Gone

CHAPTER 33

After we finished eating, D’Ambrose left for a meeting, and Parker took me over to Building 14. The huge open room on the ground floor was being used by D’Ambrose’s JSOC guys as the multiple-agency task force command center.

There were desks everywhere, several large PowerPoint boards and flat screens, a podium. Everyone on the task force must have been taking a break to eat, because except for a couple of soldiers running some wires through the drop ceiling, we were alone.

We grabbed a couple of coffees from a well-stocked table, and I followed Emily over to a desk.

“We found this footage two days ago at a safe house we raided with the federales in Durango,” Emily said, tapping at a laptop as we sat. “It’s of a dinner Perrine held for his top cartel people. We had it closed captioned. You have to take a look at this.”

I let out a breath as Perrine appeared on the screen. He was wearing an impeccably tailored tuxedo, standing at a podium in what looked to be some kind of ballroom.

The last time I had laid eyes on him, he was in a prison jumpsuit, escaping from a Lower Manhattan courthouse in a construction-crane basket. It made my blood boil to see him back in his stylish finery, dressed to the nines again.

I also noticed that he had gotten his nose fixed. Which sucked. I was the one who had broken it for him in a scuffle we’d had before I placed him under arrest. I had the funny feeling we would have another scuffle before this thing was done. But is that a good thing? I wondered.

I watched as the psychopathic murderer smiled pleasantly, adjusted the mike, and cleared his throat.

“I see myself as a historical figure,” Perrine said from the dais without the slightest hint of irony. “Like Pancho Villa or Che Guevara or the great Simón Bolívar, I am here to continue the Southern Hemisphere’s great tradition of rebellion. Only, I am more honest, more defiant, because I refuse to hide my ambitions behind the bullshit con game that is socialism.

“I do not need to justify my actions. Especially to the Americans. Borders and laws, they cry. Supply and demand is my reply. They disrupt my business while it is their decadent sons and daughters who are my very best customers.

“It is time,” Perrine said. “Time to stop fucking around. That is what I learned during my stay in the great United States. My brief stay.”

The audience broke into applause and uproarious laughter at that one.

I wanted to put my fist through the screen.

“I see the US finally for what it is,” Perrine continued. “Just another rival, just another meddlesome obstacle to our ambitions. Where the Americans are weak, we will show our strength. We will not stop until the border itself is meaningless. We will spur on chaos until it is manifest everywhere, until even the American authorities are as cowed as the Mexican ones. Then and only then will we have free rein.

“And by we, be sure that I do not mean old Mexico. I do not mean the sorry downtrodden, the blessed poor. Fuck the forever-useless, sniveling, ever-present poor once and for all, I say.

“By we, I mean you and me-all the people ruthless and lucky enough to be in this room at this present moment. Tout le monde is ours for the taking, my friends! The world is turning, readying itself for new borders, new laws. I say we write them with the blood of our American enemies. What do you say? Who is with me? Who wants to be a billionaire?”