Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  “Yeah, I suppose I might.”

  “So here’s the bottom line, Sjogren. You don’t have a clue what you’re looking for out there. You can’t follow what you can’t see, and without following, there’s no stopping these people. You need to get a name.”

  “I don’t have a name, Trev.” Sjogren’s voice vibrated with frustration. Munro had clearly struck a nerve. “It’s not like I’m holding out on you. I don’t have it.”

  “I don’t hire you for what you know,” Munro fired back. “I hire you for the information that your contacts know. Sounds to me like it’s time to put some more pressure on your own butt buddy in the U.S. attorney’s office.”

  “He doesn’t know, either. If he did, he’d tell me.”

  Munro closed his eyes as he fought to control his temper. “Don’t concentrate on what he does know. Concentrate on what he can know. Everything’s possible when the stakes are high enough.”

  All the derision was gone from the Bostonian. In fact for the very first time in Munro’s memory, Jerry Sjogren may have just been rendered speechless.

  “Hey, Jerry?” Munro said.

  “Abrams.”

  “Right. You know that part I said about anything being possible when the stakes are high enough? You might want to take that one personally.”

  He pushed the disconnect button. As he turned back to the business of fixing dinner, he felt a sense of calm, as if he might have taken the first step toward victory.

  Maria Elizondo stuffed three hundred thousand American dollars—all hundred-dollar bills, banded in five-thousand-dollar stacks—into a Tyvek envelope, sealed it, and placed the package on a shelf in the massive safe that sat next to her desk. That brought the daily total to three million five hundred forty-two thousand dollars. She made the appropriate notations in the ledger book, and then placed that into the safe as well. She pushed the door closed, turned the bolt, and then spun the lock.

  It was time to go home. Her office, such as it was, occupied one hundred square feet of tile-floored grandeur in the far southeast corner of the main building of the compound known as Hacienda del Sol—a ridiculously pretentious name, she thought, for a hideous concrete bunker of a house surrounded by fifteen-foot-high walls in one of the more squalid sectors of Ciudad Juárez, which itself was one of the most squalid cities on earth. Yet another expression of narcissism from a man whose opinion of himself could not possibly be overstated.

  Maria shed the sweater that she always wore to counter the chill of the air-conditioning and hung it over the back of her chair, where it would be waiting for her in the morning. She had to hurry now, before another delivery of cash was dropped through the louvered steel slot in the reinforced concrete wall.

  She grew so tired of the overbright yellow light that shined from behind the wire-reinforced recessed light fixtures in the ceiling that some days she swore that she felt ill from the lack of sunshine and unfiltered air. After days like today—ten hours without a break—she thought she might go mad if she had to face this one more time.

  Face it she would, though, because Felix Hernandez trusted her, and only a fool denied Felix what he desired.

  With all surfaces cleared, and all drawers and cabinets locked, she picked up the telephone receiver from its hook on the wall next to the entrance and waited while the call completed itself. The person on the other end of the line answered it merely by picking it up. Protocol prohibited him from saying anything until he was spoken to.

  Maria said, “Purple, sapphire, salmon, moon.”

  The guard on the other end said, “Apple, rose, seawater, penguin.”

  The random words were chosen anew every morning, and they needed to be recited in precisely the correct order for either Maria or her security counterpart on the other side to unlock their side of the door. This was part of Felix’s paranoia that his enemies might somehow gain control of the compound, and by so doing merely wait patiently until it was time for the occupant of the vault to go home, and when the door opened therefore have access to his money.

  He called it double redundancy, which in Maria’s mind was itself singly redundant.

  With the pass codes properly delivered, she spun the knob of the cipher lock on her side of the door and disengaged the bolts. A few seconds later, she heard the second set slide out from the wall. She pushed while the guard pulled, and as the door moved outward, she wondered if the blast of frigid air felt as refreshing to the guards as the enveloping warmth felt to her.

  Per their protocol, all six guards in the adjoining room had their rifles to their shoulders, aiming outward in an arc, waiting to shoot anyone who might attempt to rush the vault during the short time that it was open. Once outside the vault, she let the guard push the door closed, and then she waited for him to spin his lock before spinning her own. Neither knew the other’s combination.

  “The lock is set,” the guard said, and the others lowered their rifles.

  Maria said nothing to these men. No pleasantries, minimal eye contact. They were not her friends, and she was not theirs. If Felix so much as suspected relations among them, all of their lives would be endangered. In his paranoid world, people who liked each other were more likely to conspire against him, and any conspiracy could only be about stealing his money.

  Or, of course, about taking his life. In truth, there were far more people in the world who wanted him dead than cared about his money. Maria, in fact, numbered herself among them.

  Exiting the Banking Room, as it was called, Maria stopped in the doorway to the next room and held her hands out to her sides to be frisked. Though she wore tight-fitting jeans and a T-shirt, the pat-down was necessary, if only to give these teenage guards an excuse to touch her body. She knew that they lusted after her, and she didn’t mind it a bit. Let them have their dreams. These days, there was so little to dream for.

  After clearing that last search and grope, she was free to go.

  Or at least she thought she was. As she passed into the center hall, an all-too-familiar voice called, “Maria! I need you!”

  Her shoulders sagged, but only for an instant. Felix expected his women to appreciate his advances. Standing tall and donning a smile, she turned and entered the ornate study that served as Felix Hernandez’s office—at least in this house. Hacienda del Sol was only one of four homes where he divided his time in random rotation.

  “Hello, Felix,” she said. As she approached, he rose from behind his desk and met her halfway for a kiss. It was a lip-only kiss, and he did not smell of alcohol, so she relaxed a little. When he was in this mood, he rarely wanted to root and paw at her as he did when he was drunk.

  “You seem surprised to see me,” Felix said.

  “I am surprised to see you. I didn’t expect to see you for several days.”

  He led the way to a pair of love seats that flanked a coffee table in front of his desk. He gestured for Maria to sit, and then sat next to her. He was a handsome man by any reasonable standard, with strong Latin features, jet-black hair, and a dazzling smile that melted every female heart. Maria had always thought that his eyes looked empty, as if made of glass.

  “One way to remain unpredictable,” he said, “is to occasionally double back on your own tracks.”

  “You need to be careful,” she said. She sold it with a gentle squeeze of his arm, a gesture designed to reassure him that she truly cared.

  “That’s the second time that’s been said to me in just the last hour,” he said with a wry smile.

  Maria scowled. “Really? Who else?”

  “An associate of mine,” Hernandez said. “His name doesn’t matter.”

  “What does he say you need to be careful about?”

  His eyes grew even emptier as they peered into her. “My associate—who knows many things and is rarely wrong—says that I have been betrayed.”

  The words chilled Maria’s blood far more effectively than the air-conditioning had. She willed herself to maintain eye contact, yet again touch
ing his arm. “I don’t understand.”

  “He tells me that someone very close to me has been talking to American agents, plotting to do me harm.”

  The chill turned to ice. How could he possibly know? She’d been so very careful. “You mean to kill you?”

  He cocked his head and stared deeper. Maria felt as if he were trying to set her on fire from within.

  “I don’t understand, Felix,” she said. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but the fact that people are trying to kill you is hardly news.”

  The glare continued for a few seconds, and then he smiled. “Indeed,” he said. “But the threat is not to kill me. The threat is to have me imprisoned for the rest of my life.” Finally, he looked away. “But even that is not what troubles me. This associate was very specific. The informant is very close to me, and probably a woman. That means that someone to whom I have been extraordinarily generous is planning to repay me with the worst kind of betrayal.”

  Maria’s mind raced. What was her best play now? Clearly, he suspected her—he’d have to suspect her—so would it be most convincing to pretend to be totally clueless, or should she become defensive?

  “Surely you don’t suspect me,” she said before she even knew that she’d chosen a course.

  “Should I?”

  Her strategy materialized out of nowhere. She bolted to her feet and stormed to the door, furious.

  On cue, Hernandez shot out his hand to grab her wrist. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Maria whirled on him and slapped his face. “How dare you!” she said. Tears clouded her vision.

  Hernandez shot to his feet, too, his face red with rage.

  “Go ahead!” Maria dared. “Go ahead and beat me. Have me shot. If you think so little of me—if you think for even a second that I could betray you—by all means shoot me yourself.” She pulled her arm from his hand. “Bastard.”

  Her heart hammered at an impossible rate as she headed again for the door.

  “Stop!” he commanded.

  When she turned this time, he hadn’t moved. He still stood in front of the love seat, his face slack with surprise.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Maria said, pointing her finger at him. “I am not like your other mistresses. Yes, I know you have them. They pretend to care for you because they fear you. I love you, Felix. I would lay down my life for you. How dare you suspect me of such a despicable thing?”

  He moved toward her. “Where are you going?” His voice was softer now.

  “Home,” she said.

  He reached for her hands with both of his, but stopped when she recoiled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was being ... stupid. Please stay. Please stay the night.”

  “I am going home,” Maria said again. “Unless, of course, you want to have your guards drag me back here so that you can rape me.”

  The thought seemed to horrify him. “Maria. I would never—”

  “And neither would I,” she said. “Never in a million years would I betray you.”

  “Stay, then.”

  She shook her head emphatically. “No, not tonight. I couldn’t tonight. I need to be alone tonight.”

  Hernandez seemed to be at a loss for words, as if he hadn’t found himself in this position before.

  “Will you be back tomorrow?” His voice sounded oddly childlike now.

  This was a new expression. There was tenderness there somewhere.

  She might actually feel something after she drove a stake through the monster’s heart.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Two hours ago, when Ernesto Palma had taken the phone call from Felix Hernandez, he’d thought for certain that the point of the call would be to upbraid him for having lost track of his prey. Palma had spent so much time over the years dealing with the peasants and riffraff that defined the population of drug thugs that he continued to be surprised by the savvy and resourcefulness of Harris and Lerner.

  It only made sense, of course, that they would disappear after their altercation with the patrol in the jungle. Once they’d been made, they had to go into hiding. That was the bad news. The flip side of that—the good news—was that hiding and getting away were mutually exclusive endeavors. Sooner or later, they would have to make a move, and when they did, Palma would be ready for them. The longer they took, in fact, the more soldiers and police Palma could have out on the streets to intercept them.

  He’d talked himself into believing that his prey’s disappearance was actually a good thing because it allowed him to marshal more resources to catch them.

  But that had turned out to be a fantasy.

  Four hours ago, one of his patrols had found the Pathfinder stashed off the road. It had been stripped of all valuable gear, and there was no evidence of what direction they might have gone when they left.

  Had they hijacked a car? Had they taken off on foot? That latter option seemed least likely if they were in fact trying to head north—a lot of inhospitable desert lay between here and there—but maybe they’d reached some kind of a hybrid solution, in which they hiked far enough to steal a different car.

  For that matter, they had three million American dollars with them. They could buy any car they wanted. They could buy dozens of any car they wanted.

  This was the report that Palma had been prepared to give to Felix Hernandez when the phone rang, but as it turned out, he never had to. In fact, Hernandez never even asked him about how the search was going. He didn’t say much of anything. He opened with, “My plane will be waiting for you at Hacienda Luna. Be on it in a half hour.”

  Palma ran the distance in his head. “I don’t think that’s possible, Mr. Hernandez.”

  “Make it possible, Captain Palma. Your targets will be leaving from Ciudad Juárez.”

  “Ciudad Juárez? That’s twelve hundred kilometers. How are they getting there?”

  “I don’t know,” Hernandez replied. “But when they get here, I want you here waiting for them. You cannot let them leave.”

  Palma didn’t like it. “With all respect, Mr. Hernandez, we have them on the run here. They’ve left their vehicle and now they’re having to improvise on the run. Literally on the run. They are on foot, as far as we know.”

  “Which means that they could be in a boat, as far as you know. Do yourself a favor and don’t leave my pilot waiting.”

  With that, Hernandez clicked off.

  Thus, Palma found himself racing down roads that were never intended for speed, bouncing off the door and roof of the Sandcat as Sergeant Nazario did everything he could to keep it on the road.

  As he’d expected, thirty minutes had proven to be undoable, but forty-five looked to be possible.

  “We are going to hurry to Ciudad Juárez,” Nazario said. “We are leaving all our leads behind us. And then what happens when we arrive there?”

  “We await orders,” Palma said.

  In the lingering daylight, Maria stormed from the compound, every stride covering half again the distance that it normally would. The guards she passed looked startled—some even shifted their hands on their weapons—but none made a threatening move on her.

  The fact that her heart did not explode in her chest was testament to the fact that she’d taken good care of herself all these years. She left the house through the front doors and never slowed as she approached the wall. Sensing her ire, the guards moved quickly to open the heavy gates to let her pass without slowing.

  Maria felt proud of herself for pulling this off, even as she managed the swell of terror in her gut that her confidence had been betrayed. Her FBI contact had sworn on all things holy that her identity would be protected. Without that assurance, she never would have offered up all the information she had these past two years.

  Veronica Costanza had always seemed like a straight shooter to her. They’d first met at a coffee shop while standing in line. Both of them favored cold coffee drinks to hot ones, and that had led to a lighthearted d
iscussion of caffeinated drinks. Looking back on it, Maria realized that the chance meeting had been engineered from the beginning, but that knowledge didn’t tarnish the reality that she liked and trusted Veronica.

  Even now that Maria knew that she’d been betrayed, she couldn’t wrap her head around the notion that Veronica might have done it. Still, what was done was done. Now she had to cope. While Felix might have been taken off guard by her bluff back at the hacienda, his intelligence network would continue to push for details that would ultimately lead them to her. If not tonight or tomorrow, then next week or next month.

  As she climbed into her Toyota Celica and turned the key, her mind raced to find the way out of this. There had to be a way. There was always a way.

  As she drove down the streets of Ciudad Juárez, she checked her mirrors frequently, fully expecting to find a machine-gun-bearing technical closing in on her from behind. Such had been the fate of countless others whom Felix had suspected of betrayal. Yet none appeared.

  Could it be that her performance had truly been that convincing? Could it be that he actually believed that she loved him? Maybe so. Why else would he have confided so much in her?

  Still, his perceptions were at best a ruse. Soon he would learn the truth, and when he did, Maria’s life would be measured in units of agony.

  She could never go back, that much was clear. But how was she supposed to make her way out of the country? What were her options? She’d never discussed these things with Veronica. The plan had always been to endure—to wait until the FBI said that it was safe for her to enter the United States. Even as she heard the words the first time they’d been spoken, she’d realized their true meaning to be, after she had provided adequate information to the United States, but that was okay. No favors in the world came free.

  She didn’t understand what had changed. Only three days ago, she’d met with Veronica, begging her to bring her in, but as of then, the FBI wasn’t quite finished with her. Maria had even offered up new intelligence on the location of smuggling tunnels, yet Veronica had remained unmoved.