Against All Enemies

34 THE HAND OF FATIMA

It wasn’t that Moore regretted his decision to flee back into the tunnel. After all, he’d received two simultaneous pieces of information and had reacted to them in an instant: (1) they’d been spotted, and (2) a large group was inside the warehouse.

Fight or flight.

What frustrated him most was that the mission to follow the money was over. The trail had ended the second that punk had spotted them. He tried to convince himself that there was nothing they could’ve done differently. It was simply a matter of bad timing (flashback to Somalia and that fiasco, wherein they sent him in a few days late and a dollar short). Sure, he and Ansara would tell Towers about the Ford Explorer, and they’d track the vehicle with their eyes in the sky and Towers’s civilian informants, perhaps even get permission to intercept it and seize the weapons and maybe even confiscate the cash, but Moore had been counting on identifying a much more definitive link between the cartel and Jorge Rojas, at least via one of Rojas’s businesses.

Ansara was sprinting up the tunnel, increasing the gap, but Moore was beginning to slow as he heard the thundering boots of men coming down the staircase behind them. He stopped, spun around, and dropped onto his belly as, lit by the flickering light from the tunnel entrance, a figure rushed forward, arm extended. For just a heartbeat Moore glimpsed his assailant’s face: the cartel truck’s driver.

Propped up on his elbows now, Moore fired once into the figure’s chest, the round booting him sideways into the panels before he fell onto his back.

From behind him came two more men, the rest of the weapons-transfer crew, their Belgian-made cop-killer pistols flashing, the shots booming through the tunnel as one 5.7x28-millimeter round struck the pipe near Moore’s elbow.

Their winking muzzles betrayed their positions, and drawing deeply on decades of experience — and his rage — he targeted the first man, delivered a pair of rounds into his chest, then panned slightly to the right and unloaded his magazine into the second guy, who staggered backward as though he were being electrocuted.

As Moore ejected his magazine and scrambled to his feet, about to turn back toward Ansara, the far end of the tunnel vanished.

Just like that.

That faint beam of shifting light that had fallen on the wooden staircase had been extinguished in a nanosecond, replaced by a huge wall of earth and dust, accompanied by an explosion that originated from both sides of the wall, sending a blast wave of dirt and rocks and pieces of support beams boomeranging through the shaft.

Moore was intimately familiar with the sound of cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, or C-4 plastic explosives, and as the debris began to pelt him, a second explosion hammered behind him, this one much closer, the ground rumbling more violently, and then a third explosion thundered through the first two, this one even closer, as he whirled back and sprinted, echoing his first admonishment to Ansara: “Run!” That cry was all reflex and reaction; Ansara didn’t need any more motivation.

Even as he shifted past the turns, believing that each ninety-degree angle would further protect him, more detonations tore apart the tunnel, timed to blow in succession and drawing nearer. Up on his right lay the little sanctuary flickering in candlelight. As he passed, he saw Ansara trying to lift Rueben into a fireman’s carry.

Moore cursed but kept running. “Forget him! We gotta go!”

“He’s still not dead!”

The next explosion occurred so closely that Moore thought his eardrums had been blown out. The dust clouds and debris wave filled the tunnel now, dousing the candles and cutting off Ansara as he begged for another second.

Gasping and blinded, Moore ran forward, unsure if his partner was behind him. He banged straight into the ladder as an explosion near where the acoustic panels terminated loosed a wall of dirt that collapsed around him, the musty earth hissing like a chorus of snakes and burying him up to his waist as dust clouds billowed into his face.

He took a breath, tasted the gritty dirt, coughed hard, then tried to breathe again, blinking hard against the burn in his eyes. He tried to turn around, but his legs were pinned by the dirt. He screamed Ansara’s name, but there were easily thousands of pounds of debris between him and his colleague. He screamed again, beat his fists into the fresh piles of sand, knowing that Ansara and the kid were suffocating and there wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do about it. He dug past the dirt and into his pocket, barely noticing the blood dripping down his arm. He took hold of his smartphone, but his hand trembled so badly that he dropped it. Fighting for breath and coughing yet again, he picked up the phone and dialed Towers. “They blew the fucking tunnel. Ansara’s buried. I’m stuck in here, too. Do you hear me? They blew the tunnel …”

“I hear you. A team’s coming.”

“Fuck. They spotted us.”

“They get off with the weapons?”

“I think so. Black Ford Explorer. Probably leaving the warehouse. Check with your spotters.”

“Got it. Now, Moore, you just sit tight. Help’s on the way. And I’m coming down there myself.”

It took him another five minutes to free one of his legs, and by the time he was able to lift that leg in an attempt to wriggle out of the hole, he heard a group moving into the bedroom and a voice he didn’t recognize shouting his name.

“Down here!” he cried.

A flashlight blinded him for a second until the man holding it doused the beam.

Moore glanced up into the eyes of a guy wearing the black helmet and black fatigues of an FBI task force. The guy shouldered his rifle. “Holy shit!”

Moore just looked at him. “Hurry up. My buddy’s down here with a kid. He’s buried. They can’t breathe.”

“Aw, Jesus …”

Within ten minutes Moore was free and climbing the ladder, groaning over the pain in his arm as he tried to cling to the rungs. Metal fragments from one of the trusses had torn through his shirt and lodged themselves in his biceps. The wound was nothing. He couldn’t take his mind off Ansara, and as he stood there in the bedroom, pacing, wanting to get back down there and dig through the sand with his bare hands, one of the task force members came back up the ladder and said, “We’ll need a goddamned Bobcat to get them out.”

Moore leaned back on the bedroom wall, cursing and grimacing again over the dirt in his mouth. He held his breath and took himself back into the tunnel, through all that dirt and into a tiny depression where Ansara lay, taking his final few breaths. Moore shuddered. Wanted to scream. Then he just stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him.

Maybe he was just cursed. That was it. If you hung around him long enough, you’d wind up dead. How much more of this could he take? How many ghosts could populate his head?

He found Towers getting out of an unmarked car across the street. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Moore glanced back at the house. “Not till they get him out.”

“All right, just take it easy.”

Moore turned away and marched back toward the house. Other units were arriving, and the entire street would be cordoned off. Welcome to the circus, a police and first-responder big top lorded over by spotters from the FBI and the drug cartels, along with nosy neighbors, kids running around in diapers, and a host of stray cats and dogs.

Moore and Towers returned to the bedroom, where down in the tunnel several agents were clearing away debris with their hands and the butts of their rifles until an excavation crew could arrive.

“He was going to teach me how to ride a mountain bike, did you know that?” Moore asked Towers. “He told me I really sucked.”

Towers shook his head. “Don’t do it, buddy. Don’t torture yourself.”

“He’s dying in there right now.”

Towers hardened his tone. “Are you listening to me?”

The excavation team didn’t reach Ansara and Rueben until nearly one p.m. the following day, and while Moore had been coaxed away from the scene by Towers and had gone to a hotel to take a shower and get some fresh clothes, he’d returned and waited there until both his colleague and the young mule were taken out and set down on the bedroom floor. Ansara’s face and most of the left side of his body had been peppered with shrapnel, so there was a good chance he’d died in the explosion. Rueben, meanwhile, had probably been shielded by Ansara and had only his major stab wound.

One of the kid’s hands was balled tightly in a fist, while the other was limp, and that struck Moore as a little odd. He dropped to his knees and delicately pried open the kid’s hand to find a gold pendant covered in dirt.

Moore breathed another curse, because he knew exactly what he was looking at: an eighteen-karat-gold Hamsa, a Middle Eastern symbol also called the Hand of Fatima, named after the daughter of the prophet Mohammed. The pendant was shaped like the back of a human hand and included delicate filigree work that suggested lace. It was worn by Muslims to ward off the evil eye.

The tunnel had been dark. Moore and Ansara had never noticed Rueben’s other hand. He’d grabbed Moore and had been desperately trying to tell him something, perhaps give him something.

Moore closed his eyes and squeezed the pendant tightly between his fingertips.

Pablo Gutiérrez had murdered an FBI agent in Calexico during a mission to help Pedro Romero scout out homes for the workers on the Juárez Cartel’s new tunnel project. The agent had confronted them, pretending to be a sicario, but he hadn’t realized that his cover had already been blown and that Pablo knew exactly who he was. While Romero watched, Pablo had duct-taped the man to a chair inside one of the houses the cartel owned near the border fence.

The agent had been full of bravado and had pretended that he did not work for the U.S. government, even after Pablo removed both of his pinkies with a pair of hedge clippers he’d found in the garage. The blades were caked with rust and dull. After two more fingers were removed from the federal agent’s right hand, he began to babble like a little boy, confessing all he knew about the cartel’s operations in the area — or at least his story sounded good enough. Pablo didn’t care either way. His job, according to Corrales, was to kill, not interrogate, the man, but he thought he’d have a little fun first. Pablo thanked the agent, then lifted an ax to the man’s neck and made a few practice swings while Romero turned away and put a hand to his face.

The agent released a bloodcurdling cry as Pablo raised the ax and told him to be still.

It took five solid blows before the man’s head toppled to the floor. Pablo had never before seen that much blood, and there was a strange odor coming from the body, almost like raw seafood.

He ordered Romero to help him carry the chair and body out to the curb as though they were putting out the trash and recyclables. He pinned a sign on the headless corpse: FBI Agents Leave Calexico Now.

They mailed the head to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., the headquarters of the FBI, but it wouldn’t arrive for three to five days. However, less than an hour later, neighbors coming home from work spotted the grisly sight at the curb, and within minutes after Pablo left, units were on the scene.

That night, Pablo had laughed his ass off as he’d watched the story on CNN, with tickers flashing ridiculously obvious statements, such as “Trending: Mexican drug war crosses border into the United States.” Did they think it would never happen? What kind of fantasy land were the Americans living in? Dumb fuckers.

That was the night that Pablo had become a wanted man in the United States because a teenage boy had photographed him near the house and had surrendered that picture to the American authorities (Pablo had killed that kid as well). Now he realized that those were the good old days, and that his involvement with Corrales and Los Caballeros and the cartel tore at him from both sides.

He’d agonized over where his loyalty should lie: to Corrales, his immediate boss, the man who’d taught him everything and had made him a trusted right hand, rescuing him from a life of mowing lawns as an eighteen-year-old illegal immigrant in Las Vegas …or Fernando Castillo, the man whose identity Pablo had only recently learned and who had been repeatedly calling Pablo. That he’d finally decided to answer one of the calls was a well-kept secret from Corrales, who had cloistered all of them away in a pair of apartments above Farmacias Nacional.

Corrales had said that the cartel would not find them because they were unaware of his friendship with the apartment owner, and Pablo believed him. The owner of the pharmacy, also one of Corrales’s friends, ran a prescription-drug-smuggling operation to foil U.S. customs regulations that stated you could carry only the amount of a prescription for personal use back into the United States and that you needed a copy of the prescription. The pharmacist had partnered with a doctor, and together they wrote and sold thousands of dollars’ worth of falsified prescriptions that moved across the border. They were small-time smugglers but proud of their business, and thus far not a single one of their mules had been caught — a remarkable record. Corrales had laughed at them, because what the cartel smuggled was worth millions.

Dante Corrales wouldn’t be laughing for much longer, though.

“Where are you going?” the man asked, sitting on the sofa in a tank shirt and jeans, a bottle of Pacífico propped on his knee. He’d been on that sofa for the past few days, watching soap operas, going into rages, then calming down. His left arm was still in a sling, the bandages on his shoulder changed daily.

“I’m going to get some lunch,” Pablo told him.

“Get enough for all of us, okay?”

“Okay.”

Pablo shuddered and headed out into the hallway. He entered the stairwell, reached the first floor, and when he opened the back door leading into the alley behind the pharmacy, Fernando Castillo’s men were already waiting. Three of them. They wore long jackets to conceal their weapons.

“He’s up there?” asked one of them, a young punk named José who had once challenged Corrales during a smuggling run in Nogales and who Castillo said was now taking over the gang.

Pablo nodded. “There are two cameras. Look for them. And God forgive me.”

“God has nothing to do with this,” said José. “Nothing at all …”

Pablo walked away and dialed the number. “It’s me.”

“Are they going up?” asked Castillo.

“Yes.”

“Good. Remember. I want to see a picture of the body.”

“You don’t even want to talk to him?”

“What good would that do?”

“Maybe he’s sorry. Maybe he’ll pay you back.”

“Oh, he’ll pay us back. With interest. Right now.”

Corrales rose and went to the bedroom, where María was still lying sideways across the bed, still wearing her negligee and reading one of her fashion magazines. Her panties rode high up her ass, and for a second or two, Corrales thought of jumping on her, but she’d fight him off, piss and moan like the depressed bitch she’d become, and he’d tell her once more to be patient, that Zúñiga would come around, that he’d take them in as allies and finally be convinced that he could help them. They had plenty of money to live off for now, but they wouldn’t dare go near the hotel to get any more out of the safe there. Those fuckers had already killed Ignacio, and Castillo was watching the place twenty-four-seven for Corrales’s return.

Corrales saw no way to survive other than to join the rival cartel. He needed protection, because Fernando had the manpower and the money to hunt him no matter where in the world he chose to hide. Deep down he knew he would one day turn his back on the cartel that had murdered his parents. He had used it for all it was worth. His reckless decision to use the cartel’s money to finance his hotel restoration instead of paying off the Guatemalans was probably born in his subconscious. He wanted to get caught. He wanted things to go south so that he’d be forced to get out. That’s why he’d prepared for this day by spending years gathering crucial information: the identities of suppliers and smugglers around the world, including their main contacts, Ballesteros in Colombia and Rahmani in Waziristan; bank account numbers and deposit receipts; and recordings of phone calls and copies of e-mail messages that could incriminate both Castillo and Rojas himself. Corrales would offer Zúñiga inside information on the workings of the Juárez Cartel so that he could help the man he once hated take over operations in the city.

But Zúñiga had thus far failed to answer any of his calls. Corrales had even sent Pablo to his house, and the man would send out his thugs and tell Pablo to leave or suffer the consequences.

Corrales had set up two wireless battery-powered surveillance cameras around the apartment and pharmacy: one in the hall outside their apartment door, the other in the main stairwell leading up from the back alley door. The small monitor that sat on the bar near the kitchen sink showed static, and Corrales caught that screen from the corner of his eye. He swore and dragged himself from the sofa to investigate the problem.

That his FN 5.7 pistol was lying on the counter beside the monitor was the only reason why they didn’t kill him immediately.

A shuffle of feet just outside the front door caught his attention. He reached for the gun.

José, the little rat that Corrales had trained himself, kicked in the door and leveled his gun on Corrales, who was already bringing his pistol around.

There was a half-second of recognition and an almost guilt-stricken sheen appearing in José’s eyes before he yelled Corrales’s name.

Corrales fired once — a lightning-fast headshot — as two more bastards rushed in behind José, but Corrales was already ducking away, behind the bar, taking good cover. José hit the floor, a gaping wound above his left eye.

María screamed from the bedroom, and one of the guys broke off and ran down the hall.

Corrales hollered her name, drawing fire from the other guy, who’d dodged into the living room and thrown himself behind the sofa. Corrales burst from behind the bar, and releasing a cry that came from deep within his gut, he rounded the sofa and came face-to-face with the punk, who took one look at him and lifted his gun in surrender.

He was sixteen, if that. Corrales shot him twice in the face. María screamed his name.

Two shots rang out. Corrales bounded into the bedroom, just as the last sicario, a heavily tattooed guy with a potbelly whom Corrales had never seen before, turned toward him.

It took but a fraction of a second for Corrales to see María splayed across the bed with blood seeping through her negligee. She mouthed his name.

Then two things happened at once.

The guy cried, “Fuck you, vato!” and lifted his pistol.

Corrales opened his mouth, rocked by the sight of his woman lying there, dying, as he jammed down the trigger of his pistol while rushing toward the guy, thrusting the gun into the guy’s chest as though it were a sword, the last two rounds muted as they slammed into his flesh, the muzzle burning the guy’s shirt even as he fired two rounds into the ceiling. The guy crashed backward into the flat-screen television, knocking it onto the floor as he tumbled and landed facedown on the carpeting. The stench of gunpowder and burned fabric and flesh was enough to make Corrales gag.

Shouts came from the hallway outside, Paco the pharmacist, along with his wife, screaming for their two sons to get out of the apartment next door.

Corrales stood there, his chest rising and falling, the very act of breathing almost too painful to bear. He choked up, and tears that had been held back for years finally stained his cheeks as he climbed onto the bed and put his hand on María’s face. He was trembling now, lip quivering, his thoughts swirling in a vortex of anger as he flicked a glance at the dead sicario and fired three more times, but his pistol clicked uselessly. What now? Another magazine. There could be more of them outside. He tore off his sling and, with a dull ache in his shoulder, raced back into the kitchen, reloaded his gun, then returned to scoop María into his arms and carry her out of the apartment, the shoulder now on fire, his pistol clenched in his hand.

The pharmacist was screaming at him as he hit the stairwell and made it outside, but when he turned back to where he usually parked his car in the alley, he found it there — with Pablo leaning on the hood.

“We just got hit!” he cried. “Get in the car! We have to leave now!”

But Pablo just looked at him, stunned, then reached back into his waistband and drew his pistol.

No, Corrales hadn’t seen this coming, and the betrayal robbed him of breath. He turned away, back toward the door, while trying to get his arm high enough so he could fire at the young man he’d called a trusted friend.

Pablo got off the first round, but it struck María; then Corrales fired two shots as Pablo started around the car, trying to duck behind the trunk. One round caught him in the abdomen, the other in the arm. He slumped to the ground, groaning, lifting his pistol again, and Corrales squeezed off two more shots that drummed into Pablo’s chest. He staggered to the car, reached it, set María on the ground, and, weeping once more, he opened the back door and strained to drag his dead girlfriend into the backseat. Once he got her inside, he climbed into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine. The sirens were wailing in the distance as he left rubber on the pavement and a cloud of exhaust fumes pouring over Pablo’s body.

Spotters from the Juárez Cartel were watching Corrales drive up the dirt road toward Zúñiga’s house, and there wasn’t anything he could do about them. The two men had been posted in the small apartment complex where the turnoff toward the dirt road began, and he noted them on the rooftop. They, in turn, were being watched by Zúñiga’s men, who were no doubt positioned along the fence perimeter, in a dirt parking lot beside a detached shed on the north side of the house.

With a dust trail clearly marking his path, Corrales roared up to Zúñiga’s newly repaired front gates — the ones he’d blown up that night to send a message to his rival. He rushed out of the car, grabbed María, and carried her toward the gate, looking up into the security camera and screaming, “Zúñiga! They killed my woman! They killed her! You have to talk to me. Please! You have to talk to me!”

He fell to his knees and began to sob into María’s bloody chest.

And then something thumped and motors began to whine. He looked up through the tears as the wrought-iron gates parted, and up ahead, far down the long paved driveway, came Zúñiga himself, flanked by two guards.