Drone

1

El Paso, Texas

Cinco de Mayo was cooler than usual in the sprawling border city of El Paso, one of the poorest in America. In one of its grimmest barrios, a pink stucco house thrummed with life on a dark, narrow street. A crowd of teenagers from the nearby arts academy high school danced to throbbing music in the frame of its big picture window, their faces all smiles and laughter. The first graduation party of the year.

Out on the front porch, a knot of young men in hoodies and drooping pants stood guard, drinking beer out of Solo cups and smoking cigarettes, trying to look tough in a brutal part of town. To anybody passing by, they looked like somebody’s crew, but they were just teenagers like the kids inside, their young bodies rocking unconsciously to the beat of the music behind them.

An obsidian-black Hummer on big custom wheels slowed as it passed the house. The windows were blacked out. Death-metal music roared inside. No plates on the bumpers.

The hoodies out front pretended not to notice, playing it cool but keeping careful watch out of the sides of their bloodshot eyes.

Four houses up, the Hummer’s red brake lights flared as it slowed to a stop, then its white back-up lights lit up. The big black box of steel rolled backward. The gear box whined until it stopped in front of the pink stucco house.

It just sat there, idling.

The death-metal music still thundered behind the Hummer’s blackened glass, muffled by the steel doors.

Now the boys turned in unison, stared at it, starting to freak out. The oldest kid nodded at the tallest.

“Yo. Go check it out.”

“Me? You check it out.”

No need.

The Hummer’s doors burst open, death metal exploding into the night, drowning out the music inside the house.

Two men leaped out, strapped with shoulder-harnessed machine guns. Balaclavas hid their faces. They wore black tactical gear and Kevlar vests stitched with three letters: ICE.

The ICE men advanced in lockstep as they raised their weapons in one swift, synchronous motion, snapping the stocks to their cheeks, picking their targets through their iron sights.

The boys bolted toward the back of the house.

Too late.

Machine-gun barrels flashed like strobe lights in the dark. The air split with the roar of their gunfire.

The first rounds tore into the lead runner, then raked into the backs of the guys right behind him. They tumbled to the pavement in a heap like broken marionettes.

The gunmen advanced toward the porch, firing at the big picture window. The plate glass exploded. Panicked shouts inside.

In sync, the shooters loaded new fifty-round drum mags and fired at the house. Steel-jacketed bullets sliced through the walls, throwing big chunks of soft pink stucco into the air. One of the rounds smashed the party stereo, killing the music inside.

The shooters dropped their empty mags again and loaded two more. They advanced shoulder to shoulder onto the porch, the machine-gun stocks still tight to their faces. Gloved hands tossed flash bangs through the shattered picture window. The concussion grenades cracked like lightning.

Bodies on the floor writhed in blood and glass. The killers jammed their machine guns through the window frame and cut loose until the ammo gave out and the barrels smoked with heat.

Three hundred rounds. Eighteen seconds. Not bad.

Grinning behind their masks, the two shooters high-fived each other, then scrambled back into the Hummer. They slammed the doors shut as the vehicle rocketed away, tires screeching. The roar of the machine guns and the shrieking death-metal music disappeared with it. The night was finally quiet around the little pink house.

Except for the screaming inside.

2

Mogadishu, Somalia

Colonel Joseph Moi took his daily afternoon nap from exactly 3:15 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. It kept him sharp late into the evening when he usually did his whoring. It also gave him a reason to stay out of the withering sunlight boiling his troops in the compound outside.

The colonel’s sleep was abruptly interrupted when his silenced cell phone vibrated on the nightstand like a coping saw on a piece of tin. His conscious mind rose through the thick waves of REM sleep just enough to guide his hand to the phone and shut it off. Gratefully, the practiced maneuver spared him any significant mental effort and he was able to slip back down into the depths of perfect slumber, noting the faint breeze beating gently on his face from an overhead fan.

Then his cell phone rang.

Pain furrowed his angular face. Once again, his mind had been dragged into semiconsciousness, but now it was attended by a splitting headache. He’d been robbed of precious sleep. Rage flooded over him.

Who the hell is calling?

He forced his heavy eyes open.

It suddenly occurred to him that it wasn’t possible for the phone to be ringing like this. He’d put it on silent, as always, just moments before he lay down, and when it vibrated earlier, he’d silenced it again.

Strange.

Moi rolled over and snagged the phone off of the nightstand. The number read UNKNOWN.

That was stranger still. Only two people had the number to this particular phone and they were both well known to him.

The first was General Muwanga, the overbearing Ugandan army officer in charge of the African Union military district to which Moi’s command theoretically reported. That was a phone call he would have to take despite its inevitable unpleasantness.

The other was Sir Reginald Harris, the English lord and bleeding-heart administrator of a charitable family trust, but that would have been a very enjoyable phone call to receive. Harris would have rung him up only if he was ready to pay the additional “security fees” Colonel Moi demanded in order to release the shipment of corn soya blend (CSB) the trust had shipped to Mogadishu two weeks ago. Harris’s CSB shipment was intended for three thousand starving Somali children at a refugee camp one hundred kilometers toward the northwest.

Colonel Moi’s compound was strategically located in one of the least inhabited suburbs of Somalia’s capital city. As the commander of a unit of Kenyan troops assigned to AMISOM (the African Union Mission in Somalia), Colonel Moi’s responsibility was to ensure the safe transport of much-needed foodstuffs from Mogadishu’s revitalized deepwater port to the hinterland where famine had once again displaced over one million starving Somalis.

The Islamist al-Shabaab militia had reinfiltrated Mogadishu recently despite the best efforts of the African Union forces that battled against them in an attempt to give the Somali Transitional Federal Government time to reestablish functioning democratic institutions in the world’s most infamous failed state. At the moment, the Shabaab militia posed the greatest threat to the safe delivery of food.

But not in Moi’s sector. His command had completely cowed the Shabaab, thanks to Moi’s aggressive tactics. Or at least that’s what Colonel Moi reported to the Western aid organizations that coordinated deliveries through him. Moi cultivated the extremely profitable fiction for naive outsiders. The Shabaab left Moi alone because he paid them in hard currency, not because they were afraid of him.

Since it was likely neither Muwanga nor Harris calling him, Moi snapped off the phone again, but now he was wide awake.

Damn it. It was only 3:22 p.m. He decided to fetch a cold beer from his refrigerator. He padded barefoot across the silken, handwoven carpet toward the tiled kitchen area. The cold marble felt good on his aching feet. He flung open the stainless-steel Bosch refrigerator and yanked out a frosty cold Stella Artois. As he was twisting off the bottle cap, the phone rang again. He took a long swig and marched back over to the phone, slamming the glass bottle down on the nightstand. With any luck, he’d have the fool on the other end of the line in chains before nightfall and a twelve-volt car battery clamped onto his balls.

Moi snatched up the ringing phone.

“Who is this?” As an educated Kenyan, Moi spoke excellent though heavily accented English. Like many Africans, he was conversant, if not fluent, in several tribal languages, but in the polyglot world of Mogadishu, the English tongue was the most commonly employed, particularly among African troops. “This is an unlisted number.”

“Colonel Moi, turn on your television set.”

Moi cursed under his breath. The voice was a white man’s. An American, he guessed. Moi stared incredulously at the phone. “My television set?”

“Yes, the big eighty-inch LCD hanging there on the wall in front of you.”

Moi glanced at his eighty-inch Samsung LCD television, a gift from a local Somali government official in his debt.

“How in the blazes do you know about my television?”

“I know a lot of things about you, Colonel Moi. Why don’t you turn it on, and I’ll tell you all about yourself.”

“When I get my hands on you, you shall learn things about me you wish you did not know.”

“Keep yammering and it’s gonna cost you one million pounds sterling.”

That caught Moi’s attention. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your bank account in the Cayman Islands. Do you want me to tell you the account number?”

Moi frowned. How could he possibly know about that? “Fine. I will turn it on.”

Moi picked up the remote control and snapped on his television. It was linked to a satellite service. What he saw made him nearly crap his camouflaged pants. It was a crystal-clear infrared image of his compound from several thousand feet above.

The colonel quickly pulled on his combat boots and laced them up without taking his eyes off of the screen. When he finished, he approached the television and studied the image closely from just inches away. It was a live feed and he could make out each of his twenty soldiers at their various stations around the compound, even the ones loafing in the barracks. There was even a glowing gray image of him located in his second-story penthouse.

“Satellite imagery. Impressive,” Moi acknowledged. Obviously, the white man had some sort of satellite reconnaissance capability at his disposal. That likely meant he was with the American government.

“What does the CIA want with me? And what is your name?” Moi asked again, but in a less threatening tone.

“I’m not with the CIA. I’m a private citizen. A businessman, to be specific. As far as you’re concerned, my nationality is money, and my name isn’t important.” This time the American’s voice boomed out of the television’s surround-sound system. “And you can turn your phone off now. No point in running up your bill.”

Moi shut his phone and pocketed it. “Then what do you want, Private Citizen?”

“I’ve had my eye on you for a while, Colonel,” the voice on the phone said. “You’re a man of routine, like most military men are. Routine makes men predictable. It also makes them targetable.”

Red target reticles suddenly appeared on each of the men visible in the high-definition video image and tracked them as they sauntered through the compound. Fortunately for Moi, no reticle appeared over his image, at least not yet.

“Not satellite. Predator,” Moi confidently concluded with a smile. Satellites couldn’t target men on the ground like that.

“Bingo. And what I want from you is to deliver the CSB shipment to the refugee camp as you promised, and I want you to do it right now.”

“Oh, so you are a Good Samaritan as well?”

The American laughed. “Me? Hardly. The Good Samaritan gave his money away.”

“It sounds to me like you want the CSB for yourself, Private Citizen. It is worth quite a bit of cash.”

“I was hired to make sure you fulfilled your contract, nothing more. One way or another, the CSB will be delivered today.”

“That is not possible. The Shabaab militia would like nothing more than for me to expose this shipment to one of their terror squads who would either steal it or burn it.”

“There hasn’t been a Shabaab militia unit in Mog in over six months. You know that better than I do.”

“African politics are quite complicated. Since you are a foreigner, I can hardly expect you to understand,” Moi insisted. He kept his eyes glued to the television set. He was glad that his image still wasn’t targeted.

“To tell you the truth, I hate politics, African or otherwise. I’ve lost way too many friends because of it. And we both know you’re stalling. You’re holding the CSB shipment hostage. My employer wants to know why. He’s already paid you to ensure safe delivery of each shipment.”

“I have broken no agreement. The food is safe here with me and will be shipped out when the conditions warrant.”

“What conditions? And don’t hand me any Shabaab bullshit either.”

Moi quickly weighed his options. He could bolt out of the room, but then what would he do? His unit didn’t have any antiaircraft weapons to speak of. If he entered the compound, there was a chance he’d be targeted and taken out by a Predator. But if he could get to his Land Rover, he might be able to escape, but then again, a Predator could easily track that, too.

“Colonel, you’re pissing me off. The clock’s ticking.”

“My apologies.” Moi swallowed hard. He hadn’t apologized to any man in over twenty years, even when he was in the wrong. “My expenses have gone up. There are more government officials to bribe. And the roads are increasingly dangerous. Not from Shabaab, of course, but from street gangs and even those filthy Djiboutis.” He was referring to one of the other AU peacekeeper nations with forces stationed in the sprawling city.

“So you want more money? Jeezus. How much is enough?”

“A question for the ages, Private Citizen. But I might ask you the same. What is Harris paying you? I shall double it.”

“With what?”

“With the money I have in the Caymans account.”

“You mean the one million?” the American asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“Or did you mean the three million? There are three accounts in three separate Cayman banks, each worth just over a million. Look.”

Moi gulped when his three separate account statements were displayed on the big plasma screen.

“The only problem, Colonel Moi, is that you don’t have any money. At least not anymore.”

Moi watched the balances of each account zero out.

“You are no businessman. You are a thief!”

“I only returned the money to my employer for your failure to abide by the terms of your contract. He’ll use it to buy more food supplies, which will probably be stolen by some other petty tyrant.”

“Tell Lord Harris that if my money is not returned immediately, I shall order my men to dump the CSB into the ocean, and I shall not let one grain of food pass on to the camps in the future.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Colonel.”

Moi smiled. “Thank you. I take that as a compliment.”

“You shouldn’t.”

Muffled thunder boomed overhead. Moi instinctively flinched. He recognized the sound of large-caliber rifle fire and the whir of rotor blades. Moi watched in horror as the plasma screen switched to multiple live video images from several overhead cameras, all of them at much lower altitudes, swooping and careening over the compound.

One by one, Moi watched his men fall, each dropped by a single shot fired from a laser-targeted sniper rifle mounted on one of several Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper Systems (ARSS)—small, unmanned helicopters. Within moments, all of his men were dead, down, or fleeing for cover.

“Not Predators. ARSS. Impressive,” Moi admitted. He was, after all, a military man. Sniper rounds continued to fire.

“Hellfire II missiles cost a hundred thousand dollars apiece. Lots of collateral damage, too, which is also expensive. I took out each of your men with a single .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge at a cost of just four dollars apiece. It’s important to control costs in business operations, don’t you think?”

Moi stared at the plasma television. He was numb with disbelief. His entire command had been effortlessly destroyed by remote control. Chopper blades beat in the humid air outside of his penthouse. He glanced over just in time to watch a gray-skinned ARSS lower to the level of his balcony. The hovering unmanned helicopter was the size of a pickup truck and it pointed a suppressed RND 2000 sniper rifle directly at him from a turret fixed to the starboard runner. The roar of the rotor blades was barely muted by the thick double-paned glass of the penthouse’s sliding glass doors.

Another image suddenly appeared on the television. Moi watched himself being watched by the ARSS targeting camera. It almost amused him.

“And now it is the paid assassin’s turn to kill me,” Moi lamented.

“I told you, I wasn’t hired to kill you.”

Moi shook his head. “What is to become of me then?”

Another overhead image popped up on the big screen: a convoy of AU vehicles racing through the streets of Mogadishu.

“General Muwanga will be here shortly to take you into custody. I don’t need to tell you what kind of reception you’re likely to receive in his interrogation facility. He’ll also supervise the delivery of the CSB.”

“That fat meddler. Why did he not have the guts to assault me himself?”

“The AU can’t afford another fiasco. Neither can the Western aid agencies. Their donors are getting fed up with all of the corruption. And a pitched gun battle between African peacekeepers over stolen food would only embolden Shabaab and their al-Qaeda masters. So I was hired to clean up the mess.”

“I may yet be able to afford General Muwanga a surprise or two,” Moi boasted. He stormed over to a nearby closet and pulled out his personal weapon, an Israeli-built TAR-21 bullpup assault rifle. He favored the futuristic compact design over the dated but reliable Heckler & Koch G3 weapon system that was standard issue in the poorly funded Kenyan Defence Forces.

The ARSS yawed a few degrees. Moi froze. The giant sniper rifle’s suppressed barrel seemed to be pointed at his head.

BAM! The sliding glass door shattered as the sniper rifle fired. Chunks of glass rained down on Moi as he dropped to the ground with a thud.

“Sorry about that,” the American said. “Had to clean up one last item.”

Moi was confused. He turned around. A splintered bullet hole was carved in the door. Thick red blood oozed beneath it and seeped into the fringes of the handwoven silk carpet. Moi’s last surviving soldier had crept up into the stairwell to hide—and die.

Moi scrambled to his feet, embarrassed, and snatched up his rifle. He detached the magazine from the butt stock and checked it to make sure it was fully loaded.

“How long until the general arrives?” Moi asked.

“Six minutes, judging by his current speed. But there’s an alternative.”

“I look forward to putting a bullet in his fat, ugly face.” Moi racked a round into the chamber.

“If General Muwanga takes you alive, the Ugandan government will humiliate your prime minister, and your uncle will no doubt be dismissed from his cabinet position and will most likely be arrested and executed after a show trial, along with several other members of your family, all of whom have profited from your misadventures. Your name will live in infamy, your family will bear unforgivable shame, and your nation will suffer a loss of prestige it can ill afford.”

Moi frowned with despair.

“However,” the disembodied voice continued, “an arrangement has been negotiated. If General Muwanga finds you and your entire command killed, it will be reported that you and your soldiers bravely died to a man defending a humanitarian food shipment from a Shabaab assault. You’ll be buried with full military honors, and the surviving members of your family will enjoy the everlasting fame of your exploits.”

“My uncle will see through this charade. He will demand retribution,” Moi insisted.

The voice laughed. “Your uncle is the one who suggested it.”

Moi’s shoulders slumped with resignation. He glanced at the ARSS still hovering outside of the shattered glass door. He calculated that a headshot from this range should be easy for the American. Moi’s back stiffened, as if he were suddenly on parade.

“I should be grateful if you would do the honor, Private Citizen. I prefer to die as a soldier.”

“Then you should have lived like one, Colonel.”

Moi wilted again.

“Yes, I suppose I should have.”

He crossed over to his bed. He was tired now. He wished he’d been allowed to have his nap. “You have thought of everything, Private Citizen. I commend you on your efficiency. Your employer should be satisfied with the services you have rendered today.”

“We aim to please.”

And with that, Moi lifted the short barrel of the TAR-21 and placed it in his mouth. He began taking deep breaths to gather his courage. On the fourth inhalation, he found it. The rifle cracked and the top of his skull exploded, spattering blood and brain tissue onto the spinning fan blades above his bed.

Near the Snake River, Wyoming

Troy Pearce was still lean and cut like a cage fighter despite the strands of silver in his jet-black hair. His careworn face and weary blue eyes belonged to a combat veteran who’d seen too much trouble in the world.

“Satisfied, Sir Harris?” Pearce asked.

Sir Harris had watched the entire Somali operation unfold in a live feed while sitting in his country manor outside of London. They spoke via an encrypted satellite channel.

“Perfectly, Mr. Pearce. I trust you had no casualties on your end?”

“That’s why I use drones, sir. The safety of my people is my top priority. Accomplishing the mission is second.”

“Outstanding. Your team has accomplished the mission brilliantly, as expected. I don’t suppose you’d be kind enough to upload that final footage to my intranet server?”

“Did you get that, Ian?” Pearce asked.

A thick Scottish brogue rumbled in Pearce’s earpiece. “On its way now.” Ian McTavish was Pearce’s IT administrator and a certified computer genius.

“Of course.” Pearce was running this mission out of a specially equipped luxury motor home he used on occasion. It was parked on one hundred acres of secluded woodlands next to a rough-hewn cabin hand-built by his grandfather sixty years ago.

Pearce added, “The CSB is scheduled to arrive at the camp by midnight, local time. General Muwanga will contact you directly when it’s delivered. I assume you’ve already made the financial arrangements with him?”

“Yes. I just hope we won’t be employing your services again, Mr. Pearce. Heaven knows the Western powers committed their share of crimes in the past, but it seems that the greatest challenges too many Africans face these days come from the hands of other Africans.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Muwanga. When he finds Moi’s command torn to pieces, he’ll understand the true cost of breaking his contract with you. With any luck, the word will get around to the other pirates and pissants and they’ll leave you alone.”

“Yes, quite.” Sir Harris chuckled.

“My people will be providing top cover for the relief convoy, and then our contract is fulfilled.”

“Splendid. Thanks again for your service, Mr. Pearce, and your discretion. And please congratulate your team on my behalf.”

“I’ll pass it along. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have another matter to attend to.”

Pearce broke the satellite connection and shut down his computer. His highly trained team of professionals on the ground in Somalia already had their orders and didn’t require any further supervision from him. Pearce had other fish to fry.

Literally.

It was just after sunrise. The trout would already be biting. Time to break in the new fly rod.

3

On board Air Force One

It was nearly midnight and they were still an hour away from landing in Denver. Despite objections by the Secret Service over the enormous security risks, President Margaret Myers had attended the memorial service for Ryan Martinez and the Cinco de Mayo massacre victims and their families in El Paso earlier that day.

The galley steward had just cleared away her half-eaten Cobb salad and remained below deck to give her privacy. Her closest advisors were gathered in the West Wing conference center back in Washington. She was currently linked to them on a live video feed.

Myers stood, her glass empty. She had just finished two fingers of Buffalo Trace, her favorite Kentucky bourbon. She was fifty and tired, but didn’t look much of either, even tonight, still dressed in black. Years of swimming and Pilates had kept her frame strong and lean like she’d been as a young girl growing up on a cattle ranch. She still hardly needed makeup, and her dark bobbed hair was colored perfectly.

“Anybody need to freshen up their drinks?” Myers asked as she crossed to the bar.

“I think we’re all fine here, Madame President,” Sandy Jeffers said with a tired smile. Despite his obvious fatigue, his salt-and-pepper hair was still perfectly coiffed, and his hand-tailored suit as crisp as the day he’d bought it. As chief of staff, he answered for the group.

Myers poured herself another bourbon.

“I want to thank each of you for picking up the slack in my absence. And, Bill, I’m also grateful for the security arrangements you and your team put together on such short notice.”

Secretary Bill Donovan ran the Department of Homeland Security. He nodded in reply, stifling a yawn behind a beefy hand. He hadn’t slept in three days. “We owe a great deal to our friends at Fort Bliss and the governor of Texas. We couldn’t have done it on such short notice without them.”

Myers smiled a little. “From where I sat, El Paso looked like the Green Zone with all of the tanks and helicopters you moved in there. I’m sure the press will make a lot of hay with those photos.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Donovan offered. Despite his morbid obesity, he’d proven to be an effective and energetic DHS secretary.

Myers nodded. “Of course. Now, for the business at hand.” Myers returned to her chair.

The media had jumped on the first witness’s statement that ICE agents had perpetrated the massacre. The witness had seen black military uniforms, military-style machine guns, and “ICE” emblazoned on their tactical vests, which accurately described ICE combat teams.

The idea that rogue ICE agents had perpetrated the crime fit the mainstream media metanarrative perfectly—Myers’s ruthless budget cutting was causing chaos across the government. Only in Washington, D.C., could freezing future increases in spending be counted as a “cut.”

But within a few hours it became apparent that the killers had merely impersonated ICE officers. All of the gear they wore was available for purchase on a hundred websites. The Hummer they’d used had been stolen two hours before the attack and later found abandoned and burned up in a vacant lot just across the Mexican border. Most important, every ICE agent’s location and activity that night had been accounted for.

Responsible media began reporting the new facts as soon as they became available, but Myers’s staunchest opponents resorted to a variety of conspiracy theories and began alleging a cover-up.

“Faye, why haven’t we made any progress on the shooters?” Myers asked. Faye Lancet was the attorney general of the United States and thus the head of the Department of Justice and one of its subsidiary agencies, the FBI.

“Our most reliable informants on the street are suddenly either deceased or irreparably mute. Snitches have an extremely short life expectancy in that part of the world.”

“You make it sound as if South Texas is a Third World country,” Myers said.

“In some ways, it is,” Lancet replied. “The border is still pretty porous these days.”

“Maybe this was just a local neighborhood gang,” Myers said.

Mike Early, Myers’s special assistant for security affairs, spoke up. “Possibly, but not likely. According to witnesses, they were firing machine guns, probably German HK21s.”

“How do you know that?” Myers asked.

“We found six proprietary HK ammo drums on-site, each with a fifty-round capacity. The Mexican army uses HK21s. They even manufacture their own under an HK license.”

“You think the Mexican army is connected to this?” Lancet asked.

“No. But Mexican army guns have a funny way of turning up on the streets, whether stolen or sold.” Early scratched his five o’clock shadow. “Hell, the Mexican army itself has had over a hundred thousand desertions in the last decade. God only knows how many weapons they take with them.”

“The forensics point to two weapons used that night, which is corroborated by at least three survivors who thought they saw or heard two machine guns being fired,” Donovan said.

Myers frowned. “Why couldn’t local gangs purchase some of those weapons?”

“Possible, but highly unlikely. Mexican guns don’t usually travel north. It’s American guns moving south that causes problems down there. Even if a couple of street punks could find a high-end gun seller that wasn’t a Fed, or a Fed informant, it’s clear to me the shooters knew what they were doing. They weren’t a couple of gangbanger lowlifes hosing down the neighborhood like Tony Montana,” Donovan said.

Early added, “They discharged three hundred large-caliber, armor-piercing rounds in less than a minute in controlled bursts—and on target. The bastards were definitely trained.”

“So who wanted to send a message? Why attack a house full of teenagers having a good time? And who’s the message for?” Myers asked.

“Too soon to say who the message was for with certainty,” Donovan said. “Word on the street is that it was a turf issue, and given that El Paso is Castillo Syndicate territory, it’s not too big of a stretch to say that Castillo was the one pulling the trigger.”

Myers fumed. “Castillo territory? El Paso is American territory, damn it. Who does that son of a bitch think he is?” The Castillo Syndicate was the most powerful drug cartel in Mexico, based out of the state of Sinaloa where it originated. Its power was exerted over the western half of Mexico and had extended itself steadily north into the United States and south into Central America for the last decade. Its main competitor was the Bravo Alliance, which controlled the eastern half of Mexico. Both cartels had effectively absorbed all of the other smaller cartels in recent years. It was a classic bipolar system, a vicious stalemate between two equally powerful enemies, like scorpions in a bottle.

“Madame President, if I may.” The deep, resonant voice of Dr. Karl Strasburg chimed in. An old-school cold warrior, Strasburg was the elder statesman of the group, having served as a security advisor to every president since Nixon in one capacity or another. His opinion still exerted a powerful sway on Capitol Hill, and his views were deeply respected in the corridors of both power and academia around the world. His impeccable style and self-effacing manners, coupled with his faint Hungarian accent, gave him an Old World charm that few could resist.

“Please, Dr. Strasburg, share your thoughts.”

“I am embarrassed to say this, Madame President, and I certainly do not ascribe to the idea personally, nevertheless I must point out that you are already seen as a weak president because you are a woman. One thing you must consider is this: if you fail to respond to this vicious and unprovoked attack with vigor, you will only strengthen the unfortunate stereotype associated with your gender in the Latin culture.”

“I have never lived my life according to other people’s views of me, and I will certainly not do that as president, either. If I start overcompensating for the expectations of my gender, I’m only playing into their idiotic stereotype.”

From both a moral and fiscal perspective, Myers was adamantly opposed to any suggestion of going to war if it could be at all avoided. But Strasburg’s line of thinking threatened to undo everything her administration had accomplished so far.

Myers narrowly won both the Republican primary and the general election on a platform of “pragmatism above ideology.” Her primary campaign issue was to institute an immediate budget freeze once elected, and then to pass a balanced budget amendment. She managed to accomplish both in the first one hundred days of her tenure by promising progressives to keep American boots off of the ground in any new foreign conflicts, to close as many foreign bases as was practical, and to bring as many of the troops home as quickly as possible without endangering American lives left behind. Vice President Greyhill’s establishment credentials had also helped her forge the coalition with right-of-center moderates in both parties who feared new runaway social spending at the expense of defense.

Unlike many of her fellow Republicans, Myers viewed big defense budgets as just another example of out-of-control government spending. She knew that defense was necessary; she was no pie-in-the-sky Pollyanna. But how much defense spending was enough? If one new weapon system makes us safe, then two must make us even safer seemed to be the irrefutable schoolyard logic of the hawks.

As a private-sector CEO, Myers had dealt with the armchair bureaucrats in the Pentagon who were as self-interested as any Wall Street investment firm, and just as guilty of “waste, fraud, and abuse” as any welfare department in the federal government.

America’s economic malaise was being fueled by out-of-control government spending of all kinds, including the supposedly untouchable “entitlement” spending programs. As a businesswoman, Myers understood that the national debt was a millstone around the nation’s neck. It was drowning the economy and would ultimately lead to America’s systematic decline. Avoiding unnecessary wars and bloated defense budgets would actually make the nation stronger in the long run.

“The bottom line, Dr. Strasburg, is that I’m not interested in bolstering my street cred with Latin tinhorn dictators. What I want is what’s best for the American people.” She leaned forward in her chair. “What I really want is justice, especially for those grieving mothers in that gymnasium tonight. The question I’m putting on the table right now is, how do we get justice without putting American boots on Mexican soil?”

“I suppose that depends entirely upon your definition of justice, Madame President,” Donovan suggested. The dark circles under his eyes were proof that the secretary of DHS hadn’t slept in days while he sweated the details of the El Paso security setup. He fought back a yawn. “I don’t mean to start a midnight dorm-room debate, but in the end, justice for most people means getting what they think they deserve, and they seldom get it unless they have the power to acquire it from the people who stole it from them in the first place. So for the sake of our discussion, what exactly do you want? What does justice look like?”

Myers nodded. “Fair enough. I want the men responsible for the killing arrested, tried, convicted, and punished for their crimes in either an American or Mexican court of law.”

Lancet jumped in. “Forget extradition. We have the death penalty, and Mexican courts are reluctant to return Mexican nationals to American courts if there’s the possibility of a death sentence. So you’re definitely talking about a Mexican trial if the suspects are apprehended in Mexico.”

“I can live with that,” Myers countered.

Lancet continued. “It may well be possible for the Mexicans to arrest them and put them on trial. But given the lack of witnesses at the present time, let alone the current political and social crises that Mexico faces, I wouldn’t count on a conviction. And even if the Mexicans do manage to convict on what would have to be circumstantial evidence, there’s no guarantee of a punishment commensurate with their crimes.”

“If you want American justice, you’ll have to snatch them up and haul them here in irons,” Strasburg said. “SEAL Team Six can do the job.”

“And what if things go south? Do we really want American troops burned alive in an oil-drum soup?” Early was referring to the horrific cartel practice of melting people down in oil drums filled with boiling oil and lead. “These guys are batshit crazy. They’re not playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules down there.”

“Excuse me, but there are other issues to be considered here,” Vice President Greyhill said. He’d served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for eighteen years before he had been shoehorned onto the Myers ticket. He was seen as a reliable “old hand” to steady her uncertain rudder. He relished the role, partly because he knew how deeply Myers resented it. As one of the Senate’s elder statesmen, the wealthy, patrician Greyhill had been the GOP’s hand-selected candidate in the primary, but the outsider Myers’s populist, commonsense message had killed his one and only chance to be president. “You can’t start invading countries because you don’t like the way their court systems work, Margaret. You’d be in violation of a dozen international laws and treaties.”

Myers bristled at his accusatory tone but chose to ignore it—for now. “It seems to me that breaking the rule of law in order to enforce the rule of law is a moral hazard. I don’t want a war, legal or otherwise; I want justice. Let’s give the Mexicans a chance to give it to us. They have a vested interest, too.” Myers took another sip of bourbon. “Sandy, I want you and Faye to coordinate with Bill on this, and with Tom Eddleston when he gets back from China. When does he return?” Myers rubbed her forehead. A massive headache was coming on fast.

“The secretary of state will be back in town the day after tomorrow. But we can video-chat with him before then, of course,” Jeffers gently reminded her. He knew she was at the end of her rope, physically and emotionally.

“Then what I’d like the three of you to do is put together a memo for Ambassador Romero and tell him what he needs to communicate to President Barraza. Something along the lines of affirming our support for his newly elected administration, our desire for swift and certain justice, well, you get the idea. But run it by Tom first. I don’t want to step on his toes.”

“Will do,” Jeffers said.

Myers set her empty glass down. “Let’s give our friends south of the border a chance to do the right thing. We can always step up our game later, if need be. Who knows? They might even surprise us. Are we clear?”

The heads on her video screen nodded in unison. “Good. It’s very late and I have another long day tomorrow. Good night.” Myers snapped off the video monitor and rang for the white-coated steward, who appeared a few moments later.

“What can I get for you, ma’am?”

“A couple of Excedrin and a club soda would be helpful. Have Sam and Rachel had something to eat?” Myers was referring to the two Secret Service agents who were accompanying her to Denver.

“Yes, they have, and they asked me to thank you.” Normally, Secret Service agents didn’t eat while on duty, but it had been a long day for them as well, and Myers insisted that they order from her kitchen galley.

The steward slipped away to fetch Myers’s club soda and aspirin.

Myers sat alone in the empty cabin, drained. She turned around in her chair and stared at the aft compartment door. She rose and crossed over to it, then stood there for a moment gathering her courage, then went in, careful to shut and lock the door behind her.

Ryan Martinez’s sealed casket lay on the center of the floor, lashed down with half-inch cargo polycord. The casket had been removed from the wheeled transport dolly for fear it might fall off should they experience any turbulence. The room wasn’t designed to carry cargo, and the casket was heavy, posing a possible danger during takeoff and landing if it should start sliding around. Myers hadn’t cared. She’d have flown the damn plane herself if the air force pilot objected. He hadn’t. His own son had been killed in Afghanistan last year. A half hour later, the plane’s chief master sergeant had bolted right-angle flanges into the aluminum floor with a pneumatic drill and secured the load with the cords. It was the best he could do on short notice, but it worked. Myers was grateful.

She kicked off her shoes and sat down on the floor next to the polished aluminum casket. It was just like all of the others. Myers had paid for the funerals of all of the kids killed that night—anonymously, of course, and out of her own personal funds. The El Paso families were mostly working poor. Myers saw no need to add crushing debt to their inconsolable grief.

Ryan’s status as a hero on that fateful night was confirmed by both surviving witnesses and the county coroner’s autopsy. Rather than running away from the gunfire, Ryan had run toward it, and thrown himself on top of two of his students, shielding them from the hail of deadly bullets with his own body. Miraculously, both girls had survived, though badly wounded. They were still in intensive care and unable to attend the memorial service for Ryan and the others.

She laid her hand gently on the lid. It had been three months since she’d spoken to Ryan on the phone. Years since they’d had a real conversation. She hadn’t seen him since the inauguration earlier in the year, but even that reunion had been brief. At least it had been civil. God knows they knew how to push each other’s buttons. She had to hit the ground running on the first day. Hadn’t stopped running since.

Until now.

Myers’s mind replayed a dozen conversations she’d had with the mourners before the memorial service. A pretty young math teacher introduced herself as Ryan’s girlfriend. Her lovely green eyes were red with tears. Myers hadn’t known that Ryan had a girlfriend. But of course he did. That was normal, wasn’t it? Normal people have relationships, she reminded herself.

The girl’s name was Celia. Or was it Celina? Myers couldn’t remember. The girl was nice. Very pretty. No wonder Ryan fell for her. Myers felt sorry for her.

Myers’s hand stroked the brushed-aluminum casket, but she was so lost in thought she wasn’t even aware she was doing it.

The mother of one of the slain students handed her a slip of folded paper scrawled with a recipe for chile rellenos. “Señor Ryan asked me all the time for the recipe, but I never got around to it. He said it was his favorite. Lo siento mucho, señora.”

Myers thought Ryan didn’t like chile rellenos. Maybe he still didn’t like them. Maybe he was just being nice to this lady. Or maybe he really did like hers. Or maybe he did like chile rellenos. Maybe it was tamales he didn’t care for. She wasn’t sure now. They hadn’t had a sit-down meal together for quite a while now. Years, actually. Myers was never much of a cook. Never had the time. Too busy building a business, then too busy running a state. She accepted the recipe from the grieving mother. “Thank you,” Myers told her. “I’ll have to try it sometime myself.” But she knew she wouldn’t. She didn’t like Mexican food at all.

Myers sighed. Tomorrow was going to be a long day, indeed. She would bury her son in the family plot outside of Denver next to his father, John Martinez, with no one to stand beside her.

The steward reappeared in the empty conference room with a tray carrying the club soda on ice and a brand-new bottle of aspirin. He set the tray down on a small table and began to leave, but something in him made him pause. He knew she had a terrible headache. And he knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was in the room with her only child. Myers hadn’t told him she wanted to be left alone. And she needed the aspirin. So he stepped over to the aft door.

Just before the steward knocked, he paused. He heard a sound. He leaned his ear as close to the door as he dared and listened.

Myers was weeping.

The steward stepped softly away from the door and headed back down to the galley.

4

Idaho Falls Airport, Idaho

The sun had just crept up over the horizon.

Pearce kept his hands thrust in his jeans against the chill as he stood near the tarmac. He watched the Pearce Systems HA-420 HondaJet touch down effortlessly, its wheels kissing the asphalt without a sound. Crisp sunlight glinted on the gray and white carbon fiber composite fuselage as the unusual over-the-wing pod-mounted engines began to cycle down. The sleek corporate jet taxiing toward Pearce reminded him of a completely different plane on a distant tarmac in a previous life he wished like hell he could forget.

Baghdad International Airport, Iraq

March 5, 2004

“What kind of name is Pentecost anyway?” Early asked. Like Pearce, he was dressed like a local and wore a three-day growth of beard on his chin beneath a bushy black mustache. He and Pearce leaned against a Humvee as they waited for the big C-130 to cut its engines in the predawn light.

“Beats me.”

“Sounds religious. Tongues of fire and all of that.”

“You should ask her,” Pearce said. “Maybe she’s a fanatic.”

“Don’t need any more of those around here,” Early grunted. “What else did Connor say about this hotshot?”

“Straight off the Farm but first in her class. A premium Core Collector by all accounts.” The air was cool. The slight breeze coming out of the south put a chill on him.

“Is that why she rates her own plane?”

“Connor said she was eager. Wanted to get deep in the shit fast.”

“She’s probably a Poindexter with a pocket protector.”

“Connor knows what he’s doing,” Pearce said.

The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had authorized a special task force to deal with the recent wave of devastating IED attacks by Iraqi insurgents around the country. Connor had picked Pearce to lead a small hunter-killer team in Baghdad. Pearce chose Early, a first-rate gunfighter from the 10th Special Forces Group he had met during Operation Viking Hammer in 2003, along with an S-2 from Early’s unit. But after the intel officer was killed by a sniper, Connor selected Pentecost to fill the slot.

The big four-bladed props on the C-130 finally spun down and the rear ramp lowered.

“Here she comes,” Early said.

The woman coming down the ramp could have stepped out of a recruiting poster for Southern California surfer girls—lean, blond, and blue-eyed. But apparently she’d swapped out her flip-flops and bikini for combat boots and black tactical gear on the ride over.

Early’s jaw dropped. “Whoa.”

“You must be Early.” She stuck out her hand. “Name’s Pentecost. Annie Pentecost.” She smiled. “Connor described you perfectly.”

Early grinned, not sure if she was complimenting him or not. “Mike Early. Real nice to meet you, too.”

Annie turned toward Pearce. Looked right through him.

Those eyes.

“Troy Pearce,” he said, offering his hand.

She had a firm grip. Held his hand just long enough to feel the heat. “Annie Pentecost.”

“Welcome to the shit,” Early said, trying to get her attention.

“I think he meant ‘team,’” Pearce corrected.

“Thanks. I’ve heard good things.”

“So have we. How was the flight?” Pearce asked.

“Hard seats, cold coffee. The usual. The pilot just told me another IED ripped inside the Green Zone an hour ago.”

Pearce nodded. “Police station. Three Iraqi policemen killed. One of our guys wounded, too. A contractor. Critical.”

“We’re supposed to find you a hot and a cot.” Early yanked open the rear Humvee door. “We can check it out first thing tomorrow.”

“It already is tomorrow,” Annie said. “Let’s go find us some bad guys.” She tossed her duffel through the door and climbed in after it.

Pearce and Early exchanged a glance. Maybe Connor was right about this one.

And those eyes.

Idaho Falls Airport, Idaho

Pearce made his way into the state-of-the-art cockpit and dropped down into the plush leather passenger seat and buckled in. With the HondaJet’s flat-panel displays and touch-screen controls, Pearce felt like he was trapped inside of a video gamer’s wet dream instead of an actual airplane.

Pearce pulled the headset on and adjusted the mic.

Judy Hopper sat in the pilot’s seat with an unreasonably radiant smile for such an early morning. “Fresh coffee in the thermos,” she whispered in his earphones. She was a decade younger than Pearce, with a plain, honest face and clear eyes. She kept her hair pulled back in a ponytail and never wore makeup.

“Good flight over?” Pearce asked.

“Easy as pie. You ready?”

“Let’s go. Sooner we get there, the sooner I can get back to the fish.”

“ETA to Dearborn, ten-fifteen, local,” Judy said. Their cruising speed was close to five hundred miles per hour.

Judy reached over and tapped the brightly lit glass touch screen in front of Pearce, part of the Garmin G3000 avionics package. The only thing analog about the glowing digital cockpit was the faded Polaroid taped to the instrument panel. It was ten-year-old Judy flying her father’s missionary bush plane. She claimed it was her good luck charm.

After confirming GPS coordinates, weather patterns, and nearby traffic, Judy radioed in to the tower. She was cleared to taxi back to the runway for takeoff. The flat panel in front of her displayed a 3-D graphical terrain rendering and a simulated cockpit view. Pearce Systems had purchased one of the first HondaJets to roll out of the North Carolina assembly plant earlier that year.

There was no airport traffic that morning so Judy was able to taxi quickly into position. In a few minutes, they stood poised for takeoff. Judy quickly ran her preflight checks, then pointed at the yoke in front of Pearce. “You want to give it a whirl today?” she asked.

Pearce wasn’t rated to fly the twin-engine turbofan jet, but he’d practiced on the simulator a half dozen times. He was also pretty good at flying single-engine props and had gotten better at it thanks to Judy’s patient instruction. But he didn’t have a fraction of the natural skill that Judy possessed.

Judy sensed his hesitation. “If you’re not ready, that’s okay. She’s a handful, for sure.”

“Just like every other woman in my life,” Pearce said. He knew it was foolish to not let the far superior pilot take control of the aircraft, but Pearce couldn’t resist the rush of controlling a four-thousand-feet-per-minute climb. Besides, it was his damn plane. “Let’s rock and roll.”

Judy winked. “That’s what I wanted to hear.” She called in to the tower one last time. They were cleared for takeoff. Pearce fired up the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” on the comm, then slammed the throttle home, rocketing the HondaJet down the tarmac. The plane leapt off the runway, blasting into the crisp morning sky like a mortar round, grins plastered on both of their faces.

Pearce Systems Research Facility, Dearborn, Michigan

Pearce’s main research facility was located in an abandoned Mercury auto plant just south of I-94, a stone’s throw from the General George S. Patton memorial. Pearce and his mysterious investing partner had purchased it just after the ’08 crash to house their expanding research operations, which provided a significant revenue stream for the company beyond the various civilian and security services they provided.

For most of his missions, Pearce purchased off-the-shelf operational systems from legitimate vendors, often modifying them to his own specs. If particular drone systems weren’t available for purchase, he was able to emulate their capabilities by manufacturing his own either by original design or by purchasing widely available airframe, power plant, and avionics components.

But Pearce Systems was also pioneering some of the latest drone technologies by partnering with or building upon the efforts of other bleeding-edge research organizations. Pearce and Judy had made the flight to the Dearborn lab that morning at the fevered request of Dr. Kirin Rao, the head of the research division.

“Thank you both for coming,” Rao said. “Please follow me.” With her long legs, soft curves, and cloying eyes, Dr. Rao looked more like a Bollywood movie star than a Ph.D. in robotics engineering. Pearce and Judy followed her to one of the computer labs.

“This is Jack,” Dr. Rao said. She pointed at a Rhesus monkey seated in a miniature pilot’s chair, nibbling on an apple slice. A square of hermetically sealed titanium was attached to the top of his skull—a brain-machine interface (BMI) device hardwired into his cortex. A large LCD TV was on the wall three feet directly in front of him, but no picture was present.

“Is that the wireless BMI?” Pearce asked.

Dr. Rao nodded enthusiastically. “Three months ahead of schedule.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” Rao said.

The door swung open.

“Ian. Good to see you,” Pearce said. They shook hands. The wiry Scot had a kind, expressive face beneath two high arching eyebrows and a great shock of hair. Dark eyes betrayed his fierce intelligence.

“Come here, you,” Judy said, wrapping Ian in a bear hug. They were close friends, though Ian preferred something more.

“I see you’ve all met our wee friend Jack.”

“How are the legs these days?” Pearce asked.

Ian lifted one of his Genium bionic legs. His own legs had been amputated above the knee after he was cut down in the 2005 7/7 bombings in London. The new high-tech knee joints were controlled by a microprocessor that allowed for nearly perfect mobility. “Never better. I’ll be sword dancing before too long.”

“Shall we begin?” Dr. Rao shut the lights off. Instantly, the LCD panel lit up with a computer program.

“Looks like a flight simulator,” Judy said.

“It is,” Rao said.

“Where’s the joystick?” Judy asked.

“There isn’t one,” Ian said.

A wire-framed Predator was centered in the screen, swooping low over a vast virtual desert, following a black ribbon of asphalt highway.

“Jack’s flying it with his mind,” Pearce said to Judy. “Dr. Nicolelis did something similar to this a few years ago.” He tried to hide his irritation. He could’ve watched this demonstration from the comfort of his cabin instead of flying all the way here. In fact, he’d seen Nicolelis’s work on YouTube months ago after Rao sent him a link.

“Similar, but not exactly the same,” Rao said. “Watch.”

Moments later, an animated flatbed truck with a mounted machine gun appeared on the highway, surrounded by three other unarmed cars. The armed truck began firing at Jack’s drone. Jack swooped and swerved to avoid the antiaircraft fire.

“Dr. Nicolelis’s monkey could only track targets with his mind. Jack can avoid being a target. He can also do this.”

The truck continued firing, but the other three cars fell away. Suddenly, a missile shot out from beneath the drone’s wings. A moment later the truck disintegrated in a ball of digital fire, leaving the three other cars unscathed.

Rao beamed. “I bet my monkey can blow up his monkey.”

“And you’ll notice, little Jack isn’t just using his motor skills to track a single target. He’s making target choices,” Ian said.

“How?” Pearce asked.

“We hacked into the deeper cognitive functions of his cortex,” Rao said. She turned the lights back on, ending the game. “So what you’re seeing is not only a brain-machine connection, but also a true mind-machine interaction.”

Pearce nodded. It was impressive. One of the biggest challenges to achieving true autonomous drone capacity was artificial intelligence programming. If a computer program could ever simulate a sentient brain—and there were plenty of arguments against that eventuality—it would still be years away before that goal would be achieved. But why try to emulate a human brain with software if an actual brain could be used instead through BMI?

“Can you imagine the possibilities? Artificial limbs, exoskeletons, blindness… the medical applications are endless,” Ian said.

“So are the military ones,” Judy said. A rare scowl.

“Do you understand now why I wanted you to be here in person?” Rao asked. She had just made Pearce Systems one of the most important players in the field of neuroprosthetics.

Pearce nodded, trying to hide his excitement. “If you really want to impress me, next time have Jack fly me up here himself.”

“Then what will I do?” Judy asked.

Pearce shrugged. “Sit back and enjoy the ride, I guess.”

5

Isla Paraíso, Mexico

César Castillo’s Roman villa–styled mansion stood at the peak of the six-hundred-meter mountain in the center of his private island ten miles east of the Baja California Peninsula. Locating his palatial home on the highest point had certain strategic disadvantages, certainly, but it was his dream of witnessing the ineffable beauty of the daily rising and setting of the sun that had caused him to build it there. He had not been disappointed with his decision.

Castillo stepped out of the civilian MD 500 helicopter onto the helipad almost before the landing skids had hit the ground. He made a beeline for the house. His security chief, Ali Abdi, waited for the pilot to land before jumping out and scrambling to catch up with his boss. As usual, the Iranian wore a brimmed hat and dark sunglasses in order to keep his face hidden from the ubiquitous American electronic surveillance devices that might be circling overhead. He hadn’t survived this long without taking extreme precautions.

César stormed into the courtyard with the massive pool complex. The architect had replicated the expansive marble-and-tile Neptune Pool at Hearst Castle. But César had added Greek and Roman statuary depicting various gods and heroes with tridents, swords, and spears to stand guard around the crystal-blue waters of the Olympic-size pool. The face of Zeus bore an uncanny resemblance to César’s with its fierce, cruel eyes and wicked grin.

Stretched out on chaise longues near the pool were his two strapping twin sons, Aquiles and Ulises Castillo, who were even more sculpted than the statues. Naked and tan, their muscled bodies glistened with sweat. Each was six foot three inches tall, nearly a foot taller than their father, who was a squat, barrel-chested man with enormous hands attached to abnormally long arms. César was built exactly like his father, Hércules Castillo, a Sinaloan tomato farmer long since dead. Hércules told his teenage son that God must have designed the Castillos to pick tomatoes since he gave them such long arms that they barely had to bend over to gather the fruit up. César Castillo had built the world’s most powerful drug cartel just to prove both God and his father wrong.

Without a doubt, the two young men in their early twenties had emerged from the deep end of their mother’s gene pool, an Argentine beauty of German, Italian, and Spanish descent. Broad shoulders, narrow hips, green eyes, and long, thick chestnut hair made the twins irresistible to women. Men, on the other hand, either admired or feared them. The few who had ever crossed them had long since disappeared.

“Who ordered the hit in El Paso?” César demanded as he stormed into the pool area. Ali had finally caught up. He took a position in the shade underneath the portico, a short but discreet distance away. Acoustical guitar music poured out of the hidden speakers located around the pool area.

Neither Aquiles nor Ulises stirred from beneath their Ray-Bans. They were fanatical sun worshippers.

“Welcome home, Father. How was your trip?” Aquiles asked.

César whipped around and snapped his fingers at Ali. The Iranian found the remote control and killed the music. A .40 caliber Steyr printed against Ali’s back beneath his Cuban guayabera. Dark-haired and olive-skinned, the brown-eyed Iranian was fluent in Spanish. He shaved his beard but kept his mustache and easily passed for a Hispanic anywhere he traveled in Latin America or the United States.

“Answer my question.” César stood directly over his naked son.

Ulises lifted his sunglasses. “You’re blocking the sun, Father.”

Aquiles laughed. How could such a short man block anything, let alone the sun?

“Why are you laughing?” César asked.

“No reason, Father. I’m sorry. It just struck me as a paradoxical thing for Ulises to say.”

“‘Paradoxical.’ That’s a big word. I suppose that’s why I paid all of that money to send you to university, so you can use big words with me, eh? Put some clothes on, both of you. You should be ashamed to lie around here like a couple of putos.”

Ulises’s green eyes, which had been mockingly coy until now, flashed with rage, but only for an instant. “Yes, you’re right. We should dress.” Ulises stood up from the lounger, towering over his diminutive father. He yawned and stretched his muscular arms high over his head, fully displaying his powerful physique. It was a threat display worthy of a silverback gorilla.

César grabbed his son by the testicles with his left hand and crushed them as hard as he could while clutching his son’s throat with his right hand. The pain exploded in Ulises’s scrotum, but his scream only came out as a yelp because his windpipe was blocked. César charged into his son like a bull, toppling the bigger man backward until they reached the edge of the pool, where he tossed the boy into the water with a splash.

Ali watched the battle intently. He redistributed his body weight so that he was equally balanced on both feet as he slowly, carefully, slipped his hands behind his back, clasping them together just above the pistol holstered in his lower back. He had never seen either son raise a hand to their father, but he was prepared for anything with these two wild wolves. He knew exactly how dangerous the boys were in hand-to-hand combat because he had trained them himself. It had taken Ali over eight months to work his way into his current position as Castillo’s head of security, the first step of many more to come. Ali wasn’t about to let either boy derail his plan by killing their father, even if he deserved it.

Aquiles watched the lopsided battle in amused horror as he yanked on his swim trunks. He stifled the urge to laugh at his brother.

“To answer your question, Father, we put a hit on Los Tokers,” Aquiles said, tying the string on his bathing suit. “They were throwing a party on our turf. Those punks are like roaches. If you don’t squash them, they just keep spreading. Isn’t that what you taught us to do?”

“Who told you it was Los Tokers?” César asked as he stomped back over to Aquiles.

“We got a phone call. A Mara named Hater,” Aquiles said. “He’s one of our meth dealers and an enforcer.”

“And you trust this Hater guy?”

“Yes. Why?” Ulises asked.

“Because either he got it wrong or he screwed us,” César replied.

“What are you talking about?” Aquiles asked.

“Because there weren’t any Tokers at the party.”

Aquiles frowned, thoughtfully. “And why is that a problem?”

César suppressed the urge to strike his son across the face. He’d killed better men for less offense. “Tell me how it’s not a problem.”

“A hit is a hit, Father. We put the word out on the street that we thought Los Tokers were muscling in, so we smashed them. The message was sent. Mess with us and you die. And the message still makes sense even though Los Tokers weren’t there. People died just because we thought Tokers were there. Nobody’s even going to think about setting up shop on our turf again, at least not for a while,” Aquiles bragged.

César slapped his son’s grinning face. The sound echoed around the courtyard like a gunshot. Aquiles didn’t flinch, but his eyes watered. Whether from rage or pain, Ali couldn’t be certain. Probably both.

Ulises tread water in the pool, remaining a safe distance from his father’s reach. “Why are you so upset with us, Father? You told us to mind the store while you were away. We did.”

César wagged a thick finger at both of them. “You lazy bastards. You think all you have to do is pick up a phone and order people killed? You should have done the advance work yourselves. You never want to get your hands dirty yourselves, do you?”

Ulises glared at his father. He’d grown up with the endless stories of his grandfather’s backbreaking work in the tomato fields. To be accused of not wanting to get his hands dirty was the moral equivalent of accusing a soldier of cowardice in the face of battle. The verbal jab was worse than his father’s physical slap.

“But you’re wrong, Father. We did get our hands dirty.” Ulises glanced at his brother for moral support. Aquiles nodded for him to continue. “We’re the ones who pulled the trigger. We’re the ones who sent the message.”

César fell into a lounger. He buried his head in his massive hands and moaned aloud. “What have you two idiots done?”

“We took care of business. Those punks were just collateral damage. It happens.” Aquiles had lowered his voice to a near whisper, fearing another slap by his father. He sat down on the lounger next to him.

César looked up. “Collateral damage? Are you insane? You think Ryan Martinez is just ‘collateral damage’?”

“Who’s that?” Ulises asked.

César howled with laughter. “How paradoxical! A stupid tomato picker like me knows more than a college-educated fairy. Don’t either of you listen to the news?”

“Only ESPN,” Ulises said. “And hardly that.”

“So who is Ryan Martinez?” Aquiles asked.

“Ryan Martinez was a schoolteacher at that party you shot up,” César said. He wiped his thick mustache with one of his monstrous hands.

“And…?” Ulises asked, cringing, half expecting another blow.

“Ryan Martinez was the son of the president of the United States! And now she is going to unleash holy hell on us for murdering her only child.”

The boys glanced at each other, frightened and confused. “We didn’t know,” they said to each other, as if talking to themselves in a mirror.

César leaped to his feet, reaching for the chromed .45 caliber Desert Eagle in his waistband. Screaming with maniacal rage, he opened fire at the nearest statue, a goat-legged Pan with a great golden phallus thrusting up to his midsection. Pan’s marble head exploded with the first hit. The next rounds tore away the god’s massive pectorals and mashed his silver shepherd’s flute. César kept firing until he emptied the magazine. He dropped the clip and slammed a new one home, then chambered the first round.

César pointed the gun at each of his sons like an accusing finger.

“Tell me, smartasses. What should I do with the two of you now?”

6

The White House, Washington, D.C.

Ambassador Konstantin Britnev was ushered into the Oval Office where he was greeted by the warm smile and firm handshake of President Myers. A White House press camera flashed three times.

“I hate having my picture taken,” Myers whispered to Britnev under her breath.

Britnev nearly laughed as he widened his alluring smile. “You should see my passport photo. It’s terrible.” They held hands as several more shots were snapped.

“That will be all. Thank you,” Myers said to the photographer.

“Thank you, Madame President, Ambassador Britnev. Excuse me.” The female photographer cast a brief, leering glance at the handsome Russian as she exited through the secretary’s office door.

“Dr. Strasburg, so good to see you again.” Britnev nodded cordially as he extended his well-manicured hand. Strasburg was on the couch. He struggled to rise.

“No, please, Doctor, remain seated.” Britnev stepped closer to the couch and shook Strasburg’s veiny hand. The Russian, thirty years younger than Strasburg, had studied the famed security advisor’s illustrious career at the Institute for USA and Canadian Studies years ago. Now Britnev was one of the key players in the Titov administration, handpicked by the Russian president personally for the Washington post.

“It’s good to see you as well, Ambassador Britnev. At my age, it’s good to see anybody.”

Britnev politely laughed at the old man’s threadbare joke.

“What would you like to drink, Konstantin?” Myers asked. She’d dismissed the waitstaff for this morning’s private meeting.

“A coffee, please, black, no sugar, if it’s not too inconvenient.” What he really craved was a cigarette.

“No, not at all.” Myers crossed over to a credenza. She poured him a cup of coffee from a freshly brewed pot. Britnev was a huge coffee fan. He had even helped broker the first Starbucks franchise in Moscow. She handed him a cup and saucer imprinted with the presidential seal.

“Thank you, Madame President.” Britnev took a sip.

“How about you, Karl?”

“None for me, thank you. Doctor’s orders.”

Britnev’s eyes drifted over to a side table. An antique chess set was on it. He stepped over to it.

“It’s a lovely set. May I?” Britnev asked.

“Yes, of course,” Myers said as she poured herself a cup of coffee.

Britnev set his cup down and picked up a white knight, faded to yellow. “Hand-carved ivory?”

“Yes, elephant tusk, unfortunately. It’s actually a set that belonged to President Jefferson. He was quite an avid player.”

“He was a very talented man. Many gifts.” Britnev gently returned the piece to its position. “It appears as if White has opened with a queen’s gambit.”

Myers crossed over to Britnev, coffee in hand. She glanced at the board.

“You’re very observant. Do you still play?” She took a sip of coffee.

“Not with any real skill,” he said. He exuded a boyish charm, despite having just turned fifty. His hand-tailored Italian suit perfectly complemented his athletic frame, though a back injury at university had ended a promising ice hockey career.

“You were a grandmaster at the age of sixteen, Mr. Ambassador. That sounds pretty good to me,” Myers said.

“But never a world champion. As I recall, that’s about the same age you were when you wrote your first AI program, isn’t it?”

“Hardly an AI program. Just a program for playing chess. Please, shall we sit?”

“Yes, of course.” Britnev took the couch opposite Strasburg while Myers took a chair.

“Where did you learn to play the game, Mr. Ambassador?” Strasburg asked.

“My father taught it to me when I was a boy while he was stationed in Tehran. We used to play every evening together. I suppose it’s why I have such a strong emotional bond to the game. You know, chess was invented by the Persians, but the mindless mullahs banned it for years after the revolution. Do you play, Dr. Strasburg?”

“On occasion, but poorly. I believe it was Bobby Fischer who said that one only becomes good at chess if one love the game.”

“I do still love it, but I seldom have the time,” Britnev said.

Strasburg paused, lost in a painful memory. “My brother loved the game. He said that he could tell a lot about a man after he played three games of chess with him. Do you find that to be true, Mr. Ambassador?”

“I find that one match is usually enough.” Britnev chuckled. “But perhaps that is because it is a Russian’s game. We understand the virtues of sacrifice and taking the long view. You Americans have no patience for such things. That’s why the Russian players are the best in the world.”

“Until IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov.” Strasburg smiled. The old cold warrior couldn’t resist the dig. “Of course, there are other ways to defeat a grandmaster.” Both men were well aware that Kasparov had been a vicious opponent of President Titov and had been recently arrested for his political activities.

Britnev turned back to President Myers. “Is it true you never actually played chess in your youth?”

Myers nodded. “Never a full game, no.”

“Remarkable. Then how in the world did you manage to write a piece of chess-playing software?”

Myers shrugged. “Chess is a function of finite mathematics: sixty-four squares, thirty-two pieces, and a maximum of five million possible moves. The longest championship game ever played was under three hundred moves. It was simply a matter of finding the right decision algorithms.”

Britnev smiled playfully. “I suppose, then, that everything you need to know about a person is contained in the software programs he writes?”

“Depends upon the person. Or the software.” She flashed her most charming smile back at him.

Strasburg shook his head. “The whole subject is depressing to me. Computers are taking over everything. The ‘singularity’ is nearly upon us, and humans will soon no longer be the highest form of intelligence on the planet.”

“The highest form of intelligence? I’m afraid we lost that title the day the first human invented the war club,” Myers said. “Maybe computers will do a better job at politics than we have.”

“Unless it’s the same politicians who are writing the software. As a trained software engineer, Madame President, I’m afraid you possess a distinct advantage over the rest of us.” Myers had been the CEO of her own software-engineering company before she ran for governor of Colorado.

“Hardly. It won’t be long until we’ve developed software that can write its own software, so we poor humans will soon be out of the loop.”

“That’s a frightening thought, Madame President,” Strasburg said. “I’m glad I won’t be here when that happens.”

“It probably already has, Karl. They’re just not talking about it.” Myers took another sip of coffee, then set the cup down on the table in front of her. “So, Ambassador Britnev, to what do we owe the pleasure of your visit today?”

Britnev set his cup down, too. “First of all, President Titov asked me to send his personal condolences to you at your time of loss. The Russian people grieve with you.”

“Please thank President Titov for me for his kind thoughts.”

“He also pledges any assistance he can give you in your search for the murderers. We are not without some influence in Mexico and President Barraza seems to be a reasonable fellow.”

“We would greatly appreciate any assistance he can provide,” Myers said.

“We also understand borders. Unlike you, we have a thousand-year history of enemies violating ours.”

“An ocean on either side is our distinct advantage.” She grinned. “And Canadians to the north. Couldn’t be better neighbors.”

“Yes, Canadians. An amiable folk. Not like the Azeris.”

Myers and Strasburg shared a glance. So that’s why he asked for this meeting. Oil-rich Azerbaijan had just changed regimes.

“I should think you would welcome a peaceful, nonviolent, and secular revolution on your periphery,” Strasburg said.

“With a curiously pro-democracy, pro-Western, and pro-NATO orientation,” Britnev countered. “They almost sound Canadian, don’t they?” He chuckled at his own joke. “But maybe they’re more like the Mexicans, also swimming in oceans of oil and instability.”

“We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? But so far, the Azeris don’t seem to pose any problems for your government, or am I missing something?” Myers asked.

“I believe Khrushchev said much the same thing to Eisenhower when Castro first came to power,” Britnev said.

“It was the Soviet missiles Castro allowed onto his island that caused the problem, as I recall,” Myers said.

“Ah, yes. I believe that is a correct understanding of the history, Madame President.” Britnev smiled.

Myers held his gaze. Is he worried about NATO missiles being deployed in Azerbaijan?

“And as I recall, the United States has a history of resolving its border issues with Mexico in a very direct way,” Britnev added. “Should I inform our government to expect a few fireworks? Frankly, we wouldn’t blame you. Sometimes the iron fist is the only solution. Don’t you agree, Dr. Strasburg?”

“This administration is pursuing other options. As the proverb says, ‘If all one owns is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.’”

“We’re committed to reducing our military footprint around the world,” Myers said. “The global community is becoming an increasingly complex and finely tuned mechanism, but war is a blunt-force instrument. We’re also trying to get our financial house in order. Our spending has been out of control and maintaining the Pax Americana is proving to be too expensive.”

“Weakness is even more expensive, Madame President. As victims of international banditry ourselves, we can perfectly empathize with your dilemma. This is why we believe that the ultimate way forward is through mutual cooperation and understanding between our nations whenever it is possible.”

“I quite agree, Ambassador. The United States is fully committed to mutual cooperation and understanding with the Russian Federation. How can our meeting today facilitate that process?”

“As you are both well aware, there is a growing Islamist threat all over the world. So-called Arab Springs.”

So it’s not about NATO missiles. “The world is changing,” Myers said. “The dialectic of history, I suppose.”

Britnev shrugged. “But such uprisings don’t emerge victorious without intervention, particularly without modern weapons and military advisors, usually from the West. And unfortunately, the uprisings have been usurped by forces even more despotic than the regimes they have replaced, wouldn’t you agree?”

“We’re no longer in the nation-building business, Mr. Ambassador, I assure you. We can’t control outcomes when regimes change,” Myers asserted. “But we can’t stand in the way of natural forces, either.”

“But the West has played an active role in the toppling of several regimes in the past decade and continues to meddle in the Syrian civil war. Our fear is the Caucasus. Islamo-fascism is rearing its ugly head again on our borders.”

“That is why you should welcome the Azeri revolution. Democracy is your best buffer,” Strasburg said.

“Hitler was democratically elected,” Britnev countered, “which is why we’re not as confident as you are in the benevolence of democratically elected governments. We prefer reliable allies bound to us with mutual strategic interests. Syria, for example.”

Syria had been Russia’s last great ally in the Middle East. The recent events there upset Russia’s security policy in the region.

“We assure you that past Western support for emerging democratic movements against dictatorships has never been an attempt to undermine the strategic security of the Russian Federation. It was due strictly to humanitarian concerns.”

Britnev set his coffee cup down as he gathered his thoughts. “In your inaugural address, Madame President, I believe you expressed your commitment to the rule of law.”

Myers stiffened. “Of course I did. We are a nation of laws, and we have tried to help build a just social order by supporting the rule of law both within and between nations. It’s the only alternative to war.”

Britnev nodded and softened his voice. “How then did violating the sovereignty of a nation like Libya logically cohere with that sentiment, if I may be so bold?”

“I believe President Obama was supporting European efforts to enforce a UN resolution. Despotic regimes like Gaddafi’s Libya do not respect the rule of law and they violate the civil rights of their citizens. By helping to facilitate the demise of dictatorships like his, the United Nations is ultimately affirming the universal rights of the Libyan people to live in a nation and world of just laws.”

“Yes, of course. That seems perfectly logical.” Britnev paused. “I remember during the financial crisis that President Bush declared that he had to abandon free-market principles in order to save the free market. I suppose that is the same sort of idea?”

“All of that is in the past. I assure you, Mr. Ambassador. My administration has set a new course. The United States is out of the business of picking winners and losers. It’s a fool’s errand, at best, as recent history has demonstrated,” Myers said. “Without putting too fine a point on it, we can assure you that this administration is committed to refraining from any destabilizing activities in the Caucasus.”

Britnev turned his gaze toward Myers. “We have your word on this?”

“You do,” she assured him.

Strasburg leaned forward. “I trust that your government appreciates the wisdom of the American people for having elected such a thoughtful and logical chief executive?”

“Indeed we do, Dr. Strasburg.” Britnev turned slightly to face Myers. “Madame President, you have exercised remarkable restraint in regard to the Mexican crisis. I’m not sure I would have been as rational as you had I been in your place.”

“The biggest problem we face in our country today, Ambassador, is that we’re governed by feelings more than by our minds. I mean to change that.” Myers shifted in her chair. “I want to respect both the laws and borders of other nations, including Mexico. I trust that President Barraza’s government will deliver what justice it can.”

Myers checked her watch. “Forgive me, but we have another engagement.” She stood up, ending the meeting. Britnev stood as well.

“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today on such short notice. I will convey to President Titov your assurances regarding the Azeris.”

Myers extended her hand. “Please convey to President Titov our warmest regards.”

Britnev took her hand in both of his and lowered his voice. “And please, all formalities aside. If there’s anything I can do, don’t hesitate to contact me.” Her grip relaxed in his warm, soft hands.

“Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.” She felt a tingle on the back of her neck and suddenly realized she was grinning a little too broadly for her own liking.

Myers watched him turn and leave, shutting the door behind him. She turned to Strasburg. “Eddleston was right. He’s quite the charmer.”

Strasburg shrugged, a thin smile on his face. “Cobras often charm their victims before they strike.”

7

Washington, D.C.

Later that afternoon, Senator Gary Diele, the senior senator from Arizona, was huddled together with General Winston Winchell, the current chief of staff of the United States Air Force (USAF). The two silver-haired men were devouring thick porterhouse steaks at Ernie’s, one of the oldest watering holes in the District. Dark lighting, leather booths with thick oaken tables, and discreet waiters had made this place a favorite of the Washington power elite for decades.

“Her own damn kid. Can you believe it? I’d carpet-bomb Mexico City if they’d done that to my boy,” Winston grumbled as he chewed his steak.

“The president is vulnerable. She ran on a promise to scale back American foreign intervention. She can’t exactly run across the border with General Pershing in order to chase down Pancho Villa now, can she?” Diele cut himself another bite.

“Her failure to act makes us vulnerable. It makes us look weak.”

Diele grunted. “Who cares what the Mexicans think?”

“I’m talking about the Chinese. Do you remember back during the Clinton administration when a couple of our JDAMs accidentally hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade? The Chi-Coms went absolutely apeshit. I was visiting the U.S. embassy in Beijing at the time. Tens of thousands of protestors surrounded the compound, throwing rocks and raising a ruckus. It looked like the damn Boxer Rebellion all over again. We were all trapped in there for days, including the ambassador.”

Diele chuckled. “I remember the picture of Jim Sasser’s face peering through the broken door glass. Looked like a scalded cat.”

“Of course, the Chinese government had organized all of that. They would no more allow a spontaneous riot in the capital than they would authorize a gay pride parade in the Forbidden City. The hell of it is, poor old Clinton kowtowed to the State Department China hands and taped a slobbering apology to the Chinese for allowing our ‘smart bombs’ to turn dumb all of a sudden. And you know what? The Chi-Coms wouldn’t let it air on Chinese television! Do you see my point? What we see as restraint, they see as weakness. What we view as an accident, they view as a direct assault. If they think they can get away with something, they will. They have the long view and the will to chase it. How do you think the Chinese government would have responded if the premier’s son had been the one gunned down in El Paso? There’d be Chinese paratroopers goose-stepping in the Zócalo before the week was out, and they’d dare us to do something about it.”

“Calm down, you’ll spoil your lunch,” Diele said. He took another bite of his porterhouse. “You and I are in complete agreement. But what can we do?”

The general cut a piece of bloody red steak and forked it into his mouth. “We’re going to lose air supremacy to the goddamn Chinese within ten years, maybe five, if we don’t keep pushing on the new ATF systems.” Winchell was referring to the Pentagon’s enduring pursuit of the world’s most advanced tactical fighters. “The F-22 was killed in 2011 under Obama, now this administration is threatening the slowdown of the F-35s.”

“Can’t be helped, Winston. Myers is a grocery clerk masquerading as a commander in chief. It’s the times we live in.” Diele took a sip of his Seagram’s 7 and 7. “It’s all about the pennies with this woman. She fails to see the big picture. That’s what you get when you elect a businesswoman to the White House instead of a strategic thinker. And I can’t muster enough senators on either side of the aisle to filibuster her sweet ass. It’s the damn Tea Party tyranny. Do you know, we’ve lost six thousand defense-related jobs in just the last month because of her? It’s insane. Defense work is the best kind of manufacturing job there is these days. It’s good, solid, middle-class work, whether you’re blue collar or white collar.” Diele cut another slice of beef.

The two men chewed in silence. There was no doubt that the defense budget was being ground down, though technically it was only frozen to last year’s record level. But rising health care costs, automatic salary increases, and mandatory retirement payouts were consuming a larger share of the Pentagon budget every year. A defense budget freeze actually cut deeply into new weapons acquisition.

What neither man acknowledged was that the Pentagon’s weapons acquisition programs were badly flawed and ill suited for the challenges of the twenty-first century. The F-22 Raptor fighter jets cost over $140 million apiece and still suffered a mysterious malfunction in the oxygen system. The problem was so bad that some air force pilots reportedly refused to fly the plane.

The F-35 series was the next fighter behind the F-22 that was designed to give America air combat superiority. Ironically, the F-35 was going to be sold to several nations, including Japan and Turkey, thus technically eliminating “American” air superiority. But the partnerships were considered necessary to help offset the astronomical expense of development and production, and yet it still cost American taxpayers over $300 million per plane. But the F-35 program continued to experience significant setbacks in production problems, cost overruns, and testing, including losing one computer-simulated combat scenario against fourth-generation Russian fighters.

The ultimate irony, of course, was that the United States hadn’t fought a single air-to-air combat engagement since the first Gulf War twenty years ago. Seemingly, the U.S. was building fighters for future air battles it wasn’t going to fight anytime soon. Defense analysts outside of the Pentagon had reached similar conclusions for other weapons systems in other service areas. Not only do generals and admirals prepare to fight the last war, they procure the weapons systems needed to fight them.

Of course, Americans weren’t the only ones guilty of this. In the period between the world wars, few generals or admirals anywhere realized the potential for tanks, airplanes, submarines, or aircraft carriers as revolutionary weapons technologies. European and American defense budgets were squandered on outmoded technologies like giant battleships, the Maginot Line, and other weapons systems perfectly designed to fight and win World War I. Unfortunately, the Germans and Japanese had prepared for World War II and nearly won it.

But these history lessons were lost on much of the current Pentagon establishment. That was partly due to the culture. The very highest air force and navy ranks were only achieved by the men and women who wore pilots’ wings or who had captained warships or submarines. Naturally, they favored the most advanced weapons systems and promoted the warriors who mastered them.

Unfortunately, history taught still another lesson the Pentagon hadn’t learned.

The only wars America had lost since World War II were those fought against technologically inferior opponents. America’s famous B-2 stealth bombers cost over $2 billion each, counting the entire cost of development and production, but the Afghanistan countryside was dominated by illiterate Muslim peasants carrying $200 AK-47s a decade after the invasion.

“I’m afraid for this country, Winston. I thank God every day for men and women like you who are standing guard over us. I just want to put the right tools in your hands so that you can do your job,” Diele said. What Diele didn’t say was that he wanted to hand him the weapons systems the big lobbyists wanted purchased, sometimes even over the protests of the generals and admirals. Congress was famous for buying unrequested weapons because they brought a direct material benefit to their home districts and states, and virtually every congressional district had at least one DoD contract of one sort or another in any given ten-year period.

Nearly all of the current pilots of the venerable B-52, first introduced in 1955, were younger than the airplanes they flew. B-52s were scheduled to remain in service until 2040. That meant, theoretically, a B-52 pilot in 2040 could be flying a plane his grandfather flew in.

“Gary, I’m just an old soldier. You tell me what I need to do, and I’ll do it,” the general said.

Diele laughed to himself. The general was about as political as they come. When Winchell was appointed the superintendent of the Air Force Academy, he stated that the primary purpose of the school was to promote racial and sexual diversity in the service, and its secondary purpose was to promote military preparedness. He did that knowing full well that one day he’d need that kind of politically correct gold star in his record if he wanted the Senate to confirm his appointment as a major general, which it recently did, thanks to Diele.

“Well, I’m no soldier, Winston, but I’ve read a little history, and it seems to me that patience is a virtue in both politics and war. We’ll wait and see for now. I have a feeling that Myers will hand us the nylons we need to strangle her with.”

8

Isla Paraíso, Mexico

The .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle roared. Another massive brass casing tumbled onto the stony ground.

Water sprayed up a half meter to the left of an orange target buoy bobbing in the bright blue Pacific water five hundred meters away.

“¡Hijo de puta!” César barked. He lay prone on the ground as he fired the tripod-mounted weapon, Ali next to him. A pair of oversize earmuffs made the crime lord look more like a DJ than a sniper. Ali wore a similar pair. The Barrett’s big-caliber rounds were designed to pierce armor and the blast was deafening, literally.

César stood up and pulled the muffs down around his neck. So did Ali.

“No, jefe. It was an excellent shot. The wind has risen.”

The gusting wind on top of the island’s mountain peak buffeted them, fluttering their hair and shirts.

“I’m worried, Ali.”

“About Hater?”

“I have tried to reach out to him, but nobody can find the bastard.”

“If he has gone to the Americans, they would already have been here and your sons killed—or worse. Trust me, there is no evidence linking your sons to the massacre. The fact that they are still breathing proves this.”

“You seem certain,” César said.

“I am, jefe. I trained your sons myself. I am certain they left no clues behind.”

César stared hard into Ali’s eyes, probing him for lies. He found none.

That was because Ali was supremely confident about Hater. He had ordered the Mara gangbanger crushed to death in a thirty-ton hydraulic press the day after the massacre. Hater’s tattooed remains were scooped into a sealed barrel and sunk to the gulf floor where the drum settled in the middle of an abandoned dumping ground for American military ordnance. The Mara had to be killed. Hater was the only link anyone had to the massacre—and Ali.

But the inability of either the Mexican or American government to find other hard evidence against the Castillos and launch an attack had come as a complete surprise to the Iranian. The boys really had covered their tracks.

Now Ali wondered if the feckless Americans would ever seek their revenge against the Mexicans. If evidence was the problem, he’d have to provide it. Fortunately, he’d planned for this contingency, too.

César laughed. “Yes, you trained them well, didn’t you?” He clapped Ali on the back, then turned the Iranian back toward the big sniper rifle. “So tell me, maestro, why can’t I hit the fucking target with that thing?”

“It takes patience, jefe. You just need to practice. Trust me,” Ali said, smiling.

Three hours later, the three Castillos and five premium escort girls were barricaded behind the gilded doors of the mansion’s Fiesta Room, a sordid collection of vibrating beds, leather sex swings, exotic animal skins, glittering disco balls, thundering audio, and a bank of digital projectors looping porn on every wall.

When he was certain they were all passed out from copious amounts of Cristal, meth, dope, and perversion, Ali slipped into his own private quarters and locked the door behind him. He opened up his encrypted cell phone and dialed an untraceable number that bounced off of a series of satellites and cell towers, sending the signal halfway around the world and back again until someone on the other end of the line picked up.

“Yes, Commander?” a man asked in Farsi. The Western-trained computer specialist was speaking from Quds Force headquarters in Ramazan, Iran.

“The dog needs her bone,” Ali said.

“It will be done within the hour.”

Ali clicked off his phone. The technician he had spoken with was first-rate. By this time tomorrow, Myers should be howling with rage, and by the grace of Allah, tearing at Castillo’s throat with her sharpest teeth.

9

Arlington, Virginia

Within the last fifteen minutes, there had been an explosion in tweets and retweets on a string of highly related, red-flagged search topics: #elpaso, #cincodemayo, #massacre, #myers, #killers, #aztlan, and others.

What was going on?

Sergio Navarro was at his computer workstation inside the Intelligence Division of the DEA headquarters building. It was 4 a.m., he was the shift supervisor, and he was bone-tired.

The twenty-six-year-old intelligence analyst had helped form the new Social Media Task Force organized around RIOT, Raytheon’s new social-media data-mining software. Rapid Information Overlay Technology not only hoovered data on suspects using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, it also predicted their future behavior. Drug dealers were as attracted to social media as the rest of the world was, and their desire for more human interaction through inhuman computers enabled the DEA to harvest terabytes’ worth of vital intelligence information that they might not have otherwise acquired.

Navarro had been slumped behind his computer working on his master’s thesis project, designing hardware and software for an open-sourced, Arduino-based crowdmapping device to locate and track drug dealers. Because it was all open-sourced, he could distribute the devices for free to poor communities victimized by drug violence all over the world. But with the budget freeze, the DEA couldn’t pay for it, so Navarro had turned to Kickstarter and crowdfunded six figures for the project. When the RIOT software alarms rang, Navarro quickly pulled up the search window.

Tonight’s automated search had focused on El Paso and the terrible massacre that had occurred just over a week ago. RIOT had just found the string of tweets, and they were all being generated by a single event: an uploaded video file. RIOT had found the video link as well, so Navarro opened it.

It was a cell-phone video of the Cinco de Mayo massacre.

Holy crap!

This was the smoking gun his division had been looking for.

The video was dark, shaky, and suffering the pangs of autofocus—the attack had been at night and the scene was lit primarily by a distant street lamp. Nevertheless, the video was generating quite a stir in the blogosphere. The video showed the two killers blasting away with their machine guns, death-metal music screaming in the background. Unfortunately, audio quality was poor because of the cheap microphone in the cell phone that shot the video.

Navarro located the video on the original Facebook post in question and dubbed a clean copy for the DEA’s use. Navarro then reflagged the El Paso automated-search packages in order to catch the rising tidal wave of interest in the video, now surging to several hundred hits and climbing by the minute. It was about to go viral.

At the same time, the search bots were also sifting through the comments on the video posted on various web, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook pages. Just like old-school serial killers needed to keep physical trophies of their gruesome work, psychopaths in the social-media age often uploaded video of their crimes—a kind of digital trophy.

Navarro now had the time to fiddle around with the video clip he’d just copied to his own hard drive. He majored in computer science as an undergrad, but he had taken a couple of filmmaking courses as electives, including a class on nonlinear editing where he had learned to use Final Cut Pro.

Navarro opened his copy of FCP and dropped the video clip into the timeline. He played around with the filters to improve the quality of the image, slowing the shaking and enhancing the sound. He then experimented with the zoom feature. He played the newly edited clip a half dozen times, alternately slowing or speeding the clip. Something began to strike him as odd about the two shooters.

Navarro had avidly followed the El Paso massacre story. He had an aunt and uncle who lived in that city, and two cousins who had recently graduated from the Frida Kahlo Arts Academy. Navarro stopped the video clip loop. Rewound it. He put the two killers right in front of the open doors of the Hummer and paused it again. He studied the shooters. Examined the Hummer again.

That was it.

Navarro snatched up his phone and speed-dialed his supervisor.

10

The White House, Washington, D.C.

President Myers sighed. It seemed as if each new closed-door meeting was more crowded than the last.

Seated around the table were DEA Administrator Nancy Madrigal and Attorney General Faye Lancet, who was the head of the DOJ, under which the DEA operated. The director of ICE, Pedro Molina, sat next to his boss, DHS Secretary Bill Donovan, one of Myers’s closest advisors. Bleary-eyed Sergio Navarro was also at the table seated next to his boss, Roy Jackson, the head of the DEA Intelligence Division. But the rest of Myers’s trusted inner circle was also in attendance, including Mike Early and, of course, Sandy Jeffers, seated to her immediate right. Dr. Strasburg sat strategically across from her.

Protocol, not preference, put the vice president on Myers’s immediate left. If it were up to her, Greyhill would have been seated in the men’s room.

Everyone had hot coffee or bottles of water and iPads on the table in front of them. They listened intently.

Jackson adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. He was a bookish, middle-aged African American just under six feet tall but well over three hundred pounds. He shifted in his chair, a nervous habit. The chair creaked under the enormous load. He picked up the video controller.

“One of my IAs, Sergio Navarro, brought this video to my attention just three hours ago. Whoever shot this was lucky they weren’t killed in the attack. We estimate they were standing about one hundred yards south of the north-facing vehicle at an oblique angle of approximately forty-five degrees. That meant the camera operator was out of the shooters’ line of sight, otherwise they likely would have been gunned down as well.”

“Any idea who shot the video?” Greyhill asked.

Jackson nodded at Navarro. He knew his IA was not only racked with fatigue but also intimidated by this morning’s briefing. The young analyst had never even met the DEA director before, let alone the president and other cabinet officials. But Navarro had made the discovery and Jackson wanted him to get the credit.

“The video was posted to Facebook under a pseudonym,” Navarro said. “I ran the sensor pattern noise profile against SPNs in our database, but we came up short.” SPNs were the unique digital fingerprint that every silicone chip embedded in a digital-camera image. “We’re still working on that.”

“Where was it posted from? Maybe that will give us a clue,” Greyhill suggested.

Navarro leaned forward. “That’s the interesting part. We can’t locate the server. We can’t even identify it. Pretty sophisticated firewall.”

“Isn’t that suspicious?” Myers asked.

“Not necessarily. Whoever posted it was smart enough to know that they would be the only material witness to the killing. They probably wouldn’t have posted it if they weren’t sure they couldn’t keep their identity secret,” Donovan said.

“Which makes them a prime target,” Early added.

Myers referenced her iPad. “What do these comments mean?” She was referring to the viewer posts on the Facebook page.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Spanish. I came up through the Russian desk,” Jackson said.

“You didn’t get them translated? There might be a clue,” Myers asked.

Jackson hesitated. “Actually, yes. Agent Navarro translated them for me. I have it on a separate report.”

“What do they say?” she demanded.

Jackson shook his head. “Just a bunch of crackpot comments. Vile. Not worth the time.”

“I’ll be the judge of that, Mr. Jackson. Read them aloud, please.”

Jackson reluctantly opened another file folder on his iPad and pulled up a sheet of translated comments. “Most of the names are nicknames or posted as ‘anonymous,’ but we’re running them down.” Jackson cleared his throat. “I’ll just start at the top, the most recent posts. The first one reads: ‘The whore’s son deserves it.’ Signed, RicoPico. The next one reads: ‘Man, I wish I had a gun like that. I’d kill me some gringos, too.’ Signed, PanchoVilla247. The third one reads: ‘What was he doing there anyway? Probably hitting the bong and banging his students.’ Signed, AztecaNacion. The next one reads—”

“Thank you, Mr. Jackson. I think I catch the drift. Please continue with your presentation.”

Jackson gratefully closed the document and pulled up the original presentation file folder. “We estimate the person shooting the video was between five ten and five eleven, judging by the height of the image, which means that the camera operator was most likely a man,” Jackson added.

“So I take it we have some good video footage?” Jeffers asked. He was growing impatient. He wanted to see the video.

“I’m afraid it’s not like the movies, sir,” Navarro said. “Most cell phones utilize poor-quality plastic lenses with a fixed focal length and no shutter, and this particular video was shot in extremely low resolution, only 480 dpi, probably because the cell phone was low on memory. The true cost for the whole camera on these phones is less than forty dollars, usually. So the overall image quality we have is very poor. I cleaned it up as best I could, but there just isn’t enough data there for us to enhance the image any further at the moment.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Greyhill said. “Maybe we can send the video on to the FBI lab and see what they can do with it.” He saw Director Madrigal tense up at his suggestion. “You DEA guys have enough on your plate without going into the video business.”

“I think we should see the video now,” Jeffers suggested. He dimmed the lights with a remote control. Jackson hit the play button on his video controller.

Everybody in the room turned their focus to the far wall screen. A title card read REAL TIME, and then the clip began. The clip started with the Hummer already parked. The doors burst open immediately and the two killers leaped out, each cradling a shoulder-harnessed machine gun. The death-metal music blared in the room’s flush-mounted ceiling speakers.

The assassins advanced in lockstep, shouldered their weapons, took aim, fired. The machine-gun barrels flashed in controlled bursts. The speakers roared overhead so loud it was jarring.

“Sorry,” Jackson whispered in the dark as he thumbed the volume control down.

The cell-phone video camera had been in wide-shot mode. It caught the death of the first victims on the porch, the exploding plate-glass window, the house getting shot up. The camera tracked the killers marching onto the porch, then firing through the broken window until they were out of ammo, then high-fiving each other. The video clip cut to black. Total playing time was sixteen seconds and two frames.

Another title card appeared: HALF SPEED—MOS. Jackson froze the frame.

“In this clip, I would ask you to please observe the precision of the two shooters. Note the way they move, their target selection, their rate of fire.”

Jackson hit play again. The second clip started with the Hummer already parked, but this time the doors burst open in slow motion. The sound was cut out in this clip because the slow-motion effect distorted it too badly.

The two killers exited the Hummer as if they were stepping out of a space capsule into a weightless void that made the flickering, grainy images even more gruesomely surreal. The slow-motion flashes exploded out of the machine-gun suppressor ports like flaming stars, bursting and collapsing and bursting over and over again. The assassins’ slow, mechanical march toward the porch took forever, as did the emptying of the last rounds into the window. The video clip finally cut to black. Total playing time was thirty-two seconds and four frames.

“Mr. Jeffers, if you don’t mind,” Jackson asked.

The lights flicked on. Jeffers set the remote back down.

Jackson began to speak, but he noticed that the room sat in stunned silence. He realized this was the first time that any of them had seen the tape. He’d already reviewed it over a dozen times before the presentation so it no longer had an impact on him. He glanced around the room. It suddenly hit him.

He’d just forced the president of the United States to witness the murder of her own son. Twice. And in slow motion.

Jackson glanced over to his boss, Nancy Madrigal, for reassurance, but her eyes were focused on her hands clasped in her lap.

Myers stared at the blank screen. Her mouth was a thin scar on her emotionless face. Jackson saw the muscle flexing on her jaw line.

The other people around the table glanced mindlessly at their iPads, took sips of water, or pretended to take notes.

A few more agonizing moments passed.

“Madame President, I don’t know what to say,” Jackson stammered. “I’m so sorry.”

Myers turned toward Jackson. Her face softened. “There’s nothing to apologize for, Roy. I’m the one who asked to see the video. Your division has done an excellent job finding it and bringing it to our attention.”

“We’re just doing our jobs, ma’am.”

“So tell us, please, Mr. Navarro, what is the takeaway from these clips, particularly the second one we were asked to observe carefully?” Myers asked.

Navarro took a sip of coffee to clear his throat. “What’s clear to me is that these two men have received specialized training in weapons and tactics. These aren’t gangbangers running and gunning wild on the street.”

That was exactly Mike Early’s take on the flight to Denver. “So these are military or ex-military?” Myers asked.

“Not necessarily,” Navarro said. “I’m only suggesting they’ve received military-style training. I think they’re civilians.”

“Why?” Early asked.

Navarro pointed at his iPad. “If everyone will refer to the freeze-frame photo I pulled from the video—it’s on the first page of the upload I sent out.”

The others pulled up the photo in question. It showed the two masked assailants standing in front of the Hummer.

“The vehicle is a General Motors Hummer H2. The factory specs indicate that a stock H2 is 81.9 inches in height. But if you’ll notice, the tires are oversize, which means there’s a lift package on the suspension. Our best estimate is that another eight inches have been added to the overall height of the vehicle, so that puts it at just about seven and a half feet tall. Please notice where the heads of the two shooters are and that neither of them is standing fully erect. You can enlarge the photos on your screens, if you need to.”

“Wow. That means these guys are pretty tall. I’d guess around six three or six four,” Early offered.

“That’s our estimate, too,” Navarro said.

“So who are these men?” Donovan asked.

“They’re masked, wearing gloves. Combat gear. No visible skin, which means no visible scars or tattoos, if any exist. There weren’t any fingerprints or DNA on any of the shell casings or recovered bullets. It’s almost impossible to make a positive ID at this time,” Jackson said.

“You said ‘almost impossible’ to tell. I take it you have a hunch?” Myers asked.

“More than a hunch. As near as we can tell, these two men appear to be the same height and the same build, and their movements are highly synchronized, above and beyond any practiced training that they’ve had,” Jackson said.

“Synchronized in what way?”

“Like they’re used to doing things together a lot, or maybe even because they share the same build. Their movements are practically mirror images of each other.”

“You mean twins?” Early asked.

“Yes,” Jackson answered. “There are an estimated ten million identical twins in the world and one hundred and fifteen million fraternal twins.”

“Well, that really narrows it down,” Jeffers said.

“Technically, it does. That gets us down to less than three percent of the world’s population. Less than half of that if you only count adults, and half again if you discount women, which is probably a safe bet. Of course, there really is no way of telling who these men are precisely, but since we’re talking about El Paso, that’s Castillo Syndicate territory, and as it turns out, César Castillo has identical twin sons by the names of Aquiles and Ulises. According to records we’ve obtained through our counterparts in Mexico, the Castillo brothers are each six foot three.”

“And I take it we still don’t have any witnesses at the scene who will identify the twins as the shooters?” Greyhill asked.

“No, but Mr. Navarro was able to put them in the vicinity at the time of the incident,” Jackson said.

“How?” Myers asked.

“By pulling up traffic-camera images of both men in Juárez approximately three hours before and one hour after the incident.”

Myers frowned. “But not in El Paso?”

“No.”

“Were they seen inside the Hummer?”

“No. Nor were they in tactical gear. Either by accident or intent, they went to a location outside of traffic-camera range. There, they could have changed into tactical gear, stolen the Hummer, crossed the border, committed the shootings, crossed back over the border, ditched the Hummer and the tactical gear, then returned back to their own vehicle.”

“That’s a lot of ifs,” Greyhill said.

Jackson shrugged. “It’s not conclusive, but it’s another straw on the camel’s back.”

Donovan leaned forward. “So do you think the Castillo twins are the shooters?”

Jackson hesitated. “At the very least, they’re the prime suspects. And they certainly have the means, motive, and opportunity.”

Myers glowered at Jackson. “You were asked a straightforward question. The answer is either yes or no. Which is it, Mr. Jackson?”

Jackson glanced back at his boss, Nancy Madrigal. Are you sure you want to go through with this? Madrigal nodded in the affirmative. “From an intelligence perspective? The answer is yes. No question in my mind. But without further evidence, it seems to me it would be difficult to obtain a conviction in an American court of law.”

Myers turned to her attorney general. “Do you agree with Mr. Jackson’s legal opinion?”

Lancet leaned back in her chair, processing the president’s question. “A conviction would be difficult, yes, and probably impossible in an American court, based on the lack of hard admissible evidence. But the rules of evidence are one thing; the question of guilt is quite another. I agree with Mr. Jackson’s intelligence assessment. As a former prosecutor, my gut tells me these two men are the shooters. I’m just not sure what that gets us. The question now is, what do we do with this new information?”

“Same problem, same solution. We’ll hand our analysis off to the Mexican government and ask them to investigate further,” Myers said. “At the very least they can bring them in for questioning.”

“It’s one thing to ask the Mexicans to arrest a dealer or a shooter. It’s something else again to ask them to bring in the sons of César Castillo,” Madrigal said.

“I’m the first to admit I’m no expert on Mexican politics, but it seems to me that they would want to cooperate on this matter, just out of a sense of human decency if nothing else. They’ve partnered with us on the drug war for years. All we’re asking for is further investigation. What am I missing?” Myers asked.

All eyes turned to Dr. Strasburg, who’d been as silent as a Buddha until now.

“Madame President, your counterpart, President Antonio Guillermo Barraza, was also just recently elected to office. And like you, he narrowly won a hotly contested race, and he prevailed, in part, because he promised, like you, to give his people a respite. Mr. Molina, would you please tell the president about the AFI?”

The ICE director nodded. “The first thing President Vicente Fox did when he was elected in 2001 to combat the pervasive corruption within the Mexican law enforcement community was to form the AFI, the Agencia Federal de Investigación, the equivalent of our FBI, which actually trained and equipped the AFI. The AFI became the premier antidrug agency in Mexico. But the Mexicans recently dissolved the AFI, which sent a powerful signal to the drug cartels that Mexico intends to stop seriously prosecuting the drug war against them. We suspect cash was probably exchanged in the deal, and maybe even a truce brokered. President Obama’s ‘Dream’ executive order also ended deportation of young illegals, which sent another powerful signal to the cartels: you can start sending your mules across the border again.”

Strasburg continued. “The American people are tired of the battlefield deaths and casualties of our troops in the far-flung corners of the Middle East. The majority of Americans want an end to those wars and want our troops to come home and this is one of the reasons why you were elected. We’ve expended a great deal of blood and treasure on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with what result? As likely as not, people who don’t like us will return to power—maybe under a different name or party or platform—and we’re already seeing a return to the car bombings and suicide attacks of the previous years. And without putting too fine a point on it, the truth of the matter is, the vast majority of Americans paid far more attention to the box scores in the sports pages than they ever did to the war. Most American families didn’t send soldiers to war. The war had very little practical or immediate effect on most people. And yet, as a nation, we became tired of the struggle.”

Dr. Strasburg folded his hands on the table in front of him. “But consider the Mexican situation. At our urging, the Calderón administration went to war with the drug lords, and they fought courageously. But whereas we lost just over six thousand soldiers in our eleven-year War on Terror, the Mexican people have lost over fifty thousand people in about half that time. The number of Mexican dead is about equal to the number of soldiers we lost in combat in Vietnam.

“The only difference is, those Mexican casualties were mostly civilian casualties, and they all occurred in the hometowns and the city streets of Mexico itself, not off in some distant foreign land. If we are tired of our conflict, can you imagine how much more exhausted the Mexican people are? Of the stacks of human heads, the burned corpses in the streets, the bodies hanging from bridges?”

“I’m afraid Dr. Strasburg has a point,” Donovan said. “I’ve spoken to my counterparts off the record, and there is a great deal of fatigue setting in among the men and women who are actually fighting the drug war down there.”

“For all we know, there might be as many honest Mexican cops in witness protection with us here in the United States as there are in all of Mexico today,” Lancet added. “There have been chiefs of police who have fled into our consulates with their families with nothing but the clothes on their backs, scared to death of being assassinated. About thirty mayors have been assassinated since 2008; even more journalists. It’s a Wild West Show down there.”

“Though in the last few months, the violence has calmed down a little bit now that Barraza has backed off,” Molina said.

Madrigal raised a finger. “Violence is only part of the issue at stake. The Mexicans run annual trade deficits of around eight billion dollars a year, but we’re exporting between twenty and sixty billion dollars of drug money a year down there.”

“That’s a big spread in the numbers,” Myers said.

“The drug numbers are all over the place. It’s not as if you can audit anybody’s books. The best guess is that the drug trade accounts for three percent of their GDP. I’ve read one estimate that claims the cartels make three times as much profit as Mexico’s five hundred biggest corporations combined and employ half a million people.”

“What’s your point?” Myers said.

“I’m merely suggesting that there are some Mexicans not connected to the drug trade who are conflicted over the issue.”

“Sounds like you’re picking a fight you can’t win, Margaret,” Greyhill said. “I’d let this one go if I were you.” What he meant was if I were president.

“Sounds to me like you’re throwing in the towel, Robert.”

Greyhill’s eyes narrowed at the thinly veiled reference to his concession speech to Myers at the convention last year.

Myers turned to the others. “And you all are giving up, too. Is that what I’m hearing?”

Strasburg shook his heavy head. “Not at all, Madame President. We understand your desire for justice and, in fact, share it. But consider Barraza’s situation. Imagine if he had a son who was killed by an Iraqi terrorist and he asked you to reinvade Iraq in order to get justice for his murdered son. How willing would we be to open that wound all over again? It’s a horribly unfair and hyperbolic comparison, I know, but my ridiculous question points to the anxiety the Barraza administration has regarding the cartels.”

“I agree with you, Dr. Strasburg. It is a ridiculous comparison. I’m not asking Barraza to start a war. I’m asking him to make an inquiry.”

“But to Castillo, that will seem like a declaration of war,” Madrigal said.

Myers stiffened. “All I know right now is that the Castillo boys are the prime suspects—the only suspects—in a heinous crime committed on American soil. I would think the Mexican government would be interested in solving such a crime, that is, if the Mexican government is still committed to the rule of law. I’m not looking for scapegoats or a vendetta. I’m looking for a little cooperation and I mean to have it. Am I clear on this?”

The room sat in chastised silence until Jeffers finally spoke up. “Yes. Perfectly clear.”

“Then call Eddleston and get him over here ASAP, and let’s get Ambassador Romero on the line. I want this handled with kid gloves—but I want it handled now. And I don’t want the press involved. No point in putting more pressure on Barraza. I want to give him every possible leeway to pursue the matter in a way that makes sense for him. But we’re going to get to the bottom of this Castillo thing, one way or another.”

Myers stood up. So did everyone else.

The meeting was over. Everybody filed out except Jeffers. When the room was clear, Jeffers asked, “Greyhill’s going to be a problem, isn’t he?”

“The vice president has decades of experience in foreign affairs, which I value greatly. I think a goodwill tour of our G-8 allies by the vice president would be greatly beneficial to the nation, don’t you?” Myers said.

“The G-20 might be more… timely,” Jeffers offered, smiling. “You might want to toss in a few base closings and a couple of funerals while you’re at it.”

“Agreed. Please make the necessary arrangements. I’ll call Robert tonight with the good news. He always wanted to be somebody important.”

11

Los Pinos, Mexico D.F.

In his offices in Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, President Antonio Guillermo Barraza sat on one of the couches in an elegantly tailored suit. Tall and athletic, the president of Mexico had been a leading man in a number of Spanish-language films before turning to a career in politics. With strong endorsements from the business establishment and several state governors, the gifted speaker with an affable smile was quickly dubbed the “Ronald Reagan of Mexico” when he first announced his candidacy.

Sitting on the same couch was his brother, Hernán. Though five years younger than his movie-star sibling, Hernán appeared to be a decade older. Short, pudgy, and scarred with acne, the younger Barraza lacked all of the outward physical gifts the gods had bestowed upon his brother, but he possessed a brilliant mind hidden beneath his pathetic comb-over, far eclipsing the president’s limited intellect. While his older brother virtually fell into fame and fortune, Hernán battled his way through law school to become first in his class, then clawed his way to the top of his law firm, earning a well-deserved reputation as a ruthless and fearsome corporate litigator. This laid the groundwork for his ultimate ambition, politics, and over the last two decades Hernán had become Mexico’s most accomplished political operative. It was only in the last few years that the two brothers’ career paths came together.

On the couch opposite both of them sat the American ambassador to Mexico, Frank Romero. Ambassador Romero was a former pro golfer and heir to one of the largest private vineyards in Napa Valley. Romero had been the youngest lieutenant governor in California history and was a rising star in the Democratic party until he bucked his governor and endorsed Margaret Myers’s candidacy for president. But the gamble had paid off in spades, and Romero won the coveted ambassadorship to Mexico, a country he and his family knew intimately.

All three men held snifters of Casa Dragones, a premium sipping tequila, clear as the cut-crystal decanter it came in. Hernán sat motionless, studying the glass in his hands through the thick lenses of his Clark Kent glasses, as the other two men talked.

“A ‘discreet inquiry’? Is such a thing even possible anymore?” President Barraza joked.

“You can well imagine President Myers’s desire to bring this issue to a swift conclusion. If the Castillos are innocent, an inquiry shouldn’t be a problem,” Romero said.

“It seems to me, Frank, that the case you’ve presented is unpersuasive. My attorney general has gone over everything you sent. She agrees with me that there is no conclusive evidence linking the Castillos to the massacre.” President Barraza’s English was flawless, but he added in Spanish, “Donde no hay humo, no hay lumbre.” Where there is no smoke, there is no fire.

“Of course, Mr. President. We’re not accusing anybody of anything. But it’s precisely because we’re in the dark that we’re searching for any kind of lead we can find. All we’d like to do is to speak to Mr. Castillo and his two sons. Where’s the harm in that?” Romero took another sip of tequila.

“César Castillo is a law-abiding citizen of Mexico. He also happens to be the CEO of Mexico’s largest agricultural combine—our number one supplier of fruits and vegetables to the American market. As a vertically integrated concern, his company also manufactures fertilizers and pesticides for their thousands of acres of productive land, but he exports those chemical products around the world as well. Insulting Mr. Castillo is like insulting Mexico itself, and he’s a very proud man. More important, he is a very private man. Personally, I’ve never met him. I don’t think he’s even appeared in public in over five years.”

“Forgive me, Mr. President, but it almost sounds like he’s in hiding. How is a legitimate businessman able to do business like that?”

President Barraza laughed. “The same way the American billionaire recluse Howard Hughes built his aviation empire, I suppose.”

“But if the man and his sons aren’t hiding anything, why not answer a few simple questions?” Romero asked.

“Because the very question itself is a veiled accusation and an implication of wrongdoing that is all the more damaging for the truly innocent. Right now, you say that you don’t know who the real killers are. So tell me, Frank, in the interest of resolving the issue, should I instruct our attorney general to question President Myers as to her whereabouts on the night of the killings? And what would she say about us if we did make the inquiry?”

“She would be angry and insulted, certainly. But that would be a ridiculous request. There’s no reason to suspect—”

President Barraza held up his hand. “No need to explain, Frank. I agree. But you get my point, don’t you? Rightly or wrongly, César Castillo would feel as justified in his resentment as President Myers would in hers.”

The president rose and crossed over to the credenza, making a beeline for the bottle of Casa Dragones.

“I hope President Myers understands how completely sympathetic I am to her situation, both in regard to the death of her son, as well as the political difficulties she now faces. I hope that she can appreciate my difficulties as well.” Barraza flashed his million-watt smile.

“Unfortunately, Mr. President, there are members of our Congress who are very capable of stirring up trouble for both of our countries. The amnesty bill, the guest-worker program, the NAFTA renegotiation—all of these things that both of our governments want will be difficult if not impossible to achieve if your government is seen as the least bit hesitant to bring this case to a just and equitable conclusion.”

President Barraza hovered over Romero and refilled his glass.

“This really is a marvelous tequila. Sweet pear and citrus notes with a pepper finish. I’m going to have to buy a case,” Romero said.

“No need. I’ll have one sent over this afternoon.” The president crossed over to his brother and refilled his glass, then set the bottle down on the coffee table between them. He took his seat.

Hernán Barraza rolled the snifter between his stubby fingers, never lifting his eyes from it as he finally spoke. “My associates in the distillery business pray for the day you Americans make liquor illegal again—it would quadruple their profits.” He swirled the liquor in the glass and sniffed the aroma. “Cartels make drugs, but it’s your politicians who make the laws that make the cartels rich. The drug problem, as we all know, is a demand problem, not a supply problem. If you Americans had an insatiable lust for tomatoes, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today, and maybe we would have been spilling tomatillo sauce instead of blood all these years.”

Hernán finally looked up from his glass. He smiled at Romero with his sad eyes and a mouth full of small, crooked teeth. “I only see one flaw in your request, Frank. What happens if we do make a ‘discreet inquiry’ and Mr. Castillo and his sons insist they had nothing to do with the El Paso event? Will President Myers be satisfied with that answer?”

Romero set his empty glass down on the table. He cleared his throat.

“Frankly, no.”

Hernán took another thoughtful sip. “Thank you for your candor. Of course she wouldn’t be satisfied. Neither would I, were I in her shoes. Officially, César Castillo is an upstanding Mexican businessman who donates millions to charitable work. His two sons earned their bachelor’s degrees in business administration at the University of Texas at Austin, and MBAs at the IE Business School in Madrid. They, too, are legitimate businessmen working within their father’s privately held corporation. Neither Mr. Castillo nor his sons have ever been convicted of a crime.”

Hernán swirled the tequila again in his snifter. “And yet, ‘Hijos de maguey, mecates.’”

Romero nodded. “The sons of a hemp plant are going to become ropes.” It was a clever variation on an old Mexican proverb.

Hernán leaned forward, his eyes locked with Romero’s.

“Unofficially? I think we can all agree that César Castillo is the boss of the most powerful crime syndicate in Mexico, if not all of Latin America, which makes him a very dangerous man. He will not view a ‘discreet inquiry’ as anything less than a personal assault on his honor and his position, and he will likely retaliate. But a ‘discreet inquiry’ won’t accomplish anything at all, as you yourself have just admitted.”

Hernán leaned back in the couch, his head against the rear cushion. He was so short that the top of his head didn’t reach to the top of the couch. “America is our strategic partner and our best trading customer. We share a common border and a common history and, increasingly, a common people, which means we share a common destiny. We want an end to the violence and destruction even more than you do.”

Hernán turned toward his brother, his head still resting against the couch.

“What I recommend, Mr. President, is that we bring the two Castillo boys in for questioning, by force if necessary. If we suffer the consequences for this, so be it. It’s the least we can do for our friends in the north, don’t you agree?”

President Barraza frowned with confusion. That was the last thing in the world he expected his nationalistic brother to say. An oily smile greased Hernán’s pockmarked face. What was Hernán’s game? No matter. He would follow his brother’s lead. The president smiled, too, and turned toward Romero.

“Yes, of course. We will do whatever it takes to get to the truth behind this terrible tragedy. You have my word on that, Frank.”

Romero beamed. “Thank you, Mr. President. I will convey your heartfelt message to President Myers, and I can assure you she will be eternally grateful for your assistance in this matter.”

Romero departed for his embassy, eager to convey the good news to Secretary of State Eddleston on a secure line. Antonio Barraza shut the door behind the American, then stormed over to his brother, who had retaken his seat on the couch.

“Are you fucking crazy? We can’t arrest Castillo’s kids. Next thing we know, he’ll be stacking cops’ heads in the Zócalo. Maybe ours, too.”

Hernán leaned back on the couch, propped his stumpy legs on the hand-carved coffee table, and folded his hands on the curve of his round belly. He closed his eyes. “This Myers woman. She’s not stupid. If she could handle this problem herself, she would. But she can’t. So she needs us to do it. Or at least try to do it.” His voice was calm, even soothing.

Antonio’s curiosity was piqued. He sat down next to his brother and listened in rapt attention.

“We must make a good show of it. We’ll have live video feed, both here and in Washington. The Americans must see our heroic men risking their lives in order to try and carry out justice for the grieving American president.”

“I know just the man. Sanchez. He’s with the Federal Police.” Antonio was getting excited. He liked to think he was able to keep up with Hernán’s scheming.

Hernán kept his eyes shut. “No. Not him. We need our best man, the head of our best unit. Incorruptible. Undefeated.” Hernán searched his photographic memory. “Cruzalta. Colonel Israel Cruzalta.”

“Dios mio. Yes. If anyone can stand up to Castillo, it’s him and his gung-ho Marines.” President Barraza patted his brother on his flaccid thigh. “We’ll drag those Castillo assholes to the police station in chains if we have to. Their father, too. Excellent suggestion.” He checked his Rolex. “I’m late for an important meeting.”

Hernán kept his brother’s schedule. The important meeting was actually a round of golf with his mistress.

“Make the arrangements and coordinate with the Americans.”

“As you say, Mr. President.”

Antonio dashed out of the office.

Hernán sighed and poured himself another drink. He despaired at his brother’s lack of imagination. He thought about explaining the overall plan he had in mind, but his older sibling would just get confused. Hernán’s vision was too complicated, too violent, and too subtle for the actor to comprehend, let alone execute. It was better that Antonio remain a handsome figurehead while Hernán pulled the strings behind the scenes.

At least for now.

Hernán heard his mother’s small, pitying voice in his head again, an echo from his childhood.

You can’t fight fate, pobrecito.

“To hell with that,” Hernán said to nobody as he drained his glass.

12

Near the Snake River, Wyoming

Pearce hadn’t built his worldwide company in less than a decade by micromanaging. By temperament and training, he was an analyst, always looking for the big picture. When he decided to strike out on his own, he saw a world of opportunities thanks to advances in drone technologies. Drones themselves weren’t actually new technology. Nikola Tesla earned the world’s first patent for wireless remote-controlled vehicles in 1898 and demonstrated the remote-control wireless powerboat in Madison Square Garden that same year.

Pearce’s other gift was people. He knew how to hire the right ones to seize those new opportunities.

Drones were changing not only modern warfare but nearly every other aspect of civilian life as well. In the end, drones were just delivery systems. Energy, medicine, agriculture, and transportation were just a few of the areas being transformed by the advent of autonomous, independent, inexpensive, and reliable vehicles.

Under normal circumstances, Pearce’s unseen investing partner could’ve expected an excellent return on the cash used to launch the company. But Pearce’s civilian operations had already delivered exceptional returns and promised many, many more for years to come and he was happy to allow others to lead those divisions.

But Pearce Systems security operations were far more lucrative at the moment—and far more dangerous as well, so he took responsibility for the day-to-day operations of that division. As president of the company, it was his responsibility to ensure that both sides of his house were in order because, in fact, they supported each other, directly and indirectly. He did this by regularly contacting his division heads, just to let them know he was still engaged with them and as passionate as they were about their respective projects. It was an exciting time to be alive, for sure.

More often than not, though, Pearce felt as if he were riding on the back of a galloping two-headed tiger. There was no telling where all of this might end up—Skynet was just a writer’s nightmare, but was it really so far from the truth anymore? On the other hand, the promise of a technological nirvana seemed just as plausible. Pearce wasn’t sure which of the two mouths would eventually swallow him, but he knew exactly which orifice of the beast he’d eventually be vacating when it was all said and done.

Pearce shook his head. It was late. His mind was wandering. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and dropped into his favorite chair in the cabin and tapped on his smartphone. Time to check in.

Dungeness, Kent, United Kingdom

August Mann stood at the top of the old soaring lighthouse, more than forty meters in the air. Due west was the decommissioned Dungeness A nuclear reactor facility. Due south was the English Channel.

The view of the surrounding beaches was fantastic, but it was the stout wind frothing the Channel waters far below that had caught his attention. Perfect conditions for kite surfing. His phone rang. It was Pearce. He picked up immediately.

“Troy. Wie geht’s?”

“I’m fine, August. How are you?”

“I was just thinking about you! San Onofre,” he barked into the phone. The wind gusting through the open window whipped the German’s hair. Ironically, San Onofre also featured a nuclear reactor by the sea, but August was referring to the kite-surfing competition where they first met several years ago.

“Did you bring your board?” Pearce asked.

“Natürlich! Bring yours, we’ll have good fun.”

“Don’t tempt me. How are those beautiful daughters of yours?”

August had married three years ago. His wife bore him twin girls a week after the wedding. “Growing fast. I can’t wait to get them out on the water here. Thank you for asking.”

“So, how’s it going over there? Any problems?”

“No. Everything is on schedule. We began defueling operations three days ago. The drones have functioned perfectly, as expected,” August said.

Dungeness A was just one of ten Magnox nuclear reactors that were decommissioned in the United Kingdom and scheduled for eventual demolition. Pearce Systems had won one of the first contracts utilizing tracked drones with manipulator arms and laser cutters to reduce waste materials into smaller pieces without risking human contamination. Mann headed up the nuclear decommissioning project for Pearce Systems. He had been a combat engineer in Germany’s Bundeswehr and had helped develop his nation’s first tracked drones for mine clearing and antipersonnel work. After one tour in Kosovo and another in Iraq, he quit the army to chase the wind. Instead, he found Pearce.

“No casualties on our end?” Pearce asked.

“None, of course. But we deployed one of our rescue bots when a Swedish contractor collapsed inside of the reactor core building. We pulled him out with no problems.”

“Radiation?” Pearce asked.

“No. Mild heart attack. He is recuperating in hospital. But again, no risk to personnel in the rescue.”

“Outstanding,” Pearce offered. “Keep up the good work.”

“Come out soon. The wind is fantastic here!”

Mann shut his phone and grinned. The Dungeness operation was running even more smoothly than he’d hoped. He knew his friend was pleased. August headed for the circular staircase. Time to get home to his family.

Once again, Pearce had proven prophetic, Mann thought, as his feet thudded on the steel stairs. The old nuclear reactors like Dungeness were gold mines. They took decades to fully decommission and deconstruct, and safety—for the workers and the environment—was the primary concern, not money. Over four hundred civilian reactors around the world were currently at or beyond their thirty-year design life and scheduled for decommissioning. After the tragedy at Fukushima in 2011, those schedules were being accelerated. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a Ph.D. in physics, had been affected by the Japanese catastrophe and she completely reversed her own energy policy, choosing instead to phase out all of Germany’s nuclear reactors by 2022, despite the fact they currently supplied a quarter of her nation’s electrical supply.

But Mann knew that this wasn’t just about money for Pearce, or himself for that matter. This was good environmental work that needed to be done and they were both proud to be part of it. Pearce Systems was leaving an important legacy for future generations. The fact that he and Troy would get rich doing it was just an added benefit.

August emerged from the great black lighthouse tower. He held up a hand to guard his blinking eyes against the sand stinging his face. Maybe he would bring his girls out to the beach for a picnic this weekend if the wind died down. But if it didn’t, he’d gladly bring his board instead.

Near the Snake River, Wyoming

Pearce finished his beer and picked up his phone to dial again. August was seven hours ahead of Pearce. His next call was four hours behind him on the other side of the world from the lanky German.

Port Allen, Hanapepe Bay, Kaua’i, Hawaii

Dr. Kenji Yamada was barefoot. The converted wharf workshop wasn’t technically a “clean room,” but it could’ve been. Sensitive electronic controls, motherboards, and other equipment were susceptible to damage from dust and particulate matter, but Kenji was building working vehicles and didn’t mind a little real-world challenge. He used his bare feet as contamination sensors, constantly monitoring the state of floor cleanliness, or so he told his graduate students. Truth be told, he just liked being barefoot. His feet were doing a lot of sensing today because everybody was scrambling to load up the last of the equipment on the modified 350 Outrage excursion boat bobbing in the water outside.

The fifty-three-year-old researcher wore his thick silver hair in a braid and sported a downy silver beard that contrasted nicely with his sun-drenched skin. He’d traded in his lab coat for a pair of board shorts decades earlier. His excuse was that he’d found it easier to do lab work in board shorts than it was to surf in a lab coat. His passions were whale research and surfing, in that order, with adventurous women, premium beer, and fresh sushi next on the list, also in order.

The humpback whales had arrived last December in Hawaii to calve and now the pods had just begun leaving for the three-thousand-mile return trip to the Gulf of Alaska. Thanks to Pearce Systems’ funding, Yamada had spent the last three years developing an autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) designed to swim along with the humpbacks without disturbing them. Yamada had spent the last twenty-five years recording the migratory habits, social relationships, and communication patterns of the giant mammals, but no one had been able to travel with them for an extended period of time, owing in part to the extreme distances and water conditions. Some humpback pods were known to travel up to sixteen thousand miles in their annual migratory loops.

Yamada was on the verge of a revolution in whale research, thanks to Pearce Systems’ support. By translating his hard-won migration data into an artificial intelligence program, he hoped to be able to insert into a whale pod a torpedo-shaped UUV equipped with radar, cameras, extension arms, and other devices needed to monitor the humpbacks in the wild. In order to accomplish this feat, the UUV had to be stealthy, self-powering, able to receive and send data signals to the control base, and perform a dozen other monitoring functions, all without disturbing the whales or disrupting their migratory patterns. Yamada also didn’t want his UUV to invoke the fearsome wrath of an angry thirty-five-ton adult, which could crush the UUV and scatter its priceless components on the bottom of the ocean floor with one mighty swipe of its massive fluke.

Yamada’s UUV was still under development, but it was far enough along that he wanted to try a short run with one of the pods. The UUV was already in position, but the AI program was still buggy. The best he could hope for was a remote-control test run of a couple hundred miles by following the underwater drone in a surface vessel like the 350 Outrage.

Yamada pointed at a stack of yellow storm-proof camera cases and told one of his grad students, “Don’t forget the Pelicans, please.” He felt his smartphone vibrate in his shorts pocket. It was Pearce’s ring tone.

“Troy! Howzit, brah?” Yamada asked. Born in Japan in 1960, he had migrated like his beloved humpbacks to Hawaii with his family when he was a teenager and had gone completely native. He was fluent in three human languages—Japanese, English, and pidgin—and he was an avid collector of whale songs.

“I was going to ask you the same thing, Kenji. Ready to launch today?” Pearce was aware of the AI bugs but wasn’t concerned. He knew Yamada and his team were close to solving them.

“On our way out the door. Wish us luck.”

“One more thing. I’ve scheduled the BP demo for September. I’ll need you and your team out in Galveston by August fifteenth at the latest. Will that be a problem?”

“Ah, brah. Serious?” Yamada whined. “Texas? How about Cali?” Yamada had earned his doctorate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

“Sorry, ‘brah.’ Gotta go where the customers are. You’ll be back before December.”

Yamada cringed. “Meh. Humpbacks are my customers.”

“I’m after greenbacks. The Brits have ’em in spades. That UUV you’re building is perfectly designed to run automated repair and maintenance routes on ocean-floor pipelines all over the world. We sign this BP contract, you’ll have more money for your whales than you’ll know what to do with.”

“And the rest of our deal?” Yamada asked. The hippie scientist agreed to join Pearce Systems and allow Pearce to fund his whale research operations so long as his UUV was never deployed for military purposes. Pearce was happy to comply. Like he told Yamada when he first met him, he really liked whales, too. Especially if you cook them just right. Fortunately for Pearce, Kenji had a sense of humor—and a busted bank account.

“Still the deal. Scout’s honor.”

“K, brah. See you in Texas. We talk logistics later. Gotta run.”

“Good luck, Kenji. I’m excited for you. Keep me posted.”

13

Highway 24, Sierra Madre Occidental, Mexico

The small convoy of Renault Sherpa 2s climbed the winding snake of asphalt known as Highway 24. It curved its way through the rugged, pine-covered mountains of eastern Sinaloa, not far from the bordering state of Durango. The road wasn’t heavily traveled. The only traffic was the occasional pickup or eighteen-wheeler hauling farm goods down the mountain from one of the ranchitas farther up.

Sixteen Infantería de Marina, among Mexico’s fiercest and most loyal soldiers in the drug war, were packed into the French-manufactured Humvee-style vehicles, each carrying a roof-mounted Heckler & Koch HK21 7.62mm machine gun. Oscar Obregón was in the lead command vehicle, standing inside the open-air weapon station. His helmet was equipped with a video camera providing a live “first-person shooter” broadcast. He was a freshly minted subteniente, the equivalent of a second lieutenant in American rank. Like all good young officers, he was determined to outperform on his first assignment with the unit.

A Hughes OH-6 Cayuse light observation helicopter provided overhead visual security. A video camera mounted on the helicopter provided an additional live feed of the events. It was piloted by another Marine lieutenant and the battalion commander, Colonel Israel Cruzalta, the most highly decorated man in the service. His unit had been responsible for more drug busts and weapons seizures, and had engaged in more firefights, than any other military or police unit in all of Mexico. He had inherited a deep, broad chest and a cleft chin from his German grandfather, along with his height and bald head, which, combined with his dark eyes and complexion, gave him a fearsome, commanding presence.

The convoy was racing toward one of Castillo’s hideouts, thanks to a tip received by the Mexican Federal Police. A Marina forward observation team had been put on the ground two days earlier, and they had confirmed the presence of Ulises and Aquiles Castillo as recently as thirty minutes ago. The forward observation post also kept a live camera feed on the compound. They had identified the presence of two additional adult males, each armed with AK-47 assault rifles, who were alternating duty in twelve-hour shifts. Their long-range camera had also caught sight of two attractive young women in the compound, usually in bikinis and lounging near the outdoor pool. As the observation team reported, the buxom young women were definitely unarmed, but they were packing some serious heat.

In short, security at the compound was extremely light and no match for the two squads of highly trained combat infantry racing toward them.

All three live feeds were being fed simultaneously to monitors in command centers located at both Los Pinos and the White House.

The Situation Room, the White House

As soon as she was notified the convoy was en route, President Myers ordered her secretary to cancel all of her afternoon appointments because of “illness.” She didn’t want to set the town talking again with the news of yet another emergency meeting at the White House.

Madrigal, Early, Jeffers, and Vice President Greyhill were the only other people in the room with her watching the live feed on three separate monitors.

“They call that a resort compound? I see a shooting range, an obstacle course, and an outbuilding that looks like a barracks to me. Are they sure there’s no one else up on that hill?” Madrigal asked.

“They’d better be sure. Otherwise, they’re going to need a whole lot more firepower,” Early said.

Obregón’s helmet camera bounced and jostled as the stiff suspension of the Sherpa 2 rattled over the uneven mountain road. His head was on a swivel, and the camera swept in broad circles frequently on the lookout for trouble.

Occasionally Obregón’s camera ducked down into the personnel compartment where three young Marines—a corporal and two privates—were riding in bone-jarring silence.

“I’m getting motion sickness watching that guy’s helmet cam,” Jeffers said.

“How much longer, Mike?” Myers asked.

Early checked his watch. “Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”

“Why couldn’t the Castillos have just come in?” Myers said.

No one answered. They all knew the question was rhetorical.

Cruzalta’s OH-6 Cayuse

The helicopter rotors hammered against the cloudless blue sky, spun by a Rolls-Royce turboshaft engine roaring overhead.

Los Pinos had decided to run the op during the day because of the terrain. It was closer to an arrest than an assault. If it had been an assault, the soldiers would have gone in at night. The Marines’ night-vision capabilities gave them a significant advantage over most opponents, though syndicate soldiers had been known to deploy the same technology on occasion.

Colonel Cruzalta scanned the road ahead with his field glasses. A wicked hairpin turn following a switchback was about five hundred meters ahead. A steep mountain with loose rocks walled one side of the road; the other side was nothing but air and a thousand-meter drop into the gorge below.

“Obregón. Tell your driver to slow down. There’s a nasty curve up ahead.”

“Yes, Colonel,” echoed in Cruzalta’s headset, along with the Sherpa’s four-cylinder diesel engine whining in the background.

Like all true warriors, Cruzalta was anxious. Only armchair generals and fat-assed politicians thumped their chests and laughed at danger because they never really had to face any. Without fear, courage was impossible. Fear kept a man alive while courage kept him in the fight.

Cruzalta’s orders were to escort the Castillos back to Culiacán, by force if necessary, where an assistant attorney general was waiting to ask questions in the air-conditioned comfort of a federal building. If the twins requested it, Cruzalta was ordered to escort the Castillos back to their resort compound. It was possible that the Castillos would forcibly resist the attempt to bring them in for questioning, but the appearance of elite Marinas should cause them to think twice. However, it had been determined by the president’s office that a minimum of force was preferable in order to avoid any unnecessary provocation. Cruzalta prayed that the Castillo boys were wiser than their youth suggested.

Several hundred meters ahead, an ancient tractor-trailer rig belched clouds of oily smoke from its vertical exhaust pipes. The driver is doing a bad job of downshifting, Cruzalta thought to himself. The trailers were fully enclosed but ventilated. Cruzalta guessed the truck must be hauling cattle down the hill to the slaughterhouses in Culiacán.

Obregón’s Sherpa 2

Loaded out in his combat gear, including a Kevlar vest, Obregón sweated fiercely, but he could sense a slight cooling in the air temperature as they gained altitude.

He glanced up and over at his two o’clock, watching Cruzalta’s helicopter on station, keeping an eye on things. He was glad the old man was up there watching out for them. Cruzalta’s reputation was second to none in the Marinas. He had always led his battalion into battle from the front and he had the wounds to prove it.

Obregón ducked his head back into the crew compartment. The three young soldiers sat grim and determined beneath their camouflaged helmets, rifles locked between their knees.

“You girls ready to dance?” Obregón shouted over the noise.

“Sir, yes, sir!” they shouted back in unison, smiles creasing their fierce, young faces.

“Good. Won’t be long now.”

The Situation Room, the White House

Greyhill frowned. “Okay, now I’m starting to get carsick.”

Early grinned. “Trust me, it’s worse for them, especially the guys in the back.”

“Boys,” Myers whispered. “They’re just young boys.”

Cruzalta’s OH-6 Cayuse

Cruzalta watched Obregón’s lead vehicle enter the southern end of the mile-long tunnel that cut through the mountain. The other Sherpas were close behind. The drivers were tired and distracted after a three-hour ride in the twisting mountains.

“Keep your vehicles spread out,” Cruzalta ordered through his mic, but Obregón didn’t respond. They had lost voice communication inside the tunnel.

The cattle truck entered the northern end and disappeared.

The Situation Room, the White House

Obregón’s video monitor cut to black.

“What’s going on?” Myers asked.

“They’re inside the mountain. The video will be back up as soon as they’re on the other side,” Early assured her.

Myers glanced at the live feed of the compound. The Castillo brothers were outside now in the pool playing a game of volleyball in the shallow end with the two young women, who were now completely topless.

“Better enjoy it while it lasts, assholes,” Early said.

Obregón’s Sherpa 2

Obregón was glad to be in the cool of the wide two-lane tunnel. The sun had been grinding him down for the last three hours. His eyes were still adjusting to the dark. He glanced up at the tunnel ceiling. There were lights up there, but they weren’t turned on. Civilians, he muttered to himself, as he cracked open his canteen and took another sip of water.

Obregón glanced backward at the other Sherpas spread out behind him, each about two seconds apart. That was cutting it pretty close, and in a combat situation he would push them back and keep them spread much farther apart. He could barely see the anxious face of the young private driving the vehicle behind him, clutching the steering wheel with an iron grip. The private’s frowning eyes finally caught Obregón’s and Obregón flashed him a thumbs-up. It took a couple of seconds, but the young driver finally managed a wide, nervous grin.

Obregón turned around. He glanced up ahead. A pair of cockeyed headlights from an oncoming diesel tractor rattled in the dark up ahead. He could just make out the shadows of the trailers it was hauling behind it.

Cruzalta’s OH-6 Cayuse

“Come around,” Cruzalta ordered his pilot. The helicopter had flown in an elliptical pattern all day, racing ahead of the slower-moving convoy, then circling around and catching up with them, keeping an eye on threats in front of and behind his men. The OH-6 had gotten far ahead again and now the pilot circled back on his commander’s order. The nose of the helicopter turned just in time to give Cruzalta a God’s-eye view of the tunnel.

The Situation Room, the White House

Myers was fixed on the helicopter video monitor. Flames suddenly jetted out of both ends of the mountain tunnel.

“Oh my God!” Myers shouted.

Fire continued to boil out of both ends as the helicopter camera plunged toward the tunnel. Cruzalta’s voice shouted over the speakers, screaming for the pilot to land.

Cruzalta’s OH-6 Cayuse

“OBREGÓN! OBREGÓN! COME IN!” Cruzalta shouted as the helicopter rocketed down toward the highway below. Just as the helicopter’s skids hit the hot asphalt, a long-horned bull shrouded in flames charged out of the tunnel entrance. Even above the rotor wash, Cruzalta could hear its agonizing screams as it thundered past the cockpit and hurled itself blindly over the side of the mountain into the gorge below.

The Situation Room, the White House

Myers’s eyes darted over to the other monitor. The laughing Castillo boys were still batting the volleyball around with their girlfriends in the pool, oblivious to the carnage in the hills below them.

“Jesus, what a goat fuck,” Greyhill blurted. He turned to Myers. “Good thing you weren’t directly involved in this, Margaret. It would’ve been your Bay of Pigs.”

The Situation Room, Los Pinos

President Barraza sat in stunned silence, staring at the monitors. He finally managed to speak, his voice cracking with emotion. “This is a disaster, Hernán. Those poor kids.”

Hernán Barraza turned toward his brother. “We sent the best we have. The Americans will realize that, won’t they?” His voice was etched with pained sincerity. He even managed to wet his eyes a little. Hernán had practiced both for hours last night in front of a mirror. Antonio wasn’t the only actor in the family.

The president bolted to his feet. “If that Myers bitch thinks we’re going to do this again, she’s crazy. If that isn’t good enough for her, then fuck her. Do you understand me?”

Hernán Barraza nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. I understand perfectly.”

14

Camp David, Maryland

President Myers admired the tall pines through the large picture window. She loved the presidential retreat nestled in the low wooded hills of Catoctin Mountain Park. It reminded her of her mountain home in Colorado. The main building where she stood was, in fact, a lodge, just one of many reasons she felt more comfortable here than in the White House.

She needed another meeting with her inner circle. The problem now was secrecy. There had already been too many scheduled meetings with the same people not to draw outside attention, and the Washington rumor mill was in full grind. Myers wasn’t ignorant of the political forces on both sides of the aisle arrayed against her. Just being kept out of these meetings was causing something of a scandal among senior congressional leadership, especially in her own party, Senator Diele the most vocal among them. Myers had discovered early on that Washington, D.C., was just like high school, only with money—other people’s money, technically. Jealousy, cliques, and rivalries were the stock-in-trade for the preening, precious egos that populated the Hill.

“Sorry to drag you out in the woods away from your families on a Saturday, but we needed to talk about yesterday’s fiasco,” Myers began.

“It’s our job, Madame President. No need to apologize,” Jeffers said.

Lancet flashed a sympathetic smile. “I used to have a pastor who said, ‘There’s no rest for the wicked, and the righteous don’t need any.’ So we’re good to go.”

“Thank you. Let’s get to it so we can get you all back home at a reasonable hour. Mike, what exactly happened down there?”

“Near as we can tell, somebody must have dropped a dime on the operation and the Castillos set a trap.”

“What about operational security?”

“There are many honest cops and some truly terrific people fighting the good fight down there, including Colonel Cruzalta and his Marines,” Lancet said.

“You’re sure about Cruzalta?” Myers asked. “We all know there is a tremendous amount of corruption in the police and even military ranks.”

“The people I really trust say that Cruzalta is the best there is,” Lancet said. “Loyal, smart, and incorruptible. He understands what the drug trade is doing to his nation. But you’re right. There is a lot of corruption in Mexico. ‘Plata o plomo,’ they call it. Silver or lead. It’s the cartel’s way of saying either you accept the bribe or the bullet, but either way, you’re going to cooperate with us. And of course, once someone does cooperate, they’re compromised forever. So no matter how secure they think an operation is, there’s always a good chance someone—a clerk, a secretary, a disgruntled traffic cop—is going to call it in when they see the trucks roll out of the gate.”

“The explosion was horrific,” Myers said, her face clouding with emotion.

Lancet nodded. “Castillo employs some of the world’s finest chemists in his labs. Some of them are concocting pesticides and herbicides for his legit businesses, but others are cooking meth. Any of his labs can put together a batch of napalm. Near as we can tell, the poor bastard driving the truck didn’t know he was hauling more than cattle.”

“So, Mike, give me some options,” Myers said.

“President Barraza has shown that there’s a limit to what he’s able to do, at least tactically. And given the political reality today, he’s probably hit the limit on what he’s willing to do.”

“Faye?”

“As we discussed the other day, legally we’ve hit a wall. We still can’t technically prove that the Castillos are guilty of the El Paso massacre, at least not by American legal standards—”

“Setting those boys on fire looked like a confession of guilt to me,” Myers interrupted. “If nothing else, they’re guilty of murdering those Marines.”

“Again, not provable, but I don’t disagree with you. That makes it a Mexican problem, not ours. The El Paso massacre is a criminal matter, with both domestic and international dimensions. American and international criminal law is quite specific about what we may and may not do. We also have extensive treaty obligations with Mexico, as well as Memoranda of Cooperation and Memoranda of Understanding with them in regard to criminal matters. In short, we have no legal standing to pursue this case any further as a legal matter without Mexican cooperation, and we’ve seen what their cooperation has gotten us.”

“Can we set up some sort of a sting? A trap? Lure the Castillos out of Mexico and back up here?” Myers asked.

Lancet shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, we’d have to spend a great deal of money and time to set up a scheme that would be convincing enough and tempting enough to lure them out of Mexico. That means getting a lot more people involved, and that has its dangers, too. The syndicate isn’t without resources on our side of the border, either, except over here, they use more sexo than plomo to get cooperation. Corruption isn’t as bad here as it is down there, but the problem is getting bigger up here, for sure.”

“So I’m asking you both again. What are our options? How do we get justice for the families who lost loved ones in El Paso?”

Lancet shrugged. “You’ve ruled out American troops on the ground. The Mexicans have ruled out further military action on their end. And the law prevents you from carrying out any law enforcement function without the express permission of Mexico, which they aren’t going to give, at least not right now. Maybe in a few years if and/or when you get the new immigration and trade agreements rammed through Congress. Maybe that will give you some leverage.”

“Mike? You agree with Faye’s assessment?”

Early shrugged. “You’ve pretty much eliminated all of the reasonable options, that’s for sure.”

“Then I want the unreasonable ones. Do you have any?”

Early rubbed the stubble on his unshaven chin. “It just so happens I know a guy.”

New York City, New York

September 13, 2004

“You think Early knows?” Annie asked. She was spooning into Pearce, his arms wrapped around her naked torso. They were lying beneath high-thread-count sheets in a penthouse suite overlooking Manhattan.

“About us? If he hasn’t figured it out, he isn’t much of an intelligence analyst,” Pearce said. “Of course, he isn’t a professional spook like we’uns.”

“What do you think he’d say if he knew?” she asked. She rolled over and kissed Pearce on the nose.

“He’d say, ‘Why not me?’”

“Besides that, goof.” She rolled back over off the bed, padding toward the floor-to-ceiling window.

“He’d say, ‘Pearce, you’re one lucky sumbitch. Don’t screw this up.’”

“Lucky? Why? Don’t you get laid very often?” Annie teased.

“Lately, I’ve been doing okay, I guess.” Pearce stretched and yawned. “But what I think he was referring to was the emotional component. I’m usually not very good at that sort of thing.” Pearce rolled out of bed, too, grabbing the top sheet. He stood behind Annie and wrapped both of them in the sheet, pulling her close to him. They gazed out over the amazing Manhattan skyline beneath their feet.

“Oh. So this is emotional for you, is it?” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

“You’re such a girl.”

“Some girls,” he said with a playful smile. “But I wasn’t looking for it.”

“Me neither,” she said.

“But I’m glad we found it. Found each other.”

“Me, too.”

Pearce kissed the back of her head, relieved.

“So what should we do about this?” she asked.

“I dunno. Go steady? By the way, you never told me how you can afford this place.”

“My dad owns it.” She slipped out beneath his embrace and headed for the kitchen.

“Why didn’t you tell me your dad was rich?” Pearce followed her into the kitchen. The tile was cold on his bare feet.

“I’m a spy, remember? I’m supposed to keep secrets, not give them away.”

“Since when do trust-fund babies go to war?” Pearce meant it as a joke, but it came off as flippant.

“Rich people love their country too, asshole.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean it like that. It’s just… unusual, that’s all.”

“Coffee?” That was easier for her to say than you’re forgiven.

“Sounds great. And eggs, bacon, and toast while you’re at it. So you’re loaded and you can cook, too?”

“And I bang it like a porn star, in case you hadn’t noticed. But I was thinking more like room service,” she said. “Right now I’m just grabbing some water. Want some?” She yanked open the big Viking refrigerator door.

Pearce admired the view. She was buck naked, bent at the waist, reaching into the refrigerator for a bottled water, her breasts swaying with the effort. She was utterly comfortable in her own marvelous skin, even the patches of it laced with small shrapnel scars.

“Yeah, I want some,” Pearce said. He was getting hard.

“I meant water.”

“That, too. I’m a little dehydrated, if you catch my drift.”

A bottle of water sailed toward his head. He caught it at the last second.

“Drink up. You’re gonna need it later,” she promised as she cracked open her bottle. He did the same. They both took a long pull, just like they were back in the field.

“So, seriously. What do we do about this?” she asked again.

“‘This’? You mean ‘us.’ I like ‘us.’ Don’t you?”

“Is this enough?” she asked.

“For now.”

“And later”? She finished her water and crushed the bottle. Tossed it into the empty sink.

“What do you want me to say, Annie?”

“It’s what I don’t want you to say.”

“What don’t you want me to say?”

“Don’t say you’d give it all up for me.”

“I would.”

“You don’t listen very well, do you?”

“But it’s true.”

“We can’t just stop doing what we’re doing and play house.”

“Why not?” Suddenly he wasn’t hard anymore. Not even close.

Annie padded back toward the bedroom. Pearce right behind her. She reached for her pair of jeans on the floor and pulled them on. No panties. Commando.

Pearce reached for his underwear. “Why not? That’s what grown-up people do, you know.”

She buttoned up her fly and stared at him. Her breasts bunched beneath her crossed arms.

Pearce’s heart melted. Again. Could she be any more beautiful?

“Look, I don’t mean to go all Bogart on you here, but there’s something a helluva lot more important than us going on in the world right now. More important than what you and I want, no matter how badly we want it.” She grabbed her T-shirt and pulled it on. No bra.

Thank you, Jesus.

“So you do want it?” Pearce asked, distracted.

“I’m crazy about you, numbnuts. But I signed up with the Agency, not eHarmony. I’m supposed to be killing guys, not marrying them.”

She approached him, wrapped her arms around his neck. “You’re the best man I know, Troy, and that’s saying a lot because I know a lot of really great guys, Early included. But this isn’t our time. At least not right now.”

“There aren’t many people who have what we have.”

“And even fewer people who can do what we do. That means we have a responsibility. Maybe we get to have what we want later.”

“When’s that?”

“When the war’s over, I guess.”

Pearce gazed into her sparkling blue eyes. “And when’s that going to happen?”

She leaned her head against his chest and held on tight, listening to his heartbeat. It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was all she had.

15

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

It was one-thirty in the morning but the place was packed with locals. It was a sea of pierced noses, sleeve tattoos, and black T-shirts—and that was just the women. A girl in the corner with unwashed hair in her eyes played Alanis Morissette on a rosewood mandolin. Behind her, moose heads, snowshoes, and salmon trophies were nailed on the rough timbered walls.

Early fell into the booth at the back of the crowded hipster café, away from the picture windows. Pearce was already there. He was wearing a red and white Stanford University T-shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of Ropers. A ranch coat lay on the bench seat next to him, and a small iron pot of herbal tea steeped on the table.

“You do realize I’m on East Coast time, right?” Early wore his fatigue like a five o’clock shadow. His cross-country adventure had started late and it had only gotten much later. He’d flown into Fairchild AFB from Washington, D.C., on a DoD Gulfstream C-37A, then borrowed an unmarked Air Police sedan to make the hour’s drive from the air base to the coffeehouse. “Couldn’t we have done this tomorrow?”

Pearce grinned. “How the heck have you been, Mikey?”

A waitress with a buzz cut who was wearing skinny black jeans and neck tats sauntered over to the table. Her long, thin fingers held a notepad and a badly chewed pencil.

“Whatchyawant, amigo?” she asked Early.

Early’s eyes drifted to her chest and the small, firm breasts underneath her tank top. Pink letters flashed the restaurant name: GLORY BOX.

“What’s good here, sister?”

Her listless black eyes wandered around the room.

“Everything.”

“What do you like?”

“Veggie empanada’s good.”

Early admired her tongue stud. “Got any meat to go with that?”

“Beef. Chicken. It’s all organic and range-fed.”

“I suspected as much. Toss some chicken in the empanada. And some coffee would be great.”

“What kind? We’ve got fifteen different blends in the pots.”

“Black. Hot. You pick the rest, okay?” Early smiled at her. “I’m a real good tipper.”

Her eyes drifted back to his. The corner of her mouth tugged just a little. Almost a smile.

“’Kay.” Her eyes lingered on him for a moment. Early wasn’t hard to look at. She wandered off.

“When did you go hippie?” Early asked, glancing around the room.

Pearce poured his first cup of tea.

“Food’s good here. The tea’s better. Got to eat right, you know. You look like shit, by the way.”

“I missed you, too. It’s been, what, eight years?” Early asked.

Pearce shrugged, a bad memory suddenly on his shoulder. “Something like that. How’s Kate? Still in remission?”

“Yeah, thank God. Thanks for asking.”

“You married up. Everybody knows that except her.” Pearce smiled. “But she did all right, I guess.”

“I’m a lucky bastard, no doubt about it.”

“And you climbed the ladder. Congratulations.” Pearce raised his cup in salute.

“It’s a job.” Early looked around the dark room. “Maybe if it doesn’t work out, you can put a word in for me. I could dig working in a place like this.” The beefy former special forces operator glanced around the room. “I wonder if they have a health plan.”

“What brings you to this neck of the woods?” Pearce asked.

“You, amigo.” Early smiled.

“Well, here I am.” Pearce took a sip of tea. “That about do it for you?”

“We need your services.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Pearce asked.

“‘We’ is me and the number one boss lady.”

“Seems to me the boss lady has a lot of employees to carry her water. You don’t need me.”

“For this job, we do. No one else can hack it.” Early turned serious.

“Off the books, I take it.”

“Yup.”

Pearce thought about it for a moment. Took another sip of tea. “No, thanks.”

Early frowned. “It’s damn good money. I thought you were in business.”

“I am. Doesn’t mean I take every job. Don’t have to. That’s why they call it ‘free’ enterprise.”

“It’s for a good cause, Troy. You remember those, don’t you?”

“I used to believe in Santy Claus, too. Good causes get people killed, just like the bad ones.” Pearce leaned in a little closer. “You remember that, don’t you?”

Early’s foul mood turned even darker. He did remember. It’s why he’d left the service a few years after Troy did.

“Yeah. But this time it’s different,” Early said.

“That’s what they always say, until it’s not.”

“No, seriously. Myers is different.” Early meant it. “You know Kate’s loaded. I could be reef diving in Fiji right now if I wanted.”

Pearce smiled. “You were always such a Boy Scout, Mikey. You think this president is different because she’s in the other party? Don’t be naive.”

“No, I’m not talking about that. She’s in there for the right reasons, doing the right things. Or at least trying to.”

“Really? Then why hire me? Sounds like she’s trying to cover her ass on something.”

“No. She’s straight up. Trust me.”

The waitress sauntered back over with Early’s plate and a cup of coffee. She set them down on the table. “Chicken empanada and sides.”

“Looks good,” Early said.

“Is good,” she insisted.

“What kind of joe did you bring me?”

“Tanzanian peaberry.” She turned to Pearce. Her face softened. “More tea?”

“In a while. Thanks.”

“I’ll check back in a few.” She drifted to another table.

Early watched her for a moment. Caught her stealing a glance back at Pearce. Early stuck his fork into the empanada. “She’s sweet on you.”

Pearce shrugged. “She had a little boyfriend trouble a while back. I made it go away. That’s all.”

“And you call me a Boy Scout.” Early shook his head with a smile as he took another bite.

“You know how you can tell when a politician is lying?” Pearce asked. “When their lips are moving.”

“Man, this is really good.” Empanada churned in his mouth like tube socks in a laundromat dryer. “You want some?”

“No, but thanks.”

Early took a sip of coffee. Examined the cup. “This is unbelievable. Maybe she’s sweet on me, too.”

“She probably heard you were a good tipper.”

Early pulled a cell phone out of his shirt pocket and set it in front of Pearce.

“I’ve already got a phone. But thanks.”

“Not with that number on it. Pick it up and call her.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

Pearce frowned. “She’s on East Coast time, you know.”

“She’s at work. Call her. Tell her she’s a liar and I’ll go away. We never met. I won’t bother you again, and neither will she.” Early stabbed his fork into a chunk of roasted rosemary potato glistening with olive oil.

Pearce picked up the phone. Leaned back in the booth. Thought about it for a few seconds, then punched the call button. It rang twice.

“Hello, Mr. Pearce,” Myers answered.

Pearce shot a curious glance at Early. Is this a joke?

Early grinned. No, it’s not.

“Mike asked me to call you,” Pearce said.

“That means you turned down his offer. I’m sorry to hear that. He’s a big fan of yours.”

“Mikey’s always been a cheerleader for lost causes. Including yours, I’m afraid.”

“He told you about the situation?”

“I turned him down before we got that far.”

“I actually prefer doing business face-to-face. If it’s at all possible, I’d like to meet with you later today and put all of my cards on the table. You can fly back with Mike.”

“It’s going to be a very short meeting, ma’am, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“If you can spare the time, I’d be grateful.” Myers clicked off.

Pearce stared at the phone in his hand for a long time. Old habits die hard. How do you say no to the president?

“She’s a pistol, ain’t she?” Early smiled.

Pearce slid out of the booth as Early took another bite of food.

“What’s the verdict, chief?” Early asked.

Pearce grabbed his ranch coat and stood up.

“I’ve got a boat needs refinishing this afternoon. So if we’re going to do this, let’s go.”

Pearce pulled on his coat.

Early dropped his fork and leaped up.

“Give me your wallet,” Pearce demanded.

“What for?”

Pearce motioned impatiently with his hand.

Early handed Pearce his wallet. Pearce fished out a hundred-dollar bill and tossed it on the table.

“What are you doing?” Early asked.

“She’s got a kid. And you were never a good tipper.”

Pearce tossed Early’s wallet back at him, turned, and marched toward the door.

The White House, Washington, D.C.

It was just after seven in the morning when Early and Pearce arrived at the private VIP entrance to the West Wing.

Early and Pearce checked their weapons with the duty officer behind the security desk, a striking Haitian-American woman with luminous green eyes.

Early placed the palm of his right hand on the security scanner.

“What? No smile today?” Early asked.

“Sorry, Mr. Early. Everybody’s jittery. Someone called in another bomb threat an hour ago. That’s the third this week.”

“Just another crank. Won’t amount to anything,” Early assured her.

“Hope you’re right.”

A few moments later, Early’s personnel page pulled up on the security monitor. It included his latest headshot, a short bio, his job title and security status. The guard nodded him through to the unmarked door behind her.

“Thanks, Simone. Take it easy.” Early strode through the checkpoint.

Pearce didn’t budge.

“You coming?” Early asked.

“You need to wave me through.”

“He can’t. We have a strict security protocol,” Simone said.

“This isn’t a good idea,” Pearce said to Early.

Another security agent stood close by. A big slab of meat in a crew cut wearing a name tag that read HANK. He shifted his weight, his thick body visibly tensing.

“The president’s waiting,” Early said.

“Sir, you have to place your hand on the scanner,” Hank said. His cold, gray eyes weren’t asking.

Pearce looked him up and down with a smirk, then turned back to Simone. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He stepped over to the glass and put his hand on the scanner.

Simone flashed a dazzling smile. “Thank you, sir. I promise this will only take a second.”

Pearce left his hand on the scanner but glanced over his shoulder at Hank, who was still eyeing him.

Simone frowned. “I’m sorry, sir. Something’s wrong. Mr. Early’s file pulled up again. Would you mind removing your hand for a second?”

“Sure thing.” Pearce smiled.

Simone tapped a few keys to relaunch the program. When it pulled back up, she said, “Please put your hand back on the scanner.”

Pearce put his hand back on the glass screen.

Vice President Greyhill’s file pulled up.

“I don’t understand,” Simone whispered to herself. “You’re not the vice president.”

“Maybe I’m wearing a disguise,” Pearce offered.

“What’s the matter?” Hank asked Simone.

“A glitch. Let me try something.” Simone turned to Pearce. “I’m sorry, but this will take a few moments.”

“We’re already late, Simone,” Early said.

“The president will have to wait a little longer, sir,” Hank said. He glared at Pearce. “You need to step back.”

Pearce smirked. “I’m fine right here.”

Hank took a step toward Pearce.

“Oh, Jesus,” Early whispered. He knew Pearce wouldn’t back down. But Simone saved the day.

“Ah. The system’s back up. Please, sir. Once more, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.” Pearce put his hand on the glass for the third time.

Simone frowned. “Your name isn’t Elvis Presley, is it?”

“Afraid not,” Pearce said.

Alarms rang on Simone’s computer. The monitor snapped to black.

“Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” Simone hissed. She tapped keys furiously.

“Your system just crashed,” Pearce said.

Early’s eyes screamed a question at Pearce. What have you done?

Pearce shrugged.

“Told you it wasn’t a good idea.”

Hank grabbed Pearce by the shoulder.

Big mistake.

16

The President’s Dining Room, West Wing, the White House

“Sure you don’t want anything to eat, Mr. Pearce?” Myers asked. She was just sitting down to a couple of poached eggs and a cup of black coffee.

“No, thank you. We ate on the plane,” Pearce said. He sipped his green tea.

“MREs,” Early grumbled. He was working on his second cup of coffee already.

“Mike tells me you’re quite a fisherman. You ever fish salmon?”

“Only every chance I get.”

“I had the hardest time learning to tie the Jock Scott. My husband had the patience of Job.”

“They say that the hardest flies to tie are your first one and your last one,” Pearce said.

She took a bite of egg.

“That was quite a little show you put on downstairs. I see why Mike puts such faith in you.”

“One of the reasons I get hired is that I don’t leave any footprints behind.”

“You mean, besides the one you left on Hank’s face?” Early grinned.

“From what Mikey tells me, it’s probably best for all concerned that I was never here to begin with.”

“Technically, you broke the law when you tampered with our security system, but I’m the one who called this meeting, so this one’s on me, Mr. Pearce.”

Pearce took another sip of tea.

“That’s where you say something civilized like ‘Thank you, Madame President,’” Early said.

Pearce ignored him. Early was still fuming over the embarrassment Pearce had caused him at the security desk.

Myers leaned back in her chair. “I understand you’re reluctant to accept the assignment I have for you, even though you don’t know what it is.”

“Let’s just say I have trust issues,” Pearce said. He glanced around the room. It was well appointed with period-style furniture. His eyes fixed on a large oil painting of Lincoln and his war cabinet. “It’s the decisions people like you make in rooms like this that cause most of the suffering in the world.”

“I have trust issues, too,” Myers said. “But I still think you’re just the man I’m looking for.”

“How do you know that? Mike’s an old buddy, but even he hasn’t kept up with me for the last few years. And as you’ve seen, nobody else has, either.”

“I usually make up my mind about a person in thirty seconds, and I seldom change it.” Myers smiled over the edge of her coffee cup.

“Let me see if I can change it, then.” Pearce pulled out his smartphone and tapped on the photo gallery icon. He slid the phone over to Myers. She glanced at the first photo. Her face darkened.

“Royce Simmons. The man who killed my husband.”

“DUI. Three priors. Driving with a suspended license the day he plowed into your husband’s Lexus. Increasing the DUI penalties in Colorado was what got you into politics in the first place,” Pearce noted.

“That’s old news, Mr. Pearce. What’s that got to do with us?”

“Slide it to the next photo.”

Myers stiffened for a moment. She wasn’t used to being told what to do, but she complied.

Pearce saw her eyes light up for a moment, then dim again. “Mr. Simmons in a morgue. Broke his neck in a fall, I read.”

“Mike, you mind giving us a second?” Pearce asked.

“Sure. I need to call the hospital and check up on Hank anyway. I’ll send him your love.” Early turned to the president. “Call me when you need me, ma’am.” Early closed the door behind him.

“I take it there’s another picture you want to show me?” Myers asked.

Pearce nodded.

She flicked the touch screen. A man’s face.

“Cliff Calhoun,” she said.

“Tell me about him.”

Myers set the phone down and glared at Pearce. “What do you want me to tell you that you don’t obviously already know? When I learned Simmons was due for early release, I hired Cliff to follow him. And I gave Cliff the order to kill Simmons if he caught him driving drunk again.”

“How soon before Calhoun caught him drinking?”

“The first night he was released. He was in a bar, celebrating. Cliff said he knocked back a half dozen whiskey shots and as many beers in less than an hour. Got up, stumbled out to a borrowed car. No license, of course. Bastard was going to drive home. Sidewalks were slick with ice. Cliff broke his neck. Made it look like Simmons slipped and fell. Nobody cried for the son of a bitch, not even his own mother. I hope your intel told you that, too. As far as I’m concerned, it was a public service. If Simmons hadn’t gotten drunk again, he’d be alive today, or at least, he wouldn’t have been killed by me.”

Pearce thought about her answer. He could put her in jail for twenty-five to life with that confession. The only problem was, Pearce hated drunk drivers, too.

“Did I pass your test, Mr. Pearce? Can we quit playing games now?”

“Still not interested.”

“Why? Because I hired a man to kill a drunk before he could kill somebody else’s husband and father? I’ve never talked about it because I didn’t want to go to jail. Calhoun’s been dead for years, so I don’t even know how you could have possibly found out. But if you’re asking me to apologize, I won’t.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m a businessman, not a therapist. I don’t do personal vendettas. It doesn’t fit the company mission statement.” Pearce stood to leave. “You need to find somebody else.”

“Sit down,” she said.

Pearce ignored her.

“Please.”

Pearce hesitated, his hand on the doorknob.

Baghdad, Iraq

August 21, 2005

“Dick holsters. All of ’em.”

Annie stood in front of Troy’s steel desk reading the airstrike request denial again. She gripped the paper so hard her hands trembled.

It was only the two of them in the spartan operations office that morning. Troy sat and listened to Annie rant, but he was focused on the ring in his pocket. He’d been carrying it for a week, waiting for just the right moment to ask her. Somehow that moment never seemed to arrive, today included.

IEDs had been cutting down American soldiers and Iraqi policemen for months now, and slaughtering innocent civilians, too. Instead of chasing the bombers, Annie decided it was smarter to find the source of the remote-controlled bombs.

Ba’athists and Iraqi insurgents—many of them former Revolutionary Guards—had enough technical know-how to set off crude timed charges. But the Iranians had been supplying IEDs with sophisticated timers and remote-control detonators, many of which, ironically, were manufactured in the United States and smuggled via Singapore into Iran. The Quds Force operators were also particularly adept at fashioning shaped-charge IEDs, the kind of munitions that could even punch holes through the thick steel hull of the mighty Abrams main battle tank.

Annie worked her sources hard for weeks even as she turned new ones, chasing leads on the IED suppliers. She favored the “aggressive” interrogation of captured insurgents and had been reprimanded twice for the physical harm she’d caused to those in her severe custody. She once even sifted bare-handed through the shredded remains of a dead insurgent after he accidentally detonated a device he was trying to set. But it was a piece of hard intel shared by a friend in Israel’s Mossad that finally pinpointed Baneh, Iran, as the target.

Annie’s request for a satellite redeploy over the city gave her superiors the visual confirmation they needed to order an airstrike. But the request for an airstrike was denied from higher up the chain of command. President Bush’s political opposition had drawn a line in the sand at the Iraq-Iran border. The Republicans were afraid they wouldn’t get the war they wanted so badly if they asked for a declaration of war; the Democrats were too afraid to oppose a war that had gained such widespread popularity among the public. A compromise was reached. The undeclared Iraq war could continue indefinitely, but Iran was strictly off-limits. Reelection was the driving reality of Washington politics.

The reality in Iraq, however, was that dozens of people were getting injured or killed by Iranian-built IEDs every day, and the severity and frequency of the attacks were increasing.

In Annie’s mind, the gutless politicians back home were just as guilty of the carnage as the Iraqi insurgents.

“They’re all dick holsters,” Annie grunted again. She crushed the paper into a hard little ball and threw it across the room.

“You’ve got to let it go, Annie,” Troy said.

“I can’t. You know that.”

“What else can we do?”

“We could go in ourselves.”

“We’d never get approval.”

“Who’s asking for permission?”

“No support? On a mission like this? Good chance of getting killed that way.”

“Maybe. But more of our people will get killed if we don’t. Guaranteed.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“Is that your head or your dick talking?”

“You mean my head or my heart?”

“Yeah, that, too.”

“Both,” Pearce said.

“Sorry. Pick one.”

“Okay. Heart.”

Annie dropped in Pearce’s lap. She pulled a handful of hair behind her ear. That was her tell. Pearce braced himself.

Annie’s bright eyes bore into his.

“Sorry, mister. Wrong answer. We didn’t come over here to go steady. We came here to win a war. Right?”

Pearce took a deep breath. Old ground.

“Right.”

She smiled. “Good boy.” She affirmed his answer by patting his broad chest with her hands. Felt something in one of his shirt pockets. It was the ring, of course. But this wasn’t the time.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

She started to say something but held her tongue.

Pearce thought about asking her what she was going to say, but he knew she wouldn’t answer. Her mind had already turned to the mission.

Annie slipped off his lap and grabbed her cell phone. “I’ll handle logistics,” she told Pearce as she dialed. “You handle Mike.”

The President’s Dining Room, West Wing, the White House

Pearce took his hand off the doorknob, turned around, and took his seat.

“Unfortunately, it took the death of my son to wake me up to what’s been going on down in Mexico. The horrific violence. The sheer volume of drugs like methamphetamine and brown tar heroin flooding into our country, killing our children. I was too damn busy making a pile of money in the IT industry, or running a state government, to pay attention to any of it.”

“We had to deal with the heroin trade in the Sand Box,” Pearce said. “It was a primary revenue source for the bad guys. Some of our guys got caught up into it, too.”

Myers took another sip of coffee. Pearce drank his tea.

“Mike briefed you on the ambush of the Marinas?” Myers asked.

“Yeah. Somebody obviously leaked. They find out who?”

“Not yet. Probably doesn’t matter. If they find the guy—or gal—there’ll just be another one next time. I’m afraid the Castillos were sending us a message, and they set those poor young Marines on fire to make sure we got it. They want us to know that the Mexican government can’t fight this war, let alone win it.”

“And neither can you, at least not with American troops. Otherwise, you’ve broken one of your campaign promises, right?”

“It wasn’t just an empty campaign promise to win votes. Too much blood and too much treasure have already been spent fighting the War on Terror for more than a decade now. If we invade Mexico, we’re probably in for another ten years of bloody warfare. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth it. I’m not even saying we couldn’t win it. But the American people don’t have the will to start another war right now, let alone to make the necessary sacrifices to see it through.”

“So what’s your plan? Where do I fit in?”

“I can’t fight and win the drug war. But I’ve got to send my own message. I can’t control what Castillo does in Mexico, but I’ve got to keep him from crossing the border at will and killing American citizens with impunity.”

“Hire more Border Patrol agents. Call up the National Guard. Seal the border.”

“Can’t. At least not now. The budget freeze cuts across every department of government, Border Patrol included. And troops on the border are considered racist, fascist, and xenophobic by the rabid left and increasingly so by the middling center. Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass what they think, but the political reality is that the moderates in Congress won’t authorize troops on the border or slash other welfare programs to beef up the Border Patrol. More important, a great deal of trade takes place across that border. We gum it up too much, and we hurt the economies of both countries.”

“That doesn’t leave many options,” Pearce observed. “Maybe it’s best to let this dog lie.”

“I was raised with the belief that action is morality. It’s quoted so often it’s a cliché now, but Burke’s aphorism is still true. All it takes for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.”

Pearce shook his head. “The only problem with that kind of thinking is that every zealot with a suicide vest thinks he’s the good guy fighting evil, even when the bus he blows up is full of innocent civilians.”

“I’m not talking about ideology or politics. I’m no moral crusader. I’m talking about putting down a rabid dog before it bites somebody else. My job is to save American lives. I think that’s something you understand quite well.”

Once again, Pearce had to process for a moment. “So what do you want to do?”

“I believe in Occam’s razor. In this case, the simplest solution is the best one. I want to send Castillo a clear message. Blood for blood. I’m convinced he killed my son, so I’m going to kill one of his sons. Tit-for-tat.”

“A telegram would be cheaper.”

“I’m willing to pay the price,” Myers said.

“Why only one son if they’re both killers?”

“So Castillo won’t retaliate. He gets to keep one son alive if he keeps a cool head. The dead son will be a daily reminder to him to keep his war on his side of the border.”

“But what if he does retaliate? You take out his other son? Then he retaliates again. Then what do you do?”

“You were CIA. You must have read about the Phoenix Program?” She was referring to the CIA program that assassinated key Vietcong leaders during the Vietnam War.

“We studied it. A lot of mistakes were made.”

“But according to William Colby, the North Vietnamese said that the Phoenix Program was the most effective thing we ever did during the entire war.”

“Of course he’d say that. It was his program.”

“You think he lied about it?”

“I have no way of knowing. It was before my time.”

Pearce had mixed feelings about that war. His father had served in it and eventually died from it. “What I do know is that the Phoenix Program killed nearly thirty thousand Vietnamese.”

“I only want to kill one Mexican.”

“And that’s where my company comes in.”

“Yes. But it must be kept secret.”

“Who else knows about this, besides you, me, and Early?”

“Sandy Jeffers, my chief of staff, and the attorney general.”

“What does she say about all of this?”

“You don’t strike me as someone overly concerned with matters of the law.”

“I have people to worry about.”

“Without getting into the specifics, you’re operating under my authority as commander in chief, the same way President Obama dispatched SEAL Team snipers to take out the Somali pirates.”

“Our situation is a little different. We’re private contractors.”

“Then just think of it as a private contract for taking out the garbage.”

“And if this thing goes south?”

“Doubting yourself, Mr. Pearce?”

“Not at all. But humor me.”

“Then I’ll have your back. Mike will vouch for me.”

“He already did. I just wanted to hear it from you.”

“Is that why you’re recording our conversation?” Myers asked. It was an educated guess.

“Trust, but verify. In case I’m not around,” Pearce said. “Speaking of trust, why isn’t Greyhill in the loop?”

“I take it you don’t follow politics very closely. We had a shotgun wedding. Only the shotgun was pointed at me.”

“Is the operation covert or clandestine?” Pearce chose his words carefully. “Covert” actions fell under Title 50 of the U.S. Code, “clandestine” under Title 10. What Pearce was really asking was: are you notifying the armed services committees or the intelligence committees about this action?

“Neither. Or both. It’s irrelevant. This is a tactical operation. Congress doesn’t have the right to micromanage national security.”

“In other words, you want to keep this secret because your political opponents would make a lot of hay over this, even if it does go right.”

“I need to keep this secret because if I publicly shame Castillo, he’d be forced to retaliate.”

Myers locked eyes with Pearce. All her cards were on the table.

“Are you in or out?” she asked.

Pearce had an instructor at the Farm. He was one of the original cold warriors with the missing fingernails to prove it. The old man had drilled the Hagakure into their heads like sixteen-penny nails into wet lumber. Even now he could hear the spymaster’s raspy voice in his head.

The warrior makes all of his decisions within the span of seven breaths.

Pearce took just two.

Old habits die hard.

“Better call Mike back in,” Pearce said.

Myers pressed the intercom. “Please send Mr. Early back in.”

Early came in, a fresh cup of coffee in his hand. “You want me to throw this bum out?” he asked with a smile.

Pearce pushed out the chair next to him with his foot. Early fell into it. Pearce turned to Myers.

“No JAG lawyers looking over my shoulder. No bean counters asking for receipts. No squawking when I hand you guys the bill—and it’s gonna be a doozy. I do this my way, with my team, no questions. Are we clear on that?”

Myers and Early both nodded. “Agreed,” Myers added.

“I’m also going to need access to DEA intelligence and NSA databases, at least the ones my firm hasn’t already hacked. Without their knowledge, of course.”

“Mike will handle all of that,” Myers said.

“One more thing. I’m going to need you to flip the switch on DAS down there.”

“DAS?” Early asked.

“Domain Awareness System,” Myers said. “The domestic version is up and running in New York City. You know, like that TV show, Person of Interest. Links all of the CCTV cameras, criminal databases, public records, and just about every other surveillance or intelligence database to a central processing hub for total information awareness.”

Both men’s faces posed the same question to her. How do you know about DAS?

Myers grinned. “My company subcontracted some of the DAS software package on an NSA contract a few years back. The NSA uses a more robust suite of assets for covert surveillance in noncompliant cities. Deep web stuff.” She was referring to the fact that NSA was tapped into every major telecom, search engine, and ISP around the world, by either tacit agreement or covert operation, often through backdoor software and compromised system components. Essentially, there wasn’t a private or public database in the world that NSA couldn’t break into, especially in Latin America. “But isn’t deploying DAS a little bit of overkill, Mr. Pearce?”

“Pulling the trigger is always the easy part. Target acquisition is the name of the game. I can’t shoot ’em if I can’t see ’em. The more data we have, the better. We want to crack open as many of the Mexican intel databases as we can, but phone records, driver’s licenses, and car registrations will go a long way, too.”

“So long as we can do that without alerting the Mexican government. I want to keep this as limited as possible. One kill, one message. End this thing, or at least contain it,” Myers said.

“Suits me fine. One kill, one job, and we’re done. I doubt you’ll be able to stop at one and I don’t have any intention of standing under the tree after we swat the hornets’ nest.”

“Understood, Mr. Pearce. One job and you’re done,” Myers agreed.

“If you can spare him, I’d like Mike to liaison for us.”

“He’s all yours, Mr. Pearce.” Myers stood up, extended Pearce her hand. He took it. She had a firm grip.

“I’m just glad we never met,” she smiled.

17

Pearce Systems Research Facility, Dearborn, Michigan

Pearce stood with Udi Stern next to an oversize treadmill. The former Israeli paratrooper was three inches shorter than Pearce, but broader in the chest.

“Go ahead, Udi. Try.” Dr. Rao smiled.

Udi smiled nervously at her. “I don’t want to break it,” he said, in heavily accented English.

“You won’t,” she said.

Udi stepped closer to the Petman 3, a third-generation Boston Dynamics humanoid robot that was on loan to Pearce Systems. It was jogging at exactly five miles per hour on the treadmill. Its legs pumped effortlessly, and the combat boots it wore pounded on the oversize treadmill’s rubber pad in a faultless heel-and-toe strike.

Dr. Rao’s team had recently perfected the software that enabled it to run for the first time, and she had renamed the robot “Usain Bolts” after the famous Jamaican runner. But the experimental drone was still a headless mechanical monster with a skinless aluminum-titanium frame, the stuff of science-fiction nightmares. On its chest it wore a black case that housed the video sensor package.

Udi lifted his own steel-toed boot and lightly kicked the Petman 3, but the robot barely budged. It was still connected to a thick power cable hanging down from overhead, but the cable was providing no physical support.

“She said to try and knock it over, not ask it for a date,” Pearce said.

Udi’s dark eyes narrowed. He threw a hard side kick into the robot’s hip. Usain Bolts was shoved hard to the left, but it never broke stride, and quickly returned to center.

“Try using your hands,” Dr. Rao suggested. “Give it a good shove.”

Udi spit in both hands, lowered himself, then lunged at the upper torso, careful to not catch himself in the rapidly pumping arms. He whacked it good. The robot’s upper torso twisted violently away from Udi. Its right arm windmilled high while its left arm swung low to help it keep balance. The twisting torso also twisted the hips, and the legs followed the hips. Just as it looked like it was about to crash, the robot did a quick shuffling step, turned on the balls of its feet without losing stride, and righted itself again. Within moments, it was jogging once again in the center of the broad treadmill.

Pearce laughed. “I knew I should’ve brought your wife instead.”

“Can you imagine a platoon of these parachuting out of the sky, then racing through the enemy’s streets? The psychological impact alone would be devastating.” Dr. Rao’s eyes gleamed with awe at the future soldier she was helping to create.

“This place always makes me depressed,” Udi lamented.

“Not to worry. It will be at least five more years before you’re obsolete.” She giggled, patting Udi on his thick shoulder.

Pearce shook his head, incredulous. “Thanks for the demo. We’d better push on to the main event.”

Inside the brightly lit conference room at the lab, Dr. Rao engaged a large video monitor on the center table with a tablet device in her hand. Pearce and Udi stood next to her. The other operators Pearce had selected for the Castillo mission were already doing advance work in Mexico or prepping the computer and communications networks.

Rao opened the hinged lid of a small aluminum case that was also on the table.

She reached into the case and lifted something out with a pair of tweezers and set it on the pad. “Watch the monitor, please.”

She tapped the tablet in her hand and a live image of Udi’s clasped, hairy hands popped onto the screen. When Udi realized those were his hands, he moved them, suddenly self-conscious.

“Hey! A mini spy camera. Nice,” Udi said.

“Oh, no. Much more than that,” Rao said. “Watch.”

Rao engaged the tablet again, and the image on the monitor turned toward the ceiling tiles, then rocketed for one of them. The camera looked like it was going to crash into the ceiling, but instead, it stopped abruptly. The image on the monitor turned upside down, and now Rao, Pearce, and Udi were on the monitor far below. Within a second, however, the image righted itself and enlarged to full frame on the monitor.

“Now let’s have some fun.” Rao punched another button, and the lights shut off. The room was pitch-black, but a new infrared image appeared on the video monitor. Blue wire-mesh overlays—facial recognition software—instantly engaged, scanning all three faces. In less than a second, the blue lines flashed red.

“Apparently none of us is Aquiles Castillo,” Dr. Rao said. “If one of us had been, the appropriate facial image would have flashed green.”

“Impressive,” Pearce said.

Rao pressed another virtual button on her tablet. The lights snapped back on and the monitor displayed a swift, uneven flight back toward the black box. The onboard camera hovered just an inch above it for a moment. Five more miniature mosquito drones were parked in the box. Rao tapped one last button and the camera eye landed on the black foam padding inside the box, the last image displayed before the monitor shut off.

Udi and Pearce exchanged a glance.

“Amazing. But they look very fragile,” Udi said.

“Open your hand, please,” Rao said. She picked up one of the mosquito drones between her elegant fingers and dropped it into Udi’s broad open palm.

“I can hardly feel it,” Udi said. He raised and lowered his open hand like a measuring scale. “In fact, I really can’t feel it at all.” Udi brought his hand close to his face.

“It looks exactly like a little mosquito. Incredible.”

Rao picked up another one and handed it to Pearce. He examined it closely as well.

“They’re surprisingly durable. And they’re so light, our targets won’t notice they’re on them until it’s too late,” Rao said.

“What’s the battery life?” Udi asked.

“Two hours maximum. But they can tap into a light fixture, a lightbulb, even the static electricity on human skin, and recharge.”

“How does facial recognition work with identical twins? They share the same DNA,” Pearce asked.

“Identical twins aren’t truly identical. That’s a misnomer. Even their fingerprints aren’t the same. It’s like your own face. The left side of your face is always slightly different from the right side, even though it’s all the same DNA,” Rao said.

“How many are we deploying?” Pearce asked.

“Six mosquito drones. Three lethals for Aquiles. They have a blue mark on the belly. The other three carry nonlethal identity chips for tracking Ulises. All six are already charged and preprogrammed with the correct facial target recognition.”

“Why six bugs? Why not just two?” Udi asked as he examined his bug more closely. It really did look like a tiny aluminum mosquito with tissue-thin wings.

“Redundancy. Maybe the bad guys own a fly swatter. Who knows what you may encounter. Besides, we’re not paying for them.” Rao smiled. “Any other questions?”

“Range? Limitations?” Pearce asked.

“In a windless environment, a two-hour charge will get you a half mile maximum, flying straight. Any kind of wind resistance drops that considerably, as does maneuvering around objects. Windspeed above five miles per hour will be extremely problematic, even prohibitive. These drones are really designed for close indoor operations. They operate independently, day or night.” She held up the tablet. “Use this to activate them or make programming changes, but otherwise, you don’t need it for flight controls unless you want to. Their Achilles’ heel, obviously, is that you have to have some sort of a delivery system that can deposit them safely within the operating environment.”

“I’ve got a delivery system in mind.” Pearce pointed at Udi. “Him.”

Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

Two days later, two gorgeous women in bikinis rocketed across the deep blue water of the Gulf of California in a sparkling white ski boat. It was a perfect day in paradise beneath a brilliant, cloudless sky. The occasional gull swooped overhead.

Stella Kang drove the boat, towing Tamar Stern on a single high-performance water ski. The inboard engine whined like a jet turbine. The boat ran so fast that Tamar threw a ten-foot-tall rooster tail behind her.

Their circuit took them directly past a number of luxury yachts anchored in a three-mile-long line of privilege in the waters off of Cabo, including the Castillo boat, which was parked at the farthest end, some distance away from the others.

The first time around, the girls drew quite a bit of attention to themselves. Stella was a stunning Korean-American woman. Her thick black hair whipped behind her like a battle flag. Tamar was half Ashkenazi and half Ethiopian, with piercing green eyes and short-cropped hair. The two women were attractive enough to draw attention to themselves, but nobody in Cabo had ever seen anyone fly as fast as Tamar did on her ski.

On the second pass, all hands were on deck on the yachts. The men whooped and hollered, raised their glasses and bottles, whistled and cheered. A few boats even blew their big horns as the two laughing women rocketed past. The two skiers waved and smiled at their admirers. Even the party girls on the big yachts cheered, in awe of the show that Stella and Tamar were putting on.

A half mile away, Udi and Pearce kept discreet watch from a fishing boat they’d rented. They pretended to be sport fishing mako sharks, which were running hot this time of year, but their eyes were fixed on the surveillance gear they’d rigged to keep tabs on both the Castillos and the two women on their team. A couple of big rods and reels were rammed into their holders in the back of the boat, and thick steel shark lines trailed in the water behind them. Pearce sat strapped in the fighting chair holding another rod, the butt end jammed into the gimbal between his feet. Udi was in the cabin, the boat cruising slowly on autopilot. Pearce chummed the water behind the slow-moving boat every now and then, mostly to keep a half dozen gulls circling overhead.

“Your wife can really ski, Udi.”

“Base jumping, parasailing. She does it all. Well, except cook.”

“Next pass, Udi.”

“Roger that.”

Stella brought the ski boat around for another run. The big inboard engine whined even louder as she pushed the needle on the tach into the red zone. Tamar leaned deep into the curves she was cutting in broad swathes through the ocean. They pushed past the Castillo yacht and out into the blue water, getting ready for another turn.

Suddenly, the ski boat’s inboard motor sputtered, then cut out, and the high-pitched whine disappeared. The silence was startling.

The ski boat’s bow had ridden high like a haughty stallion when the engine roared; now it sagged into the water, spent. Tamar had tossed the rope aside as soon as the engine died. She glided to a graceful halt until she gently sank into the water near the ski boat. Voices echoed on the water, some cheering, some booing. The Castillo boat was nearest, but it was at least a quarter mile away. A gull wheeled in the sunlight above it.

Tamar grabbed hold of her ski and paddled to the back of the ski boat where Stella helped her up onto the skier’s platform. Stella took the ski and stowed it as Tamar climbed all the way in. They flashed a lot of skin in the process.

More cheering erupted from the Castillo yacht.

The two gorgeous women stood in front of the engine compartment, feigning confusion.

Udi watched the Castillo boat. Nobody was racing out to rescue the damsels. “What’s taking them so long?”

“Maybe chivalry is dead. You ready?”

“Yeah.” Udi had slid into the cabin and was working a joystick. A video display was in front of him.

“There,” Pearce said, without pointing.

A small rubber launch with an outdoor motor pushed off from the near side of the Castillo yacht and buzzed toward the two stranded women. Pearce lifted a pair of civilian-grade field glasses.

“Two of them. Mexicans.”

“You were expecting Italians?” Udi asked.

“You’re up, wisenheimer.”

Pearce watched the motor launch approach the stranded ski boat. They tossed a line over and Stella caught it and secured it to one of the davits. Pearce could hear the men in his earpiece ask in Spanish what was wrong. Stella pretended to not speak any Spanish, though she was more fluent than Pearce was. The two Mexicans were just deckhands from the Castillo boat, not the Castillos themselves, thankfully. No telling what stunt the twins would have tried to pull on two vulnerable women in a boat on open water this far from shore. The Castillos still weren’t scheduled to arrive on their yacht until tomorrow night.

Pearce swung his binoculars over to the Castillo yacht. An M40A5 bolt-action sniper rifle with a Leupold Mark 4 scope was tucked under a piece of canvas by his feet just in case things went south. There was even more powerful ordnance stored in the cabin if things went really south. He watched the gull circling high overhead.

Inside the cabin of their fishing boat, Udi was working the joystick controlling the SmartBird drone, a perfect example of biomimicry. It was designed and patterned to fly like a gull, including the long, rhythmic beats of its wings that appeared perfectly organic, so much so that it often found itself in the company of other gulls. Pearce had purchased the second-generation drone—smaller, faster, and even more anatomically correct than the original—from the German manufacturer Festo a few months earlier, but this was the first chance he’d had to deploy it in an operation.

The SmartBird drone featured an onboard camera, of course, and the Castillo yacht was fixed squarely in the center of Udi’s video screen. Udi maneuvered the drone in a leisurely circle, careful to keep the gull between the sun and the yacht. If anyone decided to watch the mechanical bird, the blinding sun would keep the surveillance brief.

Pearce watched the two Mexican deckhands lift the inboard motor cover and inspect the ski boat’s dead engine. The girls giggled and shrugged, feigning stupidity. “Academy Awards all around, ladies,” Pearce chuckled.

Stella slipped a hand behind her back and flipped Pearce the bird.

Udi gently dropped the gull drone down to thirty feet above the yacht and released the pod containing the mosquito drones. They activated upon release. A separate wide-screen monitor flashed all six camera images from the six minuscule machines as they made their way onto the eighty-foot-long roof of the Castillo vessel. They were programmed for evasion and quickly scuttled for cover under vent hoods and rails, spreading out as far as possible to avoid detection. Two cameras went black when two mosquitoes—one lethal, one not—were blown into the water by a random gust of wind.

“Done,” Udi called out. He pressed another button on a separate remote-control unit. “Boat’s ready to go.”

Pearce whispered a command to Stella. “We’re done here. Fire it up.”

Stella heard the command in her earpiece. She immediately stepped over to the starter button and pushed it.

The ski boat’s engine roared to life, echoing like a gunshot across the water. The two Mexicans nearly jumped out of their skins. Before they could react any further, or worse, become suspicious, the two girls clapped and shouted like cheerleaders, then playfully shooed the men off of their ski boat and back onto their motor launch. As soon as Stella untied the rope on the davit, the motor launch sped away, the men all smiles and waves as Stella and Tamar smiled and waved back. Pearce finally lowered his glasses when he saw Stella and Tamar rocket away, back toward shore.

Udi stepped out of the cabin. “So far, so good, eh?”

The fishing reel in the gimbal screamed with a big strike. The quivering line bent the big rod nearly in half.

“Look at that! Too bad we’re heading back in,” Udi said.

Pearce leaped back into his fighting chair and strapped himself in.

“We’ve got plenty of time,” Pearce grunted as he began reeling up the steel line. “Grab yourself a beer and keep the boat steady.”

Udi shook his head, laughing. “Sure thing. You’re the boss.”

“Yup. And rank hath its privileges.”

Castillo Yacht, Cabo San Lucas

Thirty-six hours later, the crew heard the girl scream.

The hot little blonde from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, had been studying Spanish for a year in Mexico on her daddy’s dime.

Though a gifted language student, she was at a loss for words at the moment, moaning like a porn star with Aquiles on top of her, thrusting like a bull. Her eyes were tightly shut in anticipation of her own ferocious climax when she heard Aquiles howl. She felt something warm and wet splash onto her face, and her eyes snapped open.

Aquiles’s face was twisted in a silent scream. Blood cascaded from his mouth and nose. She watched the last flicker of light leave his panicked eyes just as he collapsed, trapping her beneath his heavy corpse in a puddle of sticky hot blood.

And that’s how the crew found her, half crazed and keening.