by Dana Haynes
* * *
Daria left Patricio on his knees propped up against the door. She kicked off her stilettos and hitched up her already-short skirt to a decidedly unladylike level. She leaped up onto the cheap desk and used the lighter to ignite João Patricio’s stash of money. She held the burning end under the mandatory smoke detector that she had found in every room of every public building she had entered since defecting. I do so love American paranoia, she thought.
An earsplitting alarm sounded and the tiny, tin windmill beneath the ceiling-mounted spigot began to rotate, splashing water everywhere.
Daria dropped to the far side of the desk. Soaked to her skin, hair matted with water from the sprinkler, she stripped off her jacket—it was last season’s anyway.
It was her own damn fault. She shouldn’t have come to the meeting without a gun. Oh, well. Kill and learn.
She remembered a drill instructor from her Shin Bet days. Whatever can’t be used defensively, use offensively. The IKEA desk wouldn’t repel bullets but the cheaply made furniture was light enough to maneuver, and it rested on coasters so the office could be easily reconfigured for each new renter. She shoved the chairs out of the way and spun the desk anticlockwise so the short end faced the door.
She started shoving. Her bare feet struggled to find purchase in the soaked carpet, but the light, cheap desk on its concave coasters picked up speed.
João Patricio—kneeling against the door, barely conscious, right arm hanging limp and spooling out blood—half-turned to see the narrow edge of the desk only a meter from his face and moving fast. He screamed.
* * *
The alarm blared in the hall. Banguera felt the wheels fall off their well-crafted plan. He knelt to hoist up his friend as the busted door exploded off its hinges. He scrambled away as the door toppled like a felled tree, trapping Guerrón’s legs and drawing a howl of pain from the Ecuadorian. The Portuguese importer tumbled out into the hall, skull staved in, blood arcing in every direction. The fire alarm continued to shrill. Madre de Dios, Banguera thought, landing on his stomach, lo que el Diablo?
He shook his head to clear his thoughts. He felt his machine pistol dig into his side, the strap still around his shoulder.
He rolled over to free the gun but his eyes caught on a pair of bare feet standing on the felled door, which pressed down on Guerrón’s badly bleeding leg. Banguera’s eyes traveled upward from long, tapered legs, a short skirt, a soaked and translucent blouse, to a heart-shaped face.
Only then did he realize the figure was holding Guerrón’s sound-suppressed machine pistol.
* * *
There were only a handful of offices in the incubator building and the fire alarm was sufficient to drive the few employees out into the parking lot on an otherwise dull Monday afternoon. No one noticed the bedraggled, barefoot woman, soaked to the skin, carrying stilettos and a limp, wet jacket, who padded out through the fire door and climbed into a nondescript car. She put the car in reverse, maneuvered it around the building, and into the back alley lined with Dumpsters.
* * *
Doctor Hector Avila was no doctor. They just called him that because he enjoyed using surgical tools during interrogations.
He preferred to let dumb foot soldiers like Guerrón and Banguera subdue the subject before he got involved. That’s why he sat in the van, in the alley, smoking a hefty joint with the passenger-side window open, smoke billowing out. He wanted to be relaxed before beginning his bit. Breaking a person is not an amateur’s business. It took a calm, steady hand.
Hector Avila was lost in his thoughts about how to begin: fear first, then pain? Pain, then fear? Different patients required different remedies, the doctor knew.
An unremarkable beige compact backed into the alley and had come to rest a foot from the front bumper of the van. Avila squinted through blue smoke, as the driver’s door opened and someone climbed out.
Wonderful, he thought. A civilian. Just what he needed.
It was a girl, young, barefoot. Avila tried to wave away the smoke haze to get a better look at her. She circled around and padded up to his passenger-side window, a sodden jacket draped over her left forearm.
Avila leaned out to tell the puta to get the hell gone. She probably was a junkie seeking a handout. Or maybe one of his few, remaining spliffs. Before he could growl at the girl, she let the sodden jacket flutter to the concrete, revealing a Heckler & Koch with a silencer. She pointed it at his face.
“Good afternoon, sir.” Her Spanish was flawless with the flair of a Catalan accent. “Do you represent the Juarez cartel?”
Dr. Avila froze, eyes bulging.
“Sir?” The woman seemed ever so calm.
“I…” The fat man felt his asthma kick in.
“I thought so.” The girl looked both ways down the alley, then back at him. “Could you step out of the van, please?”
“W-wait…” He heard his voice crack. “I just follow orders. I do as—shit!”
The joint singed his finger and thumb. He dropped it. It hit the knit shirt stretched over his obese belly. His hands flapped, slapping it to the van floor.
The girl tapped his cheek with the sound-suppressing barrel to regain his attention.
Avila whimpered.
In his storied career as a torturer, Avila had heard many men whimper. He knew the sound and considered it a sure sign that a man was breaking. Now he heard himself and blushed.
“Tsk. You mustn’t feel embarrassed.” The girl sounded genuinely sensitive. And absolutely insane. “That’s how I reacted the first time I was shot. I was eleven years old. The second time … well, I suppose I was still eleven.” She shrugged. “It’s a difficult age.”
She opened the passenger door. She waited a beat.
Avila hefted his bulk out of the van.
She slid open the rear door of the van. In the back she spotted rope, handcuffs, a small culinary blowtorch, a car battery with two cables that ended in alligator clips, and his doctor’s bag.
“Get in, please. Facedown.”
The girl spoke as one does to a distraught child: soothingly. “I would like you to send a message to the Juarez cartel for me. Will you do that, sir?”
“Yes!” Avila’s heart skipped. This might not end with a bullet to his brain. “Yes. Of course. Yes. Anything.”
“Thank you, sir.”
She slid the door closed.
* * *
Once it was closed, Daria looked to her left and right again. No witnesses. She opened the gas cap of the van. She took Guerrón’s long, al-Qaida–style keffiyeh and stuffed the cotton scarf into the gas tank as far as it would fit. She waited a few seconds for it to absorb petrol, then used Patricio’s lighter on the tail end.
She moved back to the passenger window. “Thank you, sir.”
Lying on his belly, Doctor Avila gulped. “Miss? What … what is the message?”
Daria said, “You’ll see.”
She walked to her car, opened the trunk, and pulled out her gym bag. She climbed into the compact and pulled away.
* * *
About twenty minutes later, in an elegant Rodeo Drive wine bar, a waiter brought Daria Gibron a goblet of Montepulciano and professionally ignored her spandex attire and just-showered hair.
She sipped. “That’s lovely.”
“Nice.” To Ray Calabrese, all red wines tasted more or less alike. He played with his glass a moment, avoiding eye contact. “Look, I’m sorry to dump this on you but … I’m no longer your handler.”
Daria let a few beats of silence pass. “No?”
He looked up and approximated a smile. “The bureau decided. You’re a citizen. Your work for us, for the DEA, for ATF has … um … this seems crass, sorry. It’s bought you citizenship. You’ll ace the test. Then you’ll be an American. One of us. Congratulations.”
Daria sipped her wine. Ray seemed really proud. But also sad. In his own Ray Calabrese way, he seemed to be saying “hello” and “good-bye” at
the same time.
Daria thought an appropriate response from a normal person might be something along the lines of, This is marvelous news! So she went with that.
“Okay! Well…” Ray lifted his glass.
Daria did, too. They toasted.
“All right then. Welcome to America, citizen. What’s next for you?”
Daria thought about the bled-out importer in the rundown office building, the bullet-riddled bodies of the narco soldiers, and the burnt husk of the fat man in the van. And she thought about the message she had just sent the Juarez cartel. Would they heed the warning?
No way to tell.
She mulled the offers for translation work that were on the table. She considered the job awaiting her in Costa Rica. “A vacation, I think.”
“Good for you,” Ray said. “You deserve a break.”
Daria thought long and hard about taking Ray to bed that night but, in the end, decided it was a bad idea. He was genuinely one of the good guys.
And she genuinely wasn’t.
One
Desert, South of the Sea of Galilee
The prisoners lay in their cots. It was one cot per cell. The cells were slightly larger than a bad room at a youth hostel or a kibbutz. Each had its own heater, a little partition between the cell doors, and a toilet. Really, as cells go, these weren’t bad.
Asher Sahar lay on his back, ankles crossed, hands steepled on his chest. He wore a ratty sweater and ratty jeans and slippers. He spoke with a soft, sibilant whisper. “‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’”
In the next cell, a grizzly bear of a man lay in the same posture, ankles crossed, hands steepled. His feet hung off the end of his cot. His name was Eli Schullman. He replied, “Irving Kahal.”
“No.” The other man reached up to adjust his round, wireless glasses, forgetting that he had taken them off for the night. He’d worn glasses since the age of fifteen. “Irving Berlin. But, to your eternal credit, you were incredibly close. I mean, close in a wrong sort of way. Both, simultaneously, wrong and close to right but mostly just very wrong. It was—”
The lights in the cells and in the corridor and in the guard station blinked on. They were aging, low-efficiency lights, phosphorescents, and they blinked on intermittently: this one first, then off, then that one, then the first one again. Harsh, unforgiving. They buzzed. Both men shielded their eyes. Schullman, the bear of a man, said, “What the fuck?”
It was night. In the nearly four years they had been prisoners, they had rarely seen the lights come on at night.
“Asher?”
Asher Sahar lay still.
When the big man realized Asher hadn’t risen, he didn’t either. But they could hear other prisoners up and down the row of cells gathering at their bars.
The ticktock clang of the outer iron doors reverberated. Someone from the World was walking into the cells. At night.
This, too, happened only rarely. Except when someone was about to be executed.
The outer iron doors had never opened for a priest or a rabbi. Or for an envoy from the governor’s office waving a reprieve. Or for a crusading detective with exonerating evidence. Or a cook with a last meal. It wasn’t that sort of prison.
Asher Sahar whispered, “This might be interesting.”
He fumbled for his glasses, which lay on the knee-high stack of hardback books, two books deep, two wide, that served as his bed stand.
The main door rumbled sideways under the power of an ill-greased motor. They couldn’t see the door, only hear it. The next sound was the absolutely unexpected clack of women’s heels. Round, sensible, solid heels.
Asher sprang out of the bed as if ejected. He ran both hands through his thinning hair. He straightened his sweater. “Eli,” he said.
The bear rose quickly, knowing an order when he heard one. Even a whispered one.
The heels clacked closer. Asher folded his hands behind his back.
An armed guard came into view, then another and a third. None wore any rank or insignia or any identifying marks.
And in walked an elderly woman, very thin and tall, with birdlike shoulders, her bones seemingly visible even under a trench coat. Her hair was stark white. Her outfit was immaculate and tasteful.
She smiled warmly.
Asher Sahar said, “Hannah,” the same way you’d greet a neighbor who regularly drops by for coffee.
“Oh my God. Asher. Look at you.”
They spoke in Hebrew.
“You look well,” he whispered. He cleared his throat, conscious of the soft rasp in his voice. “How are things in the world?”
The three guards looked far less than happy to be conducting this reunion. Two of the three touched their holstered sidearms. The elderly woman said, “Not good. A situation has arisen. And we have need of your talents.”
Asher nodded solemnly. “You needed my talents four years ago.”
The woman said, “And today.” She offered no explanation about the situation four years ago. She offered no explanation about the years in between.
Asher said, “Something has arisen?”
“Unfortunately.”
He said, “War?”
“Democracy.”
A smile spread across Asher’s still-youthful, bearded face. The harsh lights glinted off his round glasses. “Who could have foreseen that?”
The woman shook her head. “As it turns out, you did, dear. You’d laid out this contingency years ago. Now, you’ve been proven prescient. Our friends have moved heaven and earth to free you. So that you can do what you must.”
Asher was aware that the giant, Eli Schullman, was standing at attention in his own cell, even though Asher couldn’t see him. “And my men.”
The woman said, “Of course.”
“I’ll need financing.”
“Which you shall have.”
“And independence.”
She laughed. “As if anyone could grant you that! Of course, independence. You never followed orders, anyway.”
He smiled. “Well, never is a little harsh. Get us out of here. Tell us the situation. Give us time to formulate a plan.”
The woman said. “Out of here, you shall be. The situation shall be made clear. You have seventy-two hours to formulate a plan.”
Asher said, “I’ve been in this prison for almost four years.”
Hannah laughed again. “Only your body, love. Only your body.”
She made a quarter turn to the nearest guard, gave him the gentlest of nods. The guards glowered at one another, expressing how unhappy they were to be doing this. But they nodded back to an unseen someone in the control room and, a second later, the doors to the cells holding Asher Sahar and Eli Schullman clanked open.
The other prisoners kept mum, watching, wondering.
The elderly woman said, “We have transport outside. Plus clothes and hot food.”
Schullman’s voice was a gravelly rumble. “Give me a smartphone. Or a laptop. Anything with a wireless connection.”
The guards flinched when he spoke. Schullman seemed to absorb more than his share of the harsh light of the corridor. Hannah looked up at him, then she made the same quarter turn to the nearest guard. She did not speak.
The guard grumbled to himself, reached into a tunic pocket, and produced a smartphone. He handed it over, reaching as far as his arm could stretch, keeping clear of Schullman the best he could. The phone almost disappeared in Schullman’s palm.
Hannah turned to Asher. “There is a preliminary plan. It’s rudimentary. Just a sketch. Many of us think it’s unworkable and foolish. Quite possibly suicidal. Definitely horrific. But possible. With you to guide it…?” She shrugged.
Schullman stabbed at phone buttons with the pad of his beefy thumb.
Asher said, “Where?”
“It begins in the United States.”
Asher smiled. It was a sad, knowing smile, and Hannah interpreted it correctly. “Yes, dear. Daria lives in the United States these days.”
&n
bsp; Asher laughed, and shook his head. He removed his glasses and began to clean the lenses on the hem of his sweater. “Of course. God being the ultimate jester.”
Hannah nodded to the lead guard. The man jerked his head toward the exit.
The other prisoners in their cells still did not speak. Most didn’t understand Hebrew, but even those who did watched silently.
Eli Schullman glared down at the tiny phone screen, then rudely bashed Asher’s shoulder with the back of his hand. He thrust the phone over. Asher studied it a moment, then nodded.
Everyone began moving toward the exit. Outside, more guards stood with M-16s.
Schullman growled lowly. “‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’ Irving Kahal.”
Asher studied the smartphone. He shook his head. “Damn it. I could have sworn Irving Berlin wrote that.”
Two
Denver, Colorado
Four Months Later
It was the first Monday of November, and the five friends—three Secret Service agents and two spouses—met as they did one Monday per month for Denver’s Greatest Federal Law Enforcement Book Club and Pizza Fest.
The pizzas this month were thin crust—one all cheese, one with sausage and pepperoni. The book was Moby-Dick. The drinks were beer. Except for Stacy Knight-Mendoza, wife of agent Phil Mendoza. She was seven months pregnant and drank San Pellegrino water with wedges of lime.
The friends always picked the same booth at a Denver pub within walking distance of them all. The booth was curved and sat all five easily, with a table wide enough for two pizzas and the books.
The night’s debate started well—two of them thought the novel was excellent, two thought it contained more blubber than an actual whale, and Will Halliday hadn’t read it yet. He was the only unmarried member of the book club. Halfway through the evening, Halliday agreed to get refills for everyone’s drinks.
He went to the bar and got two Bud Lights, a Heineken, a Dos Equis, and the sparkling water with lime for Stacy. He tipped the cute bartender in the Broncos jersey top and white shorts. As soon as she turned away, he slipped a two-inch-by-two-inch envelope out of his wallet, opened the flap, and let a pale pink pill spill into Stacy’s drink.
