera.

It seemed like a lifetime.

They’d been here, waiting alone behind the room’s glass walls while in the outer office agents worked with quiet intensity on the break. Hackett returned head down, concentrating on his BlackBerry.

“What do you have?” Gannon asked.

“We know he called from a pay phone at a gas station.”

“You must know where.”

“We do but we’re not disclosing that now. We’ve got people on-site investigating.”

“Are you going to tell us?”

“You’re media, Jack.”

“Come on. This is the closest we’ve ever been.”

“No. We want it off the airwaves because we think these guys monitor police chatter on radio scanners. Everything’s still hot right now.” Hackett’s phone rang. “Excuse me.”

When they were alone again, Cora, overwhelmed by the polygraph and Galviera’s call, contended with her emotions. Gannon put his arm around her. For twenty years she’d lived with the burden of believing she’d murdered a man and destroyed so many lives.

“I’m so sorry for everything, Jack.”

“Now you know the truth-you never killed anyone. You did the opposite, Cora. You gave comfort to a dying man. The San Francisco guys didn’t charge you, or arrest you. That’s a good sign. You can’t rewrite all the mistakes you made in your life-no one can.”

She nodded.

“All this time, I believed I was being punished for my sins, and maybe I was. But it’s strange how once I told everyone what I’d done, Lyle’s call came, like a karmic connection. Maybe now I’m closer to getting Tilly back than we’ve ever been.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“I feel it, Jack. It’s what Lyle said to me on the phone. His exact words were, ‘I’m going to see Tilly soon.’ I think it means he knows where she is.”

“Maybe not.” Hackett had returned and had been listening.

“Why not?” Cora asked.

“It could mean the cartel is luring Galviera with the promise of seeing Tilly. And there’s another key consideration.”

“What’s that?” Gannon asked.

“The cartel may also know that you were present when Eduardo Zartosa was murdered in San Francisco. If so, they may be planning to exact revenge. It’s what they do.”

Cora swallowed hard.

The security cameras at the FirstRate Gas Station had recorded Lyle Galviera in a ball cap and dark glasses, buying gas. They’d also captured clear pictures of the Arizona license plate on his Cherokee.

Within an hour those pictures were circulated in citywide and statewide alerts to all police and media. Within two hours, the FBI held another news briefing. They asked the public to help locate Galviera, or his vehicle, or the other suspects, to aid in the investigation of Tilly Martin’s kidnapping.

The appeal yielded few solid tips.

As the day gave in to the evening, Cora and Gannon returned to her home in Mesa Mirage, where she made a short statement to the news crews waiting in her driveway.

“I’m praying we’ll bring Tilly home and I beg anyone with any information to call police. Please.”

Exhausted, Cora went to Tilly’s room. She held a stuffed polar bear in her arms, looked out the window to the stars and asked God for mercy.

Tilly, I love you. Wherever you are, Mommy loves you.

57

Somewhere in Metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona

P it-a-pat pit-a-pat pit-a-pat.

Stones tapped and popped against the car’s undercarriage.

Where are they taking me? We’ve been driving for hours.

Tilly had a bad feeling with the new kidnapper, the younger guy. The way he stared at her had creeped her out. All the more reason for her to keep trying everything she could to get away from her monsters.

With a few deep breaths, she’d gathered the strength to resume working on her bindings. Her captors had paid no attention to them. The tape was still secure but she had been loosening it.

Again Tilly twisted her aching wrists against the tape until they were numb.

The car slowed, then stopped.

Weight shifted and doors opened, followed by low talking. Then she heard the rattle, clank and shuffle as they began unloading the car and carrying items away. Tilly was overwhelmed with a sense of finality.

What’s going to happen? What’re they going to do to me?

Footsteps approached. A key was inserted in the trunk and it opened to the night and something moved swiftly toward her, leaving her no time to react as her head was swallowed by a sack.

Hands lifted her from the trunk, her feet found the ground. Dirt, sand and small stones bumped under her sneakers. She sensed the still air of a vast, remote place before she was escorted like a blind person to another location.

They had not gone far when they stopped.

“Step up,” one of the creeps said.

Tilly raised her foot, feeling a step, then she found a smooth floor as they entered a structure. She was overwhelmed by the smell. It took her back to a school trip to ghost towns near Casa Grande. The decaying buildings were filled with birds’ nests. The walls were layered with “sun-cooked bird shit,” as Dylan Fuller had called it.

Now as they moved along, Tilly listened for anyone else who might be inside, anyone who could help her.

She heard nothing but creaking, dripping and the echoes of her own shuffling as they entered another area. Here Tilly sensed a dim light through the bottom of her hood as it was pulled from her head.

Standing there, she took stock of the room. It was as large as her classroom but illuminated by a naked bulb hanging like a noose from a pipe and wired to a car battery. The light created ominous shadows, for the room was abandoned, neglected. Paint peeled in sheets as if the walls were diseased. Tiles had fallen from the ceiling. At one end she saw a series of huge pipes horseshoed from the floor for about three feet before bending back into the floor like upside-down U’s as high as Tilly’s waist.

A mattress was pushed near one of the big upside-down U’s.

Tilly saw a chain.

Handcuffs.

The creep Alfredo nudged her closer. He wrapped the chain around one of the pipes, looped one handcuff around the chain, clamped the other on Tilly’s wrist, then snapped it shut on her.

The steel click destroyed the speck of hope she’d nurtured by loosening the tape.

Alfredo said nothing and removed her gag.

Before he left, he nudged the toe of his boot against a plastic bag. Tilly saw bottled water, potato chips, pastries, an apple and what looked like a sandwich.

Standing there, awaiting her fate, she felt the onset of tears but forced herself not to cry.

She could hear her captors in the next area, their low voices echoing as they talked quickly in Spanish with each other. She heard the digital chirp of a keypad and guessed one was making a call on a cell phone.

This was it.

Tilly sensed that whatever they were going to do to her, they would do it here.

She was so scared.

As she prayed, she looked to her left through the room’s only window well. It had no glass or frame. It was a low-set, large square opening to the vast night. On the horizon, Tilly saw a few small lights, twinkling like a distant shore, and wondered what they were connected to.

A house? With people living a normal life and children happy and safe in their beds, while she was imprisoned here waiting for whatever was to come.

Did anyone know she was here?

Was anyone rushing to save her?

Why was this happening? Why?

Furious, she yanked against her handcuff, rattling her chain against the pipe, causing a loud clanking of metal rings against metal.

Tilly looked at the pipe, at its upside-down U shape. It was about as big in circumference as a soda can, with a bigger circular collar at each end. In the middle it had several rings, each about three inches wide, that slid along the main pipe like bracelets.

Tilly focused on them.

One bracelet was out of alignment.

It seemed slanted.

Did she do that by jerking the chain?

Tilly slid the bracelets away from the slanted one. Then she slid the slanted one to reveal a clear two-inch gap in the pipe. A section had been removed, but the bracelet ring had covered the gap.

Alfredo never checked! The stupid creeps missed this!

Tilly’s heart raced.

Would the chain fit? She looked around-no one was near. Quietly and carefully she slid the chain through the gap.

Yes! Oh my God! Oh my God!

Then with the utmost care she threaded the chain from her handcuff. She let out her breath slowly. All that was fastened to her now was the one handcuff on her wrist. Its open mate dangled from it and she held it to keep it from clinking.

She walked softly to the edge of the room, peered around the entrance carefully and saw a large warehouse area where her captors were at a table eating, surrounded by their luggage and equipment.

In the opposite direction, she saw a darkened hallway.

She moved slowly down the hallway until she came to another open doorway and night air.

And just like that she was outside under the stars.

Free.

In an instant she searched for her bearings, for any sign of civilization or help in the vast darkness surrounding her. She scanned every direction until she found the small lights blinking in the distance.

There!

Tilly ran toward them as fast as she could.

Blood pounding in her ears, her heart nearly bursting, she wanted to cry and scream at the same time as she ran for her life.

58

Lago de Rosas, Mexico

The phone in the priest’s rectory was an old wall-mounted touch-tone.

Father Francisco Ortero was folding his laundered shirts when it rang. He went to the kitchen and answered it.

“Is this Ortero, the priest who hears confessions in Lago de Rosas?”

The young male voice was familiar.

“Sí,” Ortero said.

“This is the sicario you promised to help.”

Several icy seconds of silence passed.

“I told you I would be calling, Father. You remember our discussion?”

“Yes.” Ortero adjusted his grip on the handset.

“And my proposal?”

“Yes.”

“I am about to finish my last job.”

“Don’t go through with it. Surrender, I beg you.”

“Listen to me. You made a promise in the confessional to help me.”

“You must stop.”

“Have you arranged for a journalist you trust to tell my story?”

Ortero thought of all the funerals of the innocents murdered by narcotraficantes that he had officiated; how the bloodshed had challenged his faith.

How much suffering does God allow?

“Father? Have you arranged for a journalist you trust to tell my story?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Take note of this information.”

The sicario gave the priest the time and the location near Phoenix, Arizona, where the journalist was to meet him tomorrow, confirming what the priest had suspected.

“Please, surrender. Police everywhere are looking for you and the others. Your faces are on all the news channels. Surrender!”

“It does not matter now. I am nearly finished.”

“Please, I beg you, no more killing. Surrender now and atone.”

“This is how it must happen. This is how it will happen.”

The priest was disgusted with himself. He was aiding a sicario. He squeezed the handset as revulsion and fear coiled within him. What he was doing was akin to the devil’s bidding.

“I am considering sending police,” Ortero said.

“You would break the seal of the confessional?”

“What if it did not matter? What if I stopped being a priest to stop the killing?”

“If you send police, I will kill the girl before their eyes in the most memorable way you could ever imagine.”

“I beg you to surrender.”

“The girl’s life is in your hands, priest. Your betrayal would result in her death. I have killed nearly two hundred people. Do you think I would hesitate to kill her? Do you want to gamble her life with an executioner of my stature?”

“Do you want to gamble with eternal damnation?”

“That is exactly what I’m doing,” the sicario said. “I know my days are numbered. Either way I am damned. This is my last chance at a new life. Send the reporter, or the girl will die. Wait. You anger me, Father. Maybe she will die anyway. Consider this your only hope to save her.”

The line went dead.

Shaking, Ortero fell back to the wall, sliding down to the floor.

What have I set in motion?

59

Near Phoenix, Arizona

Angel 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!”

60

Greater Phoenix, Arizona

Tilly’s heart was bursting.

She was running on pure adrenaline. Each time she stumbled in the desert, her skin peeled and blood seeped from her cuts.

Don’t stop. You can’t stop. They’ll find you.

Her pulse pounding in her ears, she wanted to cry out-Please! Somebody help me! Please!-but she didn’t want to alert the creeps. Her hard breathing and soft whimpering pierced the night air.

In the distance behind her a motor revved. She looked back. Doors slammed, headlights swept and began undulating, accelerating in her direction. At the edge of the lights’ reach, Tilly saw a cluster of buildings and ran toward them. They looked like run-down wooden garages with steel drums and crates of junk inside.

The car lights shot through the gaps between the boards of the buildings, making the ground glow as shadows rose.

Hide! Run! Hide!

The car churned dirt into dust that swirled in the headlights as Tecaza braked near the buildings.

“She’s here. Spread out.”

Limon-Rocha and Tecaza used their night-vision goggles to probe the buildings. Angel had a flashlight and searched the perimeter.

Tilly had found a gully surrounded by tall grass and shrubs and scrambled into it, laying flat on her stomach. She could hear them talking, glimpsed them searching the buildings. A flashlight beam raked the ground near her as a silhouette approached.

She held her breath.

No, please! No!

A cell phone rang and someone answered in Spanish but ended the call abruptly. The silhouette suddenly veered. At the same time one of the creeps near the buildings called out, “I see her!”

Oh no! Please, no!

It sounded like Alfredo, but his voice was lower, as if he’d turned from her. The others were with him. Tilly risked lifting her head and discerned three silhouettes near the idling car. By their posture, it appeared two of them were using binoculars.

“Where?” one of them asked.

“There, to the left.”

“That’s a coyote.”

“No, that’s her. She got away behind the buildings, let’s go.”

Doors slammed. The car roared off.

Tilly waited, got to her feet and ran toward the lights in the distance. She kept her eye on the car, way off to her left bounding over the vast field.

Keep running. Keep running.

Her side began aching, burning.

Tears blurred her vision but she saw a house ahead.

Please, somebody help me!

Far off to her left, the car changed direction, headlights turned toward her, the engine growling.

Virginia Dortman gripped her knife and cut potatoes into chunks. She was making a salad and desserts for the hospital fundraiser potluck tomorrow.

Judging from the aroma filling the kitchen of her small double-wide, the pies baking in her oven should almost be ready. Give them a few more minutes, she thought, gazing out her window at the flat land stretching toward the abandoned airfield.

Look at those lights bouncing and waving around out there. It must be teenagers again. All that tomfoolery can get dangerous. One time, they started a fire. Virginia had a good mind to call the sheriff’s office.

She’d let it go for now. She had too much to do.

For the past year, since her husband died of a heart attack at fifty-two years of age, Virginia busied herself baking, volunteering and working at the library. But most of the time she feared for her son, Clay.

He looked at her from his framed photo atop the TV he’d bought her. Handsome in his dress blues, eyes intense under his white cap. He was a proud Marine, like his dad.

Clay had been posted to South Korea three months ago.

He was twenty-four.

Virginia whispered a prayer for him each day.

What was that?

Her attention shifted to her window.

Something outside was moving, approaching her house. She searched the night beyond the floodlights illuminating her property.

A coyote? No. That’s a-

Virginia’s eyes widened.

“Please, help me!”

Tilly ran up the wooden stairs to Virginia Dortman’s front porch.

“Help me!”

Stunned at the site of a sobbing little girl at her door, Virginia’s immediate thought was that this was a joke, set up by teenagers.

She opened her door, her disbelief turning to shock at Tilly’s dirty T-shirt, torn jeans, frazzled hair and bloodied arms. When the kitchen light glinted off the steel handcuff dangling from Tilly’s wrist, Virginia gasped.

“Oh my Lord, sweetheart, what happened to you?”

Tilly fused herself to Virginia, inhaling the smells of her kitchen, her apron, shaking so badly, her words spilled through a torrent of tears. “P-p-please…h-h-help…”

Virginia’s next thought was calling 911, and she glanced toward her cordless phone on the sofa of her living room.

But before she moved to get it, her kitchen was awash in blood-red pulsating light.

A police car?

An unmarked patrol car halted at her doorstep, a red emergency light revolving on the interior dash. Two uniformed officers rushed toward Virginia. Confusion then recognition dawned, memory swirling with TV news images of a kidnapped child, drug gangs, fake police officers- Oh, dear Lord.

“Release the child, ma’am!”

Both officers put their hands on their holstered guns.

“No!” Tilly screamed. “They’re not police!”

“Ma’am, release the child! We have reports that a missing girl was sighted here. Now, release the child and step forward with your hands above your head palms out. Now!”

“No! Don’t listen to them!” Tilly screamed.

A third figure left the rear of the car, disappearing in the night.

Paralyzed with fear, Virginia glanced to her counter for her knife.

“Freeze! Release her, now!”

One of the officers drew his weapon and pointed it at Virginia while his partner charged at Tilly. She broke free, bolting to the living room for the phone just as Angel smashed through the rear door and seized it from Tilly.

The two men held her down, clamped the loose handcuff around her free wrist. One of the creeps, Alfredo, dragged her wailing to the car and locked her in the trunk.

Inside the house, Limon-Rocha held Virginia at gunpoint in a chair in her kitchen.

Angel entered, glanced at her, then picked up the knife she had been using a moment ago.

Angel took stock of Virginia’s double-wide trailer, the photograph of her Marine son. Running his finger along the serrated edges of the blade, he looked into her eyes. They glistened with terror.

“I am very sorry,” he said.

61

Phoenix, Arizona

Lyle Galviera kept the Cherokee a few miles under the speed limit, moving south along the freeway.

The AC had quit. His hands were sweating on the wheel. He opened the windows and concentrated.

This was it, his only shot.

The cartel had given him the location for the meeting. He knew the area but still had a long way to go. Amid the multilane streams of headlights and taillights, he checked his mirrors again, glad the guy in California who’d provided him with the Cherokee and new ID had put several different plates in the storage bin.

“Never know when you might need ’em.”

Galviera had switched to a Colorado plate a few hours ago. There was no margin for error here. As the road rushed under him, he looked out at the ocean of city lights and floated with memories of his father.

His old man had driven a bus all day, taking every overtime shift. At home, his mother kneaded the cords of stress from his neck. His old man worked extra hours because he wanted Lyle to be the first in the family line to go to college.

Make something of yourself. Make me proud.

It had happened; Lyle was accepted at Arizona State and, man, it brought tears to his father’s eyes. Then came the day Lyle was called to the faculty office. A phone was passed to him and he heard his mother’s voice: “Come to the hospital!”

After they buried his dad, Galviera dropped out and worked like a dog as a bicycle courier and delivering pizzas before finally carving his own business out of nothing.

Nothing.

He nearly lost it all when his first marriage ended but he triumphed, battered but wiser. Then he met Cora, admired how she’d survived her own problems. They were alike; they were good together. They had dreams but he’d put them on hold because his company was in trouble.

He refused to lose it.

He pounded the wheel with both fists and cursed.

Tilly kidnapped, Salazar and Johnson murdered, leaving me a wanted man, a marked man. Half of the money is mine. I earned it. I need it. Without it, I lose everything. I can’t lose.

He could fix this.

The solution lay behind him under the tarp in the sports bags filled with cash-cash from high school pot-heads hustling fast food to suburban soccer moms, university dope smokers, music types, movie types, bottom feeders, high flyers, pimps, hos, street trash, tripped-out execs and all-round losers; drug users from every scene of the American dream. Three million dollars in unmarked bills for Tilly’s life.

No one knew about the two million he was hiding for his own use.

This was it.

He came to an industrial wasteland at the city’s edge, a railcar repair depot that had closed down after an explosion some thirty years ago.

In the darkness, the Cherokee crawled by the crumbling brick buildings rising like headstones from the yard. Galviera’s instructions were to go to the tallest building, park at the base and wait in the car with his lights off.

He turned down a road that ran between two long tracks, both lined with weatherworn box and hopper cars. He followed the dark road to the metal tower that supported a deteriorated storage tank, the tallest structure in the site.

He parked near the base.

He waited, watching the strobe lights of jetliners sailing by overhead. After nearly an hour, his rearview mirror glowed with the headlights of an approaching vehicle.

It stopped behind him.

Two figures got out, carrying flashlights, and came to his passenger and driver doors, where one directed a blinding beam into his eyes. “Mr. Galviera?”

He glimpsed a shoulder patch-a uniform-and his heart sank.

“Yes.”

“Step out of the car, please, with your hands above your head, palms out.”

Galviera complied, grappling with the fact it was over as they patted him for weapons. The men kept the light burning in his eyes before taking him to the rear of their vehicle, where another figure stood in the dark.

The trunk opened and Galviera’s heart lifted.

Light washed over Tilly-bound, haggard, scared, but alive.

“You brought our property, Mr. Galviera?”

“Yes, in the back, under the tarp. In the bags.”

One of the men opened the rear door of the Cherokee, dropped two laden sports bags on the ground in front of the car and unzipped them to display thick bundles of cash. He took one and fanned the edges.

“Did you bring all of it?”

“It’s all there in all the bags. Let me take Tilly and go. Our business is done.”

“No.”

“We each fulfilled our obligations. You can count it.”

“We’re not going to count it here.”

“Why not?”

“We’re not done, not yet.”

“I don’t under-”

Stars exploded across Galviera’s eyes.